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From The Times of India:
Thiruvananthapuram: ‘Hotbed of terrorism’ is not the usual label for Kerala. But intelligence gathered by disparate agencies over the last few years suggests the description may not be far off the mark. Confirmation of this came with the horrifying incident of July 4, when a college lecturer’s right hand was chopped off in Moovattupuzha, a town in Eranakulam district.
The attack on T J Joseph was apparently in retaliation for setting a question paper that allegedly hurt Muslim sentiments. Police raids on offices of the Popular Front of India (PFI), whose activists are believed to be behind the attack, have exposed a well-oiled, pan-Islamist network fed by a heady mix of Wahhabism and hawala. Kerala’s deep-rooted Gulf links also come in handy for the PFI.
The revelations of the last two weeks are startling. It includes al-Qaida training tapes, Taliban-style courts that dispense justice according to Shariat law, literature on conversion, explosives enough to kill dozens, and documents indicating unusual interest in the Indian Navy.
Sources say it was one of the PFI’s Taliban-style ‘courts’ in Erattupettah in Kottayam district that decided Joseph’s fate. There are 13 more across Kerala, discreetly exhorting members of the community to stay away from regular courts which are deemed “un-Islamic”. The state police is now taking a fresh look at three murders in Kannur, including that of a police constable. There is some suspicion the killings were ordered by Taliban-style courts. More:
Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar in the Wall Street Journal:
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says he want India to hit an annual GDP growth rate of 10% soon. Since the country averaged 8.5% from 2003-08, he thinks this is definitely achievable.
Think again. Given a sluggish global economy and lack of domestic reform, India may not average much more than 8% growth in the next five years. True, the country has many advantages—cheap skills, catch-up possibilities and good demographics (the working-age share of the population is rising). But against these must be weighed disadvantages such as high inflation, rising corruption and deplorable public services.
The biggest dampener is not local but global. Record financial leverage and global imbalances created the mother of all booms from 2004 to 2008, and a giant global tide lifted all boats. Sub-Saharan Africa more than doubled its growth rate to 6%, from 2.4% in the preceding two decades. This puts India’s performance in perspective. Yes, its growth rate improved, but not as much as Africa’s.
The Great Recession has ended, but the world will not revert to a leverage-financed boom. Europe is headed for years of slow growth or stagnation, and the U.S. recovery is hesitant. And India is more integrated with the world economy than ever before. More:
A new, low-cost device developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab can diagnose refractive defects of the eye in under two minutes.
The Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment, or NETRA, Sanskrit for ‘eye’, is a little device that can be clipped on to a phone with the requisite software installed on it. With an array of lenslets made of plastic, the device uses the phone display to run tests and generate a prescription in less than two minutes.
Associate Professor at the Camera Culture Lab, Ramesh Raskar, who led the project, said the device can be mass-produced for less than $2 a piece and used to diagnose myopia, hypermetropia and astigmatism.
Read more at MIT Media Lab here and here
To see how it works, watch the YouTube video below.
An American and an Indian immigrant remain unable to prove a negative: that theirs is not a sham marriage. Nina Bernetein in the New York Times:
In their cluttered studio apartment in Astoria, Queens, after nearly 17 years of marriage, Shari Feldman and Inderjit Singh seem like a pair of old shoes — a little the worse for wear but comfortable with each other’s creases.
“Our marriage certificate is so old, it’s yellow,” Ms. Feldman, 51, joked over the Bollywood soundtrack that blared from the TV. “Hey, honey, would you turn that down?”
Yet three petitions and five marriage interviews have failed to convince federal immigration authorities that the couple’s union is not a charade to get a green card for Mr. Singh, 45, a car service driver from India.
