Latest news with #KurtVonnegut
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Writing is all about discipline, love, luck and endurance – and I sure know about endurance
'If I wrote another book, who would read it?' I lamented. 'I would!' enthused my brother, perhaps echoing Kurt Vonnegut's remark, 'Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.' Over the years, commercial publishers had reliably dampened my enthusiasm by teaching me to ask two questions as soon as even the idea of another book crossed my mind. Who will sell my book? Who will read my book? But my brother's fireproof confidence in me fuelled me to pen a proposal that successfully wound its way through acquisitions until a contract landed in my inbox. Overnight, the dream of writing another book was replaced with the dread of producing said book – a guide to writing engaging opinion and advocacy columns mixed with a personal account of being a physician exposed to a great variety of experiences. Being a columnist had made me more observant, deepened my appreciation of medicine and honed my understanding of why every word we say (or write) matters. When I began to teach writing classes, I wanted to democratise what I knew. Then, George Orwell made me quail. In his famous essay, he accused writers of being motivated by 'sheer egoism', calling them 'more vain and self-centred than journalists, although less interested in money'. Ouch. At least the last bit was true, although not by choice. As I wrangled with the ego issue, the wonderful Annie Dillard rescued me with her prescient writing from back when I was a teenager. 'The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.' She knew my reason to write. High principles aside, it was on to the next two unglamorous years, starting with a blank document and progressing page by page, draft by draft. How I found the time is how every writer I know finds the time – by squeezing it from elsewhere. I still haven't watched Breaking Bad and only finished Succession when news of the final episode was everywhere. Patient care came first. My notional 'writing day' was inevitably taken up by the exigencies of family life, leaving spare nights and weekends to write. Being a writer is heady but doing the writing is painful. This got me wondering about how the writers I admired were so expert and fluent. What innate talent did they possess that I lacked? Enter James Baldwin with his no-nonsense counsel. 'I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.' Now, there was a word I recognised from 15 years of medical training: endurance. The next two years of conversations went like this: 'I thought you said you finished your book.' 'That was just the last draft.' Having exhausted the generosity of the people who read my (numerous) drafts and nurtured my spirits, and feeling no more 'done', I ventured to AI for inspiration and distraction. It produced some nice suggestions but when it rewrote my manuscript, I found it stiff, formal and, frankly, dishonest. The truth was that I loved the act of rearranging the same 26 letters in so many ways and was in no rush to wrap up the book. On days that I lost a patient or made a patient cry over bad news, I couldn't wait to escape to my perennially unfinished manuscript to calm my mind. Oliver Sacks knew exactly how I felt when he called the act of writing an indispensable form of talking to himself. My explicit permission to dawdle came from Joan Didion. 'Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.' Maybe, Orwell was right after all. Nearing the end of his life and suffering from oesophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens remarked that an awareness of mortality was useful for a writer because it helped one avoid the fear of public opinion, sales, critics, or for that matter, friends. What timely words to strengthen my resolve to publish the work I could no longer stand to read! At this point, dare I imagine my ideal reader? As if eavesdropping on my thoughts, Joyce Carol Oates warned against it. 'He/she may be reading someone else.' Touché. Then, just after I had hit 'send', Annie Dillard swung back into my life with a vengeance. 'Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients … What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?' Gulp. I would be the first to say my terminally ill patients have better things to do than read my book. After all, what food for thought could I possibly offer to compete with the contemplation of mortality? My book is out today. In an unexpected gesture, one of my terminally ill patients pre-ordered it so he could tell me in clinic that he looks forward to reading it. But, he added, beaming from ear to ear, if he doesn't get to finish it, he will leave it to his granddaughter who wants to be a doctor and a writer. This kind of generosity really does feel like sufficient reward. Ranjana Srivastava is an Australian oncologist, award-winning author and Fulbright scholar. Her latest book is called Every Word Matters: Writing to Engage the Public
Indian Express
7 days ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: If Gaza's corpses can vanish from our conscience, what else are we becoming blind to?
