Tag Archive for ‘Culture’ at Asian Window

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Tag Archive for 'Culture'

The long and short of it

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on March 13, 2010

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Two decades of research into saris throw up some little-known facts about the versatile garment. Veena Venugopal in Mint-Lounge:

Sari - Traditiion and Beyond; Roli Books

The sari, caught in a vicious knot of dropping demand and the slow death of weaving traditions, is Rta Kapur Chishti’s life mission.

Chishti, 61, started researching the handloom sari over 20 years ago. She travelled to all the traditional handloom centres and studied the weaving, dyeing and draping methods. She chronicles this in her book Saris: Tradition and Beyond. The book also demonstrates 108 ways of draping the sari, with step-by-step graphics.

When we meet, she is dressed in a grey Ikat, draped without a petticoat, so the bottom is more pantaloon, less sari. That style, she says, is a combination of two or three drapes. “I wear the sari based on what activities I have scheduled for the day. This is the run-around and get a thousand things done drape,” she says. Draping it differently and reinventing it to suit modern-day living is Chishti’s solution to reviving the sari. More:

Once-clear thoughts are clouded

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on June 21, 2009

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Which will change India first, the trickle-down of compassion or the trickle-up of rage? Why, when the world sees India as a great power, does India see itself as Burundi? After six years living in India, the chasm between what one wonders and knows has widened. Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times:

MUMBAI – There has always been a lush, adjectival richness to foreign correspondence from India. We write of creaking bullock carts, curled moustaches, stinking latrines, sallow-cheeked farmers, smoky air, sweltering megalopolises and aching villages. We relentlessly describe.

We write about India this way because India is beautiful – not beautiful like Paris, sumptuous and elegant, but beautiful in its distillation of the extremes of human experience. To go into a Mumbai slum or a rain-starved Rajasthani village is to know how beautiful ugliness can be.

But description tempts us, too, because India is mystifying. Correspondents send home answers. India withholds reliable answers. Correspondents schematize reality. India waits for the schema, then cruelly disproves it. The temptation to write 1,000-word tone poems is fierce in a country easier to describe than to explain, and easier to explain than to understand.

I will leave India soon for America, from where I came. I have spent six years seeking to understand. Before going, I wanted to write a column saying something conclusive about India, why it matters, what it means. More:

A life in the day: ‘Rebecca’, UN worker in Kabul

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on November 24, 2008

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A 29-year-old UN adviser describes her daily life in Afghanistan. Sharon Brennan in the Times:

I set my alarm for 6.50 every morning and light a wood fire in a metal heater in my room as soon as I get out of bed. During winter it was often minus 25 outside. I’ll have a shower and dry my hair. It’s a 15-minute battle trying to dress as covered up as possible while feeling professional and feminine. I must have my head covered at all times when I’m outside my house or workplace. You’re not meant to see the female shape, and the three scarves I own go down to my knees. They are all black, so they match everything and don’t get dirty: there’s so much dust in this city.

I get picked up at 7.45am by a driver in a UN Land Cruiser with blast-proof windows. I could walk to work, as it’s only five minutes away, but for our safety we’re never allowed to walk far on the streets.

I head for the Portakabin canteen in our UN compound. Breakfast this morning was a British-style egg sandwich with lots of ketchup.

Making movies the Afghan way

Cinema was banned under the Taliban, but film-makers are once again at work inside Afghanistan. Robert Fisk visits a set near Bagram. From the Independent:

Actors on the set of The White Rock, about the murder of 680 Afghan refugees by Iranians

Actors on the set of The White Rock, about the murder of 680 Afghan refugees by Iranians

Drive north of Kabul for an hour, turn left into a grey desert and head east for fifteen minutes, the sand shawling up the side of the windows until an armed man in the uniform of the Iranian police stops you before a forbidding compound of watchtowers, mud walls and razor wire. For a brief moment, that willing suspension of disbelief – I can see the inmates sitting on the sand beyond the iron gate – I forget that this is an Afghan movie set, and that Daoud Wahab, the producer of ‘The White Rock’ is sitting in front of me. “Looks real, huh?” he asks over his shoulder. It does.