Last year, after they reapplied with a new lawyer, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services refused to interrogate them again, citing the conflicting answers they gave four years ago to questions like what Mr. Singh wore at their 1993 wedding and whether he had taken Ms. Feldman out to eat on her last birthday. More:
For the right price, you can get Sri Ram Sene (the Army of Lord Ram), a right-wind Hindu group, to organise a riot anywhere. A Tehelka expose:
There are 133 videos that show up on YouTube when you search for “Mangalore pub attack”. Over 300,000 people have viewed the first video. Put in the same query on Google and 69,000 websites show up in a fraction of a second. On 24 January 2009, a group of 35-40 men barged into a pub in Mangalore and attacked young women as they enjoyed an afternoon drink. Amongst the attackers were members of Sri Ram Sene — a right-wing organisation that was relatively unknown at the time. The Sene cadres considered women drinking publicly as “indecent behaviour” and more importantly “an insult to Hindu culture and tradition”. Two days after the attack, as India marked 60 years of the Constitution coming into force, national television channels looped footage of women being slapped, beaten and chased out of the pub. (In a telling detail, the footage of the assault was available only because the Sene had informed journalists and photographers in Mangalore of their intended attack 30 minutes before they entered the pub.) The footage sparked outrage. News producers from French, Russian, German television channels despatched correspondents to ground zero. Even producers from The Oprah Winfrey Show called in asking for the footage. The Sene had burst onto the scene.
As an organisation, the Sene has always claimed for itself a radical Hindu identity. Its leaders position themselves as zealous custodians of “Hindu religion” and “culture”, its cadres as valiant foot soldiers. In their own words, they will not hesitate to assault people, vandalise property, destroy artistic expressions, separate mixed religion couples — in general, interfere violently — to implement their hardline Hindutva agenda. Their professional calling card is violence justified by a puritanical, spitfire morality.
A six-week undercover investigation by TEHELKA, however, reveals that even this violent, spitfire morality can be a hypocritical sham. Sri Ram Sene members are not just committed ideologues who are spontaneously willing to become violent law-breakers for a “cause”. That’s just one of their criminal and negative faces. They are also cynical lumpen that can be bought for a price. “Contract rioting” — thugs being handed out contracts or money to create riots — no longer needs to be a matter of mere speculation. TEHELKA’s investigation shows it is an alarming reality. Vandalism can be purchased; ‘cultural nationalism’ can go on sale. It’s all kosher in the “business” of outrage. More:
Pervez Hoodbhoy in Dawn:
As anti-US lava spews from the fiery volcanoes of Pakistan’s private television channels and newspapers, a collective psychosis grips the country’s youth. Murderous intent follows with the conviction that the US is responsible for all ills, both in Pakistan and the world of Islam.
Faisal Shahzad, with designer sunglasses and an MBA degree from the University of Bridgeport, acquired that murderous intent. Living his formative years in Pakistan, he typifies the young Pakistani who grew up in the shadow of Ziaul Haq’s hate-based education curriculum. The son of a retired air vice-marshal, life was easy as was getting US citizenship subsequently. But at some point the toxic schooling and media tutoring must have kicked in.
There was guilt as he saw pictures of Gaza’s dead children and related them to US support for Israel. Internet browsing or, perhaps, the local mosque steered him towards the idea of an Islamic caliphate. This solution to the world’s problems would require, of course, the US to be destroyed. Hence Shahzad’s self-confessed trip to Waziristan.
Ideas considered extreme a decade ago are now mainstream. A private survey carried out by a European embassy based in Islamabad found that only four per cent of Pakistanis polled speak well of America; 96 per cent against. More:
Maya Jaggi in The Guardian:
The freeing of women from Taliban rule became a belated war aim for US‑led troops in Afghanistan; this, despite western bolstering of the Taliban’s precursors, the mujahideen, in their resistance to Soviet occupation during the cold war. The latest novel by writer and filmmaker Atiq Rahimi imagines what such liberation might entail, for both women and men. It also hints at how relations between the sexes in his country of birth have been deformed, not just by residual tradition, but by the political interventions of recent history.
Women were off-stage in Earth and Ashes, Rahimi’s powerful debut novella set after the Soviet invasion of 1979, which traced an almost mythic cycle of vengeance among generations of men. It was written in Dari (a form of Persian) in 1999, years after the author had fled the Soviet occupation to asylum in France. His film version won a prize at Cannes in 2004. The Patience Stone, awarded the prix Goncourt in 2008, is his first novel written in French. Like his previous novel, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, it adopts the viewpoint of women, for whom war can bring both suffering and a curious freedom. More:
In The Telegraph, Noel Malcolm reviews The Colour of Paradise by Kris Lane that demonstrates that emeralds were as well travelled as they were highly prized
For Muslims, green is the emblematic colour of Islam; traditionally, only descendants of the Prophet Mohammed were allowed to wear green turbans and green robes. So it is not surprising that when Muslim potentates amassed hoards of jewels, they prized emeralds above all. Some had verses from the Koran carved into the faces of large emeralds, which were sewn into their ceremonial robes as talismans and amulets.