The silence and denial around the moral catastrophe unfolding in Gaza only seems to grow in proportion to the scale of atrocity being inflicted on the Palestinian people. It is as if humanity is in moral regress. The fragile gains of international law — those slivers of humanitarian sensibility that once insisted atrocity on this scale must be unacceptable — are being steadily eroded. There are signs of progress. The facts of what is happening in Gaza are more widely acknowledged, and the debate over how to legally and morally name the horror has intensified. Yet, paradoxically, the atrocity is also being made more invisible. Any ceasefire now will already be too late. The world will assuage its conscience only after mass death and destruction, and call the wreckage 'peace'. But the silence around Gaza demands deeper analysis. Perhaps it was always naïve to believe that humanity was capable of sustained moral progress. As Bruce Robbins argues in Atrocity: A Literary History, moral indignation in the face of atrocity is historically rare. For much of human history, violence was treated like the weather — brutal, routine and morally unremarkable. Killing civilians was normal, and even the victims did not always think of themselves as morally wronged — only defeated. Often, mass violence was invested with redemptive meaning. Even rulers with moral qualms about violence applied those doubts selectively. As a character in one of the few novels to confront moral culpability during wartime — Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five — says, 'So it goes.' Robbins's powerful meditation exposes the many ways humanity evades confronting atrocity. Moral demands rarely override the narcissism of group identities. Even when atrocities are condemned, the critique is hemmed in: It must not destabilise existing hierarchies. Conservatives often fear mass violence not because of its human toll, but because it might disrupt order. Societies struggle to indict themselves; self-accusation is psychologically intolerable. Literature is saturated with violence, but most writers ultimately find it difficult to indict their own societies in the face of atrocity. We are increasingly in a world in which moral concern is no longer trusted. It is pathologised. Those who speak of atrocity are seen not as conscientious objectors but as the sort of people who feel superior in feeling bad about these things. They use it to make others feel bad. The function of atrocity talk is performing superiority, virtue-signalling, making others uncomfortable. Humanity's moral conscience, in the face of tribal loyalty, is shrinking terrain. Yet there is still something alarmingly distinctive about Gaza. Is there any precedent for this — where state after state not only denies the horror, but also actively expects silence? The US is effectively policing speech on Gaza, not just within its borders but globally. UN officials are being sanctioned with barely a murmur of protest from the international community. In India, criticism of Israel is now tantamount to being seen with the 'wrong side'. The states of West Asia now extensively regulate criticism of Israel. Australia is considering adopting a definition of anti-Semitism that, as Richard Flanagan noted in The Age, would render some of the most morally courageous Jewish voices — Joseph Roth, Tony Judt, Omer Bartov — effectively anti-Semitic. Much of Europe has already made Israel its 'reason of state'. While some states are complicit, through sins of omission or commission, in failing to push back against the atrocities in Gaza, it seems that much of the world is becoming complicit in drawing a veil of silence over them. One of the most important moral lessons of the Holocaust is being forgotten: That 'never again' must be a universal ideal. To defend that principle is not to deny the Holocaust's specificity, but to protect its moral legacy. To reduce it to a licence for state violence is a betrayal of its memory. Anti-Semitism is a real and urgent problem. But its political weaponisation now threatens to empty the term of moral content. The most reactionary forces invoke it not to combat hate, but to silence criticism, stifle reflection, and protect impunity. Most Western democracies are now sacrificing their democracy and civic freedoms — not for the Jewish people, but for the policies of the state of Israel. In West Asia, too, the discussion of Palestine is hemmed in by state repression. Fear of retaliation, of being seen on the 'wrong side', chills public discourse. Even social movements seem unable to articulate a language of universal principle: That no one should be targeted for who they are; that the mass killing of non-combatants is never justifiable. We are trapped in a nihilistic moment, where