For incredibly, as Afghanistan sinks back into the anarchy which became its natural state these past 29 years, Afghan film-makers are producing movies of international quality, turning out pictures which prove – even amid war – that a country’s tragedy can be imaginatively recreated for its people. Safaid Sang – Dari (Persian) for White Rock – was an Afghan refugee detention camp inside Iran whose Iranian guards helped to massacre more than 630 of their prisoners in 1998 after inmates protested at their treatment. The atrocity – largely unknown in the West – ended after two Iranian helicopters strafed the Afghans with machine guns. Quite a story. Quite a movie.

Rescuing cultures of India, from A to Z

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on November 11, 2008

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An academy in the agrarian countryside tries to preserve a culture by steeping a new generation of villagers in their own quickly disappearing traditions. Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times:

Tejgadh, India – In an academy deep in the agrarian countryside of western India, five students were writing briskly in ruled notebooks. They were in their early 20s and newly enrolled, but there was no discounting the gravity of their assignment: When they are finished, the world will have five more documented languages.

One word at a time, they are producing dictionaries of languages with which they grew up, but which scarcely exist in the rest of the world. These are oral languages, whose sounds have perhaps never before been reproduced in ink.

“If we make this, those who come after us will profit from it,” said Kantilal Mahala, 21, taking a brief respite from his work on the Kunkna language. “In my village, people who move ahead speak only Gujarati. They feel ashamed of our language.”

Call centers are fodder for India’s pop culture

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on October 21, 2008

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Rama Lakshmi in the Washington Post:

A scene from "Hello," a Bollywood film about the lives of India's 2 million call-center workers.

A scene from "Hello," a Bollywood film about the lives of India's 2 million call-center workers.

In a training session at a suburban call center, groups of fresh-faced Indian recruits jettison their Indian names and thick accents and practice speaking English just like the Americans do. They have hesitant conversations with imaginary American customers who complain angrily about their broken appliance or computer glitch.

The instructor writes “35 = 10″ on the board, as though he is gifting the recruits with a magic mantra.

“A 35-year-old American’s brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian’s,” he explains, and urges the agents to be patient with the callers.

That is a scene from “Hello,” the first Bollywood movie about the distorted and dual lives of India’s 2 million call-center workers.

Mysteries in the marble

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on September 11, 2008

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In The Independent, a review of Giles Tillotson’s Taj Mahal. Giles Tillotson is an art historian specializing in South Asia and the author of many books including Mughal India and Jaipur Nama: Tales from the Pink City.

The Taj Mahal at Agra stands for India in the eyes of the world. Yet the Archaeological Survey of India, founded in 1861, which looks after the Taj, has never devoted a publication to its most famous site – not even a guidebook. Indeed, there was no architectural monograph until 2006, when Ebba Koch’s excellent The Complete Taj Mahal appeared.

The art historian Giles Tillotson’s Taj Mahal leans on Koch’s research, as he is happy to acknowledge; however, his accessible and enjoyable style will engage a broader readership. Like every author in Profile’s “Wonders of the World” series, Tillotson considers not only architectural history but also cultural heritage and resonance – picturesque 18th-century aquatints of the Taj, early 20th-century restorations by Lord Curzon, literary responses such as Rabindranath Tagore’s poem (“a teardrop on the cheek of time”), and the famous photo of Princess Diana posing alone in front of the “monument to love” shortly before her marriage break-up. Tastefully omitted is the Trump Taj Mahal, a casino resort in New Jersey built by property mogul Donald Trump.

In The Times, William Dalrymple reviews the book:

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great Mogul city of Agra is revealed to Adam after the Fall as one of the future wonders of God’s creation. This was hardly an understatement: by the 17th century, Agra had grown larger even than Constantinople and, with its 2m inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris. A succession of riverside palaces and “sweet-smelling gardens with sweet blossoms” spanned both banks of the river Yamuna.As the Mogul chronicler Abdul Aziz put it, the city was “the wonder of the age – as much a centre of the arteries of trade both by land and water as a meeting place of saints, sages and scholars from all Asia . . . a veritable lodestar for artistic workmanship, literary talent and spiritual worth”.

