Sweet

Yesterday was the south Indian festival of Deepavali; today is the north Indian festival of Divali -- but it's all one: lights, fireworks, giving boxes of sweets and nuts, wearing new clothes, visits with friends and family. We don't really celebrate any festival, but we still wrap up a few boxes of nuts (called 'dry fruit' here) and other nice things to give; and receive a few boxes of sweets and other nice things. I lit one big candle, instead of setting out hundreds of tiny oil lamps.

The fireworks yesterday were properly deafening (though some dastardly person began at 5:45 in the morning, for which I curse him as noisily as possible). I expect they will be deafening again tonight. You can buy firecracker chains of 10,000 crackers -- you unroll them down the length of the street, and they seem to go on exploding forever. I have been told that chains of 100,000 crackers are available too, but fortunately we've missed out on them so far. Big bangs and flowers of light rise above the popping crackers.

I just ate TWO sweets (Mysore paak, a weakness of mine), and am feeling slightly sugar-sick, with an aftertaste of roasted gram flour and ghee.

So, Happy Deepavali / Divali! On to the next station in the festival season, which will only end with Pongal in mid-January.

Green

I sent this poem out -- I had written it some years back, and forgotten about it until recently -- and got it back with a constructive note, saying that the ending was too familiar. I agree, actually -- I have this tendency to romanticize, and it was easy, I guess ....

But the interesting thing for me is that the final word of the poem: green, was pretty much just a word when I wrote it. And now it is staggering under the burden of so many meanings, implications, hopes, fears.... I see language changing all the time, but I don't often pay much attention to it.

I might try to look at this again sometime, but meanwhile, here it is:

Mantis

Brown as late Autumn,
jointed with leaf-fragments,
your face a horned mask,
you pretend to be old wood.

Did a male mount you?
Did you graze on his head
as he impregnated you with twigs?

You will give birth
to copper stickpins.

When your life dries up
and you sink into earth

you will bring forth green.

Hold On

The Sunday Washington Post reviewed Shashi Tharoor's new book, The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India, the Emerging 21st-Century Power.

It's a very positive review, but suggests that

The reader would do well to start at the end, which is where the extremely funny introductory "A to Z of Being Indian" has inexplicably been placed, then dip through the beguiling biographies in Part Three, before going on to the reflective cultural essays in Parts Two and Four, and ending up with the political and economic material in Parts One and Five. Anyone familiar with the house numbering system in Delhi will find this system not only logical but apt.

I was reading this review to R, and when I reached the end, we both burst out laughing:

... it is a chaotic, joyous, occasionally exhausting and often uplifting collage. As such, it could hardly be a more fitting reflection of its subject. If Tharoor's India really is the future, the rest of us had better hold on tight.

Martial Law

I usually go to The Daily Times, a liberal Pakistani newspaper, when I want to know more about what's going on there. Today there's an analysis by editor Najam Sethi which should interest people who are interested in the region.

(I'm giving the link but also copying the text - in case the site comes down; private TV channels were blocked yesterday, and curbs have been placed on news media -- here's the list of resrictions):

News analysis: Where do we go from here?

By Najam Sethi

Several points are interesting and significant about last night’s political rupture.

1: We have a state of martial law, whatever the government may say and however long it may last. The Proclamation of Emergency (PE) and the Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO) have been signed by the “Chief of Army Staff”, General Pervez Musharraf, and not by “President” Musharraf or Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. In fact, a PCO is an extra constitutional deviation and only an army chief can order it.

2: The constitution has accordingly been “held in abeyance”. But significantly, the PCO says that the country will continue to be governed, “as nearly as possible” by the constitution. But where there is any other departure from the constitution apart from what is contained in the PCO and the PE from now onwards, it will be at the behest of the “President” and not the COAS. In other words, General Musharraf’s presidency has been confirmed and upheld by the PCO.

