(This is a product of the crazy wanderings of my mind during the wedding season last year. This was sent to a couple of friends as a prank with a rather tragic outcome: one of them has stopped writing to me. :( Alas!)
My Dear Friend,
I am pleased to announce the consummation of nearly two years of courtship with Sripriya Sasidharan, Lecturer in Microbiology at Bharathiar University, Coimbatore. Sripriya and I shall enter into wedlock in a little over four months’ time, and we extend a warm invitation to each one of you to grace this happy occasion with your august presence. For Sripriya and I, the wedding is an effort to indulge in a celebration of cultural values and at the same time, display our love and concern for the environment (which, we believe, is a core Indian cultural value, although in a state of emasculation today). We plan to celebrate our wedding in the traditional manner over a period of five days from January 9-13, 2008. The venue is our ancestral village of Kolinjavadi, on the banks of the river Amravathi, at a distance of 45 kilometres from the city of Coimbatore. We strongly urge you to treat the wedding as a vacation in the sylvan retreats of the beautiful Kongu region and partake of the personalised hospitality that our village is famous for. The dates of the wedding have been carefully chosen to dovetail with Pongal, the Tamil harvest festival which commences from January 13, the same day as the wedding ends. (The wedding draws to a close on the morning of the 13th, leaving the day free for the initiation of Pongal celebrations.)
Traditionally, the purpose of a five day wedding has been to allow the bride and the bridegroom to grow out of their coyness and get to know each other, in the process developing the inseparable bonds that shall bind them together for life. Long weddings served as occasions for guests to socialise; middle-aged parents would look for prospective matches for their children-come-of-age; young boys and girls would court and fall in love (perhaps even elope in the next weeks); while the elderly would meet with faraway relatives, engage in family arithmetic (accounting for additions by way of marriage or birth; and subtractions arising from death) before eventually parting with sadness, knowing well that given their age this might well be the final farewell.
We hope to recreate this atmosphere in the course of our wedding.
The highlights of the wedding will be the various traditional ceremonies, particularly the Virudham, Paaligai Thelikkal, Mapillai Azhaippu, Oonjal Paattu, Kasi Yatra, Ammi Mithikkal, Meen Vettai and Nalangu. There is immense scope for guests to participate in many of these ceremonies. Sripriya and I are particularly keen on the last two ceremonies, which are in the nature of games played between the couple with others egging them on, and are most mirthful and entertaining when staged in all fullness. In addition to these ceremonies will be numerous informal events involving traditional music, song and dance. Exponents of the nadaswaram (a musical instrument somewhat akin to the shehnai) and the thavil (a percussion instrument) will purvey strains of music befitting the occasion. Womenfolk will sing wedding songs. Wedding songs can serve to tease and create merriment; some extol the beauty of the bride and bridegroom; some are distinctly risqué, while others are typically sad, marking the separation of the bride from her family. There will be performances of kummi, a traditional folkdance. This is a simple dance in which all are encouraged to join in. Some of Sripriya’s cousins also plan to stage a bharatnatyam performance at the temple grounds.
Living arrangements will be made in the roomy ancestral houses belonging to our families. Guests are urged to sleep on reed mats spread on the floor, in the traditional way. Beds can be arranged in the open for those desiring a particularly close communion with the beautiful night sky. Morning ablutions may be performed along specially earmarked sections of the river bank. We expect the wedding to generate enough nightsoil and organic waste to serve as manure for the next crop in the village that will be sown in late January or early February. Guests will enjoy their morning bath in the cool, crystal-clear waters of the Amravathi, one of the few rivers in our country left undammed. While bathing areas are separately marked out for men and women, it is a common prank for boys to hide the clothes of the bathing girls. (Despite suggestions from some quarters, Sripriya and I decided not to have the song, Tere man ki ganga…, playing in the background, on the grounds that this would be a most jarring external cultural influence.) Adventurous girls, particularly those with a taste for the bucolic, may take potshots at the boys bathing in the river, by climbing up the trees in the mango orchards. Catapults will be made available for this activity.
The food will be South Indian vegetarian with the distinct flavour that is a hallmark of the Kongu region. Some of the special traditional drinks to watch out for are paanagam, a tasty energising drink made out of jaggery, neer mor or seasoned buttermilk, and sanjeevi, a drink made out of crushed ragi and corn. Guests are encouraged to help with the cooking, which will be done on earthen hearths. Food will be served on banana leaves spread on the floor and will be handled entirely by volunteers among the guests. We shall be delighted if you are to step forward and nominate yourself for this task. The serving of food is the highpoint of hospitality and we want this to be marked by conviviality and warmth throughout the five days of the wedding. (Please note that all volunteers will have to be appropriately attired. The right kind of sarees and dhotis will be arranged for.) Guests will be required to burp with pleasure at the end of the meal indicating that they have eaten their fill.
Evenings will be taken up by folk performances. This is also a good time for courting and minor flings. Serenading is possible in the coconut groves, where one can endlessly run around the trees and sing to their heart’s content. Couples can hide in the overgrowth along the river bank (this will be sufficiently thick by early January, thanks to the nourishment of the northeast monsoon) and display their amorous affection for each other. For those who believe in elevated love, there are plenty of asoka and banyan trees with thick foliage. (If you are unable to climb up the trees, ladders can be strategically positioned upon request.) We will be delighted to see as many of you take advantage of these romantic pleasures as possible.
Now to the travel logistics. Bullock carts will be waiting at the Coimbatore railway station (you are urged to take a train to Coimbatore since air travel is highly polluting and contributes greatly to carbon emissions) on the morning of 9 January to ferry guests to Kolinjavadi. This is a non-polluting and truly enjoyable mode of conveyance, which will give you a panoramic view of the lush green fields of the Kongu region. You will draw deep breaths of clean, fresh air, a rare commodity in Indian cities today. (Guests arriving on other days are free to charter their own bullock carts. We request them however, to make arrangements for collecting the bullock-dung that will be dropped on the way. As you are aware, this is an important source of manure.) If some of you wish, we can arrange for a few express horse carts. However, horse-dung is believed to be inferior to cattle-dung in terms of fertiliser quality.
We look forward to hosting all of you at Kolinjavadi and enjoying your company on the occasion of our wedding. Your contribution to both tradition and environment shall be equally momentous. (Since some guests are being invited only for specific ceremonies, kindly take a print-out of this page of the invitation, which shows that you are invited for all of the five days. The print-out will serve as something of a season ticket, not unlike the ones sold at five-day cricket matches. We are sending out only electronic invitations to avoid the use of paper.) Please mark the wedding dates on your calendar. Do let us know if you have any suggestions. Our email address is sriram.wedding@gmail.com
With best regards,
Ramanujam
PS: Sripriya delivered a little bundle of joy in the last week of August. Our bouncing baby daughter, Alai Osai (which is Tamil for ‘resonance of the waves’), will be all of four months at the wedding.
Thursday 19 June 2008
Tuesday 17 June 2008
In those days there was no coffee!
Take the exclamation mark at the end away and you have the title of a book. Yes indeed. In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History is the delightful title of a book by A.R. Venkatachalapathy (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008), a bilingual author prolific in both Tamil and English.
In Those Days There Was No Coffee is a collection of nine essays that explore life in the Tamil-speaking parts of early 20th century Madras Presidency. The title is slightly deceptive, for only one of the nine essays is on coffee. Arguing that history is not a straightforward reading of the archives, Venkatachalapathy asserts that a careful study of popular literature can provide a nuanced understanding of the past and offer valuable perspectives denied by the archives. Using coffee as the object of the title essay, the author uncovers references to the drink in Tamil newspapers, journals, short stories and autobiographies of the colonial period to purvey rich insights into cultural values and perceptions of the early 20th century, accompanied by a superb exposition on how these were influenced by the coffee-drinking habit. The perspective that unfolds in such an unusual reading of history is likely to pose something of a surprise to any Tamil worth their salt who has grown up with the ubiquitous aroma of filter coffee wafting through the house thrice a day. Admittedly, in my own case, I was well into my twenties before I could even begin to conceive of a past when coffee, the common man’s elixir, was unknown and people drank something else.
Venkatachalapathy captures the tension and ambivalence of early 20th century society when coffee was seeping into popular Tamil middle class consciousness, conferring status and sophistication on the drinker. However, conservative elements inveighed against what they termed an ‘evil influence of modernity’ and ‘a copy-cat imitation of the West’. The contention was partly over the supplanting of the traditional morning drink neeragaram (the word is a combination of the Sanskritic words, neer and aahaar) by an alien, coffee. To quote the author, ‘Made by fermenting water drained after cooking rice, and adding water and salt to taste, neeragaram's demise was lamented by many intellectuals - a sign of their cultural anxiety.’ My grandmother confirms that in her younger days children and elders alike woke up to a breakfast drink of neeragaram, and that in the countryside this could be prepared even out of raagi, kombu, cholam (maize) and other traditional grains. She adds however, that in her time the rice was dehusked at home using the olakai or the traditional metal-bottomed long wooden pestle. As a result, it would not be dehusked completely and would possess considerable nutritive value, quite unlike the rice of the present day, which is polished clean by the comprehensive mechanised dehusking of the rice mill.
