A day after I walked through the portals of the Habsburg Empire (see previous post), Austria went to the polls. All of Austria voted on a single day, which would be a novelty to any Indian, used as we are to multi-phase polling. (But of course, all of Austria’s electorate – numbering approximately 6.5 million – is probably smaller than that of many of our state capitals.) In the run-up to the elections there was little to indicate that the country was at the hustings. There were no cutouts, no graffiti, no mega-posters, no traffic jams. No public rallies, no loudspeakers, no locality-wise, let alone door-to-door, campaigning. The only indications of the election were the posters, blow-ups of the leaders of the various political parties, all put up in the place of regular advertisements, at tram or bus-stops, or along the sidewalks. The two main political parties, the Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP), competed between themselves, luring voters with the promise of “Die neue Wahl”: The New Choice, and “Die bessere Wahl”: The Better Choice. (I may add that the translations are not authentic.) Also in the fray were the Greens, the Liberal Party and two right-wing parties, the Freedom Party and the Alliance for the Future of Austria. The right-wing parties, as one may imagine, have an open dislike for immigrants and Muslims, a proclivity for Nazi policies, and their agenda includes, in addition to a full-stop to further immigration, deportation of foreign migrants as well as an anti-EU stance that demands the return of certain powers to Austria currently vested in the EU.
The results, announced the same night, have come as a nasty shock. The right-wing parties together nearly doubled their presence in the new Austrian parliament, polling about 29% of the popular vote, only marginally lower than the front-running Social Democrats, who polled 29.7%, and more than the People’s Party, who came second with 25.6%. The numbers for the two main political parties are their lowest since the Second World War. They seem to have paid the price of their internal bickering as coalition partners in a grand coalition; the current elections - snap polls really since they were not due until two more years - were a result of the their failure to work together in the incumbent government. The fractured mandate of the current elections gives rise to the very real possibility of at least one of the two right-wing parties becoming a part of the new government, although protracted negotiations may precede the formation of a new coalition.
The implications of the elections cannot be more blunt. Clearly, Austria, as indeed various parts of Europe, is in the grips of a spreading xenophobia, notwithstanding suggestions from political commentators that the vote-swing in favour of the right-wing parties may be read more as a negative vote for the two main political parties, as a petulant response to their inability to collaborate in the incumbent coalition.
At the root of xenophobia lies insecurity. And human beings seem to be growing insecure across the world. Not least in our very own Mumbai.
The New Zealand Herald seems to have carried a more interesting analysis of the Austrian political developments than other news portals on the net. Take a look.
Tuesday 30 September 2008
Sunday 28 September 2008
A Coimbatore TamBrahm in a Habsburg court
The sun is out in all its blazing glory! Exactly two weeks after it staged its disappearing act. I’m light at heart and high in spirits!
For the last three weeks, I’ve been letting the sights of the city sink into my eyes. This is a beautiful city, there can be no doubt about it. Even on the greyest of days, and in the face of the dullest weather, this is a fact one cannot gainsay.
However, I’ve really not done any sight-seeing. Struggling to come to grips with the sudden onset of cold, wet weather, I’ve allowed myself to be led by the nose by automatons. Of which, two have become surreally close buddies. Tram 52 and the U4. Every morning I mutely coast along a longish length of Linzerstrasse, followed by a turn into an almost equally longish stretch of Mariahilferstrasse. In the evenings, I mutely coast back. Except on some occasions, when I take the underground. But every journey is a journey undertaken in muteness. To be in a land where you cannot speak the language is some experience. But traveling by tram is relatively better. Because it travels over the ground it gives you a sense of life.
But yesterday, disgusted at myself for turning up for work for the third consecutive Saturday, I allowed a brief appearing act of the sun to give me an excuse that let me march out onto the streets of Vienna. I traveled to the St. Stephan’s Cathedral and walked down the old city. Briefly I peeped over the banners of an anti-Israel demonstration and lent my solidarity. I marvelled at the wares of itinerant artists and the music of indigent violinists. I took wistful rides on the horse-driven carriages. And walking down the streets of the old city I wondered what the Austro-Hungarian Emperors would have made of me, a puritanical TamBrahm, lounging in a Habsburg courtyard.
In circumstances such as these – alien language, alien culture, an excessive sense of order (as may appear to an Indian whose exit amidst much jostling and queue-breaking at the New Delhi airport is followed, upon touchdown, by a bewilderingly sanitized and agonizingly empty environs) and self-imposed poverty – it is perhaps inevitable for a sense of loneliness and longing for company to sprout. One of the first people I was introduced to was MT – and I took an instant liking to her. We talked academics, Austria and India; shared Indian food, cake and coffee, and in the process, found common interests. The conditions were ripe for one’s heart to mellow. One was taking it day-by-day, looking forward to some sunshine in the midst of the depressing weather, wondering all the time whether there was a possibility of anything more than what met one’s eye. And one fine day, not very long ago, words were dropped about a boyfriend, so that with a sharp stab of pain and a dizzy spin of the head, the roller coaster drew to a halt, bringing to an abrupt end one's little would-be romance!
But the bright spot so far has been the cooking! Unencumbered by a loving grandmother, who felt that the entry of a male – no matter that it was her grandson – into the kitchen implied a shirking of responsibility on her part, I have been engaging in some interesting culinary experiments. My pongal is a stepbrother of khichdi, and I eat it with rasam. Last week, my sambar turned out watery (my mother advised me to use rice flour, an ingredient missing from my limited pantry, to thicken it) and the cabbage curry burnt. But elation stemmed from small achievements: fine tomato rice, puliyodarai, rasam and chapattis!
For consolation, I brace myself with the hope that padhai na sahi, ladki na sahi, Hindustani dhaba hi sahi! In the worst event perhaps, I can open an Indian eating joint. ;)
Well, so long, till next time!
For the last three weeks, I’ve been letting the sights of the city sink into my eyes. This is a beautiful city, there can be no doubt about it. Even on the greyest of days, and in the face of the dullest weather, this is a fact one cannot gainsay.
However, I’ve really not done any sight-seeing. Struggling to come to grips with the sudden onset of cold, wet weather, I’ve allowed myself to be led by the nose by automatons. Of which, two have become surreally close buddies. Tram 52 and the U4. Every morning I mutely coast along a longish length of Linzerstrasse, followed by a turn into an almost equally longish stretch of Mariahilferstrasse. In the evenings, I mutely coast back. Except on some occasions, when I take the underground. But every journey is a journey undertaken in muteness. To be in a land where you cannot speak the language is some experience. But traveling by tram is relatively better. Because it travels over the ground it gives you a sense of life.
But yesterday, disgusted at myself for turning up for work for the third consecutive Saturday, I allowed a brief appearing act of the sun to give me an excuse that let me march out onto the streets of Vienna. I traveled to the St. Stephan’s Cathedral and walked down the old city. Briefly I peeped over the banners of an anti-Israel demonstration and lent my solidarity. I marvelled at the wares of itinerant artists and the music of indigent violinists. I took wistful rides on the horse-driven carriages. And walking down the streets of the old city I wondered what the Austro-Hungarian Emperors would have made of me, a puritanical TamBrahm, lounging in a Habsburg courtyard.
