What Happened to the Child?

Sulochana Bai cannot read or write. Her conversations are peppered with words like 'danger', ' 'emergency', and that favorite word used by so many folks : 'Chapter', to be used this way: 'yeh aadmi ek chapter hai'. Chapter = What a Character.
She was with me, next to me at a hospital in front of the MRI department, and wanted to know what MRI was. Was it X-Ra (that's the way she pronounced it - X-Ra).

As I struggled to come up with an explanation, she came to my rescue herself:
'CT- Can type ka kuch hai kya?'
Yeah!
'Haan na, CT-Scan ke tarah hi kuch hai.'

Bai may be illiterate, but she is the current head - adhyakhsh - of the mahila mandal in her residential area. Time spent with her is always so illuminating. About life in the basti, social tensions, how resolved, how not. And I always wonder why I don't talk more often about these essentials, rather than day to day stuff like 'kapda-dhona, sukhana, bartan saaf karna, kuda-kachra'.

She asked me if I remembered what she had told me a couple of years ago - of the couple that had died by pouring 'rakel' kerosene on themselves, in her neighborhood? Of course I recalled the incident. The man was a perennial drunkard, and the wife struggled to make ends meet, to send her seven year old child - who was slightly handicapped physically - to school.

One day after the usual late night fight over her money, she had - in a fit of pique - poured kerosene on the man, and dared him over god knows what. He was part -drunk, went and picked up a match, lit it. Before she knew what was happening, he went and caught her in a tight bind, saying ' *#@*, come, you die with me'.

The little boy had come running to Bai's house, the neighbors went running back. The man had over 80% burns, she had less - 60%. Was conscious, narrated what had happened. Over the next few days, she succumbed first. He went a day or two later.

Her sister arrived from somewhere in the boondocks of Northern Maharashtra.
When the neighborhood said - and this is always such a heartening aspect of life in a basti - they would pool in and continue to send the boy to school, the aunt said, No need, I'll take him back with me, to myhome. And send him to a good 'English' school there. I owe this to my sister.

Bai became suspicious when she happened to see this woman trying on various saris of the dead sister, when she thought no one was looking, inside the small home.
But the police said they wouldn't stop her from taking the child. After all she was the legitimate relative. The basti women on their own, quietly removed the dead woman's bank book, and kept it in their own safe keeping. With some Rs. 30,000/- in it. That they could not touch, of course, but the idea being that it could go to the child some day.

The dead man, it seems, had just sold the hutment. For some Rs. 25,000/- advance and this issue and the money already in the home was the root cause. Of all that had then taken place. Aunty dearest got this money, sold the TV, almirah and whatever else she could get hold of, and went away.

This was two years ago.

Last week, she arrived, asking for the bank book. Saying how the boy was now in fourth standard doing so well. After all, he had always been a quiet, shy and such a good student at his studies as all the neighbors were aware of. She arrived with this man, who went off to catch a drink. Bai and the other women of the mahila-mandal smelt a rat, and continued drilling her, talking to her, trying to figure out how the boy was doing.

A couple of hours later, the man comes back, completely drunk, and tells them 'Don't you believe a word of all that she is saying. She threw him out two years ago. She just wants the bank money now'.

This 'aunty' later, I am told, escaped.

After a sound thrashing from the basti women. Apparently, in a moment of distraction, while they debated what to do, how to get the police to take some action.... Basti life and the police after all share a strange, uneasy equation - they had wanted to be sure of what to do.

No one has any idea where the little boy is today.
Is he somewhere begging. Did some kind soul take him under his / her wing (our minds would want such an outcome, and these are the 'happy endings' we wish are happening). Is he alive at all. Does he have anyone to call his own.
And what about his state of mind? What happens to a shy, quiet, endearing seven year old? Who was a favorite of the neighborhood. And yet, how could a seven year old ever find his way back to a certain loving basti of this large metropolitan city from some place 250 kilometres away?

And having heard this incident, what can we do? Do I leave it as it is? Another story to be filed away in my mind? And how do believers explain this 'logic' of God?

