Dear Reader,Amazement never ceases at the cringe content that drops on social media each year on August 15 as everyone suddenly turns hyper-patriotic. A friend who otherwise dresses in pant suits posted a selfie with the tricolour with a dab of sindoor on her forehead as an added emphasis—I guess the display of devotion to the country is expected to go hand in hand with a show of fidelity to the pati parameshwar. Then there was the stunner of a speech from the Prime Minister at Red Fort. Amidst all this muchness, a few chastening thoughts were provided, for example by a cartoon in The Hindu that showed a policeman telling his colleague with trepidation: “They are singing in that ‘Bangladeshi language’ again!” as the national anthem played from loudspeakers at Red Fort on Independence Day.Sobering ideas also came from a matchless book I have reading for a while, A Stranger in Three Worlds: The Memoirs of Aubrey Menen, recently published by Speaking Tiger. I became a Menen acolyte in 2010 after reading his collected novels in Classic Aubrey Menen: Complete And Unabridged (Penguin). In his day, Menen stoked quite a lot of controversy in England and India, two nations to which he “belonged” by birth. The third country (to explain the Three Worlds in the title) he was a part of was Ireland—his mother was an Irish nurse married to Kali Narain Menon, a Nair from the landed gentry of Kerala.As if this fascinating dissociation stemming from his parentage alone were not enough, Aubrey was brought up as a pucca Englishman and spent his callow youth among the Bloomsbury set when Virginia Woolf was writing scathing rejection letters to hopeful writers who dared to send her their manuscripts (Menen mentions this hilarious incident in the memoir). As a result of belonging to three nations at once, he belonged to none, naturally. All his absurdist novels (compiled in Classic Aubrey Menen) unfurl in a moral and geographical limbo, even if they are set in real places.It is impossible to bring out the flavour of Menen’s writing merely by commenting on it because his brand of wit is unique in its quiet sabre-sharpness. So, I will quote at length from the tongue-in-cheek introduction to his Dead Man in the Silver Market: Autobiographical Essays on National Prides.“Men of all races have always sought for a convincing explanation of their own astonishing excellence and they have frequently found what they were looking for.‘Thus, the Scottish historian Buckle established his fame by the discovery that civilisation was all due to climate. In an exhaustive survey of the climates of the world, he was able to range them in their order of merit. Hot, wet climates produced monstrous civilisations; hot, dry ones produced no civilisation at all, or if they did, the culture withered away. Extremely cold climates produced cultures of a low, huddling, grubbing and contracted nature. The best climate of all was temperate, varied, moderately rainy and briskly cold in winter. It was to be found in a fairly wide area, but particularly in the north-west corner of Europe. It was well exemplified in the climate of the British Isles, but perhaps it was best seen at its most vigorous in that part of the British Isles which lay to the north of the River Tweed. Buckle’s theories were well received in north-west Europe but did not gain much currency among the Spaniards, the Italians, or the Indians, while the Chinese, as is their custom, made nonsense of the whole thing because they have every sort of climate in the world.‘A later theory was that natural selection determined that certain races should go to the top of the evolutionary tree and that others, owing to the lack of those qualities which led to survival, fell behind and ultimately became absorbed by the lucky winner. This theory held the field for a considerable time in England, particularly during those decades when the English were the greatest power in the world. Nowadays, when it would appear that Nature has selected them to be a secondary one, the theory gains no acceptance at all.”Like all great satirists, Menen plays with scale to drive home his point—we notice here, for instance, how each person/race thinks they are at the centre of creation, always great and always right, while the universe laughs at their pretensions and brings them down to size. The delusions of grandeur of a race/ caste/ class emerge from its inability to see the little man in the mirror. Once that awareness comes and the scale is set right, other things fall into place. We learn to love our parent/ spouse/ children/ country according to the bond, neither more nor less—as Cordelia tells King Lear in answer to his foolish demand to quantify the amount of her filial devotion. Menen has this to say about patriotism:“A true patriotism is a simpler thing. It is to love the land of one’s birth; its hills and mountains, cities and skies; its sea; its air; its language and the people who nurtured you. It reminds us constantly not of our greatness, but of our true size.”In spite of my great admiration of Menen, I must say that not all of his writings have aged well, that he can be obscure in his intelligence, he can be contemptuous, un-woke. It is difficult to take to his writings (a friend I had recommended A Stranger to took an instant dislike to it), but once we attune our mind to his style, it is easy to conclude that he is an exceptional writer, quite without parallel.In-betweenness, Menen’s favourite subject, is a good launching pad for an exploration of the merits of translation, a remarkable example of which is reviewed in the latest issue of Frontline. Marathi director, screenwriter, playwright Sachin Kundalkar’s debut novel was translated into English as Cobalt Blue in 2013. The novel was critically acclaimed and made into a Netflix film, which, in spite of starring Prateik Babbar, turned out to be a vanilla exploration of gay love.The latest translated novel by Kundalkar, Silk Route, is anything but vanilla, going by Kushalrani Gulab’s glowing review. She says, “What I loved best though was the matter-of-fact way the author presents Nishikant’s sexuality. It is as though there is nothing about it to cause comment, as though queer lust and love are regular, everyday matters, and a person is just a person regardless of who she, he or they might be attracted to. Which is exactly as it should be in both real life and fiction, so please, O Universe, may this become a trend.” Read the review here.To return to Menen (evidently, I have a thing), his memoir’s ending, when he retreats to a barely functional tenement in Italy, gives up all vanities, including sex and elaborate meals, in a concerted effort based on the teachings of the Upanishads to unpeel the layers of his self till he reaches its core (or its lack), had me elated. The last chapter, the Appendix, is, in fact, a user-friendly guide on how to pull off this feat. Besides everything else, it contains an enlightening discussion on the Upanishads.So, if you want to take your little grey cells out for a walk, do read A Stranger and whatever else you can find on Menen. (Since Menen’s works are not easily available in India, Classic Aubrey Menen and A Stranger are invaluable collections.) He will leave you enriched by making you re-realise the hollowness and stupidity of all grand posturing.See you again next week.Till then, Anusua MukherjeeDeputy Editor, FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS