The Gulf – by Tania James

Published on May 16, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A beautiful, evocative story by Tania James in The Boston Review. [via 3quarksdaily]

In later years I will come to avoid him, but for now, I am eight years old, and the man everyone says is my father is sitting in the living room. I watch him, discreetly, from the doorway. He is wearing my mother’s baby-blue robe and matching slippers whose seams are pulling apart around his big toe. He arrived the week before with three Air India tags on his single suitcase, looking little like the man in the photograph my mother kept tucked against Psalm 23 of her Bible. In the photo, he was leaning against a coconut tree, an inch of ash on the end of his cigarette.

This was the father I thought we would collect from the airport a week ago. On the morning of his arrival, my mother slipped into her churchgoing heels and dusted her face with Chantilly instead of talcum powder. The Chantilly came in a round pink case as wide as my mother’s hand, and inside was a satin pillow that smelled like the type of lady I was almost sure I would someday become. She looked perfect all the way to the airport, until she parked the car and applied a rash of blush to each cheek. “Is it too much?” she asked me, and for the first time in my life, I pitied my mother enough to lie and say no.

“Don’t ask him about Dubai,” she said. She clapped her compact shut.

But what else would I ask him about? For the past four years my father had been working in the Gulf under a man we called The Sheikh. To me, The Sheikh was a villain robed in black who kept dragging out the work contract by withholding my father’s passport. I pictured my father pleading with The Sheikh for a brief vacation, just to spend a few days with my mother and me. I pictured The Sheikh, petting his beard, shaking his head no. More:

No country to call home

Published on May 16, 2012 in Burma and human rights. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Long persecuted in their native land, the stateless Rohingya have sought sanctuary across the globe. In Mother Jones magazine, Magnum photographer Saiful Huq Omi documents their predicament.

Saiful Huq Omi, a photographer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, first focused on Burma’s Rohingya refugees in 2009, when he began documenting their lives in Bangladesh, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom. The Rohingya—an ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority from Burma’s northern Rakhine State—have been persecuted for decades; nearly a million of them are estimated to reside in Burma, while another half million have sought refuge in Bangladesh. Smaller populations have fled to other countries.

The 1982 Citizenship Law of Burma stripped the Rohingya of their nationality, making them legally stateless. As Amal de Chickera, the head of the Statelessness and Nationality Projects for the Equal Rights Trust, explained in a recent conversation with Omi: “While many individual citizens of Burma experience human rights violations, the Rohingya are specifically targeted and face discrimination as a group. Outside of Burma most Rohingya are irregular migrants with no legal status. Because they are stateless they have to travel illegally, and are thus targeted and often become victims of arbitrary detention, deportation, extortion, trafficking, and smuggling.” more

Saving the classroom from the political class

Published on May 16, 2012 in Education. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Are politicians ready for a textbook that encourages young citizens to think seriously about politics asks former NCERT advisor Suhas Palshikar who resigned in the aftermath of the political row over a cartoon of B.R. Ambedkar in class XI textbooks. From The Hindu.

When an emotional issue erupts in the public domain, argument becomes difficult and secondary to decision-making. That is what happened over the controversy regarding the inclusion of a cartoon depicting Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in a class XI textbook. One self-proclaimed inheritor and interpreter of Dr. Ambedkar’s legacy ensured the debate could not even enter the realm of reason by comparing him to the Prophet. Such persons have done immense harm to the Ambedkar legacy of critique — remember that he not only sought to critique and demolish Hinduism or Gandhi’s ideas; he even sought to critique and recreate Buddhism when he chose to embrace the Buddha. But now the controversy has become wider in its scope. When the Parliament of the country, almost in one voice, reprimands the inclusion of cartoons in political science textbooks, is there any scope for reason? Thus, in either case, argument is the casualty. more

Previously on AW: Does this Cartoon Offend You?