And how come some 'shy, unassuming' kids become Abhinav Bindra, chased by all the newspapers. Others - I don't even know this child's name - fall between the cracks of our attention?

Our 'Copying' Fetish in Education

A building coming up in Powai has signs put up all around it : IBS Mumbai. India Business School Mumbai.

This morning, front page ads announce the CFA Program leading to a CFA charter.

The ponytailed hero of the Indian MBA wannabes, Arindam something-or-the-other takes full page ads in the national dailies with - among all else, for sure - his own photo. (I know a professor at IIM A who cringes each time - he is a namesake!)

Yet another gentleman 'Chate' ensures he hogs the media ad space every time there is talk of extra classes or tuition classes.

IBS is written exactly as the logo of LBS, the London Business School. Down to the very same blue square background. With a red underline.

The CFA India thing uses words of the original CFA program of the US, but is actually a Tripura based body, who even took the poor firangis to court (and won!). Calling what they give as a degree a 'CFA charter' and what not. A different matter, if I-Banks such as Accenture, Lehman Brothers, E & Y give a far different weightage to who they see as the actual CFA charter holder - a crazily tough place to get into and then get through its exams, where even chartered accountants and IIT engineers are known to fail - as versus these tom-tomming media and space hoggers. God knows if the Tripura one is at all entertained by the international finance institutions. It would be interesting to see how these two CFAs measure up against each other, in - say - a third exam.

Even suggesting this - same for IBS versus LBS - is perhaps giving them too much 'bhav'. And 'bhav' is something the Arindams and the Chates obviously give bhav to.

While India is definitely going places, it is a sad state of affairs that she is doing so willy-nilly.
An Anything Goes attitude that would make Paul Feyerabend cringe.

MANY LIES, MANY MASTERS…

1.5 million copies sold. Says the jacket. True story, it says. Of a psychiatrist, his young patient and the past-life therapy that changed their lives.

I made my 18^th attempt to complete reading ‘Many Lives, Many Masters’, my interest in half life mode. i.e. going down exponentially - half-hearted as compared to the last time I tried reading - each time.

How come so many folks swear by this book, and I find the going so totally uphill?

Don’t get me wrong. I would absolutely love to do a past-life therapy on myself. Imagine if science can get my DNA to talk, and tell its fascinating history. Imagine – if I can re-look at the seed of me that existed at an earlier point of time – for something of me was there, always, in the past, that is as sure as I stand here living and breathing.

If I decide to begin my journey, say, a mere hundred years ago, there are clearly eight people I am, for sure, merged in – the four sets of parents of my grandparents. Each with future bits of me… my predilections, my genes, my inherent tendencies…Ah, that’s the one I got the dust allergy from. Oh, he’s the one who dislikes sweets, is it? And wow, look at how well she sings and plays the instrument – why did this gene evade me? My ancestors, while they gave me the genes, what I would love to know more of, is what is called the ‘environment’ they each lived in - each bound in social roles, so many untold thoughts, so many untold histories. And all stories, in a real and fascinating way, enmeshed deep deep inside me, in the mist of the past.

Imagine. As I go back further and further in time, there are not just eight, but perhaps hundreds who I am, in a real sense , a part of back at any point of time – I am a living proof of their presence on this planet today. This is such a soul-stirring feeling, such a seamlessly connected to the wide world feeling, so much my-continuing-life feeling. So simple in the truth in it. So awesome too.

Just like the flower blooms so simply,

The morning in my life has woken up the same way.

… and I hope that my evening time also recognizes

To end in the same tune…

Tagore, I think. Who else can put in focus, our time on this planet, so well.

And science tells us there are no endings. If I am a drop in the ocean, I am so, along with billions of molecules. When I merge and go back, and then re-emerge, it will be as another combination of molecules perhaps, but what a mesmerizing history each subpart might have. Like the billions of strands in the double helix of my DNA.

Yet, what do we do - we look at the whole, and seek the past of the complete drop as such. That is because we are so attached to the 'me' of this life!

