Orientophobia by Teed Rockwell
The Hiring Paradox by Vivek Wadhwa
Of Gods and Faith by Sarita Sarvate
Celebrating 27 Years of Excellence
Shining Light octoberoctober 2013 2013 • vol.•27vol. , no27 . 7, no • .www. indiacurrents.com 7 • www. indiacurrents.com
Indu Sundaresan’s latest book sweeps through history and mythology in search of the Kohinoor diamond. by Indu Sundaresan, Jeanne Fredriksen
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I Am Beautiful, No Matter What They Say The Miss America 2014 contest had a record five Asian Americans competing for the crown. Three of them made it to the top five. It finally came down to Miss New York, Nina Davuluri, and Miss California, Crystal Lee, with Davuluri emerging as the winner. Is the idea of beauty being re-defined in America? If you believe that our experience of beauty is based on existing cultural and social norms, then the palette of colors in the top ten of the Miss America 2014 contest is a stirring commentary on race and diversity. Zed Nelson, a documentary photographer, featured on CNN, traveled the world in search of people who explored the validity of their own attractiveness by body improvement. He found that the Eurocentric perception of beauty has so persistently been the standard of pretty that many people from non-western nations also bought the western prescription for beauty-enhancement. This is borne out in a country like India with “Fair & Lovely” creaming the crop of beauty hopefuls. It is no surprise then that we saw twitter exclamations of Nina Davuluri’s skin color being “too dark to win Miss India in India.” Such evidence of internalized racism buttresses the stereotypes in our culture and empowers the purveyors of white vanity. If
we do not believe in the appeal of the color pigments that shade our skins, then how are we to convince the world that Nina Davuluri is beautiful? “If you can sell the idea of one prescriptive look, then you can sell people the products and services to help them attempt to achieve this idea,” said Nelson, implying that the formulaic description of beauty was a matter of profit and loss and demand curves. We have been conditioned into believing the binary colors of beauty by the products that are arranged at the retail counters of department stores. Indeed, Davuluri had difficulty finding the “right color of lipstick”—the right color for her skin tone? The beauty industry exploits the vulnerabilities extant in our society and the Miss America pageant does little to address these insecurities. But at least it has come to be more representative of the color scheme of America. Soon after her historic win, Davuluri brushed off racist remarks like loose powder from her compact with a combination of intelligence, confidence, grace and class. Davuluri has shown that beauty is much more than mere skin color. Jaya Padmanabhan
/ indiacurrents @ indiacurrents
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INDIA CURRENTS Celebrating 27 Years of Excellence October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 1
2 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
INDIA CURRENTS october 2013 • vol 27 • no 7
PERSPECTIVES 1 | EDITORIAL I Am Beautiful, No Matter What They Say By Jaya Padmanabhan
Washington, D.C. Edition www.indiacurrents.com Find us on
38 | MUSIC Bollywood Countdown By Vidya Sridhar
7 | A THOUSAND WORDS Moving Out ... Again By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
19 | POLITICAL VIEWPOINT Shuffling Cards By Jagjit Singh 24 | YOUTH A Yen for the Arts By Viveka Kymal 28 | LIVES The Journey Home By R. Benedito Ferrao 30 | ON INGLISH Who Took the Tamarind Out? By Kalpana Mohan
8 | BUSINESS The Hiring Paradox By Vivek Wadhwa 36 | BOOKS A Review of Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes By Tara Menon
6 | FORUM Non-Citizens to Serve on Juries? By Rameysh Ramdas, Mani Subramani
14 | OPINION September Blues By Dilnavaz Bamboat
LIFESTYLE
52 | REFLECTIONS Good Health By Mimm Patterson
10 | Shining Light Indu Sundaresan traces the history of the Kohinoor diamond, the subject of Mountain of Light, her latest offering. Includes a book review. By Indu Sundaresan, Jeanne Fredriksen
17 | Viewpoint Orientophobia By Teed Rockwell
32 | Films
54 | HEALTHY LIFE Gandhi’s Legacy By Apala G. Eagan 56 | TRAVEL Flavors of Konkan By Kavita Kanan Chandra 59 | RELATIONSHIP DIVA A Clash of Countries By Jasbina Ahluwalia 60 | RECIPES Food in Mythology By Malar Gandhi 61 | DEAR DOCTOR What’s Causing Our Estrangement? By Alzak Amlani
40 | ANALYSIS An American Export Mightier than McDonald’s By Sandip Roy
Satyagraha, Shuddh Desi Romance and Once Upon a Time in Mumbai Dobaara
DEPARTMENTS
42 | PROFILE Patti Tripathi: Suited to Succeed By Deepak Chitnis
By Aniruddh Chawda, Madhumita Gupta
4 | Voices 45 | Popular Articles
44 | FICTION Ripples By Architha Subramaniam 46 | COMMENTARY An Ideal Match By V.V. Sundaram
26 | Ask a Lawyer 27 | Visa Dates
64 | The Last Word Of Gods and Faith
20 | About Town 62 | Viewfinder
By Sarita Sarvate
WHAT’S CURRENT 48 | Cultural Calendar
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 3
IC
voices
Taboo to be Single?
The editorial by Jaya Padmanabhan (Her Red Lipstick, India Currents, September 2013) though of a serious nature, is hilarious and (sarcastically) amusing. I believe that Huma is stuck in a situation that some women find themselves in. They are too scared to be alone. They fear that they might be worse off if they leave their man. This ideas is strenghthend by the stories, the news and the culture of making it a taboo to be single. Keep up the good work, I enjoy the magazine. AkramDin Hencie, Canada The editorial (Her Red Lipstick, India Currents, September 2013) has brought back some of my “red” experiences. The slogan “give me red” became a powerful advertising tool for Eveready Battery. “Face becoming red” indicated embarassment and “eyes becoming red” represented both anger and an alcoholic hangover. “Going to red” became an indication of a negative balance in one’s bank account. A red pen was banned in schools and only allowed by examiners or teachers for correction or remarks (“get some marks not remarks”). While going for job interviews, encountering a candidate wearing red lipstick and carrying a vanity bag in the lift made other candidates nervous! I know cases where matrimonial alliances were turned down and stamped with the “ultramodern” brand when lipstick was used (sometimes by the would-be mother in law). K.N. Ganesh, Fremont, CA
What Culture?
Regarding the article by Kamala Thiagarajan (Have Daughter, Will Move, India Currents, September 2013), it is a good reflection of what most of us, particularly the parents of daughters go through when we migrate to a new society. All of a sudden we start missing the same culture that we were so anxious to leave. The change and the new environment is scary. Often we find ourselves all alone, unable to share our inner feelings with anybody. It is hard to adjust, but most of us ultimately do. What I find difficult to understand is why are we not honest with ourselves when we talk of “our culture” and our values. In the article, the writer states “The Indian culture is of course a wonderful, age-old code of living.” What is the “Indian culture?” Is it the total sum of our lifestyle, a combination of
4 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
religion and rituals and ceremonies? What about putting our daughters at the mercy of dowry and the life long blackmail for it? What about the corruption, lawlessness and the class system? It is a good article to start the thought process and to see reality as it exists and not as we nostalgically remember. AkramDin Hencie, Canada
A False Dichotomy
In response to the fiction story by Anu Chitrapu (The Legacy, India Currents, August 2013), by all means, kill the tiger. Kill all the tigers. Kill anything that might hurt a child who has no business wandering in the jungle in the first place. I’ll wager, however, that many more children are killed in every single major city in India by automobiles each year than are killed in the whole subcontinent by tigers. But do I hear demands to dismantle automobiles? And will killing tigers solve the problem of poverty? Of rising population? If we kill the tigers and destroy the wilderness they won’t be coming back, and any chance of saving nature in India will be gone, and poverty will still be here. This is a false dichotomy: poor versus wilderness, as if the wilderness caused poverty and destroying it would solve it. The real problem is the maldistribution of wealth and its increasing concentration, globally, in fewer and fewer hands. Bruce Duncan, Sacramento, CA
Rebel War Crimes
The forum debate title (Should America Intervene in Syria, India Currents, August 2013) should read “Should America Stop Intervening in Syria?” Pulitzer Price-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his New Yorker article “The Redirection” revealed as far back as 2007 that the United States was planning on overthrowing the government in Syria and using terrorists to do it. This is and has always been an imperialist adventure by the United States, France, and Great Britain along with their client states: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel and Tur-
SPEAK YOUR MIND! Have a thought or opinion to share? Send us an original letter of up to 300 words, and include your name, address, and phone number. Letters are edited for clarity and brevity. Write India Currents Letters, 1885 Lundy Ave. Suite 220, San Jose 95131 or email letters@indiacurrents.com.
key. Syria and it’s people have seen their sovereign nation destroyed by Al Qaeda terrorists masquerading as opposition rebels that have been openly funded and armed by the United States and its allies. The same agenda was rolled out in Serbia, Iraq, Libya and now Syria, with Iran in the cross hairs. Where is the outrage and the call for crimes against humanity as these “rebels” wage their campaigns of violence against the civilian population of Syria? Now the use of chemical weapons has been blamed on the Syrian government by the United States to justify military assault. To Ramesh Ramdyas, while you genuflect on the criminal United States government from the comfort of your home, ponder the Iraqi babies born with horrible birth defects caused by depleted uranium, the massacred black Libyans in Tawerga by NATO-backed “rebels” and now the Syrian parents who look into their childrens eyes with fear in their hearts. Nilesh Solanki, Sacramento, CA
A Better Parenting Outcome
This is regarding the Forum article (Do Teens Have it Better Today?, India Currents, September 2013)? The answe is: perhaps. But teens of today didn’t observe the teens of the previous generation first-hand. So they can neither make a fair comparison nor appreciate one made by others. However, parents of today did observe the parents of the previous generation first-hand. Therefore, a more interesting question may be whether parents have it better today. More specifically, do Indian American parents have an easier time raising children today, and do they have a better “parenting outcome?” In terms of raising children, I think most Indian American parents probably have it a bit easier financially than their parents did, but a bit harder time-wise. Clearly, most Indian American parents today give much greater importance to their children’s careers than their parents did. This is evident from their single-minded focus on academics and college admissions. Many Indian American children are growing up in a family environment where they receive everything they need from their family, but don’t get any opportunity to give back. Will these children develop this important skill or habit of giving back to the family and societ later on in life? And if some of them don’t acquire this habit naturally, will there be an Indian American cultural ecosystem that will help and encourage them? Answers to questions like these may ultimately determine whether parents really have it better today. Vijay Gupta, Cupertino, CA
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 5
forum
T
Non-Citizens to Serve on Juries?
No, non-citizens are not “peers”
Yes, legal residents are also capable
By Rameysh Ramdas
By Mani Subramani
T
he California Legislature recently passed AB 1401, a bill that would allow non-citizen-residents of the state to serve on juries. The Bill now awaits the signature of Governor Jerry Brown. Proponents of this bill say that the bill would address the shortage of jurors in many counties by tapping into the estimated three million non-citizens in the state. Further, they argue, this would ensure a jury of peers for the defendant that represents the diverse communities in our state. I respectfully disagree with those in our legislature who are championing this bill. While their intentions may be honorable the bill is flawed due to many reasons. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, of the UDC David A. Clarke School of Law, in a very well articulated opinion piece in The Atlantic outlined three reasons why only citizens should qualify to be on jury duty: That citizenship symbolizes self-governance; that citizenship has come to represent our political identity; that citizenship involves a legal and social relationship with the government that includes a commitment for jury service. Beyond those esoteric reasons, there are practical considerations as well. A United States defendant is entitled to receive a fair trial and judgment from peers who are well assimilated into our American culture, psyche, society and who share the American spirit of the individual (and not the government). A United States Such assimilation and integration takes years, if defendant is entitled to not decades, to mature receive a fair trial and in a person who was not in the United States judgment from peers born and immigrated here who are well assimilat- much after his formative years. ed into our American As Ralph E. Shaffer of Cal Poly Pomona, culture, psyche, society pointed out in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Dai... ly—“When native-born American citizens are called for their first service on a jury, they have lived in this country for nearly two decades at least and have studied American government in school for years. But AB 1401 implies none of that is necessary to reach a just decision in trials” Further many immigrants emigrate from countries where a defendant is presumed guilty until proven otherwise—diametrically opposed to the bedrock of our legal system that presumes innocence until proven guilty. While I applaud California to always be in the forefront welcoming, nurturing and allowing immigrants from all over the world to thrive in Silicon Valley and Hollywood, we must also be mindful of and make sure that the integrity of our legal institutions are maintained by ensuring that only citizens with sworn allegiance and long standing ties to our nation are allowed to have the high civic privilege of being a juror. n
he number of legal permanent residents in the United States in 2012 was about 4.2% of the population and this number is growing at more than triple the rate of average population growth, which is about 0.7% annually. It may not make sense for Montana with less than 1% of non-citizens among its population to create laws to include non-citizens. However, more than 3.4 million legal permanent residents make up California, about 10% of the California population. So it makes perfect sense for California to pioneer efforts to enable and include green card holders in the jurdicial system. AB 1401, which is waiting for Governor Brown’s signature, would allow permanent residents the privilege of serving on juries. Some cities in California have a large number of legal permanent residents. Therefore, it would be a disservice to defendants in such areas to have a huge chunk of the population un (der)-represented in the jury pool. Especially if the defendant happens to be a non-citizen. One of the eligibility requirements for jury duty is residency within the court’s jurisdiction. As a result, juries are made up of locals and their decisions tend to be local in nature and often not attuned to national sentiment. The recent verdict in the Zimmerman case shocked the nation proving that being selected to serve on a jury, whether citizen or non, does not make the indiLegal residents ... are vidual sufficiently qualified to make the right perfectly capable of decision. Besides, being eligible for jury duty does grasping the bedrock not mean selection to the principles of the crimijury. Defense or prosecution lawyers still have the nal justice system ... right to refuse anyone from serving. A Center for Jury Studies survey indicated that 20 percent of courts across the country reported a failure to respond to jury summons and a failure to appear, which could indicate juror shortage. This bill would fill the juror gap. Legal residents have made significant efforts to immigrate to and assimilate in the United States and are perfectly capable of grasping the nuances of the criminal justice system including the innocent unless proven otherwise doctrine. Nationally syndicated columnist, Ruben Navarette, writes that the left in California has this labeled a “pro-immigration issue.” Criticisms like this, in fact, are confusing. This issue has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with demographic data. The proportion of green card holders in California is the same as the proportion of African Americans in the United States. And it is a rapidly growing demographic. These are legal permanent residents who, more than likely, will apply for citizenship eventually. So it only makes sense to try and integrate them completely. California is just the right place to enact this bill. It’s all just a numbers game! n
Rameysh Ramdas, an S.F. Bay Area professional, writes as a hobby.
Mani Subramani works in the semi-conductor industry in Silicon Valley.
6 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
a thousand words
Moving Out … Again By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
D
ays before I move across the country, I remember a childhood dream. My family lives in a four-story home, open to the world like a dollhouse, with matchstick-sized stick figures on every floor: on the first, my parents, my brother, and me; above us, my maternal grandparents, Ammamma and Papa; above them, my paternal Patti and Thatha; and at the very top of the house, my favorite aunt and my great-grandmother. We are together separately, with private entrances and shared kitchen, individual quarters and communal responsibilities. I nursed this fantasy of intergenerational living throughout my childhood. We spent summers in India and Thanksgiving with friends, something that set me apart from peers who spent school breaks at stay-away camp and holidays at Grandma’s. The joint-family house was the answer to all those months of absence and unending flights. “But now it will never happen,” Ammamma says ruefully. Now, both my grandfathers have passed away. Now, the members of my dream house live on three separate continents. How far is too far to be away from your family? How close is close enough? We, children of immigrants, have seen first hand the challenge of living time zones removed from one’s parents. My parents have struggled for years with the fact of having aging mothers in India, who have no desire to live with us in the States (“too mechanical,” “too antiseptic,” “too boring,” “too distant”…no green card, anyway), but long for a kind of sustained togetherness that our annual month-long visit strains and fails to approximate. They used to find solace in aerograms. Now my Patti looks daily at photos of my newborn daughter, scrolling through baby’s tumblr from start to finish in a penitent bedtime ritual that probably only reinforces our distance. Generations past left India for those nebulous things called economic and educational opportunity, which were assumed to reside in the formerly ascendant United States. Today, of course, the imperatives of migration are less certain. In 2009, Vivek Wadhwa showed that 86% of Indian students matriculating at United States universities and earning post-graduate degrees believed that “the best days for [India’s] economy” lay ahead, while the predominant attitude regarding the United States was doom and gloom. Just four years later, the rupee is in free fall and “India rising” seems less like prophecy than a cruel joke. Where does opportunity live? Where should you chase it? In a world of uncertainty, which country do you bank on, and in? Is it better to stay close to home? Better to take a chance on a new frontier? It’s hard to say where the future resides, in a post-American world or a renewed American dream, in India Shining or another brain drain. But immigrants like my parents have learned an important lesson from their own irrevocable flying of the coop: keep parents close, children closer still. In the Bay Area, this actually seems possible; unlike in many parts of the country, there are jobs, universities, resources to lure children back from out-of-state universities and cross-country love affairs. Who wouldn’t want to live in sunny California, land of the year-round farmer’s market, tech mecca, where slow foodies and investment bankers live side by side, bicycle to work, lunch at vegan taco trucks, and send their children to bilingual pre-schools?
The advantage of being far is that when you come together it is always a special occasion. Your routine is on hold; grocery shopping is deferred. When my Midwestern husband and I tell people that we are moving from Berkeley to Princeton and then on to Chicago, with no definite plans to return, even professors who should be accustomed to the vagaries of the academic job market look at us agog. “Why would you leave?” they ask. “And when are you coming back?” This chauvinism, this classically Californian provincialism, would be laughable (as if there were nowhere else worth living, no seasons to celebrate, no ethic beyond that of the entrepreneurial) if it weren’t for the fact that my parents are here. If we stay away, will we be repeating the past? If we come back home, will we regret it? The advantage of being far is that when you come together it is always a special occasion. Your routine is on hold; grocery shopping is deferred. The advantage of being near is you are part of each other’s daily lives. This is also the disadvantage; you risk bad habits exposed. This summer, my husband, daughter, and I moved in with my parents for the four months before our big cross-country move. We were lucky to be able to do it, to have parents willing and able to feed and house us, help with baby laundry and baby baths, to provide us a structure of support and environment of love in which to negotiate baby’s first weeks and our own, uncertain, exulting transition into parenthood. Friends—both theirs and ours—were surprised and even impressed with how seamless our cohabitance was. Of course, my husband and I had the really sweet deal, but my parents loved having their granddaughter home and didn’t feel (I hope they didn’t feel) too terribly exploited. For the first six weeks of summer, my Ammamma was with us, and so for a short time my old dream was reality: four generations under one roof. My brother was living at home as well, working nearby so he could be close to his baby niece. Often, we were doing our own things and keeping to our own schedules. Someone was at work; someone was asleep. My grandmother went for walks, stopping to pick up fruit fallen from a neighbor’s tree for her lemon pickle. I was preoccupied with baby, who was learning day by day more about being alive and at home in the world. But we were together, in one house, not because we had to be, but because we chose to be. We chose to manifest our belonging to each other in one amazing summer that brought my childhood dream to life. This is what I’ll remember when I contemplate my next move. My brother bought the pizza. My grandmother sang bhajans to my daughter. n Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 7
business
The Hiring Paradox Is there a glut or shortage of technical talent? By Vivek Wadhwa
W
henever I write about immigration, I hear heart-wrenching stories of computer workers who are unemployed and facing severe hardship. I get bombarded in the comments sections, on Twitter, and via email. Some people get so angry and xenophobic that they threaten me with violence. Their argument is that if there were indeed a shortage of talent, there would be no unemployment in the technology industry; that technology companies are making false claims of shortages just so that they can hire cheaper foreign workers. At the same time, the founders of technology startups in Silicon Valley say that their single biggest obstacle to success—after they have obtained funding—is a shortage of talent. They simply can’t find people with the skills that they need. Big companies such as Google and Facebook buy startups at ridiculously high prices—not for their products, but for their people. The tech industry has a name for this: the “acqui-hire.” There are frequent bidding wars for top talent, with big companies offering big money and startups offering big stock. So is there a glut of technical talent in the United States, or a dire shortage? The answer is: both. There are indeed tens of thousands of unemployed engineers—and there are shortages. The mismatch is between skill, location and need. One of the biggest problems that software developers face is that technology changes rapidly. It is very hard to stay current. Over the past 20 years, we have witnessed a technology shift from mainframe computers to mini-computers (or servers) to personal computers and now to tablets. The languages and architectures for programming these devices keep changing—as does the way the technology is used. The younger generation is very comfortable with apps and social media and has an intrinsically different way of doing things with its tablets and smart phones. So recent graduates with the
8 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
latest skills are always in high demand. Older workers with obsolete skills are not. Some engineers are able to adapt to new technologies and are well worth the higher salaries that they demand. But they are often in the wrong parts of the country. Many are burdened by home ownership and the difficulty of relocating a family. To make matters worse, tech centers with the greatest demand—Silicon Valley and New York City—have the most expensive real estate and the highest costs of living. So these tech workers can’t move there. The Brookings Institution documented this mismatch by analyzing the demand for foreign workers in metropolitan areas. It found that supply and demand for skilled labor varies by region. Demand for foreigners is highest in tech centers such as New York, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Chicago and Boston. And, not coincidentally, these are the places with the lowest unemployment rates for engineers. Ultimately, we shouldn’t be debating whether there is a shortage or a glut. Hiring foreigners is more expensive and more difficult than hiring locals, because of the visa fees and long lead times for visa processing. And companies face a backlash from antiimmigrant groups for hiring foreigners. So they do it only because they have to. There is a problem caused by the shortage of permanent-resident visas for people from high-population countries, such as India and China—which causes wait times to stretch into decades. While these workers wait for their visas, they are essentially stranded in the companies that sponsored them. They often receive lower salary increases than workers who can readily switch jobs. This is what creates the salary distortion that anti-immigrant groups complain about. It can easily be fixed by increasing the numbers of permanentresident visas—so that the backlog is cleared and foreign workers aren’t tethered to the employer for too long—and letting the free
Hiring foreigners is more expensive and more difficult than hiring locals, because of the visa fees and long lead times for visa processing ... So they [companies] do it only because they have to. markets do their magic. It is best to let U.S. companies hire the best talent wherever they can find it and pay what they think their employees are worth. If workers are underpaid but are free to change jobs, they will leave and join companies that pay market wages. Supply and demand will find a balance if we remove the regulations that are creating the problems. n Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. You can follow him on Twitter at @ vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com. First published in The Wall Street Journal.