In circumstances such as these – alien language, alien culture, an excessive sense of order (as may appear to an Indian whose exit amidst much jostling and queue-breaking at the New Delhi airport is followed, upon touchdown, by a bewilderingly sanitized and agonizingly empty environs) and self-imposed poverty – it is perhaps inevitable for a sense of loneliness and longing for company to sprout. One of the first people I was introduced to was MT – and I took an instant liking to her. We talked academics, Austria and India; shared Indian food, cake and coffee, and in the process, found common interests. The conditions were ripe for one’s heart to mellow. One was taking it day-by-day, looking forward to some sunshine in the midst of the depressing weather, wondering all the time whether there was a possibility of anything more than what met one’s eye. And one fine day, not very long ago, words were dropped about a boyfriend, so that with a sharp stab of pain and a dizzy spin of the head, the roller coaster drew to a halt, bringing to an abrupt end one's little would-be romance!
But the bright spot so far has been the cooking! Unencumbered by a loving grandmother, who felt that the entry of a male – no matter that it was her grandson – into the kitchen implied a shirking of responsibility on her part, I have been engaging in some interesting culinary experiments. My pongal is a stepbrother of khichdi, and I eat it with rasam. Last week, my sambar turned out watery (my mother advised me to use rice flour, an ingredient missing from my limited pantry, to thicken it) and the cabbage curry burnt. But elation stemmed from small achievements: fine tomato rice, puliyodarai, rasam and chapattis!
For consolation, I brace myself with the hope that padhai na sahi, ladki na sahi, Hindustani dhaba hi sahi! In the worst event perhaps, I can open an Indian eating joint. ;)
Well, so long, till next time!
Friday 26 September 2008
Lustlos!
I'm writing this in a long overdue bid to rescue a collection of cyber-writings slipping ever deeper into the dustbins of trivial history with every passing day. To the left of my keyboard lies a desultory pair of glasses over a sheaf of papers claiming to unravel the secret of institutional change. To my right, there's a mouse. (Well, what did you expect?) The weather outside has slipped into gloom once again. I am in an alien land, far from the delightful, sunny landscape on the outskirts of my hometown. And for no particular reason, with nothing even remotely resembling the emotions they describe, I'm humming these lines in the mind:
Perhaps I had a wicked childhood, perhaps I had a miserable youth
But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, there must have been a moment of truth
For here you are standing there loving me, whether or not you should
So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good
Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.
No, I’m not bored. Just listless!
Guess where I am?
Perhaps I had a wicked childhood, perhaps I had a miserable youth
But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, there must have been a moment of truth
For here you are standing there loving me, whether or not you should
So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good
Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.
No, I’m not bored. Just listless!
Guess where I am?
Thursday 7 August 2008
A trip to Bengalooru
Last Saturday I was in Bengalooru, taking a much-needed break from dusty, rainless Coimbatore. An invitation to a Ramachandra Guha discussion from a generous reader of this blog served as an excellent excuse for me to break away from an existence that was becoming dangerously humdrum.
Bengalooru was delightful. Luckily, I didn’t run into too much pollution or traffic. It rained, but not at the wrong times. Despite all the construction that is happening in and around the city, Bengalooru continues to have sizeable wooded, green spaces.
On the train from Coimbatore I wondered why Guha was addressing an elite audience of only twenty-five (which is how the talk had been advertised). Guiltily, I asked myself why I had to be a part of this elite gathering.
My sense of guilt eased when I picked up Thursday’s Times of India (its Bangalore edition is relatively sober compared to the Mumbai and Delhi editions) and saw that Guha had been lecturing on the same topic – Will India be a superpower? – the previous day at the National Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS) in the city. And, as I discovered during the course of the discussion on Saturday, Guha has been engaging on this question quite actively. I came away from the discussion with the satisfaction of having listened to a genuinely public intellectual whose questioning of India’s aspirations to superpower status is very much desirable.
Guha’s arguments on the grave challenges that wannabe-superpower India faces are available on the net (they were first published in a recent Outlook issue). He thinks India may not become a superpower and doesn’t want it to be one. Needless to say, his views have generated much heat, particularly among the middle class, which has prospered greatly from the bull run on the Indian economy in recent years, and is now in a hurry to take on the world. I do not propose going into Guha’s arguments beyond stating that I hold broadly similar views with some disagreements, and adding that it takes considerable boldness for someone to air contrary views publicly on a holy cow of an issue in the way Guha has done.
The interesting part of the discussion, in my opinion, came in the form of the questions asked by some of the young people present (I presume they were college students). It seemed very likely that they were listening to Guha’s views for the first time and it was apparent that they were quite bewildered. One of them thought that India had done well on all fronts despite the many challenges she had faced in the years since independence and therefore why could the country not surmount present dangers and become a superpower well nigh? Guha responded, of course, but the boy pressed his question, seemingly unconvinced. Another question came from a young lady, who wanted to know that if India was not going to be a superpower then what were we to tell our children?! A third question, from a young man sitting next to me, was dripping with penitence – how could the common man try to 'solve' the various problems (Naxalism, religious fundamentalism, widening economic inequality, abysmal socio-economic status of adivasis, environmental degradation etc. that had been discussed earlier) that he had brought upon himself?
The appeal lay not in the quality of these questions as much as in the way they were asked, disbelief and naivete couched in a certain diffidence that is characteristic of that age when one is introduced to a world outside of one’s orbit. My thoughts went back ten years ago to the time that I had myself taken tentative steps into college life. Perhaps it is the nostalgia that makes me dwell on the youngsters so much, but the experience showed just how against the grain it is to take a contrary stand on an issue that the urban Indian middle class, by and large, would like to treat as close to its heart as to that of a zealot.
But then, Bengalooru was much more than the Ram Guha discussion. It was a trip on which I caught up with friends, aunts and cousins, and sampled my former room-mate's excellent culinary skills. There were moments when I was confronted by chauvinism: a driver-conductor duo at the Shivajinagar bus stand refused to give me directions unless I spoke to them in Kannada; and there were moments when absolute strangers, also Kannadiga, gave me extensive guidance on where to get off and how to make my way to such-and-such place on such-and-such road. With their help at hand, I let myself sink into the fairly luxurious interiors of the Bengalooru Mahanagar Palike townbuses as I crisscrossed the city, listened to abuse of the newly constructed international airport (someone likened it to a cowshed unfit for cows), lunched at an Andhra restaurant called Bheema’s, eavesdropped on passers-by talking in various tongues, and caught my return train to Coimbatore feeling very cosmopolitan!
(PS: I call Bangalore Bengalooru for purely idiosyncratic reasons - because I love the way it sounds. It is also closer to one of the legends about the city’s origins, of a king separated from his hunting companions who stayed over for the night in an old woman’s hut. The old woman fed him with what little that she had, some boiled lentils or ‘bendha kalluru’, giving rise to the name Bengalooru for the place where she lived. The tale is also narrated in R. K. Narayan’s “The Emerald Route”.)