That’s what this Brian Weiss is missing the point on. When the true reality is so very fascinating, how can these descriptions of past life, by one young girl – each sounding suspiciously like some pages out of a school history text book hold my attention? I mean, her past lives (and the many masters) would do yeoman service to the world, not by providing what is being presented as 'gems of wisdom' but by perhaps going to times that would make it truly incredible - such as deciphering the Indus Valley script, no? Why isn’t anyone ever from some place like this, in her past lives? And that’s the basic defect in the Weiss logic. That he well camouflages under the academic degrees, and with continuous explanations that he rambles on & on about - of his own doubts, and thus smartly tying up of every loose end that could degenerate into outright suspicion by other readers such as me, of course written in a fairly easy to read style.

But then, if indeed she had deciphered the Indus script, the irony is that the book may not have become this famous. Whoever heard of reality – such as archaeology – sell a million and half copies? And that is a telling comment on what we humans seek – doubtful answers to the unknown are always more interesting than some proven and concrete solutions.

I loved watching the movie Ghost – still watch it if I catch it on any of the channels. Enjoy the chemistry between Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, and the story is one you want to believe in - you want to imagine it real. It is exactly what a good 2 hour movie is supposed to do – provide entertainment, in a world of make-believe simulations outside. I loved reading Roots too, once upon a time, and could never understand why folks dissed the book saying Alex Haley created a work of fiction. So what? That’s great, it was well-researched, and an important addition to the racial anthology, I felt.

But I just cannot bring myself to fit this Many Lives Many Masters anywhere into my acceptance grey cells. It is a piece of shit - to me. And my opinion each time I try to complete it, only digs in deeper. And thank god for blogs where one can bare one’s feelings as it is!

A 'Socio' story coming up !

These Times in Hindustan...

Our monthly paper bill is Rs. 273/- . For TOI (that includes the Mumbai Mirror tabloid), Hindustan Times, Indian Express and The Economic Times... in short, with the thickness of pages nowadays, a significant amount of newsprint to be able to sell to the raddi-wala.

The thing is : this entire thappi of papers, I find, I can skim through in five minutes. Seriously.

Ind. Exp. we keep because I used to quite like the editorials. Now I increasingly find this is so with HT instead. Today's 'paper actually had a lot of food for thought. On various angles, and not just some 'issue of the day' like the kidney racket or something... Many are mediated - in other words, representing another (not the writer's) point of view, but made the richer, for drawing us - the reader -'s attention to it...

The Faithscape page held me... as Renuka Narayan replicates a poem written by Lance Naik Sukhwinder Singh, the first liver recipient of AORTA. To quote her: Here's how the young soldier thinks of the dead lady whose liver now keeps him alive and fit. Calling his poem Jigar Ki Dhadkan

Khushkismat hoon main ki mamta ke aanchal mein jee raha hoon,
Tootne lage the jo sapne dil ke, un sapnon ko phir se see raha hoon,
Ek maa hai jisne janam diya aur laad pyaar se paala hai,
Ek maa hai jisne jeevan diya aur girte hue samhala hai,
Apna jigar ki dhadkan dekar so gayi sitaaron mein
Bhool na paoon kabhi main unko chamak rahi jo taaron mein
Aasmaan ke taraf dekh ke ghoont sabr ka peeta hoon,
khushkismat hoon main ki.....

RN also writes an aside on Uddhav (eeks - not the Shiv Sena variety - the original one) as he brings a message from Krishna to Radha, in her other article on the same page. Uddhav feels awkward at having no real message to deliver, and fakes one up.

And then there is Khushwant Singh. Again, what spellbinds my attention is his quote - of Kuldip Salil's translation of Ghalib...