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Shining Light Chasing the Kohinoor diamond through the ages By Indu Sundaresan
India’s erstwhile jewel, the Kohinoor diamond, is the main protagonist of Indu Sundaresan’s new novel, The Mountain of Light. In this essay, Indu follows the jewel’s shining trail as it is bartered, bequeathed, secreted and stolen, finally to end up adorning England’s crown.
I
n January 1850, Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General of India, boards a barge down the Indus River to Karachi. Having just left Lahore, Dalhousie has stealthily taken one very precious item with him from the treasury of the heir to the Punjab Empire, eleven-year-old Maharajah Dalip Singh. To keep this safe, Lady Dalhousie stitches a leather bag with a loop which goes around Dalhousie’s belt. He keeps it on him day and night, and when he sleeps, two massive dogs are chained to his camp bed. At Karachi, Dalhousie embarks upon the SS Firoze to Bombay. There, he is feted by the Governor, Lord Falkland, sits in meetings, and inspects local schools. The bag stays on his hip—and other than his wife and his nephew, Captain Ramsay, no one knows it is there. The last thing Dalhousie does in Bombay is to deposit the bag into the Treasury at Fort George. Two months later, the HMS Medea, a Royal navy steam sloop, leaves Bombay carrying Colonel Mackeson and Captain Ramsay—and that little package. The captain of the Medea has orders to escort the two men to England, and he’s told nothing else. Soon after the Medea puts to port, the Directors of the East India Company meet with their sovereign, Queen Victoria. They hand the package to her. Within is a gold armlet, with one massive 186 carat diamond in the center, flanked by two smaller diamonds. Then, and only then, is the news blazoned forth—the Kohinoor diamond has reached England in the greatest of secrecy. In Punjab, its erstwhile owner, Maharajah Dalip Singh, is conducted out of Lahore in the charge of two British guardians. He will never return to his lands or his people again—the Punjab Empire is finally dissolved 10 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
and annexed to British India. The Kohinoor first appears in Indian legend two thousand years ago, when Lord Krishna gives a mammoth diamond to a devotee. In the 14th century, the stone emerges again, briefly, in the possession of the Turko-Afghan ruler of northern India, Alauddin Khilji. The diamond disappears from all narratives, written and verbal, until Babur storms India in 1526 to set up the Mughal Empire. In his Baburnama, the emperor notes that the Raja of Gwalior gifted his son Humayun with a colossal stone as the
spoils of conquest—so valuable, that it was “the whole world’s expenditure for half a day … Humayun presented it to me but I gave it right back to him.” After Babur’s death, Humayun finds it challenging to hold this newborn empire together, and is driven out of India. He leads a nomadic life for fifteen years until the Shah of Iran helps him regain Qandahar as a stepping stone back into India. The price the Shah demands for his assistance? The Kohinoor diamond. The diamond resurfaces in the court of Humayun’s great-grandson, Emperor Shah Jahan who displays it in his famed Peacock Throne. It passes on to Shah Jahan’s son, Aurangzeb—and a hundred years later, when the Mughal empire has crumbled into dust, Nadir Shah of Persia sacks Delhi and carts back with him the treasures of the Mughals, including the Peacock Throne and the Kohinoor nestled within it. It is Nadir Shah who gives the diamond its contemporary name. When he first sees the rock, glowing with a white fire within its heart, he exclaims that it is a veritable Koh-i-noor, a “mountain of light.” The diamond passes from Nadir Shah to the Afghan Durrani kings. This is where The Mountain of Light begins—with Shah Shuja Durrani, deposed of his kingdom of Afghanistan, coming to the Punjab Empire and Maharajah Ranjit Singh for his aid in regaining his lands. As with most people, I’ve been fascinated by the history of the Kohinoor, arguably one of the world’s most magnificent diamonds. I thought long and hard on how to frame the novel, and how to tell the story of the stone’s tumultuous and bloody past in the people who coveted it, who owned it, who lost it—and consequently lost their lives and their realms.
Given that the Kohinoor is documented over many centuries, I wrapped the timeframe of The Mountain of Light tightly over the last fifty years of its existence in India. Shah Shuja comes to the court of Maharajah Ranjit Singh for his help in 1810—in return, he promises the Kohinoor to Ranjit Singh. This great diamond of India, Persia and Afghanistan is the value of an empire, a kingdom, an entire nation. Maharajah Ranjit had established the most powerful, extensive independent empire in the early 1800s, even as the English East India Company was fast expanding its territories in India. When Shuja approaches Ranjit, Peshawar and Kashmir belong to Afghanistan. Ranjit, unbothered by niceties, conquers both, does not give them to Shah Shuja, and also acquires the Kohinoor diamond from the Afghan ruler. Some twenty years later, the British Governor-General of India, Lord Auckland, comes to Ranjit Singh’s court with his extremely articulate sisters, Emily and Fanny Eden. Auckland comes with an entreaty—for
Ranjit’s help in invading Afghanistan, and putting a puppet ruler on the throne. Emily and Fanny Eden document this visit in detail in their published collections of letters and mention that the Maharajah, old and ailing, was still a power to reckon with, and that he had sent the Kohinoor diamond to their tent for them to examine. Ranjit Singh dies in 1839, and in quick succession, three of his heirs are shot down, leaving, in 1843, the six-year-old Dalip Singh as heir on a quaking throne, under a regency consisting of his mother and her alleged lover. This tenuous state of affairs leads to the first Anglo-Sikh war—the British stay out of Ranjit Singh’s empire while he is alive; upon his death, they find an excuse to invade Punjab. In The Mountain of Light, Henry Lawrence comes to Lahore after this war as Resident and guardian to Maharajah Dalip Singh. It’s supposed to be a temporary arrangement—the British will retreat once the Maharajah reaches his majority, leaving Dalip in control of the empire his father has
created. This also is Henry Lawrence’s intention, but he’s thwarted by a new GovernorGeneral—Lord Dalhousie—who seizes Punjab and annexes it to British lands in India. Dalhousie grabs the Kohinoor and sends it to England on a Royal Navy ship—however, in The Mountain of Light, the diamond travels aboard a commercial steamer, the SS Indus, filled with a slew of passengers panting for a sight of the Kohinoor, wanting to steal it. Do they? In 1854, the sixteen-year-old Maharajah Dalip Singh reflects upon that first voyage, how he is treated kindly by Queen Victoria, how much he dislikes Lord Dalhousie, and how he’s finally come to realize that nothing makes up for the loss of his Kohinoor, his crown, or his Punjab Empire. The Kohinoor, today, whittled down to 105 carats from its original weight, is set in the Queen Mother’s crown and can be seen in the Tower of London. n Indu Sundaresan is the author of the bestselling Taj trilogy, Her sixth work of fiction is The Mountain of Light.
Different Colors, Same Jewel By Jeanne E. Fredriksen THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT by Indu Sundaresan. Washington Square Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York. $16.00. 352 pages. simonandschuster.com, indusundaresan. com. Published October 8, 2013. Available as a trade paperback, an audio book, and for digital readers.
T
he Kohinoor, once a stunning 186-carat diamond and still impressive at a truncated 105 carats, is an inorganic entity, a hard rock over which empires, countries, and people fought, shed blood, and died. It traveled the known world for centuries, a symbol of conquests and glory, a prize of immeasurable worth. In The Mountain of Light, author Indu Sundaresan focuses on the most intense portion of the Kohinoor’s story and once again has written an historical novel that dazzles and captivates the reader from the first words. The Mountain of Light chronicles with clarity how the Kohinoor traveled from Maharajah to Maharajah and eventually into the hands of Lord Dalhousie, who deviously sealed Britain’s hold on the sub-
continent. The novel begins in 1817, when Afghanistan’s Shah Shuja Durrani, living under the Maharajah’s roof in exile, is duped by Singh and loses the diamond to him. From that point on, Sundaresan provides a thought-provoking hopscotch history of the diamond’s travels through a turbulent time of change and subterfuge. India’s collective history is filled with conquests and conquerors, heroes and victims, emperors and changing civilizations, yet only the Kohinoor remains a constant throughout much of it. In the hands of a less-skilled, less-visionary storyteller, the Kohinoor’s story might be coated with a dull sheen. However, with Sundaresan’s passion for history and talent for turning it into an enjoyable lesson, The Mountain of Light sparkles sharply and brightly like the Kohinoor itself. “When I was in high school in India, a junior, in the 8th grade, I learned about the Kohinoor diamond in history class,” Sundaresan told me in an e-interview. “Even after so many years, the Kohinoor touches a chord October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 11
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it tell the story so that the reader would see the larger picture? Where do I tell more, where less? And will it all fit together into a seamless whole when I’m done? This isn’t straightforward storytelling, and I worked very hard to make it all come together, like a puzzle, if you will.” That puzzle resulted in a superbly-written book with all the political backstabbing, selfserving desire, and patient masterminding one would expect of a history involving the finest gem on earth. “In the end,” she added, “if the reader walks away with a sense of the value of the diamond, not monetary, but emotional, and connects with the characters as I have—then, I’ve done my job.” Set in the crown worn by the Queen of England, what is left of the Kohinoor resides in the Tower of London. On the Tower’s official web site, there is a link to “Prisoners at the Tower.” Text on the page reads “For nearly 900 years, traitors, kings, queens, saints and sinners have been held here against their will.” n Jeanne E. Fredriksen lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where she freelances in advertising and public relations. Between assignments, she writes fiction, enjoys wine, and heads to the beach as often as she can. Title reference: “You don’t want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel.”—Richard Bach
A Wikipedia Commons Image
within all of us, maybe because it was a mammoth diamond, but I think mostly because of the way Punjab was annexed summarily by Lord Dalhousie, and the diamond was secreted out of India. Some histories you never forget.” That’s certainly true, but I wanted to know what compelled her to tackle this particular history. “For me, personally, I’ve wanted to write about the diamond for a while now. It is just a rock, an inanimate object, but its history is what is fascinating—the people who owned it, who coveted it, lost their kingdoms and their lands for it—at one time, the Kohinoor represented India, he who owned it was the supreme ruler of the land. There’s so much emotion vested in that stone, even today, that I had to wrap this new novel around it, and tell its stories in the people who possessed it.” After four years of research, evaluation, planning, and writing, The Mountain of Light is a crown jewel in Sundaresan’s growing bibliography of finely-crafted Indian historical novels. Because of the time period covered in Light, primary sources were available and seemingly plentiful. These bolstered the color and the faceted day-to-day proceedings between the countless people whose lives are woven into the diamond’s chronology. “Most of my research came from 19th century books and collections of letters written by some of the main players in The Mountain of Light,” Sundaresan explained.
“Lord Dalhousie, GovernorGeneral of India, who annexed Punjab, allowed his letters to be published fifty years after his death—he’s very candid in them. Lady Login, Maharajah Dalip Singh’s guardian, published at least three diaries of her time with him [Dalip Singh], and about her husband’s relationship with him. The Eden sisters left letters, and their nephew wrote about the Punjab court.” Her desire for fact, meaning, and detail is evident in each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence as she leads us on the path from a king’s exile, to a maharajah’s empire, into the British camps where India’s future was plotted, and ultimately to the court of Queen Victoria. The Kohinoor rarely rested easily in anyone’s hands, no matter whether they held it, sequestered it, wore it, coveted it, or stole it. Sundaresan, author of the Taj Trilogy, a novel set during the Quit India movement, and a collection of short stories, took a bold step forward as a writer when she began her work on Light. The history itself was cut with challenges she hadn’t encountered before. One such challenge was the evaluation and subsequent handling of the plethora of people around the Kohinoor decade after decade. Sections of the book jump years in advance and introduce new “players” in the saga of the diamond, but the past is never forgotten. “This book was tough to write,” Sundaresan admits, “because it is littered with characters all of whom step onstage briefly or for a longer while, and each of whom is influenced by the diamond, or who influences the fate of the diamond. In a larger context, they influence India’s eventual fate—within eight years of the diamond leaving India, the country is colonized and becomes part of the British Empire.” Skillfully unfolding this history, Sundaresan makes every character—major or minor—an essential contributor to the diamond’s long and illustrious journey. “I know each character intimately, of course, but I didn’t have the space to sketch out their personalities in length, yet they are each important in the telling of the story. So, for me as a writer, this was an exercise of my craft. Could I make the reader vested in these histories, even the brief ones? Could
Her Majesty Queen Alexandra wearing the Kohinoor in her coronation crown. 9th August, 1902
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 13
opinion
September Blues
O
n a crisp September morning, a dozen years ago, I emerged into the sunshine feeling happy and ravenous. Having finished an intense summer at Syracuse University’s famed Newhouse School of Communications, I was easing into the Fall semester, thoroughly enjoying the thrill of learning. Breakfast was on my mind as I walked over to the Schine student center and waited in line for an omelet. Maybe I’ll add hash browns and toast, I was thinking, when an undergraduate student interrupted my thoughts. “What are they showing on those screens,” she asked, and gestured toward two pull-down panels showing planes and buildings and smoke. “Probably a movie,” I shrugged and took my tray over to a table to watch. That omelet, those potatoes, and the carefully buttered toast grew cold and unwanted as I watched with dilated pupils and mouth agape a moment that changed the course of history. Of course, when events occur that change lives, nations and entire lexicons, you hardly hear the warning bells right away. The enormity of shift that will follow isn’t always estimated accurately. Especially when you are a recently-turned 23-year-old who landed in the country with two bulging suitcases and a crock of naiveté. What I remember of the day is the notso-flattering peach top I had worn with my jeans, a leaf pattern around the neckline. What I remember is running through the Bird library, to tell a family friend who had already heard. I remember being inundated with calls from folks in India, because nobody knew the difference between New York the city and the state—or maybe they didn’t care. I remember being in the World Trade Center, a mere three weeks earlier. I remember a picture taken in its foreground, young 20-somethings leaning into each other, laughing into the camera, unaware that this would be the last time we would see the twin towers standing. You don’t need me to tell you that America changed that day, twelve years ago. Human anguish, horror and anger hit all life within a 1000-mile radius like a ton of bricks. Rhetoric and war and a decade long manhunt were only the most high-profile ca-
14 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
sualties of this emotional earthquake that equally crumbled bricks and the notions of security, terror and insularity. America darkened, its economy crashed, and against the backdrop of the nation’s struggles, my own newly-minted life in the country rode the crests and troughs of immigrant life. Industries creaked to a crawl, jobs grew scarce, and the then-President’s reaction to this atrocity bubbled over and scorched lands and people. Relatively cocooned in my student existence, grad school provided a buffer from the ugly realities of the next year. But there comes a time when the door is thrown open and you finally must walk. The graduating class of 2002 walked out into a drastically changed reality—one of a tanked economy, financial uncertainty, and no warm welcome from a suddenly hostile America. Engineering students, fattened on stories of bulky sign-on bonuses and Silicon Valley embraces, felt like dethroned monarchs. Ph.D. candidates desperately delayed graduation for the next few years. Young people from India who never had to lift a finger in their lives were now grunting it out in food courts, temp jobs, and limited projects, the golden H1-B nowhere in sight. Many returned to their home countries. The ones with loans looked on in despair as ends simply refused to meet. America’s manpower loss, a small casualty in the face of the larger horror, was India and China’s gain. Two years later, another war was announced. And I’ve always wondered how many rallied against it only for the havoc it would further wreak on their lives. Even as I traveled and worked and plodded along my own 20s journey of self-discovery, relationships and independent living, the rumble of 9/11 was never too far away. Millions before us were fed narratives of the American Dream, but we, those who arrived in the year of 9/11, saw the country at her naked worst—her breath craggy, her vision blurred,
A Creative Commons Image
By Dilnavaz Bamboat
refracting her trauma on other innocents of the world. I sometimes wonder how it must have felt, being part of the wave before that date seared in collective memory. To have known the tech boom, the easy green cards, the ubergenerous land of plenty. A country preceding brown skin hostility. A time before I had to say my name, spell it out, and quickly share I wasn’t Muslim even to my fellow Indians, because my horns, you see, were simply waiting to burst from my skull if I happened to be one. A dozen years later, as I write this from my serene couch in the heart of Silicon Valley, I marvel at how we survived—both America and I, on our respective but not discrete journeys. That we held on through the harsh times with resilience I didn’t know existed. That it is this country, and not the land of my birth, that has taken me on the ride of a lifetime—one I know is far from over yet. Maybe we choose some of our difficulties. Or perhaps they choose us. We come out on the other side with battle wounds and weary spirits, but I live with the faith that I survived—and the hope that America, strange bedfellow in a stranger journey, will as well. n Dilnavaz Bamboat manages communications and social media for a Silicon Valley non-profit, is a scriptwriter for iPad applications for children, a writer and editor at IDEX (idex.org), a section editor at Ultra Violet (ultraviolet.in), a feminist blogger at Women’s Web (womensweb. in) and a founder member of India Helps (indiahelps.blogspot.com). She shares a home in the San Francisco Bay Area with her spouse and misses the Bombay monsoon madly.
