William Dalrymple on Pakistan

William Dalrymple writes in the New York Review of Books of the steadily disintegrating situation in Pakistan. The main reason for this is the policy of courting Islamic extremists, wholeheartedly adopted since the 1980s by the Pakistani army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ISI must simply and unequivocally be termed a rogue agency. But ISI had the support of the CIA (which, for the role it has played in meddling with countries the world over, must also be called rogue). The CIA-ISI supported Islamic extremists were then fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The ISI also found extremists useful in bogging India down in the Kashmir conflict.

Decades have passed and the beast that was unleashed in the 1980s is now threatening to consume Pakistan. Even in Lahore, Pakistan's cultural and artistic capital, far away from the Afghan border, journalists and editors are being threatened by radical groups. The activist Asma Jahangir has also received warnings - "in her case, to desist helping the victims of honor killings."

Dalrymple's entire essay, which focuses on Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid's book Descent into Chaos, is well worth reading; but here are some of my picks - these, in my opinion, are the most telling.

"As Hamid Gul, the director of the ISI who was largely responsible for developing this strategy [of using jihadis in Kashmir], once explained to me, if the ISI "encourages the Kashmiris it's understandable." He said, "The Kashmiri people have risen up in accordance with the UN charter, and it is the national purpose of Pakistan to help liberate them. If the jihadis go out and contain India, tying down their army on their own soil, for a legitimate cause, why should we not support them?" Next to him in his Islamabad living room lay a large piece of the Berlin Wall presented to him by the people of Berlin for "delivering the first blow" to the Soviet Empire through his use of jihadis in the 1980s."

[...]

"The army's senior military brass were convinced until recently that they could control the militants whom they had fostered. In a taped conversation between then General Pervez Musharraf and Muhammad Aziz Khan, his chief of general staff, which India released in 1999, Aziz said that the army had the jihadis by their " tooti " (their privates). Yet while some in the ISI may still believe that they can use jihadis for their own ends, the Islamists have increasingly followed their own agendas, sending suicide bombers to attack not just members of Pakistan's religious minorities and political leaders, but even the ISI headquarters at Camp Hamza itself, in apparent revenge for the army's declared support for America's war on terror and attacks made by the Pakistani military on Taliban strongholds in FATA. Ironically, as Rashid makes clear, it was exactly groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which were originally created by the ISI, that have now turned their guns on their creators, as well as brazenly launching well-equipped and well-trained teams of jihadis into Indian territory. In doing so they are severely damaging Pakistani interests abroad, and bringing Pakistan to the brink of a war it cannot possibly win."

And last, but certainly not the least, is Dalrymple's suggestion that the "Saudi-financed advance of Wahhabi Islam" needs to be stopped, and that the Sufism of provinces such as Sindh could be an effective counter against such puritanical strains:

The Saudis have invested intensively in Wahhabi madrasas in the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab, with dramatic effect, radically changing the religious culture of an entire region. The tolerant Sufi culture of Sindh has been able to defy this imported Wahhabi radicalism. The politically moderating effect of Sufism was recently described in a RAND Corporation report recommending support for Sufism as an "open, intellectual interpretation of Islam." Here is an entirely indigenous and homegrown Islamic resistance movement to fundamentalism, with deep roots in South Asian culture. Its importance cannot be overestimated. Could it have a political effect in a country still dominated by military forces that continue to fund and train jihadi groups? It is one of the few sources of hope left in the increasingly bleak political landscape of this strategically crucial country.

Ramachandra Guha on his Lahore trip

The historian Ramachandra Guha, author of India after Gandhi, writes about his recent Lahore trip here. A sample:

The day before I was due to depart for Lahore, a publisher friend sent me a story by a writer she referred to as "a sort of Pakistani R.K. Narayan". I read it on the flight, and found that for once a publisher had sold an author short. Through the character of an ordinary electrician, Daniyal Mueenuddin had uncovered the violence and callousness of everyday life in rural west Punjab of Pakistan.

True, the elegance of the prose matched that of the Mysore master. But the world was more brutal, and hence more credible.

However, the world I was about to enter was altogether more civil and genteel. Lahore is Pakistan’s most cultured city. In three intense days, I met a cross-section of Pakistan’s thinking classes—journalists, activists, lawyers and economists. Naturally, our talk was dominated by the tensions then prevailing. I sensed, among these sensitive and hospitable people, a triple fear: the fear of their city being overrun by Taliban-style fundamentalists; the fear of their government being taken over once more by the military; the fear that after the recent terror attacks, their country would be shunned and scorned by India, and the world.

Quick thoughts and quotes on Sanskrit

I learned Sanskrit for five years, in middle and high school. And yet, at the end of those five years, I had nothing to show for my efforts. All the rote learning and exhausting analyses of sandhis had come to nothing. I couldn’t speak the language except for a few rudimentary, stilted sentences. Others in the class were the same way.

Over the years, I’ve lost touch with Sanskrit, and only recently have I begun to learn of its history and merits – often by Western scholars of the language. The Clay Sanskrit Library (New York University Press) for instance, is a monumental undertaking: many ancient Sanskrit texts, secular and religious, poetry and prose, are being translated; the library has already released several titles. I am currently trying to read Dandin’s Daskumaracarita (I really don’t know how to add the proper accents to the title, but the English translation, by Isabelle Onians, is called What Ten Young Men Did.)

One of the best and most evocative descriptions of Sanskrit I’ve read, though, is in linguist Nicolas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Ostler surveys the world’s greatest languages: if you ever wanted a scholarly yet readable history of languages, this is it. But it is clear he has lavished the most attention upon the 75-page chapter, Charming like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit. This is not surprising: Ostler has a PhD in linguistics and Sanskrit from MIT.

It was in Charming like a Creeper that I first learned how complex the grammar of Sanskrit – which I had much difficulty learning in school – is and how it had been relentlessly analyzed by Indian scholars such as Panini before and in the first millennium AD. As Ostler writes, “the Sanskrit word for grammar, vyakarana, instead of being based, like the Greek grammatike, on some word for word or writing, just means analysis: so language is the subject for analysis par excellence.”

The rules of grammar in Sanskrit as expounded by Panini in his treatise Ashtadhyayi are as rigorous as the transactional format of the Turing machine. This is an amazing connection: between millennia-old ideas of grammar and modern computing. I admit I am still trying to understand what this exactly means; perhaps in a few years I can write about it with more authority. But for now, here is an extract from Ostler’s book:

“…the grammar that the tradition had defined was a vast system of abstract rules, made up of a set of pithy maxims (called sutras, literally threads) written in an artificial jargon. These sutras are like nothing so much as the rules in a computational grammar of a modern language, such as might be used in a machine translation system; without any mystical or ritual element, they apply according to abstract formal principles.”

Ostler also talks about how Sanskrit spread to the far corners of Asia, traveling along with its principal disseminators, Buddhism and Hinduism. Unlike the languages that accompanied monotheisms of the Middle East – Arabic or European languages such as Spanish – the spread of Sanskrit was entirely devoid of conquest. The south-east Asian kingdoms and even places as far away as Japan, took up elements of Sanskrit probably because it was a matter of prestige, arriving with either Hinduism or Buddhism. Evidently, India had a reputation at the time as a place where great ideas and philosophies emanated from.

The case of Japan is particularly interesting. Ostler proposes that

“Japan owes the order of its symbols in its syllabary, the so-called kana, or go-ju-on, ‘fifty sounds’, to the order of letters in Indian alphabets.”

[…]

“This thoroughgoing intellectual borrowing at the root of the writing system demonstrates that not just the sound of the Buddhist chants but also elements of traditional analysis of language had spread to Japan with Sanskrit.”

Thus, Sanskrit, traveling with the Indian subcontinent's spiritual exports, influenced the far-flung parts of Asia not only with regard to religious ideas, but also subtler aspects, such as the structure of languages. Japan was not the only case: Tibet, Cambodia, and Thailand were influenced too in this fashion. In fact, these cultures may have become literate only with the coming of Sanskrit and its associated vernaculars, such as Pali.
___

And finally, a quote from an interview of Ostler, in which he summarizes why he loves Sanskrit so:

Q: Your affection for Sanskrit comes through in your book. What is it about Sanskrit that appeals to you?