Dair nahin, harum nahin, dar nahin, aastaan nahin,
Baithey Hue raah-guzar pe hum, koi hamein uthaye kyon.
(No home, no hearth for us, no temple, no mosque,
Why should anyone remove us from one thoroughfare, can we ask)

And ultimately, there is Barkha Dutt with her article 'Disadvantage Sania'. Lucidly put and clearly point-put-forth, it is a joy to read. It highlights our peculiar Indian love-hate relationships, that swing between adulation and annoyance. Her analysis of what exactly makes people so uncomfortable. She highlights how the visible women in sports hold up a mirror to both our prejudices as well as our changing attitudes. She calls it a mixture of 'breathless awe' and 'bewildered fright'. How we would rather do with the sentimental do-goods of fiction than the messy reality of fact. The article - I think I said this already, but what the heck, let me just say it again - is simply brilliant.

Must say, sometimes when I watch 'We, The People' am filled with misgivings at the thought of the way the media - including Barkha - perpetrates the sensational stuff of the moment. Once I had the (mis)fortune of being sent as an 'expert' to the show by one of my corporate clients to defend their position on a certain brand. It was quite an intriguing experience seeing the episode from the inside out. I recall being totally taken aback and alarmed at the deference with which I was ushered in the NDTV offices at New Delhi into a 'special room' - as one of the key 'experts' of the day along with stalwarts such as Dipankar Gupta, Balki etc. where each of us virajmaaned with our own individual halos of importance (separate from 'we, the people' the hoi polloi that we were kept away from, till we reached the actual 'set').

And the main HT editorial today, highlights the plight of Indians who get hospitalized. Apparently, a quarter of all those hospitalized every year, slip below the poverty line for medical expenses for which they are not insured. Falling ill means entering into an unending debt trap.

In the past two years, while I have pursued my 'course-work' in sociology leading up to the actual PhD fieldwork, have often added to my growing list of topics I could have covered (but ultimately have not) for my dissertation. One has been the whole 'moneylender' thing in India... how come so many of the unscrupulous ones survive and thrive, and where the bloody hell is the 'State' in all these dealings, and why does it prefer to look away...

Vibhu (Mittal) and we have been having this conversation recently ... He is on a sabbatical right now from Google, and while he is busy being (what he calls) Mr. Mom ! , while wife Sujata helps run the company HP in Palo Alto where they reside, we are having this sporadic chat regarding publications - how they are disappearing from the West, and simply snowballing in India. Earlier I had sent in this essay by Ruchir Goswami, a classmate in the 'Culture & Media' sessions, who has done a halt-in-the-tracks analysis of the diversity of publications that come out in IITB versus those in Harvard, as written by students... At Harvard, students have carte blanche, while in IITB, any masala has to be whetted by the DOSA - Dean of Students Affairs...

Since we are talking media out here, let me speak of an Urdu sammelan recently, and cut-paste from my chat mail here:
...I was attending a talk as part of an Urdu Sammelan (lest you wonder where all i go - this was at Solapur, and of interest to me as part of the changing 'Public Culture' space being created in liberalized small town India)... and the speaker - an erudite and extremely articulate editor from Hyderabad was rueing the fact that readership in Urdu is completely dying off - and the culprit is not just the content, it is also the style - they cannot afford to print in color, nor can they bring out the latest in fashion in print : 'glazed paper'.... A huge part of the 45,000 figure you mention (Vibhu had said : On a larger level, that figure is inverted: the US has 1500 newspapers versus 45,000 for India. I wonder if this just reflects the fact that the IITs (or maybe IITB) is not a reflection of the larger Indian demographic at all?) ...., are folks doing it dedicatedly, as part of some inner-directed goal of 'wanting to make a difference'. Like this Urdu ed said, 'We are not just the editors, we are the owners, we are the jamaadar who sweeps the floor, we are the watchman, we are the peons'.

... Actually, IITians just adore and devour all that is published locally. The point Ruchir is making is that the authorities refuse to recognize this is important, and one has to scrounge out time to do these 'extra curricular activities' in the literal sense of the word. In that sense, the campus is as much a reflection of the larger Indian demographic... in the sense of working within impossible constraints, and still bringing out the papers against all odds..

Like all staid media articles, let me also end on a good note (why can't we end with anger????) - Of eleven month old baby Kyson Stowell (Fate names us well!) surviving a twisted tornado and its debris.