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 15
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viewpoint
Orientophobia How fear of the East lives on in literature and arts By Teed Rockwell
F
ear evolved long before rational intelligence. Consequently, a creature who fears but cannot think very well will make many errors, and it is better for those errors to be false positives than false negatives. If a rabbit fears a rope because it thinks it is a snake, it will waste some calories running away. But if it mistakenly thinks a snake is only a harmless rope, it gets eaten. Unfortunately, when our scattershot fear mechanism works in harness with our formidable rational capabilities, we waste far more than a few calories. Expensive weapons get built, innocent people become needlessly harassed or even killed, and cherished human rights get trampled, all to soothe an inflamed fear that was only partially caused by a real threat. How can we protect ourselves from this kind of overreaction? One way is to acknowledge that our experience of The Other is heavily stained by our subconscious view of history, and the stories we have told ourselves about it. Ever since Xerxes and Darius tried to invade Greece around the 4th century B.C., Western Europe has been haunted by the fear that a powerful empire from the East would invade and plunge the world into a second darkness. The movie 300 artfully (and somewhat creepily) connected this story to modern phobias by portraying 4th century B.C. Persians as wearing turbans, and the Persian emperor as a bejeweled half-naked quasi-African tribal chief. It also ignored the fact that life under the Persian Empire was arguably closer to modern democracy than the fascistic monarchy of the Spartans. The constant rhetoric about “freedom” from a king who deliberately flouted the rulings of the city council reminded me a lot of George W. Bush. Orientophobia lives on in literature and foreign policy. Both J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis’ the Chronicles of Narnia rely heavily on Orientophobic images derived from medieval literature. The Orcs and Uruk-Hais who fight for Lord Sauron, the Dark Lord and primary
A scene from the film 300
antagonist in Lord of the Rings, have black curly hair, dark skin, gold earrings, and ride on “Oliphaunts.” They are patterned after European superstitions about the Mongols. The great Calormene empire that lies south of Narnia is inhabited by people who have turbans, scimitars, dark skin, and a poetic speaking style patterned after the Arabian Nights. The Narnian “good guys” have fair skin, blond hair, and dress like medieval European knights and ladies. In The Last Battle, Calormene conquers Narnia, which eventually ushers in Judgment Day. Both Lewis and Tolkein were careful to isolate these racist images from their historical context. Tolkien, sensitive to the dangers of racism against actual humans, mentions that the Oliphaunt riders must have been duped or misled by Sauron. C.S. Lewis also created significant differences between his Calormenes and actual Muslims. The Calormenes worship a god called Tash, who was very like the polytheistic gods that Muhammad was campaigning against. He also permits a young Calormene prince to enter into paradise by having the Narnian God Aslan say “All the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me.” This is arguably a patronizing view, but it is a step ahead of saying that the Heathen are all damned. When the remains of the Islamic empires
were colonized by the West, the Islamic images of Orientophobia faded into the background. Nevertheless, politicians and generals were still able to manipulate these fears for rhetorical effect. After World War II, the Communists replaced Islam as the eastern Bugbear of choice, for it was clearly their intention to conquer the world. Once Communism collapsed, however, there was something even scarier to fear: Nothing. As the German philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out, “Nameless Dread” (which he called Angst) is much harder to deal with than any particular enemy. For several years after the Berlin wall fell, the question kept hovering in the background “What do we need all of these weapons for?” The only answer was “Well, the world is a pretty dangerous place.” And then we were rescued from Anxiety, and delivered into Fear, by 9/11. Here was our dear familiar enemy, The Evil Empire from the East, with all of the trappings we had been trained to respond to: the turbans, the beards, the violent attacks, the darker skin color. Pure Pavlovian training. It is essential for the West to remember that because we have inherited this interlocking set of horror stories, our first reaction to this kind of crisis can rarely be trusted. We must consciously remind ourselves that those two cruelly stupid young men from Chechnya are not Osama Bin Laden, and Osama Bin Laden is not Genghis Khan. n Teed Rockwell studied with Ali Akbar Khan for many years, and is the only person in the world to play Indian classical and popular music on his customized touchstyle veena. You can see and hear videos of his musical performances at www. bollywoodgharana.com. October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 17
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political viewpoint
Shuffling Cards Examining diplomacy on Syria By Jagjit Singh
I
ndian Americans have made considerable inroads professionally and are making a significant impact politically at the local, state and national levels. As a community, we often bring a unique perspective to U.S. domestic and foreign policy issues. This is my reading of the events on and about Syria. It started with the White House launching a “flood the zone” blitz campaign to persuade a skeptical Congress to authorize a limited bombing of Syria. It released a military resolution that authorized the President to use armed forces “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in connection with the use of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in the conflict in Syria.” The Assad regime must be comforted by the United States position as this gives them the green light to kill as many of the Syrian opposition forces—with little danger of United States intervention—if they do not use chemical weapons. The slaughter of 100,000 did not invoke such an outrage but the death of 1,400—has invoked moral indignation. It is puzzling to understand how we have suddenly become paragons of virtue in excoriating the Assad regime. There is little doubt that Assad, like his father, is a brutal dictator. But have we forgotten the dark chapters of our own history? The nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that vaporized tens of thousands of innocent civilians; carpet bombing of Vietnam with Agent Orange; the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium in Iraq; aiding and abetting Saddam Hussein in his chemical attacks on the Iranians and Kurds? The London Independent reported that the British Government was under fire for “breathtaking laxity” in its arms controls after it emerged that officials authorized the export to Syria of two chemicals capable of being used to make a nerve agent such as sarin a year ago, allowing a British company export licenses for the dual-use substances ... in 2012.” It certainly seems that profits triumph human life. A United States attack would likely rekindle collective memories of outrage of previous Western hegemonic attacks. The bogus claims of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs followed by the United States’ “shock and
The slaughter of 100,000 did not invoke such an outrage but the death of 1,400—has invoked moral indignation. awe” attacks on Iraq is deeply seared into Arab minds who are highly distrustful of our humanitarian intervention claims. Several questions arise out of Secretary of State, John Kerry’s testimony to Congress. How did U.S. intelligence come up with such a precise number of fatalities of 1,429 including 426 children? A United Nations report claimed 734 people died in the chemical attacks and a further 3,600 were injured.” Anthony Cordesman, a former senior defense official who is now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, challenged Kerry’s death toll statistics charging that he had been “sandbagged into using an absurdly over-precise number.” In another stranger twist, a freelance journalist, Dale Gavlak, was credited with an article claiming to have interviewed a number of rebels who admitted they received chemical weapons from Saudi Arabia. They further admitted they had little knowledge of its capability and accidently triggered the explosions that led to the tragic loss of life. But once the article was published, Ms. Gavlak denied having written it. She indicated that the article was written by Yahya Ababneh, a Jordanian and “a reputable journalist.” Further, according to a New York Times article, “Ms. Gavlak told The Lede (a Times blogging site) that she has been suspended by The Associated Press as a result of the article.” If it is true that the Syrian rebels were behind the chemical explosions, it erodes United States’ credibility and tarnishes Obama’s leadership. Mark Seibel of McClatchy argues that a U.S strike would have unintended consequences by strengthening the more extremist elements of the opposition, namely, al-Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which are al-Qaeda-affiliated organizations. These groups have been at the forefront of all major attacks against Assad’s government forces. Most disturbing is the reported in-fight-
ing, rebel-on rebel, among opposition forces with Al Qaeda forces determined to kill Syrian resistance fighters in an operation they have dubbed “expunging filth.” Fortunately, the cards are being shuffled once again. Assad has now agreed to destroy his stockpile of chemical weapons and has given President Obama a much needed lifeline to postpone a potential defeat by Congress. Vladimir Putin, whose New York Times op-ed article reeked of hypocrisy in projecting himself as the guardian of human rights and justice, nevertheless, deflated the United States self-promoted claim of being “exceptional.” A country that has incarcerated more people than the rest of the world, where educational standards have declined precipitously, a nation that is experiencing horrific acts of gun violence and whose government is paralyzed with indecision by its deeply entrenched ideology can hardly merit the mantle of “exceptionalism.” With the President’s recent address at the United Nations, it is clear that Putin’s words rankled. Obama remarked that the United States was still an “exceptional” leader of the world, since America was not afraid to intervene when necessary. He urged the Security Council to take on the task of monitoring and destroying the chemical weapons surrendered by Assad, as outlined by Russia, acknowledging that his shifting positions on Syria had resulted in anxiety in the region. He assured the assembled leaders that we would “use all elements of our power, including military force” to defend our interests in the region. The brokered agreement on destroying chemical weapons may be largely irrelevant to Syrians who are being killed by AK-47s, missiles and bombs. Valerie Amos, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, estimates seven million Syrians are in critical need of aid. In a twitter post she reiterated “the importance of diplomacy and discussion, rather than war.” n Jagjit Singh is a retired computer professional. He is an active member of Amnesty International and is a founder and director of a nonprofit company Aid for Indian Development which supports numerous charities in India. He is an avid writer. October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 19
ABOUT TOWN ASHA for Women Celebrates Anniversary with Gala
A
SHA for Women held a gala event on Saturday, September 14 to celebrate the 24th anniversary of its inception. The organization, dedicated to empowering female victims of domestic violence who hail from South Asia and reside in the Washington, D.C. metro area, held the event at George Mason University’s Johnson Center, in northern Virginia. The event included a silent auction, in which 24 prize packages of various kinds were bid on by the attendees. “Domestic violence is a community issue, not an individual family issue,” said Priya Kulkarni, the president of ASHA for Women, in her opening address.
Sheela Nayak, Owner of Barts Properties, Inc
Present at the event was Sheela Murthy, president and founder of the Murthy Law Firm, who introduced a short film, entitled “Women off the Map,” directed by her husband Vasant Nayak; the film is about women in the Indian village of Neemrana and their struggles with overcoming the adversities put on them by a heavily patriarchal society. Murthy also served as the auctioneer for the night’s silent auction. Ninety-four cents of every dollar earned at the auction went to the women and children ASHA for Women represents; the biggest item, a trip to a Himalayan mountain resort, fetched $1,300. Also present at the event were the two ASHA for Women honorees: Miranda Ken-
Miranda Kennedy, Editor for National Public Radio
Priya Kulkarni, President of ASHA for Women
nedy and Sheela Nayak. Kennedy, an editor for National Public Radio, lived in New Delhi for five year when she was NPR’s South Asia correspondent. Her experiences there, particularly in regards to the lifestyle and treatment of women, became the subject of her 2011 book Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India. The book was highly praised by literary critics the world over. Sheela Nayak, Owner of Barts Properties, was accompanied by her son. A crusader for women’s equality she started a nursing school in Bangalore for underprivileged girls, and saved over 160 abused girls from an orphanage in the state of Karnataka. She started initiatives to bring donated clothes and goods from the United States to financially deprived women in Indian jails and orphanages. One of ASHA for Women’s biggest supporters throughout the years, Nayak was honored as much for her work as for her trailblazing spirit. The event also featured a client of ASHA for Women, the client chose to go unnamed and whose speech was shrouded in darkness by the stage lights being dimmed, who read a first-hand account of her experiences with domestic violence of all kinds: physical, mental, and emotional. The story of how she finally stood up to her husband and in-laws, was able to get simple things for herself like a driver’s license, and finally see her parents after several years with dignity, brought the entire hall to its feet with thunderous applause. n
Bhoomi Puja for Hanuman Temple
A
three day-long bhoomi puja, to sanctify the ground where a new Hindu temple is to be constructed, was conducted from September 13th-15th. The Shri Bhakta Anjaneya Temple will be built on a 43-acre large plot of land in Ijamsville, Maryland, about 45 miles north of the nation’s capitol. It will be the first Anjaneya temple ever built in the United States. “This is a very significant day for the
20 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
devotees and [the] people who are organizing and building this temple,” said Swami Dayananda Saraswati, who specially flew in for the occasion from India, said during his address to the assembled devotees. “This will become the place of pilgrimage [and] is going to be a center for vedic ritual.” The temple is a joint effort that brought together five priests, each of different denominations as well as cultural and religious
traditions. Sridharan Vadyar (Vaishnava Purohit, Pancharatra Agama , Yajur Veda Priest), Balakrishna Bhat (Madhwa Shastra, Agama Priest), Venkatesh Vadyar (Smartha Rig Veda Priest), Pandit Thyagu Sastri (Smartha Yajurveda Priest), and Ganesan Grukkal (Shaiva Agama, Vasthu Jyothisha Priest). “Five priests got together to create a center where seva can happen,” said R.S. Venkatachalam, the cultural coordinator for
Temple Ground Being Sanctified by Swami Dayananda
Swami Dayananda Being Honored
the bhoomi pooja. “Besides being a center for service, it will also be a center for worship and learning. There will be shloka and Sanskrit classes, as well as annadhaanam [offerings of food].” One of the highlights of the three-day event was the presence of Swami Dayananda Saraswati, founder of the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam. “The presence of Swamijee (Saraswati) was an unexpected blessing,” said Raghuram Janamanchi, a key temple official. “Despite his health issues, he came here. It is [like] icing on the cake.” n
Indian Prime Minister’s Visit
The Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh and Gursharan Kaur being received by Rosemarie Pauli, Deputy Chief of Protocol at Andrew Air Force Base International Airport, Washington DC (September 26) Photo
US Secretary of State, John Kerry and External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid during a bilateral meet on the sidelines of UN General Assembly in New York (September 25). Photo by Jay Mandal
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh shakes hands with US President Barack Obama during their meeting in the White House in Washington DC (September 27). Photo by Shahbaz Khan/PTI
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh meets with US President Barack Obama at the White House in Washington DC (September 27). Photo by
by Shivraj Photo Division
Shahbaz Khan/PTI
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 21
10th Annual Fall Festival of Indian Arts
T
aking on issues of social justice, the Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company presented a weeklong celebration of the arts. At the Fall Festival of Indian Arts at the Shakespeare Theater’s Sidney Harman Hall, Singh welcomed a diverse and international roster of artists. Leela Samson (bharatanatyam) and Sadanam Balakrishnan (kathakali) presented Urvashi, a collaborative work depicting the life of a heavenly nymph on earth, her marriage to a human king, and their inevitable but heart-wrenching separation when the nymph’s time on earth is done. Astad Deboo presented a solo that blended folk, traditional and contemporary movements and spanned the range of human emotions. Madhavi Mudgal led an all-female troupe epitomizing the elegance and sophistication of odissi, blending modern sensibilities with ancient ethos. Sheejith Krishna presented an original dance-theater production, commissioned by Dakshina, featuring an all-male cast of performers. At age 70 and 74, Shanta and V.P. Dhananjayan, who have performed together for over 50 years, closed the festival. They have both been bestowed with the prestigious Padma Bhushan for their outstanding
Astad Deboo
contributions in the sphere of bharatanatyam. Local artists included Gowri Koneswaran, a DC-based poet and singer; Alif Laila, a sitarist and Anu Yadav, a DC-based playwright, actress, and theater-based educator. Yadav’s work is often connected to issues of social justice and community engagement. Students from several schools of dance performed two hours before each featured event as part of the festival’s free community performance series. Upon successfully wrapping up the festival, Artistic Director/Curator Singh reflected on the milestones achieved. “Dakshina has put Indian dance and arts on the main stage consistently for the past 10 years. This year the distinguished guest artists were recognized with media previews in the Washington Post, India Abroad, DCist.com and many other local papers. The Washington
Leela Samson
Madhavi Mudgal 22 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
Post gave the festival a warm review, and Al Jazeera is producing a Festival Synopsis that will be aired internationally in the next few weeks. I’m especially proud that our festival brought together poetry, music, theater, and many different dance forms. The festival has broadened the notion of dance in the United States. We did this by drawing attention to the holistic approach in Indian arts that values senior artists who continue to perform well into their 70s. This year’s festival featured senior artists besides emerging artists—intentionally building a bridge across generations, traditions, cultures, countries, and art forms. Our scope and programming was deep and wide-ranging and we hope to build on these partnerships and connections for richer festivals in upcoming years.” Dakshina—which means “offering” in Sanskrit—aims to spread awareness of Indian dance and music, both classical and modern. n (202) 656-5679. http://www.dakshina.org.
Shanta and V.P. Dhananjayan
Sadanam Balakrishnan
Sheejith Krishna
Fall Health Fair Open to All – Come and get the benefits on a Sunday, October 27th Our health care volunteers will be there to help you
• Free Flu Shots – First come first served • Free Blood Test – Blood Count and Metabolic Panel • Bone Density Check • Enroll in Obama Care and avoid paying penalties to the IRS • Get information about yours and your family’s future health coverage • Attend the ‘Education Corner’ on various health issues – like heart health, diabetes, mental health, resources for domestic violence, etc. • Sign Up for free Colorectal Cancer Screening • Bone Marrow Tests • Biometric Scan • Eye Test for Glaucoma
Organized by NCAIA (National Association of Asian Indian Associations) in partnership with AAHI (Asian American Health Initiative) of Montgomery County (Department of Health and Human Services) and with the collaboration of Health Care Professionals, Community Organizations & Hospitals
October 27th from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM The Great Hall of Silver Spring Civic Center, 1, Veterans Place, Silver Spring, MD 20910 For more information: Please Call/Email: Mr. Mayur Mody– 240-330-9421, mmmayurmody@gmail.com; Sam Mukherjee – 301 318 8056, smukh5521@gmail.com Vendors please e-mail to: mmmayurmody@gmail.com or smukh5521@gmail.com ***
The Federal Government’s Health Insurance Plan (Obama Care) for all Americans and Permanent Residents PPACA – Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – nick named ‘Obama Care’
All Americans must enroll to avoid paying penalties to the IRS
You Pay Nothing to Enroll
Open to all - Irrespective of your Financial or Health status. Failure to enroll by March 31st 2014 - you shall have to pay a fine to the Federal Government
To Enroll: Come to the ‘Fall Health Fair’ of NCAIA/AAHI in downtown Silver Spring on October 27th between 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM at the Silver Spring Civic Center, 1 Veterans Place, Silver Spring, MD 20910 Trained professionals will be there at the site to guide you through the process. Immigrants with language barriers shall have translators in a few languages. October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 23
youth
A Yen For The Arts Treading unconventional paths By Viveka Kymal
W
hen I was a child, my parents often told me I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up. They would be proud whether I was a clown or doctor, so long as I tried my best and enjoyed what I did. With these assurances, I was not in the least bit uneasy when it became clear that my passions had sauntered into the precarious territory of the arts. To some Indian parents, my love for sketching and poetry may have been worthy of a scoff closely followed by a lecture about the merits of medical school. Certainly that scoff might have become a scowl when they saw the state of my physics grades! Luckily for me, I received nothing but encouragement and was packed off to a fabulous camp two summers in a row to hone my skills in creative writing. Only a few years ago I would have called the existence of my “liberal” parents a stroke of undeserving luck—a cultural anomaly paralleled only by the startling pursuits of Parminder Nagra, the soccer prodigy of Bend it like Beckham! Nowadays, however, one need only look to the likes of Russell Peters, Aziz Ansari, or Mindy Kaling, each strutting into the limelight in full South Asian-American glory, to wonder whether the tradition-oriented, Indian parent is a steadfast reality or a fading stereotype. The best way to find the answer is to direct the attention to those who would be truly affected by potential change— the ambitious youth of today walking the path of unusual careers.
Opera Singing
It is not unusual to find Indian youths pursuing the classical arts, but you are more likely to find them warbling Karnatik melodies or thakathaiya-ing to intricate bharatanatyam footwork. One young singer who is pursuing a very different classical direction is Simran Arora Afsah from Washington, D.C. Afsah is an aspiring opera singer who is entering her fourth year at Indiana University. She is working on acquiring two degrees—one in voice performance and another in environmental policy. Ironically, her pursuits in music began with classical Indian. She took Hindustani classical music lessons for eight years and is a trained kuchipudi dancer. At age 10, her interest took a turn for the West when she auditioned for a children’s classical choir at the Peabody Institute, John Hopkins’ music conservatory. Here she took voice lessons and her ambitions blossomed. Is it rare for an Indian-American to try and master such a unique art? Well … not entirely, it appears. Afsah claims that, in fact, there are many other Indian-Americans pursuing opera, “There are less of us than most races, but it really isn’t some crazy rarity anymore!” After five years of college, Afsah hopes to begin her career as an opera singer. She plans to base herself in Munich, Germany where, with luck and a few references from her German music teacher, she hopes to find contacts in the business. Any parent would shudder at the boldness of this plan, but Arora’s parents are supportive and ready for the risks. “My parents’ one rule is that I have to do two degrees in case singing doesn’t work out,” she explains, “that way, I won’t be jobless my whole life.” It seems the main concern amongst many parents today is the risk that accompanies an uncertain trade, like opera. Perhaps their hesitation now has less to do with reputation and more to do with parental concern.
Music Therapy
Simran Arora Afsah 24 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
In the SF Bay Area, Rohith Santosh Jayaraman is courting a slightly different musical interest. A sophomore at Berklee College of Music in Boston, one of the largest contemporary music schools in the country, Jayaraman is majoring in Music Therapy and
Rohith Santosh Jayaraman
Professional Music, which focuses on business and production. Musical therapy is an established health profession in which music is used to soothe the physical, emotional, cognitive and social problems of individuals. Jayaraman became interested in this unique field because it combined two important aspects of his life. “Music has always been my foremost passion,” states the youth, “but I am also involved in working with a school for people with mental and physical disabilities. Music Therapy brought two of the biggest parts of my life together.” Like Afsah, Jarayaman has also noticed a growing number of Indian-Americans popping up in unexpected careers. “I have friends who are considering art therapy, dance, musical theatre, and film/stage acting.” He insists, “Just at Berklee, there are probably about 50-100 Indians (that I only know of) … It’s just really heartening to see Indians branching out.” Although music therapy is a less radical career option than opera, Jayaraman’s own parents took some convincing. While his mother, the singer, Asha Ramesh, fully supported his dreams, his father was hesitant. “He was just unsure of my determination and my dedication to it [music therapy]. He was worried about what sources of income existed after college, if I would lose my core general education studies, and if I would be able to secure a long term job.”