Bengalooru was delightful. Luckily, I didn’t run into too much pollution or traffic. It rained, but not at the wrong times. Despite all the construction that is happening in and around the city, Bengalooru continues to have sizeable wooded, green spaces.
On the train from Coimbatore I wondered why Guha was addressing an elite audience of only twenty-five (which is how the talk had been advertised). Guiltily, I asked myself why I had to be a part of this elite gathering.
My sense of guilt eased when I picked up Thursday’s Times of India (its Bangalore edition is relatively sober compared to the Mumbai and Delhi editions) and saw that Guha had been lecturing on the same topic – Will India be a superpower? – the previous day at the National Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS) in the city. And, as I discovered during the course of the discussion on Saturday, Guha has been engaging on this question quite actively. I came away from the discussion with the satisfaction of having listened to a genuinely public intellectual whose questioning of India’s aspirations to superpower status is very much desirable.
Guha’s arguments on the grave challenges that wannabe-superpower India faces are available on the net (they were first published in a recent Outlook issue). He thinks India may not become a superpower and doesn’t want it to be one. Needless to say, his views have generated much heat, particularly among the middle class, which has prospered greatly from the bull run on the Indian economy in recent years, and is now in a hurry to take on the world. I do not propose going into Guha’s arguments beyond stating that I hold broadly similar views with some disagreements, and adding that it takes considerable boldness for someone to air contrary views publicly on a holy cow of an issue in the way Guha has done.
The interesting part of the discussion, in my opinion, came in the form of the questions asked by some of the young people present (I presume they were college students). It seemed very likely that they were listening to Guha’s views for the first time and it was apparent that they were quite bewildered. One of them thought that India had done well on all fronts despite the many challenges she had faced in the years since independence and therefore why could the country not surmount present dangers and become a superpower well nigh? Guha responded, of course, but the boy pressed his question, seemingly unconvinced. Another question came from a young lady, who wanted to know that if India was not going to be a superpower then what were we to tell our children?! A third question, from a young man sitting next to me, was dripping with penitence – how could the common man try to 'solve' the various problems (Naxalism, religious fundamentalism, widening economic inequality, abysmal socio-economic status of adivasis, environmental degradation etc. that had been discussed earlier) that he had brought upon himself?
The appeal lay not in the quality of these questions as much as in the way they were asked, disbelief and naivete couched in a certain diffidence that is characteristic of that age when one is introduced to a world outside of one’s orbit. My thoughts went back ten years ago to the time that I had myself taken tentative steps into college life. Perhaps it is the nostalgia that makes me dwell on the youngsters so much, but the experience showed just how against the grain it is to take a contrary stand on an issue that the urban Indian middle class, by and large, would like to treat as close to its heart as to that of a zealot.
But then, Bengalooru was much more than the Ram Guha discussion. It was a trip on which I caught up with friends, aunts and cousins, and sampled my former room-mate's excellent culinary skills. There were moments when I was confronted by chauvinism: a driver-conductor duo at the Shivajinagar bus stand refused to give me directions unless I spoke to them in Kannada; and there were moments when absolute strangers, also Kannadiga, gave me extensive guidance on where to get off and how to make my way to such-and-such place on such-and-such road. With their help at hand, I let myself sink into the fairly luxurious interiors of the Bengalooru Mahanagar Palike townbuses as I crisscrossed the city, listened to abuse of the newly constructed international airport (someone likened it to a cowshed unfit for cows), lunched at an Andhra restaurant called Bheema’s, eavesdropped on passers-by talking in various tongues, and caught my return train to Coimbatore feeling very cosmopolitan!
(PS: I call Bangalore Bengalooru for purely idiosyncratic reasons - because I love the way it sounds. It is also closer to one of the legends about the city’s origins, of a king separated from his hunting companions who stayed over for the night in an old woman’s hut. The old woman fed him with what little that she had, some boiled lentils or ‘bendha kalluru’, giving rise to the name Bengalooru for the place where she lived. The tale is also narrated in R. K. Narayan’s “The Emerald Route”.)
Wednesday 23 July 2008
Profit from rising oil prices?
At a time when rising oil prices are spelling misery for a lot of people, there seems to be a perverse touch to this call to investors: http://www.valueresearchonline.com/story/h2_storyview.asp?str=100024
Thursday 17 July 2008
A forest and its people
(Am recycling an old travel piece. The reason? Have been thinking of Joseph, Douglas et al for a while. I wonder how they're doing. It's been a long time.)
It is a fine morning and as I peer out of the window, the azure waters of the Indian Ocean lap at the shores of Malindi, a little tourist town on the Kenyan coast. This delightful town, an important yesteryear port, has an interesting Indian connection: this is where Vasco da Gama is believed to have hired a guide who led him successfully to India in 1498, thereby capping the long search for a sea route from Europe to the sub-continent. After two days of rain the sky looks gay and friendly, and I think I can finally move out of Malindi. I have been staying at the dharamshala attached to the Malindi Swaminarayan Temple. It is the month of May, which is the slack tourist season, and the town is enveloped in tropical ennui. But it gives me the opportunity to make friends with the temple keeper, David, an elderly African who has been around for more than twenty years. To my astonishment, I discover that it is David who cleans out the sanctum sanctorum, lights the incense and adorns the deities everyday. He has been doing this ever since the temple priest passed away some weeks ago. A new one, who must belong to the Swaminarayan sect, is yet to be found. Till then, for all practical purposes, the priest at this Hindu temple is a Christian African who takes immense pride in his work! I see this auspicious confluence of religion and race as a good omen and set off to the village of Gede.
Gede is 18 kilometres south of Malindi and is known for the Gede Ruins, the site of an Arab-African settlement that is believed to have flourished between the 13th and 17th centuries. This is now a Kenyan National Monument and is managed (remarkably well, one must add) by the National Museums of Kenya (NMK). My own interest in Gede lies in NMK but for a different reason. The NMK is the site of a ‘kipepeo’ (Swahili for butterfly) farm and on the day of my visit, is teeming with farmers from nearby villages carrying butterfly pupae for sale. The pupae are exported to live butterfly exhibits in Europe and serve as an important source of income for the farmers. The butterfly farm is an outcome of the remarkable Kipepeo Project, a community-based butterfly farming project developed with the specific intention of getting local communities to develop a stake in the conservation of the neighbouring Arabuko Sokoke Forest.
As a matter of fact, it is the Arabuko Sokoke Forest that has drawn me to Gede, about 120 kilometres away from the port city of Mombasa. For Arabuko Sokoke is the largest remaining fragment of rich tropical forest that once stretched across the East African coast. About 42,000 hectares in size, the forest is rich in biodiversity and is regarded as the second most important forest for bird conservation in mainland Africa. It is the home of the enigmatic Clarke’s Weaver bird (Ploceus golandi), which is found nowhere else in the world, and of the Sokoke Scops Owl (Otus ireneae), which is found at only one other site, in north-east Tanzania. These are only two of the more than 230 bird species recorded in Arabuko Sokoke. Also found here are three rare, near-endemic mammals: the Golden-rumped Elephant Shrew (Rhynchocyon chrysopygus), Ader’s Duiker (Cephalophys adersi) and the Sokoke Bushy-tailed Mongoose (Bdeogale crassicauda omnivora). The forest also supports a population of the African elephant (Loxodonta africana).
