The Monumental

A couple of days ago, MathWhiz (who's visiting) and I wandered past the British Museum late at night: the gates still stood open so we wandered in and were invited to wander further since the Great Court apparently stays open all night. I can't even begin to describe what it's like to walk into the Museum courtyard at night when there aren't crowds of people all around.... and then to walk around the cool marble floors on the Great Court and look up at the reading room... again, all in silence, with no chattering masses around you, no din from zillions of school-kids on tours and parents bringing with reluctant children attached to their feet. It is something else to see this place when it is not in its normal state of chaos.

I've always had a special spot for the Reading Room here: given its storied history of Marx and Lenin, Gandhi and Kipling, it's hard not to feel that it is space steeped in the history of the 20th century. But the British Museum itself is one of those institutions that I can only ever be ambivalent about; like the Victoria & Albert -- perhaps even more so -- it can only ever have been a product of an empire and that it was so manifestly the product of an empire that I have a familial connection to makes it so much harder to single-mindedly appreciate. It is without doubt one of the world's great institutions, it has a collection without peer and yet it is somehow -- in my mind, anyway -- horribly flawed by its (metaphorical) foundations. And seeing it in this light -- cold, silent, empty -- where its sheer monumentality can't possibly be missed.

moreish

This is the word I'm going to import into my vocabulary from this trip. It means exactly what it sounds like it means - it's a descriptor for something (generally food but not always) so good that you want more of it. So: this past weekend, I discovered that hot Indian food you can pick up on the go at supermarket chains such as Sainbury's can actually be moreish (and trust me, no one is more surprised by this than I am!). I got caught in a cold December rain and was tempted by the Vegetable Makhani Masala with Pulao Rice: it was steaming hot and the thought of going home and having to cook dinner was not appealing. It was moreish - and it was surprisingly spicy, for something that is sold at a mainline supermarket.

It made me think that I should have gone to see the Dandy Warhols play at the Astoria (which has to be one of most written about music venues ever). I was minding my own business, clutching the books I'd bought on Charing Cross Road when I was accosted by a guy who was desperate to sell me a ticket 'to see the Dandies for the last time....' That caught my attention but it turned out to be the last time 'for this year, yah' so I decided to take my chances in the years to come and went home instead. But hey, if I enjoyed a plastic ready-meal in London, maybe I'd have enjoyed the Dandies too. Ah well, I'll never know. Speaking of music, the only conversation I've had on the tube comes to mind: there was a lot of confusion this weekend because a number of the Underground lines were shut down for maintainence. So after being completely unable to figure out how I was supposed to get to where I was supposed to go, I finally asked a guy who was standing next to me studying the large-scale map of the underground on the wall at Leicester Square if he was from London. He was, and after assuring himself that I wasn't a maniac ('cos of course only maniacs talk to strangers on the Tube in London), he helped me figure how to get to Liverpool Street without using the Circle line. Anyway, in the process we established that I was from Canada. 'Oright, Canada. Nickelback.' It turns out that Nickelback has a new album out - or maybe it's just out here now... whatever... and there is a massive amount of advertising for this album all over London's Underground. Not moreish, I'm afraid.

Sunday, I went on a Harry Potter walk, or, to be precise, a 'The London that Inspired Harry Potter' walk organized by London Walks. I know, I know, not the kind of thing you'd go to without some trepidation but it turned out to be moreish. For a cold Sunday evening in December, there were a lot of people there and that they were all adults too made me feel less ridiculous. But we were led down the tiniest of alleyways in the heart of London, places that I'd never have guessed existed - and it must be said, places that remind you of Knockturn Alley and of Diagon Alley; we got to see the red telephone box that will let you into the Ministry of Magic but only if you know the right number to dial, and sadly, none of us did... and so on. All good fun and a nice way to spend a couple of hours in London.

Experiment in 19th century design!

I don't actually dislike the V&A, despite my comments below! There are things about it that I do really like - here's an example. This is a typical of the 19th century 'design' that I created on one of their little hands-on machines. I have to admit that I'm quite taken with the pattern! But again, it kinda makes my point about the lack of adequate historicization offered by many of the exhibits. In the South Asia rooms, for instance, there are a number of dresses made up in various parts of Europe that use cotton or silk materials with designs like this one that came from India and which were one widely imported ito Europe. But you'd have to know about why and how this appears in the South Asia rooms yourself - there's no explanation offered alongside the exhibit. While I was there, there was a school group in there, mostly made up of girls who looked like they were 9 or 10. And I swear I overheard one brown - ie, presumably British-Asian - kid say to another, 'Lookit the dresses people in India used to wear.' I don't know that she realized that the only people in India who wore dresses like the ones displayed in the cases were the British....

So, what would an 19th century lady have made of my little design for Indian cotton?

The Victoria & Albert Museum

Somehome calling this the V&A makes it sounds mildly lewd and while there are many things you could say about this particular museum, mildly lewd is not one of them! One of my fave musuem pieces in the world is here - Tipoo's Tiger - as they call it. There's a whole history to this mechanized tiger and to Tipu Sultan and you can read it all here so I won't repeat it all. Suffice it to say that every time I go to Mysore, I get myself to Srirangapatnam - what the British called Ser-ringa-patam - and visit Tipu's summer palace, the 'Daria Daulat.' As far as I know that translated into the 'riches from the sea' which is an odd name for a place that is landlocked but whatever. It's a low building with a wrap-around verandah, full of carved archways and the most intricate paintings all over it. The paintings are mostly of Tipu and his court but the most famous ones are of his victory over the British in the late 18th century. The tiger, I imagine, comes from the same time period and telegraphs his feelings about the British quite clearly! And yet... and yet... the intriguing thing about the Tiger is that it is an automata, such as were hugely popular in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and France. There's an irony in Tipu's Redcoat-eating tiger being a creature that could only have come about in the interaction between colonial margin and imperial centre; an irony that sadly isn't explored in the rather poorly curated exhibit in which it now lives.

Ahem, right, back to the Victoria & Albert. I went in particular to see a small display on 40 years of the Booker prize they have up but got distracted by all the colonial bric-a-brac that fills up that space. Truly, I wonder what the British would exhibit in it if it weren't for their colonial history! The rooms just off the lobby - usually reserved for the most popular exhibits - have been the Islamic art, South Asia and East Asia collections for as I've been coming here. And it doesn't end there: wander upstairs to their 'Europe' collections and you can't help but be struck by how much of it is influenced - if not directly brought 'home' from - British expeditions to distinctly non-European parts of the world. Take the stunning silver collection - two of the most interesting pieces in there are a solid silver South Indian temple (vaguely reminiscient of the famous Madurai Meenakshi temple, with its carved and layered pagoda-style top) and a massive table decoration of an Arab tribesman on his camel under desert palms - made respectively in Madras and Cairo and 'presented' to colonial officers by various collectives of 'natives.' Collectibles like this abound here: don't even get me started on the jewellery collection! And I have to say, the curating is disappointing in that it doesn't seem to draw attention to this deep colonial history. This museum really exists because the Victorian era was the great age of empire; its exhibits are vital momentos of the (sometimes forcible) globalization of British culture that really started in that age though it may only have culminated in the post-war period.

Even the Booker exhibit should have excavated Britain's colonial history: for one thing, there is a reason that the Booker prize goes to the best British or Commonwealth novel every year; more immediately, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things are prominently displayed. The best bit of the exhibit were the four or five books that are shown with their 'bespoke' bindings. I didn't know this but apparently books shortlisted for the Booker are handbound by selected master bookbinder from the Designer Bookbinder association for presentation to the authors. The result is a set of unique - and fascinating - bindings that try to reflect the form and content of the books. Check out the bookbindings from 2005 to 2008 here. Aren't they gorgeous? Looking at these bindings makes me want to run and read the books - which I suppose is the intent. But it's interesting that the bookbinders - for both Midnight's Children and The God of Small Things - chose to include the colonial connection in their concepts. Perhaps the V&A at large could learn something about the concept of acknowledging the hybridity at the heart of empire from this tiny - but oh-so-interesting - little exhibit.

Bookhunt!

Today I decided to wander with a real purpose: look for books that I couldn't find in Toronto. So started my day with a quick tramp through storied Brick Lane (yes, I saw the church that is now a mosque) and Spitalfields Markets - these London markets are quite unlike anything I've seen in other places, mostly because they mash so much crap next to so many cool things I couldn't afford (in this case, the offerings on Brick Lane, other than the fruit & veg were the crap and the hand-made organic products in the new but christened 'Old Spitalfields' market were of the too-cool-for-school and way beyond my means variety). Still, it was a fun place to begin - and the fact that most people seemed to be walking through Brick Lane market to get to Spitalfields again suggested that quality of forced live-togetherness that cities foist upon their citizens.