Jayaraman switched from a traditional to an unconventional path when the stress of self-inflicted expectations grew unbearable. “I took AP Biology in high school because I thought my options as an Indian American were either engineering or medicine … I found that I just didn’t enjoy the material in that class so I was a little lost.” Indian-American youths like Rohith can feel burdened by the expectations, caused by the potency of stereotypes. It is difficult not to feel foolish when you are in a lower math section at school and are often told, “All Indians are good at math.” Society has a duty to remove these expectations and free children to explore new and different fields without the pressure of stereotypes. It seems to me that if change is happening, then it is because young people like Jayaraman are beginning to put their own wants above what Indians are supposed to want.
Theater Arts
Madhulika Krishnan, a sophomore at University of Southern California, is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree with a specialization in Theater Arts. The BFA degree is a rigorous program that covers every aspect of acting training and technique. Krishnan has always been very confident about her future. “I guess nothing really excited me more than theater (growing up),” she explains, “and while I did have other interests (Broadcast Journalism, Psychology etc.) I realized that I wouldn’t be as satisfied doing those things, as I would be acting.” Krishnan’s parents are also very supportive. They help her with applications and auditions, harboring only the smallest amount of doubt, as any parent would. “My parents are very liberal,” she says, “but my mother’s a bit nervous about the whole thing because I could very well end up without a job.” Although she has faced no lectures from her parents, Krishnan, like Jayaraman, has felt pressure from other sources. In this case that censure is her community. “I was definitely irritated by the disapproving looks I’d receive starting freshman year of high school, when I’d tell Indian parents of friends what I was interested in,” she recounts, “they’d judge me because I didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.” This pressure is shared by many IndianAmerican youths across the country. Some say competition brings out the worst in people, and often times it is the primary reason for someone to abandon their dreams for a more traditional career choice. But luckily for Krishnan she has managed to overlook the speculations of those freshman year parents. “After a while I didn’t care,” states Krishnan, “you honestly can’t be happy unless you’re
Madhulika Krishnan
doing what you love.” It is probably this kind of attitude that is affecting masses of young Indian-Americans today and nudging them onto their own paths regardless of expectation.
The Big Change?
Are South Asians beginning to change their views on non-traditional fields? And if so, why is it happening now? Jayaraman believes the answer lies in a generational switch “We’re at this transitional period, I think, with the Indian-American population.” He explains, “A lot of kids who were the first in their families to be born in the States now have kids of their own. When you have parents who grew up pretty much as Americans, you’re going to see a lot more open mindedness in terms of their own children’s careers.” The rising third generation have a more Americanized view of the world. But what of the large majority of Indian-Americans whose parents are still first generation? Krishnan believes that it is the pervasive influence of the surrounding environment. “Those who have immigrated here are being immersed with people so different from themselves—people who are focused less on tradition and family values and more on individualism. Living here compels you to adapt to that way of life. I even know a lot of Indian parents who have abandoned certain careers very late in their lives to do something that makes them happy.” Individualism is an influential and fundamental concept in America that permeates all corners of this society. It is not unlikely that it has tempted some to rediscover themselves and their passions. Indeed Shabnam Afsah (Simran Afsah’s mother) experienced such
rediscovery after she was denied the opportunity to pursue music. “When I was young and got accepted as a student by some of the most famous Indian singers, my father absolutely put his foot down,” claims the elder Afsah, “I guess, once I got to the United States (I came for a graduate degree at a law school) I was out of my dad’s control and then I could do what I wanted to do ... I actually went back to music and learned for 12+ years here.” Afsah admits that she wishes to kindle her daughter’s passion for opera because she lacked the opportunity to do so herself at a young age. “I remember my own disappointment at that moment and was certainly not going to put my child through that!” It seems that by moving to America some parents, who caved to their own parent’s desires and followed traditional paths, are seeing new opportunities to recreate their views of professions that once were considered “non-traditional” and re-focus on the individual, whether that be themselves or their children. But then again, perhaps the change lies not in the parent, but in the child. Jayaraman considers social maturity to be another force for change. “I think kids really are becoming more independent and confident,” he states.“I don’t know if it’s so much standing up to their parents as it is just having the ability to have a mature and adult conversation with them.” This maturity could be the result of individualism. Is it impossible to consider that the youth of today might have absorbed some of the omnipresent ideals of free speech and freedom of choice that are characteristic of this country? Certainly for many Indian teens today, there is still a nagging reason to pursue the path of conventional academics; a pressure that seems to point down a one-way road to respect and acceptance. This type of pressure has always been an expected fragment of life as an Indian-American or even just simply as an Indian. But as more and more IndianAmericans are visibly succeeding in the arts with the support of their parents, it is hard not to conclude that change is indeed rolling down over the horizon. Whether this possible change is due to a new generation of liberal parents or the strengthened wills of the new youth, or both, I know I, and many of my peers, will certainly not stand in its way as it tumbles into our lives and opens up doors of possibility that the youth of the past never had. n Viveka Kymal is a senior at Scarsdale High School in Scarsdale, New York. This article was written while she interned at India Currents this summer. October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 25
ask a lawyer
Escaping Jury Service By Naresh Rajan
Q A
Explain the jury service process and if called upon, how can we avoid it?
I just finished a jury trial last week. The trial was notable for the number of prospective jurors who requested to be excused for hardships. Jury service is the only obligation of citizenship that strikes randomly and requires positive effort on the individual’s behalf. Taxes are uniform like death, but jury service is like lightning, and can strike twice in the same place. I have met prospective jurors in trials who served over four times in the past ten years and also individuals who have lived in the county for forty years and yet never been called for service. The requirements for jury service in California are United States citizenship, residence in the county in which the court sits and the ability to pay attention and understand the proceedings. Jury service starts in a large room some-
26 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
where in the courthouse. They take roll and often show a video explaining the process. A number of the prospective jurors would be sent to a courtroom where a trial is starting. The court clerk will administer an oath requiring everyone to truthfully answer questions designed to determine whether they could serve in that case. The process, called “voir dire,” (pronounced “vwor deer”) meaning, in old French, to speak the truth, begins in earnest when, the judge comes out and addresses the group. The judge asks questions and then lets the attorney from each side ask more questions. The questioning is designed to flush out biases and determine whether each juror is a good fit for the case. No one wants to serve on the jury at the outset, but service has its rewards. I have had many jurors tell me after a trial that they thoroughly enjoyed the experience and learned a great deal about the justice system as a consequence of their service.
I am often asked how to avoid jury service. To those people I say that jury service is rewarding, but that the best way to avoid it is to express such a bias that you could not be fair to both sides in the case. If, for example, in a drug case, you say that you believe that all drugs should be legal and that the government should give free samples of marijuana to everyone, you could avoid service. Or, in a case about police brutality, you express your belief that police are never untruthful, you will probably be excluded. Strong opinions coupled with an inability to set them aside and be impartial will almost always result in exclusion from jury service. The qualifications for serving as a trial juror are minimal. Service can often be very rewarding. Escaping service is easy, but you may miss out on an excellent opportunity to participate in our society and our government. n Naresh Rajan is an attorney in San Mateo County. Email nrajanlaw@gmail.com.
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October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 27 October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 27
lives
The Journey Home Media’s broadcast of a painful loss By R. Benedito Ferrão
Photo credit: Sanna Malick
I
t was a strange, yet somehow very Indian American moment. In January, this year, I was to meet Andy in front of McDonald’s. “The one across the street from KFC,” I had said on the phone. The McDonald’s in Bandra, that is. By the time I got there, Andy had already arrived. The postwork traffic whizzed by on Linking Road as we embraced in front of the golden arches. “I am SOOOO happy to see you,” Andy said. “Can you believe we’re here? In Bombay? In front of this?” I asked, indicating the Mickey D’s behind me. “I know right?!” Andy said with that unforgettable chuckle in his voice. We laughed together at the delicious irony of the American fast food company dishing out such fare as the “McSpicy Paneer.” This was Andy’s first journey to India. It was a lifetime in the making, and the trip of a lifetime. I got to know Andy in 1998, during my junior year at UCLA. In the years following, he would often express his interest in visiting India, knowing that I went to see family. However, after a while, I could not help but think: “Sure … that will be the day.” So, when he emailed to say that he was actually going to do it, I could barely believe it. Having already been in India a few weeks at that point, I was all the more excited at the prospect of sharing Andy’s experience. In 1998, UCLA hosted the South Asian Youth Conference (SAYC) for high school students, primarily. Most attendees were from schools in and around Los Angeles’ Little India: Artesia and Cerritos, for example. The conference had been organized by a group of students who called themselves “Sangam,” a word in Hindi that means coming together. The organizers who had consti28 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
Anand “Andy” Shah
tuted Sangam solely for the purpose of the youth conference were spurred on by its success, and decided not to disband after. I had attended SAYC, and thereupon was invited to join Sangam. It was where I met Anand “Andy” Shah, a staff reporter for UCLA’s newspaper the Daily Bruin. While there were other South Asian American student organizations on campus that served a social purpose, Sangam strove to educate about progressive causes that had a political bent. It was a heady time as protests erupted over issues of affirmative action and the dwindling numbers of Latino and Black students on campus, along with other underrepresented minorities from Asian and Pacific Islander communities. What Sangam did was to include South Asian students as activists by building awareness and solidarity within and across lines of race. We were on the front lawns of Royce Hall protesting along with other student groups as the Regents made decisions that would impact generations of Californians. We tried to remind the UC system that as a public university, it had a mandate to serve the community in all its diversity. These were the kinds of goings on that Andy reported on for the school newspaper,
while also being involved in Sangam’s activist efforts. Additionally, he was part of various community outreach and educational projects the group undertook. Among others, these included a SAT tutorial project in the Bangladeshi community in LA’s Korea Town, a mini festival of films from South Asia and its diaspora, and efforts to expand South Asian Studies at UCLA. We bonded over our commonalities. Andy was part of a community of young South Asians who were not what might be considered typically “model minority.” There is little doubt that what drew us together was the sense of family we felt in our shared differences from the norm: we were the offspring of divorced or separated parents, or “parachute” kids (children sent to a new country to live alone or with a caregiver while their parents remain in their home country”) and new immigrants, or queer and otherwise nonconforming. And it was in knowing that we had each other that we gained an education our classrooms could not provide. This intimate knowledge of why social justice was so important to us and others like us, and to those whose causes we might have little personal experience of, led Andy to be an advocate for change even after his time at UCLA. Because he knew only too well about domestic abuse, the marginalization of those who are both queer and of color, and anti-immigrant sentiment, he sought to build awareness around these topics through participation in community and national organizations and also by writing about these matters. For Andy, who always had an interest in journalism, the issue was representation. Or, more aptly, how the media skews representation, particularly when it comes to
minorities. On September 5, 2013, while Andy was crossing a street in Beverly Hills, he was struck by a vehicle. At the time of writing, the driver in this hit-and-run incident has not been identified. At the age of 33 when he still had so much more to give, my friend was no more. From India, I made the mistake of watching the online story about his death as it was reported on by a Los Angeles news station. I will forever be haunted. It was not just that my friend’s entire life had been reduced to a nameless image of his face in this report that referred to him as, only, “Norwalk Man.” It was not just that the news channel felt the need to display the crime scene while Andy’s remains were still there. It was that none of these elements bore any relevance to the ostensible reason for the story, which was to bring to public awareness that the perpetrator had fled the scene of the crime. This was a telling instance of the usual manner in which Los Angeles news deals with cases of this nature. There is no thought to how such callousness affects a grieving family and only adds to our desensitization to violence, because of the proliferation of such decontextualized images in the media. What irony that a person so aware of the media’s distortion of representation should be so represented. I am saddened not to be in Los Angeles with Andy’s mother and brother, and our friends, as they say goodbye to someone who touched our lives so deeply. There is some solace in knowing that in those brief days in Bombay, which would be the last time I would see Andy, I was part of his life’s journey at such a significant moment for him. Though he had never been before, I remarked at how he seemed as comfortable in bustling Bombay city as he had always been in Los Angeles. He navigated the town like a native, hailing cabs and rickshaws, informing drivers where to take us, and pointing out the city’s sights to me. Now, neither Bombay nor Los Angeles will ever be the same for me Andy, because I was lucky to know you. Rest in peace. n
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R. Benedito Ferrão writes from Goa. Find his blog at thenightchild.blogspot.com, or on Facebook at The Nightchild Nexus. Anand “Andy” Shah has written for India Currents. Listed here are two of his articles: “Pursuing their Passion:” http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2004/07/13/pursuing-theirpassion; “The Detached Desi:” http://www. indiacurrents.com/articles/2004/01/16/the-detached-desi. October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 29
On Inglish
Who Took the Tamarind Out? By Kalpana Mohan
ayurveda—noun (ah-yur-vey-dah) Origin: Sanskrit, equivalent to ayur/ayus life, vital power + veda knowledge —the traditional Hindu system of medicine, which is based on the idea of balance in bodily systems and uses diet, herbal treatment, and yogic breathing
“N
ow drink this,” I said to my father late one night handing him a dark green liquid that looked as unappetizing as moss floating on an ancient temple pond in South India. It also reeked like rotten seaweed. “I’ve taken a teaspoon of kayam churna powder and mixed it in water. This apparently gives you relief from all stomach problems.” Kayam churna is a dry mix of several herbs that, according to Ayurveda, rids the body of gastric problems such as hyperacidity and constipation. My father took one sip, grimaced as his olfactories got punctured by the smell and then proceeded to splutter and cough. After a minute, he returned the cup to me saying there was simply no way he would drink any more of it even if his life depended on it. I couldn’t blame the poor man. I remember my few encounters with dasamoolarishtam, the Ayurvedic syrup from hell that my mother forced me to drink in my formative years because it was a great health tonic. For most of my life, friends and family members have sworn by the miraculous efficacy of alternative medicine over Allopathy. On every trip to Chennai, I’m at the receiving end of suggestions about holistic living and Ayurvedic philosophies from friends, billboards and Facebook pages. According to the proponents of Ayurvedic principles of living, this system of healing has no equal in the world. Over 6,000 years ago, during Vedic times, enlightened seers propagated information on how the body worked and what promoted health, making Ayurveda the oldest form of health care in the world. Ayus in Sanskrit means life but it is believed to encompass the whole—mind, body, senses, and soul. Veda is a Sanskrit word that means knowledge. Ayurveda theorizes that the universe is made up of five elements: air, fire, water, earth and ether. These elements manifest themselves in human beings as three doshas, or energies: Vata, Pitta and Kapha. When a dosha builds up in the body beyond the desirable limit, the body is believed to be out of balance. Each of us has a unique balance of the three doshas. A friend participated in a retreat at an Ayurvedic resort in Bangalore a few months ago. For a whole week, her life revolved around massages, oil baths, yoga, a specially formulated diet, serene walks through meandering pathways and herbal tonics. At the end of the week, she claimed that she was a changed woman, purged of all toxins. I wondered about the real reason for her glow for I believed that I too would be detoxified if I spent a week away from my husband and children. Despite my cynicism, I was willing to dip my toe in my first Ayurvedic experience in Chennai. I’m leery of spa treatments that leave me exposed to handling or fondling, as the case may be, especially when I’m scantily clad and generously oiled and cannot even run and nab the miscreant fast enough. I decided, then, that it was least risky to begin balancing my doshas with food. Filled with anticipation about the goodness of healthy eating, I checked in at Chennai’s Sanjeevanam restaurant one morning. But now, weeks later, if you told me that I had exactly two hours on earth and gave me several choices for a last supper, Sanjeevanam won’t even make my long list. My meal began with one slice of an unripened banana. Fresh coconut had been grated and sprinkled on it. Then the waiter set five diminutive drinks in front of my clean, glistening banana leaf. I sipped each in order, 30 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
from right to left, which, unfortunately for me, went from best to worst. By the time I reached that water of bran, which, by the way, is a welcome drink for my father with his many digestive challenges, I began craving a paneer tikka sizzler. The shot glasses that held the five drinks were little devilish cups that reminded me of Kahlua. While I wanted to sin at that moment, I also wanted to drink water. Sanjeevanam has a rule, unfortunately, about when you must drink water. You’re given water only long after all your food is bottlenecked in your gullet and inching at a glacial pace, like those million company buses crawling on Chennai’s Old Mahabalipuram Road on a weekday morning. Between my meal, I stared at Sanjeevanam’s menu card. It promised little for the starved: “As deep-frying makes food unhealthy, it is avoided. We do not use ingredients that have long-term side effects, such as maida (refined flour), red chillies, tamarind, etcetera.” The reference to “etcetera” signaled the slow, methodical annihilation of every joy receptor inside my taste buds. At some point during the meal, I received four things on my leaf that were “half-cooked” items. One of them looked like the famous Kerala delicacy, olan, but it was a weak, poor man’s version. I began feeling like Oliver Twist at the end of his line. But unlike Oliver, I didn’t want any more of the same thing. I wanted some honest, authentic sambar with tamarind and red chilli powder. Since tamarind was banned from my Ayurvedic meal, suddenly, I lusted after the meanest Iyengar puliyodarai, the kind that’s bursting with tamarind, whole red chillies, sautéed peanuts, fresh curry leaves and giving off an aroma of roasted sesame seeds, coriander, curry leaves and fenugreek. Instead the sambar I’d been offered with red rice was a dal, a limping spineless sambar, missing its core, the juice of tamarind. One of Ayurveda’s key concepts is that prana or life force enters the body at birth and travels through all the parts of the body until it leaves at the moment of death. I felt that the blandness of the food I’d been offered that morning caused my prana or vital energy to leak out of every pore of my being. At the end of my Ayurvedic repast, I was unsure about extreme diet control because I recalled my father’s core belief—everything in moderation. Ayurvedic doctors believed that each person’s state of balance is unique. An imbalanced dosha is believed to interrupt the natural flow of vital energy. But what if my blood got its burn from tamarind and red chilly? What if I preferred to be more acidic than alkaline? And what if, just what if, I just didn’t want to be in balance? n Kalpana Mohan writes from Saratoga. To read more about her, go to http://kalpanamohan.org and http://saritorial.com.
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 31
films
Bite-Sizing History By Aniruddh Chawda
SATYAGRAHA. Director: Prakash Jha. Players: Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn, Kareena Kapoor, Manoj Bajpai, Amrita Rao. Music: Aadesh Shrivastav. Hindi with sub-tit. (UTV)
P
rakash Jha movies strive for the fine balance between political machinations and wider box office appeal. Jha’s success with Raajneeti (2010) and Gangaajal (2003) proved that when he is able to level the playing field, he can be spot on. When he bites off too much, as he did with Chakravyuh (2012) the fare appears water-filled and soggy. Sentimental without being sappy, Satyagraha sits in on a decently outlined modern parable that even Gandhi may not mind. Staged as pedestrian-level history lesson and contemporary commentary, Jha’s story, co-written with Anjum Rajabali, hinges on retired headmaster Dwarka Anand (Bachchan) being forced by a family tragedy to confront possible corruption perpetuated by local highway building authorities. Aided by investigative TV reporter Yasmin Ahmed (Kapoor) and Anand’s former-student turned community organizer Arjun (Rampal), Anand must decide whether to tackle the well-organized, deep-pocketed and shrewd politician Balram Singh (Bajpai) at his own devious game or stake out a Gandhi-influenced higher moral ground. Bajpai and Bachchan essentially recreate the same roles they undertook for Jha in Aarakshan (2011) with Bachchan as an old-school moral guardian and Bajpai as an opportunistic lizard somehow always clawing his way to latch on to the most favorable political winds. This time, however, the tug of war between them is more appealing, wittier and better staged. Their tussle pushes Anand’s opposition to a highway funding scheme being transformed from a grassroots movement to a political party to Anand eventually being labeled an enemy of the powers that be. Bachchan’s channeling of Gandhi is directly extracted from a handful of grainy, black-and-white photos classically depicting
32 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
Gandhi as a frail, white-clad wise owl on a hunger strike or a guardian sage walking with the help of two young women. The way that a grieving Anand approaches a highway patch that has witnessed a tragedy and delicately caresses the road surface could serve as an allegory of Gandhi pounding the pavement during a Salt March to make a case for India’s independence. Void of high speed chases and loud explosions, the story moves on crowd control and histrionics. Kapoor does well as a principled investigative reporter who shuns ratings stunts offered by exposing the sex life of a political figure in favor of following the trail of a highway construction contract that she senses could very well morph into a full-fledged criminal and political conspiracy. Rao as a young widow and Rampal as the go-to guy Anand relies on for gathering everyday folks into a potent force are also written well and fleshed out nicely. Embedded in Kapoor’s TV reporter is the subtle supposition that—much like the character Rani Mukherjee played in No One Killed Jessica (2011)—a strong woman needs to have a career to be taken seriously. That is unlike, say, Deepika Padukone’s character in Chennai Express who had no ambition other than to run away from home. In 2013, providing a professional career to the female
lead can be considered a small step forward. Ironically, its Devgn’s Manav Raghvendra, an unambitious captain of industry, who comes across as the weakest link in a chain of otherwise well-defined characters. Lackluster in Devgn’s delivery, Raghvendra is written as Anand’s surrogate son and yet comes across as an arrogant venture capitalist uninterested in the immense wealth that can be both created and destroyed—and especially the human toll demanded—by his symbolic flicking of a few high tech switches in a wired world. Ashutosh Gowariker and Aamir Khan tapped into the Gandhi persona in Lagaan (2001) delicately and almost as an afterthought. Jha’s approach in Satyagraha is more blunt—and yet carried though with just as much finesse. Lest we get tempered with an excessive populist posturing—this is, after all, a Hindi movie—the unexpected splash of cold water and what turns out to be the most lucid lines in the entire script are voiced by Kapoor’s Yasmin in objecting to Anand’s camp swaying too much toward political showmanship. Simply put, Yasmin’s words amount to the following: Populism is no substitute for democracy. Well summed up! n EQ: B+
Jitterbug at the Altar SHUDDH DESI ROMANCE. Director: Maneesh Sharma. Players: Sushant Singh Rajput, Parineeti Chopra, Vaani Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor. Music: Sachin Jigar. Hindi w/ Eng subtitles. Theatrical release (Yashraj).