The public denouncement of coffee went to extremes that may sound at once ridiculous and amusing to us at this point in time, a hundred years later. One writer reviled the drink, calling it even more addictive than arrack, and went on to regret, ‘In those days people lived a hundred years [by drinking neeragaram]; nowadays times have changed. Even the women who work the fields demand coffee. There is not a single household without a coffee drinker’. Another critic complained, using the language of modern medicine, that ‘with the increase in coffee-drinking in our country, infant mortality, diabetes, constipation and other lowly diseases have begun to afflict our brothers and sisters’!
The attack on coffee extended also to women, by women. Thus, the Stri Dharma, published by the Women's India Association wailed:
Alas! This damned thing has got hold of women! Two cups of coffee have become the order of the day...This habit has taken over even aged women. These old women who were adept in home remedies now rush to the doctor, making a beeline to the hospital for the slightest headache.
The railing against coffee and women spilled over to the realm of the political. A highly sexist letter to Gandhi, apparently in the wake of the Non-Cooperation Movement, went thus:
The greatest obstacle in the way of success to our [non-cooperation] movement in Madras are our women. Some of them are very reactionary, and a very large number of the high class Brahmin ladies have become addicted to many of the Western vices. They drink coffee not less than three times a day, and consider it very fashionable to drink more.
These vituperative attacks on coffee, by their very vehemence, suggest that the anti-coffee brigade was fighting a losing battle. Very much so. For coffee gradually moved on from being a mere refreshment to become an integral part of cultural consciousness relating to notions of refinement and hospitality. Writers began to use coffee as a metaphor. For instance, the short stories of Pudumaippithan, the celebrated Tamil short story writer, are littered with references to the drink. In fact, one of his stories, Kadavulum Kandasamy Pillaiyum (God and Kandasamy Pillai), considered a classic, has Lord Shiva descending to the earth to meet the central character, Kandasamy Pillai, in Madras, whereupon 'the latter instinctively leads him to a nearby coffee hotel'. Here the following conversation ensues:
As God sipped the coffee, a divine demeanour of having drunk soma suffused His face.
"This is my divine handiwork", said God.
"This is not Your handiwork, but the hotelier's. Mixing chicory with coffee is his handiwork. Show your mettle when you pay the bill", whispered Kandasamy Pillai into His ears, content that he had sorted out the issue of paying for the coffee.
"Chicory...what's that?" God looked up quizzingly.
"Chicory powder resembles coffee, but is not coffee - like those who defraud people in the name of God", replied Kandasamy Pillai.
Coffee came to be closely associated with the upper caste, predominantly Brahmin, middle class. Its growing popularity led to the setting up of 'Brahmin coffee hotels' or 'coffee clubs', which served only coffee (in addition to snacks) and no other drink, in urban clusters. The coffee hotels, like coffee itself, also found their way into popular literature as we have seen in the excerpt from Pudumaippithan’s story. However, they came to be targetted - with success - by the Self-Respect or anti-Brahmin movement, which excoriated the obnoxious practice of keeping some seats out of bounds to all except Brahmins.
Coffee’s dominance among the Tamil middle class contrasts sharply with the universal popularity of tea elsewhere in India. In Tamil Nadu, tea is seen as a working class drink and a cultural 'other' of coffee. This perception has even entered the popular idiom so that somebody with a touch of the loony about them may be described as ‘a chap who drinks tea at a Brahmin hotel’!
Some of the other essays in the book are delightful as well. One of them is on the introduction of cartoons in Tamil newspapers, an influence carried over from the English Punch, which spawned an entire genre of Indian journals ambitiously named after the original as The Delhi Punch, The Punjab Punch, Urdu Punch, Gujarati Punch and so on. Among Tamil newspaper publications of the time, it was in the weekly, India, that cartoons were first introduced by its editor, the celebrated Subramania Bharati.
Another essay that stands out is Excising the Self: Writing Autobiography in Colonial Tamilnadu. Venkatachalapathy persuasively argues that autobiography as a literary phenomenon met with the popular approval of the Tamil audience only by the 1930s but was quickly appropriated by writers to provide a historical account of social transformation rather than scrutinise their own lives. This was an indigenisation of the western literary genre, which in its original form served as an expression of individuality and a narrative medium for reflection and self-realisation. The early autobiographies wove their themes around contrasting pictures of ‘those days’ and ‘these days’, producing a romantic narrative of a pristine past, whose order and social harmony was gradually chipped away by the rapid social and technological change permeating society in the wake of the colonial encounter.
In Those Days… offers a splendid peep into the life of the middle class citizenry of the colonial period, painting an evocative picture by drawing from popular literary sources of the time. In brilliantly capturing the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, from its unconventional sources, it shows that history is not the exclusive domain of the pedantic and the obscure. The lay person with an inquisitive mind may not only stake claim to it but also revel in the delight of its more accessible forms.
In Those Days There Was No Coffee is a collection of nine essays that explore life in the Tamil-speaking parts of early 20th century Madras Presidency. The title is slightly deceptive, for only one of the nine essays is on coffee. Arguing that history is not a straightforward reading of the archives, Venkatachalapathy asserts that a careful study of popular literature can provide a nuanced understanding of the past and offer valuable perspectives denied by the archives. Using coffee as the object of the title essay, the author uncovers references to the drink in Tamil newspapers, journals, short stories and autobiographies of the colonial period to purvey rich insights into cultural values and perceptions of the early 20th century, accompanied by a superb exposition on how these were influenced by the coffee-drinking habit. The perspective that unfolds in such an unusual reading of history is likely to pose something of a surprise to any Tamil worth their salt who has grown up with the ubiquitous aroma of filter coffee wafting through the house thrice a day. Admittedly, in my own case, I was well into my twenties before I could even begin to conceive of a past when coffee, the common man’s elixir, was unknown and people drank something else.
Venkatachalapathy captures the tension and ambivalence of early 20th century society when coffee was seeping into popular Tamil middle class consciousness, conferring status and sophistication on the drinker. However, conservative elements inveighed against what they termed an ‘evil influence of modernity’ and ‘a copy-cat imitation of the West’. The contention was partly over the supplanting of the traditional morning drink neeragaram (the word is a combination of the Sanskritic words, neer and aahaar) by an alien, coffee. To quote the author, ‘Made by fermenting water drained after cooking rice, and adding water and salt to taste, neeragaram's demise was lamented by many intellectuals - a sign of their cultural anxiety.’ My grandmother confirms that in her younger days children and elders alike woke up to a breakfast drink of neeragaram, and that in the countryside this could be prepared even out of raagi, kombu, cholam (maize) and other traditional grains. She adds however, that in her time the rice was dehusked at home using the olakai or the traditional metal-bottomed long wooden pestle. As a result, it would not be dehusked completely and would possess considerable nutritive value, quite unlike the rice of the present day, which is polished clean by the comprehensive mechanised dehusking of the rice mill.
The public denouncement of coffee went to extremes that may sound at once ridiculous and amusing to us at this point in time, a hundred years later. One writer reviled the drink, calling it even more addictive than arrack, and went on to regret, ‘In those days people lived a hundred years [by drinking neeragaram]; nowadays times have changed. Even the women who work the fields demand coffee. There is not a single household without a coffee drinker’. Another critic complained, using the language of modern medicine, that ‘with the increase in coffee-drinking in our country, infant mortality, diabetes, constipation and other lowly diseases have begun to afflict our brothers and sisters’!
The attack on coffee extended also to women, by women. Thus, the Stri Dharma, published by the Women's India Association wailed:
Alas! This damned thing has got hold of women! Two cups of coffee have become the order of the day...This habit has taken over even aged women. These old women who were adept in home remedies now rush to the doctor, making a beeline to the hospital for the slightest headache.
The railing against coffee and women spilled over to the realm of the political. A highly sexist letter to Gandhi, apparently in the wake of the Non-Cooperation Movement, went thus:
The greatest obstacle in the way of success to our [non-cooperation] movement in Madras are our women. Some of them are very reactionary, and a very large number of the high class Brahmin ladies have become addicted to many of the Western vices. They drink coffee not less than three times a day, and consider it very fashionable to drink more.
These vituperative attacks on coffee, by their very vehemence, suggest that the anti-coffee brigade was fighting a losing battle. Very much so. For coffee gradually moved on from being a mere refreshment to become an integral part of cultural consciousness relating to notions of refinement and hospitality. Writers began to use coffee as a metaphor. For instance, the short stories of Pudumaippithan, the celebrated Tamil short story writer, are littered with references to the drink. In fact, one of his stories, Kadavulum Kandasamy Pillaiyum (God and Kandasamy Pillai), considered a classic, has Lord Shiva descending to the earth to meet the central character, Kandasamy Pillai, in Madras, whereupon 'the latter instinctively leads him to a nearby coffee hotel'. Here the following conversation ensues:
As God sipped the coffee, a divine demeanour of having drunk soma suffused His face.
"This is my divine handiwork", said God.
"This is not Your handiwork, but the hotelier's. Mixing chicory with coffee is his handiwork. Show your mettle when you pay the bill", whispered Kandasamy Pillai into His ears, content that he had sorted out the issue of paying for the coffee.
"Chicory...what's that?" God looked up quizzingly.
"Chicory powder resembles coffee, but is not coffee - like those who defraud people in the name of God", replied Kandasamy Pillai.
Coffee came to be closely associated with the upper caste, predominantly Brahmin, middle class. Its growing popularity led to the setting up of 'Brahmin coffee hotels' or 'coffee clubs', which served only coffee (in addition to snacks) and no other drink, in urban clusters. The coffee hotels, like coffee itself, also found their way into popular literature as we have seen in the excerpt from Pudumaippithan’s story. However, they came to be targetted - with success - by the Self-Respect or anti-Brahmin movement, which excoriated the obnoxious practice of keeping some seats out of bounds to all except Brahmins.