In keeping with the looking in markets theme, my next stop was the Riverside Book market. South of the river, literally underneath the rising sweeps of London Bridge is a small - and truth be told, a generic -- lot of long tables upon which books are displayed and sold every weekend. It's the location that makes it special, not the books themselves or the prices. And as with any set of used books, you have to have the patience to dig if you want to find something worth the effort! My haul from there today included Eric Newby's On the Shores of the Mediterranean and Anthony Capella's The Food of Love. Having accidentally picked up Newby's biography, A Traveller's Life, a few weeks ago in Toronto, I'm now a fan. But I only bought the Capella book because the Hagrid-lite man who was looking after the table where I found the Newby recommended it so highly: he asked if I was looking for travel books on the Med in particular since he had one that he'd loved... and one thing led to another until I found myself saying, 'Go on then, I'll give you two quid for it.' Done, he said, and so I'm now the owner of a books whose blurbs include one from Hugh Laurie that goes like this: 'a splendid linen suit, panama hat, distant lawn-mower kind of a book; guaranteed to whisk you far fro this drizzly island, soothe you, warm you and return you home again without losing any of your luggage.' How could I resist? I'll report back.

Fortified with hot chocolate - 'special Christmas recipe with rum and cinnamon,' - I wandered through the heart of tourist London -- across Waterloo Bridge, up Charing Cross to Trafalgar Sqaure, past the National Gallery, along Oxford Street, up Marylebone Lane - until I hit my last serious bookstop for the day: the Oxfam Book and Music store and Daunt's on Marylebone High Street. I found the Oxfam last year one wet summery day when I dashed into it to escape for a rainshower and left two hours and many pounds later. It's truly a tiny little gem of a bookshop - and it's very close to Daunt's, which is quite possibly my favourite bookshop in all of London. My practice now is to go to the Oxfam store first and go through the little travel writing section they have there before heading to Daunt's and spending too much money on books that - strictly speaking - I don't need.

Today's haul from Oxfam include:
Mary Taylor Simeti's On Persephone's Island
Chris Stewart's Driving Over Lemons
Clive James' Falling Toward England
and Michael Sanders' From here, you can't see Paris

And last but not least, from Daunt's, I emerged with Adam Clapham's Beware Falling Coconuts (you've got to see where this link takes you!) and Robyn Davidson's Tracks. Not a bad haul, and (other than at Daunt's) all bought from used bookshops so I still have a few quid left for food and cider!

Yes, there is a clearly a theme to my book purchases: it's December and cold here and I'm heading back to Toronto where it will only be colder. So travel narratives about far-away places, mostly warm ones, seem to be calling out to me. So I'll leave y'all with a thought from St. Augustine (I know, I know!) : 'The world is a book and those who do not travel, they read but a page.'

On the Other Side of Town

I wandered around Chelsea yesterday, a deliberate attempt to see another London. And I couldn't help but think of Tourism, a novel by a 'British Asian' man called Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal. I'd never heard of it but saw it on one of the bulging bookcases in the room I'm occupying and couldn't resist it. Have I ever mentioned the first requirement for house-sitting? Packed bookshelves! Preferably packed with books you want to read! Part of the reason I'm loving my stay in London so much are the bookshelves here.... my cool-Britannia cousins (and I don't mean that in a snarky way -- they embody the best things about Brits of a certain generation) have these wonderfully laden bookshelves that I get to come home to everyday! Ahem... Tourism then caught my eye: I'm not sure I like the novel but it's acutely observed. And it prompted me to visit Chelsea and Sloane Square and the King's Road, all such popular haunts of 'posh birds' that they are mocked in British novel after British novel... to quote almost at random, from the last novel I read: 'That night he became enamoured of the upper classes. ...heading back toward the studio on King's Road her father had impulsively bought for her one weekend, he fell in love with Chelsea's solemn Georgian terraces and resposeful, well-fed squares. Here, Doug could see, life was lived on the grand scale.' (This is from The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe but that's almost irrelevant). But this mocking is particularly charged in Tourism which at least takes a stab at racism in the upper echelons of British society, even the supposedly post-everything millenial one.

You'd be amazed by the number of dessicated old ladies wandering into stores along the King's Road and Knightsbridge. Or perhaps not. I mean, that's where one expects the rich to shop in London, isn't it? But to have that expectation so very obviously met means that it can't be mocked all that easily. All that is left to say is that there are clearly very rich people living (or at least shopping) in London; that the vast majority of them are white and that I truly did feel like a tourist in that neighbourhood, in a way that I haven't felt in any other part of London that I've wandered around in. I saw a couple of Filipino women, obviously nannies pushing kids along in prams, some cabs being driven by Asian men (but not many since this is not the land of cheap mini-cabs: this is where customers are chauffered in style or have Black Cabs hailed for them by doormen) and there were a black construction workers working on the endless repairs being made to 'London's Victorian Water Mains'; other than that, there was yours truly wandering along. It's an odd feeling to be so consciousness of my browness; I suppose it's a necessary reminder that not all of London is as approachable as the places I've been hanging around in.

Tomorrow, I'm checking out a couple of the markets here in the East End! Something tells me that will be less... segregated.

In the East End... (part the first)

One of the things that I've found most amusing about this sojourn in somewhere in the middle of Bethnal Green & Bow, Mile End and Hackney is that its residents constantly surprise you. There are rows and rows of two, three and for storey brick row houses, all with names such as Twig Folly Close, Digby Knottisford, Oystercatcher Close and Gawber Street. For your amusement, I should mention that I've also seen street signs for Sugar Loaf Walk, Dug on Street (though my A to Z tells me that should be Duggon), Poultry, Gerund Rd, Railway Children Walk, Old Jewry, Garlick Hill, and Ribbon Dance Main. (I've been keeping a list!). Oh, and have I mentioned that I'm staying in Gunmaker's Lane, off of Gun Wharf?

Just for fun, I thought it would be interesting to see how far the colonial connection goes: I wasn't surprised to find Madras Place or even Bombay St -- it's near Canada Water, for those of you who know this city; there's also a Bangalore St in Richmond, a Hyderabad Way in West Ham, and even a Mysore Road, near Clapham Junction. If I can manage it, I want to go and take a picture of the street sign for Mysore Rd. But seriously, I think it would be very interesting to see just how many colonial villages, towns and cities have lent their names in this way -- we're so familiar with the metropole-to-outpost flow of names, especially in North America with its plethora of 'New something' names but this other routing is just as interesting I think.

Staying in this part of London though is also teaching me about immigration here and the ways in which it is different from immigration into North America. One of the things that struck me almost immediately is how South Asian -- specifically Bangladeshi -- this neighbourhood is and how that identity is obvious in the clothes people wear and the ethnic enclave within which much of their lives seem to be lived in. I'm two kms away from the infamous Brick Lane (and I can't recommend the books Brick Lane (Monica Ali's novel) and Tarquin Hall's lived ethnography Salaam Brick Lane enough!) and it is obvious in between Brick Lane and here that there is a large and unintegrated community here. I don't know that this is either good or bad but even Mississauga and Brampton haven't prepared me for the large numbers of women in salwar-kameezes, hijabs, and burkas and men in a combination of long thobe, wolly socks and sneakers who walk around doing their shopping in little shops that wouldn't look out of place in working-class Bombay or Karachi or Lahore. (I will admit too that nothing prepares you to have them open their mouths and sound as though they've walked off the set of Eastenders but that's another story...).

The disturbing thing about this phenomenon -- or perhaps I should say the potentially disturbing thing -- is that I don't know that this isolation is by choice. I take the No 8 bus on my trips into Central London and could wax lyrical about how wonderful it is: it goes all the way from here past Brick Lane and Liverpool Street and the City to Oxford Circus and then onto Victoria. But while it is full of people from the Bangladeshi community when I get on and for a little while after, by the time the bus gets to Liverpool Street, it's mostly white folks heading off for work and shopping.... and I'm not sure that that's because they choose not to leave the East End or because they can't....

The City

So I've spent the last week or so thinking about cities... the attacks on Bombay and being here in London and reading the New York Times online somehow made me think of The City as an entity much greater than the sum of its parts. I've thought of myself as a Torontonian for quite a while now -- perhaps more so after the disasterous year in Halifax than before! -- but watching and reading the attacks on Bombay in real time, as it were, I've realized again how much we owe to the idea of a city. There was all the usual stuff about how the city responded to the crisis as no other city had -- promptly debunked by the NYT comparing it to 9/11 (and the Guardian here comparing it to the attacks on London transit in July 2007; known here as 7/7). The thing is though that there is both greater impact (and tragedy) because this happend in a city and such a city and greater redemption.

I love cities: the noise of traffic, the crowds, the sense of never being alone because you can just choose to be anonymous in the crowd, the public transit, the sense that you are part of a community, will you or nill you, that is always moving, always growing, always embracing differences that you can't even imagine -- these are the things that cities have going for them. And there is something about how they are always space-conscious even as they are ever-growing that makes it impossible for any scar(e) to be permanent. The Twin Towers came down but New York will build something in that space because it has to; so also here in London, those Tube stations that were bombed are up and running again and in Bombay, too, Leopold's Cafe is already open and crowded where four days ago people lay bleeding. It's not that cities can't stand still and mourn, it's that they don't memorialize a space. We could concieve of leaving behind a blighted village and just building anew over the hill, but who can imagine a great city doing that. Where would the great cities go, anyway?