It was the Emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666) who was responsible for the jewel of the Agra waterfront, and the Mogul empire’s most enduring creation, the Taj Mahal. The Taj, which was designed by Shah Jahan’s master architect, Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, is arguably the most admired building of the past 400 years, a masterpiece rising above the river Yamuna as perfect, beautiful and shimmeringly symmetrical as it was when its great dome was first completed in 1643.

From matters of the flesh to the stars, India finds a way

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on August 30, 2008

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Anand Giridharadas in International Herald Tribune:

Mumbai: In India, vegetarianism is not a passing Bohemian fad.

For 200 million or so people, it is an ancient means of purifying the body and pacifying the mind. Meat-eaters are widely believed to be aggressive and unclean. When Gandhi sailed to England to study, his caste excommunicated him for fear that he would succumb to the pleasures of the (animal) flesh.

Today, thanks to globalization, you need not visit Europe to be tempted by flesh. KFC and McDonald’s and Pizza Hut outlets beckon to a swelling middle class. (Guess why they’re swelling.) Fancy restaurants tantalize diners with sea bass, lamb shanks and duck confit. Children find meat-eating cool. Young executives want to fit in on business trips overseas.

How is a family to preserve its vegetarianism in a flesh-eaters’ world?

The Chandigarh dream

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on August 30, 2008

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Long neglected by its own people, the treasured buildings Le Corbusier built for the capital of Punjab and Haryana are now decrepit, and in need of preservation. A Unesco World Heritage Site nomination, likely to come through in early 2009, is the city’s last hope. Melissa A. Bell in Mint-Lounge:

Outside India, though, the city has been a source of fascination for the international architecture community that has both vilified and adored Le Corbusier, “the father of modern architecture”. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) approached the city in 2001, with a plan to nominate the city as a possible modern World Heritage site. Design students constantly make pilgrimages to the city. And, last year, foreign furniture dealers auctioned off original Le Corbusier items from Chandigarh. A typical piece, such as a wooden coffee table, which fetched around Rs100 at a government auction, went for over Rs67.7 lakh at Christie’s in New York.
After years of dragging their feet, the city’s authorities have finally gone into an overdrive to protect their heritage, spurred on by a group of architects and design lovers in the city, and by the embarrassment of the Christie’s sale. Not only have they created committees to oversee the preservation of its historical core and organized community outreach programmes to educate citizens, but, in a major coup, the three governing bodies in Chandigarh-the Punjab, the Haryana, and the Union government-have finally agreed to submit the Unesco nomination. The preservation, maintenance and repair work done at a Unesco Heritage Site can only be carried out under the UN body’s supervision.

Ema: The fiery Bhutanese food

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on August 8, 2008

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From Kuensel:

To most foreigners, chilli is something of a provocative oddity in the cuisine. What kind of vegetable makes a person break into a sweat and yelp and howl and gasp for relief, all at the same time? Or worse, makes you scoot to the loo right after consuming it. There is little room in mainstream cookery for food so potently flavoured and impolite, they protest.

To a Bhutanese, however, ema (chilli) enjoys an exalted culinary position. It isn’t just a food or a fad. It is the stuff of life. It is integral Bhutanese heritage and culture.

It’s not just the vegetable; it’s the taste. A bowl of black dhal or a cauliflower sabzi in a diner in India is likely to contain some chillies, and would be considered very hot by most people there. But that, as every Bhutanese who has studied in India would vouch, is piddling compared with the blistering fury of a highland Bhutanese chilli. But it is not raw heat that makes Bhutanese chillies distinctive. It is their incomparable sharp flavour, which some describe as succulent and earthy, with a clarity that seems to reflect the taste and smell of the skies and landscapes of Bhutan.

The pursuit of the Southasian past

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on July 3, 2008

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Moving beyond the colonial-era understanding of the history of the Subcontinent gives us a whole new way of looking at the Subcontinent’s past. This now includes not just the usual explorations of politics and economy, but also of social, cultural and religious issues – as well as the writing of history in the first place. Historian Romila Thapar in Himal Southasian:

Sixty years ago, at the time of Indian Independence, we in the region inherited a history of the Subcontinent shaped by two substantial views of the past: the colonial and the nationalist. Both were primarily concerned with chronology and with sequential narratives. The focus was on those in power, a focus that has been basic to much of the writing of history. There was information on the action of kings and dynasties, on governors-general and viceroys, and on various national leaders. On these, there was broad agreement. What was contested, although only partially, was the colonial representation of early Indian society. The colonial view was a departure from earlier Indian historical traditions, and drew on European preconceptions of Indian history. The use of history to legitimise power had changed from the rule of dynasties to colonial and nationalist definitions of power.