Also read:

Copy of the resignation letter sent by Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav: “Our duty to dissent”

Yogendra Yadav on the dangers of deletion

Power to Asia’s women

Published on May 15, 2012 in Women. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

From birth, girls in Asia face significant obstacles to fulfilling their human potential – especially their potential for leadership, write Vishakha N Desai and Astrid S Tuminez for Project-Syndicate

Everyone’s eyes on are Asia’s rise. China, once dismissed as poor and backward, is now the world’s second-largest economy. India, with its huge population, scientific prowess, and entrepreneurial vitality, is another powerful engine of Asian growth. Add to this Japan and South Korea’s formidable economies, and Southeast Asia’s dynamism, and a picture emerges of rising wealth, confidence, and leadership.

Yet few women in Asia make it to the top. Social norms undervalue girls and women, with sex-selection abortions resulting in an estimated 1.3 million girls per year not being born in China and India alone. more

Salman Rushdie’s PEN speech

Published on May 15, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In New Yorker, Salman Rushdie on censorship and creative freedom.

No writer ever really wants to talk about censorship. Writers want to talk about creation, and censorship is anti-creation, negative energy, uncreation, the bringing into being of non-being, or, to use Tom Stoppard’s description of death, “the absence of presence.” Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it. And writers want to talk about how much they get paid, and they want to gossip about other writers and how much they get paid, and they want to complain about critics and publishers, and gripe about politicians, and they want to talk about what they love, the writers they love, the stories and even sentences that have meant something to them, and, finally, they want to talk about their own ideas and their own stories. Their things. The British humorist Paul Jennings, in his brilliant essay on Resistentialism, a spoof of Existentialism, proposed that the world was divided into two categories, “Thing” and “No-Thing,” and suggested that between these two is waged a never-ending war. If writing is Thing, then censorship is No-Thing, and, as King Lear told Cordelia, “Nothing will came of nothing,” or, as Mr. Jennings would have revised Shakespeare, “No-Thing will come of No-Thing. Think again.” more

Lonely planet guide to economic growth

Published on May 15, 2012 in Books, Economy and India. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Shreekant Sambrani reviews Ruchir Sharma’s Breakout Nations. In The Asian Age:

When I was a teenager hundreds of moons ago, I was very impressed by the rate at which I grew taller. I shared my observation with my cousin, a brilliant doctor, that teens must be the fastest-growing people. She quickly disabused me of this conceit by telling me that children under five held that distinction.

I have noticed a similar conceit among the current crop of economists who compare economic development of nations. Their sole concern is the rate of growth, irrespective of the country’s background, stage of development, resource endowment or socio-political realities. The result is not too different from my faulty comparison of growth of infants to adolescents.

Comparison of growth experiences is the theme of Ruchir Sharma’s book, Breakout Nations, and, to put it simply, the growth rate is at the heart of it, despite the numerous details and asides the book abounds in. Sharma’s objective is succinctly summarised in the book’s sub-title, In Pursuit of the Next Miracle Economies, what he terms the breakout ones. Sharma attempts to do this by taking us through his experiences of the last decade as the head of the global emerging markets equity team at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. His unique vantage point exposes him to not just economic realities of a large number of countries but also a wealth of interesting if impressionistic details, which he generously shares with his readers. More:

How do you build an international university from scratch? Cases in India

Published on May 15, 2012 in Education and India. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Poised to become the most populous country in the world by 2030, India is facing tremendous challenges in addressing the educational needs of its citizens. To put into context the magnitude of the educational challenge that confronts India, there are more than 370 million Indian school-age citizens (ages 6-23) representing a cohort larger than the entire population of the U.S. and three times the total population of Mexico.

Considering the fertility rates in India, this number will remain unchanged for the next 40 years. By comparison, the college-age population in China will be reduced an estimated 23 percent over the same period. Currently, for each preschool student in the U.S., there are four in India, and the number of elementary education students in India is almost six times larger than in the U.S. How can India cope with such great demand? The Indian government has estimated that it will be necessary to build 1,000 new universities and 50,000 colleges by 2020 in order to accommodate expected demand. Just think about the need to build an average of 125 new universities and 6,250 new colleges per year.