I'm living in the East End of London for this month and it's an area of this city that I've never really explored before. So I'm reading about it now as I'm walking its streets trying to orient myself: it is the part of the city that I like to think I'd live in if I had the choice because it is the raw pumping heart of London, with a history of radical politics, it has seen waves of immigration (think Kensignton Market spread over a vast area), and has been through numerous incarnations. This is the only riding that has sent a Communist to the British Parliament, right after the Second World War, when it was pulverized during the Blitz. Bethnal Green and Bow is now one of the poorest and most heterogenous ridings in the country and yet it nestles up to Westminister Palace and central London.

A place of contradiction, of despair and of hope -- kinda like the east end of Toronto, of so many slums in Bombay and of Queens in NYC. I suppose when you live in a city you have to live in close proximity to other lives and that in itself is a hopeful process.

The Two Indias

John Edwards may have spent the last few years talking about the "two Americas" but I can't help feeling that the notion of two divergent nations yoked together for all eternity is as true of India as it is anywhere else in the world. There is what is often termed "India Inc" here (that miniscule Westernized and wealthy elite -- the "aam admi" (man on the street, literally) but generally meaning the rest of the nation, where most everyone is a farmer or farm labourer and lives at or below the poverty line.

The nuclear deal that the Indian government and the US was pushing for has come through and India has been granted an exemption (though I don't understand on what grounds) for the purposes of trading in civilian nuclear energy supplies though it will not sign either the non-proliferation treaty or the CTBT. And there is a large part of India that is ecstatic about this news. Again, I don't quite understand how this obscure piece of legislation affects the average Indian but so many of its younger citizens seem to have overdosed on nationalism and patriotism that they signify any kind of national event with such sentiments.

The interest in this is seen as a part of globalization and also, contradictorily, as a rallying point for those from the left (and far right) who would reject mass-produced commercial and corporate globalization but it's just kinda weird to see. And I'm opposed to the deal anyway. What's even weirder is that the Communist led "Left" parties who broke with the ruling Congress party over this issue are also casting their refusal to condone the deal as a macho, nationalist thing. They don't object to this deal on the grounds that India should be focussing on developing safer sources of alternative energy (or if they do, this is at the tail end of their platform). The main point that Prakash Karatand his buddies in the Left have been making is that this deal is a loss of Indian sovereignity, where this is solely determined by India's right (and ability) to keep testing nuclear weapons without suffering any international consequences. Am I just not getting something here or is this simply bad politics, for a so-called "progressive" party?

The contradictions are endless -- the world's largest democracy, which actually regularly elects a number of Communists to federal government is going ga-ga over the legalization of nuclear energy trading. This, in a place wherein the federal government has just mandated that anyone standing for any village or panchayat (rural) election must own a toilet! Yes, you read that right -- you don't need to be educated to any particular level or not have criminal convictions or anything like that in order to qualify to run for these small-time positions but you do need to have a built lav. This in an effort to promote sanitation in the vast swathes of rural India wherein it has not yet caught on or is beyond the reach of the people. What price nuclear energy there?

In other news, that Tata Nano project I wrote about is more or less going to go ahead although there are negotiations and negotiations-about-negotiations going on.

The aftermath of the floods in Bihar (and surrounding areas) are still devastating. As I watch saturation coverage of Hurricane Ike, I can't help thinking of the 2-3 million who have been left homeless (no accurate number of dead can yet be reported though eye-witness accounts say it will be in the tens of thousands) by the Kosi River's catastrophic flooding. There are those who make the news and those who will never merit a mention. Globalization doesn't mean a damn thing here.

The Nano, the Nuclear Deal and the Floods

I've been so obsessed with myself and my family that I haven't said much about what's going on in the rest of India these days, but life for the millions is part of the background to everyday here. The big news stories of the time are about the cataclysmic floods that are affecting Bihar (in East-Central India); the India government's attempt, backed by the US, to secure an exemption that would allow it to trade in nuclear energy; a politically framed agitation in Singur in West Bengal that has halted work on the October rollout of the Nano (aka as the world's cheapest car, one that the Tata Corporation unveiled last year); a deal signed a coupled a days ago on Hindu pilgrims right to use certain government lands in Kashmir that caused another flare-up between Islamic separatists and the national Army and and and..... hmmm.... those are the big ones, I guess. There's a lot about about cricket and local corruption and a court suggesting that women in sarees ought to be banned from riding pillion on motorcycles and scooters and other such fun stories. But.... and in no particular order, here are some editorializations:

The central government in India nearly fell a couple of months ago when the "left" parties in the coalition -- ie, the communists in name and their smaller regional allies -- pulled out when the Congress party insisted on going ahead with a nuclear deal with the US. The details are incomprehensible but essentially, the deal allows for India to buy supplies to produce nuclear energy from the US. In return for such business, the US is attempting to get the world's elite nations who are part of the nuclear cartel -- aka as the Nuclear Suppliers Group -- to allow India an exemption to buy these materials legally. I'm not a fan of either the US and India (playing its regional superpower card) bullying this permission through or of the idea that a handful of nations can decide who trades in cheap sources of power legally. This country needs to find alternative sources of energy and it needs to do so yesterday!!! I do think that there are safer and greener sources of energy out there that India should be aggressively developing.

Singur. Well, this one is interesting. Last year, Ratan Tata unveiled his "car for the masses" -- a 4 door that would be produced for $2500 or so. In theory, it's a great idea. One has only to see common the family-of-four-on-a-motorscooter phenomenon everywhere in India to understand that a cheap car is a social good. The environmentalists have been screaming -- and I get their point. But public transport is nowhere near good enough here and even when it gets better, who are we to say that the mass of Indians shouldn't have the option to access to what we who have the luxury of living in the West take for granted? That said, I was also impressed by the fact that the Nano production unit was set up in Singur in West Bengal, the only state in the world that has consistently and democratically elected communist governments for over 50 years.... and where the union movement is as strong as it gets in India. But there are now major problems -- a year after the plant was established, there are numbers of farmers who haven't accepted and don't want to accept the cheques they've been handed for the expropriation of their land. Enter an opportunist political party -- not the communists who are in power and are actually backing the Singur plant -- but an opposition party who supported the farmers with protests and road blockades and we have chaos. I'm not sure where I stand on this, since I've heard a number of farmers say that they don't want their now unarable land back.... they just want things to go back to how they were 2 years ago. And the plant is providing good union jobs to a lot of people. But it's a story that has gripped the nation. More on it as it develops.

The floods in Bihar are awful. To start with, this is a have-not state in a (mostly and still) have-not nation. The hundreds of thousands of people affected are mostly small farmers and farm labour, living in hundreds of tiny villages that are remote at the best of times. The Indian army is out rescuing them where it can and herding them into makeshift camps. Honestly, this makes the aftermath of Katerina look like a model operation. The scale of tragedy in such parts of the world is unimaginable: I look at TV coverage of the tens of thousands of deaths and think about how to calibrate my grief over losing my grandmother in the face of that kind of loss. And the truth is, I can't.

Not in Kansas Anymore

I know I promised y'all a post about funeral customs next but I'm going to write about everyday life in Mysore instead because I've had a couple of emails from people asking me about it. Besides, I thought it'd be a nice change for all concerned if I didn't write about death and my feelings of fragility -- so instead I'm going to switch back into cultural analyst mode.

Today, the big excitement is that we finally -- I hope -- have a maid again! I know how strange this will sound in Canada but it's impossible to manage in a place like this without someone to come in and do the chores for you. At least, it's impossible for me. And it's impossible for pretty much everyone I know -- of course, there's a class component to this: labour, especially women's labour is incredibly cheap here but it's also the everything-takes-more-effort setup of daily life here. Unbelievable amounts of dust come pouring into the house so it has to be swept at least once, but ideally twice, a day and the floors need to be swabbed to lay the dirt for a while. I haven't seen a dishwasher here, and there's no running hot water so imagine the quantity of dishes that pile up in a family household, with 4 or 6 or 8 people eating three meals a day and drinking numerous rounds of coffee and serving drinks and munchies to all the people who drop by. Also, there are generally no microwaves or ovens or even ranges so everything is cooked on two gas rings that run off calor gas cylinders. My family has the most antiquated washing machine you ever saw, that can only handle being run once a day (if that) because of how much power and water it sucks up -- water is "let out" by the city corporation between midnight and 3 or 4am and gets filled into a tank on top of the house. If your tank runs out during the day, oh well, too bad. I know lots of women who stay up till midnight to fill up additional buckets with water because their water tanks are too small or they're expecting guests who'll need extra water. Add things like bucket baths using hot water that's heated in an (electrified) copper water boiler, power outages at least twice a day, garbage that gets picked up only when the garbagemen feel like it, milk that needs to boiled and cooled before it can be used, and in our case, a family car that's older than ! am.... and is slowly falling apart (I kid you not -- yesterday, the rim on the inside of one door fell off!) and you get the idea of how ramshackle (my) life here is. Everything seems to be held together with string and cello-tape and I can't help worrying that the wheels are about the fall off altogether.