Three arguments were foundational to the colonial view of Indian history. The first was a ‘periodisation’ (the dividing of history into periods) that was to have not just consequences for the writing of history, but also major political impact during the 20th century. Indian history was divided into three sections – the Hindu, the subsequent Muslim civilisation, and then the British period – as formulated by James Mill in The History of British India, published in 1818. In the first two cases, these labels were taken from the religions of the ruling dynasties. The divisions were endorsed by the assumption that the units of Indian society were monolithic religious communities, primarily the Hindu and the Muslim, and were mutually hostile. Religion was believed to have superseded all other identities. This periodisation also projected an obsession with the idea that Indian society never changed throughout its history, that it was static.

A match made in cyberspace

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on June 12, 2008

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The matrimonial service shaadi.com has revolutionised the way Indians find their future spouses. Boasting 10 million members and a million marriages in 11 years, the site has been a runaway success. Anita Sethi in The Telegraph, UK:

Dressed in pale-green shalwar kameez and pink slippers, Usha Bala Gossain opens the front door of her terrace house in Slough and greets me cautiously. She leads me into her living-room, its pale-green walls decorated with plastic ornaments of mangoes and peaches, and offers me a can of Coca-Cola. A pungent smell of curry wafts through the house. Usha’s only child, Pooja, has lived here since she was two years old; now 24, she will soon leave the family home following her marriage to her fiancé, Kushu, and embark on a new life in Nottingham.

The fresh-faced couple emerge from upstairs, dressed in matching white outfits and holding hands. Tonight, Pooja, an economics graduate from her local university, Brunel (she now works in a bank), will celebrate her hen night. She eagerly answers text messages and calls from friends. A limousine has been booked to drive them to London.

Kushu, 26, explains how meeting a suitable life partner can be a difficult business for many Asians, in Britain and around the world. ‘The majority of Asians our age seek their parents’ acceptance of their partner,’ he says. ‘Asian parents don’t like the idea of dating or casual relationships that are not necessarily going to lead into marriage.’

Doing business in India? Go to school first

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on June 11, 2008

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From Reuters:

When foreigners complain to her that Indians are liars, Ranjini Manian often tells them what’s actually upsetting them is a simple clash of cultures.

The accusation is common among expatriates stumped by the Indian way of doing business and one that Manian tries to counter with the help of Global Adjustments, one of a few firms offering cross-cultural services in the world’s third biggest economy.

“Foreigners can’t understand why Indians don’t say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ clearly,” Manian, the firm’s CEO, told Reuters.

“We tell them Indians have a hard time using the word ‘no’. There is this tendency to want to save face, (but) a polite ‘I’ll try my best’ is not good enough.”

Gods in the manger

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on April 24, 2008

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In its eagerness to be politically correct, India has lost an opportunity to exploit its cultural heritage, writes Renuka Narayanan in the Hindustan Times

While the politically fearful (read: history departments) and the politically opportunistic (read: politicians) twist and shout on ‘mythomania’ and the Hindus-in-the-middle (read: most regular people) wonder if they should say, “Excuse me for living,” foreigners happily use our Saraswati for their Lakshmi. Want a supremely ironic example? Even as Indians still squabble about the religious and political correctness of singing Vande Mataram, look at Indonesia, a country with the world’s largest Muslim headcount — well over 200 million, making over 88 per cent of its total population while Indonesian Hindus account for merely 1.81 per cent. And yet Indonesia happily called its national airline ‘Garuda Indonesia’ way back in 1950, making its maiden flight to Mecca in 1956. To add a piquant twist, Garuda’s first aircraft was involved in daring airdashes during the country’s freedom struggle against the Dutch with the day of its first flight on January 26, 1949, later recognised as Garuda Indonesia’s official birthday.