The hunger of some rulers for these vivid green gemstones was almost insatiable. The first East India Company merchant to visit the Mughal court at Agra (in 1610) noted that the Emperor Jahangir’s emeralds weighed a total of 412 pounds – whereas his collection of diamonds weighed little more than a quarter of that, even though India was then the world’s leading diamond producer. more
Sean McLain reports from Lahore on Tariq Mirza, the master carpet weaver. From The National:
When the curators of Historic Royal Palaces in London needed a carpet, they contacted Tariq Mirza. The charity that cares for Britain’s unoccupied royal palaces needed to decorate King Edward I’s bedroom with a Spanish carpet from the 13th century. The problem was that the technique for making this sort of carpet died out hundreds of years ago. This was part of the appeal for the man who calls himself a “medieval craftsman”. “The more challenging, the more difficult, the more research involved, the more I love it.”
That carpet now lies in the Tower of London, but few people know its story. One cannot tell by looking at it that it took six months of painstaking labour by Mirza and his master weavers in the Pakistani city of Lahore to complete it.
“We could have made a Spanish design carpet in any weave. When it is on the floor, you would not be able to tell. It is only close examination that shows this.” But that would not have been good enough for Mirza. The project turned out to be more complex than even he anticipated. “The museum wanted a Spanish weave carpet, which was current in the 13th century. They wanted it technically woven in that way. That weave has been dead for ages.” To meet the demanding specifications, Mirza first began with research. He contacted museum curators and anyone with a Spanish carpet from that era to rediscover the lost art of their making. Using their analysis, his own guesswork and several high resolution photographs of the weave pattern, he began to reverse-engineer the carpet. More:
In Mint-Lounge, Parizaad Khan reviews The Surian Kitchen by Lathika George:
The Suriani Kitchen by Lathika George; Published by Westland
There are lovely stories of ritual baths, paeans to coconuts and a story about Kerala Kalpam, an ancient Sanskrit manuscript on agriculture which outlines the ideal way to tend to the fields—only men with a calm and orderly disposition should do so. Bulls should be enticed with song instead of being prodded by sticks and while sowing seeds, a song should be on the lips and in the hearts of farmers.
George’s recipes, thankfully, don’t seem this demanding. Though the non-vegetarian ones dealing with beef, pork, poultry and seafood are all lip-smacking, the sections for the vegetarian recipes and accompaniments are a delight. Fresh Cashew Sauté, Wild Mushroom Sauté, Spiced Cooked Buttermilk, Jar Soup and Dried Shrimp Chutney all look simple enough for amateurs to try. More:
From The New York Times:
American ice dancers Meryl Davis and Charlie White thought their Indian-themed original dance program could be popular.
Little did they know it would become an international sensation, thanks to YouTube.
A video of their program, from the Rostlecom Cup last October, has drawn more than 220,000 hits.
White and Davis, the 2009 Grand Prix champions as well as the reigning national champions, have received e-mails from fans in India and South Asia, who are pleased with their routine. They have had interview requests from Indian and Indian-American media outlets, wanting to discuss the program. More:
[Below, the original from the Bollywood movie]
Bombay Time was one of the two official time zones established in British India in 1884. Vikram Doctor tells the fascinating story in the Economic Times:
The seeds for the second battle over Bombay Time were set in Washington DC in 1884. This was at the International Meridian Conference which established Greenwich in Britain as the Prime Meridian, from which all other time zones were set. This was a huge step towards establishing the primacy of standardised time over local time, but the politics that accompanied it were an indication of how difficult the matter would be. France, for example, was so furious that it refused to acknowledge Greenwich time at all.