Coffee’s dominance among the Tamil middle class contrasts sharply with the universal popularity of tea elsewhere in India. In Tamil Nadu, tea is seen as a working class drink and a cultural 'other' of coffee. This perception has even entered the popular idiom so that somebody with a touch of the loony about them may be described as ‘a chap who drinks tea at a Brahmin hotel’!
Some of the other essays in the book are delightful as well. One of them is on the introduction of cartoons in Tamil newspapers, an influence carried over from the English Punch, which spawned an entire genre of Indian journals ambitiously named after the original as The Delhi Punch, The Punjab Punch, Urdu Punch, Gujarati Punch and so on. Among Tamil newspaper publications of the time, it was in the weekly, India, that cartoons were first introduced by its editor, the celebrated Subramania Bharati.
Another essay that stands out is Excising the Self: Writing Autobiography in Colonial Tamilnadu. Venkatachalapathy persuasively argues that autobiography as a literary phenomenon met with the popular approval of the Tamil audience only by the 1930s but was quickly appropriated by writers to provide a historical account of social transformation rather than scrutinise their own lives. This was an indigenisation of the western literary genre, which in its original form served as an expression of individuality and a narrative medium for reflection and self-realisation. The early autobiographies wove their themes around contrasting pictures of ‘those days’ and ‘these days’, producing a romantic narrative of a pristine past, whose order and social harmony was gradually chipped away by the rapid social and technological change permeating society in the wake of the colonial encounter.
In Those Days… offers a splendid peep into the life of the middle class citizenry of the colonial period, painting an evocative picture by drawing from popular literary sources of the time. In brilliantly capturing the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, from its unconventional sources, it shows that history is not the exclusive domain of the pedantic and the obscure. The lay person with an inquisitive mind may not only stake claim to it but also revel in the delight of its more accessible forms.
Wednesday 11 June 2008
Bombay Dying?
For quite some time now, no news is good news as far as Mumbai is concerned. It is a case of the bride suffering from the attention of more than one overzealous suitor, each staking a violent, obsessive claim over the city and its people. New strictures are being regularly passed: who is welcome to the city and who is not; who can be criticised and who cannot; who belongs to the city and who does not. By common consent, tolerance is on nobody's 'Approved' list. Mumbai or Bombay is no longer a byword for cosmopolitanism.
Mumbai is a palimpsest, and traces remain of each of the various layers that make it what it is. The Koli tribesmen, who must surely be given their due as the original residents of what is now the city of Mumbai, are almost gone but not fully so. Ironically, adivasi families that have lived for generations together in what has come to be set aside as a national park in recent times - the abhorrently named Sanjay Gandhi National Park - are now treated as trespassers in their own territory, and are sought to be evicted by the government.
Within the national park, the Kanheri Caves, which are dated back to the period stretching from the 1st century BCE to the 9th century CE, offer ample proof of an extensive and well-organised Buddhist monastery. On the other side of the railway line, in the same suburb of Borivali, lies the Mandapeshwar rock-cut cave temple. Together with the cave-temple in Jogeshwari and the more elaborately sculpted caves in the island of Elephanta, these splendid specimens of art are a reminder of another era and people who lived and flourished in parts of what now comprise Bombay city and its suburbs.
Modern Bombay was shaped by the Europeans, chiefly the British 'servants' (which is what the staff were called) of the East India Company, which acquired it on lease from Charles II, the then English monarch, for a goodly loan plus annual rent, in or around the year 1668. It is of course, well-known that Charles II himself acquired the island of Bombay as a wedding gift when he married the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza.
While the British developed their possession into a port, it was not they alone that made the city. As it goes with port cities, Bombay attracted people of a multitude of ethnicities. By the early 19th century, Bombay was peopled by a mercantile community comprising, in addition to the British, Parsis, Marwaris, Konkani Muslims, Gujarati Banias, Bohras, Armenian and Indo-Portuguese. The city's growing prosperity attracted migrants from the hinterland.
Bombay's rise was concomitant with the decline of the port city of Surat, but its fortunes were really built upon the illegal opium trade with China. The merchants who smuggled opium into China had extensive networks and deep pockets, and for all their risks they were rewarded with windfall profits. It is another matter that these merchants who made their pile at the cost of Manchu China's deep misery were probably the 19th century prototypes of modern-day arms dealers that feed upon civil wars in the Third World to keep themselves in an extremely lucrative business. Some of the oldest family names in Indian business today, including the Tatas, may trace the origins of their business empires to the days of the opium trade.
It is interesting to find that there was a point of time in the late 1700s, before the opium trade took off, when Bombay, a town little other than a port in those days, was proposed to be shut down in view of the enormous drain it posed to the finances of the East India Company. Amar Farooqui, in his insightful book, Opium City, quotes the Governor-General of Bengal, Lord Cornwallis, who observed that the Company had ‘appropriated the whole of the surplus revenue of Banaras and Bahar (sic) to the support of Bombay’ but was nevertheless ‘obliged to send many lacs thither from Calcutta’, and went on to propose that the Company’s operations there be restricted to ‘just a small factory’. However, things were to take an altogether different turn.
By the mid-19th century, the city’s meteoric growth made it one of the foremost seats of the British Empire. In 1857 it acquired the distinction of being one of the three sites of India’s first modern universities with the establishment of the University of Bombay (now renamed University of Mumbai). This development, complemented by the existence of wealthy patrons, was germane to the setting up of a number of educational institutions, many of which exist even today. The rise of an educated Indian middle class and modern intelligentsia in Bombay and the other Presidency towns fed into the growth of Indian nationalism, an all-too-familiar story that needs no recounting.
Bombay’s political future came under question for the first time only after independence, when popular upsurge demanding the creation of linguistic states threatened to redraw the map of independent India. A States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) was appointed in 1954 to consider the demands from various parts of the country and to make recommendations to the Government of India. It is a matter of considerable interest that enormous heat was generated over the question of Bombay. Several prominent citizens of Bombay, counting among them luminaries such as JRD Tata, in addition to other industrialists, lawyers, scholars and doctors, organised themselves under the banner of the Bombay Citizens Committee, and printed a 200-page book as a submission to the SRC to argue that on the grounds of history, economic importance, multicultural character and geography, Bombay should be kept out of the state of Maharashtra that was being demanded by Marathi-speakers. In Parliament, the Bombay MP SK Patil went a step further to demand the creation of a separate self-governing city-state of Bombay. Totally opposed to this stand and vociferous in its demand for a state of Maharashtra with Bombay as its capital was the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (earlier Parishad), which drew support from members across the political spectrum, so that it included in its ranks, Congressmen, Communists, Jana Sanghis, Socialists as well as the towering constitution-maker, BR Ambedkar. It was alleged that the Bombay Citizens Committee was dominated by the Gujaratis, a major linguistic community in the city who were loath to see Bombay go to Maharashtra. Caught between the devil and the deep sea, the government of the day at the centre refrained from appeasing either side, choosing to retain a bilingual province of Bombay even as linguistic states were carved out elsewhere towards the end of 1956. For this the Congress paid a heavy price in the form of serious losses in the 1957 general elections and the subsequent municipal elections. Their hand forced, the Union Government finally settled the thorny issue with the creation of the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra on 1 May 1960. Bombay went to Maharashtra.
Mumbai today is a city where prince and pauper alike literally joust for space. This is only natural. With 16.38 million people, Mumbai is India’s most populous city. It holds at least 3 million more people than the second largest city, Kolkata, although it is two-and-a-half times smaller. Thus, Mumbai’s mind-boggling population density, at 22,000 persons per square kilometre, is incomparable with the corresponding figures for Maharashtra and all-India: 315 and 324 respectively. Inevitably, housing is a severe problem. Between 55 to 60 per cent of the city’s population lives in slums, in highly degrading living conditions. Or to put it differently, less than five people out of ten live in a proper house.
Commuting is a daily nightmare. Despite the large numbers of private vehicles that keep the city’s roads perpetually clogged, public transport accounts for 88% of daily commuting. The suburban rail system, which ferries 6.4 million commuters across the length of the city everyday, is hopelessly overstretched. On an average, four people die and four more are injured in accidents on railway tracks every single day. An average of 824 people falls off local trains every year. And all this is just getting worse in a city where planners failed to wake up in time to the mammoth logistical problems confronting them, and have seen them worsen with the passage of time.
While organised crime and corruption in the police ranks may not touch citizens’ lives everyday, the scale they have attained is deeply worrisome for a democratic, civilized society. They are so deeply entrenched that for many years now they have become a common subject of portrayal, sometimes essayed with bone-chilling realism, in Hindi films produced out of the same city. Yet, their detailed exploration in some recent popular books, for example, Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found, the narrative non-fiction work by Suketu Mehta, and Shantaram, an autobiographical novel, leave the reader shocked and aghast. These factors combine with Mumbai’s sheer population density to make it a prospective terrorist’s delight. It has already suffered two major terror attacks, apart from several smaller ones, since 1993 – and continues to remain extremely vulnerable.