Among the many universities being built in India, I will discuss two interesting cases. More:

‘India is racist, and happy about it’

Published on May 15, 2012 in India and Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Diepriye Kuku, a Black American PhD student at the Delhi School of Economics, in Outlook:

Discrimination in Delhi surpasses the denial of courtesy. I have been denied visas, apartments, entrance to discos, attentiveness, kindness and the benefit of doubt. Further, the lack of neighbourliness exceeds what locals describe as normal for a capital already known for its coldness.

My partner is white and I am black, facts of which the Indian public reminds us daily. Bank associates have denied me chai, while falling over to please my white friend. Mall shop attendants have denied me attentiveness, while mobbing my partner. Who knows what else is more quietly denied?

“An African has come,” a guard announced over the intercom as I showed up. Whites are afforded the luxury of their own names, but this careful attention to my presence was not new. ATM guards stand and salute my white friend, while one guard actually asked me why I had come to the bank machine as if I might have said that I was taking over his shift. More:

Decadence and the IPL

Published on May 12, 2012 in Cricket. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

In Times of India, Mukul Kesavan says it’s not just dumbing down, not just monstrous but IPL is a celebration of utter decadence.

In the beginning, the Indian Premier League (IPL) seemed just a new kind of tournament. At worst, it was a dumbing down of cricket, at best, it was inspired event management. In the five years since its inception, though, it has become monstrous.

The tournament is historically interesting because it is republican India’s first public celebration of decadence. One charac- teristic feature of decadence is a contempt for convention and procedural scruple. Indians are familiar with this in everyday life, but the IPL is a departure in that the people involved with it legitimise and defend conflicts of interest explicitly and in full public view.  more

Inside India’s rent-a-womb business

Published on May 12, 2012 in Health and Women. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Gestational dormitories, routine C-sections, quintuple embryo implants. Brave new world? Nope. It’s surrogacy tourism, reports Scott Carney for Mother Jones

From its pock-marked exterior walls and stark interior, you’d never guess that the pink three-story building tucked in a narrow alley a few blocks from the train station in the fast-growing city of Anand houses India’s most successful surrogate childbirth business. But this is the place they raved about on Oprah. Nowadays, thanks to the endorsement of daytime TV’s leading lady, the Akanksha Infertility Clinic fertilizes eggs, implants and incubates embryos, and finally delivers contract babies at a rate of nearly one a week. more

History matters

Published on May 11, 2012 in Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

In Mint Lounge, Rohit Brijnath asks why India isn’t a bit more careful about preserving its sporting past.

Do you recall a first tennis racket? The first bat, the first clumsy pads? Do you have a sporting history? I remember entering Calcutta’s Gander and Co., buying hockey sticks that were then pitted by a divider and oiled, cork balls that cracked, heavy footballs whose only promise after the rains was concussion after a header. I had a scrapbook, with pictures of a balanced Sunny and a diving Solkar gummed across a page.

But memory dies and scrapbooks find their way into a kabadiwallah’s (scrap dealer’s) jute bag. So much fades. Not just our history, but more vitally the athletes. Their clippings, letters, jerseys, bats…it all becomes a precious past lost in a storeroom. Unless you reclaim it. Unless you start a museum, open a hall of fame. Unless you protect history. more

Does this cartoon offend you?

Published on May 11, 2012 in Education and Leaders. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

On Friday, India’s Lok Sabha was disrupted by MPs protesting a 60-year-old cartoon drawn by Shankar that shows B.R. Ambedkar, Pandit Nehru and the Constitution. So great was the furore over the cartoon which has featured in class XI NCERT text books since 2006, that Human Resources Development minister Kapil Sibal had to issue an apology. By the end of the day two senior NCERT advisors, Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar had resigned. But no one had an answer to the question: what exactly is so offensive about this cartoon?

The Sachin Tendulkar interview: ‘I’ve got to be myself’

Published on May 11, 2012 in Cricket. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The God of cricket makes it to the cover of Time (Indian subcontinent, Singapore and Australia and New Zealand editions), speaking to Bobby Ghosh on what keeps him up at night, his Rajya Sabha nomination and, yes, cricket.