I
t isn’t often that Yashraj Films, the largest movie house in India, falters in their marketing. After the megahit Ek Tha Tiger (2012) and money-making Jab Tak Hai Jain (2012), the studio came up with less than impressive Aurangzeb (2013). After the very expensive 2012 entries, perhaps the studio needs a breather. Ever to spot rising talent timely, Aditya Chopra has zeroed in on Parineeti Chopra and Rajput with Shuddh Desi Romance, a smaller, smartly made romantic comedy that carries no pretentions and yet walks away with light-hearted kudos. Set in Jaipur, Jaideep Sahni’s story enfolds three altar-bound characters whose lives appear to be inextricably intertwined. There is Raghu (Rajput), a budding tourguide about to take the plunge with Tara (Vaani Kapoor) as his bride. Last minute wedding jitters win out as Raghu flies the coop and becomes a runaway groom. His initial reason for the leap: the very forward, bossy and chain-smoking Gayatri (Parineeti Chopra) who Raghu shared a bus seat with on the way to his wedding. Parineeti Chopra turned out an impressive performance in Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl (2011) as well as Ishaqzade (2012), both smaller budget entries that were received well critically and at the box office. She is clearly Yashraj’s new muse. Carefree onscreen, she is able to inject a youthful, slightly-wayward, sexually sophisticated and very mod city-dweller that finds a ready niche in India urban markets. Rajput made a respectable debut with Kai Po Chhe earlier this year and continues the off-center persona that served him well earlier. Together, they take turns being oil to the other’s vinegar. Amusingly awkward as a couple, down to devising the sexuallyexclusive (for the moment) cohabitation under the always-triangulating eyes of gossip starved neighbors, Raghu and Gayatri build up enjoyable rapport. Their pent up libidos provide ripe fodder in their relationship. In a crowded city, in an outwardly modest society, the slightest body moves can amount to—as they do here—pretext for foreplay. Take the afore-mentioned bus-ride. A trick of the wedding planner’s trade in cer-
tain Indian circles is to include in a travelling wedding party “professional” wedding guests. These are English-language savvy, smartly dressed, upwardly mobile appearing special “invitees” whose job is to give out an air of importance to increase the social stature of either the bride or the groom’s party they are accompanying while getting paid to attend the wedding. This social twist is elevated to comic perfection here. Fake guests must mean fake wedding, get it? As a marital farce, Shuddh Desi Romance works like a charm. At the heart of Raghu, Gayatri and Tara’s on-again-off-again interest in tying the knot, however, there is a social anxiety that is seldom talked about in India. The pressure to marry by a certain age— regardless of personal aspirations—has no doubt forced more than one young man or woman to contemplate unhappy lives and instead opt to elope or, worse, commit suicide. Music makers Sachin Jigar, collaborating with lyricist/writer Jaideep Sahni here, come up with a catchy score that taps into the wedding mood with Mohit Chauhan and Sunidhi Chauhan’s “Tere Mere Bich Mein” as well as a sedate and yet still ear-worthy number with Jigar and Priya Saraiya’s “Gulabi”—a nod to the pink city of Jaipur. Solid support is also provided by Rishi Kapoor as Goyal, the wedding planner whose matrimonial choreography links together all the musical nuptials going on here. Goyal’s choice words unleashed on his employee Raghu hints that Raghu’s actions may not be as rash or unpredictable as Raghu would have us believe. Perhaps that
“other” generation knows a thing or two about human interactions after all! n EQ: B+
Globe trekker, aesthete, photographer, ski bum, film buff, and commentator, Aniruddh Chawda writes from Milwaukee.
L ATA’S FLICK PICKS ilkha Bhaag
Bhaag M press Chennai Ex ay D-D ris Ishq In Pa andola i Bijlee Ka M K Matru Policegiri haana Raanj Vastavaiya Ramaiya raha Satyag 2 gla Deewana Pa la m Ya wani ee D ai H waani Yeh Ja
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 33
34 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
A Revamped Milieu By Madhumita Gupta ONCE UPON A TIME IN MUMBAI DOBAARA. Director: Milan Luthria. Players: Akshay Kumar, Sonakshi Sinha, Imran Khan, Sonali Bendre. Music: Pritam Chakraborty, Sandeep Shirodkar, Anupam Amod. Hindi w/ Eng sub-titles. Theatrical release Balaji Motion Pictures.
T
he rumors that the film was based on the real-life affair between gangster Dawood Ibrahim and starlet Mandakini, the stylish promos with a ravishing Sonakshi, a different Imraan Khan and a distinctly evil looking Akshay Kumar, were appetite-whetting and the film did not disappoint, even though the story was nowhere as gripping as the original Once Upon a Time. Shoaib (Kumar), the wily kingpin returns from Dubai to seamy Mumbai to set right an underling (Mahesh Manjrekar) who has dared to defy him and could become a major threat. To bring him to book, he appoints his right hand man, Aslam (Khan), whom he trusts as much as one can in that treacherous world. Enter the chirpy Jasmine (Sinha) who has come to Mumbai with
starry aspirations but unwittingly becomes the bone of contention between Aslam and Shoaib. Whether love changes the rotten-tothe-core Shoaib for better and whether the friendship will survive this tough test is the somewhat predictable plot of the story. What saves the movie is the deft way the director Luthria handles the two love-stories. The quirky one with Kumar keeps one glued to the seats. And the way Kumar turns on his evilness when Jasmine scorns his overtures is worthy of applause. Kumar’s unabashed flamboyance remains endearing despite his dark character. Khan does justice to the goon character despite his chocolate-boy looks which don’t quite hide behind the new facial hair that he sports. Kudos to the director for excellent casting. Sinha is breathtakingly beautiful and cast in the perfect mold of heroines of the bygone era. She delivers as the naïve newbie and then as the tormented soul. A surprise package is Bendre, in a small but effective cameo, as Shoaib’s long-suffering once-upon-a-time mistress.
The movie, when compared to the original, lacks in pace. However it makes up with excellent cinematography and the period setting which includes movie-posters and Fiat taxis, of the Bombays in the 70s and 80s. The music is not even close to the songs of the original film which had topped all charts. But Rajat Arora’s dialogues are as melodramatic as they were in Luthria’s earlier pot-boilers Once upon a time in Mumbai and The Dirty Picture. All in all, worth a watch if you enjoy old world unapologetic Bollywood. And never mind the lack of logic—it never was important those days! n Madhumita Gupta is a freelance writer and a teacher.
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books
Sprinkle of Exotica By Tara Menon JANA BIBI’S EXCELLENT FORTUNES by Betsy Woodman. $6.00. Paperback 336 pages. Henry Holt & Co, July 2012. betsywoodman. com.
A
lexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Series has proved to be enormously successful, and its formula of exotic setting, colorful characters, unusual occupations within the mystery genre have inspired many writers. Much like McCall Smith, Betsy Woodman’s Jana Bibi’s Excellent Adventures has an exotic setting, quaint characters, and a heroine with an unusual occupation, but no mystery. Woodman’s choice of an Indian setting is hardly surprising, considering she spent ten years as a child in India. When she lived there she thought she was having an ordinary childhood; in reality, it was anything but ordinary. In an essay included with the book, the author says, “... completely normal to live next door to three young movie stars who were the rage of India ... Routine to vacation on houseboats in Kashmir, to have dancing bears, stilt walkers, and snake charmers perform for our birthday parties ... My best friend in Delhi at age ten was a Muslim princess, and for a while our next-door neighbors kept a tiger in the backyard, as a gift for Jacqueline Kennedy.” Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes features a titular character of Scottish descent who has inherited her grandfather’s house, the Jolly Grant House, located in fictional Hamara Nagar. The novel is set in the sixties. Jana Bibi is a colorful character, who like the writer, spent her childhood in India. However, one feels the heroine is not infused with autobiographical traits, but rather that she owes her personality to the author’s imagination. The novel starts with the startling piece of news for Jana that she has inherited her Grandfather Grant’s house. As the violin teacher of a nawab’s dozen children, Jana enjoys a comfortable existence in a palace with her children’s ayah, Mary, and the charming, intelligent parrot, Mr. Ganguly, who steals some of the limelight in the novel. Jana follows her instincts and heart and settles down in the Jolly Grant House. 36 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
Hamara Nagar is home to the Victoria Hotel, distinguished for having had eminent visitors like the Princess of Wales, Rudyard Kipling, and George Everest; the Treasure Emporium, where the locals like to shop; the English Bazaar that has a Scottish aura; the overwhelmingly Indian Central Bazaar; three boarding schools, including the Far Oaks boarding school, mostly attended by foreign students; and the Jolly Grant House with its unique architecture. A mosque, a temple, and a church reflect the multi-religious population. Foreigners flock to the destination. Jana Bibi remembers visiting the place as a ten-year-old in 1912 when there used to be signs that read “No Indians or dogs.” Much has changed, but not at the Victoria Hotel, where even “the people seem imported from the past ...” The Jolly Grant House, boasting gabled and latticed windows and a six-sided tower, is in a dilapidated condition when Jana inspects it. A strong-willed woman, she is not dejected by its shabby appearance or the fact that monkeys have taken over the property. Nor does she get persuaded to leave when she finds out the government plans to destroy their town to create the largest man-made lake and dam to supply drinking water for the whole of Uttar Pradesh. Jana joins forces with the merchants to convince the authorities that Hamara Nagar is too important a tourist destination to eradicate. In order to do her part and with the help of her feathery friend, Mr. Ganguly, she becomes a fortune teller. Jana Bibi doesn’t worry about her own future though her legacy from Grandfather McPherson isn’t enough to live on and provide for her household, which in addition to Mary and the bird, has swelled to include Lal Bahadur Pun (the watchman), old Munar (the sweeper), and ten-year-old Tilku (messenger boy). To counter a woman like Jana, Woodman has created a villain who could have leapt right out of the Bollywood screen. Police Commissioner Bandhu Sharma reeks of corruption and meanness. Bandhu Sharma’s obsession in life is to make everyone contribute to the Homeland Purity Society in order to
advance Hindu civilization, but the thought of the destruction of Hamara Nagar only fills him with happiness. One of Woodman’s best creations is the tailor Feroze Ali Khan. She does a better job of getting into his head than Jana’s. She portrays his tumultuous emotions, whether it’s his love for his nephew, or his ambivalent attitude toward Jana, or his arduous affections for his young wife. Like McCall Smith, who makes his two main characters, Mma Ramotswe and Mme Makotsi habitual philosophers, Woodman gives Feroze philosophical musings. Woodman brings Hamara Nagar to life with the cast, the physical descriptions of the place and historical details. At the end, Woodman sprinkles Bollywood magic and there is the sparkle of the unbelievable. Such sheen is permissible in a novel like Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes. Indeed with so much tragedy and grim reality abounding in novels and tell-all memoirs, one welcomes a pleasant fictional town, where the villain can easily be outwitted and trials and tribulations can be happily resolved. The writer plans a series. Perhaps the next time around she may not be as kind to her characters? In any case, in anticipation of the sequels, like Mr. Ganguly says, “Jana Bibi, Zindabad!” n Tara Menon is a freelance writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her fiction, poetry, and book reviews have been published in many magazines.
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 37
music
Bollywood Countdown By Vidya Sridhar
P
resented here are five recent song releases that are at the top of the IC musical chart. Including some foot
5
Ambarsariya
Movie: Fukrey Singer: Sona Mohapatra Music Director: Ram Sampath Lyricist: Munna Dhiman This song is absolutely beautiful. I was captivated by Sona Mohapatra’s voice. The rest of the album is similar to Delhi Belly but this one song alone makes up for the rest of the album. n
2
Chugliyaan
Movie: Once Upon Ay Time In Mumbai Dobaara Singers: Javed Ali and Sahir Ali Bagga Music: Pritam Lyricist: Rajat Arora This is a romantic beautiful number incorporating Qawwali notes. The lyrics are beautiful and this one will stay a favorite for months to come. n
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tapping numbers and soul-stirring melodies the numbers below can fuel some powerful melody moments. n
4
Satyagraha
Movie: Satyagraha Singers: Rajiv Sundaresan, Shivam Pathak, Shweta Pandit Music: Salim-Sulaiman Lyricist: Prasoon Joshi The title song is a modern contemporary rendition of “Raghupathy Raghava Raja Ram.” The blend of Hindustani music and western instruments is unusual and captivating. It gave me goosebumps and succeeded in capturing the spirit of rebellion and patriotism. n
1
Vidya Sridhar works at NASA and is a mom of two elementary school children. She lives and breathes all things filmi.
3
Hey Mr. DJ
Movie: Phata Poster Nikhla Hero Singers: Benny Dayal, Shalmali Khol gade, Shefali Alvaris Music: Pritam Chakraborty Lyricist: Irshad Kamil and Amitabh Bhattacharya This song is super fun and very reminiscent of the dance numbers in the nineties. This is the latest album by Pritam and has a great variety of offerings. n
One, Two, Three, Four
Movie: Chennai Express Singers: Vishal Dadlani Music: Vishal-Shekhar Lyricist: Amitabh Bhattacharya This is a fun, mast dance number. It features South Indian street dance flavors mixed to hindi music, and captures north and south on the dance floor. n
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 39
analysis
An American Export Mightier Than McDonald’s By Sandip Roy
A
t my school in Kolkata, far far away from the American civil rights movement and the red hills of Georgia, “I Have a Dream” was an elocution favorite. Tutored by Belgian priests, Bengali students from resolutely middle class families belted out their renditions of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech. Stripped of its historical context, delivered in the prone-to-breaking voices of teenagers, our tremulous interpretation of an African-American preacher’s cadence often landed somewhere in between Bollywood melodrama and souped-up folk theater. While justice rolling down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream sounded like an excellent idea, we had little sense of what any of it really meant. Unlike Mississippi, “a state sweltering with the heat of oppression,” we were just plain sweltering in a stuffy auditorium in the humid Kolkata summer. We were all for letting freedom ring but we just hoped not to stumble over the “heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.” I don’t think any of us thought about that speech as anything particularly relevant to our lives. It was a rite of passage in an elocutionist’s resumé—somewhere in between “Custard the Cowardly Dragon” and “Friends, Romans and Countrymen.” For Anglicized middle-class boys with neatly side-parted hair, whose only real worry was Bengali grammar and the algebra examination, King’s very specific utterances of American geography and American history, from the “vicious racists” of Alabama to the “hilltops of New Hampshire,” allowed us to blissfully insulate ourselves from the speech’s universality. I heard that speech many times without thinking whether there were people in our country too who had been given a “bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.” Or whether we too had children “stripped of their selfhood” or Indians languishing in the corners of society, “an exile in his own land.” Or whether that colored person in Mississippi who could not vote had a counterpart in our own voting booths. The only thing we really took away again and again from that speech was that one line: “I have a dream that my four little chil-
40 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
As schoolchildren in India, we can be forgiven for regurgitating the entire speech without digesting its message. Far more egregious are minority politicians like Indian-American Bobby Jindal who cherry pick it for their own political expedience ... dren will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.” Since then we have stripped that line of its context, the bone-weary journey Dr King was talking about—of bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, who cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of American cities. We have turned it into a catchphrase for a vanilla vision of equality without the hard work of leveling the playing field. As schoolchildren in India, we can be forgiven for regurgitating the entire speech without digesting its message. Far more egregious are minority politicians like Indian-American Bobby Jindal who cherry pick it for their own political expedience and use Dr King’s words to subvert Dr King’s dream. The success of a Bobby Jindal or a Nikki Haley is directly a fruit of Dr King’s dream. As President Obama points out in his speech marking the 50th anniversary of Dr King’s speech, the civil rights movement made America more free and fair “not just for African Americans but for women and Latinos, Asians and Native Americans; for Catholics, Jews, and Muslims; for gays, for Americans with a disability.” Indian Americans did not have to do most of the heavy lifting in that movement because their immigration history is largely a post-1965 one. Yet Indian Americans quickly learn to look down on African-Americans while climbing up the ladder even as they
are happy to become the faces of diversity in America. That disdain is masked, even legitimized, in our minds as being not about the color of our skins but the content of our characters. This willful blindness allows Bobby Jindal to write in an op-ed marking the “I Have a Dream” speech anniversary that “it’s time for the end of race in America.” Then he twists Dr King’s words around to say that content of our character, not the color of our skin means we should not place “too much emphasis on our ‘separateness,’ our heritage, ethnic background, skin color, etc.” He writes, “Here’s an idea: How about just “Americans”? That has a nice ring to it, if you ask me.” Presumably when Jindal basks at IndianAmerican functions as America’s first IndianAmerican governor or is used by his party as its brown face to rebut Obama’s State of the Union address, it is “just enough emphasis” not “too much.” There is nothing in Dr King’s speech to imply that to be a hyphenated American is to have divided loyalties. When Jindal says American, the non-hyphenated version, he simply means Judaeo-Christian white—a whiteness that might not be visible in the color of the skin, but is definitely there in the content of the character. King’s speech needs to be read again and again—not just commemorated or elocuted to prevent it from being appropriated by the Jindals for their own ends. And not just in America. Now in India it is fashionable to blame America for exporting all kinds of ills to our part of the world—from McDonald’s McTikka abominations to kissing in public to skanky fashions. But it is worth remembering that long before liberalization opened the floodgates, it gave us “I Had a Dream.” And even if as boys in my school, we didn’t fully grasp its grandeur or depth or relevance, I am grateful we paused for a moment in its shadow. n Sandip Roy is the Culture Editor for Firstpost. com. He is on leave as editor with New America Media. His weekly dispatches from India can be heard on KALW.org. This article was first published on FirstPost.com.