only one question matters: Which side are you on? Not: What are the limits of power, the principles that must bind all states and actors? This tribalism is not new; nor is hypocrisy. But rarely in recent memory has there been such a drastic foreclosure of moral reflection. It is as if we now believe that vindication will not come from being humane, but from letting power operate unrestrained, whatever form that power takes. The horror in Gaza is so palpable that explanation or contextualisation often feels obscene. These are now tools of evasion, not illumination. The evasions and silences are linked to the broader civic failures of democracy. In a powerful essay in Harper's Magazine, 'Speaking Reassurance to Power', Pankaj Mishra connects the silence over Gaza to the collapse of civic courage in democracies. He writes that 'for all its claims to superior virtue, the American intelligentsia manifests very little of the courage and dignity it has expected from artists and thinkers in less fortunate societies'. Mishra sees this failure as rooted in complicity: The American intelligentsia, too close to the machinery of imperial power and too dependent on the largesse it doled out, was often disabled from speaking truth. It was meant to offer reassurance. Or rather the criticism that it permitted was costless. But the disquieting thought he offers is whether the willed silence over Gaza, and the relative lack of resistance to authoritarianism, are linked. They both speak of an easy adjustment to the realities of power. But this is not only America's problem. Across democracies, we are witnessing the ease with which civic discourse renders mass death invisible. If Gaza's corpses can vanish from our conscience, how much easier it will be to ignore the quiet, shadowy encroachments of our own states, which are increasingly going after whoever they choose. What the silence and inaction over Gaza is saying is: Only brute power rules. As Vonnegut said, 'So it goes.' The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
Spectator
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Spectator Competition: Family matters
For Competition 3409 you were invited to submit parental advice courtesy of famous writers. Kurt Vonnegut's father's advice to his son gave me the idea for this challenge: 'Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don't stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect.' Your entries were witty and imaginative and there were many more potential winners than we have space for. Congratulations all round, and a special mention to George Simmers's Georges Perec, Joe Houlihan's Truman Capote, David Silverman's Shakespeare and Max Ross's Wordsworth. The following take the £25 John Lewis vouchers. We assume today that an adult's duty is to keep children entertained. This assumption can only lead to disappointment in adulthood and a disinclination to grow up at all. Children need to experience the banality of real life; the way potatoes, if allowed to boil dry, blacken and become bitter; the not-quite-matching of amateur wallpapering; the taste of a penny, licked on a long, boring Sunday afternoon. Bracing northern weather. Streets of houses whose only individuality is in their front doors. As for books, the terse precision of The Very Hungry Caterpillar shames me. Deprecate the florid whimsy of The Wind in the Willows, but cherish its hay-scented nostalgia. Do not expose your children to Milne or Barrie. Forbid Dahl, so that they can read him illicitly. Ensure that their clothing is a little dowdy and they will learn to secure approval through merit. Above all, be comically glum. Frank Upton/Alan Bennett I was never a child, chum. (Pause) But I can handle them. It's largely a matter of the equitable distribution of mint humbugs. (Pause) The sparing. Equitable. Distribution. They'll require repeated instruction. The youth of today possess little knowledge about the correct operation of a dumb waiter, the location of Sidcup or how to fashion an anecdote that goes very precisely nowhere. They'll take none of it in, hence the necessity and futility of repetition. Culture is wasted on them. They prefer pantomime to the tragedies of John Webster. (Pause) Oh yes they do. Sport is the thing to break them in. If they can play impassively a properly umpired game of cricket your work is done. Start on the small and work up, that's my motto. Should you fail, they'll become merely childish. Succeed and, in due time, you'll be eye to eye with something truly catastrophic: yourself. Adrian Fry/Harold Pinter Too much guff gets talked about fatherhood, most of it by childless sociologists. All a chap needs to make a decent fist of fathering is a wife who wants kids about three times as much as he does, a