Sports icons are rarely good interviews. They’re usually too conscious about their public image to be truly candid, and tend to speak in bland bromides. So when TIME correspondent Nilanjana Bhowmick and I met with India’s cricket star Sachin Tendulkar in Mumbai last month for a magazine profile that will appear in this week’s issue of TIME (available to subscribers here), we were not expecting much. Although he is known as the ‘Master Blaster’ for his swash-buckling batting, Tendulkar is famously reticent off the field. When he has given interviews, he has tended to steer clear of anything remotely controversial. He’s also been careful not to reveal very much about himself, about what goes on in the mind of a man who’s revered by his cricket-crazy countrymen as a kind of divinity. more

Curator of a hollowed conscience

Published on May 11, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: .

Ayesha Jalal on Saadat Hasan Manto, in The Hindu:

Saadat Hasan Manto, whose birth centenary is being celebrated in Pakistan and India today, once remarked that any attempt to fathom the murderous hatred that erupted with such devastating effect at the time of the British retreat from the subcontinent had to begin with an exploration of human nature itself.

For the master of the Urdu short story this was not a value judgment. It was a statement of what he had come to believe after keen observation and extended introspection. Shaken by the repercussions of the decision to break up the unity of the subcontinent, Manto wondered if people who only recently were friends, neighbours and compatriots had lost all sense of their humanity. He too was a human being, ‘the same human being who raped mankind, who indulged in killing’ and had ‘all those weaknesses and qualities that other human beings have.’ Yet human depravity, however pervasive and deplorable, could not kill all sense of humanity. With faith in that kind of humanity, Manto wrote riveting short stories about the human tragedy of 1947 that are internationally acknowledged for representing the plight of displaced and terrorised humanity with exemplary impartiality and empathy. More:

A haunting paean to a maddening mother

Published on May 11, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Prayaag Akbar reviews Jerry Pinto‘s debut novel Em and the Big Hoom (Aleph Book Company) in The Sunday Guardian:

There are various kinds of unreliable narrators, sometimes mad, sometimes motivated, sometimes forgetful. The British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro has built a stellar body of work exploring how the mind reshapes the past in a manner concordant with its owner’s self-image and desires. In a 1987 essay on this topic, Salman Rushdie makes the distinction between “literal” and “remembered” truth. As he writes, “one of the simplest truths about any set of memories is that many of them will be false.”

It is arguable whether Em and the Big Hoom, Jerry Pinto’s impressive first novel, has this unreliable narrator. But Pinto sets up the story in such a way that we must search for the “literal” truth through three overlapping narrative filters – layers of complexity, if you will. This is the story of a two-parent-two-kid Goan Catholic family told in the words of the son. The son, however, seeks to relate the story of his parents, so he must rely on his parents’ memories, and the information they are willing to share with him. Already we are two steps away from how events might actually have unfolded in this fictional world. Atop these lies the filter that is potentially decisive, and Pinto makes note of it time and again as he writes – the woman who delineates most of the action in the book is seriously mentally ill.

It is interesting, if this kind of thing interests you, to think about why Pinto chose to write his first novel this way. Perhaps it is because he is writing about debilitating mental illness, the inner processes of which remain largely unknown despite much scientific advance. Yet juxtaposed against this narrative ambiguity is that this is the story of the author’s family, especially his mother’s struggle with a serious neurological condition. There are some fictional departures, but we know that the Em of the title is his mother, the Big Hoom is his father, Pinto is the narrator, Roger Mendes, and his sister is Susan. The reader knows Pinto has lived this ordeal, and she must rely on the authority this lends if at times she questions something about the events depicted. More:

Our case against Manto: by Mohammed Hanif

Published on May 11, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Manto outside his home: Lakshmi Mansions. Photo courtesy Manto family archive. / Herald

Mohammed Hanif in Herald / Dawn:

If you were writing today, and specially if you were writing in English, you could go to all the literary festivals and drink all the free booze you wanted. But they probably wouldn’t invite you because before and after drinking their booze you’d rant against the festival organisers, you’d raise questions about the sponsors’ parentage. Just like you maligned us judges. Having made your acquaintance while you were in the dock, and having familiarised ourselves with the filthy bits in your writings in the privacy of our chambers, we just wish to elaborate on the verdicts we handed down in those trials. No, this is not an apology on behalf of Islamic Republic’s judiciary, just some observations, clarifications – and we are sure you still hate it – some literary advice. Times have changed. If you were writing today we’d probably ignore your little blasphemies against good taste and national interest and would just book you for that half pint in your pocket. But since you are probably sipping some superior stuff in heaven, can we ask you what this obsession was with human anatomy and edible birds?

Why sir, did you like to peer at poor women’s armpits and describe them in gory detail? While describing Saughandi in your notorious short story Hatak you tell us: Her armpit looked as if a piece of plucked chicken skin had been placed there. Did it occur to you that you might be spoiling your reader’ s dinner? And although we didn’t mention it in our verdict, do you have any idea how offensive it sounds? You knew your language well so we are sure you knew that literary practitioners in Urdu language have perfected the art of describing human body parts as metaphysical entities and all you could come up with was a chicken skin? Plucked? Why couldn’t you have come up with some metaphor that might have involved pouring of some wine in the said body part and sipping it slowly as a tainted dawn hovered in the backdrop?

You see a tired woman going about her day’s work. We see a woman with such an appetite that after sleeping with the local police inspector and drinking (a woman, drinking?) still wants some more. So according to your story, this Saughandi woman has had a pretty dreadful day, maybe the saddest day of her life and she still wants more. She cuddles her dog and goes to sleep with him. How were we supposed to read it, sir?

Your problem, Manto sir was that you weren’t satisfied with mentioning one haram thing per story. We do realise that in the world of short stories sometimes you have to describe bad things, things that our religion and our culture don’t approve of but couldn’t you have exercised a bit of moderation? As if having a prostitute as your main character wasn’t enough, you had to make her drink alcohol, and as if her drinking wasn’t bad enough you had to make her go to sleep with a flea-ridden dog. And I am not even mentioning the uncalled for description of her blouse where she stuffs her haram-earned money. Why did you have to do all that when you could have written about banana peels? More:

Ramachandra Guha: The constant writer

Published on May 10, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: .

In Open magazine:

Q What is your normal writing day like?

A I write every day from about nine in the morning to one in the afternoon. In 1995, when I began to write full-time, my son went to school and my young daughter to playschool. My wife runs an office, so she was away as well and the home was quiet from about nine to one. That’s when I developed this writing schedule. During this time, I don’t check emails, don’t take phone calls. Once I’m done, I take a printout of whatever I’ve written and reflect on it in the afternoon, while I’m catching up with the newspapers.

Q Where do you write?

A I have a study. In this study, I have two or three things around me, the keepsakes of people I admire. One is the autobiography of an extraordinary doctor, who was one of the most selfless and compassionate people I knew. There’s nothing really important—some pieces of art and my computer. I don’t believe in too many writing rituals. More:

India’s god laws fail the test of reason

Published on May 10, 2012 in India. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Praveen Swami in The Hindu:

Early in March, little drops of water began to drip from the feet of the statue of Jesus nailed to the cross on the church of Our Lady of Velankanni, down on to Mumbai’s unlovely Irla Road. Hundreds began to flock to the church to collect the holy water in little plastic bottles, hoping the tears of the son of god would sanctify their homes and heal their beloved.

Sanal Edamaruku, the eminent rationalist thinker, arrived at the church a fortnight after the miracle began drawing crowds. It took him less than half an hour to discover the source of the divine tears: a filthy puddle formed by a blocked drain, from where water was being pushed up through a phenomenon all high-school physics students are familiar with, called capillary action.