And this faith - that the nextgen deserves the best - will keep us all going on, in life. Or to go back to the RN article, Radha laughs, for the words when they reach her, read 'Uddhav has not finished his learning yet'. Shocked, he seeks an explanation.... 'I am one with Krishna. I don't need a letter from Him. He himself is my love letter'. It is the realization that Uddhav figures - a village woman has understood the nature of faith better than he had, particularly faith in oneself, that comes from a secure belief in one's soul connection with all Creation!

Aaja, Khinchle...

Watched Aaja Nachle, about 'small town Shamli' - in an asli small town Solapur. A town deep inside Maharashtra - no flights, no three, four or five star hotels. One where, 'families with ladies' were allowed to enter the cinema hall first ('As in Titanic?' quipped the hubby), and the balcony ticket cost Rs. 40/- (also price of hiring the autorickshaw for an hour). Solapur welcomed the entry of Madhuri Dixit on screen with whoops of delight and wolf-whistles. Later, collapsed into laughter everytime we were shown the two locals of Shamli sitting down for a drink and pouring a bit into the tin cup of the third hanger-on (Why did they find this so funny? Who knows... but hey, it was crazily infectious :-) ). An audience WANTING to love this movie about their amchi mulgi coming back, and soon, an audience let down completely, resulting in an ominous quiet very soon, as the story got - not curiouser and curiouser, but 'boringer and boringer'.

Aaja Nachle was like falling into the hands of a bad dentist who's taking his/her own time to khinchofy your teeth.

So here was one more movie with the trope of a Bollywood small town - a vanishing point of low buildings beyond the hillock, a place where announcements, we were given to believe, still needed to be made from a bhonpu-cycle-rickshaw... the geography always looks suspiciously similar in all these places. What else can we expect, built as they all are under the sky of the Film City property in Goregaon Mumbai, where if you turn the camera an extra inch either way, you get to see the high-rises of the suburbs.

Ill-thought out storyline of half-baked aspirations. Worse, the makers forget that small towns whether quarter or half baked, do rest their beliefs within the ideological framework of the 'Indian Family' - much more into 'shame' and 'values' than their more metropolitan counterparts - for that very reason, the protagonist comes across as one that not the hip youngster nor the wannabe of the city, and not quite the small-towner will relate to... a carelessly carefree woman, following her own instincts. Instincts are shown to be proven wrong - from a small town perspective anyway, when it is carelessly thrown in, that she got 'divorced' (bad girl!), and one who comes back running at the bidding of a long forgotten 'guru', but never the parents, presumably because they did not yell out for her.
And why Laila-Majnu for God's sake! as the story-within-the- divorcee-story? In 2007?

Well, it didn't seem to weave any magic in a small town, that's for sure. Not sure if the folks in metros will throng the multiplexes situated within shopping malls to see this sanctimonious story that is built on the theme that small towns should not get this shopping mall. Oh boy.

Ugh, and why does every movie have an audition sequence nowadays? Was intriguing in RDB, just about OK in OSO but by now in this one, it is like mildewed roti being served on a platter. And the only actor who manages to step out of the pasteboard boundaries set for them is Irrffaaan or whatever his spelling goes nowadays. An unscrupulous businessman is an ubiquitous Indian phenomenon, and he makes it spine-chillingly so. The rest are just not there anywhere in the story. Kunal, Konkona, Raghubir, Ranvir, Jugal are not different from the hundreds of 'Shamli' residents who suddenly step out on stage during the grand finale ('yeh kahan se tapke' asked the Solapur audience to one another).

And will YRF please explain the most inexplicable point of all? How do you get the pulse of India so right with Chak De, and so devastatingly, off-kilter in your very next?

ROFL - Rowling on the Floor, Laughing....

Kind of late in the day to do a 'deathly' review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Or is this the right time, now that the initial euphoria is over, I mean?