As much as I am interested in its wildlife, I am also interested in the people living around the forest. These are mainly the Giriama, an indigenous people who are believed to have originated from present-day Somalia, which lies to Kenya’s north-east. From Gede therefore, I move onward to the village of Dida, which hugs the Arabuko Sokoke Forest in the southwest. I plan to be there for a few days.
The road to Dida is a dirt trail often cutting across the forest. The forest hangs low on either side and travelling here at twilight or later can be quite eerie. My escort is an immensely friendly forester who gets me engaged in a conversation on elephants. He keeps me riveted with anecdotes that illustrate the pachyderm’s intelligence. Among his stories is one of a villager plucked off his bicycle and dashed to the ground as an act of revenge. I swallow, and utter a silent prayer to Ganesha, hoping that I will remain in his good books, at least till I leave the forest.
In Dida I am entrusted to the care of the forest guard, Douglas, who beams as he receives me, having been informed by radio of my arrival. He lives in what turns out to be one of the few concrete structures in the village. It is also very old and looks as if it might collapse any moment. I consider invoking Viswakarma, the divine architect. There is no electricity in Dida, as in most other villages around the forest. However, as I step into the house, I can see that Douglas has taken great pains to make things comfortable for me. His own bedroom has been made over to my disposal with a couple of small kerosene lamps to light it up at night.
One of the first people I meet the next day is Joseph ‘Radio’ Kajomo. 35-year old Joseph has an honest face and an earnest way of talking that makes me take to him instantly. He volunteers to take me around the village and I accept at once. For the next few days Joseph is my constant companion. He carries a small radio with him all the time, which is the only connection to the world in these parts with neither electricity nor newspapers. I am taken to his house where he proudly throws open a battered trunk containing his proud possessions - books. His star possession is an old encyclopaedia set, purchased eight years ago from a second hand bookshop in Mombasa. It cost him 15,000 Kenyan Shillings (approximately 9,000 Indian rupees), a small fortune that he repaid from his farm income in instalments over eight long years.
One of the butterfly farmers whom I met in Gede the previous day lives in Dida. A message of invitation is sent out for me to Douglas, who arranges for me to meet Felix and his wife at their house. Felix is 43, has a gentle beard and a generous grin. I learn that he was once an inveterate small-time timber poacher, who went to prison thrice. After being introduced to butterfly farming though, he has turned over a new leaf. Butterfly farming helps supplements his income from growing maize and plantains. He is now strongly in support of protecting the forest. Felix’s grin grows wider and wider as I am being told all this. “From thief to conservator,” he says, “that’s my story!”
Joseph takes me around Dida and its neighbouring villages, Kafitsoni and Kahingoni. The houses are all located far apart and it takes quite some walking. We talk as we walk; when we fall silent the radio crackles to life. I meet some interesting, even inspiring, people. One of these is an elderly widow, Kadzo Masha, with a reputation for industry. Beginning as a widowed landless labourer, Masha raised her children well and was able to buy land for her family through sheer hard work. At 74, she works daylong on her farm and keeps a beautiful home. I ask Joseph to tell her that she reminds me of my grandmother. Masha is very pleased. “God bless you”, she says.
The staple food in these parts is warri, boiled flour eaten with baked kidney beans. I partake of this simple but filling meal at the home of Thomas Barawa, a village elder. He explains that the people are suffering ever since their entry into the forest was forbidden some years ago, on grounds of conservation. They are now forced to depend on the market for basic necessities such as firewood and charcoal; their nutritional status has fallen since they can no longer enter the forest to hunt small animals, pluck fruits or collect honey.
Before I realise, it is time for me to leave. I want to pay Douglas for all his troubles but he declines. “You are like my brother”, he beams at me, his hands resting on my shoulders. “I cannot take money from you.” Douglas supports a family of three children - they live in his village further south – on his meagre salary. I am overwhelmed by his gesture. As for my guide, Joseph, I dare not even mention that I would like to pay him. It would be an affront after the camaraderie that we have developed. Douglas and Joseph see me off on a rickety minibus to the town of Kilifi, where there will be a connecting bus to Gede. My friends in Dida may be poor, I say to myself, but they have something that money cannot buy. Dignity. I look back towards Dida and say softly, “I came, I saw, I was conquered.” Never mind if Caesar turns in his grave.
(An edited version of this piece was published in The Hindu Magazine, 8 July 2007.)
Tuesday 15 July 2008
Nishant
I’m not a film critic, nor do I aspire to be one. My solitary foray into the business of appraising a film happened six or seven years ago, when I took on the formidable Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, extended my critique onward to Kaaghaz ke Phool, and in the impetuousness of youth, sent it by post straight to The Hindu, which had only the preceding week published an atrocious (as it seemed to me then) review of the same movie by the eminent writer, Meenakshi Mukherjee. As if this was not enough, I was cheeky enough to enclose along with my essay a covering letter that in its tone hovered dangerously over the thin line that sometimes separates would-be-smartness from impertinence. Had I rummaged through the rubbish-bins of Kasturi Building, 858, Anna Salai, Chennai, a few days later, I might have found material that looked distinctly familiar (unless of course, someone in a fit of disgust had taken the trouble to reach for the shredder). The only gain from the whole exercise came from the bit of looking-up that I did, mainly some insights from Nasreen Munni Kabir’s biography of Guru Dutt, which was yet to hit the bookstands at the time.
It is therefore with some trepidation that I choose to record some of my impressions of Shyam Benegal’s Nishant. This 1975 film is the second of what is considered his quartet (the others being Ankur (1973), Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977)), which, as I understand, met with reasonable success in breaking ground with mainstream cinema without suffering an undue discount in terms of viewership. The occasion for watching Nishant came about through my discovery of the Konangal Film Society, a group of cinema-lovers in Coimbatore that holds regular movie-screenings. The discovery was reinforced by the draw of the authorship of Nishant’s screenplay, which rests with the fiery Vijay Tendulkar who passed away recently.
Nishant may loosely be translated as ‘the end of the night’ (निशा + अंत) or better still, in the context of the movie, ‘the end of darkness’. For it is indeed the darkness of debauchery and terror, flowing from the haveli of the zamindar, that engulfs the village in which Nishant is set, and which is seemingly dispelled when the village turns against the zamindar. However, while the end of the zamindar may mark the end of darkness for the village, such a luxury is not available to the central character, a violated woman who is solidly restrained by the fetters of social norm that rule out her return to a respectable existence. A question-mark as a suffix to the film title may not have been out of place.