A: Well, the Indian background helps: my parents would never have met if they had not both been sent out to India owing to the Second World War. But Sanskrit has many virtues that attract. Its grammar has been rigorously analyzed, but not in a doctrinaire way – there is room for intellectual debate. The classical Indian culture in which Sanskrit first flourished offers an immense variety of material, from romantic comedy and sensual poetry to epic, massive-word play, political science and philosophy. It embodies a contradiction, that a language whose literature is so lithe, should be indigenously analyzed as a sort of architectural structure. And I suppose I like the fact that it is so difficult (coming from English, certainly), yet so familiar in another way (coming at it from Latin, Greek and Russian).

Ganesha in Mayan country

Generally, India has never been very distant, no matter where I've traveled. It isn't hard to find Indians and, besides, there is always the ubiquitous Indian restaurant, however pathetic. Even in the town of St. Etienne, which is in a provincial part of France and where I never expected to eat any curry, I found at least four Indian restaurants.

But in remote Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, the only Indians are Mayan Indians. In the highland city of San Cristobal de las Casas, there was, for a long time, no indication that there would be anything from the home country - and I expected it to stay that way. So you can imagine my surprise when, on one of my walks through town, I found the following sign.


I still haven’t figured out what it means – I believe it is a sign for a hotel or hostel. But how nice it was to see my favorite deity, the pot-bellied Ganesha, the Elephant God, rendered so well so far away from home.

A whirlwind summary of Mexico

I am back from Mexico. The trip was illuminating in many ways. It’s time now to get on paper everything of importance that I observed. I’ll start with broad thoughts on the country, and in future posts – which might run for the next two months, or even more – I’ll elaborate on specific aspects. Wherever possible, I’ll try to contrast Mexico with India in the hope of unearthing interesting insights. Some readers may have wondered why I focus on topics that most of the time are unrelated to India. Indeed, it’s been a conscious choice, made in the hope that, at some time in the future, armed with knowledge about other cultures and their histories, I’ll be able to understand my own background better.

Mexico – the modern nation state – is about a fifth the size of the United States (India is about a third). It is broad in the north, and progressively tapers in width; at its southern end, the Yucatan Peninsula juts back up into the Atlantic, like the tail of a scorpion. This northward tilt of the Yucatan Peninsula means that Miami to Cancun is a short jaunt. Unsurprisingly, coastal Yucatan is full of beach resorts packed with American revelers.


My first trip to Mexico was in May 2007. I visited then the northern state of Chihuahua, the largest in the country, and which shares a long border with the United States. This time, I visited Mexico City, the capital, in Central Mexico. I also went to the country’s southernmost state, Chiapas. These are three very different places. Mexico may only be a fifth of the United States in size, but mountain ranges run relentlessly through the country. It takes a lot of time to travel by road in Mexico. For instance, Chiapas is a tiny southern state, and though roads there are in good condition, it takes seven hours to travel from San Cristobal de Las Casas in the central highlands to the Lacandon Rainforest, along the Mexico-Guatemala border.

Geography of this sort generally means diversity, and indeed, Mexico had diverse cultures before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City is testimony to that diversity. This unbelievably comprehensive museum collects and maintains with great care all pre-Hispanic cultures. Not just the Aztecs and the Mayans, the most visible and popular cultures, but also Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Olmecs, Toltecs, the people of Casas Grandes and countless others. Just as the Indian subcontinent has a shared civilizational heritage, yet each region its own culture, language and distinctness, so Mexico once had numerous cultures with common practices but which maintained their own identities and languages.

All that began to change in 1519, when strange things began happening on the Atlantic coast of Mexico. Bearded men arrived in ships, and rode on massive beasts that had never been seen before. Horses, which the Spaniards introduced, were new to the Americas. Indeed, all domesticated mammals – cows, pigs, donkeys, pack mules – did not exist in either North or South America at the time of Spanish arrival.