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 41
profile
Patti Tripathi: Suited to Succeed By Deepak Chitnis
E
ver since my younger sister was born nineteen years ago, I saw her grow from an innocent, naive little girl into the strong, confident young woman that she is today. She had the privilege of growing up in a family and a society that encouraged her to pursue her dreams. Unfortunately, young girls around the world are often not born into such circumstances. Enter Patti Tripathi, a former reporter for CNN Headline News who is now the founder and president of TriPath Media. Tripathi is launching a bold endeavor this year called Saris to Suits, a calendar that will feature twelve outstanding women of Indian origin in various fields—business, politics, entertainment—in an effort to motivate young girls by showing them that positions of power and leadership are not reserved solely for men. “There’s more to a woman than her outer beauty,” said Tripathi, via email, regarding how the initial idea for Saris to Suits came to be. “I wanted to feature role models rather than models. They are the complete package. Looks are inherited—education, drive and accomplishments are earned.” Troubled by the recent surge in violence against women around the world, particularly in India, Tripathi hopes that the calendar will also lead to women standing up for themselves. “When I traveled to India in the past, I recall that someone kissed me on my face while I was walking with my relatives on a crowded street, and then ran away. Men would stare at me and follow me through New Delhi shops. You have to ask why India topped the list of the ten most dangerous countries for a woman to travel alone. What is happening is horrifying, and I am glad it is being discussed and debated.” Born in Uttar Pradesh, India, Tripathi emigrated from the country when she was ten, and has spent most of her life living in the United States and England. Tripathi’s parents supported her career choice to go into journalism, despite having reservations about her pursuing a non-technical field. Her father, a physicist, clashed with Tripathi over whether or not she should have an arranged marriage. But although Tripathi says she dealt with “verbally and emotionally abusive situations” regarding the arranged marriage, tensions have long since been settled and she now enjoys a warm relation42 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
ship with her father. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Maryland, she worked in print journalism for several years. Then, she accepted a lead anchor position at CNN Headline News, where she covered some of the biggest news stories that occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as the BushGore elections. She was the first South Asian anchor in the channel’s history. “It was my American dream come true,” she says about her time at CNN. “I was very young and felt like a kid in a candy store. Every day I was in awe, rubbing elbows with the amazing journalists and newsmakers I met and the amazing stories that we covered from around the world.” Tripathi’s life took a detour when her mother passed away in 2004. It began a particularly difficult period in Tripathi’s life, one that ultimately ended in her leaving her job at CNN. “Life threw me some curve balls and took me out of the game that I loved so much.” But those curve balls could only slow Tripathi down, not stop her completely. Currently, she is the founder and president of TriPath Media, a multifaceted company whose work involves media relations, event planning, and marketing for businesses. It’s during her time at TriPath Media that Tripathi got the idea and inspiration for Saris to Suits. “The concept came to me because I was chosen to be one of the original Women of Notre Dame [a calendar]. Their criteria were good grades, service, and extracurricular activities. The proceeds from the calendar went to help battered women.” But can a calendar really make a huge difference? Inequality between men and women has been around practically as long as there has been a human species. “Unfortunately, in the immigrant community, women often don’t seek help because of their immigration status, cultural stigma, language barriers, an inability to maneuver through the justice system, or a combination of those factors. I hope the role models featured in the Saris to Suits calendar are invited to speak at events about topics concerning women.” Tripathi is aiming to knock down stereo-
types with regards to women’s issues around the world. To echo a line from Batman Begins, people need dramatic examples to shake them out of their apathy, and few people understand this better than Tripathi. “Maybe next year I’ll feature dark-complexioned women to get rid of the notion [that] fair-complexioned women are prettier,” she speculates, which would put Saris to Suits alongside other popular skin color campaigns like Dark is Beautiful. Although unsure of what exactly her future may hold for her—she leaves open the possibility of returning to television in some capacity down the road, perhaps even in a Saris to Suits program. She does know that her fight for women’s equality is far from over. “I am in the process of writing a book with the proceeds going to help abused women. Would you believe Saudi Arabia just now made it a crime to hit women and children? Until now, physical abuse was considered a private, family matter.” And it all comes back to family, and the ideal of living in a world where families give their daughters the encouragement, respect, and strength to be whatever they want to be, regardless of how impossible that may seem. n Deepak Chitnis is a staff writer for American Bazaar Online and a Writer/Producer for Global India Newswire.
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 43
Ripples
fiction
Katha 2013 • Honorable Mention
S
By Architha Subramaniam
44 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
A Creative Commons Image
he was humming a slow song under her breath, and picking out what color to wear for the evening when her maid came to her gasping for breath after running through the halls. She was mumbling incoherently till Bhanumati made her sit down and drink a glass of water. All Bhanu could comprehend for the first few minutes were “Panchali ... sabha ... the king” and then the maid burst into tears. It took a while for her to piece together the sequence of events. Her eyes stung with tears even before her maid had finished telling the whole story. She pressed her fingers hard on her eyebrows and told her maid to leave her alone. How could she believe something this preposterous? Her husband and his brothers had disrobed and insulted a woman in front of the entire sabha? The maid had been heartless with the details. She had been called to serve wine in the sabha and saw the whole thing. She shuddered as she described the maniacal laughter of Dusshasana as he pulled Draupadi by her hair into the sabha, the valiant Karna egging him on, mild Yudhishtra with silent tears running down his face, mighty Bhima with his body heaving with rage, handsome Arjuna unable to look at anyone but his brother in disbelief, majestic Draupadi with her beauty disheveled and the most painful of all the images—her husband in the middle of all this, not raising a finger to stop this madness, displaying his bare thigh asking Draupadi to sit on it. Bhanu’s heart stopped when she heard how Bhima with his eyes red with fury vowed to break that very thigh one day and kill her husband. She stared at the dull glow from the gemstones on the edge of her bed and counted them for the hundredth time, secretly hoping that this mindless exercise would make her forget what she had just heard. Everyone had always said she was the strong one. Bhanu can handle anything, they said, after all, wasn’t she the mighty queen whom Duryodhana cared most about? She wondered how they would react when they saw her now, quaking with an emotion she could not quite identify, biting hard on her lips to stop the
tears, and hands clenched tight. From her first days in the palace as a young bride, she had been very particular about being dressed well to receive her husband every evening. It was something her mother had taught her just after she got married. Her room would be well lit with tiny lamps placed all around; the slight hint of camphor in the air, his preferred scent; and a dice game set up for them as entertainment as they discussed the happenings in the palace. Today, she had refused to let anyone enter her room to clean or to help her with her hair. She sat in a corner and watched the black shadows of the palace walls inch closer and closer till her room was completely dark. She heard Duryodhana’s powerful voice booming below asking if the queen was unwell and why there were no lights in her room. She could sense a current of restlessness from the other side as he made his way to her chamber. The heavy door creaked as he pushed the door open slowly and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness till he found her curled up in the corner. It took him less than a minute to realize what was wrong—partly because her behavior was so unusual and partly because his own conscience pricked him. “Did you hear about what happened today at the sabha?” began Duryodhana with a hint of defiance in his voice. To Bhanu, he sounded more like a petulant child who was trying to avoid a scolding from his mother. Her face was as still as a smooth rock betraying nothing. She kept playing almost distractedly with the pearls on her neck while a million thoughts whirled in her head.
Should she ask for an explanation? Where would she begin? And could he really make her understand with just words? He placed his hand very slowly on the crook of her elbow and she was sharply reminded of the first time he had held her in the very same way. She had been a shy bride, terrified of the mighty Duryodhana and wondering how she was going to ever get over her fear of the man next to her. He had looked at her quizzically and then burst out laughing saying “Really, my dear, I am not as bad as they make me out to be.” They had spoken for several hours and it was then that she discovered their mutual love for the game of dice and they had sat up playing all night. By dawn, she was laughing and teasing him for being such a sore loser wondering how she could have ever been intimidated by him. It had always been his personality that drew Bhanu most towards him. He was almost obsessively protective of the people he cherished in his life. When he wanted something, he was so focused that people couldn’t help being inspired to follow him. And when he loved, he loved with a ferocity that was almost as intense as his dislike for his enemies. Bhanu had never been naive enough to not know how the world saw Duryodhana but she had always been content with the Duryodhana only she and a few others had the privilege of knowing. But today when she really thought about what she felt, more than the incident itself, she was upset that he had given the world another chance to make him out to be a man she knew he truly wasn’t. “It was Karna who began the madness,” he began slowly. She turned to look at him sharply with a spark in her eyes that was all too familiar to him. Almost instinctively, he sat up on the bed with his knees against his chest and said slowly “And I didn’t do anything to stop him or Dusshasana. You should have seen it Bhanu, the humiliation in their faces and their helplessness. I can’t even begin telling you how many years I have waited to wipe those righteous smirks off their faces. You know how they treated us in Indraprastha ...” She turned, startled to
see how hate had transformed his face. It was grotesque to look at. Suddenly, a thought seemed to strike him and his face cleared, “Is this really because of what I did today or more importantly, is it because it is Panchali?” He knew he had said the wrong thing the minute the words were out of his mouth. She stood up tall and for an instant he thought she would strike him across the face. “You think I am jealous? Me, who was ready to welcome Subhadhra as a sister once you married her? I had even planted jasmine creepers in the palace because that was her favorite flower. Do you know me at all?” He slowly moved to the window away from her almost as if it was too painful to even look at her “Have you ever felt like you are being completely consumed by hate? Physically felt your stomach bubbling with venom and determining the direction of your actions? Have you had your grandfather choose a favorite grandchild and look at you differently? Have you grown up with an uncle who told your father that he would never get the throne because he was blind? And that I never would either? You may think I fight a selfish cause, Bhanu, but I fight as much for my father as I do for myself. A man denied the throne because of his disability. Reduced to a mere regent. It was all right then for them to decide who was fit to be king and it isn’t all right for me or my father to wish the same now?” Her own emotions surprised her. She became aware that her anger had subsided and had slowly crossed into the gray shadows of pity. Almost as if by magic, few images flitted across her mind’s eye. She saw Duryodhana as a child brooding in a corner, watching the Pitamah playing with Bhima on his lap. His uncle Vidura telling his mother that there were evil omens at Duryodhana’s birth and that he should be killed immediately. Panchali laughing at him in Indraprastha when he tripped. The images blurred as quickly as they had come to her. She was almost shocked to see herself identifying with and almost justifying her husband’s gruesome behavior. She saw her old Duryodhana once again. The one who, without a thought for power or kingdom, crowned an unknown boy as the king of Anga just because he was insulted because of his birth. The king whose subjects adored him. The artful warrior with the mace who was Balarama’s favorite student. The brother who his siblings would willingly follow into death. The husband who attempted to pacify her even though he knew he didn’t really have to. She continued to cry softly but now she realized the rage was no longer directed at her husband. It was for what had made him
such a man, capable of such hate; for the fate over which neither of them would have any control over; for the helplessness that she could never completely erase his painful memories and for the fear at what the future held for them. She moved closer to him and held him tight. He whispered softly “I know I made a mistake today, Bhanu, I feel like a vile animal for what we did to another man’s wife in there but I truly do not regret making them feel helpless and miserable. Even now nothing has changed, Bhanu, they gambled their wife away as a wager and yet everyone will still see them as victims, I know it. I am yet to understand my actions completely but I feel vindicated at some level.” She looked into his eyes “At what price, my lord?” “Well, my love, We’re yet to see what history will make of me.” n Architha Subramaniam grew up in India with a stubborn habit of refusing to eat unless a new story was told to her and falling more in love with the grand epics each day. She holds a master’s degree in Human Resources and currently works in the United States. At the moment, she is working on a set of stories with the theme of “Mute Voices” to address the never-before-heard voices/perspectives from the established epics of India. Judges’ comments: “This was a refreshing use of mythological subject matter, made relatable and immediate. While covering a broad canvas of characters, the story never veers far from its heart: the deep wound between a husband and wife. It reads like the tantalizing introduction to a larger work.”
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commentary
O
An Ideal Match
ne of the solid tips I received, from the three Seniors’ groups to which I belong, is to recall pleasant memories of the good old days instead of brooding over one’s sugar, cholesterol, BP-levels, the cataract that is eclipsing one’s vision or which of the 100 history and civics questions the U.S. Immigrations officer will select to unleash at the citizenship interview. That was precisely why I thought the best way to celebrate our 40th marriage anniversary was to simply relish some moments of wonder and embarassment. I must admit beforehand that I am not trying to steal a march over my friend’s parents who celebrated 72 years of marital bliss. Compared to that, 40 years is just a little more than the half-way mark. Bangladesh had just been liberated and emerged as a new nation. The ravages of war had begun to take their toll with dead bodies strewn all over, and diseases assuming epidemic proportions. The United Nations Relief Operations at Dhaka, pitched in for assistance—rehabilitation, resettlement, food, clothing ... From Delhi, the World Health Organization (WHO) deputed me to set up an office to help medical experts address public health issues. On my way to Dhaka, I stopped over in Calcutta (Kolkata) for a day. A friend took a day off to show me around the city. During the course, he took me to meet Pammechan, a distant relative, who was as much delighted to see me as I was him. Little did I know that the stage was being set for the rest of my life. That evening, Pammechan took me to meet his eldest brother Murthy Anna. I did feel some reluctance, for as a lad I had seen Murthy Anna in person only once or twice when he had visited my village to pay obeisance to my grandfather (one of his elder cousins). To this day I cherish that encounter, for at Murthy Anna’s house I met his daughter who was “next in line” for marriage—second of the seven. In beauty she might not stake claim to a heroine (as I would not to a hero), but she carried a charm that I could not resist. I didn’t even know her name, since Pammechan had mentioned the names of all seven in one breath. All that registered was that she worked in a bank. That night I hit upon a plan. I had, with me, more Indian currency than I was allowed to carry to Bangladesh. So early next morning, I knocked at
46 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
By V.V. Sundaram
Then
her house. She opened the door and was visibly ill at ease to see me. She was literally dipped in oil for her weekly oil-bath. She blushed and tried to rush to the kitchen to call her mother or one of her sisters. But before she could go, I handed her the excess cash and requested that she make a bank draft and send it across to my bank. I left my Dhaka address for her to confirm the action taken. It was a 50-50 chance that she would follow through. She could easily have dropped a line confirming the deposit, without leaving her address. But I did receive a reply from her, fortunately, with her address. That gave me the springboard I was looking for. I sent her a thank-you reply with a brief introduction about me, my plus and minus points (heavily loaded on the former, and mentioning the latter in passing, just to give the semblance of being unbiased) and wondering if we could stay in touch. She showed her father the letter. “Sounds a perfect gentleman,” her father judged after reading it. He had no clue how much I had labored over it. He gave her the go ahead to respond to it. Over a period of time we got to know each other better and decided to take the final plunge. I informed my parents who insisted on matching horoscopes. The astrologers unanimously proclaimed our union an “uttama poruttam,” or an ideal match. Yes, that was God’s way to chart the course to bring us together, and I have nothing but gratitude. After four decades together, I find her a person for all seasons—a loving wife, a caring mother, and a responsible daughter-in-law. At home, much to my discomfiture, she can fix a leaking tap, try her hand at carpentry or resurrect domestic appliances. Forty years on and I am still looking for a breakthrough
Now
in winning an argument with her. It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, her pronouncements have been more marked than my impulsive utterances. Ours is a marriage of mortals. Certainly, there have been the occasional war of words. During our morning walks, the conversation takes off on a cordial note but sometimes before we cover three hundred yards it warms up into arguments. Thankfully, we have an understanding. We do not step back into the house without burying the hatchet first, be it right at the doorstep, and we carry no domestic discord for the morrow. We forget and forgive before we hit the bed. How about the promised embarrassing situations? We had sold our Delhi house and were shifting to South India. The movers had loaded all the goods. We telephoned our elder son in the United States to convey that we were heading for the airport, and the goods had all been packed and loaded. “Have you cleaned up everything from the first floor attic?” he asked. “Yes, of course, but why?” “No, nothing, just that years ago when I was stacking all the Indian Institute of Technology Brilliant Tutorials study material in the attic, I stumbled upon the well-preserved bunch of letters between you and Amma.” My regret, and a sincere one, is that we have only one life to live, to love, or be loved. Recently, our second son in Santa Clara called me to greet us on our milestone marriage anniversary. In an effort to sound polite I said, “Yes, it is nice of Amma to have put up with me all these 40 years.” “It is not just her, all of us, Appa,” he reassured me. n V.V. Sundaram, an incurable optimist, still hopes his debut mainstream novel in 100,000 words will see the light of the day—rejection slips regardless.
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 47
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CULTURAL CALENDER
October
1 Tuesday
Book Reading by Jhumpa Lahiri. She will be discussing her new book, “The Lowland,” with novelist Susan Richards Shreve. 7 p.m. Politics and Prose Bookstore, Sixth and I 600 I St. NW, Washington DC, 20001. $35. (202) 364-1919. books@politics-prose.com. 48 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
Book reading by Jhumpa Lahiri, October 1
www.politics-prose.com.
2 Wednesday
the 144th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. Performances by Isha Dube (vocal), Sudeshna Basu (vocal), Pratap Das (tabla), Krishna Ramdas (tabla), Alif Laila (sitar), Jeffery Bauer (piano), Golden Lotus Temple Bell Choir, and remarks by Ambassador of India to the United States, Nirupama Rao. 7:30 p.m. The Gandhi Memorial Center, 4748 Western Ave., Bethesda, MD 20816. (301) 320-6871. info@gandhimemorialcenter.org. www.gandhimemorialcenter.org.
managementuhjt@gmail.com. www.dcunitedtemples.org.
Karnatik Vocal Concert. Papanasam Ashok Ramani (vocal) accompanied by Mannargudi Easwaran (mridangam) and Nagai Muralidharan(violin). 5 p.m. Sri Siva Vishnu Temple, 6905 Cipriano Road, Lanham, MD 20706. Free. (301) 552-3335. ssvt@ssvt. org. www.ssvt.org. Kaushiki Chakrabarthy in Concert.
5 Saturday
Accompanied by Subhajyoti Guha (tabla) and Ajay Joglekar (harmonium). Organized by Arindam Ghosh Films and Chhandayan. 6 p.m. Universities at Shady Grove, 9630 Guldelsky Drive,Rockville, MD 20850. $20, $25, $30, $50,. (613) 320-8760, (703) 795-3019. aghosh1972@gmail.com, chhandayanva@ gmail.com. www.tabla.org.
Diwali Mela. Fireworks, food, shops and children’s entertainment. Organized by United Hindu Jain Temples. 12 p.m. Fed Ex Field, 1600 Fedex Way, MD 20785. General $5, students/seniors $3. (443) 538-3006.
Navarathna Raga Laya. Music concert by flutist V.K. Raman. Organized by Murugan Temple of North America. 6 p.m. Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, 6125 Montrose Road, Rockville MD 20852.
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$15, $25, $50, $100. (301) 552-4889. www. murugantemple.org.
Navratri Festival. Arpan band performs. Activities include raas, garba and bhangra. Snacks will be served. Organized by Gujarati Samaj of Metropolitan Washington. 8 p.m. Bohrer Park, Gaithersburg, MD, 506, South Frederick Ave., Gaithersburg, MD 20877 . $12, Free (children under five). (301) 8389778, (301) 989-9014, (301) 236-9570. president@DCSamaj.org. www.dcsamaj.org.
October
6 Sunday
Jayanti Chakraborty in Concert.
Performing Rabindra Sangeet, Nazrul geet, atulprasadi, dwijendrageeti and adhunk songs with team of Kolkata musicians. Organized by Dhroopad. 4 p.m. Holiday Inn Express, Grand Ballroom, 6401 Brandon Ave., Springfield, VA 22150. $15, $25, $50. (571) 723-1809, (703) 403-1275. events@dhroopad. org, dhroopad@dhroopad.org. www.dhroopad. org.
October
12 Saturday
Chandrika Krishnamurthy performs, Oct. 17
Dance Drama. Radha Dutta and troupe
pay tribute to actors and artisits from the black and white film era with mohini attam, bharatnatyam, kuchipudi, kathak and Bengali folk dance styles. Organized by Kalalayam Dance Academy. Sterling Middle School, 201 W Holly Ave Sterling, VA 20164. (301) 581-0323.
October
13 Sunday
Eid Mela and Festival. Indian clothing, jewelry vendors and mehendi. Organized by Mariam Fashion. 3 p.m. Hyatt, 474 Elden St., Herndon, VA 20170. Free. (703) 332-5189.
October
17 Thursday
Chandrika Krishnamurthy Performs. Grammy award-winning singer combines Hindustani, Karnatic, Latin American and Jazz music elements. Director Mira Nair, Alec and Hilaria Baldwin, Lorenzo Cohen, Sean Corn, Vidya Dehejia, and John Schumacher will also be present. 6:30 p.m. Freer|Sackler Smithsonian’s Museum of Asian Art, 1050 Independence Ave SW, MRC 707 Washington, D.C. 20013-7012. $200. (202) 633-1000. www.asia.si.edu. Radha Dutta performs, Oct. 12
October
18 Friday
Sharad Poornima—Raas, Garba and Sanedo. With artists are Nila and
Amit Patel. Organized by Gujarati Samaj of Metropolitan Washington DC. 8-11:30 p.m. Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale, 8333, Little River Turnpike, Annadale, VA 22003. $12. (301) 838-9778, (301) 989-9014. President@DcSamaj.Org.
October
19 Saturday
Strange and Wondrous—Prints of India. 50 printed works that trace European and American documentation of Indian ascetics, deities and religious ceremony. The exhibit will be on view in conjunction with “Yoga: The Art of Transformation,” the world’s first exhibition on the art of yoga. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian’s Museums of Asian Art, 1050 Independence Ave SW P.O. Box 37012, MRC 707 Washington, D.C. Free. (202) 633-1000. publicaffairsAsia@si.edu. www.asia.si.edu.
R.S.V.P. Hindi Play. Comedy drama written by Pali Bhupinder Singh featuring Dalvinder Multani (director), Paul Singh, Amritpal Kaur, Soniya Arya and Goldie Manocha. Ends Oct. 20. Organized by October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 49
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events Natyabharati. 4 p.m. Kreeger Auditorium, Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, 6125 Montrose Road, Rockville MD 20852. $16, $24, $20, $30. (571) 296-1286, (571) 445-0123. natyabharati.org.
Vijya Dashami Mela. Ravan Dahen,
Garba, Mehendi, cultural programs, boutiques, food bazaar and jewelry. 4 p.m. Durga Temple, 8400 Durga Place Fairfax Station, VA 22039. Free. (412) 298-0106, (703) 569-5957. www.durgatemple.org.