The film is nourished by the splendid performances of the cast, which includes Amrish Puri as the zamindar, and Anant Nag (of later-day Malgudi Days fame) and young Mohan Agashe as his villainous brothers. Naseeruddin Shah is cast in an uncharacteristically tentative role as Vishwam, the youngest of the zamindar’s brothers, although his character is pivotal to the way the story unfolds. Girish Karnad is slightly wooden as the schoolteacher. Shabana Azmi as Sushila, the schoolteacher’s wife, delivers a fine performance. Smita Patil, as Vishwam’s wife, shows promise.
It is interesting that in exploring the complexity of relationships and the bearing that social mores have on them, Nishant seems to completely overlook the complexity of societal make-up in rural India. The film presents us with bipolar opposites with the diabolical zamindar on one side and the rest of the village on the other, ignoring the heterogeneity of caste and class divisions that typify an Indian village and pose a daunting impediment to any attempt at mass action. This neglect is enhanced by the uneven temporal balance of the film. While the first half proceeds at a leisurely pace dwelling at length on minutiae, the call to rebel and its execution is accomplished in double-quick time.
The choice of the elderly temple priest as the medium that incites the village to revolt is curious. As was perceptively pointed out by one of the viewers in the discussion following the film, the priestly class, particularly the practising priest, has scarcely gone down in history as a bugler of incipient radical change, and is more often than not found on the side of the reactionary.
On the whole, however, Nishant does sufficient justice to a lay-audience – among which I count myself - that seeks out the film in the hope of a compelling experience. Backed by some excellent cinematography and Benegal’s ciné-vérité, the film is a remarkable product of its time. Its refusal to dumb down the viewer makes it deeply provocative and rouses one to think along not-so-comfortable lines. Which, at least in part, is what good cinema should be about. Isn’t it?
It is therefore with some trepidation that I choose to record some of my impressions of Shyam Benegal’s Nishant. This 1975 film is the second of what is considered his quartet (the others being Ankur (1973), Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977)), which, as I understand, met with reasonable success in breaking ground with mainstream cinema without suffering an undue discount in terms of viewership. The occasion for watching Nishant came about through my discovery of the Konangal Film Society, a group of cinema-lovers in Coimbatore that holds regular movie-screenings. The discovery was reinforced by the draw of the authorship of Nishant’s screenplay, which rests with the fiery Vijay Tendulkar who passed away recently.
Nishant may loosely be translated as ‘the end of the night’ (निशा + अंत) or better still, in the context of the movie, ‘the end of darkness’. For it is indeed the darkness of debauchery and terror, flowing from the haveli of the zamindar, that engulfs the village in which Nishant is set, and which is seemingly dispelled when the village turns against the zamindar. However, while the end of the zamindar may mark the end of darkness for the village, such a luxury is not available to the central character, a violated woman who is solidly restrained by the fetters of social norm that rule out her return to a respectable existence. A question-mark as a suffix to the film title may not have been out of place.
The film is nourished by the splendid performances of the cast, which includes Amrish Puri as the zamindar, and Anant Nag (of later-day Malgudi Days fame) and young Mohan Agashe as his villainous brothers. Naseeruddin Shah is cast in an uncharacteristically tentative role as Vishwam, the youngest of the zamindar’s brothers, although his character is pivotal to the way the story unfolds. Girish Karnad is slightly wooden as the schoolteacher. Shabana Azmi as Sushila, the schoolteacher’s wife, delivers a fine performance. Smita Patil, as Vishwam’s wife, shows promise.
It is interesting that in exploring the complexity of relationships and the bearing that social mores have on them, Nishant seems to completely overlook the complexity of societal make-up in rural India. The film presents us with bipolar opposites with the diabolical zamindar on one side and the rest of the village on the other, ignoring the heterogeneity of caste and class divisions that typify an Indian village and pose a daunting impediment to any attempt at mass action. This neglect is enhanced by the uneven temporal balance of the film. While the first half proceeds at a leisurely pace dwelling at length on minutiae, the call to rebel and its execution is accomplished in double-quick time.
The choice of the elderly temple priest as the medium that incites the village to revolt is curious. As was perceptively pointed out by one of the viewers in the discussion following the film, the priestly class, particularly the practising priest, has scarcely gone down in history as a bugler of incipient radical change, and is more often than not found on the side of the reactionary.
On the whole, however, Nishant does sufficient justice to a lay-audience – among which I count myself - that seeks out the film in the hope of a compelling experience. Backed by some excellent cinematography and Benegal’s ciné-vérité, the film is a remarkable product of its time. Its refusal to dumb down the viewer makes it deeply provocative and rouses one to think along not-so-comfortable lines. Which, at least in part, is what good cinema should be about. Isn’t it?
Wednesday 2 July 2008
Tag: The man who knew infinity
Songs of sixpence has been tagged by Mampi. The tag asks me to quote sentences numbering six, seven and eight from page 123 of the book nearest at hand. In my case, the book in question happens to be The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. Now before you jump to conclusions and accuse me of engaging in an exercise in narcissism by reading a biography of my namesake, let me make it clear that the book has come into my temporary possession absolutely by chance, thanks to a friend of mine who fell for the charms of Nalini Chettur, the keeper of Giggles, ‘the biggest little bookshop’, in Chennai. This friend already has several books piled up waiting to be read, so he passed it on to me, mistakenly thinking that I possibly had more time at my disposal. I say ‘mistakenly’, because I have my own pile of unread books. Nevertheless, I gave The Man Who Knew Infinity top priority because it has to be returned, and allowed it to jump the queue of books begging for my attention. To my delight however, I believe I do not have much cause to complain and might even want to hug my friend for his act of generosity. Having traversed about three-fifths of it, I find the book quite engaging. Anyway, here goes:
He devotedly studied his Wisden, the cricket annual crammed with bowling averages, test-match results, and other arcania of the game. In 1910, the minutes of a Cambridge club would alliteratively cite his command of “the University Constitution, the methods of Canvassing, Clarendon type, and professional cricket.” As a young Fellow of Trinity College, he’d play a bastardized form of it in his rooms, with walking stick and tennis ball.
The lines are from the fourth chapter, and as you have probably guessed already, describe Godfrey Harold Hardy, the celebrated Cambridge mathematician who was responsible for dragging Ramanujan out from near oblivion as a lowly clerk in the Madras Port Trust and into the hallowed portals at Cambridge. The book is as rich in biographical detail of Hardy as it is of Ramanujan. As is evident from the lines above, Hardy was a great cricket enthusiast. In fact, he was very much unlike the picture that one may carry of a mathematician: he was extremely good-looking, an excellent speaker and a fine writer. Nonetheless, to partly justify the slightly stereotyped perceptions of a mathematician, he had his share of eccentricities. He was known to refrain from shaking hands and to walk down the street face down, without exchanging greetings with acquaintances among passers-by. For a flavour of the man, I take the liberty of quoting some more lines from the book:
In The Case of the Philosopher’s Ring, a Sherlock Holmes mystery written half a century after the death of Arthur Conan Doyle, the characters include Ramanujan and Hardy. In it, author Randall Collins pictures Hardy as a sort of White Rabbit hopping around the Fellows Garden at Trinity in white flannels and cap, cricket bat in hand, frantically searching for his cricket gloves, crying, “There’s a match due to begin, and I can’t find them. I’m late! I’m late!” In a prefatory note, Collins abjures all claims to historical accuracy. But in Hardy, he’s close to the mark.