For years it stuck with Paris Mean Time, only finally capitulating in 1911 when it standardised this with the universal time zones – but by saying they were delaying Paris Mean Time by 9 minutes, 21 seconds and still refusing to admit that GMT existed. The Irish, who were fighting for Home Rule from Britain were similarly unwilling to take direction from Greenwich, and set Dublin Time as 25 minutes ahead of GMT, rather than the usual half hour difference.
In India the meridian selected for setting the time zone was 82.5° East, which was five and a half hours ahead of GMT. But the Viceroy’s government knew that the problem in moving from Indian Mean Time (IMT, the old Madras Time) to what would come to be called Indian Standard Time (IST) was that the calculations for Bombay and Calcutta would no longer be the simple half hour less or more that people were used to making when adjusting for Railway Time. More:
A team of TV journalists recorded what happened — and what didn’t happen — on December 6, 1992, in Ayodhya. Madhu Trehan in Hindustan Times:
It should have taken 60 minutes — 30 minutes to watch the footage from Newstrack, the old video magazine, and 30 minutes to write the report. Newstrack’s December 1992 edition gave a minute-by-minute account of what happened in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992. And yet, M.S. Liberhan took 17 years to come up with what he came up with.
Mritinjoy Jha along with his team were in Ayodhya from November 23, 1992. Thousands of pumped-up, slogan-shouting people were pouring in, carrying pick-axes and other equipment. Manoj Raghuvanshi, with another Newstrack team, had pulled the story together. In his voice-over, Raghuvanshi spoke about “a chief minister who spoke from both sides of his mouth — promising the Supreme Court that no construction would take place on the disputed site — and a prime minister who trusted everybody, including his central forces sent ostensibly to defend the masjid”.
The recordings captured Hindu leaders, including Tyagi Maharaj and Acharya Dharmendra, exhorting the crowd that the masjid must be destroyed and a temple built. Uma Bharti in her speech made three crucial points by demanding answers from the crowd: “Will you restrain yourselves when the leaders ask you to? Will you maintain peace and observe rules? Will you obey your leaders?’” The crowd bellowed a yes. But did the BJP really believe that it could control the kar sevaks, the RSS volunteers, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad after its own passion-rousing rath yatra? More:
A group of women from underprivileged families in remote, rural India have set up Khabar Lahariya, a village paper. The paper, whose name translates into English as News Wave, covers local news, educational features, and information on campaigns for Dalit rights.
Farah Naqvi tells their story in her book, Waves in the Hinterland: The Journey of A Newspaper (Nirantar and Zubaan Books). Gillian Wright on the newspaper and the book in the Hindustan Times:
The Book, Waves in the Hinterland, and the newspaper, Khabar Lahariya
Recently, there was a very unusual book launch in Delhi. Two women from underprivileged families in rural Bundelkhand addressed a packed audience at the India Habitat Centre and told them what it was like to be a neo-literate woman reporter on a local Bundeli language newspaper in two of the most backward districts of Uttar Pradesh — Chitrakoot and Banda.
Their colourful eight-page weekly appears in both the Chitrakoot and Banda variants of the lilting Bundeli language, and their stories expose corruption and injustice affecting the same villages where the paper is read by some 25,000 people.
For standing up and telling the truth, they have been sexually harassed and frequently threatened — at one point with a
masked man with a gun. Attempts have been made to buy all copies of the paper to keep news from getting out, to buy the whole paper and to close them down. But Khabar Lahariya — News Wave — keeps on making waves. More:
Vikas Bajaj in the New York Times:
After seeking help from him and other numerologists, actors have added or dropped letters from their names — the actor Ajay Devgan recently became Ajay Devgn. Filmmakers have deliberately misspelled the titles of their movies — “Singh is Kinng” was a recent hit. And companies have redesigned brands and logos.
Recently, a travel company started a luxury train service, The Indian Maharaja – Deccan Odyssey. Mr. Jumaani had recommended adding the word “The” and hyphenating the name. Sajivv Trehaan, who heads the tour company the Travel Corporation (India), said the maiden trip was sold out and he believes Mr. Jumaani’s wordsmithing helped. He says Mr. Jumaani’s counsel has been a key to many of his business successes.