To these existing woes have been added political ones, with deep sectarian and communal colourings. Although their presence is not something new, their continued existence and intensification in recent times do not bode well for the metropolis. The political factors in play have sought to create mythical icons with attributes that defy fact and to enforce a rigid, narrow discipline accompanied by broad definitions of what might constitute an infraction. Today, the remark of a critical journalist; tomorrow, a scene in a particular movie or play and on another day, the exchange of greeting cards – all are subject to the whims of a clumsy moral discipline, with any ‘infringement’ being met with swift, violent retribution. In many ways, Mumbai is India’s own Wild West. Given the resort to violence at the drop of a hat, one may very well doubt the existence of a laboriously compiled constitution in the country, drafted, ironically, by a Maharashtrian who was also a resident of the city.
The mark of a flourishing civilization is its openness to the winds that blow from different directions. The great universities of the world, whether in the East or the West, sought to attract and welcomed talent from other lands. This practice holds good to the present day. The decline of the sophisticated Indus Valley civilization has been attributed by some historians to the trenchant hold of the priestly class, which upheld traditional forms of art and craft and treated innovation as near-felony. Likewise, the fall of the Mughal Empire is traced not merely to the bigoted Aurangzeb, but even further back to his father, Shah Jahan. On one hand, the latter abandoned the creative, pluralist outlook of his grandfather, Akbar, which had encouraged the flowering of native talent; on the other, his wars with the Persians and the Uzbegs effectively plugged the flow of immigrants from Central Asia, so that an important source of new ideas and thoughts that had enriched India over the centuries dried up. There are lessons here for the men and women who seek to rule over a city that is dangerously slipping in the direction of inexorable decline.
In 1954, when the question of Bombay was being hotly debated, the two sparring sides sought to arrive at an understanding. Shankarrao Deo, President of the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad met Sir Purushottamdas Thakur of the Bombay Citizens Committee, and said that while the central demand of Bombay for Maharashtra could not be given up, he was very much agreeable to preserving the ‘autonomous character of the metropolitan city [and] ensuring its cosmopolitan life’.
Few of the trumpeters who lay narrow claims to Mumbai today are likely to know of this compromise once offered as a price for the city; fewer still are likely to care for it.
References:
Samir S. Patel, Mumbai's Rough-Hewn Legacy, Archaelogy, Archaelogy Institute of America, 4 April 2007. Available at www.archaeology.org/online/features/mandapeshwar/
Nick Robbins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, (Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2006)
Amar Farooqui, Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay, (Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2006)
Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, (Picador India, 2007)
Manorama Yearbook 2007, (Kottayam: Malayala Manorama Co. Ltd., 2007)
Dionne Bunsha, Torture Trains, Frontline, 4 January 2008
Abraham Eraly, Gem in the Lotus: The Seeding of Indian Civilisation (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000)
Abraham Eraly, Emperors of the Peacock Throne: The Saga of the Great Mughals (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000)
Mumbai is a palimpsest, and traces remain of each of the various layers that make it what it is. The Koli tribesmen, who must surely be given their due as the original residents of what is now the city of Mumbai, are almost gone but not fully so. Ironically, adivasi families that have lived for generations together in what has come to be set aside as a national park in recent times - the abhorrently named Sanjay Gandhi National Park - are now treated as trespassers in their own territory, and are sought to be evicted by the government.
Within the national park, the Kanheri Caves, which are dated back to the period stretching from the 1st century BCE to the 9th century CE, offer ample proof of an extensive and well-organised Buddhist monastery. On the other side of the railway line, in the same suburb of Borivali, lies the Mandapeshwar rock-cut cave temple. Together with the cave-temple in Jogeshwari and the more elaborately sculpted caves in the island of Elephanta, these splendid specimens of art are a reminder of another era and people who lived and flourished in parts of what now comprise Bombay city and its suburbs.
Modern Bombay was shaped by the Europeans, chiefly the British 'servants' (which is what the staff were called) of the East India Company, which acquired it on lease from Charles II, the then English monarch, for a goodly loan plus annual rent, in or around the year 1668. It is of course, well-known that Charles II himself acquired the island of Bombay as a wedding gift when he married the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza.
While the British developed their possession into a port, it was not they alone that made the city. As it goes with port cities, Bombay attracted people of a multitude of ethnicities. By the early 19th century, Bombay was peopled by a mercantile community comprising, in addition to the British, Parsis, Marwaris, Konkani Muslims, Gujarati Banias, Bohras, Armenian and Indo-Portuguese. The city's growing prosperity attracted migrants from the hinterland.
Bombay's rise was concomitant with the decline of the port city of Surat, but its fortunes were really built upon the illegal opium trade with China. The merchants who smuggled opium into China had extensive networks and deep pockets, and for all their risks they were rewarded with windfall profits. It is another matter that these merchants who made their pile at the cost of Manchu China's deep misery were probably the 19th century prototypes of modern-day arms dealers that feed upon civil wars in the Third World to keep themselves in an extremely lucrative business. Some of the oldest family names in Indian business today, including the Tatas, may trace the origins of their business empires to the days of the opium trade.
It is interesting to find that there was a point of time in the late 1700s, before the opium trade took off, when Bombay, a town little other than a port in those days, was proposed to be shut down in view of the enormous drain it posed to the finances of the East India Company. Amar Farooqui, in his insightful book, Opium City, quotes the Governor-General of Bengal, Lord Cornwallis, who observed that the Company had ‘appropriated the whole of the surplus revenue of Banaras and Bahar (sic) to the support of Bombay’ but was nevertheless ‘obliged to send many lacs thither from Calcutta’, and went on to propose that the Company’s operations there be restricted to ‘just a small factory’. However, things were to take an altogether different turn.
By the mid-19th century, the city’s meteoric growth made it one of the foremost seats of the British Empire. In 1857 it acquired the distinction of being one of the three sites of India’s first modern universities with the establishment of the University of Bombay (now renamed University of Mumbai). This development, complemented by the existence of wealthy patrons, was germane to the setting up of a number of educational institutions, many of which exist even today. The rise of an educated Indian middle class and modern intelligentsia in Bombay and the other Presidency towns fed into the growth of Indian nationalism, an all-too-familiar story that needs no recounting.
Bombay’s political future came under question for the first time only after independence, when popular upsurge demanding the creation of linguistic states threatened to redraw the map of independent India. A States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) was appointed in 1954 to consider the demands from various parts of the country and to make recommendations to the Government of India. It is a matter of considerable interest that enormous heat was generated over the question of Bombay. Several prominent citizens of Bombay, counting among them luminaries such as JRD Tata, in addition to other industrialists, lawyers, scholars and doctors, organised themselves under the banner of the Bombay Citizens Committee, and printed a 200-page book as a submission to the SRC to argue that on the grounds of history, economic importance, multicultural character and geography, Bombay should be kept out of the state of Maharashtra that was being demanded by Marathi-speakers. In Parliament, the Bombay MP SK Patil went a step further to demand the creation of a separate self-governing city-state of Bombay. Totally opposed to this stand and vociferous in its demand for a state of Maharashtra with Bombay as its capital was the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (earlier Parishad), which drew support from members across the political spectrum, so that it included in its ranks, Congressmen, Communists, Jana Sanghis, Socialists as well as the towering constitution-maker, BR Ambedkar. It was alleged that the Bombay Citizens Committee was dominated by the Gujaratis, a major linguistic community in the city who were loath to see Bombay go to Maharashtra. Caught between the devil and the deep sea, the government of the day at the centre refrained from appeasing either side, choosing to retain a bilingual province of Bombay even as linguistic states were carved out elsewhere towards the end of 1956. For this the Congress paid a heavy price in the form of serious losses in the 1957 general elections and the subsequent municipal elections. Their hand forced, the Union Government finally settled the thorny issue with the creation of the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra on 1 May 1960. Bombay went to Maharashtra.
Mumbai today is a city where prince and pauper alike literally joust for space. This is only natural. With 16.38 million people, Mumbai is India’s most populous city. It holds at least 3 million more people than the second largest city, Kolkata, although it is two-and-a-half times smaller. Thus, Mumbai’s mind-boggling population density, at 22,000 persons per square kilometre, is incomparable with the corresponding figures for Maharashtra and all-India: 315 and 324 respectively. Inevitably, housing is a severe problem. Between 55 to 60 per cent of the city’s population lives in slums, in highly degrading living conditions. Or to put it differently, less than five people out of ten live in a proper house.
Commuting is a daily nightmare. Despite the large numbers of private vehicles that keep the city’s roads perpetually clogged, public transport accounts for 88% of daily commuting. The suburban rail system, which ferries 6.4 million commuters across the length of the city everyday, is hopelessly overstretched. On an average, four people die and four more are injured in accidents on railway tracks every single day. An average of 824 people falls off local trains every year. And all this is just getting worse in a city where planners failed to wake up in time to the mammoth logistical problems confronting them, and have seen them worsen with the passage of time.
While organised crime and corruption in the police ranks may not touch citizens’ lives everyday, the scale they have attained is deeply worrisome for a democratic, civilized society. They are so deeply entrenched that for many years now they have become a common subject of portrayal, sometimes essayed with bone-chilling realism, in Hindi films produced out of the same city. Yet, their detailed exploration in some recent popular books, for example, Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found, the narrative non-fiction work by Suketu Mehta, and Shantaram, an autobiographical novel, leave the reader shocked and aghast. These factors combine with Mumbai’s sheer population density to make it a prospective terrorist’s delight. It has already suffered two major terror attacks, apart from several smaller ones, since 1993 – and continues to remain extremely vulnerable.