The Man Who Knew Infinity is written by an American, Robert Kanigel, and he writes about the considerable difficulty of having to straddle two worlds very different from his own – those of South India and Cambridge - in researching the book. Indeed, his description of life in (South) India when he is discussing Ramanujan’s early days, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt (his denigrating description of sambar as ‘a thick lentil soup stocked with potatoes’ still rankles!) Yet, in tackling two highly complex personalities of the twentieth century along with their daunting mathematics, one must accept that overall, he has done more than a decent job. After this, I am more eager than ever to lay my hands on David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk.
He devotedly studied his Wisden, the cricket annual crammed with bowling averages, test-match results, and other arcania of the game. In 1910, the minutes of a Cambridge club would alliteratively cite his command of “the University Constitution, the methods of Canvassing, Clarendon type, and professional cricket.” As a young Fellow of Trinity College, he’d play a bastardized form of it in his rooms, with walking stick and tennis ball.
The lines are from the fourth chapter, and as you have probably guessed already, describe Godfrey Harold Hardy, the celebrated Cambridge mathematician who was responsible for dragging Ramanujan out from near oblivion as a lowly clerk in the Madras Port Trust and into the hallowed portals at Cambridge. The book is as rich in biographical detail of Hardy as it is of Ramanujan. As is evident from the lines above, Hardy was a great cricket enthusiast. In fact, he was very much unlike the picture that one may carry of a mathematician: he was extremely good-looking, an excellent speaker and a fine writer. Nonetheless, to partly justify the slightly stereotyped perceptions of a mathematician, he had his share of eccentricities. He was known to refrain from shaking hands and to walk down the street face down, without exchanging greetings with acquaintances among passers-by. For a flavour of the man, I take the liberty of quoting some more lines from the book:
In The Case of the Philosopher’s Ring, a Sherlock Holmes mystery written half a century after the death of Arthur Conan Doyle, the characters include Ramanujan and Hardy. In it, author Randall Collins pictures Hardy as a sort of White Rabbit hopping around the Fellows Garden at Trinity in white flannels and cap, cricket bat in hand, frantically searching for his cricket gloves, crying, “There’s a match due to begin, and I can’t find them. I’m late! I’m late!” In a prefatory note, Collins abjures all claims to historical accuracy. But in Hardy, he’s close to the mark.
The Man Who Knew Infinity is written by an American, Robert Kanigel, and he writes about the considerable difficulty of having to straddle two worlds very different from his own – those of South India and Cambridge - in researching the book. Indeed, his description of life in (South) India when he is discussing Ramanujan’s early days, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt (his denigrating description of sambar as ‘a thick lentil soup stocked with potatoes’ still rankles!) Yet, in tackling two highly complex personalities of the twentieth century along with their daunting mathematics, one must accept that overall, he has done more than a decent job. After this, I am more eager than ever to lay my hands on David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk.
Thursday 19 June 2008
Fiction: Wedding Invite
(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.
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.
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!
Tuesday 27 May 2008
High upon the High Tatras
A slightly edited version of the following travel piece of mine, based on a hike up the High Tatras mountains in Slovakia last summer, was published in The Telegraph from Kolkata last Saturday, 23 May 2008 (http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080524/jsp/personaltt/story_9310441.jsp):
View from Malá Studená dolina ; Photographs by Gualter Baptista, reproduced with permission
The sight in front of us is stunning. At an altitude of 2,015 metres, we are perched on a rare piece of flat rock, between an endless expanse of cottony blue-grey sky on top and rock-cradled green slopes below, together merging into a panoramic view of the far countryside. To our backs, the craggy granite cliffs of the High Tatras rise up spectacularly, almost casting their shadows upon us. A little to our left lies an alpine lake, fed by melting ice and so freezing cold that my hands are still numb after having dipped into its waters. This is Malá Studená dolina (the Little Cold Valley) in the High Tatras, a mountain range stretching across the border between Slovakia and Poland. We are on the Slovak side, in a region called Vysoké Tatry.
The High Tatras are a part of the Tatra mountains, distinct from the Alps but noted for their similar appearance, climate and flora. They are breathtakingly beautiful. For the past week, from our hotel in the village of Stará Lesná in the plains below, we have been watching the snow-streaked peaks dally with clouds of varying hues of black and white. The summer is upon us but the late June weather is whimsical. At one moment thick, dark clouds are huddled around the mountains, as if locked in an embrace, and there is a wet chill in the air. Within hours, they turn white and wispy and move away, as if breaking up after a lovers’ tiff. In a few hours they are back again, this time as a boundless sheet of spongy white, standing well aloof over the mountains. And just as you wonder if they are going to make up, the clouds descend ever so lightly on the peaks, sealing their pact of reunion with a delicate kiss.
Enticed by their beauty, we resolve to go up the High Tatras over the weekend. Awakening to a brilliant Sunday morning, perfect for a hike, we walk down to the village of Tatranská Lomnica, which is the starting point for a cableway that can take you all the way up to Lomnický štít, the second highest peak in the High Tatras, at an altitude of 2,634 metres. We take a cable car midway to Skalnaté Pleso (or Rocky Lake), a popular picnic spot and the site of an astronomical observatory. The lake is crystal clear and we can see down to its bottom as we lean across the wooden bridge passing over it.
The High Tatras are a part of the Tatra mountains, distinct from the Alps but noted for their similar appearance, climate and flora. They are breathtakingly beautiful. For the past week, from our hotel in the village of Stará Lesná in the plains below, we have been watching the snow-streaked peaks dally with clouds of varying hues of black and white. The summer is upon us but the late June weather is whimsical. At one moment thick, dark clouds are huddled around the mountains, as if locked in an embrace, and there is a wet chill in the air. Within hours, they turn white and wispy and move away, as if breaking up after a lovers’ tiff. In a few hours they are back again, this time as a boundless sheet of spongy white, standing well aloof over the mountains. And just as you wonder if they are going to make up, the clouds descend ever so lightly on the peaks, sealing their pact of reunion with a delicate kiss.
Enticed by their beauty, we resolve to go up the High Tatras over the weekend. Awakening to a brilliant Sunday morning, perfect for a hike, we walk down to the village of Tatranská Lomnica, which is the starting point for a cableway that can take you all the way up to Lomnický štít, the second highest peak in the High Tatras, at an altitude of 2,634 metres. We take a cable car midway to Skalnaté Pleso (or Rocky Lake), a popular picnic spot and the site of an astronomical observatory. The lake is crystal clear and we can see down to its bottom as we lean across the wooden bridge passing over it.