This isn't -- of course -- what everyone experiences in India or even in Mysore. It's possible to live here and at least inside your home or hotel room, not realize that you're not in Kansas anymore. Since the early 90s, a class that I'm going to call the New India has grown up around globalization and the tech and service industries in particular. This is a class that has access to the kinds of disposable income that my grandmother could never have imagined. They are for the most part young and English speaking and have grown into adulthood already entrenched in consumer culture. Apple's IPhone just launched in India, for instance, and it's certainly catering to this demographic. They have expensive (if usually bad) taste, drive new motorbikes or cars, eat out a lot and tend to live in the "Metros." A slightly older class of people who've benefited from globalization are those who've seen their property values go up -- increasingly, globalization has meant industrialization and the further movement of rural populations to urban centres and this new population needs accommodation. At the same time, the New India is reluctant to remain in joint-family living arrangements so there's more demand for smaller, single family living spaces. So apartment buildings -- unusual outside cities such an Bombay even as late as 15 years ago -- are going up everywhere, municipal facilities are failing to keep up with skyrocketing demand and property values in most urban locations have gone up exponentially.

Rest in Peace

So the end is here: my grandmother Kama died a few days ago. She was in a lot of pain and half unconscious for the last few days – and when she could speak, she’d said that she wanted to go – so there are no regrets from her perspective. It’s those of us who are left behind now who have to figure out ways of going on living. I’ve been lucky so far in that I’ve not had to deal with someone this close to me dying… but now I don’t know how to cope. Every morning when I wake up and remember that Kama is dead, that that’s the reason why I’m here in India – well, it hits me all over again. Right now, I can’t see how to reach “normal” (whatever that was) again. How does one cope with death anyway? Is there a route back from here?

It hasn’t helped that it has been chaotic here since, well, it was pretty chaotic when she was in the hospital, too. But death brings with it a frenzy of activity that momentarily takes your mind off the actual fact of having lost someone forever… and that’s what the last few days have been like. There’s the sheer physicality of having to deal with a body – suddenly transformed from a living breathing person with a personality into merely a thing – the minimum shastras (religious rites) that have to be performed, pictures selected for obits and a ceremonial lunch organized for next week to mark her passing.

I’m a heap of relief (that she is not in pain and that we don’t have to see her so), guilt (were we right to wish for a quick end for her?), sadness (because she’s not here anymore) and anger (I can’t explain this one… I just know that I’m angry with the world). You can imagine what it’s like living in close proximity with five other people who are as upset as I am: and the thing about India is that you get no space to yourself – everyone is with you all the time, they’re leaning on you and hanging onto you and touching you when all you want is to be left alone. This is bad enough when you’re on holiday but it’s a million times worse when you’re dealing to deal with emotions. I suppose people derive comfort from each other at times like this but it’s not my way to share my grief with people I don’t know intimately (and just because they happen to be relatives or have known my family for eons does not make them my intimates) – and I don’t know how to tell all the relatives and family friends who insist on visiting and calling and crying and hugging that all I want is some peace and quiet, preferably in a nice dark room somewhere far away from everyone here!

I can't bring myself to write about it yet but my next post will be on the funeral rites – I’ve never been to an Indian funeral before so I found it all fascinating. Maybe I’m truly an academic at heart but thinking about it in terms of how and why the customs are what they are was one way of distancing myself from what was going on.... I’m still not ready to deal with the fact that my grandmother doesn’t exist in any knowable form anymore.

Tragedy and Comedy on Independence Day

Yesterday was Independence Day and was it ever celebrated all over the place! I've got lots to say about nationalism in the New India but that'll have to keep till I can find the videos I want to link to on youtube!

It’s been a week since we arrived in India and it feels like its been forever. Today’s the first day I’ve actually been home and had time to think since we arrived here: I’ve been home (cleaning up the disaster zone this place has become but still home alone and those of you who’ve followed my adventures in India last year know how rare that is!) all day and have realized that this is what purgatory must feel like. Waiting for someone you love to die is horrible but the tragedy of it all is undercut by the low comedy of “life must go on.” When a crisis lasts a day or two, you get by on adrenaline alone – and who cares if you’ve not changed. But this has been over a month and so there’s food to be procured or produced for six, not to mention clean underwear and beds for different people at different times.

We’ve only been here for a week but its been a critical week – I can’t believe how fast the cancer is eating away at her. I know she’d made a special effort to hold on till we got here and for a couple of days after that she didn’t seem to be in too much pain. She talked to us, haltingly perhaps, and certainly responded to us talking to her. In the last few days, though, she’s begun to sink markedly…. She seemed to spend longer and longer periods asleep, which we thought was a good sign but now the sleep is more like a stupor and I’m not sure she’s even aware of us. She’s certainly not responding to conversation or to touch – it’s heartbreaking to see her lying there more or less blankly, though this is, I suppose, better than seeing her restless from pain and in real distress. There were a couple of bad days in between when she was in pain and moaning out loud, which nearly drove me around the bend as I sat there holding her hand murmuring that it would alright when I bloody well knew that it wouldn’t ever be alright for her again.

Of course, it hasn’t all been tragedy though – I’ve been taken for a “real” doctor by one of the real doctors attending to her. Hospitals in India are quite informally run – and given that my mom’s medical standing in Mysore, we’re consulted as to my grandmother’s care to an unbelievable degree. So yesterday was when I became a “real” doctor: I was alone at the hospital and but had been left with instructions as to what to ask the consultant physician who was supposed to be doing his “rounds” that morning. Gramma is in a teaching hospital so consultants arrive for their rounds with a gaggle of respectful medical students and junior doctors in various stages of their careers. So in walks the great man. Nods all around. Then:

Great Man: “How has she been?”
Me: “She’s now asleep, sir, but she’s been in pain all morning and we’re wondering if she should be on medication for it?”
GM: “Yes, yes, what does your mother think?”
Moi: “Well, we talked about giving her Pethidine….” [
GM, nod, nod. “Yes, yes, terminal cancer patient. No point worrying about addiction. Pethdine, huh? Why not morphine?”
Me: “She’s allergic.”
GM: “Hmmm, I see, I see.”
Me: “Perhaps a 50mg dose, but only to be given when she’s actually awake and in pain?” [parroting my mother again].
GM: “Yes, yes, I’ll write it up for the nurses.”
Me: “Thank you, sir, we just want to make sure she doesn’t suffer.”
GM: “Quite right, terminal case but no need for distress. OK, doctor.”
I thought perhaps I’d misheard or that he’d just not realized what he’d said. Until… an hour later, he popped his head into the room (followed by heads of a few of the entourage) to say: “One more thing, doctor, make sure the dose is signed out from the Chief when he’s here – he handles all narcotics personally – so you can administer at night if you need to.”
Me: “Er, sir….”
GM: “That’s it, that’s all I came to say. OK doctor.”
And GM and entourage all back out while I stand there trying not to laugh.

Here and Now

Since there’s no positive change to report, I thought I’d amuse myself by recording a few of the things making the news in Mysore these days: this stuff is all gathered from The Times of India (major Indian newspaper – think Globe and Mail), the Deccan Herald (slightly more regional daily – Halifax Chronicle, perhaps), the Bangalore Mirror (sort of Metro meets Now) and the Star of Mysore (I can’t think of what to compare this to – it’s an earnest local evening paper)…. We seem to subscribe to all of them and these days, as I sit by my grandmother’s side for hours on end, reading a newspaper from cover to cover is one of the few things I can do. So:

India’s richest temple – in Tirupati, which is a famous pilgrimage site – owes back taxes to municipal, local, state and federal governments to the tune of $30 million. The best part about this is that $19 million of this is for “human hair sale.” Read all about the Tirupati temples here!
(I should add that people go to the temple and donate their hair as a penance or out of gratitude or whatever and the temple then sells this…though I’m not sure what all that hair is used for!)

“Indian Viagra” works on eves too.
(I’m not making this one up: it’s a headline from the Deccan Herald. I’m not sure whether to be amused or appalled but since we’re in India, I’ve settled on being annoyed. An eve?! Please.)

Unmarried couples will not be rented rooms in premier hotels in Bangalore, apparently because of “security” concerns in the wake of serial bomb blasts in the city. As a hotel manager put it: “we do not want hankying and pankying in our rooms.”
(There have been a couple of letters protesting this in the Bangalore Mirror, which ran a cartoon wherein a receptionist was admonishing a couple obviously in desperate need of a hotel room – “Yes, you each have your ID and marriage certificates but you need to be married to each other.” Also, I really want to know about the unpremier hotels - is "security" not a issue there?!)

Fusion cuisine has arrived in India – in the form of vodka panipuri and cheese-mango shakes.
(I might be tempted to try the vodka spiked panipuri if I had the chance but a mango shake that has sliver of Amul cheese shaved onto it – urgh! Amul is a local brand name and it makes this (in)famous plasticky cheddar-like cheese.)

And last, this headline comes from today’s Star of Mysore: “Bangalore to get Astrology Mall.”
(Apparently this mall, which is set to open in September, will offer one-stop shopping with soothsayers, astrologers, numerologists, tarot-card readers and palmists all under one roof. Moreover, this is clearly just the beginning – there are plans to open “satellite” malls in other parts of Bangalore shortly.)

