The month of
January literally flew by. It feels like the earth is rotating faster as the
sun rises sooner, the hours flash by and it is noon and then the night falls and it is midnight . Last month my
hairdresser held an art exhibition and gave away all the paintings that he had spent the last two and
half years created. Altogether there were one hundred and eight
paintings.When I go for my hair
appointment, I see him working on his canvas and I will try to make out what he
is drawing and he says, ‘I’ll see where this leads to, slowly,
bits by bits…’ I ask him about the work that has been completed if I see them sitting around in his living room. He set out to draw hearts in all colours and
sizes as he wanted to spread the message that we must open our hearts for
only the hearts can see clearly. It reminds me of Le Petit Prince where the fox
tells the Prince : On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible
pour les yeux. You can only see things clearly with your heart. What is
essential is invisible to the eye. Charles has invited his family, his friends
and clients to the exhibition at Botanica Mansion where afternoon tea was also served in conjunction with the event. Everyone was happy to take home a piece of his work of 'hearts'. It is very generous of him
to give all his paintings away and it was a joyous tea party. 
A Hologram for the King written by Dave Eggers has taken me longer than what I intended to.
Eggers’ writing is direct and unadorned, reminds me a little of
Hemingway. Reading the novel is like drinking Burgundy wine that is light,
fresh and uncomplicated. But the contents of the fiction are far from light and
straightforward, the novel deals with uncertainties in the commercial world.
Alan Clay is a
consultant who has been sent to
Jeddah by Reliant, a huge conglomerate to pitch for the IT infrastructure
contract for King Abdullah Economic City ( “KAEC’). It is going to be a massive
new development somewhere in Saudi Arabia. Alan and his team hope to impress
the king by showing him a cutting –edge holographic teleconferencing system
which can make a colleague in London appear in 3D in a tent in Saudi Arabia.
Alan started as a door- to–door
salesman and his recent venture in manufacturing bikes failed miserably when he
tried to outsource the whole process to Asia in order to get away from the
unions in America. He cannot afford his daughter’s college fee unless he can
pull off the one big job he has been engaged by Reliant. Alan is no longer
optimistic like before. As he and his colleagues
wait for King Abdullah to show up, it is like waiting for Godot in Samuel
Beckett’s play. When he is waiting
for King Abdullah to show up, he starts writing to his daughter to persuade her
to forgive her mother , Ruby. Alan and Ruby are divorced. 
‘Dear
Kit, You say that your mother has always been “ emotionally unreliable,” and
still is that way. That is true to a certain extent, but who among us is the
same in all seasons? I’ve personally been a moving target for years, wouldn’t
you agree?’
No
, he needed to be more constructive.
‘Kit,
your mother is made of different stuff than you or me. More volatile and
flammable materials.’
He
crossed that out. The greatest tragedy about Ruby was that talking about her
made him sound like a bastard. She had done him great harm, repeatedly ------she’d torn him open, thrown
all kinds of terrible ruinous stuff inside him, and then had sewn him back up
--- but Kit couldn’t know that . He took another sip. A numbness overtook his
face. He took another pull. My God, he thought. He’d had the equivalent of two
shots and already he was feeling weightless.
Like Alan in the story, I have this
habit of looking through photographs that are stored on my laptop and I try not
to let nostalgia take over me.
‘ He was already in the photo
program, the vast grid of his life in thumbnails, so he scanned backward.
Everything was there, and it terrified him. For Alan’s last birthday, Kit had
taken a few dozen photo albums from his garage and sent them away to a service
that scanned all the pictures within and put them in a disc. He’d dumped them
all onto his laptop and now they were all there, photos from his own childhood,
from his life with Ruby, for the birth and growth of Kit. Someone, Kit or the
digitizens, had arranged them all more or less chronologically, and now he
could, and too often did, scan through the thousand pictures , a record of his
life, in minutes. All he had to do was keep his finger on the leftward arrow.
It was too easy. It was not good. It kept him in a dangerous stasis of
nostalgia and regret and horror.
The author
cleverly describes a character that is jaded and very much a fragile human
being in a world that is going virtual. The story was set in 2010 and it is about the expatriate life in the
Gulf states and how globalization has brought about outsourcing of
manufacturing process to anywhere that can do it cheap and Asia is where these cost conscious
manufacturers go to for their productions.
On the plane
from America to Jeddah, he has to put up with his seatmate’s malaise.
‘People were
done manufacturing on American soil. How could he or anyone argue for spending
five to ten times what it cost in Asia? And when Asian wages rose to untenable
levels --$5 an hour, say –there was Africa. The Chinese were already making
sneakers in Nigeria. Jack Welch said manufacturing should be on a perpetual
barge, circling the globe for the cheapest conditions possible, and it seemed
the world had taken at him at his word. The man on the plane wailed in protest :
It should matter where something was made !
But
Alan did not want to despair, and did not want to be dragged down with his
seatmate’s malaise. Alan was optimistic
wasn’t he ? He said he was. Malaise.
That was the word the man used again and again.’
Dave Eggers’ subdued style of writing
conveys emptiness in a deliberate way. The overall feeling is bleak and
transitory about our planetary future.click
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| Venice Sept 2014 |
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