Yobama

I hearby officially eat my words in the previous post about where the US might go in this year's election.

Personal Geometry

Small, narrow room. Boy looks out the single window at the far end. A huge Mango tree dominates the view outside. Its branches snake nearly to the window grille and when the wind blows he can touch the leaves. A thousand Rhesus monkeys make their home in this tree. Hardly surprising, for the fruit is succulent and the shade is a cool respite from the punishing heat of long summer days. They are a noisy and mischievous and spunky lot, are these monkeys. For when the fruit is no longer in season, they will sneak right into the home and steal food from the table.

That boy is me. The year is 1966 or 1967. Baba works for the Life Insurance Corporation and was transferred here from Bombay a few years earlier. I am in Class I or II and this modest flat in Basotia Bhavan along the Canal Range in Kanpur has been my home for as long as I can remember.

[Wait up. What’s with the deep dive into personal prehistory?

Locations and loci. Trajectories, paths, vectors. We plot where we are and where we will likely go next. We triangulate our situation and define our coordinates. Our neural wiring makes us geometers.

This, then, is an exercise in personal geometry. A draw-by-numbers art book where I must first get all the dots together before I can start joining them. Perhaps I won’t even join them. For I suspect, I won’t be able to figure out which dot connects up to which one. The neural network probably connects every dot to every other and it is a web in there.

The oldest, farthest dots are for the most part in Kanpur.]

Dust. If there is a single thing that is all-pervasive in these memories of Kanpur circa 1965 it is the dust. With the advantage of knowledge since acquired, I now recognize in its hazy, choking ubiquity, another gift of the mighty Ganga that flowed, and still flows, through the city. This great river carries down millions of tons of the stuff from its source high up in the Himalaya and deposits it all along her banks as she makes her sinuous way down to the Bay of Bengal. As the loamy mounds dry they replenish the fertility of the endless fields on either bank. Or are blown away by the winds whipping off the river and become the ubiquitous dust.

The domestic help, Mehri as she would be referred to in those parts, would sweep the home in the morning and a substantial pile of dust would be the predictable result. Every leaf of the Mango tree was covered by dust. When I stepped out of the building, every step would be marked with little bellows. Running around during snack and lunch breaks in the grounds of West Cott High School meant churning up huge clouds of smoky yellow. The mehendi bush that lined the path to the School was laden with it. The very air you breathed was choking with it.

Quite early in the morning, 7 o’clock perhaps, I would set out for my milk run, the aluminium ‘barni[1]’ swinging in the right hand. The ‘gwala[2]’ was on the other bank of the nullah just past a couple of bhadbhoonjan[3] shops that would be redolent with the smell of roasting moongfali[4]. Vast kadhais[5] full of hot sand and whatever it was that was being roasted would sit atop wood or coal stoves fanned by large leather bellows. The bhadbhoonja would use massive slotted ladles to constantly keep turning the mix to ensure even roasting and prevent the subjects of his hot ministrations from getting burnt. The sibilant hiss of the sand as it ran through the slots in the ladle, the crackling of the charcoal in the stove and the scrape of ladle against kadhai provided a rhythmic cadence to the process, truly wondrous for the seven year old as he walked past. Four decades on, the memory of the fresh, hot roasting aromas that rose from the kadhais  is still strong enough to produce a spontaneous salivary response.

Much is made in culinary circles, particularly in the West, about the provenance of various food ingredients and the superior virtues of local produce. Back in Kanpur c. 1965, it can be safely said that everything we ate or drank was produced within a 100 kilometer radius of the city.

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[1] A cylindrical vessel with lid traditionally used for carrying or storing liquids such as milk and oil

[2] Milkman

[3] Traditional roasters of rice, wheat, peanuts, lentils and legumes. Their main products are puffed rice, puffed wheat and roast chickpeas

[4] Peanut

[5] Indian style Woks made of cast iron

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It's McCain/Palin on November 4, 2008 (Rs. 100 bets anybody?)

Last things first: McCain/Palin will win the US Presidential Elections. And I have a Rs. 100 note that says so.

Simple, really. Difficult times ossify mild positions into tough stances. And boil off all pretense of liberal, inclusive fellowship. As the US tumbles swiftly into the toughest economic times it has seen in almost three generations, the common man will revert to deeply buried (but never abandoned) stereotypes - most significantly about the Black and White Races - reviving a xenophobia that few will find themselves immune to. The polls over the next several weeks will reveal little, as political correctness will get in the way, but once in the ballot box, the voter's  pretense will be shed and voting will (particularly male voting will) run along tightly racial lines. While women can become a big swing factor, they will probably not turn out in large enough numbers to make it happen.

Lagi sau-sau ki?

p.s. And I have a rotten feeling that something similar will inform the Indian General Elections that will follow in 2009.

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Looking glass land

(Dissolve slowly through pink to November 1989)

A wall came down.

Two years later, Francis Fukuyama declared, ""What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

The liberal democratic West had won. The oppressive communist East had lost. A miasma of Nuclear Holocaust that had loomed over the planet for four decades had lifted and we could all see clearly. The failed experiment would never be repeated. And all forms of 'Commie Lite' pedalled by now discredited votaries of re-distributive egalitarianism were going to be exiled to the outer darkness.

Country after country, economy after economy, society after society was enormous pressure to line up behind the new Valhalla. In India, the dour faced Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao earned himself the sobriquet of Father of India's Economic Reforms by becoming a votary of this wonderful nostrum. A long oppressed middle class celebrated. Their moment had arrived.