That’s all for today. I’ll be back with more in a few days. Email is harder to respond to than to update the blog (because of the slowness of the connection and its frequent outages) but I promise, I’ll get respond to all of your emails soon.

Arrival

I know it’s only been 5 days since we left Toronto but I’m feeling as though several lifetimes have passed. For one thing, arriving in India always hits me like a physical shock – you travel for hours, you’re exhausted from the plane and the airports you’ve passed through, you’re finally there and India hits you in a combination of humidity and smell (exhaust fumes, perspiration, and dust). Not in a bad way, just in a very distinctive way. BUT this time, as we arrived in the brand new Bangalore International Airport, neither the mugginess nor the smell hit us! South India is in the mild throes of the winter monsoon and when we emerged out of the airport at 1:30am, it was into a beautifully cool evening. Even before that though, the airport is one of… the airports of the world: all glass and light, gleaming shiny floors and aircon, plants in tall pots, and for someone who’s been arriving at the old HAL airport in Bangalore for ages, it’s a real shock to the system!

Because this is India, which is only really held together by spiderwebs of friends and relatives, we were met by a family friend and my cousin. We emerged blinking to find my cousin waving his cellphone at us, since he was just on the phone to the hospital, where our arrival was being as carefully monitored as though it were a situation room! Since my darling grandma was awake and waiting, we drove straight there from the airport – this will possibly remain in my memory as one of the best rides I’ve had in India: speeding through the empty streets late late at night creates a certain drama of its own that sustains you through the exhaustion of the past few hours. And anyone who’s been anywhere in India will recognize the rarity of empty streets. Though there were signs even on that drive of the heightened state of tension that the South is in following the bombings in Bangalore a few days ago: our taxi was stopped by sweatered and scarved police officers (it’s 20 degrees – practically freezing, dontcha know?!) who wanted to know who we were and where we were going. The check was rudimentary, involving as it did the noting of the cab’s number and the driver’s name but still… the fact that it happened at all (a first for me) is a reminder of the New India. By the way, the luxury taxi cab – hired for the night, basically and including the return trip from Bangalore to Mysore – cost us a whacking $110. Plus a gratefully received $5 tip for the driver.

So we got to the hospital at 4:30 in the morning – I know, I know – very soap opera but it wasn’t really like that – hospitals in India are still evolving so the fact that my mom and her brother and sister were all with their mother in the hospital at 4:30 am is not that surprising. So we went in, after being warned of what to expect, and visited with my grandma for a while. I can’t begin to articulate how awful it is to see her like this – hooked up to oxygen tubes and what not, her hands and feet swollen, her face folded in and her eyes set in deep dark hollows of misery and exhaustion. There is no drama here – only sadness. I’ve now spent hours sitting at her bedside, holding her hand, trying to figure out what she’s saying when she can mouth a few words, trying to distract her from the pain and discomfort… all of this is just excruciating for her and miserable for us who wait with her. The hospital she’s in here is one of the best in the city but it’s an Indian hospital, which means that she’s in a “Deluxe Private” Room – these rooms have a bed for the patient and an extra bed for an “attendant” as someone is expected to stay with the patient all the time. We’re also expected to provide her food (and ours!) and to monitor the IVs and medicines and just call the nurse when there’s something to be done – like changing the IV. To be fair, my grandmother is getting royal treatment here because my mother used to be a well known doctor in Mysore (20 years ago and that, m’dears, still means something here!) and she knows all the doctors here and so on. In fact, we’ve been given the unheard of privilege of having another “Deluxe Private” room which is currently not needed set aside for our family to use – we take it in turns to nap there, eat takeout food in it and so on. I can’t imagine a setup like this anywhere in Canada! Not the “attendant” allowed – no, required – to stay with the patient nor anything else.

But nonetheless, I hate it. I hate the sense of bareness about this best of the options hospitals (I’ve discovered that I have a lot of faith in the technologies so easily available in hospitals in the West – there’s no such thing as a crash cart here; there are no intercoms or call buttons; the nurses have to call down for the one oxygen meter when they are asked to check oxygen saturation levels (and trust me, this is not a complicated or expensive machine!)… everything feels pared down to the basics, which in general is a good thing because I think medicine in the West is too mechanized and too dependent on technology as opposed to trained diagnosis etc but this… this is a little bit too much bare-foot-doctor for my tastes). More on this theme later, I’m sure, because it’s something I find interesting – after all, I wrote about this in my thesis!

More than anything, though, I hate her helplessness, I hate ours and this sense of just sitting there waiting for death to come and relieve her. It’s so cruel that after all these years of enduring life, she has to go through this. That there is no hope of recovery makes it all the harder to bear for everyone – it’s impossible to not resent this phase when there is no chance that she will get better. “Better” at this point is counted in a good hour here or there.

My “break” at home is over so I’m off to the hospital again. I’ll write more soon. In the meantime, please keep the good vibes (and emails!) coming – they’re my only link to my normal (whatever that is) life in Toronto!

I leave today; I'm packing light, a suitcase and some toiletries....

It's true: I do leave today and I am packing light. I didn't think I'd be returning to India this fall and certainly not to Mysore or with the shadow of my grandmother's illness hanging over me. But some things are beyond prediction or anticipation: we can only respond to things as they happen. I returned last week from New York to find that my imperious, indomitable (and I truly mean that: she was the one who ruled her family -- seven younger sisters and a brother to start with!) grandma is terminally ill; since then, I've been desperate to get on a plane and go to her. There were complications, of course, with visas and tickets but we're all set now. The Brother comes with me and we fly out in a few hours. I'm going back to the blog because it's going to be the easiest way of keeping in touch with y'all over the next few months and because I'm hoping (selfishly) that writing through my experiences in Mysore will help me to deal with them.

In the meantime, I want you to meet my grandmother, Kasturi Sivaswamy. That's her up there. She means the world to me: until I was seven, I (we) lived with her while my mom and dad bounced around the world practicing medicine and doing other doctorly things.

I know it's going to be a hard trip back and nothing like the last one but I'm telling myself that it's only during the hard times that we actually learn to deal with life as it happens and not as we shape it. I've already learnt that it's pretty easy to pack up a life: I'm on leave from SSHRCC, my place is sorted out and I have nothing else to keep me in Toronto. This is both terrifying and manifestly, a good thing right now. Also, I now know how little one actually needs to take on long journeys: "a suitcase and some toiletries," as the song goes.

Send me strength and patience, won't you all? I have a feeling that I'm going to be needing a lot of those two over the next little while.

'Bye, Toronto. At least for now.

Leaving India

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That's all, folks. If all goes as planned, I leave India in about 7 hours and should be "home" in Canada in about 24.

I'll do a wrap from there -- call me paranoid but I don't want to do it here and now.

Cheers y'all!

A

East and West

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If you’re a reader of postcolonial fiction you’d probably assume that the flow of peoples these days goes in only one direction: from East to West. Literary fiction is full of the tales of those who dream of going from India, or Kenya, or another exotic sounding but poverty stricken margin to England or America and more rarely, to Canada or Australia. For two generations now, there’s been a much written about exodus from India of the educated classes, epitomized perhaps by Jhumpa Lahiri’s moving short story “Third and Final Continent.” (If you haven't read it yet, read it there at the New Yorker: it's last paragraph is perhaps the finest epigraph written for for the experience of immigration!) Smarting under what they experienced of the lazy socialism of India in the 3^rd quarter of the 20^th century, too many of the educated classes – primarily doctors, engineers, nurses, and later on, computer types and suchlike professionals – departed the shores of the young nation. I should know: my family falls right into this category.

But things are slowly starting to change: where once the culmination of most young university students’ dreams was to leave for greener pastures, now it seems as though most young graduates dream of landing a job in India in an MNC (multinational corporation). The opening up of the Indian economy to foreign direct investment and the easing of regulations on joint enterprises has meant that there are now literally thousands of companies in India which are affiliated – in some way – with organizations in other parts of the world. One consequence of this is that people now move both ways – from and into India. Leaving India for education or employment is no longer seen as a permanent decision; more importantly, there is a heady feeling in the air – perhaps still more potentially than realistically – that the world will have to start coming to India rather than expecting India(ns) to come to it.

It’s with this sentiment in mind that GMR (one of these aforementioned MNCs that is poised to reap benefits from the latent arrival of modernity in India – for instance, they have a large share in Hyderabad’s new international airport) has launched an aggressive new advertising campaign. The “Getting Ready for India/Getting India Ready” campaign features a number of spots all focussing on various people preparing to arrive in India. One, launched in the middle of the ongoing India-Australia cricket series, begin with the voiceover announcing “Getting Ready for India” as a Chinese family is learning to play cricket: as the mother grips a cricket bat, the father watches a cricket game in slo-mo and instructs his son on how to bowl. The voiceover returns to announce “GMR: Getting India Ready.” My peeps here tell me it’s a hit. Another ad features a roomful of Europeans learning to dance Bollywood style. A third shows a family weeping as they sit at a laden dining table and eat chillies. And there’s one that has two Turkish men sitting, fully clad in business suits, in a sauna and practising the names of the Indian cities they are heading to. There is a last GMR ad that’s also currently playing that isn’t obviously part of this series but which captures this sentiment even more precisely: it features an Indian mother and father (respectively praying and pacing) as they wait for their son to return from a visa interview at a US embassy. He erupts into the room, celebrating, and they stare befuddled, as he chants that his visa was denied.