To these existing woes have been added political ones, with deep sectarian and communal colourings. Although their presence is not something new, their continued existence and intensification in recent times do not bode well for the metropolis. The political factors in play have sought to create mythical icons with attributes that defy fact and to enforce a rigid, narrow discipline accompanied by broad definitions of what might constitute an infraction. Today, the remark of a critical journalist; tomorrow, a scene in a particular movie or play and on another day, the exchange of greeting cards – all are subject to the whims of a clumsy moral discipline, with any ‘infringement’ being met with swift, violent retribution. In many ways, Mumbai is India’s own Wild West. Given the resort to violence at the drop of a hat, one may very well doubt the existence of a laboriously compiled constitution in the country, drafted, ironically, by a Maharashtrian who was also a resident of the city.
The mark of a flourishing civilization is its openness to the winds that blow from different directions. The great universities of the world, whether in the East or the West, sought to attract and welcomed talent from other lands. This practice holds good to the present day. The decline of the sophisticated Indus Valley civilization has been attributed by some historians to the trenchant hold of the priestly class, which upheld traditional forms of art and craft and treated innovation as near-felony. Likewise, the fall of the Mughal Empire is traced not merely to the bigoted Aurangzeb, but even further back to his father, Shah Jahan. On one hand, the latter abandoned the creative, pluralist outlook of his grandfather, Akbar, which had encouraged the flowering of native talent; on the other, his wars with the Persians and the Uzbegs effectively plugged the flow of immigrants from Central Asia, so that an important source of new ideas and thoughts that had enriched India over the centuries dried up. There are lessons here for the men and women who seek to rule over a city that is dangerously slipping in the direction of inexorable decline.
In 1954, when the question of Bombay was being hotly debated, the two sparring sides sought to arrive at an understanding. Shankarrao Deo, President of the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad met Sir Purushottamdas Thakur of the Bombay Citizens Committee, and said that while the central demand of Bombay for Maharashtra could not be given up, he was very much agreeable to preserving the ‘autonomous character of the metropolitan city [and] ensuring its cosmopolitan life’.
Few of the trumpeters who lay narrow claims to Mumbai today are likely to know of this compromise once offered as a price for the city; fewer still are likely to care for it.
References:
Samir S. Patel, Mumbai's Rough-Hewn Legacy, Archaelogy, Archaelogy Institute of America, 4 April 2007. Available at www.archaeology.org/online/features/mandapeshwar/
Nick Robbins, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, (Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2006)
Amar Farooqui, Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay, (Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2006)
Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, (Picador India, 2007)
Manorama Yearbook 2007, (Kottayam: Malayala Manorama Co. Ltd., 2007)
Dionne Bunsha, Torture Trains, Frontline, 4 January 2008
Abraham Eraly, Gem in the Lotus: The Seeding of Indian Civilisation (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000)
Abraham Eraly, Emperors of the Peacock Throne: The Saga of the Great Mughals (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000)
Saturday 7 June 2008
Fiction: Rama came calling
I rose from the bed to find Rama, my eldest brother, ensconced in my wooden chair, reading The Hindu.
"Hullo anujan, good morning ", he nodded at me pleasantly.
"When did you come?" I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, "You should've woken me up."
"You know me better than that. Anyway, today's op-ed page is interesting. Why don't you freshen up? I'm not in a hurry."
I brushed, wondering what brought Rama here today, so early in the morning.
He read my thoughts like he did all the time.
"It's the kumbabhishekam at the temple in Ramnagar today", he said, without looking up from the paper as I entered the kitchen to prepare the decoction. "Oh, it's today, is it?" I exclaimed, reaching for the coffee powder. Putting water on the boil I went back to my room to switch on my laptop and play Venkatesa Suprabhatam. Rama grinned at me, looking up from the sudoku he was solving. He woke up to the Venkatesa Suprabhatam every morning and it was still good time for him to listen to it again.
He was peering into my bookshelf when I emerged with the coffee.
"Thanks, anujan."
"Looking for something?"
"Yes, do you have any Harry Potter?"
"Harry Potter?!"
"Yes, you know, the kids have been pestering me no end."
"Why didn't you bring them and manni along?"
"Your manni is very busy these days. She's launching a heritage walk company, you know", said Rama, settling into the wooden chair again. I pulled up the wooden stool and we sipped coffee silently for a moment, as I let the news of another of my sister-in-law's crazy entrepreneurial ventures sink in.
"You're getting very good at making coffee", he remarked, taking another sip. It was a left-handed compliment. I knew what he was getting at.
We sipped the coffee in silence.
"Did you speak to Urmila again?" he asked gently.
So this is why he had come.
"Yes, I did. It's the same story. She won't come back until I've got a steady job", I replied matter-of-factly. I paused and added, "Until I'm earning more than her".
Rama took in all this thoughtfully.
"She got another pay raise recently. Eighteen lakhs per annum. I can never hope to match that", I said. “She'll never come back", I added bitterly.
"Chha chha, don't say that", my brother interjected.
I glowered silently, thinking angrily of Urmila.
“She’s a demon!” I added, as the train of events in the mind halted at a particularly unpleasant station.
Immediately, I said, “Sorry.” It was wiser to say it than to look into Rama’s face. Not that he would be angry. He would be pained. Extremely pained.
And as I sobered down I indeed grew sorry.
“I don’t know what possessed her to do all this…life was so smooth”, I mused.
Rama cleared his throat. “You know it all began with your habit of keeping the chocolates in the fridge…”
“You know that isn’t true”, I declared hotly, “she made that all up. Don’t tell me you don’t know it. You’re a god. You know it. Of course, you know it.”
I could see Rama wasn’t buying it. He had never bought it.
There was silence again as I began to deflate. “I promised I wouldn’t annoy her again. That I would keep the chocolates in the basket like she wanted.” I paused before concluding. “But she said it was too late now.”
Rama had a half-smile on his face. “So you did get round to talking about it at last.”
I replied in one word. Yes.
“The world is changing”, I remarked bitterly.
“The world is always changing”, said Rama.
“It’s a market, a bazaar, that’s what it is”, I said with asperity.
I took off somewhat on a tangent.
“Do you know what happened to the last girl Natesh Anna spoke to?” I asked. I had no intention of waiting for a reply. “She turned him down because he’s an only son. She didn’t want his parents coming and living with them after marriage. And she wasn’t the only girl to turn him down on that count.”
I went on, “Then there was this lady who was known to them. She called up when she found that her daughter’s horoscope matched with Anna’s. She began to ask all sorts of things – how much Anna’s salary was, how much money he had saved, why he hadn’t bought a car yet. Poor Meenakshi Athai, you know how innocent she is. She answered that Anna was about to take a bank loan for a new house. And you know what the lady said? She said that they were willing to take matters forward only if Anna were to buy the house in her daughter’s name!
But this one really takes the cake. This guy, who was the uncle of a girl whom Anna found on a matrimonial site, came home the other day. And you know what? He was actually carrying a five-page questionnaire. A questionnaire! Can you beat that? It had questions like, 'What are your qualifications? Are your degrees genuine? Please provide Xerox copies' and 'How much money have you invested? How much has been invested in your name and how much in the name of your parents or brothers/sisters? Please provide a break-up of your investments in stocks, mutual funds, real estate, fixed deposits, gold etc.etc.' Anna was so angry! But he kept his cool and politely refused to fill up the questionnaire. Had I been in his place…”
Rama remained unmoved, his face tranquil and the wisp of a smile still playing upon his lips.
I continued, “I know you think I’m responsible for what happened between Urmila and me. But Natesh Anna? He’s as good as gold. Why should all this happen to him?”
There was not even a hint of an emotion crossing Rama’s serene face.
I was heating up again. “Why is all this happening? This isn’t fair. It’s all wrong. Why don’t you do something about this? You’re a god. You can put an end to this. Knock some sense into people’s heads. You’re responsible for all this. Do you hear me? You’re responsible…”
I was angry. Very angry. He had to answer this.
Instead, the only words that came out of him were, “Can you make me another cup of coffee?”
I shrank. The anger, the energy, drained out of me.
“Yes, sure”, I rose timidly and took the cup from his outstretched hand.
When I returned I must have looked miserable. Rama changed the topic.
“Do you know where Shatrughanan is at the moment?”
“There was an email from him yesterday saying he’s in Oslo.”
“That’s right. He’s on a tour of Scandinavia planning a holiday for us. We’re planning to vacation there next month. All four of us – me, your manni, Lava and Kusha.”
“Oh! That’s nice. The whole family together.”
“Yes, it’s so difficult to keep together these days. Either your manni or I are always out of town. Life’s gotten so stressful, you know. It really brings down your productivity. We’re looking forward to a break.”
Stressed out? Rama didn’t look hassled in the least.
“What you see is not what really is.” Rama read my thoughts as usual and stood up, smiling broadly at me.
It was nice to see him smile.
“You’re free to join us on the vacation, you know. You probably need a break as well.”
It was really nice of him to say it although he knew that I wouldn’t take up his offer. A part of my relationship with manni had turned cold since the day in the forest when she had refused to trust me, accusing me of wanting to possess her and forcing me to leave the house in search of Rama. What a rigmarole bringing her back had turned out to be!
“There’s a purpose to everything”, said Rama, reading my thoughts again. It was an enigmatic statement and I sensed that he was responding to something more than my immediate thoughts. I wasn’t convinced and showed it in my wry smile. It sounded more like a cover-up for divine intervention failure.