Previously on AW: Ramayan trail in Sri Lanka

The revolt is about making Tibet Tibetan once more

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on March 21, 2008

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Gabriel Lafitte, adviser to the Tibetan government-in-exile, in openDemocracy:

This uprising has many uniquely Tibetan characteristics. At street level, a favourite item seized from Chinese shops was toilet-rolls – hardly the usual target of looters. Not that Tibetans, over millennia, have felt much need for the paper rolls, or even for the basics of the Chinese cuisine such as soy sauce. What the Tibetans did with the loo paper was to hurl it over power lines, instantly making Lhasa, and other Tibetan towns, Tibetan again. Right across the 25% of China that is ethnically and culturally Tibetan, the unrolled toilet paper looks like wind horses, the white silken khadag [or kata] scarf with which Tibetans greet and bless each other. As all Tibetans know, they carry their message on the wind: victory to the gods!

That is what this revolt is about: making Tibet Tibetan once more. The white scarves also protected Tibetan shopkeepers from attack as the streets filled, for a short and costly moment of freedom, with Tibetans smashing the businesses of immigrant Chinese traders.

In Tibetan areas, parallel worlds now collide

From International Herald Tribune:

GABU VILLAGE, China: For farmers whose lives in this traditionally Tibetan area revolve around its Buddhist temple, an aluminum smelter that belches gray smoke in the distance is less a symbol of material progress than a daily reminder of Chinese disregard.

“Look at the walls of our temple, they have all gone grimy with the smoke that pollutes our air,” said a 40-year-old Buddhist peasant named Caidan. The big factory, said a man sitting next to him, benefits only members of the Han Chinese majority.

“Tibetans get the low-income and the hard-labor jobs,” the man said. The Han, he said, “are all paid as technicians, even though some of them really don’t know anything.”

A Brazilian in Goa

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on March 17, 2008

in Culture and Heritage

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In openDemocracy, Arthur Ituassu’s has an internal dialogue with Amartya Sen as he travels through Goa:

“Our food is Goan. It is not Indian, nor Portuguese. It is Goan. We are not Portuguese. We are Indian for sure, but we are also Goan.”

The speaker is Jeanette Afonso, a middle-aged Portuguese teacher in Panaji, the small, historic capital city of the Indian state of Goa. As well as teaching, Jeanette runs a small guest-house at her Cantinho dos Afonsos, a double-yellow house in Panaji’s beautiful Old Quarter. At the end of the street, the little white church of São Francisco de Assis bathes in the light, blessing the neighbourhood and enshrining its history – there is even a crucifix that had given authority to the trials of the Goan inquisition (1560-1774).

For a Brazilian, this is a very interesting place to be. It is so clear that both former colonies of Portugal (Brazil 1500-1882, Goa 1510-1961) are products of a shared history.

[via 3quarksdaily]

Goa: A creaky paradise

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on March 14, 2008

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“Forty years ago, Goa was a trip. Now it’s also a business, a disease,” writes Sudeep Chakravarti in Hindustan Times. Chakravarti’s novel, Once Upon a Time in Aparanta, set in present-day Goa, will be published later this year.

Two days ago, a friend and I were breakfasting at a chic café in Baga, a bizarre Goan confluence of the digital hippie, Indian yuppie and those whom I simply call Charter Jack and Charter Jane – “Oi, mate!” and chips with everything. A French couple, replete with tattoos, wearing worn clothes, BO, and a girl of about six came and sat by us, burnt some charas, rolled a joint, and began to fumigate the vicinity. My friend, a Goan preparing to adopt a girl, was outraged at the couple’s nonchalance in doing something so openly in Goa that would land them in jail in their own country, besides possibly placing their daughter under State care.

“I can’t believe these guys,” she spat. “They should be whipped. And this Scarlette,” she continued, “how could her mother leave a 15-year-old girl by herself in this day and age, in an area known to be unsafe, known for drugs and raves and what not and go away on her travels? Would she do that in England? No. But this is Goa, right? So now the girl is dead.”