I’m taken with the “Getting India Ready” ads, partly because I find them amusing and partly because I’m impressed by the truly global nature of the people they depict as getting ready for India: Chinese families, Turkish men, Germans and Spaniards are all shown as preparing to arrive in India. That old binary of the West having to mean North American/Western Europe is slowly being erodod. And that last ad – the visa rejection one – is perhaps the most interesting example of the generationality (is there such a word?) of the Westward movement. That these are ads, designed not so much to make points about national trajectories as to capture an already existent feeling makes them even more powerful: it suggests that for some at least, this satisfaction with India already exists. And that – from where I sit – can only be a good thing.

Notes on the Oscars

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Watching the Oscars these days is not what I remember it being when I was kid. Somehow, a lot of the giltz seems to have worn off. Or maybe it's just that I'm missing LibraryGirl, who's my personal movie maven. Without her, it's not as much fun watching. But since we did watch, here's my take on the night of the star:

1. Oh Heath. In retrospect, considering the role he played in Brokeback Mountain, I suppose we should have seen the darkness in him but he players such a sunny character in so many other films that it's hard to comprehend. That's acting for you, I guess.

2. Ousmane Sembene's dead too and I never heard about it. If don't know who he is, you should. Start with God's Bits of Wood, which you should be able to find at any half-decent library. It is - hands down - the best strike novel ever written. I've read it a dozen times now, taught it at least thrice and it never fails to reduce me (and many of my students) to tears because of the intensity of hope it embodies.

3. What on earth was Jennifer Hudson thinking when she chose that dress?

4. What was that thing about the shout-out from the troops in the field all about? Has Hollywood deluded itself that it's so left-wing that it needs to pretend to such cheap tricks to convince middle-American that it's really not? Yeeesh.

5. Way to go, Sarah P. When I come home, yours is the first movie I'm going to watch.

6. Also, also, while Patrick Dempsey looked as delectable as ever, even his presence couldn't make the songs from Enchanted appear anything other than a sucrose overdose. So I was happy with the win for Glen Hansard's song (whose name escapes me now). I found Once - their little independent film - truly moving so I'm happy, if surprised, that it went all the way.

7. Mmm. Helen Mirren. Need I say more? She's my grandmother's age, exactly, and is still stunning. Also Johnny Depp. Mmmm-hmmm.

8. Daniel Day-Lewis. Clever, articulate, elegant and beautiful. What more can we expect of men? I need to go watch My Beautiful Laundrette again, for the *young* DDL on offer there.

9. I thought Jon Stewart was - again - too... sheathed... in his wit. If he's going to anchor the 4hr Oscar telecast, he ought to provide us with some Jon Stewartisms at least.

10. And finally, given that we all watch mostly to comment on the gowns, maybe it's time the men started to wear some bright colourful dresses too. I'm tired of the sea of black suits and bow ties. Or better year, perhaps we could actually have some women nominated for some of the non-acting roles. I think I counted three women getting awards for non-acting things but I might have been delirious by that point. And I did note that there weren't any women even nominated for the biggies such as Director, of course. Or even women appearing in the "past winners" montages.

Let the Games Begin!

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As I spend days lazing away, watching cricket and eating chakli and mysore pak, I am returned to childhood summers. Some things never change. Yet, as I watch, I can't quite capture the ease with which I watched those games. What with my consiousness of the racial and class overtones of cricket (not to mention cricket-watching), I'm contantly reminded that cricket is a game that is deeply entrenched in the traumas of colonial and postcolonial history. I don’t suppose anyone with a sense of the history of the game will really deny that – one of the ironies of this history is that, like the English language, cricket is one of the colonial imports to have taken deep root in diverse ex-colonial spaces – the four cricket-playing nations of the South Asian subcontinent, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand and a handful of African nations and England are the only nations wherein cricket is still played on a national basis. And arguably cricket is most popular now in India and Pakistan: not only is there no other national game in these countries but it seems as though no other game can possibly encapsulate the metonymic weight of the nation that cricket is accorded. Historians of the game may date this improvement of the qualify of subcontinental cricket in the 1970s and1980s, when teams from Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan began to stake their claims to the trophies but it seems to me that the advent of television across much of the subcontinent in the 1980s also had much to do with the creation of national audiences for cricket’s national teams.

Cricket became the national game and international matches began to take on a fervidly nationalist atmosphere. For instance, the historic rivalry between Pakistan and India – a rivalry rooted in religion, a rivalry that is underlaid with the memories of Partition – has meant that there is no stronger rivalry in cricket than that between India and Pakistan. Other international matches are watched, possibly by similar numbers of people but for sheer partisan intensity, nothing comes close to a close match between these age-old foes. And the size of these audiences (mainly in India, but also in other postcolonial nations) – and the advertising revenues they generate – has meant that the old guard in cricket (England and Australia) have had to give way before the power of these newly fledged national sides and their “boards” of control.
Last week, cricket in India (and by association), cricket in the rest of the world has gone through another shift of seismic proportions. What was once so much the preserve of gentility that a cricket game stood as an utterly comprehensible marker of the leisured privileges of the landed class in England (come on, haven’t you see any of the Merchant Ivory films?) has already become the national pastime of poverty-stricken millions. These days, the audiences for cricket matches in the subcontinent, certainly, but also increasingly across the world, tend not to be ladies with parasols and gentlemen in straw boaters as young men disenfranchised by globalization who see in this sport a last vestige of national pride and identity.
Now, however, the attempt is on to try and convert these questionable national allegiances into city-based sporting franchise audiences. Modelled after the NHL and the NFL, the Indian Premier League has arrived: the 8 city based leagues of the IPL intend to play a series of intense matches over April and May of each year. The games will be in the Twenty20 format, which means that they last for 3 hours or so each – this to ensure that they can be played during the evening hours and on weekends. Much is expected of the IPL; the 8 city franchises were sold off for millions of dollars and yesterday, the successful bidders of these franchises participated in an “auction” of world class Indian and international cricketers. Media outlets in the cricket playing world have since been trumpeting the news that further millions have been spent on “buying” players – the current Indian captain, for instance, has been “bought” for a cool $1.5 million a year for the next 3 years. I’ll repeat that: $1.5 million a year for 3 years, to play in a 2-month tournament that is yet to be initiated. 77 other players, including Indians, Australians, South Africans, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and the odd New Zealander or two have also all been bought, though a number of city franchises have yet to find names for their teams.
So what we have is an intriguing hybrid: a colonial game made peculiarly their own by audiences that are as far removed from its original audiences as we can imagine, a game that is now being shunted in an entirely new direction – a direction influenced more by the enduring popularity of games featuring the Toronto Maple Leafs or AC Milan than the symbolic national pride that has characterized its popularity in postcolonial spaces so far. I’m the first to admit that I don’t know the difference between a Yorker and Yorkshire pudding, but what I do know is my postcolonial history. I’d be willing to bet that this whole cricket thing is a case study of the overarching trajectories of colonialism, postcolonialism and globalization. Go figure.

Saint Valentine's Day Massacre

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Yesterday was madness here. Everywhere we went, there was pink and red. Streamers, clothing, advertisements -- the Times of India (a serious newspaper, that) -- took it upon itself to have kitschy Valentine-related articles and pictures all of last week; at a grocery store, I came across a display of Valentine cards (I think the pick of the bunch was "A Valentine's Day Wish for My Boss and Bestfriend"); all of the local news channels ran Valentine's "specials." We stopped by an eletrical appliances "fair" -- only to be ambushed by an offer to buy two electric rice cookers -- "One for you and one for your Valentine Mother." Schools and colleges and other places where the yout gather have all been done over in pink and red for the big day. But clearly, St. Valentine's Day isn't just about the sickly-sweet sentiment that love is assumed to be by the vast masses of Indian yout for whom sweaty hand-clasps have to be the extent of the expression of love. Oh no, it's become a family and friend and people you don't know extravaganza driven by corporate marketing, disposable incomes in the hands of the young techie demographic and mass media. And it's not just the women; I counted 17 men in pink and red shirts yesterday and we were only out and about for an hour or so. It's nuts. NUTS, I tell you.

Especially because this is still a deeply traditional culture. And I do mean deeply. The norm is still for marriages to be arranged. Gender roles are pretty much still the traditional ones; female foeticide is still a subject of serious concern to the nation -- there are entire states where the ratio of women to men is in the 800:1000 range. So this embrace of Valentine's day is bizarre, on so many levels. But I also suspect that it appeals to the new-age Indian consumer of globalization precisely because of the syrupy sentimentality attached to its global marketing. St. Valentine's day -- or at least its mass-market variation -- is all sickly sweet chemically tasting chocolate, fluffy bunnies and expensive hot house roses with no perfume. It's not about any real change in the deep patriarchies of Indian social life. A Valentine's day date might involve the girl being invited out to the latest movie or the nearest Coffee Day but I'd wager that few of them get invitations to come and meet Mom and Dad (and Grandad and Grandma). The superficial acceptance of love and sentiment hasn't changed the conservative traditions upon which social life is built any.