“The world has changed for me since then,” Mr. Trehaan said about the time seven years ago when Mr. Jumaani suggested he change his name from Sajiv Trehan. “We were a small company at the time. Now we have seven offices overseas. And I live in Switzerland.” More:
Maneesh Chhibber in the Indian Express:
The Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan Commission of Inquiry has indicted former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee along with current Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha L K Advani and former BJP president Murli Manohar Joshi, among others, for the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992.
Citing the evidence it gathered, which includes witness statements and official records, one of the key conclusions of the Commission is said to be that the entire build-up to the demolition was meticulously planned. And there was nothing to show that these leaders were either unaware of what was going on or innocent of any wrongdoing.
The one-man Commission probed the “sequence of events leading, and all facts and circumstances relating, to the occurrences at Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid complex on December 6, 1992” — the day the Babri Masjid was brought down by kar sevaks. More:
Read the followup stories in the Indian Express here and here.
Previously in AW: Who demolished the Babri Masjid?
Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta reviews Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald (Orion Books):
The new and thought-provoking SF from Ian McDonald, Cyberabad Days, is set in the India of 2047. In McDonald’s dystopian vision, bitter wars are fought over water; crime, terror and separatism are rampant; divides between the few who have and the millions who have nothing have deepened to dangerous levels; and the nation has broken into fragments. Even human identities are becoming fragmented as more and more ways of escaping to simulated versions of reality become available. One and a half billion people struggle to live through interminable conflicts, chemical warfare, military occupation, a dangerously skewed sex ratio, and more. Most of all, they struggle to cope with social and technological changes that have engulfed them with fierce suddenness. More:
And some more reviews at scifi sites: scifiwire.com and sfsignal.com
Excavating the call centre’s private stories, Saritha Rai in the Indian Express:
For ever so long, India’s call centres have been portrayed as glamorous workplaces where fashionable young men and women work crazy schedules and lead fast-paced lives. Their workers have been depicted as brash spenders and year-round revellers.
Now anthropologist-couple Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta, both from the University of California, Los Angeles, say their joint research titled, Refashioning Selves, Reimagining Futures: Media and Mobility in Call Centers in Bangalore’s back office companies shows how not-true these portrayals are.
For a study funded by the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Fulbright Program, Mankekar and Gupta have spent the best part of this year uncovering and understanding the lives of back office workers. More:
India had a tremendous influence on the Beatles and their music. Many a song came about just hanging around the Maharishi’s ashram at Rishikesh. So the Beatles’ double album is really a hymn to India. Bill Harry, the founder of Mersey Beats, the magazine that made the Beatles famous and introduced the band to manager Brian Epstein, in the OPEN magazine. Above, The making of Sgt. Pepper (circa 1992)
In 1966, George began studying the instrument under Ravi Shankar and continued to be inspired by Indian music, recording several numbers incorporating Indian instruments or using Indian musicians to accompany him. Another example is Love You To where he played the sitar like a guitar and featured instruments such as tabla and tambura.
George also recorded the track The Inner Light at EMI Studios in Mumbai while one of his contributions to the Sgt Pepper album was Within You, Without You. John’s Across The Universe featured George on sitar and tambura. The Sanskrit phrase, ‘Jai guru deva, om’ features in the chorus, which roughly translates to ‘victory to God divine’.
The Beatles were to be inspired by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and transcendental meditation and set off for the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, a journey which became one of their most fulfilling creative adventures during which they composed 32 songs. More:
Akash Kapur in the New York Times:
My first memory of being Indian in America was being called an “injun.” This was around 1980. I was visiting my grandparents in rural Minnesota. The boy who called me an “injun” punched me in the stomach; later, his friends would call me a “communist.”
Those were particularly crude reactions but they were characteristic of the distance that separated India and America for much of my life. I grew up between both countries, the son of an Indian father and an American mother, but my two homes always felt very far apart. For much of my childhood and early adulthood, India and America were literally — but also culturally, socially, politically and experientially — on opposite sides of the planet.