He did not argue. It was almost time for the ceremony at the temple.
“Ramanuja, my Lakshmana”, he brought his arms down on my shoulders with affection, “let me take your leave.”
“Wait a minute”, I excused myself, returning in a minute with a bundle of Amar Chitra Katha. “I don’t have Harry Potter but I’m sure Lava and Kusha will enjoy this.”
“This is great!” he exclaimed, “they will love it.”
He tucked the bundle under his arm. “Don’t fret over Urmila. I’ll get your manni to speak to her…”
He gave me a pat. The next moment he was gone.
"Hullo anujan, good morning ", he nodded at me pleasantly.
"When did you come?" I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, "You should've woken me up."
"You know me better than that. Anyway, today's op-ed page is interesting. Why don't you freshen up? I'm not in a hurry."
I brushed, wondering what brought Rama here today, so early in the morning.
He read my thoughts like he did all the time.
"It's the kumbabhishekam at the temple in Ramnagar today", he said, without looking up from the paper as I entered the kitchen to prepare the decoction. "Oh, it's today, is it?" I exclaimed, reaching for the coffee powder. Putting water on the boil I went back to my room to switch on my laptop and play Venkatesa Suprabhatam. Rama grinned at me, looking up from the sudoku he was solving. He woke up to the Venkatesa Suprabhatam every morning and it was still good time for him to listen to it again.
He was peering into my bookshelf when I emerged with the coffee.
"Thanks, anujan."
"Looking for something?"
"Yes, do you have any Harry Potter?"
"Harry Potter?!"
"Yes, you know, the kids have been pestering me no end."
"Why didn't you bring them and manni along?"
"Your manni is very busy these days. She's launching a heritage walk company, you know", said Rama, settling into the wooden chair again. I pulled up the wooden stool and we sipped coffee silently for a moment, as I let the news of another of my sister-in-law's crazy entrepreneurial ventures sink in.
"You're getting very good at making coffee", he remarked, taking another sip. It was a left-handed compliment. I knew what he was getting at.
We sipped the coffee in silence.
"Did you speak to Urmila again?" he asked gently.
So this is why he had come.
"Yes, I did. It's the same story. She won't come back until I've got a steady job", I replied matter-of-factly. I paused and added, "Until I'm earning more than her".
Rama took in all this thoughtfully.
"She got another pay raise recently. Eighteen lakhs per annum. I can never hope to match that", I said. “She'll never come back", I added bitterly.
"Chha chha, don't say that", my brother interjected.
I glowered silently, thinking angrily of Urmila.
“She’s a demon!” I added, as the train of events in the mind halted at a particularly unpleasant station.
Immediately, I said, “Sorry.” It was wiser to say it than to look into Rama’s face. Not that he would be angry. He would be pained. Extremely pained.
And as I sobered down I indeed grew sorry.
“I don’t know what possessed her to do all this…life was so smooth”, I mused.
Rama cleared his throat. “You know it all began with your habit of keeping the chocolates in the fridge…”
“You know that isn’t true”, I declared hotly, “she made that all up. Don’t tell me you don’t know it. You’re a god. You know it. Of course, you know it.”
I could see Rama wasn’t buying it. He had never bought it.
There was silence again as I began to deflate. “I promised I wouldn’t annoy her again. That I would keep the chocolates in the basket like she wanted.” I paused before concluding. “But she said it was too late now.”
Rama had a half-smile on his face. “So you did get round to talking about it at last.”
I replied in one word. Yes.
“The world is changing”, I remarked bitterly.
“The world is always changing”, said Rama.
“It’s a market, a bazaar, that’s what it is”, I said with asperity.
I took off somewhat on a tangent.
“Do you know what happened to the last girl Natesh Anna spoke to?” I asked. I had no intention of waiting for a reply. “She turned him down because he’s an only son. She didn’t want his parents coming and living with them after marriage. And she wasn’t the only girl to turn him down on that count.”
I went on, “Then there was this lady who was known to them. She called up when she found that her daughter’s horoscope matched with Anna’s. She began to ask all sorts of things – how much Anna’s salary was, how much money he had saved, why he hadn’t bought a car yet. Poor Meenakshi Athai, you know how innocent she is. She answered that Anna was about to take a bank loan for a new house. And you know what the lady said? She said that they were willing to take matters forward only if Anna were to buy the house in her daughter’s name!
But this one really takes the cake. This guy, who was the uncle of a girl whom Anna found on a matrimonial site, came home the other day. And you know what? He was actually carrying a five-page questionnaire. A questionnaire! Can you beat that? It had questions like, 'What are your qualifications? Are your degrees genuine? Please provide Xerox copies' and 'How much money have you invested? How much has been invested in your name and how much in the name of your parents or brothers/sisters? Please provide a break-up of your investments in stocks, mutual funds, real estate, fixed deposits, gold etc.etc.' Anna was so angry! But he kept his cool and politely refused to fill up the questionnaire. Had I been in his place…”
Rama remained unmoved, his face tranquil and the wisp of a smile still playing upon his lips.
I continued, “I know you think I’m responsible for what happened between Urmila and me. But Natesh Anna? He’s as good as gold. Why should all this happen to him?”
There was not even a hint of an emotion crossing Rama’s serene face.
I was heating up again. “Why is all this happening? This isn’t fair. It’s all wrong. Why don’t you do something about this? You’re a god. You can put an end to this. Knock some sense into people’s heads. You’re responsible for all this. Do you hear me? You’re responsible…”
I was angry. Very angry. He had to answer this.
Instead, the only words that came out of him were, “Can you make me another cup of coffee?”
I shrank. The anger, the energy, drained out of me.
“Yes, sure”, I rose timidly and took the cup from his outstretched hand.
When I returned I must have looked miserable. Rama changed the topic.
“Do you know where Shatrughanan is at the moment?”
“There was an email from him yesterday saying he’s in Oslo.”
“That’s right. He’s on a tour of Scandinavia planning a holiday for us. We’re planning to vacation there next month. All four of us – me, your manni, Lava and Kusha.”
“Oh! That’s nice. The whole family together.”
“Yes, it’s so difficult to keep together these days. Either your manni or I are always out of town. Life’s gotten so stressful, you know. It really brings down your productivity. We’re looking forward to a break.”
Stressed out? Rama didn’t look hassled in the least.
“What you see is not what really is.” Rama read my thoughts as usual and stood up, smiling broadly at me.
It was nice to see him smile.
“You’re free to join us on the vacation, you know. You probably need a break as well.”
It was really nice of him to say it although he knew that I wouldn’t take up his offer. A part of my relationship with manni had turned cold since the day in the forest when she had refused to trust me, accusing me of wanting to possess her and forcing me to leave the house in search of Rama. What a rigmarole bringing her back had turned out to be!
“There’s a purpose to everything”, said Rama, reading my thoughts again. It was an enigmatic statement and I sensed that he was responding to something more than my immediate thoughts. I wasn’t convinced and showed it in my wry smile. It sounded more like a cover-up for divine intervention failure.
He did not argue. It was almost time for the ceremony at the temple.
“Ramanuja, my Lakshmana”, he brought his arms down on my shoulders with affection, “let me take your leave.”
“Wait a minute”, I excused myself, returning in a minute with a bundle of Amar Chitra Katha. “I don’t have Harry Potter but I’m sure Lava and Kusha will enjoy this.”
“This is great!” he exclaimed, “they will love it.”
He tucked the bundle under his arm. “Don’t fret over Urmila. I’ll get your manni to speak to her…”
He gave me a pat. The next moment he was gone.
Wednesday 4 June 2008
The Great Man
Through the misty dawn
His eyes pensive, brooding
The Great Man peeped out.
All night he had grappled
With existential questions.
He looked out over the town
His far-sighted eyes
Taking in all:
the empty bus-stand,
the constitutionals in the park,
the lonely woman sweeping the street,
the stall with kettle on the boil.
He thought of his day of resurrection
People crowding around
Garlands weighing him down
Eloquent speeches made
in extolment of the Great Man.
Every morning they embellished him
Fell at his feet
A woman wiped him clean
Although to his shame
He failed to turn tumescent at her touch.
But then they found another Great Man
And flocked around to him.
The hiss of dosai batter
upon the stove in the stall
Jolted the Great Man
back into the present.
To his crown of streaming crow-shit
Was added another smear
The bird flew away
He looked down
I caught his forlorn eye, smiled at him
And crossed the statue unconcerned.
His eyes pensive, brooding
The Great Man peeped out.
All night he had grappled
With existential questions.
He looked out over the town
His far-sighted eyes
Taking in all:
the empty bus-stand,
the constitutionals in the park,
the lonely woman sweeping the street,
the stall with kettle on the boil.
He thought of his day of resurrection
People crowding around
Garlands weighing him down
Eloquent speeches made
in extolment of the Great Man.
Every morning they embellished him
Fell at his feet
A woman wiped him clean
Although to his shame
He failed to turn tumescent at her touch.
But then they found another Great Man
And flocked around to him.
The hiss of dosai batter
upon the stove in the stall
Jolted the Great Man
back into the present.
To his crown of streaming crow-shit
Was added another smear
The bird flew away
He looked down
I caught his forlorn eye, smiled at him
And crossed the statue unconcerned.