Burdensome shackles were being shed. Onerous regulations were being extinguished. Command and Control was giving way to Energy and Entrepreneurship. Wealth went from being a Really Bad Word to a VERY NOBLE OBJECTIVE. We were all 'Wealth Creators' now after all.

And the beacon of this new world, the United States of America, shone brightly. The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave stood for all that we looked up to, our faces awash in unabashed admiration (and only slightly veiled envy).

(Jump cut to September 15, 2008)

Lehman Brothers filed for Bankruptcy Protection under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Act.

We had just crossed over into Looking Glass Land (and Alice, we discovered, was working for the Mad Hatter).

Semitic Hinduism

About two weeks back, Karan Thapar wrote a piece entitled 'Who's the real Hindu' in the Hindustan Times. He raised a simple question: Does the VHP have the right to speak for you or I [sic]?  Easy enough to answer that one: No. He offers up some reasons for why not and I have a somewhat different take. Here's mine.

Every major world religion is defined by a codified set of beliefs that every adherent must subscribe to. With the exception of course of Hinduism. It almost appears as if in India, we define Hinduism by subtraction - if you are not Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Jew, Baha'i, Shinto, Taoist or anything else, voila! you are Hindu.

The Middle East was the cradle of three major religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam that we now collectively think of as the Semitic Religions. With their shared beliefs in a single, all knowing God the Creator, an identifiable Prophet or series of Prophets and a congregational form of worship, their common roots are hard to miss. And finally their shared belief in offering an exclusive path to redemption denying all but their own adherents access to salvation and heaven. In two of these, Christianity and Islam, there was also a clear emphasis on proselytising to the heathens to the point of making it a sacred duty for followers. The continued organic and inorganic growth of both these religions even in the 21st century is driven by a continued playing out of this powerful force.

Cut back briefly to Hinduism. With no shared belief system, no congregational worship, no conversion route inward, it isn't as if the religion (or whatever) has stopped growing. Not by the longest chalk! India's 2001 Census revealed a Hindu population of 827 million up, hold your breath now, a solid 20% over the previous decade though the decadal growth rate did drop from 22.8% for the 1981-1991 period. Assuming that there is a further drop in the decadal rate by a similar proportion when we next run the Census you should still see a 17.5% growth to 972 million Indian Hindus in India 2011. Short point - this is not a religion in any imminent danger of disappearing.

Strangely, a relatively small band of misguided people believe that the solution to  fighting back the forces that threaten Hinduism (yeah, right, I'm scared already :-/) is, believe it or not,  to turn it into a Semitic Religion, complete with its own prescribed dogma, its own congregational leaders (a Hindu Pope, wow!) and its own proselytising army. So much for originality.

It is a unique civilizational inheritance that we in India enjoy. Because of the utter amorphousness of 'Hinduism' it became the ultimate assimilator. As the Scythians and the Parthians, the Greeks and the Persians, the Moghuls and the Turks kept invading, or otherwise fetching up in this sub-continental land mass south of the Himalayas, they were progressively integrated into the gentle but utterly inexorable ebb and flow of this great stream of human civilization. And all their beliefs and practices were effortlessly assimilated into the shared heritage. (A lot like our culinary traditions developed :-) for instance I've heard that the famous Bengali Prawn dish, Chingri Machcher Malai Kari, has nothing to do with Malai as in Cream but everything with Malay as in Malaysia!).

That is what we Hindus are and who we Hindus are, assimilators, not segregationists.

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Barack McCain?

Did you wake up in time to see the Republican Presidential Candidate accept the nomination this morning?

At least one thing from the Democratic camp has been weighing on the mind of this candidate... the whole 'no more 4 more years of Bush' theme. Look at the time he spent today on distancing himself from Bush 43. You would have thought after 8 years of being in power, and a TWO term Presidency just starting to fade away, a candidate for the GOP would have at least acknowledged the Party faithfuls' pride in their Dear Leader. Instead, he went on and on about how the ordinary American was 'hurting' and finding it hard to put gas into his tank and food on the family table. And how opposed he was to pork barrel politics. And how, with the big broom of Palin by his side, he was going to bring 'Change to Washington'. This latter seems to be a pet theme of American Politics in general and Presidential Politics in particular. EVERY major stump speech, convention speech and televised debate suggests that every candidate is interested in bringing change to Washington. So where the hell is the change? And equally, how can Joe Public continue to listen to this unorginal boilerplate as anything more than vacuous promiseering?

Now hear this: Al Gore just became McCain's speechwriter. Where else did he get the long pitch about the new, renewable energy economy and millions of new jobs that will stay in America instead of running away to they-who-shall-not-be-named? It might as well have been a certain Obama doing the talking.

Finally, the bit I love the most: Americans griping about how badly McCain was treated in the POW Camps of the VietCong. Here is a man who has voluntarily chosen to enrol in his country's army and is parachuting into enemy territory, not for spreading peace and love and enrolling poor Vietnamese children into school, but to shoot, maim and kill. He is caught and becomes a POW. The Vietnamese, never the world's wealthiest people, are deep into an endless war of attrition where the staple diet of the average citizen is a weak tapioca gruel. What does this son-of-Admirals expect, filet mignon done medium rare with a nice and dry Napa Valley Cabernet to go with it? And a four-poster bed to retire into after a long day on the Golf Course? Listen chaps. Your country crossed an ocean to beat up a tiny, helpless people but didn't count on their determination, ingenuity and fearless sacrifice. Uncle Sam's posters still carry a bloody nose, three decades on. McCain fought an unjust war and picked up some heat. So he was not the guy who took the country to war but merely a youngster who bought the whole patriotic psychobabble.

Change is coming, quoth... quoth who? Barack McCain?