For his discovery, Mr. Edamaruku now faces the prospect of three years in prison — and the absolute certainty that he will spend several more years hopping between lawyers’ offices and courtrooms. In the wake of Mr. Edamaruku’s miracle-busting Mumbai visit, three police stations in the capital received complaints against him for inciting religious hatred. First information reports were filed, and investigations initiated with exemplary — if unusual — alacrity. More:

The Sachin Tendulkar interview in Time

Published on May 10, 2012 in Cricket and Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Bobby Ghosh talks to the cricket legend:

On his inner monologue while batting:

Sometimes I chat to myself, sometimes I don’t. Most of the times, it’s my subconscious mind that’s working. I don’t have time to complicate my mind, so I try to keep it empty. Being in “the zone” is when you’re not thinking of anything, merely reacting.

One would like to be in that zone more often, but it’s not that easy. It’s like you are completely cut off from the crowd, from the noise they are making. Your subconscious has taken over.

I feel it’s the conscious mind that messes things up. The conscious mind is constantly telling you, this might happen or that might happen, even before it has happened. Your conscious mind tells you the next ball might be a out-swinger, but when it’s coming at you you realize it’s in-swinger… so literally, you’ve played two balls.

On how often he is in “the zone,” and how he gets there:

I would say 50% of the time I’m in that zone. Sometimes I am there instantly, sometimes I get there through a couple of shots, and sometimes I’m fighting to get that feeling. You focus on your breathing and all those kind of things. But it’s not a guaranteed formula that works always. More

Girish Karnad reflects on Bangalore

Published on May 7, 2012 in India. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

In Newsweek / The Daily Beast:

The new IT prosperity has created a young, energetic, educated, and wealthy working class, transforming Bangalore into a consumer’s paradise of shopping malls and office complexes with glass-fronted exteriors. The insatiable demand for “good English” has renewed the anxiety that Kannada may die out in the city. In 2006 Bangalore was renamed Bengaluru.

But the main loss has been the sense of a stable, coherent city. The experience of the city has become formless, even viscous. Everyone is trying to get somewhere, and distance has become the only real object of daily concern. Instead of shrinking the city, the flyovers, underpasses, and elevated trains seem continually to expand it, pushing people farther and farther away from each other.

Twenty years after we built our house in a residential zone, we have now been informed that the road in front of it needs to be widened to accommodate the traffic. Any day now an entire swath could be cleared from our front garden, and the wall of our living room knocked down. More:

Tiny Desk Concert: Red Baraat

Published on May 7, 2012 in Music. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

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Among the 10 grumpiest living writers: Khushwant Singh and V.S. Naipaul

Published on May 7, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

From Flavorwire:

V.S. Naipaul:… Naipaul always seems to be stirring up trouble with the kind of statements that make you want to roll your eyes and say “oh, Grandpa” — or they would, if they weren’t coming from an accomplished and influential author in a high-profile public forum…

Khushwant Singh:… Like any grumpy old man worth his salt, Singh just wants to be left alone — a sign next to his apartment door reads “Please do not ring the bell unless you are expected.” Fair enough, and it’s really for the good of everyone.

Full list here

Aamir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate: Episode 1 – Female foeticide

Published on May 6, 2012 in India. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In this episode Aamir talks about the killing of unborn girls, or female foeticide, an alarming and frightening reality. It involves the collusion of families, doctors and a social structure that encourages the desire for a boy child – at any cost. More here at Aamir Khan’s  Satyamev Jayate:

Remembrance of things past

Published on May 6, 2012 in Economy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph:

When I think of my childhood in late middle age, I remember people less vividly than I remember things. I remember scented erasers made of opaque rubber topped with a strip of translucent green. Also a cheaper eraser enigmatically called Sandow. And soap. The history of middle-class India in the 1960s and 1970s can be written in soap and detergent.

Red Lifebuoy was the soap you washed your hands with afterwards. Cinthol (green) was the bar to bathe with except for people with aspirations who bought Moti, a fat round of soap too large for small hands, or Pears. But Pears was posh; any household that routinely used Pears wasn’t middle class; it was the sort of place that bought crates of Coca Cola instead of bottles of Kissan orange squash, where the children went to boarding school and owned complete sets of Tintin.