booklined study off-limits to the rest of the brood (decent single malt in top right-hand bureau drawer) and a repertoire of amusing faces – Monocled Headmaster Suffering Aneurism, Savonarola in Soho– to buck things up during meals you can't spend out at the Garrick. Children are drawn to the parent they see least, a win-win. You can go drinking with pals most days and still expect to pop up in as many memoirs or romans à clef as you have offspring. Your brood want bedtime stories? Dick Francis is bloody good and will simultaneously grip you and set them snoring like piglets before the end of the first furlong. Russell Clifton/Kingsley Amis A word of good advice while I still can – If you have based your life on solid virtue And been the best of Ideal English Man; If sticks and stones and words have never hurt you You may by now be just one half a man. Though 'If' has long inspired your moral core And helped defeat the blandishments of sin I'll say now, as I meant to warn before, You might have had some problems fitting in With friends who think you're now a priggish bore. So try to loosen up a bit, my son. Of all the Deadly Sins there must be one Which, tried discreetly just for one-off fun, Might win you street-cred as a proper man – And, what is more, an English man, my son. Martin Parker/Rudyard Kipling Along the muddy lanes of Hampstead Heath, Safe in a world of trams and buttered toast, The children, dry in hoods and sturdy boots, Return for tea – and tales of playground spats. Then give them Scott's Emulsion, rusks and malt, And fortify with scones and Ovaltine. Preparing them for School ma'am's iron rule, Ask, 'Now, how many pennies in a pound?' Then bath-time with the goddess Soap in hand, And off to Dreamland, tucked in eiderdown. But if young John should dare to disobey Be hard of heart – it's character they need. 'All right, bend over.' Three resounding thwacks From Father's gym-shoe bring a gulp. Then pause – A pat upon the head, a thoughtful smile: 'I liked the way you took that beating, John.' Ralph Goldswain/John Betjeman I have assembled you here, in this venerable library on this stormy night, to offer counsel. Your lives have run hitherto on well-worn rails – the cashiered major, the faded adventuress, the Bohemian aspiring artist, still aspiring, the bankrupt man of business – and your assorted branch lines now run through the wilderness. You have ignored my advice and let the priceless alignment of motive, method and opportunity evade you. Or so I thought – for I now recognise the early symptoms of arsenic poisoning. Was it the Turkish Delight? The brace of woodcock? The Circassian liqueur or the amusingly edible Romany cigarette holder? I have ignored my second rule and my scornful Hubris is now followed by Nemesis. I offer two bequests: My large fortune to my murderer, whichever one of you that might be. And secondly, the recommendation that you think very hard indeed before applying for probate. Nick Syrett/Agatha Christie No. 3412: Hard lines You are invited to submit a poem about the struggle of writing a poem (16 lines maximum).Please email entries to competition@ by midday on 6 August.
India Today
21-07-2025
- India Today
ChatGPT, crisis of em dash, and please leave our beloved punctuation alone
Almost two decades ago in The Statesman newsroom — this was when I started my training in page-making in QuarkXPress — one of the first things I learnt was ALT + 0151. Soon, mashing together ALT + 0151 in a quick and fluid moment became second nature while typing. This was the key combination that we would input subconsciously while going through news copies — of course, after placing them inside the mighty Quark with which we spent our evenings. A quick ALT + 0151 and each time it would replace with em dash, that puny mark which reporters used to write in a stopped making pages around 15 years ago after I switched from desk work to full-time writing and reporting. But em dash has stayed with me all this while. It is one mark that I love, largely because it is — along with the comma — the mightiest and most versatile punctuation mark. And while it has its share of problems like any other punctuation mark, for people who are in the business of writing, it is a scalpel and an axe at the same time. It can be utilitarian, like in a news copy, or it can be used to make words sing in a book like in 2025, I am rethinking. For years, I encouraged writers in my team to use em dash because of its ability to organise information neatly. In 2025, I sometimes ask them to remove it from their pieces. I know I should not and yet I do. Thank you, ChatGPT! Or not. Yes, it is all because of ChatGPT and that crazy beast called popular taste. Many among you dear readers, many among you, will read the first two paragraphs