The clashes that ensued between the Spanish and the pre-Hispanic cultures of Mexico were won decisively by the Spanish. Some of the collisions were quite destructive - destructive on the pre-Hispanic side - as I’ve often stressed before.
____

In the centuries that followed, indigenous languages slowly faded – though many like Nahuatl still persist to this day – and Spanish became the lingua franca. Millions were converted to Catholicism. The Catholic Church became powerful. In contrast to Protestant United States, where the natives were either exterminated or corralled into reservations, the Spaniards in Mexico (then called New Spain) intermarried with the Indians, giving rise to the mestizo. This is a vital fact and difference between Mexico and its northern neighbor.

Colonial Mexico had a clear hierarchy: at the top was the tiny elite comprising of those born in Spain but living in Mexico; next were the criollos, who were of Spanish descent, but born in Mexico; next came the mestizos, of mixed Spanish and Indian descent. At the bottom of the pyramid were blacks and mulattoes who had been imported as slaves, and, of course, millions of Indians, many of whom were also enslaved and given very few rights.

Today, mestizos form nearly 60-75% of the population of Mexico. Northern Mexico – the Chihuahua region – even had Chinese immigrants, who had come to work for the construction of railroads in the 19th century. I met a potter in the village of Mata Ortiz who claimed he had some Chinese ancestry - and it looked that way too. There are also Mormon and Mennonite communities in Chihuahua.

In 1821, Mexico gained independence from Spain, but the country remained on the boil for the next hundred years. In that period, it lost almost half of its territory – all in its north: Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas – to American aggression. This is why immigrant Mexicans in the American Southwest today will tell you that they are merely repopulating a territory that is rightfully theirs.

____

In the late 1850s Mexico elected a liberal Indian President, Benito Juarez (left). This was a remarkable achievement, not only because Juarez was Indian - Indians were the most underrepresented group - but also because he was born into a poor family. Western Europe, meanwhile, was hatching its colonial schemes: Mexico was soon invaded by France, and came to be ruled for a while by, believe it or not, Maximilian I, a scion of an Austrian royal family. (Maximilian's wife Carlota was the daughter of the Belgian King Leopold, who plundered the Congo and sanctioned the death of millions – a holocaust that is hardly ever talked about.)


Eventually, though, Juarez regained control and after his death, Porfirio Diaz ruled for more than three decades. Diaz’s rule ended with the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, in 1911. The revolution essentially channeled the rage of peasants and the working class against wealthy, property-owning elite, and threw up such leaders as Emiliano Zapata, Francis Madero, and Pancho Villa. If you visit Mexico, you’ll find Zapata’s fiery face, with its long mustache (left), staring at you from walls and paintings – Zapata seems to be everywhere. His name also features in a modern, still-existing movement in Chiapas, which I mention below.

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For the last 80 years, Mexico has had relative political stability, though one party – the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI – held power for more than seven decades, up until 2000. The country has benefited from its large oil reserves. In the 1990s, the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were finalized, causing much controversy.

On January 1st 1994, as NAFTA went into effect, and as communal land was increasingly privatized, a new movement, comprising largely of indigenous people, emerged in Chiapas, called the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN in Spanish). EZLN was suppressed by the Mexican military in its initial years, but is still active in the villages of Chiapas. I saw plenty of signs during my travels that suggested it is still functioning.

With regard to the concerns they raise, movements like EZLN are not different from shadowy Marxist-Naxal movements in India.

____

Like India, Mexico is deeply unequal and many live in poverty. Mexico's complex history of subjugation and power have meant that wealth has not always trickled to those at the bottom. But if I compare, say, Bombay with Mexico City – two of the world’s largest cities – I would say the former, despite being more glitzy and glamorous, is a lot poorer and weaker in terms of infrastructure than the latter.

But as far as petty and violent crime is concerned, Mexico City probably fares worse: carjackings, kidnappings and murders are rife. Mexico’s drug cartels, its bane, have entered a new phase: the equilibrium of power seems to have spiraled out of control, resulting in increased violence this past year (violence has been especially severe in certain states like Michoacan and Sinaloa). The cartels are also locked in a struggle with Felipe Calderon’s government, which has decided to confront them head on. During my visit, one newspaper had a headline that screamed “Decapitated!” (in Spanish, of course); and below was the gruesome image of ten trussed-up headless men.