The only detergent that seems to have survived as a brand is Surf. Not that anyone used the word ‘detergent’ in the 1960s. Surf was detergent: it was the generic word for any powdered soap that came in a box and was used to wash clothes. Nobody had heard of Rin or Nirma; a cheap yellow cake of washing soap called Sunlight was widely used, but it was an inferior thing, used offstage by the hired help, not the housewife.

There was a soap to wash woollens with called Lux Flakes, which smelt nice but disappeared from the market early on. I think our parents liked the thought of collecting petrol-perfumed woollens in giant brown paper bags so much that they were willing to pay Novex and Snowhite a bit extra for that privilege. Dry-cleaning was a way of being modern, smart and confidently middle class. More:

Good Morning Mumbai!

Published on May 6, 2012 in Art and Design. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

A student diploma film directed by Rajesh Thakare and Troy Vasanth from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

Russian pilot of sight-seeing flight saves lives in Nepal flood

Published on May 6, 2012 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Kunda Dixit / Nepali Times:

Captain Alexander Maximov used to fly MiG fighters in Russsia before coming to Nepal to work for Avia Club in Pokhara.

On Saturday morning he had taken a tourist up the Seti Valley in his blue single-engined Ukrainian-made Aeroprakt to see the Annapurnas up close. It wasn’t a perfect day and there were lingering clouds from last night’s thunderstorm. He got back to Pokhara, and took off again immediately with another passenger before the winds picked up over the mountains.

He had reached his cruising altitude of 10,000ft above the Seti 17 miles north of airport with Machapuchre and Annapurna 4 towering over him. Looking down, he noticed something odd. The Seti wasn’t its usual think white thread at the bottom of the valley, but looked like an angry brown rope. The leading edge of the wave was a dark wall of water about 10 metres high.

Because of his military training, Maximov knew exactly what he was seeing and thought he better alert people downstream. He immediately radioed Pokhara tower and told the air traffic controller that “a big water” was coming down the Seti. The control tower informed the security agencies, and it was possibly because of this half-hour early warning that a lot of lives were saved. More:

Himalayan Tsunami

At least 10 people have been swept away and dozens including trekkers are missing after a flashflood early Saturday on the Seti River that seems to have been triggered by an avalanche upstream in the Annapurna mountains.

Latest reports say buses and houses have been swept away on the outskirts of Pokhara and police are trying to make their way up the Seti River to ascertain damage. Army helicopters have been combing the narrow gorge of the Seti to rescue survivors and pinpoint the exact location of the avalanche. Thousands are thronging the bridges to see the river which flows beneath the city. More

An Indian in pursuit of Guinness records

Published on May 5, 2012 in India. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Mark Magnier from New Delhi in Los Angeles Times:

As a candidate in last month’s municipal elections, Guinness Rishi didn’t do any campaigning. In fact, he thinks the 30 votes he got were 30 too many. He suspects his wife voted for him out of spite.

Rishi’s real goal was to garner zero votes and become the world’s most-losing politician, complementing the seven Guinness World Records certificates on his wall. There should be 22, the self-described record maniac grumbles, but Guinness has it in for him.

Although every country has its share of glory seekers, India has really taken to this particular form of chest thumping. Guinness says applications from India are up 178% over the last five years, making it the world’s third-most active nation of wannabes, after the U.S. and Britain, with actual records up almost fourfold. Guinness has just appointed a Mumbai-based representative to manage the crowds of record seekers, with plans to open a full office next year.

Among recent Indian records: most consecutive yoga positions on a motorcycle (23), most Mohandas Gandhi look-alikes photographed (485), most earthworms swallowed (200), longest ear hair (7 inches). More:

India: A Sacred Geography

Published on May 5, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

In Mint-Lounge, Rachel Dwyer reviews India: A Sacred Geography by Diana L Eck:

Diana L. Eck, a distinguished scholar whose book, Banaras: City of Light, is rightly regarded as a classic, is an ideal guide. Wearing her immense learning lightly, she leads us gently but firmly through the contested nature of India’s sacredness. She focuses mostly, though not exclusively, on Hindu texts, taking the reader around the whole country, though rarely stepping beyond its 1947 borders. After the introduction and “What is India?” sections, themselves comprising a hundred pages, the book is organized around an overview of Hindu cosmography, the sacred rivers, then the landscapes of five major deities, Shiva, Shakti, Vishnu, Krishna and Ram. Eck travels from place to place, pausing to tell us stories before moving smoothly on to the next.