Cable car at Skalnaté Pleso
There are hiking trails branching out from Skalnaté Pleso. The trails are well laid out and marked with different colours, so that is possible to go on a hike by oneself without undue fear of getting lost. Nevertheless, our group is led by Norbert, an earnest young academic from Hungary who is today doubling up as our guide. He has carefully chalked out the plans for the hike and it is reassuring to have him around. We take the red trail, which winds around the edge of the mountains, offering superb views of the valley and plains below. About an hour later, it leads us to Zamkovského chata. The chata or mountain cottage is a remarkable feature of the High Tatras. A small number of them dot the mountains, and they are the only way of spending a night for hikers who wish to avoid the tourist resorts at the foothills. Interestingly, the High Tatras are a part of the Tatras National Park (TANAP), and camping is forbidden. The chatas are thus invaluable for hikers who want to explore the mountains over a few days. They provide refreshments and fairly inexpensive accommodation; they may also have a kitchen. Each chata is managed by a chatar, or inn-keeper, some of whom are a legend by themselves. One such is Viktor Beranek, who keeps the Chata pod Rysmi at the popular Rysy peak. Unlike many of his counterparts, he refuses to have supplies brought up to his chata by helicopter and prefers to carry them up over a four-hour trek on foot in time-honoured tradition.
We halt only briefly at Zamkovského chata; Norbert is soon leading us on the green trail that diverges from the red trail here. The path is now narrow and steep, and climbs up against a swift-flowing mountain stream. At one point just before the trail slopes up sharply, some of our fellow hikers find a fine spot on the banks of the stream to break for lunch. The sun is still bright, and upon finishing a light lunch of apples and sandwiches, it is tempting to stretch out to laze on the rocks with feet dangling into the water.
Hiking in the High Tatras is a popular pastime at this time of the year and it is not just young people who are into it. On our way, we come across barely-ten-year-olds with their parents, and middle-aged persons who politely sidestep to let you climb past. Most amazing of all is the sight of elderly couples negotiating the way with their hiking sticks, in eloquent testimony to their fitness and zest for life.
As we resume our trek, the stream flowing past us narrows to a brook and then eventually disappears. Soon we come to one of its sources, a crunchy stretch of ice. We walk across gingerly, stepping sideways to avoid slipping. The trail, now completely rock, twists its arduous way up. The distance between the hikers widens and we seem to be all on our own. I am glad for the green marks painted on the rocks.
The Tatras National Park represented by a Tatra chamois
I keep my eyes open for a Tatra chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra tatrica), the mountain-goat, which is the pride of these mountains. This subspecies of the handsome mammal, with a reddish coat and curved, hooked horns, is critically endangered and is placed by the IUCN in its Red List of Threatened Species. Less than 500 of these beasts are known to survive and it is little wonder that the TANAP can be found symbolically represented by a majestic chamois, with its neck arched so that its magnificent horns are on full view. The TANAP covers a breadth of 740 square kilometres, which includes not only forest but also these mountains, with all their twenty five peaks and a hundred lakes. In this extensive area, the chamois shares space with lynx, brown bears, marmots, golden eagles and wolves, but none of them quite match up to its stature. It is in a league of its own.
The Tatra chamois manages to evade us but we are euphoric as we finally reach Malá Studená dolina (which is where we found ourselves at the beginning of this piece!). Limpid waters fill the five splendid tarns, or mountain lakes, here, a reminder of the glaciation of the past. Also here lies Teryho chata, the highest of all mountain cottages in the High Tatras. Teryho chata has 24 beds and charges 280 Slovak crowns (roughly 500 Indian rupees) a night. At an altitude of over 2000 metres with nowhere else to spend the night, this is certainly cheap. Miro Jilek, the inn-keeper, is known for his exceptional brew of Teryho tea – and his hospitality. Apparently, no visitor in need of shelter is turned away. If the beds are full one is free to stretch oneself across the tables or even the floor.
A tarn or mountain lake
As we munch biscuits and savour the sight from the vantage point that we have temporarily colonised, the clouds suddenly start to hang low, blotting out the sun. A cold wind begins to blow. It’s time for us to leave our regal perch. We retrace our steps - but only partially, for Norbert is soon leading us through another trail that takes us into forested parts of the TANAP in the lower reaches of the mountains. We briskly make our way under the forest canopy, negotiating occasional waterfalls and clearings randomly strewn with tree stumps and fallen trunks of spruce. In mid-November 2004, a 180 kilometre-per-hour windstorm swept through the TANAP, uprooting trees and causing mayhem over an extensive area. Subsequently commercial interests sought to remove the fallen and damaged trees and tourism developers have used the opportunity to lobby for increased human activity and recreational facilities. These developments have generated much concern among civil society groups, including scientists, who fear for the fragile ecology of the TANAP and the High Tatras.
The descent is relatively quick although we are hiking all the way down without taking the cable car. Soon the forest is thinning and the meadows are visible in the distance. Eventually our trail opens out on to a road leading right to our village. As we step out of the woods the Slovak sun is out again, casting its warm glow on the evening. We look up to see the mighty Tatras stand tall and clear. Looks like they’ve had a lovers’ tiff again.
Thursday 22 May 2008
My favourite short stories
If you were to compile a list of your all-time favourite short stories, which are the ones you would call upon? I recently finished reading a short story anthology that I picked up at one of the second-hand bookshops near Town Hall, and the question has been playing on my mind ever since. Included in this short story collection were some stories that I had read previously and at least two of them deserve to go into my list of faves.
However, compiling a freelance list of this sort is fraught with danger. The exercise brings home a sinking sense of inadequacy and exposes one’s limitations in terms of breadth (or lack of it) of reading. My nightmarish fear is that anyone with a taste for short fiction will go through my list with growing severity. “No Chekhov?” they might frown. No Saki either? No P. G. Wodehouse?! Where's Somerset Maugham? Jhumpa Lahiri? Satyajit Ray? Rohinton Mistry? And so on and so forth they might ask, reeling off a long list of names as I shrink in embarassment and shame.
Bravely, nevertheless, I shall take the plunge, on the strength of my own individuality and preferences. There are of course, some parameters to be laid out. I propose to discuss very briefly short stories that I adore, stories that I read over a period of time since my schooldays. Many of these are evergreen stories that one gets to read time and again in various short story collections. From the ones so discussed I propose to narrow down and draw up a list of approximately ten favourites. I can already foresee a bias towards earlier writers, and there is unlikely to be much contemporary writing.
However, compiling a freelance list of this sort is fraught with danger. The exercise brings home a sinking sense of inadequacy and exposes one’s limitations in terms of breadth (or lack of it) of reading. My nightmarish fear is that anyone with a taste for short fiction will go through my list with growing severity. “No Chekhov?” they might frown. No Saki either? No P. G. Wodehouse?! Where's Somerset Maugham? Jhumpa Lahiri? Satyajit Ray? Rohinton Mistry? And so on and so forth they might ask, reeling off a long list of names as I shrink in embarassment and shame.
Bravely, nevertheless, I shall take the plunge, on the strength of my own individuality and preferences. There are of course, some parameters to be laid out. I propose to discuss very briefly short stories that I adore, stories that I read over a period of time since my schooldays. Many of these are evergreen stories that one gets to read time and again in various short story collections. From the ones so discussed I propose to narrow down and draw up a list of approximately ten favourites. I can already foresee a bias towards earlier writers, and there is unlikely to be much contemporary writing.