of this piece and immediately think that it has been written by ChatGPT. Because somewhere you have read, or someone has told you, or maybe you have seen some X thread called How To Identify ChatGPT Writing, explaining that one tell-tale sign of AI writing is em dash. It is not without logic. ChatGPT and other AI tools do use em dash liberally. But what is not right is that just because an AI tool loves a punctuation mark, we are being forced to discard is a reason. ChatGPT loves em dash because writers love it. Em dash is not a punctuation mark like semicolon, a reviled and pretentious sign that is neither here nor there. Semicolon deserves its ignominy. Samuel Beckett hated it so much that in his novel Watt, he ended up writing, 'how hideous is the semicolon.' And Kurt Vonnegut famously called it 'transvestite hermaphrodites' in an era when politically incorrect things could be said without a lynch-mob forming outside one's house. Vonnegut was clear: no semicolons. 'Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. All they do is show you've been to college,' he once semicolon deserves all the hate. But not em dash. Because em dash, along with comma, represents how we think. And how we think is how we our regular conversations, such as when everyone is sharing gossip during dinner, we talk linearly. This means one word leads to another, one thought leads to the next, and there is a thread running through them. But writing is different. Writing is not speaking. Instead, writing is a far truer reflection of thinking. And when it comes to thoughts, it is easy to notice that our thoughts are not linear. Instead, thoughts are haphazard, and every time you think about how sweet mangoes are, you are also probably thinking that similarly sweet are love em dash because it can be used in tens of different ways to organise haphazard thoughts. It can be used to branch out to a new tangent — and how lovely that is, like wishfully thinking of sun on a rainy day — while staying the course. It can be used to connect two bits in a statement — join them together so they seem whole. It can be used to put emphasis on something — and think about this deeply — because it is an important point. It can be used to end a sentence with some force — stop. Its versatile nature makes em dash a favourite of is also why ChatGPT — and other AI tools — learnt to use it. Various AI models have been trained in high-quality writing. Just a few weeks ago, we got reports that Anthropic bought millions of books and scanned them to train its Claude AI. The case is similar for ChatGPT and Gemini, or DeepSeek. You can say that AI has learnt writing from people like Hemingway and Joyse and Nabokov, the writers who used to love em that AI has been trained more on writing, and less on speech, it uses punctuation that may seem out of place in 2025. We live in a time of podcasts and short videos and text messaging, a time when reading and writing are considered pretentious activities, when vocab of an average person is considered outsized if it has the word 'delve' in it. In this time, something like em dash may come across as a mark of artificiality even when it is is a tricky subject. Rules exist, and more so in India, where we place our Wren & Martin on the same shelves where we keep our holy books, but in reality, these rules are extremely flexible. Their only task is to bring clarity and meaning to words. It doesn't matter in what manner they do it. This is the reason why Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison struggled with her editor on commas. Her idea was that a comma is not for grammar, a thought that apparently did not sit well with her editor. 'He does not understand that commas are for pauses and breath. He thinks commas are for grammatical things. We have come to an understanding, but it is still a fight,' Morrison once famously said. It is also the reason why Gertrude Stein, who too disliked commas, wrote sentences such as 'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.'Writing is this complex, beautiful, shape-shifting thing. It slithers and simmers and, in the hands of good writers, it rarely follows, ahem, a script. But as AI takes over, there is a great rush to create new rules that can distinguish between AI writing and the words that humans have put together. The task is futile. Good writing is going to be good writing. And the marker for that goodness needs to be decided by merit and taste, and not on the basis of how many times em dash and the word 'delve' have been used in it.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)- Ends(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Trending Reel
The Hill
25-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Behind the mask: What are ICE agents hiding?