____

Infrastructure in Mexico is quite good. Roads and public transportation are very reasonable – the buses extremely comfortable and fares low – even in poorer states like Chiapas. One can argue that the country has been independent since 1821, and therefore has had much more time to control its trajectory as a nation and provide for its people. Indeed, given that it is rich in resources, it might come as a surprise to many that Mexico has not attained first-world status yet.

But really there is nothing to be surprised about. Modernity remains a wily beast, always eluding, always evanescent. Few countries have managed to tame it successfully, and Mexico is no exception.

Best fiction and nonfiction at The Middle Stage

I should be writing about what I am doing in Mexico - as I vaguely promised - but I really haven't had the time. A part of me insists strongly : "When you are traveling, focus on the travel, observe, talk to as many people as possible, and worry about collecting your thoughts later." And so I haven't gotten down to writing anything. But just to orient readers, I am in the southern state of Chiapas, which borders Gautemala.

Let me also use this opportunity to say Happy New Year to all my readers.

I do have something else to share. I've written earlier about Chandrahas Choudhury of the The Middle Stage earlier. Chandrahas is an exceptional interpreter of books and literature. And nowhere is the scale of his effort and the diversity of books he writes about more evident than in his end of the year list of best books. This year, his readers get an extra reward: a separate list for fiction and non fiction. This a great collection, and contains many books that you may not have heard of. But as you pause to read Chandrahas' notes on the books, you'll realize why they are good and how, especially in the case of non-fiction, they tell us something new.

Traveling to Mexico City

Some readers of this blog know I am fascinated by Mexico. Why? There are many reasons, but one is certainly Mexico's history - particularly the history of Mexico City. There's an element of drama in how the city was founded by the Mexicas (who are known more popularly but imprecisely as the Aztecs). There's also an element of drama in the city's eventual conquest by the Spanish.

Bernal Diaz Del Castillo (1492 - 1584) provides in The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico an eyewitness account of Spanish soldiers entering the City of Mexico for the first time. The soldiers were led by the conquistador Hernan Cortes. It was a remarkable historical moment, and Castillo's account is one of the few glimpses we have of the Mexico City of the early 16th century - called by its then rulers as Tenochtitlan - before it was laid to waste.

We proceeded along the Causeway which is here in eight paces in width and runs so straight to the City of Mexico that it does not seem to turn much or little, but, broad as it is, it was so crowded with people that there was hardly room for them all, some of them going to and others returning from Mexico [City], besides those who had come out to see us, so that we were hardly able to pass by the crowds of them that came and the towers and cues were full of people as well as the canoes from all parts of the lake.

[…]

Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one side, on the land, there were great cities, and in the lake ever so many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the Causeway were many bridges at intervals and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico, and we – we did not even number four hundred soldiers!

(Picture of the lake city of Tenochtitlan - the lake has since been drained - as recollected by Cortes, the conquistador who took over it; picture from here.)

Even today, Mexico City, with a population of somewhere between 15 and 20 million, is one of the great cities of world. Many parts of the city are capsules of history, markers of that dramatic collision between the Spanish and the Mexicas.

___


I’ll be traveling to Mexico City tomorrow, to explore some of that history. Especially the famous National Museum of Anthropology, where there is a model of Tenochtitlan and its spectacular pyramids, in addition to an inexhaustible number of exhibits on Mexico's long and complex history. I’ll be in Mexico City for a few days, and then will go on to Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico, bordering Gautemala, to get a sense of the country's Mayan past. There, my plan is to visit the ruins at Palenque (example relief from the museum in Palenque, left).

Blogging thus may be light until the New Year; but if I do have internet access and have the time, I will try to write from some of the places I am visiting.

Hurling size 10 shoes: What people do in a free society

By now, most of you would have seen this. As Falstaff says, reality can sometimes outdo fiction. What was President Bush's response? This:

“All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said, continuing to take questions and noting the apologies. He also called the incident a sign of democracy, saying, “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves,” as the man’s screaming could be heard outside.