Tuesday 3 June 2008
Congress on the downturn
There can be no doubt that the Indian National Congress's prospects for next year's Lok Sabha polls have been growing progressively dimmer. The latest reminder of this gradual decline lies in the results of the Karanataka Assembly elections. The story is not very different from what it was in Gujarat at the turn of 2008. Continuous infighting and the failure to project a chief ministerial candidate have been key among the various factors responsible for the successive defeats. Factionalism in the Congress has continually eroded its base all over the country, to the point that the party can scarcely boast of hardcore Congress cadre on the ground, quite unlike the BJP or the Left parties. Harish Khare, who is arguably one of the most astute political commentators in the Indian print medium, made some hard-hitting comments recently, saying that by adopting a please-all policy the Congress high command is trying to keep various faction leaders happy at the expense of the party's own survival. He pointed to the recent examples of K. Karunakaran, who has been welcomed back into the Congress and made a member of the Congress Working Committee, and C.K. Jaffer Sharief, who was placated after he made overtures to the JD (S) just before the recent polls in Karnataka. Khare has come very close to hitting the nail on the head. The Congress high command does not want to displease its heavyweights, and is allowing itself to be blackmailed. In the process, it is only weakening itself.
There is not much to speak of the UPA's performance in office in the last four years. The overall public perception of this government seems to be largely negative. At this point in time, the government seems to be battling a lame-duck nuclear deal with the United States and a perception of allowing terrorism to proliferate within the country, or at any rate, of being unable to curb terrorist attacks that occur with mind-numbing regularity in various parts of the country. The latter is partly a result of the BJP's successful gimmickry, which has played upon the UPA's 'pandering' to the Muslim community, as evidenced for example (according to the BJP), in the Rajinder Sachar Committee report. It is a different matter that the BJP itself does not have an exceptional record in battling terrorism during its years in the NDA government. The infiltration of Pakistan armed personnel into Indian territory that led to the Kargil War, the IC-814 hijacking which led to the humiliating release of three militants from Indian prison and the attack on Parliament - all of these, among others, were pointers to serious lapses in intelligence. Yet the fact is that the BJP has the upper hand in terms of public perception on terrorism. The broad division of labour between the incumbent Prime Minister and the Congress President, whereby the latter handles political and broad policy issues while day-to-day governance and policy matters are left to the former, has not been very successful. It has only exposed the Prime Minister to cries of being powerless and ineffectual. Certainly, Manmohan Singh does not have the stature of Atal Bihari Vajpayee or L.K. Advani within his own party let alone the Congress allies; Sonia Gandhi has not been able to use hers to sufficient effect. And as if this were not enough, in recent weeks, inflation and rising oil prices have become yet another albatross for the UPA government.
At the same time, it is not that the UPA government has done nothing remarkable in its four years in office. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the Bharat Nirman initiative and the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) are products of this government and at least the first among these, the NREGA, is landmark legislation that well and truly bears the impress of those in this government whose heart is in the right place. Although its record in implementation has been mixed, there is no doubt that if the shortcomings are attended to in seriousness, this legislation will go a long way in providing succour to the millions who live in the dark shadows of the India of 9% economic growth, and can transform the countryside where the majority of Indians live. Another positive offering of this government is the Sachar Committee Report, which, backed by extensive data, provides a pretty accurate picture of the status of the Muslim community in India. However, the government has failed to use the report to introduce major policy measures although it has attempted to introduce a focus on Muslim communities in its social welfare schemes. These have not been played up by the government though, and its efforts to follow up on the Sachar Committee Report have been quite inadequate, making it appear that it has succumbed to the BJP’s denouncement of the report – quite wrongly and cynically, one must add - as another instance of ‘minority appeasement’.
There is no doubt that the bulk of liberal-minded people in this country (unfortunately, there aren't too many of this ilk) are likely to support the Congress and/or the Left. This is less due to an instinctive identification with these parties than due to the lack of an alternative worth embracing. Nevertheless, the organisational decline of the Congress, and its reluctance to take tough measures to rejuvenate the party and motivate its rank and file, are cause for deep dismay. On the one hand, the BJP has already sounded the bugle for the 2009 polls; on the other, the Congress is yet to get its act together. Time is short, and the road to be travelled, a long one. As politically disinclined but concerned citizens, one can only wait and watch.
There is not much to speak of the UPA's performance in office in the last four years. The overall public perception of this government seems to be largely negative. At this point in time, the government seems to be battling a lame-duck nuclear deal with the United States and a perception of allowing terrorism to proliferate within the country, or at any rate, of being unable to curb terrorist attacks that occur with mind-numbing regularity in various parts of the country. The latter is partly a result of the BJP's successful gimmickry, which has played upon the UPA's 'pandering' to the Muslim community, as evidenced for example (according to the BJP), in the Rajinder Sachar Committee report. It is a different matter that the BJP itself does not have an exceptional record in battling terrorism during its years in the NDA government. The infiltration of Pakistan armed personnel into Indian territory that led to the Kargil War, the IC-814 hijacking which led to the humiliating release of three militants from Indian prison and the attack on Parliament - all of these, among others, were pointers to serious lapses in intelligence. Yet the fact is that the BJP has the upper hand in terms of public perception on terrorism. The broad division of labour between the incumbent Prime Minister and the Congress President, whereby the latter handles political and broad policy issues while day-to-day governance and policy matters are left to the former, has not been very successful. It has only exposed the Prime Minister to cries of being powerless and ineffectual. Certainly, Manmohan Singh does not have the stature of Atal Bihari Vajpayee or L.K. Advani within his own party let alone the Congress allies; Sonia Gandhi has not been able to use hers to sufficient effect. And as if this were not enough, in recent weeks, inflation and rising oil prices have become yet another albatross for the UPA government.
At the same time, it is not that the UPA government has done nothing remarkable in its four years in office. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the Bharat Nirman initiative and the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) are products of this government and at least the first among these, the NREGA, is landmark legislation that well and truly bears the impress of those in this government whose heart is in the right place. Although its record in implementation has been mixed, there is no doubt that if the shortcomings are attended to in seriousness, this legislation will go a long way in providing succour to the millions who live in the dark shadows of the India of 9% economic growth, and can transform the countryside where the majority of Indians live. Another positive offering of this government is the Sachar Committee Report, which, backed by extensive data, provides a pretty accurate picture of the status of the Muslim community in India. However, the government has failed to use the report to introduce major policy measures although it has attempted to introduce a focus on Muslim communities in its social welfare schemes. These have not been played up by the government though, and its efforts to follow up on the Sachar Committee Report have been quite inadequate, making it appear that it has succumbed to the BJP’s denouncement of the report – quite wrongly and cynically, one must add - as another instance of ‘minority appeasement’.
There is no doubt that the bulk of liberal-minded people in this country (unfortunately, there aren't too many of this ilk) are likely to support the Congress and/or the Left. This is less due to an instinctive identification with these parties than due to the lack of an alternative worth embracing. Nevertheless, the organisational decline of the Congress, and its reluctance to take tough measures to rejuvenate the party and motivate its rank and file, are cause for deep dismay. On the one hand, the BJP has already sounded the bugle for the 2009 polls; on the other, the Congress is yet to get its act together. Time is short, and the road to be travelled, a long one. As politically disinclined but concerned citizens, one can only wait and watch.
Monday 2 June 2008
End of the inaugural IPL
The IPL ended a few hours ago and the hugely close and exciting finish is going to be the talk of the media all of tomorrow and for the next few days and weeks to come. I will leave the analysis at the hands of cricket experts and aficionados, and limit myself to my personal impressions here.
I am of course, immensely happy that the Rajasthan Royals won. They had my support right from the beginning of the match. This is for at least three reasons. One, this team has truly shown tremendous character and camaraderie. Their high levels of motivation and team spirit were easily visible in the matches they played. Two, I have grown to appreciate the way Shane Warne led this team. He made the most of the chance to captain a low profile, or almost profile-less, team, without displaying any ego hassles. And what an opportunity he made of it! In the course of his international career luck refused to court him in the matter of captaincy of the Australian team, this owing not insubstantially to his misdemeanours off the field. In the IPL though, he led the Rajasthan Royals with great élan, and what proved endearing was his modesty, his grace in acknowledging his rivals and the space that he seemed to give to the players of his team, topping it up with generous, effusive praise of them. He has not been a mere leader; he has served to be an inspiring one. I am convinced that the cricketing world is all the poorer in not seeing him lead the Aussies as a regular, full-time captain.
Reason number three why I am happy about the victory is that the Royals were owned by Emerging Media, a relatively less known entity, of which one heard and saw very little. This extends also to the other finalist, the Chennai Super Kings, who are owned by India Cements, a long-time patron of cricket in Tamil Nadu, and who, one presupposes, know from their long association with the game that the best way of helping cricket is to leave it to the players. I am immensely happy that none of the four teams owned by high-profile film or corporate personalities made it to the finals. Of the four, I thought the owners of the Mumbai team conducted themselves with the requisite constraint and dignity. However, the other three were often in the news for the wrong reasons, and I think their teams would have been better off without all the unwarranted, unwanted shoo-sha that their owners brought them.
I did feel sorry a bit for Dhoni. He’s a fine captain and his short but meteoric career thus far as one-day skipper is a testimony to his astuteness. I appreciated the way he brought his team together into a huddle at the end of the tight finish and manoeuvred Shastri’s question about the turning point of the game during the awards ceremony, saying that the outcome was a team responsibility and no one or more individuals were to be singled out for the mistakes that were made. Yet, he could have been graceful enough to applaud the Royals for the way they played and it was disappointing that he did not do so. Nevertheless, he has proved his mettle by bringing his team back into the tournament with the limited resources that they had, especially in the bowling department, after they started slipping following Hayden and Hussey’s departure.