In Hinduism, the boundaries between humans, gods and animals are porous. Vishnu’s 10 incarnations include animals (kurma or tortoise, matsya or fish), half-animals (Narasimha or the Man-Lion) and humans (Krishna, Ram). Yet Hinduism does not stop with the animate, as gods are also manifest as shalagrams (stone symbols of Vishnu) and other svayambhu (spontaneously occurring) forms. These include signs of Shiva as lingas, notably the 12 jyotirlingas (lingas of light) as well as murtis (statues) and swarupas (true forms) or in mountains, rivers and forests. More:

Power grid by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Published on May 5, 2012 in Af-Pak and Pakistan. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In The New Yorker:

In Pakistan, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, I remember seeing high-tension electric pylons that had affixed to them a shield similar to something Captain America might carry, with two muscular arms across the middle, sleeves rolled up, shaking hands against a Stars-and-Stripes background—one arm American, the other presumably Pakistani, although both had pale skin—as if signalling not friendship but a more self-congratulatory mood. These pylons and the accompanying power grid were American gifts, built by American engineers, proof of the two countries’ solidarity. The son of an American mother and a Pakistani father, I found these emblems of the two countries’ amity warming, reassuring.

Pakistan basked in America’s favor. American cars muscled through bazaars tangled with bullock carts and tongas, and American largesse gave us power, one of the largest earth-filled hydroelectric dams in the world, and also F-104 fighters that, we hoped, would prevent the Indians from eating us alive. The earnest Americans who roamed the country doing U.S.A.I.D.’s good works had a benign, roly-poly appearance, as if they lived on jam and honey. The long-haired bachelor Mr. X, from the American Midwest, who taught at the Lahore American School, where I studied, kept an open bar in his living room, stocked with whiskey and Playboy magazines, and offered hospitality to Pakistani Army officers and bon-vivant politicians and the sleeker expats, who late at night poured out their sorrows and secrets to him. His bedroom had a huge Playmate poster that covered an entire wall—Laocoön limbs and golden pelt—a vision imprinted on my tender mind at the age of eleven, consonant with the impression I then had of America as the source of all things good, and more than good. Years later, people said that boozy, hale Mr. X had been C.I.A. More:

Purifying Kashmir

Published on May 4, 2012 in Religion. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Tariq Mir in Boston Review:

A squat and priggish man of 46, Abdul Lateef Al Kindi has a thick salt-and-pepper beard and a reputation for causing controversy. During a sermon last August at his mosque in Srinagar—one of the capitals of Kashmir, and its largest city—he evoked the spirit of Islam as observed fourteen centuries ago, in the Prophet’s time, and demanded a total break from local traditions. He railed against the veneration of the tombs and relics of saints—common practice in Kashmir—as vestiges of ancient Greek and Hindu mythologies with no place in Islam.

Historically, Kashmir has been dominated by Sufi Islam, a mystical branch of the faith that the puritanically minded abhor. But Al Kindi plans to change all that. In a region already wracked by internal division and foreign pressure, he represents yet another potentially destabilizing force: orthodox Salafism, aggressively expansionist and imported from Saudi Arabia.

After the sermon, we drove to Al Kindi’s rented apartment. He lived in a prosperous area with large houses and fenced-in compounds stretching along the barbed wire–topped wall of a sprawling Indian army camp. The ragged three-room flat was a temporary accommodation for his family; he was putting the finishing touches on a house in a new suburb. Constructing even a modest house in Srinagar is out of reach for most, but Al Kindi, an alumnus of the Saudi-backed Islamic University of Medina, managed thanks to a hefty monthly stipend from his alma mater. More:

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