'Who was that masked man?' If you're of a certain age, you'll remember that line from 'The Lone Ranger' — a weekly morality play, first broadcast on the radio in the 1930s, in which the hero wore a mask to hide not from accountability, but from accolades (and from the outlaw gang that ambushed him and left him for dead). In that depiction, justice rode in on a white horse and rode off into the sunset. It was dispensed honorably — if anonymously — and always in defense of the vulnerable. Fast-forward to 2025, and we're contending with a different kind of masked man. These cowboys don't ride stallions or fire warning shots into the air. They roll up in unmarked SUVs, dressed in tactical vests and with their faces covered. In one viral video, such men appear to pummel a landscaper outside an IHOP in Santa Ana, Calif., where he worked. The man's three sons, as it happens, are all U.S. Marines. This isn't just excessive force or profiling. It's the perversion of the very idea of public safety — one that creates deeper, more insidious problems. The first is psychological and moral. The old proverb warns: The mask becomes the face. Anyone who's spent time online knows that anonymity often brings out the worst in us. But this isn't just about a loss of civility. The hyper-militarized look of these Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents isn't merely a 'mask' in the Lone Ranger sense. His was a modest black domino mask — the kind that concealed just enough to hide his identity, but not enough to make him look menacing. The masks being worn by ICE agents are, by contrast, a posture. A weapon. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, 'We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.' Nietzsche put it more bluntly: 'Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.' The moral? When men begin to dress like soldiers and vigilantes, we shouldn't be surprised when they start acting like both. The second problem is more straightforward and potentially more dangerous: When real law enforcement abandons clearly identifiable uniforms and professional procedures, it becomes easier for imposters to step in. This isn't hypothetical. In South Carolina, a man named Sean-Michael Johnson was 'charged with kidnapping and impersonating a police officer after allegedly detaining a group of Latino men,' according to a CNN report in February. He flashed a fake badge. That was enough. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a man allegedly threatened to deport a woman he met at a Motel 6 unless she slept with him. He showed her a business card with a badge on it. In this political environment, that threat — like the depicted badge — seemed credible. Police power isn't contingent on the integrity of the individual with the badge; it relies on the appearance of authority. We obey the symbols, not the man. But what happens when the uniform becomes easy to fake or deliberately obscured — or tarnished — by the officers themselves? That's not just a glitch in the system. It's the erosion of public trust. And in a culture increasingly obsessed with 'cosplay' — from Capitol rioters in combat gear to politicians posing in body armor — is it any wonder that law enforcement has been reduced to just another costume? The lines have blurred, not just between enforcement and abuse, but between officer and imposter. Put yourself in the shoes of a detainee: If you're dragged into a van by masked men on the street, how are bystanders supposed to know whether or not you are being kidnapped? In the Santa Ana case, a woman tried to intervene. She was thrown to the ground. Most people didn't even try. The default assumption is that you deserved it. Or that you weren't supposed to be here in the first place. We know from social psychology that bystanders are already reluctant to intervene, even when a violent crime is underway. Now imagine the hesitation when the masked aggressors might actually be law enforcement agents. And while immigrants are the most vulnerable targets of this deception, it isn't limited to immigration enforcement. Even those who are unlikely to be profiled should be concerned about the broader trend — a 'warrior cop' culture that has metastasized into something darker, unmoored from accountability. Here's the bleak irony: Americans are told we have the right to defend ourselves. Indeed, this is a largely conservative insight. But if the people kicking in your door at 3 a.m. are law enforcement — perhaps on a faulty warrant — you'd better not try. The same is true if you are accosted in public. Of course, the people being tackled by masked ICE agents — or impersonators — aren't the only ones who are harmed. Images of masked men tackling and disappearing people in broad daylight chip away at public trust. The damage ripples outward, undermining the very legitimacy of the system. We used to teach kids to respect authority. If someone knocked on the door wearing a badge, you at least opened it because the badge meant something. There were rules. There was a story we told ourselves — about order, fairness and due process. That story is unraveling. So what do you do now when a bunch of masked, anonymous men — possibly claiming to be the law — try to grab you? You probably still comply. Not out of civic responsibility or reverence, but because not complying might get you killed. Matt K. Lewis is a columnist, podcaster and author of the books 'Too Dumb to Fail' and 'Filthy Rich Politicians.'