Links

1. I've always put in a good word for the documentaries of Frontline, but now I've found another terrific source. This too a PBS production; it's called Wide Angle. The two documentaries I would especially recommend: Brazil in Black and White, which follows several Brazilian kids trying to get into college, and the effect of a recently implemented affirmative action policy. And Back to School - this one is an all time favorite - follows six children (one each in Kenya, Benin, India (in Rajasthan), Japan, Romania and Brazil and Afghanistan), trying to attend primary school, and the challenges they face.

2. Confessions of a xenophile: Amitav Ghosh writes in this contemplative essay about his early experiences in the village of Lataifa in Egypt, which led to one of his best books, In an antique land. Ghosh ties his time in Egypt to something broader: a yearning for universalism. Some excerpts:

The world today is very different from that of 1980, when I came to Egypt. The conversations and exchanges that re-commenced in the post-war period are now in danger of being broken off again. Today, especially in the Anglo-American world, capitalism and empire are once again being packaged together, in a bundle that is scarcely distinguishable from the old ‘civilizing mission’. Indeed, one of the outcomes of the horrifying attacks of 9/11 was that it led to an extraordinary rehabilitation of imperialism, not merely as a political and military force, but also as an ideology – one that has led to the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq.

[....]

Against this background it is tempting to look back on the days of non-alignment with some nostalgia: and indeed there was much that was valuable in that period. Yet it would be idle to pretend that solutions could be found by looking backwards in time. That was a certain historical moment and it has passed. If I have reflected on it here, it is not in order to suggest that we should try to turn back the clock – as religious fundamentalists seek to do – nor in order to fall back on an ideology of permanent victimhood such as that which the French rightly castigate as ‘tiers-mondisme’. I have pointed to that period, rather, in order to evoke the desires and hopes that animated it, in particular to its strain of xenophilia, to its yearning for a certain kind of universalism – not a universalism merely of principles and philosophy, but one of face-to-face encounters, of everyday experience. Except that this time we must correct the mistake that lay at the heart of that older anti-colonial impulse – which is that we must not only include the West within this spectrum of desire, we must also acknowledge that both the West and we ourselves have been irreversibly changed by our encounter with each other. We must recognize that in the West, as in Asia, Africa and elsewhere, there are great numbers of people who, by force of circumstance, have become xenophiles, in the deepest sense, of acknowledging that in matters of language, culture and civilization, their heritage, like ours, is fragmented, fissured and incomplete. Only when our work begins to embody the conflicts, the pain, the laughter, and the yearning that comes from this incompleteness will our work be a true mirror of the world we live in.

A visit to an emergency room

No, nothing to be alarmed about: I did not visit as a patient. My research focuses on developing methods that can make healthcare run more efficiently, and I’ve just begun to explore how emergency room (ER) operations can be improved. For a country that is the leader in just about everything – especially medical research, technology and innovation – the United States has a lamentable health care delivery system. And nowhere is it more evident than in emergency rooms across the country. Patients, even patients who have had a stroke, may have to wait hours before getting care. Some wait seven to eight hours. In major cities, ambulances carrying patients to an emergency room are diverted to other emergency rooms, simply because there is no capacity and queues are long. (Queues again! Haven’t we talked about queues before?)

The ER I visited is in Baystate Medical Center, in Springfield, Massachusetts. In terms of volume, this is one of the largest in the country. About 110,000 patients use it each year; about 300 patients come to the ER every day, 80 of them brought by ambulances. Others just show up by car, accompanied by friends or relatives.

Some have ordinary ailments, like a cold or sore throat. Instead of going to visit a primary care doctor, they use the ER. They do this probably because they don’t have a doctor. And that in turn is probably because they don’t have insurance. The statistic that crops up in just about every major discussion about the US healthcare system is that there are about 45 million uninsured patients in the country – a colossally high number; indeed an unforgivable number if you compare with other developed countries. Massachusetts is a bit ahead of the curve and has tried to fix the problem, but other states lag.