When I moved to America in the early 1990s, India was little more than a cipher in the American imagination. Many of my new friends were uninterested in and uninformed about the country that I desperately missed. India was defined by the broadest, and usually most unflattering, of brush strokes — stereotypes about poverty and corruption, images of crowds, maybe a vague sense of what Indians in America used to call the “three C’s”: caste, cows and curry. More:
The East Coast Road has created jobs, strained the area’s environment and brought death to this part of southeast India. Akash Kapur in the New York Times:
E. Vinayagam remembers when the country road outside his village ran through a forest. When Vinayagam, born in 1947, was a boy, he and his friends were scared to go to the road at night; the forest was thick, and it was rumored to be haunted.
Vinayagam remembers when the road became a highway. A group of surveyors showed up one morning with their equipment. They were marking what would become the East Coast Road – an ambitious highway project, financed in part by the Asian Development Bank, that runs nearly 800 kilometers, about 500 miles, along the southeast coast of India.
The East Coast Road, or ECR, was built in the late ’90s. Vinayagam was an impoverished agricultural laborer at the time. The highway changed his life. He set up a thatch tea shop by the side of the road. It was a humble establishment, but traffic was picking up, and the thatch hut was soon a two-story concrete structure that served branded cold drinks and fresh fruit juices. More:
The Hope Diamond was mined in Golconda, India. It was sold to King Louis XIV of France in 1668. For the first time in its 50-year residence at the Smithsonian Institution, the diamond has been taken out of its setting, giving the public a rare look at its bare beauty. From the Washington Post:
At a morning press conference, with the doors locked and security personnel glaring, a jeweler wheeled a trolley out from a workroom. Atop it was the Hope Diamond covered with a white cloth; the cloth was taken off with a flourish by museum director Cristián Samper. “This is a new chapter in the history of the Hope Diamond,” said Samper, facing a lineup of camera crews. “We wanted to celebrate this legacy by giving people a look at the Hope Diamond in a new way.”
The 45.52-carat gem, which was donated to the Smithsonian on Nov. 10, 1958, by the firm of Harry Winston Inc., has been one of the most visited objects at the Smithsonian. More than 5 million people a year peer into its enclosure. More:
[Read more at the Smithsonian]
Aarti Virani in the Wall Street Journal:
About two months ago, armed with a range of artifacts that served as visual testaments to our love and commitment for each other-a monstrous wedding album, the lease to our New Jersey condo and a range of mementos that chronicled a two-year courtship-my husband and I appeared for our green card interview. Inside a gritty government building in downtown Newark, I regurgitated my personal history to a surprisingly patient officer with a generous smile: I was born and raised in Japan, to Indian parents. With the authoritative thump of a stamp, our 15 minutes came to an end. Before bidding us goodbye, the officer innocently asked whether I’d become an American citizen. Perhaps the fuzzy look in my eyes gave it away, but she instantly and amiably dismissed the question, shook our hands and wished us well. On our drive home, I quietly mulled over whether I needed to add another country to the growing list of places from which to feel estranged.
When I first arrived in the United States almost seven years ago, trading in the temperate winds of my hometown, Kobe, for the exponentially icier climes of Syracuse, New York, hardly a day went by when I didn’t have to map out my seemingly puzzling background for a fleeting acquaintance, forgetful friend or even a prospective employer. In those moments, brimming with frustration and a keen sense of displacement, I would think of my late grandfather’s good-natured chuckle, urging me that it was possible to straddle cultures as he had so gracefully done. More:
Ruchir Joshi in The Telegraph:
All the other passengers have gone, passed through immigration and customs without incident, but two US customs officers have taken the young South Asian man to one side. They make him open his suitcase, they make him take everything out and they spread it across the inspection table like entrails from a dead patient. As they feel through the man’s possessions they grill him, one officer passing the ball to the other, interrupting each other sometimes, interrupting the passenger often, changing tack, moving through different gears of aggression and insult. The young man is nervous, eager to go out and meet his girlfriend who he has no doubt is now waiting for him with growing anxiety. At some point one of the officers asks the man what he does and he replies that he is a freelance journalist. The officer picks up a new diary the man has bought in London, during his stop-over. “Journalist, hunh?”, “Yes, freelance.” The Boston Irishman fingers the obviously fresh diary. “So, is this for your thoughts? Can I read through this?” The fact that the dairy has only one paragraph of very personal writing jotted during the flight from London makes the Asian man go cold. But then the sneer loading the word ‘thoughts’ makes the man’s blood boil. “Sure.” He shrugs. “Whatever.” The customs guys don’t like this change of tone and they ignore the diary and ask the man to come to a separate room.