3: The PCO prohibits the courts from holding or issuing any decree against the President, the Prime Minister or anyone exercising powers under their authority. Specifically, the President shall now require a fresh oath under the PCO by those judges who wish to be included in the Federal Shariat Court, High Courts and Supreme Court. In this context, four Supreme Court judges have already taken oath under the PCO from President Musharraf and a new chief justice of Pakistan has been nominated, ie, Justice Hameed Dogar. In other words, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry is now to be referred to as a former chief justice of Pakistan. He will be in the company of at least seven other fellow judges who have revolted against the PCO. We should now expect a host of other judges from the four High Courts and possibly Federal Shariat Court to be excluded from the new oath taking ceremonies. If this manoeuvre is accomplished by General Musharraf relatively quickly and the high courts are sufficiently revamped, then we shall have a pro-executive judiciary soon.

4: All ordinances promulgated by the president prior to this PCO remain valid. In other words, the National Reconciliation Ordinance is alive and kicking. Benazir Bhutto will be pleased.

5: The PE lists several reasons for its necessity. The prime reason is the state of deteriorating law and order and the vanishing writ of the state owing to acts of terrorism. But the judiciary has been held to be a major culprit in log-jamming the executive and undermining the war against extremism. Indeed, out of 11 effective clauses in the PE, eight refer to the negative role played by the judges and the judiciary in undermining the war against terrorism, the executive functioning of government and the economy. As such, the Supreme Court under Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry is held critically responsible for harming the national interest and exacerbating the crisis of the state and deadlock of the political system.

6: The 2007 PCO does not dissolve the assemblies or the provincial and federal governments. Nor does the PE announce any extension of the term of parliament by up to a year as is possible under a state of emergency. This means that General Musharraf intends to allow these parliaments and governments to finish their terms on November 16 (National Assembly) and November 24 (provincial assemblies), followed by general elections within a stipulated time frame.

7: We should expect the lawyers, civil society groups and most, but not all, the opposition parties to launch a spirited protest on the streets and boycott the courts. But with the electronic media blinded, and the administrations freed from the oversight of the courts, the police and paramilitary forces will be used to arrest opponents and crush the protest movement. Two factors will play a critical role in what happens next: one, the extent to which the lawyers can continue their protest and if necessary sacrifice some dead bodies for their cause; two, the role played by the People’s Party of Ms Bhutto and the JUI of Maulana Fazalur Rehman. We should also expect a surge in terrorist activities and bomb blasts by Taliban and Al Qaeda elements to take advantage of the situation.

8. Ms Bhutto has returned to the country in the midst of the crisis. The government will expect her not to destabilise its modus operandi in exchange for a power sharing deal. In all probability, she will oppose the PCO and PE. Supporting it would incur the wrath of Pakistanis who generally don’t like what General Musharraf has done. But she may lend only token PPP support to the protest movement. Much the same may be said of Maulana Fazal’s JUI. Instead she will demand that the road be cleared for free and fair general elections so that the people may give their verdict on all parties.

9. Writ petitions will fly against the PCO. The new SC will agree to hear them. But no judgment will be forthcoming until such time the elections have been held and a new parliament is in place to indemnify the PCO and confirm President Musharraf as the legitimate president of Pakistan. In other words, the unconstitutionality of this act will probably be pronounced by the new SC after it has got retrospective validity from a new parliament some months hence. The question of whether General Musharraf will remain army chief for another five years or take off his uniform then will have to be settled by the new parliament in 2008 as happened in 2003.

10. The US, EU and the international community will condemn the PCO and demand a restoration of full fledged democracy via free and fair general elections. General Musharraf should not have any problems complying with their demand in due course.

To Be or Not

One of the blogs that I started my blogging life with, Giornale Nuovo, has ended after a wonderful five-year run (though the archives are still up). The shock that one gets when something familiar disappears has made me wonder about this blog. I have not been paying it attention, it is overgrown with weeds. And yet, once in awhile, I still see something and think, I must post this.

While I decide, here are a couple of things that I've read / seen / heard recently:

This, from Randall Jarrell's Pictures From an Institution, in which every sentence is so clever that you just have to shake your head in amazement:

Gertrude thought children and dogs overrated, and used to say that you loved them so much only when you didn't love people as much as you should. As much as you should had a haunting overtone of as much as I do - an overtone, alas! too high for human ears. But bats heard it and knew, alone among living beings, that Gertrude loved.