Shafaat Khan in Concert. Will be
performing sitar, surbahar and tabla using Sufi-inspired, western classical and African rhythm compositions and will be accompanied by his brother Wajahat Khan (sarod). 8 p.m. The Alden Theatre, 1234 Ingleside Ave, McLean, VA 22101. $18, $27. (703) 7900123. www.aldentheatre.org.
October
26 Saturday
Diwali Festival. Food, dance and music
performances, fashion show, clothing, accessories vendors. Activities for kids include moon bounce, puppet shows and raffles.
Your Best Guide to Indian Events Organized by Asha-Jyothi. 5 p.m. Park View High School, 400 W Laurel Ave, Sterling, VA 20164. $15, $20. (703) 870-1961. contactus@asha-jyothi.org. www/asha-jyothi.org.
Silverscreen—Celebrating 100 Years of Indian Cinema through Classical Dance. Performing different styles of dance
corresponding to the varied languages of India. Organized by Indian Dance Educators Association. 6 p.m. Artisphere Spectrum Theater, 1611 N Kent St, Arlington, VA 22209. $12, $15. (240) 491-3467. www. ideadancers.org.
October
27 Sunday
Diwali Mela. Live music, dancing, food stalls, clothing and jewelry booths. Organized by Sanjeev Kumar. 2 p.m. Holiday Inn, 1500 E Market St., Leesburg, VA 20176. Free. (703) 300-7488.
October
28 Monday
An Awards Dinner and Discussion to Celebrate the Power of Film.
Honoring outstanding leaders whose work exemplifies the power of media to inform, educate and empower. Aamir Khan, Kathryn Bigelow and The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict will be honored. Ambassador for India, Nirupama Rao will serve as co-chair. Organized by America Abroad Media. 6:30 p.m. Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, 1301 Constitution Ave., NW, Washington DC. $350. (202) 457-8050. sbusch@americaabroadmedia.org. www.americaabroadmedia.org/awardsdinner.
Share your health stories with India Currents readers! We are accepting original submissions that focus on health and wellness.
Yoga & Spritual Calendar Saturdays Balaji Suprabhatha Seva. Group chant-
ing of Balaji Suprabatham, Vishnu Sahasra Namam, Balaji Astothram, Lakshmi Astothram and Balaji Govinda Namams. Followed by prasad. 9:45-11 a.m. 4525 Pleasant Valley Road, Chantilly, VA.
Yoga Classes. Self-guided and instructor assisted. 7-9 a.m. (Self-Guided), 9-10 a.m. (Instructor Guided). 4525 Pleasant Valley Rd Chantilly, VA. ( 703) 378-8401. Sundays Geeta Discussions. Explanation of vari-
ous chapters of Karma and Bhakti Yoga. Organized by Rajdhani Mandir. 4:15-5:30 p.m. 4525 Pleasant Valley Rd Chantilly, VA .
Sanskrit Class. Emphasis on Sanskriti
(culture). Taught by Moti Lal Sharma. $60. 3-4 p.m. 4525 Pleasant Valley Rd Chantilly, VA.
Yoga Classes. Self-guided and instructor
assisted Yoga classes. 7-9 a.m. (Self-Guided) and 9-10 a.m. (Instructor Guided). 4525 Pleasant Valley Rd Chantilly, VA. (703) 378-8401.
60+ senior Citizens Club. 3 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mangal Mandi, 17110 New Hampshire Avenue, Silver Spring, MD. (301) 421-0985. Bhajans. 6-7:30 p.m. Mangal Mandir,
17110 New Hampshire Avenue, Silver Spring, MD. (301)- 421-0985.
October
5 Saturday
Sarada Navratri Dasara Celebrations. Ends Oct. 13. Sri Siva Vishnu
Temple, 6905 Cipriano Road , Lanham, MD 20706. (301) 552-3335. www.ssvt.org.
Send your 600-800-word essay on disease prevention, exercise, ayurvedic cooking, or any other health-related topic to Mona Shah at events@indiacurrents.com.
Kaushiki Chakrabarthy in concert, Oct. 5
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October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 51
reflections
Gandhi’s Legacy By Apala G. Eagan
I
t was on a chance visit to Riverside that I saw a figure towering beneath the blue of the California skies that seemed strangely familiar and brought back memories from my childhood in India—a bronze sculpture of a man wearing a dhoti with a shawl hung over his left shoulder and draped partially over his chest, leaving most of it bare. Beneath his breast bone, his stomach seemed hollow. His head was bent and through his glasses perched on his nose he gazed down at his path; balding and well past his prime, he nonetheless appeared to be in a perpetual forward motion. Unsmiling, his face did not appear grim rather, it had a contemplative look. Signs of age were visible on his jowls and around his mouth. A sunken grey and black marble walkway surrounded the statue, and etched on the wall was this quotation by Albert Einstein: “Generations to come will scarcely believe that such a one as this, in flesh and blood ever walked upon this earth.” Sculptors Madan and Aruna Garge of India have not only created a realistic figure, they have also developed a narrative of Gandhi’s life at the base of the piece. The Mahatma is shown bending down to grab a handful of salt from the Arabian Sea by the shores of Gujarat in defiance of the salt tax imposed on the Indians in 1930 by the British. The soft swell of bronze at the very bottom is evocative of the ocean waves; his wife Kasturba, her sari draped over her head and shoulders, is a step behind by his side. Another scene shows Gandhi being thrown off a railway carriage in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa; yet another depicts him at his spinning wheel making khadi cloth, his left arm outstretched holding a spool of thread. His message of non-violent struggle has continued to reverberate across the globe during and well after his death. His spiritual heirs include Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. An image of King, the American civil rights leader giving one of his many speeches, stood tall and imposing on the other side of 52 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
the base. Behind him a much smaller image of Nelson Mandela had been fashioned from the bronze and farther back, almost merging into the background, were the face and figure of Cesar Chavez, famous for his activism for farm workers’ rights, particularly in California. Fewer people may have heard of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, but the Afghan leader known as the “Frontier Gandhi” fought alongside the man from Gujarat to free his country from the same master; he is shown bearded and as being deep in thought. It took me back many years to my childhood home in Calcutta where the gramophone would belt out a song that at times still rings in my ears, though I do not recall much of the words except the refrain of “Gandhiji ki Jai”; it had a catchy beat and the music flowed like the waves. Little images carved out of polished bamboo of Gandhi clad in a dhoti and carrying a walking stick proliferated in stores as wall hangings or desk ornaments. The charkha or spinning wheel shown in the sculpture stood as a symbol of the independence struggle—the effort to achieve self-sufficiency from the production of cloth at home as opposed to purchasing material made from cotton grown on Indian soil but manufactured in the mills of Lancashire. It was Gandhi who spearheaded the production of khadi, a homespun cloth useful for daily use. Another potent message may lie in the support of natural fiber and handloomed fabrics. Cotton and linen are plant products and hand-loomed textiles typically use vegetable dyes which are not harmful to the environment; moreover, production of such material uses little or no fossil fuels such as coal. These facts may well have particular resonance today. I recall that college students in Delhi during my time sported khadi kurtas in jewel tones of green, purple, blue, yellow and crimson which were typically worn over jeans. Years later, when I visited India again, I found myself buying some mauve and black floral print khadi fabric and getting a sundress tailor-made.
The sculpture is the brainchild of Lalit Acharya, founder of the Riverside Mahatma Gandhi Peace Foundation, who felt that a monument dedicated to Gandhi would be a good symbol of peace in his city, which saw a build-up of racial tension in 1998 when police shot a black woman. Placed in a prominent section of the Main Street Mall in downtown Riverside, this symbol of peace and activism remains visible to all local residents as well as visitors and is in fact, right across from the historic Mission Inn. Viewers may note that the Mahatma passed away on January 30, 1948 and this year marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of his assassination. A little known fact is that the United Nations declared Gandhi’s birthday, October 2, be recognized as the International Day of Non-Violence. Artists express their message through symbolism and imagery and indeed, the Garges’ have demonstrated that they are adept in their art. Gandhi’s classic pose, the forward stride and a walking stick in his right hand, contains a message that may prove timeless and influence generations to come.n Apala G. Egan is a teacher, translator, and writer.
California Declares October as Month for Hindu Awareness By Ritu Jha
I
t was a historic moment for California’s Hindu American community, when on June 24th, the senate floor at the Capitol unanimously passed the resolution designating October as Hindu American awareness and appreciation month. The bill was authored by state Senate Majority Leader Ellen M Corbett, who said, “As the senator representing the 10th state senate district, I am honored to represent constituents from many diverse backgrounds including a significant number of Hindu Americans.” She said California is home to a thriving community of over 370,000 Hindu Americans that enrich “our state’s diversity and professional assets in fields as diverse as academia, science, technology, business, arts and literature.” She thanked her colleagues for supporting the bill that recognizes the contributions of Hindu Americans as well as designates October 2013 in their honor. “This is the first time any resolution recognizing Hindus has ever been passed in the entire country,” said Samir Kalra, director and senior fellow for human rights, Hindu American Foundation (HAF). “It is the beginning of the great movement for Hindu Americans in California,” adds Kalra. “It was historic, so it feels great.” He said, “Today it’s at the state level and hopes one day it will reach at the national level.” Kalra said the Foundation helped draft the bill and the measure would “recognize and acknowledge the significant contributions made by Californians of Hindu heritage to the state.” “It’s great to see that the contribution the Indian American community is making is now being recognized at the highest levels of the state,” Ro Khanna, former deputy assistant secretary at the US Department of Commerce in the Obama administration and 2014 Congressional candidate from California district 17. About 105 people of various interfaith groups were present at the Capitol on June 24. “I am very proud to see that the community believes in religious pluralism. I am running from the 17th Congressional district and I am fortunate to have people of strong faiths from different backgrounds that make our state and country stronger. I
Senior Human Rights Fellow Samir Kalra, Executive Council Member Vinnet Sharma, Fremont Vice-Mayor Anu Natarajan, Fremont City Council Member Raj Salwan, and Union Sanitary Board Vice President Anjali Lathi with a commemorative plaque of the resolution. Photo credit: Preston
Merchant
am a big believer in religious pluralism and also that people of various faiths should have a voice in public debate. I am a proud American and like an American I think all different faiths should be respected,” he added. Answering a question on why it took so long for the state to recognize the Hindu community, Khanna said, “It takes a decade to start and to establish a political voice.” The unanimous passage of SCR 32 was celebrated by an HAF delegation of more than 70 Hindu Americans that travelled to the State Capitol from various parts of the state. The delegation was present in the Senate Gallery to witness the historic vote, while HAF’s Director/Senior Human Rights Fellow, Samir Kalra, Esq. and Executive Council Member, Vineet Sharma, M.D., were presented with a commemorative version
of the resolution on the Senate floor. Kalra and Sharma were joined on the Senate floor by local Hindu American elected officials, including San Jose City Council Member Ash Kalra, Fremont Vice-Mayor Anu Natarajan, Fremont City Council Member Raj Salwan, and Union Sanitary Board Vice President Anjali Lathi. Starting October, the HAF will work with City Hall as well as schools in California to commemorate the event by hosting educational activities and creating awareness about Hinduism in general. “The HAF is doing this for next generation, so that they feel proud about their culture,” added Senate Majority Leader Ellen M Corbett. n
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 53
healthy life
Good Health Less about exercise and more about movement
T
here are a few new buzz words in town: “active couch potato” and “organic mover.” Just when we were becoming comfortably smug in our daily workout research has thrown a monkey wrench in our Pilates Reformer. It turns out that our herculean effort to ensure the thousands of dollars we spend annually on gym memberships is not money wasted may not be enough. But don’t despair. Giving up on health is not an option and before we begin to list all the reasons why we can’t possibly add any more exercise to our lives know this: we don’t have to. Recommendations on the amount of exercise we should take haven’t changed since 2008. Both Livestrong and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention agree that one hundred and fifty minutes of moderate intensity activity each week—time that can parceled into ten-minute blocks—will adequately support cardiovascular health. In other words three ten-minute walks per day; five days a week is all it takes. Add in two days of light weight lifting and we’re on to a healthy lifestyle. Of course, these recommendations will not transform our bodies into those of Olympic athletes, but they will keep us vertical. They will keep our joints moving, our hearts beating, and our muscles strong. Therefore, as long as we’re consistent and the time we spend playing sports, hiking, dancing or swimming follows the suggested guidelines, exercise is not the issue. The problem, it seems, is the time we spend sitting. Results of a recent study of 100,000 American adults suggest that individuals who sit for more than six hours per day have a 40% greater risk of death over fifteen years—regardless of the amount of exercise they do. Individuals whose work involves long periods of sitting have twice the rate of cardiovascular disease compared to their more active friends. They have a 50% greater likelihood of a heart attack. While regular exercise adds a zest54 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
By Mimm Patterson
ful clarity to life the truth is we still spend a far greater amount of time sitting than what is healthy for the body. Sitting has more of an effect on the body than we want to believe. Sitting decreases the activity of the fat burning lipoprotein lipase. Because we are not using our own body weight for support, sitting diminishes bone density. It increases blood pressure while decreasing the diameter of our arteries. And because it increases blood pressure, habitual and epic bouts of sitting does the health of the kidneys no favors. At all. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it is relatively simple to transform from an “active couch potato” to an “organic mover.” An active couch potato, sometimes mistaken for The Weekend Athlete and typically an individual filled with impressive intentions can change into an organic mover by spending more time on her feet during those hours when the rest of her office-mates are sitting. One of the nicest ways I know to add more organic movement to life is by delivering messages
to co-workers in person rather than by sending an email or text. But what about those of us who work from home? The closest thing I have to an office-mate is my foot thumping upstairs neighbor. I spend the nonyoga teaching part of my work life at home, in front of a computer. What can I do to bust a move? A standing work station is a good choice. With a big enough budget we can go one step further—pun intended— by investing in a treadmill desk. Yes, someone has brought new meaning to the phrase “rat race” by combining a work station and treadmill. I’ll confess to coveting the gigantic ode to multitasking but since it’s unlikely one exists small enough to fit through the door of my studio apartment we’ll have to be more creative. In other words, we have to engage our brains if we want to engage our bottoms. I turned my desk at home into a standing work station by cleaning and then inverting a large ceramic planter. Of course a stack of encyclopedias will manage the same task. And who uses their 27-volume set of Britannica when they have Google at their finger tips? The decorative planter, however, is heavy enough to remain stable and holds my laptop at the perfect height for my 5’5” frame. While standing rather than sitting at our work stations is great, experts still recommend that we take a break every thirty minutes. To help me do that—especially when I’m working on a project and have settled into a flow—I’ll use the timer on my smart phone. Stepping away from the work station is an opportunity to stretch the body and to clear the mind. The first thing I do is look out the window into the far distance to give my eyes relief from the strain of the short focal length that is endemic with computer work. And then I blink. Even having a slight squint when facing our monitor can reduce our blink rate by 50%. A slower blink rate contributes to chronic dry and strained eyes. So before I move, I blink.
Allowing our body to move organically suggests we need to listen to it. After sitting or standing at my work station for thirty minutes, as I take my break I ask myself “What part of my body needs attention?” Sometimes I need to do nothing more than pace the living room for a few minutes. Sometimes, though, my lower back feels tight and so I’ll take a gentle forward fold with my hands supported on a wall or table top and my legs perpendicular to the floor. This will create a long stretch through the back of the legs, across the hips, up the spine and into the shoulders. I’ll bend one knee and then the other to keep the joints moving fluidly and to add stretch to the outside of the hips. If my shoulders are craving attention I’ll choose movements that lift the front of my chest to counter the ubiquitous forward roll we all seem to have mastered over the past few decades. With my hands clasped behind me I’ll roll by shoulders back and down. I’ll lift my heart toward the sky and allow the whole front of my body to open. When I’m feeling “too in my head” I’ll stamp my feet or jog in place and stretch my toes. If my body feels heavy and leaden I’ll dance. To increase circulation and to stimulate neural pathways I’ll form a loose fist and tap my body from foot to cranium. When I reach my scalp I’ll use my finger tips and give my head a vigorous massage. How we choose to move—what we choose to move—depends so much on who we are and the work we’re doing. While you might begin with my examples it’s more important that you find a way back into your own body.
But not all movement is physical. Sometimes the shift we need to see is on the inside. We need to remind ourselves that remaining present in the moment—with our body, our work and our spirit—requires something more than a chime that sounds every thirty minutes. To help myself stay present at my desk I created a desk top altar. It’s not much and in fact if anyone took a look at my desk they would never notice it there. I found a small box and made it my own with paint and paper. I believe this is an important step as it infuses the box with our energy and set intentions. As the paint dried I flipped through magazines and found words that described my hopes, my talents and my life. I collaged them to the inside of the box and then added a few small items as reminders of where I had been and where I hoped to go: a seashell collected on a beach in Australia when I was there to observe the solar eclipse, a feather to encourage my ideas to take flight, and a button I found in a San Francisco shop with the word “truth” imprinted on it. Truth can set us free. So can breaking the invisible tethers that bind us to our desks. Move. Breathe. Take a break. Know truth. For more details and options, visit http:// www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/everyone/ guidelines/adults.html.n Mimm has been a yoga teacher, massage therapist, reflexologist and writer. When she’s not balancing in Ardha Chandrasana or wrestling with a sentence, Mimm’s either playing her guitar or doing homework. She is working towards a master’s degree in transpersonal psychology.