Inside the room, one of the officers lights up a cigarette and the man is grilled again, asked repeatedly whether he has any connection to the smuggling of drugs, whether he has any sort of illicit connections in the US at all. On the table in the interrogation room there is an unopened pack of surgical gloves; throughout the questioning there is a clear threat of an anal examination. Unsaid, but clearly stated is this: “Not only will you answer our questions but you will be polite to the point of servility unless you want to provoke us further.” Genetically unwise, the brown man stays with his seething anger but somehow keeps his English clean and crisp. Later, he will realize that his ‘Indian’ accent had a double function: that of provoking the hard-wired ire of working-class American Irish against anything remotely ‘English’ and ‘posh’, while simultaneously saving him from a ‘search with extreme prejudice’. The officers make the man take off his sneakers, one of them desultorily kicks the shoes over with his boot to see if they are loaded with contraband, but they stop at that. Clearly this passenger is less than slim pickings but they’ve met their quota of people examined. Their afternoon coffee-break beckoning, the Uniforms ask the man to pack his bag and be on his way. As the Asian guy stumbles off with his suitcase, he feels like a stick of sugar-cane that’s been put through the wringer. From behind him, one of the officers jovially calls out: “Welcome to the United States!” More:
On India’s Independence Day, Aakar Patel in Mint-Lounge:
The British left in 1947, and they left too soon. We celebrate Independence Day, but another six decades of dependence as Great Britain’s colony would have been good for us. We could have learnt how to run cities. No harm in admitting what is obvious for all to see: We cannot even manage traffic.
Mumbai, not Hong Kong, would have been the centre for finance in Asia, instead of the second-rate city it has become since the British left.
Delhi would have more bits like the ones the British built, the only elegant parts of the city, just as British South Bombay is the only elegant part. Cities such as Surat and Ahmedabad and Hyderabad and Indore would have become civilized. Under English and Scottish bureaucrats, architecture, certainly civic architecture, would not be as ugly as it is.
Justice would mean something. Gandhi and Nehru repeatedly got arrested voluntarily because, correctly, they trusted British justice. Today’s politician resists arrest even though he may be innocent, because he’s liable to get stitched up, like Omar Abdullah.
What else would be better? Education, through the Macaulay plan.
Europeans, of course, told us who and what we were. After 3,000 years of illiteracy, we learnt of the existence of the Indus Valley civilization from John Marshall in 1924. The identity of our greatest emperor, Ashok (died 232 BC), whose lion capital is our emblem, whose wheel is on our flag, was revealed to us by James Prinsep 175 years ago. More:
It never rains in Bombay (Mumbai) as it pours. Why do the people of this once great city have to put up with waterlogged streets and traffic jams, year after year after year? In DNA, Sandeep Ashar reports
cc/Mohit.Ed
Incessant heavy rain since late last night caused waterlogging at several places in Mumbai and threw life in the city out of gear.
Office-goers had to brave traffic jams and diversions on several routes for the best part of the morning. Public transport and suburban railway services were badly hit.
Several parts of the city were flooded. Among them were the area outside the GPO, the Mahalaxmi Temple junction, Dr Annie Besant Road at Worli, Maratha Mandir, St Mary’s School at Byculla, Sleater Road, Sewree, Hindmata, Lilavati Hospital at Bandra, King’s Circle, Jain Society at Sion, Wadala, Juhu, and Andheri. At many of these places, the floodwaters were more than 2 feet deep.
The crucial Andheri and Milan subways in the western suburbs were under almost 3 feet of water and were closed for traffic. Roads leading to the airport witnessed massive traffic jams with waterlogging at several places.
Track Mumbai’s floods on Twitter here.
Pico Iyer in the New York Times:
“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.
I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either. More:
At Dhoni village in Gujarat water is so scarce that they not only lock up their wells but sleep over the wooden lids as well to ensure that nobody steals their water. During the day women and children keep a watch over the small village pond. Parimal Dabhi has a report in the Indian Express. Photo: Javed Raja.
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