And a very different sentence, from the beginning of Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, by Jason Goodwin. I just read a review of a mystery novel he has written, set in the Ottoman Empire, with a eunuch detective, and it sent me back to this earlier work:

Between age-old fortresses with wells and marketes, domes and minarets, and lemon groves where learned men rehearse theological points worn smooth like pebbles in the handling, the turkmen come riding upon embroidered saddles, with stirrups like metal galoshes.

And a link to amazing paintings, by Gerard Charruau. These cityscapes, which must be very large, because they appear to be painted on sheets of paper glued to canvas, remind me of the crowded scenes in Mughal miniatures.


I imagined a painting of Chennai -- though it has such a low skyline in most places, that if you look at it from a rooftop, many of the buildings are obscured by trees. And the buildings are mostly not pretty... I think a montage of the good ones, placed together...

And finally, a link to a YouTube video from a singing contest which is similar to American Idol. The song, Tujhse Naraaz, from the film Masoom, is in Hindi, but it need not matter, I think. It's very touching (Rough partial translation: "I'm not angry with you, life, I'm surprised / disturbed. Your innocent questions unsettle me. I never thought that in order to live I would have to manage pain; that if one smiles one has to pay a price for it...") -- it makes me cry. The singer is Amanat Ali, a contestant from Pakistan. You have to overlook the horrible costumes and gaudy sets.

I guess I've answered the title question, for the moment at least.

A slide show of some remarkable work by Indian photographers -- from the New York times.

Raghubir Sing's Pavement Mirror Shop, Howrah, West Bengal (1991)

Daniyal Mueenuddin

I just read a beautifully written story in the New Yorker, Nawabdin Electrician, by Pakistani writer Daniyal Mueenuddin. It's online here.

I googled him and found another (very different) story at Zoetrope: Our Lady of Paris.

As soon as I finished reading Nawabdin I read it again, out loud. It sings. It starts out rather R.K. Narayan-ish; i.e. quaint / whimsical, though the writing is better - and then it goes beyond that with a powerful conclusion. Read it immediately!

Heaven

We're back at sea level. It's not too bad -- it's raining, and the sky is soft and grey.

About 30 years ago, I took 2 years out of my American life to study classical dance here in Chennai, which was then called Madras (20 years ago I returned and stayed on). During a school vacation I went up to Ooty, close to Coonoor, from which we have just returned. Everythng was much smaller and simpler then, of course. I stayed at the Anandagiri YWCA and was given what is called bed tea, in a white china pot covered with a tea cozy. I paid for a bucket of steaming hot water to bathe in. I sat on the terrace and ate toast and home-made marmalade for breakfast. It was cold and wonderful.

One day I took a bus to Kotagiri, which was a tiny hamlet, just a few buildings and the tea estates. I had tea and something in a place with old lithographs on the walls, of Queen Victoria, and kittens. Then I walked into the estate, a valley with a stream flowing through it, and thought that if there were such a thing as heaven it might look like this.


Even today, whenever I see a tea estate I imagine that person, my self of that time, surrounded by the tidy green plants, interspersed and shaded with silver oak trees. She sits beside a clear stream in gentle sunlight, reading a book (there would be libraries, of course). Perfectly alone and contented, forever.

Jaladosham

I’m having a jaladosham (jala = water; dosham = disease, in Sanskrit-Tamil) – i.e., a cold. My nose is producing almost as much jala as the drizzling sky outside my window. The product of the nose is called, in Tamil, mukkupi (mukku = nose; pi = disagreeable substance).

Although my physical state is expressing itself in Tamil, I am listening, for about the millionth time, to a song by Kailash Kher called Saiyyan, a most romantic love song, in Hindi. It can be found here. Or go out and buy the CD -- Kher has a big voice, full of feeling. Even when he's belting out a song (not written by him) whose lyrics are almost impossible to figure out, i.e. "Allah ke Bande"... -- 'jo bhi ho, voh phir ayega' -- you mean that bird is going to get injured and not be able to fly all over again?? (It's a great song too, though, Allah ke Bande -- rousing and catchy -- just don't think too much about what the lyrics mean. If you don't know Hindi, all the better, in this case.)