Here's a book and a series that has involved the world real-time into a fictional world. In the past ten years, we have kept pace with the author's imagination - happily gone wherever it has led us. I recall coming back from a trip to the US, telling all and sundry here in India, you've got to read Harry Potter. I'd bought five copies of Chamber of Secrets (that was the one out those days) along with Philosopher's Stone, as the de facto gift for everything - birthdays, weddings, home visits, whatever. And trying to explain it was an amazing children's book series though it was me recommending it; also a book for all ages...

JKR's confidence by now, her seventh in the series, borders at an arrogance - that we Harry Potter lovers would be waiting with bated breath, would've read the books in the right order, and know all about Polyjuice Potions, Expelliarmuses, Disillusionment Charms etc. No need to explain and no need to try and come up with any other new surprises that a magical world gives full leeway to its maker to bring about. Recall the amazing idea of Tom Riddle's diary? Pensieve? Time Turner? And in this Deathly Hallows, forget coming up with the new stuff, she seems to have kedged a line off Pulitzer winner Toni Morrison's Tanner lectures of 1988 ( wherein Toni refers to one of her novels as 'Book can be seen to open with its close'). Uh oh...
Kavya Vishwanathan, you are no longer alone. One, a does-not-know-any-better teenager and the other, a nouveau billionaire with a host of secretaries to do the background reading up, and provide the appropriate warnings wherever necessary.

Also why try to keep the book lean and crisp any longer, when the world - mainly consisting of children following the proverbial Pied Piper, fawns over every extra word put in? So we get 600 plus pages of a vista that seems either to take its readership for granted ( it meanders along even while the book seems to move at breakneck speed) or made to order with a Warner Bros. future for itself - wont this Big Battle look great on screen? Same with the Gringotts seige that is suspiciously like an entertainment ride in one of the modern 'Disney Worlds' (can already imagine this ride in the future 'Harry Potter World' coming up). Humour is absent even when the Weasley twins are around - and often, when we are exhorted by the author to LAUGH since the characters on the pages are laughing till their bellies ache or something like that (page 119: they were all laughing so much...) bewildered we smile at the joke that escapes us.

And she puts Deaths (the capital D is my interpretation), into the story with the attitude of - 'haven't I told the world I am writing for a mature world and not merely for children'? Haphazardly, and helter-skelter. When a Weasley brother dies - come to think of it, one of the ones we loved best all through, it is with this same sanctimonious underlying feeling - did you think I'd leave you to get away scot-free, she seems to be saying to the hapless readers, caught in the throngs of the imagination of a You-Know-Who author who has risen Phoenix-like in the past decade, to capture and ensnare our minds. There is no real mourning for this character. And no naming of children after him either, in the nineteen years later last chapter. With all the other dead guys having got their place in, with the names of the next gen, this most deserving bro is left 'out in the cold'! :-(

A last chapter that seems to have a close-to-reality feel paralleling JKR's personal life - as the brood expands, and the babies start to grow. A fellow blogger Uma Damle has written it well : the unexpectedly expected ending rather than an expectedly unexpected one. Also, wonder what a feminist reading of the book will come up with... Mrs. Weasley, Hermione and Fleur do all the cooking as and when there is any cooking spoken of, and the men - well, they go out to work. Also, in the last chapter, please note, it is men who do the driving, no mention of women, however 'brainy' they may have been through the long journey so far.

Anyway, the wait - from July to September, was worthwhile. I did not have to buy the book after all :-) My nine year old niece Ishani has kindly lent her personal copy of the book to her much much older aunt, just a few days ago. To me, this has been a well-timed borrowing along with being down with a viral attack ... in other words, no rapid reading, and consequently, more time to mull over JKR's plans for our imagination.

And a glimpse into hers too. Why in the world does she want us to accept that if a Horcrux has a bit of your soul, you don't feel a modicum of anything while it is being destroyed, but just sharing a thought within your mind, like Harry does with You-Know-Who, is excruciatingly painful.

Or why she believes that a mom can protect a child only till his 17th birthday. Is it because the law so decides in this non-Muggle world? The eons-old maternal instincts actually follow the bureaucratic decree of current times!

Perhaps, what does it matter, eh?
While the Galleons roll in, into the Gringotts of the Muggle...
ROFLOL.