After Twenty Years: Illustration from "Outstanding Short Stories", S. Chand & Company (Pvt.) Ltd., New Delhi, year unknown
One of the prime contenders for the list is a story that always manages to thrill although I have read it umpteen times. In After Twenty Years, O’ Henry tells the remarkable story of two friends who fix a rendezvous for 20 years later – and keep it, but with the most dramatic consequences. O’ Henry’s penchant for shocking the reader with a sharp twist of irony is at a pinnacle here as it is in another story of his, The Last Leaf, in which a failed artist eventually goes on to paint the masterpiece he has only talked about all his life. The Gift of the Magi, also an O’ Henry offering, stands out for the stab of emotion that hits the reader in the end. I have read this tale of love and sacrifice again and again, and a lump sticks to my throat every time.
Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace stocks a similar reservoir of shock and irony, which is unleashed in the very last line. It is a story marvellously told and for that reason it serves as an excellent ambassador for the writer across numerous short story collections. Boule de Suif by the same writer offers a penetrating insight into Prussia-occupied France of the latter half of the 19th century. The narrative compellingly exposes the hollowness of the gentry even as it leaves the reader with a deep sympathy for the anti-protagonist, Elizabeth Rousset.
C. Auguste Dupin’s investigation of the murders in the Rue Morgue in the eponymous murder mystery of Edgar Allan Poe remains a classic, evoking a certain thrill and awe with a touch of the sinister. Dupin himself was a forerunner of his counterpart across the English Channel, Sherlock Holmes. Their creators, Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle respectively, overly romanticised many of their sleuths’ adventures and borrowed liberally – and with a great degree of inaccuracy – from the exotica of the mysterious East. Yet many of their stories are a delight to read. Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Speckled Band, a strong contender for my list of favourites, combines romance, death, fear and adventure as Holmes summons his deductive prowess to crack one of his most intriguing cases.
Holmes listens in rapt attention: A Sidney Paget illustration from The Strand magazine.
In possibly the only case of its kind, Holmes is outsmarted - by a woman - in A Scandal in Bohemia, and in a somewhat singular peep into how the great detective’s gender prejudices were stilled, Conan Doyle, in Watson’s shoes, writes: “ And that was how … the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of ___, … it is always under the honourable title of the woman.” The story makes it a strong contender for my list for this unusual characteristic alone. This distinctive trait leads me to another story of failure, and the gentleman in question is none other than the little Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. Published as a short story sometime between the two World Wars, Agatha Christie’s The Chocolate Box has Poirot narrating to companion Hastings the one occasion when his little grey cells failed him in his illustrious professional career.
The Man who saved Pumpelsdrop is a breezy story that describes the ascent of a town from the furrows of economic depression to the happy air of prosperity. This Walter J. Turner tale fed my schoolboy ambitions of becoming an economist and it continues to entertain although I am today merely an economist manqué.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More is often regarded (arguably so) as comprising the cream of Roald Dahl’s short fiction. Originally published in this collection (and later in others), The Hitchhiker never ceases to surprise and entertain with its account of an unexpected highway passenger’s uncanny abilities.
I am getting back home now. If one is to cast a glance at the gamut of Indians writing fiction in English one is compelled to give a wide berth to any dogma on what constitutes Indian identity. Yet few writers have managed to capture the nub of the average Indian’s life in the manner of R. K. Narayan. In my opinion, his novels are more engrossing than his short stories. Nonetheless, I can think of at least two contenders from his oeuvre for our list. One is a short story drawn upon the characters of his novel, The English Teacher. His wife desperately ill and unresponsive to medical treatment, Krishna is compelled to consult an astrologer as a last resort. To neutralise the extremely inauspicious position of the stars the astrologer can offer only one shocking remedy – Krishna must see a prostitute if his wife is to survive. The rest of the story describes how Krishna deals with this devilish dilemma. This is my favourite R. K. Narayan story but I do not know its title. I have no remembrance of where I read it and it is certainly not present in the two readily available short story collections of his, Malgudi Days and Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories. My choice therefore, falls upon The Doctor’s Word, a story that is remarkable for its deft portrayal of human nature. Here, Raman, a doctor with a reputation for ruthless honesty in the matter of life and death, struggles with the realisation that the survival of his latest patient hinges more upon his prognosis than his medication. The story has been reprinted in more than one anthology.
My favourite Ranji story: Illustration from Ruskin Bond's "Three Stories in Cricket", The Students' Stores, New Delhi, 1990
Leaping across the Vindhyas we come to a writer for whom India is home. From Ruskin Bond’s expansive repertory I draw three contenders. Ranji’s Wonderful Bat is about a budding boy cricketer who has lost his touch with the bat and is on the verge of losing his place in the school team. The Girl on the Train is a more ‘grown-up’ story that ends with a twist. My favourite Ruskin Bond tale, however, is another Ranji story: Koki Plays the Game. It is to be enjoyed for its sheer charm as it captures the nuances of small town ‘maidan’ cricket, with young boys playing the game for sheer fun and pride. A far cry from today’s masala matches and a throwback to one’s own days of innocence. In the story, the gender barrier is broken as Kokila, Ranji’s girl next door, migrates from bowler-in-the-nets and cheerleader to twelfth man, and eventually makes it to the playing eleven in style.
Dal Delight: An illustration by Suddhasattwa Basu from "Best of Target Stories", Living Media India Ltd., New Delhi, 1991
Another ‘desi’ story scoring high on the delight quotient is Dal Delight by Subhadra Sen Gupta. Set in nawaabi Lucknow, the narrative takes the reader through a mouth-watering experience, giving anxious but exciting moments when Mohammad Qadir’s shahi menu is held hostage to the kite-flying whims of Nawab Hasan Ali.
The last contender is The Imam and the Indian, to include which I will have to bend the rules a little, for strictly speaking, this is a prose piece that meanders over the lines that separate essay, autobiographical experience and short story. Yet, its uniqueness is striking. This Amitav Ghosh product truly speaks of an age that arrived somewhat late in Indian English writing, addressing as it does the conundrums posed by a juxtaposition of different cultures. That it should have come from the pen of an Indian, a people largely self-absorbed and self-obsessed, is what makes it remarkable. If the Imam’s railing against the writer for the treatment meted out to the dead in his country is deeply startling, the more sympathetic but equally perplexed voice of the simple Egyptian villager brings the essay to an end on a note of amusement.
Now, the denouement. Having discussed the probables, the final selection turns out as follows:
After Twenty Years (O’ Henry)
The Last Leaf (O’ Henry)
The Necklace (Guy de Maupassant)
The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Edgar Allan Poe)
The Adventure of the Speckled Band (Arthur Conan Doyle)
The Man Who Saved Pumpelsdrop (Walter J. Turner)
The Hitchhiker (Roald Dahl)
The Doctor’s Word (R. K. Narayan)
Koki Plays the Game (Ruskin Bond)
Dal Delight (Subhadra Sen Gupta)
The Imam and the Indian (Amitav Ghosh)
Ten short stories and one prose piece.
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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...