When people have a cold or a fever, they usually attribute it to ‘change of climate’ – even when, in Chennai, the weather seems to me to be pretty much business as usual. I nod politely, but inside I’m scoffing. And now here I am, 30 degrees F cooler than usual, and loving it intensely, and I’ve caught a cold. I automatically think, ‘ah yes, change of climate,’ and then scoff at myself.

Thus the internal monologue of the morning.

The Toy Train

I never feel so purely childlike as when we take the toy train (it has a grander official name and status: The Nilgiri Mountain
Railway, a World Heritage Site) from Coonoor up to Ooty. We have lunch at the Savoy and then drive back to Coonoor.

We arrived at Coonoor station at 1:00 p.m. for the 1:30 train, and bought two first-class tickets for Rs. 78 each, entitling us to sit in splendid solitude in the first car. While we waited, we wandered around the station with our cameras. I shot the small fountain:



R took this picture of the train:


A group of men had gathered on a bench on the station platform. One of them sang Tamil film songs in a good strong voice. I love the smiles on his listeners' faces:


A little late, the guard took his seat on a bench at the front of the train, just outside our compartment (photo by R):


The engine was in the rear; the guard held red and green flags, with which he signalled to the engine driver when people or cattle strayed too close to the tracks. When we reached Ooty, R asked him how long he had been working on the train. He said 19 years, with 6 more to go. He lives in Mettupalayam, in the plains, where the train's journey begins; and travels up and down every day.

Scenes from the trip:




At Lovedale, the Station Master came out to meet the train:


The proprietor of the Combined Fruit and Vegetarian Teastall looked on:


A family sat in the second section of our car. Their youngest child rested his chin on the back of our seat, and looked out with fascination; inside me, I had exactly the same expression:

Some Things About Coonoor

Coonoor is about 1770 metres higher, and 30 degrees cooler, than steamy, tropical Chennai by the sea. Here are some things about it:


it has fallen leaves that look like autumn


red tile roofs are everywhere - even on the churches


you can wear a wool shawl in the evening


it has beef stalls


mist rises up from the valleys


there are tea plantations everywhere, even in the town


(okay, you can see this in Chennai too:) a cow with horns still bright after the Pongal festival


you can walk for ten minutes and reach the forest



it has monkeys.

Far Off Hindostan

I brought on vacation with me a stack of old New Yorkers. Today I was reading an article from April 2005 (!), Global Warning: Mrs. Mortimer's guide to the world, by Todd Pruzan. Mrs. Mortimer (1802-78) wrote a number of books for children, including a series of guides to different countries, one of which was Asia and Australia Described (1849). As Pruzan writes, "No matter where your ancestors had the misfortune to live, Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer likely had something nasty to say about them." The article is fascinating, and I rushed to the internet, to find out what she had to say about 'Hindostan'. Here it is -- page down for the entry on Hindostan, which begins:

This word Hindostan means "black place," for in the Persian language "hind" is "black," and "stan" is "place." You may guess, therefore, that the people in Hindostan are very dark; yet they are not quite black, and some of the ladies are only of a light brown complexion.

What a large country Hindostan is! Has it an emperor of its own, as China has? No: large as it is, it belongs to the little country called England.

How did the English get it?

They conquered it by little and little. ...

... There is no nation that has so many gods as the Hindoos. What do you think of three hundred and thirty millions! There are not so many people in Hindostan as that. No one person can know the names of all these gods; and who would wish to know them? Some of them are snakes, and some are monkeys!

The chief god of all is called Brahm. But, strange to say, no one worships him. There is not an image of him in all India.

And why not? Because he is too great, the Hindoos say, to think of men on earth. He is always in a kind of sleep. What would be the use of worshipping him?...

Vishnoo, the preserver, is a great favorite; because it is supposed that he bestows all manner of gifts. The Hindoos say he has been _nine_ times upon the earth; first as a fish, then as a tortoise, a man, a lion, a boar, a dwarf, a giant; _twice_ as a warrior, named Ram, and once as a thief, named Krishna...

It goes on, and she has a few kind things to say, and it is all written in a remarkably authoritative style, even though she never went there.

Pruzan points out that Mrs. Mortimer's views were consistent with those of the time; and concludes his article by citing a few recent stereotypical views of foreigners, including one by the Russian politician Ivan P. Rybkin, who, in 2004, declared: "Tyranny is tyranny. Tyranny in Africa is tyranny, only there they eat people."