Had Dhoni’s team won, I fear, it would have marked yet another – almost the final one – nail in the coffin of the career of the senior players of the Indian team. Dhoni’s views on the team composition, which have been very plainly in the media, favour a young team in which the seniors, barring Sachin Tendulkar perhaps, do not find a place. His views seem to have been fed by his own successes, particularly in the Twenty20 World Cup last year, and there is more than just a tinge of arrogance in them. A Chennai victory in the IPL may have furthered strengthened his hands in matters of team selection, and possibly enhanced his hubris. The failure of four of the five teams led by senior Indian players to make it to the semi-finals is likely to go against them despite their sterling individual performances, and the omission of both Dravid and Ganguly from the recently announced one-day squad is a matter of sadness. They are both fine players who still have a good amount left in them, and it is rather unfair that their abilities are under question. Their treatment goes to say much about the fickle nature of public memory. In his heyday, the cricketer is saluted, feted and pandered to by a loving, almost hysterical, media and fan-following. In his twilight years, however, all his energy, effort and sacrifice are forgotten, and his match-winning performances that once had audiences going delirious with joy, are relegated to the margins of memory. The man is reduced to a bauble, a one-time fancy that is now out of both fashion and favour. Heroes deserve better treatment, especially when they are also fine human beings, as is the case with Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Sachin Tendulkar. Despite the blips, Saurav Ganguly also deserves to join this list; he is after all, India’s most successful cricket captain, one who showed the chutzpah to take on the indomitable Aussies.
But I have digressed and must return. The IPL was truly well-packaged, well-marketed and well-organised but there were several unpalatable things on the table at the same time. Prime among these, as far as I am concerned, was the visible conceit of the organisers. Before the tournament began, near-impossible conditions concerning coverage and use of pictures were laid down for the media, and were withdrawn in part only at the eleventh hour when a media boycott seemed imminent (the conditions were not relaxed for cricket websites, as a result of which Cricinfo’s coverage looked forlorn at times, having to burrow into its archives for images). While the foray of film actors and corporate guns was a draw in the initial stages, needless controversies were stirred up around some of them. At another extreme, politicians saw capital in raking up issues of their own, such as the one relating to the presence of cheerleaders. I see nothing wrong with the cheerleaders being around. It is the Indian male who is depraved and intent upon staring at cleavage and midriff. Let him grow out of his perversion and shed the double standard of taking the moral high-stand all the time. Last of all, there is nothing to justify the treatment meted out to the Indian Cricket League (ICL) by the BCCI. The ICL did well to stage their tournament before the IPL in the face of severe limitations due to BCCI restrictions on use of stadia and facilities imposed on them. One hopes the success of the IPL will rub off on its less-fortunate counterpart, the ICL, and give it increasing visibility and recognition in the years to come.
There were also causes for celebration. The greatest attraction remained the thrill of watching players from different countries rubbing shoulders and playing as comrades rather than opponents. Saurav Ganguly hugging Shoaib Akhtar or Virender Sehwag applauding Glenn McGrath was a sight to see. It was equally exciting to watch many domestic players come into their own. The tournament truly produced an explosion of talent.
I agree with those who fulminate that the rise of Twenty20 cricket is the rise of the slog and the slow demise of elegant strokeplay. But one cannot deny that change, no matter how detestable, is essential for survival. It is the essence of evolution. Let us see how cricket evolves in the days to come.
For the moment, let us savour the joy of the present!
I am of course, immensely happy that the Rajasthan Royals won. They had my support right from the beginning of the match. This is for at least three reasons. One, this team has truly shown tremendous character and camaraderie. Their high levels of motivation and team spirit were easily visible in the matches they played. Two, I have grown to appreciate the way Shane Warne led this team. He made the most of the chance to captain a low profile, or almost profile-less, team, without displaying any ego hassles. And what an opportunity he made of it! In the course of his international career luck refused to court him in the matter of captaincy of the Australian team, this owing not insubstantially to his misdemeanours off the field. In the IPL though, he led the Rajasthan Royals with great élan, and what proved endearing was his modesty, his grace in acknowledging his rivals and the space that he seemed to give to the players of his team, topping it up with generous, effusive praise of them. He has not been a mere leader; he has served to be an inspiring one. I am convinced that the cricketing world is all the poorer in not seeing him lead the Aussies as a regular, full-time captain.
Reason number three why I am happy about the victory is that the Royals were owned by Emerging Media, a relatively less known entity, of which one heard and saw very little. This extends also to the other finalist, the Chennai Super Kings, who are owned by India Cements, a long-time patron of cricket in Tamil Nadu, and who, one presupposes, know from their long association with the game that the best way of helping cricket is to leave it to the players. I am immensely happy that none of the four teams owned by high-profile film or corporate personalities made it to the finals. Of the four, I thought the owners of the Mumbai team conducted themselves with the requisite constraint and dignity. However, the other three were often in the news for the wrong reasons, and I think their teams would have been better off without all the unwarranted, unwanted shoo-sha that their owners brought them.
I did feel sorry a bit for Dhoni. He’s a fine captain and his short but meteoric career thus far as one-day skipper is a testimony to his astuteness. I appreciated the way he brought his team together into a huddle at the end of the tight finish and manoeuvred Shastri’s question about the turning point of the game during the awards ceremony, saying that the outcome was a team responsibility and no one or more individuals were to be singled out for the mistakes that were made. Yet, he could have been graceful enough to applaud the Royals for the way they played and it was disappointing that he did not do so. Nevertheless, he has proved his mettle by bringing his team back into the tournament with the limited resources that they had, especially in the bowling department, after they started slipping following Hayden and Hussey’s departure.
Had Dhoni’s team won, I fear, it would have marked yet another – almost the final one – nail in the coffin of the career of the senior players of the Indian team. Dhoni’s views on the team composition, which have been very plainly in the media, favour a young team in which the seniors, barring Sachin Tendulkar perhaps, do not find a place. His views seem to have been fed by his own successes, particularly in the Twenty20 World Cup last year, and there is more than just a tinge of arrogance in them. A Chennai victory in the IPL may have furthered strengthened his hands in matters of team selection, and possibly enhanced his hubris. The failure of four of the five teams led by senior Indian players to make it to the semi-finals is likely to go against them despite their sterling individual performances, and the omission of both Dravid and Ganguly from the recently announced one-day squad is a matter of sadness. They are both fine players who still have a good amount left in them, and it is rather unfair that their abilities are under question. Their treatment goes to say much about the fickle nature of public memory. In his heyday, the cricketer is saluted, feted and pandered to by a loving, almost hysterical, media and fan-following. In his twilight years, however, all his energy, effort and sacrifice are forgotten, and his match-winning performances that once had audiences going delirious with joy, are relegated to the margins of memory. The man is reduced to a bauble, a one-time fancy that is now out of both fashion and favour. Heroes deserve better treatment, especially when they are also fine human beings, as is the case with Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Sachin Tendulkar. Despite the blips, Saurav Ganguly also deserves to join this list; he is after all, India’s most successful cricket captain, one who showed the chutzpah to take on the indomitable Aussies.
But I have digressed and must return. The IPL was truly well-packaged, well-marketed and well-organised but there were several unpalatable things on the table at the same time. Prime among these, as far as I am concerned, was the visible conceit of the organisers. Before the tournament began, near-impossible conditions concerning coverage and use of pictures were laid down for the media, and were withdrawn in part only at the eleventh hour when a media boycott seemed imminent (the conditions were not relaxed for cricket websites, as a result of which Cricinfo’s coverage looked forlorn at times, having to burrow into its archives for images). While the foray of film actors and corporate guns was a draw in the initial stages, needless controversies were stirred up around some of them. At another extreme, politicians saw capital in raking up issues of their own, such as the one relating to the presence of cheerleaders. I see nothing wrong with the cheerleaders being around. It is the Indian male who is depraved and intent upon staring at cleavage and midriff. Let him grow out of his perversion and shed the double standard of taking the moral high-stand all the time. Last of all, there is nothing to justify the treatment meted out to the Indian Cricket League (ICL) by the BCCI. The ICL did well to stage their tournament before the IPL in the face of severe limitations due to BCCI restrictions on use of stadia and facilities imposed on them. One hopes the success of the IPL will rub off on its less-fortunate counterpart, the ICL, and give it increasing visibility and recognition in the years to come.
There were also causes for celebration. The greatest attraction remained the thrill of watching players from different countries rubbing shoulders and playing as comrades rather than opponents. Saurav Ganguly hugging Shoaib Akhtar or Virender Sehwag applauding Glenn McGrath was a sight to see. It was equally exciting to watch many domestic players come into their own. The tournament truly produced an explosion of talent.
I agree with those who fulminate that the rise of Twenty20 cricket is the rise of the slog and the slow demise of elegant strokeplay. But one cannot deny that change, no matter how detestable, is essential for survival. It is the essence of evolution. Let us see how cricket evolves in the days to come.
For the moment, let us savour the joy of the present!
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The Sahib of Saraidadar, Part 2 of 2
(Illustration below by Sandeep Sen. Originally published on Pangolin Prophecies , a blog maintained by Krishnapriya Tamma.) It was Diw...