But you wouldn't think that on the face of public display of Valentine fever yesterday, and because this is India and there is never any kind of a ridiculous embracing of this type of pop culture without an equal and opposite heart-rending somewhere else, there were protests organized by right-wing Hindu groups over "unIndian" Valentine's day celebrations. The irony will no doubt be lost on them, but I think it's worth mentioning -- given the depth of right-wing Hinduism's contempt for Islam -- that in Saudi Arabia, the religious authorities have reportedly ordered a crackdown on the "decadent" practice of St. Valentine's day to the extent that there is now a "black market" for roses and women have been instructed not to dress in red on that day.

Yes, I know. My mind boggles too. Boggle, boggle, boggle. b.o.g.g.l.e....

Of Riots and Racism

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Sharad Pawar of the Board of Control for Cricket in India claims that no Indian can be "a racist." His rationale -- if it can even be called that -- is that India has been at the forefront of the "fight against racialism in its history." After my reaction of "eh?!" I'm tempted to note here that if one of my students offered me such "proof" in support of such an "argument," that student would have had the laws of argumentation explained her. At approximately the same time, and incidentally, in the same city from which Pawar's absurdities flow, there are near-riots on the streets: the people of Bombay, now dubbed "Mumbaikars" are being encouraged to kick others (namely, North Indians) out of their "Mumbai" by scions (metaphorically and literally, since the prime accused in this is one Raj Thackery, whose main claim to fame seems to be his close relationship with Bal Thackery of the Shiv Sena) of the BJP and allied right wing organizations. This isn't limited to Bombay; according to all the news sources here, across the state of Maharashtra, North Indians are being targeted by unruly mobs with the motto "Maharashtra for Maharashtrians."

Though I was born in Bangalore, and all of my family in India live in Karnataka, I have a Maharashtrian last name (courtesy of dad, whose father was born there): so I'd like to know if I count as a Maharashtrian? Having never lived there, and having only been to Bombay to fly in and out of the country, not speaking a word of Marathi, do I count? Am I -- unlike the hundreds of thousands of "other" Indians currently living and working all over the state -- welcome there? If I am, I'd like Mr. Pawar, or anyone else who feels qualified, to tell me how this is different from the racism of apartheid-era South Africa, or indeed, the current policies of the Jewish state?

If not, i.e, if I'm not "Maharashtrian" enough, then surely Maharashtrian-ness is a matter of nurture rather than nature. And surely those who've flocked to the state, who've contributed to its robust economy, who've chosen to live and work there have as much right to be there as anyone else?! So what price "racism" in India?

In the meantime, here in Karnataka -- and for those of you who are unfamiliar with Indian geography, Karnataka, the state in Mysore and Bangalore are located, shares a long border to the north with Maharashtra -- there are all kinds of protests over the lack of "quotas" for "Kannadigas" (i.e Kannada speakers, who are presumed to be Karnataka natives) in the Railways. Apparently too many Railway jobs (and keep in mind that in India, with its high umemployment rate (30%, I think), a job with the central government owned Indian Railways is pretty much a unionized-job-for-life and in the lower ranks, one of the few such things available to those with little education or experience, are being snagged by "North Indians" (those from Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, mostly).

Lest you go away thinking that there is a peculiar animus that "South India" holds against "North India," it's a little more complicated than that. I'm not sure that Maharashtra, until this newest of agitations against "North Indians," would ever have considered itself a "Southern state" -- in fact, even now, it probably thinks of itself as "Central India." The "South" is Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andra Pradesh. And my childhood memories attest to the historic denigration of "the South" by federal politicians in India, who have mostly been of North Indian origin. Historically, it's been a question of language rather than location: and the four states of the South have always rejected the imposition on Hindi as a national language. Add to this the sense of the rest of the country that the South is "dark" -- a legacy of the Dravidians (and don't get me started on the racist connotations of the Northern dislike of "darkness"; "uncivilized" -- because it did not take well to the Aryan invasions; and "hot" -- this last is true. And what we have now is a deeply alienated part of India that in the last two decades or so has suddenly gained economic power and social prestige through its ready acceptance of globalization. The IT industry is headquarted in Banglore, and next in line is Hyderabad, the capital of Andra Pradesh. Likewise, the call centre economy emerges from Bangalore. Ironically, this can be traced back directly to "the South's" rejection of Hindi and stubborn insistence upon English as a medium of education and communication.

My point is simply this: there is a lot of murky social history in India that is being brought to the forefront now as a result of the imbalances of economics. Given this, and given the turmoil against members of various groups -- all on the basis of alleged "origins" and "otherness" -- it is not just ironic to make absurd claims on behalf of all Indians, it is downright ridiculous.

Actually, it's worse than ridiculous but words fail me at this point so I'll leave it to your imaginations.

Poetry and Prose in Politics

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is being used to describe Barack Obama a lot. Someone over at the New Yorker said that his "aura" trumps her "arguments" -- that's a nice way of putting it. But the sentiment has been all over the news and the political junkies might just have a point: Obama is poetry and Clinton is prose. Which, for those who buy into Cuomo's take on political campaigns ("we campaign in poetry and govern in prose" make him a more appealing candidate and her a more effective president. I'd buy that -- at least, think of the words used to describe them or the words they use to describe themselves: Obama is a dreamer, a thinker, an ideas man, an idealist, a visionary, a peacemaker, and so on while she's presidential, a pragmatist, a doer, an incrementalist. He was a community organizer; she's organized. If I were to guess as to their cooking styles, I'd say he's a thrower of various things into a pot and a stirrer until it tastes right (which, in the end, it does often but not always) whereas she's a baker who knows her recipes cold and turns out perfectly only the things she knows how to bake. That's what Clinton's comment about Martin Luther King and the President who legislated his "dream" was about: I don't think it was a racist comment, really I don't. But it was an illuminating moment: it showed that she viewed social change as a reaction to legislation. I'd suggest -- based on his campaign and his personal history -- that for Obama, legislation is the reaction to social change. That's where the "transformativity" of his candidacy comes in. But the question remains: can a movement also be a goverment? Can a poet translate his dreams into legalese? (It's it funny how we talk of "Obama" but never of "Clinton"? Is it because "Barack" is just too un-American a first name for the down-home boys to be able to say? How long do you think it'll take for him to become "Barry"?)

Anyway. Super Dooper Tuesday for the Americans is almost here: so here are some last minute predictions: "Clinton" will emerge with more delegates than "Obama" but by a margin that's too slim for her to carry the nomination.

More later, I'm sure.

Aftermath

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LibraryGirl wants to know if I really spent my time at Canadian weddings boozing and flirting with boys. I suppose the truth is that I didn't, really. But I've consumed my share of celebratory glasses of champagne and been checked out by my share of inebriated men who are trapped at weddings. This seems to be the time honoured way of passing time at a wedding in Canada; in India, this is not a possibility. At least, not any wedding (or wedding-related function) I've ever attended here. Instead, you go around being introduced to people you've no interest in meeting and who've no interest in you except the purely genealogical: witness this one, where I must have been introduced to at least four dozen relatives with the words "this is my granddaughter, you know, my daughter Paru's child. She's thirty, and not married yet, but she has a PhD." Trust me, that gets old fast. Note that while I might be exaggerating here, it's not by much!

The reception itself was... nice. Everyone was all dressed up and they were fun to deconstruct. I got to play at being a glamourous Indian woman one last time, complete with sari (red and black silk with beads) and jewellery (gold) and heels (wobbly). The food was good, though that's already palled for me. I mean, I've been eating wonderful Indian food for 4-5 months now, so what's another such meal anyway. Aunt and I were to spend the night at a hotel in Bangalore and then spend the next day shopping before returning to Mysore. And so we returned back to the hotel and debriefed. And then, at midnight, we were awakened by the wedding party!: they'd decided to come hang with their out-of-town guests after seeing off the stragglers at the reception. That was the best -- we actually got to talk to the bride a bit though I do think she found the 12 or so of us gathered at the hotel all a bit much.

The next day Aunt and I spent wandering around the used and new bookstores of Bangalore. Oh joy! I'm now stocked with enough books to get me through to the end of my trip here (at least, I think so) and I've confirmed that (new and used) books are probably one of the few things that cost as much in India as they do in Canada. The stuff you can buy here though is crazy: I picked up a 70s edition of Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe, for instance, for just over $2! It's the kind of book that no one reads nowadays (with good reason) but since it's one of the earlier fictive attempts to deal with questions of academic freedom and political repression in the university, I've always thought I should read it sometime. Well, sometime was yesterday, when we had no power for 12 hours and I therefore had very little to do. So, the book is dated and depressing but interesting in an odd way. And I can't imagine the circumstances under which I'd have read it in Toronto so this was all to the good!