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travel
Flavors of Konkan Following the gastronomic trail of the Konkan coast By Kavita Kanan Chandra
M
y trip to Harihareshwar, Srivardhan and Diveagar on the central Konkan coast in western India (Maharashtra) was an experience to savor. The stresses and strains of urban existence disappeared upon arrival in this cradle of nature just four hours away from Mumbai. The Konkan coast proved to be a great place to unwind for a city-weary soul like myself. So many times we just fritter away our holidays in pursuit of tourist attractions, thus engaging in unnecessary hopping from place to place and ending up tired instead of refreshed. The real joy of traveling is to pause, experience the sights, sounds and smells and take in the views in an unhurried manner. As if taking the cue from our slackened pace the internet, too, refused to work and mobile signals started playing hide and seek. The latter aspect might be welcomed by someone who lives a fast corporate life, desperate to unplug. I did, however, feel the lack of the internet. My kids could have remained occupied inside hotel rooms and I could have communicated with friends and family while on vacation. But the poor connectivity in the region made my travel truly unconnected with the outside world and helped me make an invaluable connection with Mother Earth in all her pristine glory. My gastronomic adventures at Hariheshwar began at the homes of local village folks. These places are modest homes doubling as eateries called Gharguthis or Khanavals and one has to place orders well in advance for lunch and dinner to savor deli-
Harihareshwar rocks
At the beach
made batata phovu or poha (puffed rice with potatoes) and kanda phovu/poha (puffed rice with onions) garnished with lots of fresh grated coconut to bring about that irresistible coastal flavor. The basic recipe requires tempering with green chillies and curry leaves and a squeeze of lemon on poha and voila a tasty treat is ready in a jiffy! I also loved the desserts sheera (sooji halwa) and ukdiche modak (a dessert made of coconut, jaggery, rice and poppy seeds) to satisfy my sweet tooth. After taking a long leisurely walk through village lanes, climbing hills and spending peaceful moments at the ancient Harihareshwar temple we were ready for lunch. Little did we know that this would turn into an interesting affair for us. The thatched roof made of terracotta bricks and the cowdung polished mud floor of the modest open air dining hall looked inviting. The fresh catch of the day was being cooked in the adjoining kitchen and the wafting aroma of seafood was enticing. The palm fringed open air dining facility and soft sea breeze cooling the air in the absence of electricity was heavenly. There were some cats causing a ruckus in the vicinity and it was a tussle to concentrate on the delicious fresh grilled pomfret lying in front of me. The cats were stubbornly sitting under the table ready to grab any bits of fallen fish or chicken. Brushing them off as minor irritants my fellow seafood aficionados had eyes only on their pomfrets, prawns, Rawas (Indian
Alphonso unripe mangoes
Hens 56 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
cious Konkan food. For breakfast we went unannounced to Guru Geeta where the open kitchen was being readied for orders. The aroma of tea, the clatter of pots and pans and the sight of hot milk being poured in glasses made me very hungry. I devoured the freshly
Konkani Surmai Thali
Salmon) and Surmai (Kingfish). Finally after watching the cats jump over tables to lick the leftovers on other tables, I had to ask the owners of Vishranti to chase them away so I could eat in peace. Harihareshwar was a food-lover’s delight and easy on the pocket too. The ambience was perfect; a sleepy coastal village with no-fuss homes serving fish caught fresh in the morning and cooked in a simple homely way. And the cats were not a menace in other Gharghutis. Non-vegetarian fare was available at Vishranti, Shivshanti, Gokul and vegetarian Konkani thalis (plates) at Guru Geeta and Swayam. These simple but hygienic eateries do not serve a-la-carte but mostly thalis or plates. Even the popular Konkani restaurant Open Umbrella at Mangaon, en-route at NH-17 Mumbai Goa highway is sought after for its Konkani thalis. Situated beside a lake, with umbrellas providing shade, it provided the perfect ambience. We plunged into the rhythm Fried pomfret of rural Konkan life. I had never woken up to the cock’s call in my life. It had always been the irritating sound of the alarm, a contraption that I wanted to throw out of the window as soon as it sounded. But cocka-doodle–doo was like music to my ears and I rushed out to find several hens and cocks chasing each other and waking the whole village of Harihareshwar. My kids were excited as they recorded this natural sound on their mobile phones. We had opted to stay at a Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation cottage that was built amidst groves of
Harihareshwar cottage
Gharghuti
palm adjacent to a hilly forest. It was walking distance from the beach and we could hear the roaring of waves and the rustling of palm fronds in the stillness of the night. With nothing much to do other than chasing hens, plucking the famous Alphonso mangoes from trees and paying obeisance to the village deity, we completely surrendered ourselves to the sandy beaches in the mornings and late afternoons. At dawn we were up and jogging on the beach till the sun’s rays pierced through the leafy branches of the tall Suru (Casuarina) trees. The morning rays reflecting off the shimmering water tempted us into wading in the water. Since the exclusive MTDC beach has few tourists, on several occasions, we found ourselves to be the only ones on the beach. The next town, Srivardhan, which has the only ATM facility in the vicinity, is a green coastal town with beautiful Suru lined beaches and small wadis (leafy lanes). Its other claim to fame was the birthplace of Peshwa Balaji Vishwanath, the founder of Peshwas (The powerful dynasty of the Maratha kingdom). Apart from its historic importance it also has some fine dining options. We had a sumptuous Surmai or Rawa Fry and bombil (Bombay duck) at Hotel Prasad. Other options are Sagar Darshan and Alankar. Most of these central Konkan coastal villages and towns have eating and lodging facilities inside homes. It is a delight to drive along the Shekhadi road running parallel to the Arabian Sea leading to the off-thebeaten-track village of Diveagar and feast on delicious homely food at Kshitij Lodge or Suvarnaganesh Khanaval. In most of these Gharghutis, they have October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 57
Village boys playing cricket on the beach
reasonably priced vegetarian or chicken/mutton/fish thalis for lunch and dinner. The non-vegetarian thali basically consisted of a dry preparation, a curry, chapati/bhakri (white millet) and rice. As far as seafood is concerned one is spoilt for choices, be it pomfret, prawns, bangda (mackerels), bombil (Bombay duck), rawas (Indian salmon), surmai (kingfish) and kurli (crab). A Konkan vegetarian thali typically consists of two vegetables, dal, rice, chapati or Jowar bhakri (Sorghum or white millet). Sol Kadhi, a pinkish drink made of Kokum fruit and coconut milk, is a staple with all Konkani meals. The Konkani vegetarian fare is not very spicy and yet very tasty. The temple hamlet of Diveagar has lots of coconut, banana and betel nut trees and bullock carts offering free rides, which we took advantage of. The four-mile stretch of clean beach is lined with Suru trees and Belu trees, a favorite with locals for playing cricket. The beach is flush with migratory seagulls. It has a happening fish market so a meal here means fish straight from the Arabian Sea and onto your plate. Another important fish market is Harne in central Konkan where fish auctions take place in a big way. Back in Harihareshwar I was eager to learn more about Konkani cuisine. No prizes for guessing the one ingredient common to most Konkani dishes is coconut. They use it
Diveagar village 58 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
liberally be it grated, dried, fried, pasted or as coconut milk. Other spices used are ginger, garlic, cumin, cardamom, peppercorns and dry red chillies. Some dishes are prepared with kokum (fresh and dried), tamarind or unripe mango. As I found out from the ladies of Gharghutis the recipe of sol kadhi is quite simple. They soak some pieces of kokum fruits in water for a few hours and then grind them with grated fresh coconut, garlic flakes and green chillies. Once a paste is prepared, water is added to it and the resultant sol kadhi is extracted. My fascination for this fetching pinkish drink prompted me to buy kokum extract that is sold in large plastic bottles in the stalls leading to the Kalbhairav temple. I also purchased papad (wafers), Alphonso mango papad and dried chillies. The Kalbhairav temple is dedicated to Shiva. It attracts devotees, the only other attraction of this sunny sleepy village apart from its palm-lined beaches and seafood. But this is also the very reason why we had left the hustle and bustle of Mumbai, skipped the usual Mumbaikars weekend trip to Alibaug-Kashid-Murud Janjira stretch and opted for the sylvan coastal stretch of Harihareshwar-Shrivardhan-Diveagar (Diveghar). The sole reason for this four day trip was to slow down our pace, savor the
Sunrise at the beach
solitude, avoid unnecessary hopping on the tourist trail, live life like unhurried villagers and enjoy their local cuisine. It was the mango season, and the trees had drooping branches laden with Alphonso (hapoos) mangoes. I couldn’t hide my smile as the juicy yellowish smooth fragrant mangoes that were sold in Mumbai at half the price. It was a steal and I carried with me the sweet fragrance of Konkan back to the teeming bustle of Mumbai. n
Kavita Kanan Chandra is a freelance journalist and travel writer based in Mumbai. She has lived and worked in different parts of India and understands the pulse of her country.
A bullock cart
relationship diva
A Clash of Countries By Jasbina Ahluwalia
Q
I found your column online while researching complicated, inter-ethnic relationships. My boyfriend and I have been together for about a year and a half. He is from India originally, I am from California but my mother is from Pakistan. She’s been in the United States for over 30 years. On my boyfriend’s recent trip to India he told his parents about our relationship and it’s pretty much been hell ever since. His mother cries and says horrible things to him like “you’re so selfish, if you marry her we won’t be a part of your life, etc.” All of this has nothing to do with who I am and more to do with all the preconceived notions they have about me and my Pakistani background. He tells me he loves me and wants to marry me but needs more time to talk to them. What’s bothering me the most is that he has not truly committed to our figuring things out and getting married. It’s almost like it’s contingent upon his parents’ approval which I fear will
never come. I love him very much and the thought of losing him is devastating. On the other hand I don’t know how much longer I can bear feeling like I am. I feel so lost and confused. Do I fight for what is right and hope that everything will work out or do I end this misery now and possibly save us both a lot of hurt in the future?
A
It takes the commitment of two to make a relationship work. There is only so much that you can do. Try to keep the lines of communication open—perhaps there are things he can share with his parents about you and/or your family, which may increase their comfort level? It may also be likely that he has been a victim of his mother’s manipulation through the years, and is probably torn by her resistance. It is also worth noting that his parents may hold this resentment post-marriage; you
cannot count on them ever changing their mind. Unfortunately, the estranged relations between Pakistan and India can be a source of deeply-entrenched mistrust between the people of both countries. Ask yourself if this relationship is worth the trouble should his parents never change. If you can handle their presence in your life, and believe he is truly the man for you, then you must do what you can in order to live without regrets. If you cannot accept their misgivings, or you find him not taking the relationship as seriously as you are, then it may be best to end things now. n Jasbina is the founder and president of Intersections Match, the only personalized matchmaking and dating coaching firm serving singles of South Asian descent in the United States. She is also the host of Intersections Talk Radio. Jasbina@intersectionsmatch.com.
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recipes
Food in Mythology By Malar Gandhi
I
n ancient mythologies, everything is a gift of the Gods. Even the knowledge of food production is thought to occur by divine intervention. Examples appear crossculturally. Ninkasi, the Mesopotamian Goddess of beer, helps the dough rise. She is the one who inspired bakers to add sesame seeds and herbs to bread. In ancient Greek mythology, Dionysus, the God of grape harvest, wine making and wine, gave nourishment and strength to his patrons. In Indian mythology, a Hindu who sincerely worships is rewarded with rice by Annapurna, the Goddess of food. Anna means food and purna means complete. Because of its centrality to our lives, food becomes a perfect vehicle for rituals and food rituals become central to many religions. The association between humans and Gods endows food with a sacred quality—a mystical solidarity of man with plants and animals. Consuming a ritual meal is considered a sacred bond between the participants of the feasts. Consuming votive food gives the feeling that you are consuming some element
of divinity. Food offerings to the deities is a common practice in mythology. In order to prevent the wrath of the Gods, priests were obligated to procure food for the sanctuaries. Some deities have special food preferences. Lettuce is the favorite vegetable of the Egyptian God Set. Butter is Lord Krishna’s favorite, and many temples accept fresh coconut, raw milk and fruits as offerings to the Gods. In Hindu temples, kheer (pudding) is given to the devotees as holy offerings. Beer is frequently mentioned in the mythologies of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Scandinavia. In Greek mythology, wine plays a prominent role. Both in Greek and in Indian mythology, ambrosia is the food that gives Olympian and Hindu Gods eternal youth and beauty. They believed that ambrosia made even an ordinary person immortal. The Indian counterpart of ambrosia is amrita. Folk stories tell us that nectar was found at the bottom of the ocean—a heavenly elixir that ensures
Perumal (Lord Vishnu) Temple Thayir Saadham Ingredients 2 cups cooked rice, mashed 1 cup milk 1 cup plain yogurt salt to taste 1 inch ginger root, minced 2 green chilies, chopped ½ tsp mustard seeds ½ tsp cumin seeds ¼ tsp asafoetida 1 tsp chana dal 1 tsp urud dal ¼ peppercorns few curry leaves 2 tsp sesame oil cilantro leaves to garnish Method In a small pan, heat oil. Add mustard seeds, cumin seeds, peppercorns and let it pop. Then add asafoetida, chana dal and urud dal. Allow the dals to turn crisp and red. Add ginger, chilies and curry leaves and continue frying for a minute and then remove from heat. Add the tempered spices to the mashed 60 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
rice. Then add salt, yogurt and milk. Mix well and allow this to stand for two hours. Garnish with cilantro leaves and serve chilled or at room temperature. Serve this comfort meal as a main course along with pickles and vegetables on the side. This is served as a prasadham (offering) in many Hindu temples in South India.
Anjaneyar (Hanuman) Temple Vadai Ingredients 1 cup urud dal 2 tsp rice powder 1 tsp peppercorns 1 tsp cumin seeds 1 inch ginger, grated
immortality. There is plenty of evidence to show that the Gods loved our food. The Hindu Goddess Annapurna is described as holding a golden ladle in her right hand and a vessel full of delicious porridge in her left hand. It is also said that she does not eat a morsel unless all her devotees have been fed in her temple. n Malar Gandhi is a freelance writer who specializes in Culinary Anthropology and Gourmet Indian Cooking. She blogs about Indian Food at www.kitchentantras.com and can be reached at malargandhi@kitchentantras.com ¼ tsp asafoetida 1 dry chili, crushed few curry leaves, torn into pieces salt to taste oil for shallow frying Method Toast the black gram in a wide pan for about 2-4 minutes. Blend into a coarse powder. Mix all the above mentioned ingredients to the black gram powder, except oil. Add about a tablespoon of water to it, and run it through the grinder, preparing a coarse batter. Take a small, lemon sized, amount of batter and flatten into 4 mm thickness patties. Make a hole in the center of these patties. This methodology is applied to bring forth thorough cooking (frying) even in the middle, where sometimes the batter can remain uncooked. Heat oil in a shallow frying pan, and fry these vadas till crisp and brown. Never overload the oil, fry only a few at a time. Remove from heat and drain them on kitchen towels for a few minutes. Serve warm as a tea time snack. This healthy version of vada is served as prasadham in many South Indian Anjaneyar temples. n
dear doctor
What’s Causing Our Estrangement? By Alzak Amlani
Q
After some therapy, my husband and I ironed out some of our relationship issues. We now have two children—ten and fourteen years old. We love our kids very much, but we notice that we may not be as connected as we should be as a family. This is disappointing to me. Our teenage girl is already very independent, into her friends, school activities and often on the internet. Our son is quieter and likes to spend time in his room reading, playing games and watching television. Both, my husband and I, work and we have our individual interests. I don’t know how to bring us all together on a regular basis. I sometimes wonder if we need some family therapy to help us deal with any issues that we are avoiding.
A
The estranged-family phenomenon that you are describing is unfortunately becoming more common as technology increases and individual schedules and pursuits dominate our lives. It’s valuable and exciting to have the freedom to pursue interests and enjoy the people you like and have things in common with. However, people are starting to live more in their own bubbles, thinking that happiness
can be found by having the power to choose exactly what you want and getting it quickly. This leads to self-absorption, orienting every decision to what you want and actually believing that getting it is where happiness and fulfillment lie. Seeking personal desires is only part of the path towards a rich, happy and meaningful life. The other parts include thinking about others, being an integral member of a family and community and letting go of your desires and even needs at times. These qualities help humans recognize how we need and belong to each other and that giving is just as fulfilling as getting. Doing without doesn’t mean deprivation, and can lead to finding contentment with yourself, what you have and empathy towards others who have much less. In your family, begin by creating activities such as meals, outings, home projects and homework time that bring everyone together. Every family needs to have structured time when the focus is being a family. The foundation of a nuclear family are the parents. Sounds like you are both busy with
your individual lives. What is going on there between the two of you? Do you have a relaxed and connected time together? If you do, then you can invite your kids into this experience as well. If there is a lot of resistance from your family in coming together regularly, you’ll need to ask directly what they don’t like about connecting. Don’t accept “we’re too busy and it’s boring” as an answer. That’s an avoidance of the estrangement in the family and perhaps, some unspoken and uncomfortable feelings. Family therapy is useful to get at the underlying issues that are not addressed directly at home. It is also a focused and safe space, where every family member is present with a skilled therapist to open up about his or her feelings toward each other and anything they need to share, ask and want help with. You would be surprised at the feelings and concerns that arise. n Alzak Amlani, Ph.D., is a counseling psychologist of Indian descent in the Bay Area. 650325-8393. Visit www.wholenesstherapy.com
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Steady Hands
viewfinder
By Dhruv Joshi
er n win
I
learned to use the potter’s wheel in America. When I visited India in 1985, my newly developed interest in pottery took me to the potter’s colony in Jamnagar, Gujarat. There, I met this above featured 77 year-old potter. He showed me various hand positions used to make British style pottery that he had learned from a British man in the 1940s. I requested to use the wheel. Confidently I started to center the clay. But no matter how deftly I tried, the wheel touched
the ground, screeched, and came to a stop. Quizzically I looked at the potter, who explained that the old style wheel did not have ball bearings to distribute the force more evenly for an amateur. n Dhruv Joshi teaches chemistry at Chabot College in Hayward, California. Teaching, meditation, and writing are his main interests. He can be reached at djoshi@comcast.net.
India Currents invites readers to submit to this column. Send us a picture with caption and we’ll pick the best entry every month. There will be a cash prize awarded to the lucky entrant. Entries will be judged on the originality and creativity of the visual and the clarity and storytelling of the caption. So pick up that camera and click away. Send the picture as a jpeg image to editor@indiacurrents.com with Subject: A Picture That Tells a Story. Deadline for entries: 10th of every month. 62 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
October 2013 | www.indiacurrents.com | 63
the last word
Of Gods and Faith By Sarita Sarvate
A
s a child, Ganesh was my favorite God. I wanted, then, to have a God in my life. Most children have no such desire because they are born into families with Gods. God and religion are passed on to them. But for me, a God, or rather an idol, was something to long for. Because we did not have any in our house. So I would sneak Gods into my life. I would line up with neighbors in the monsoon drizzle to see the building-sized Ganesh installed at the town’s textile mill. I would marvel at his silky dhoti, and his golden crown. I would practically smell the roses in his garland. Coming home, I would avoid sharing my adventures with my parents for fear of being forbidden to go again. Even at age four or five, I knew that God did not exist. I was used to my father, Dada, pontificating about the evidence against the existence of God; I was accustomed to my mother, Aai’s, violation of the Vatasavitri fast other women observed every year to obtain the same husband for the next seven incarnations. In an ultimate demonstration of subconscious sexism, I was used to resenting only Aai’s transgressions, while admiring Dada’s modernity. Still, I wanted all of God’s trappings. I wanted to make garlands for idols; I wanted to distribute sweets afI ter prayers; I wanted the pomp and celebration and fun associated with still believe religion. Most of all, I wanted to Dada’s assertions belong. that poverty, injustice, So I persuaded Dada to get our own Ganesh one year. inequality in the world From then on, we would go are all evidence against to the shop every year to purchase a colorful clay idol. It the existence would be installed in the middle room with much fanfare. Every of God. year, I discovered that I was the only member of the family able to recite the Ganapati’s aarti, Sukhakarta Dukhakarta Vata Vignachi. Every year, I laughed as Dada stood in front of the Ganesh statue, an oil lamp in one hand and a prayer book in the other, stumbling over stanzas like Lambodar Pitaambar Phanivar vandana Saral Sond Vakratunda Trinayana. But I never wondered how, growing up in their orthodox families, Aai and Dada had avoided knowledge of the scriptures. I myself knew all the stories from the Mahabharata; at age eight, I had memorized the Ramaraksha stotra; I could even draw elaborate rice powder rangoli designs from memory. I did not feel an outsider then. I kept in check the feeling of alienation buried deep inside me by participating. I danced the kathak at the Ganesh Festival; I took part in debates. I listened to lectures on Hindu philosophy. I watched three-act plays and old black and white films. I persuaded Dada to join the procession for immersion of the idols on the last day. I learned to separate religion as a cultural phenomenon from religion as a dogma. But then something happened. I drifted far away. Did it happen when I was pressured into a traditional wedding ceremony? Did it occur because the wedding was for a marriage I did not believe in? Or were the seeds sown much earlier, as I watched my mother’s brilliant mind being ravaged by mental illness? Whatever the reason, somewhere, a break happened. A childhood filled with celebration and joy turned into tragedy. I was consumed by 64 | INDIA CURRENTS | October 2013
a bleak sadness. Later, during the late eighties, overcome by deep personal disappointments, I suffered a severe clinical depression. I had just returned from New Zealand; my graduate school friends had drifted away. The only one who was left was a friend from my Hawaii days, the one who had introduced me to my second husband. At the peak of my crisis, she went to her church and asked the congregation to pray for me. Later, when she told me this, I cried. Did the break happen then? Was it because no one had prayed to Ganesh for me? Moved by my plight, my parents presented me with the only idol they possessed, a statue of Balaji, our family deity, during my visit. Religion had come to them late in life; and even then, only half-heartedly. I still have that statue in my dining room. It is not a religious symbol so much as a totem of my parents’ complex, separate histories as young single people living in Mumbai and discovering the world on their own terms. A dozen statues of Ganesh are also scattered around my house. Still, I cannot make myself believe in a God who allows so much suffering. Gods do not demonstrate their love in that way, believers would say. Perhaps they are right. My African-American secretary once told me that the one thing she lived for was going to church every Sunday. I could not fathom her sentiment. I could not understand how a person, who lived alone in a crime-infested part of Richmond, whose grandson was in prison, who suffered from numerous health problems, could have so much love for God. “What has God done for you?” I wanted to ask. I still believe Dada’s assertions that poverty, injustice, inequality in the world are all evidence against the existence of God. I was surprised recently when an architect friend asked me to accompany her to the Livermore Temple. Once there, I only observed the chaos, the noise, the gaudy décor. The place failed to evoke any nostalgia or solace for me. Yet, deep down somewhere, I envy those who can believe. I long for that childhood when I pined for idols; when prayers and rituals were symbols of belonging, of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. In those moments, an image comes back to me, of our next door neighbor, Kayande Master, presenting Dada with a framed picture of God Rama. “From today, you are going to start worshipping Gods,” he said. The day was Rama Navami. That day, Dada sent me to the shops to buy a book of prayers to Rama. Later, he bathed, recited the mantras, and after a day-long fast, dined. I remember this vignette, not as a memory of my father discovering religion, but as a neighbor’s act of love. Dada was moved, I am convinced, not by a religious spirit, so much as by his desire to please his good neighbor, Kayande Master. And regardless of faith or lack thereof, I miss that era when ritual meant arts and crafts, when sacrament was not angry but full of laughter, when religion was community, and community religion. I miss being surrounded by believers who accepted non-believers. n Sarita Sarvate (www.saritasarvate.com) has published commentaries for New America Media, KQED FM, San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune, and many nationwide publications.