Scarlette Eden Keeling, flower-child of a flower-parent, is dead, after allegedly being on an extended trip of substance abuse, after allegedly being raped by a manager of a shack at Anjuna beach. Less than an hour’s drive north of where I live, in Panjim, Anjuna was once the eastern extremity of Woodstock.

Mothers and monsters

In the media’s hands, Scarlett Keeting’s mother Fiona MacKeown has become a scapegoat for the middle classes. Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian, UK:

Compassion is not a response the media seem able to sustain. That small window that affords a degree of respect for the grief of the bereaved seems to shrink ever more, but even so the treatment of Fiona MacKeown, the mother of the 15-year-old murdered on a Goa beach, has plumbed new depths of harsh judgmentalism.

While MacKeown struggles to get the police to take on the case of her daughter’s killing, she has a second child lying in hospital in the UK with a broken neck from a car accident that happened shortly before her daughter’s death. This goes well beyond the platitude of a mother’s worst nightmare. Yet even such circumstances have not inhibited the torrent of criticism and contempt that has poured down on this woman’s head. Open season has been declared on every part of her family life, her parenting style and even her appearance. She is blamed for abandoning her daughter in a resort while continuing her travels; accused of a recklessly indulgent style of parenting; and criticised for her mode of grieving. Almost every article refers to her hair – it is “lank”, a “curtain” and, most unforgivably, grey.

Previously on Asian Window:

The changing face of Bhutan

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on February 28, 2008

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As the last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom cautiously opens itself to the world, traditionalists fear for its unique culture. Arthur Lubow in the Smithsonian Magazine.

On rural highways in Bhutan, trucks hauling huge pine logs rush past women bowed beneath bundles of firewood strapped to their backs. In the capital of Thimphu, teenagers in jeans and hooded sweat shirts hang out smoking cigarettes in a downtown square, while less than a mile away, other adolescents perform a sacred Buddhist act of devotion. Archery, the national sport, remains a fervent pursuit, but American fiberglass bows have increasingly replaced those made of traditional bamboo. While it seems that every fast-flowing stream has been harnessed to turn a prayer drum inside a shrine, on large rivers, hydroelectric projects generate electricity for sale to India, accounting for almost half the country’s gross national product.

A cross-cultural mismatch

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on February 20, 2008

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In the Christian Science Monitor, Yvonne Zipp reviews The Konkans by Tony D’Souza. D’Souza is the author of the novel Whiteman, which was a New York Times Editor’s Pick.

The Konkans is less a novel and more a series of interconnected short stories, set in India and Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s, that pivot around three central characters: Francisco’s mother and father, and his uncle Sam.

Lawrence, his dad, who worships the British with a fervor greater than Rudyard Kipling at his most colonial, longs for the West. When a white Peace Corps volunteer shows up in his village, she might as well have INS stamped on her forehead. Chicago isn’t Oxford, but Lawrence and his dad see blond, ponytailed Denise as the means to make the D’Sai family fortunes.

Creating happy places at work and at home

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on February 19, 2008

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Namita Bhandare in Mint:

Early last year, I took a long, hard look at the mirror, drove into work and chucked up the job that I loved.

had my reasons. After five years of breathing work, I suddenly had a new boss whose lament about the lack of ethics and talent in the Indian media made him a bit of a red flag. The more he talked of ‘core teams’, the more I began to feel like an outsider.

There were other extenuating factors. I was exhausted with juggling: parent-teacher meetings, family obligations, a mother who at 75 wasn’t in the pinkest of health, running a household. The biggest tug of war was over my daughters.

The Tallest Story Competition

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on February 8, 2008

in Art

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Tara Douglas in Mint on a unique experiment between Indian tribal artists and Scottish animators:

This is the story of a creative collaboration between tribal artists from central India and young animators from Scotland: ‘The Tallest Story Competition’ consists of the first collection of tribal stories to have come to life through animation.

Leslie Mackenzie, director of Scotland-based West Highland Animation, wanted to tell stories about unknown places to children in her country. She rallied support from Gaelic cultural organizations, on condition that the first version would be in Gaelic. The half-hour animation series has now been dubbed into English, Hindi and five Indian languages-Halbi, Santhal, Marathi, Gond, Soara-of the communities represented in the films.