Politician, Coonoor

Tamil politicians liked to be shown embracing the elderly poor -- it started, I think, with the late M.G.R., back in the seventies. This picture looks a little ambiguous to me, though. And I feel that they have made him more fair-skinned than he is. Wonder if he won...

Looking out the window at Cafe Coffee Day in Indira Nagar. It made an attractive picture, although it was too humid to sit outside. Coconut palms are a constant feature here; yet I realised that this picture might look quite exotic to someone in, say, Boston.

It has been raining almost every day. When it rains and I turn on the cold water tap, the water that runs over my fingers is actually cold, not just tepid -- it startles me every time.

Vinod Joseph

I had earlier written about Vinod Joseph's first novel, Hitchhiker. Now Epic India, an online arts magazine is publishing ten of his short stories, one every Saturday. The first one, The Boy Who Killed a Rainbow, is here.

Take a look -- the story has the same rich detail as the novel, without its heavy burden of caste politics. It's very easy to imagine the setting and the people, and their everyday talk. It's pace is about as leisurely as the days it describes, but it made me want to bathe in the river too, and throw stones at the rainbow.

Update: Story #2, One Hundred Rupees, is also up. I liked it even more than the first one.

A European Traveller

(Thanks, Peter!) The New York Times has an article about a new show at Washington's Sackler Gallery: Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17 Centuries . The article includes a slide show, and the first picture in the slide show is the 17th century Mughal painting of a European traveller which I've been using as a kind of logo on this blog since it began:


(The article captions it "Homage or sendup?" - and he does look rather silly, I suppose; yet how could one not admire him, striding through a landscape so completely unknown.)

Rain

It's the best kind of weather: rain, not heavy and therefore destructive, but fairly steady and saturating, so that the garden looks impossibly, radiantly green. The temperature is almost 20 degrees less than it was a couple of weeks ago -- in the upper 80s.

We went to Amethyst and sat on the verandah, watching drops of water dropping from leaves and drinking cappuccino. It was heavenly.

Several Things

A recent search referral:

plaster crumbling away salt infection

I read this and immediately thought, Yes, that's me all right...


Some good photographs of Chennai.

A new(ish) Indian blog directory.

I love mehndi. Here's a photoset of Indian mehndi on Flickr. And one of Arabic mehndi. (both of these links via Dispatch from L.A.)


A pleasant side-effect of the real estate boom: yesterday afternoon one of the city's few organised real estate brokerage firms sent us a bushel basket full of perfectly ripe banganapalli mangoes. How many such baskets must they have delivered all over the city?

I've eaten more mangoes this year than ever before, and the season is not over. Last night Mary surprised me with a sweet-sour curry of green mangoes from our garden, after I had eaten one of the meltingly sweet real estate-mangoes for tea...

It is equally sweet-sour to remember that mango season will be over soon; though if it weren't I would be in danger of ending up like the young English lady in India whose epitaph I'm sure I read about somewhere, who died of a surfeit of pineapple.

Sheets

In India, when you are talking about bed linen you don't say 'sheets' but 'bedsheets.' I suppose it's to save you from the embarrassment of asking a shopkeeper for sheets and being presented with pieces of paper, or sails.

I struggle with insomnia. Tossing twisting, contorting into the aches I will feel tomorrow, I forget what I am trying to do: SLEEP, dammit.

It's dry, dry, not finding sleep. The twisted sheets have sandpaper edges. The air-conditioner gurgles like a creature with indigestion. I will fold one sheet into a captain's hat, another into a boat, raise the sail and I'm away.

Two Searches

I don't look at my search engine referrers very often - they tend to be pretty repetitive (e.g., from a few minutes ago: 'late in night we clothless photo') - but yesterday I did, and I found two interesting ones:

--'at what does watermelon laugh when it's murdered.' That was intriguing enough that I did the search myself, and found this page. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I gathered that it was a line from a poem by Pablo Neruda, and, searching further, found this.

--'I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer'. That turned out to be from 'Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams' by Kenneth Koch. Here it is, from this site:

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the
next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

-- Kenneth Koch

That's two excellent discoveries. I must read my referrers more often.