The lack of power yesterday was the last straw. I've been sick, on and off, for the past 2 weeks -- nothing major but just sick enough that I'm always conscious of it. And if you add traveling and meeting relatives reluctantly to that and then garnish it with the irritation of being ill and not being able to turn on a fan, you'll have an accurate picture of my state of mind (and body). So I've invested in an inverter, or UPS, or whatever it's called. It's a little black box that will apparently store enough power to keep us going with a light and a fan for a few hours when the power fails again (as it surely will). It wasn't cheap by Indian standards (about $400).... and it reminds me that quality of life in India is a matter of wealth in a way that it isn't in the West.

It's been awhile....

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and I'm sorry I caused a few of you to wonder what's been going on that's so exciting that I haven't been updating this blogue. The short answer is that I've been trying to get on with w.o.r.k -- that thing that I'm really in India to do: I've been setting up formal interviews and informally talking to people and it's taken me a lot longer than I thought it would to organize what they've had to say in reasonably accurate and easily retrievable passages.

Other than that, I've had a short foray into the world of public health care in India (for my aunt, not for myself). I've lots to say about it but I'm still processing it so that's a post for another day.

And perhaps more interestingly, one of me cousins has gone and gotten hisself engaged and married! All in the space of two weeks, too. The Fam has been abuzz with curiosity and more curiosity about it all, especially since the wedding was held with a week's notice in Bombay. Which meant that no one apart from said cousin's Ma and sister attended. No, it's not what you're thinking -- this is still India: there's very little pre-marital sex and pregnancy here. At least among the so-respectable middle-classes. But there's to be a fancy-schmancy reception at a private members' club in Bangalore tomorrow night and ofcourse, we're all gonna be there. It's not often we get a chance these days to experience any kind of Monsoon Wedding off the big screen; there aren't very many unmarrieds left, even given my extremely large and extremely trying Fam. And never mind that I don't approve of private members' clubs; this might be my last chance to get all dressed up in a fancy sari while I'm in India. It also means that I don't have to go visiting all the distant rellies to say hello and goodbye; they'll all be at the reception so I can see 'em all in one go. One night of plastering a smile on my face as people I haven't seen in a couple of decades take it upon themselves to tell me how much I've grown since then and how I should be married with sprogs by now. I'm planning to bare my teeth and bring up all the gossip about erring children and straying spouses that I've been assiduously gathering since I arrived for precisely this purpose. All in all, it should make for a fun night -- bad bollywood music, greasy Indian food, hundreds of Indian relatives and a few hours in a swish costume with no alcohol and no one to flirt with -- ah, what would a trip to India be without an Indian wedding to attend!

I shall report back. Till then, enjoy the tiddlywinks games that are going on all around the US: I gather it's South Carolina and Florida next.

By the way, for those of you who care, my entirely unscientific survey of y'all has Obama in the lead, with Edwards second. Only a couple of youse folks plumped for Hilary. Interesting. For what it's worth, I'd take an Obama-Edwards ticket just fine. Though one can only imagine what the Reps would do with that come election time. Feeding time for the sharks, most likely.

I'm gone.

"It's Not Tiddlywinks."

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Cricket, that is. At least, according to Cricket Australia's head, this game ain't tiddlywinks. No kidding. The "cricket crisis" has been making the headline news in India for 4 days now and I'm bored of it. There, I've said it. Yes, the racism charge caused a bad reaction here. The Board of Control for Cricket in India -- the Indian version of Cricket Australia -- and ain't just the name enough to make you think of 1984? -- sees the charge and the conviction handed out to "Bhajji" as a national insult and is now out for blood. BCCI's official response cites India's "proud" stand against apartheid.... I'll let you imagine the tone of indignation and fury. Meanwhile, sources inform me that "sledging" (that's the correct term for on-field slagging in cricket) often involves racist, sexist and homophobic language. General all-around offensiveness. Apparently the Australians call it "mental disintegration" and use it as a deliberate strategy for throwing their opponents off their collective game. So I've said my piece about it -- I still think it's a pity that the racism is all tangled up with the particularities of this match and these teams -- but I'm now moving on.

A game of tiddlywinks, anyone?

Actually, what I wanted to move on to tiddlywinks for political junkies. Heh. I'll admit to getting up at 7am Indian time yesterday so I could find out who'd won the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Course, I got up, checked the nets, and went straight back to sleep. But still. I'd like to point out that that's probably showing way more interest in the US election than most American citizens do. So, tell me, y'all -- if you were Americans -- who'd you be voting for? I like to think that I know all of y'all pretty well so it's going to be Obama, Hilary, Edwards or Richardson. If there's a Giuliani fan reading this blog, please.... keep browsing. There's aint' going to be anything of interest to you here. I've been a fan of John Edwards ever since I saw footage of him addressing a small volunteer crew in post-Katrina Louisiana on my last trip to the US. I was stuck in a hotel in Philadelphia, infuriated by the racialization of poverty that I'd seen in that prosperous city.... I couldn't believe the contrasts to be found between black and white within a city block or two. I thought it crazy then and I think it crazy now: I still don't understand why there aren't riots on the streets. Anyway, that night, as I pretty much gave up the ghost on looking for academic work in the US, I turned on the TV and happened upon Edwards talking about the relationship between poverty and race and class in the US. And he was angry about it -- not in a contrived, this is an on-camera moment kind of way but blazingly, furiously angry. Since then, I've done a little bit of reading up on his positions and I'm convinced that he's as good as any of the mainline Democratic candidates are gonna get. If I were an American, my choice would be... Martin Sheen as Jed Bartlett. But if I couldn't have my Nobel-prize winning Professor of Economics, I'd probably go with Edwards.

And the joys of globalization mean that even though I'm not -- and can't imagine ever being -- American, the US elections matter to us in more ways than we know. Bah.

Anyway, back to tiddlywinks. Who'd you be voting for?

It's Just Not Cricket!

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Kiddies, I can't believe I'm spending my time in Mysore blogging about cricket! If only all the nice Canadian boys who tried to explain hockey to me could see this.... but since four of you -- you know who are -- asked, the cricket embroglio continues: the Sydney match ended with an Australian win but as the sports columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Roebuck, put it "India have been dudded. No one with the slightest enthusiasm for cricket will take the least satisfaction from the victory secured by the local team in an S(ydney) C(ricket) G(round) Test that entertained spectators, provided some excellent batting but left a sour taste in the mouth. It was a match that will have been relished only by rabid nationalists and others for whom victory and vengeance are the sole reasons for playing sport. Truth to tell, the last day was as bad as the first. It was a rotten contest that singularly failed to elevate the spirit. Until another shocking decision was made by a 61-year-old umpire, reliable in his time but past his prime, the fifth day of this unattractive contest was offering plenty of tension to put alongside the memorable hundreds contributed by capable batsmen on both sides. Thereafter they might as well have drawn stumps, as all interest had been removed. Once justice and fair play have been ejected there is no point in playing the game."

(Here's the article in its entirety.)

So now more controversies swirl around this game with a name that has come to mean good sportmanship. Roebuck's column is brave, and he's concerned about the state of the game and the state of the reputations of the Australian side. I'm concerned about the fallout from the racism charge, given this poisoned environment. It seems that the match was followed by a hearing, wherein it was determined that Harbhajjan did call Andrew Symonds a monkey and he's now been banned from playing in the next three Test matches that India plays. Like I said yesterday, having watched the match as it was being played, I've no doubt that emotions were high and that heated language was used. And I've no qualms about saying that there is a line in the sand and racist remarks cross that line. But... and here's my concern -- if the International Cricket Committee, the voluntary board that makes the ultimate decisions about international cricket -- wants to make a point about zero tolerance, this ain't the match to do it in. As I write, Indian news agencies are reporting that India has filed a counter-charge about abusive language used on the field by an Australian player. The Indian population at large -- those for whom cricket is not a game but a religion (think hockey meets world cup soccer) -- is furious at what they see as Australian intimidation on and off the field. I'm not exaggerating: this was the top news story on every news channel in India (I looked at ones in English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam); there were irate emails and call-ins to the shows demanding that the team be brought home immediately, that such "unfairness" be protested and rejected; and I'm willing to bet my ticket home that this is going to go on for the next couple of days. In this atmosphere, the seriousness of the charge of racist abuse against "Bhajji" is lost -- it's seen by most as another in their list of grievances about the treatment their beloved boys have received in Australia.

Remember Lagaan, anyone? Nothing makes a team close ranks like the kind of scathing criticism that both the Indians (for being sour losers, and for boorishness) and the Australians (for not displaying proper sportsmanship, and for boorishness) are now getting. I wonder... do the complaints sound at all similar? But back to Bhajji and his alleged name-calling: nothing bring this country together like cricket -- if it isn't quite a religion in India, cricket is at least the only national pass time that supercedes religion. And in this orgy of national hair-pulling and chest-thumping that both these testosterone-soaked sides are now indulging in, there is no room for any kind of honest examination of mutual faults and errors.

Ah, the joys of sport. I never knew how much I was missing.