So if you don’t have insurance, and if you have a medical condition, you end up using the ER and pay a huge bill. But even if you have insurance, you might use the ER because you could not obtain an appointment with your doctor. ERs cannot refuse care; they have to treat everyone who shows up, irrespective of whether the patient has a trivial condition or is uninsured.

ERs, thus, are a safety net; they soak up the consequences of inefficiencies whose root causes lie elsewhere.

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At the Baystate ER, patients with minor ailments are sent to a Fast Track section. That way they do not interfere with the more critical patients who are sent to the main area. But the name Fast Track has become something of a joke. Waiting times for getting into Fast Track can be very long. So to pacify patients and ensure they don’t feel mocked, the Fast Track area was recently renamed the General Treatment section.

Needless to say, only the name has changed; the waiting times have not.

When I visited the Baystate ER, it was about 2 pm in the afternoon. It was crowded. Early mornings are the least busy hours; but by noon things start picking up. By late afternoon, early evening, the ER is packed. This too is a US-wide trend – and perhaps true worldwide as well.

In the waiting area, there were patients and their relatives and friends. A couple of the patients were in wheelchairs; they were elderly, clearly sick, and their faces had a resigned and faded look to them. Their faces told also of the passage of time: seconds had become minutes and minutes hours, yet they were still waiting. If sicker patients arrive, they tend to preferred, thus increasing the waits for less sick patients. But assessments of sickness are to some extent subjective, inevitably so.

The main emergency area – entered from the waiting area through double doors – was a world apart. It was a buzz of activity and felt surreal. Constant activity and motion: like a video on fast-forward. There was a central square, the inner portion of which consisted of staff working hastily with computers, records, paperwork. On the outside, doctors, nurses, assistants swirled around immobile beds with prostate patients. These beds are supposed to be in rooms, but to create capacity, beds had been added to the hallway. Monitors displayed constantly changing information: how much time each patient had been in the ER, whether the tests that had been ordered had returned, which resident or doctor was assigned to the patient. The charge nurse, who was in charge of operations, had tough decisions to make. Whom to admit next? Which nurse to assign to which patient? Should another bed be added to the already overcrowded hallway?

The staff, even though busy constantly attending to something, seemed cheerful enough; their cheer was much needed, considering the bleak faces of the patients.

Patients, once they are treated, are either discharged or admitted to the nearby Baystate Hospital. And here too there is a crunch. Hospital beds are a scarce resource, and generally there is no availability. So the patients continue to wait in ER beds, effectively denying beds to other patients waiting for hours for treatment in the waiting area. Such as the elderly patients I'd seen upon entering, waiting in wheelchairs and with tormented looks.

So it goes. Emergency rooms are not supposed to be pleasant places. The nurses and doctors who work there know there is no room for sentimentalism. Work just needs to be done. But ERs are also a barometer of the larger issues that ail a healthcare system. The US healthcare system is badly fragmented and inefficient; and a large part of the cost is borne by ERs.

Elections in Ghana

Ghana, the first sub-Saharan country to gain independence - in 1957 - will have elections this coming week. After what happened in Kenya in December last year - that country too was regarded as stable until elections - and in Zimbabwe earlier this year, there might be some apprehension. Ghana also has recently discovered oil, always a problem - just look at neighboring Nigeria, whose oil wealth has been its bane.



(Video, via Ethan Zuckerman.)

But Ghana, everyone is saying, is different. Democracy has taken deep root there; the media and reporting scene is vibrant, the election commission strong. And the vote counting system - going by what this article says - is remarkably transparent:

During elections radio stations like the capital's JoyFM dispatch staff armed with mobile phones around the country.

The correspondent gives continuous live updates and reports by mobile phone to their media "election headquarters".

Once results are collated at the constituency, in the presence of party officials and electoral officers, the radio stations rapidly compile the results, broadcast them and a clear picture of the outcome is available within 24 hours.

The process has become too fast for old-fashioned election shenanigans.

JoyFM takes this a step further and publishes the results on the internet, thereby making it virtually impossible for a government to fiddle with results during a deliberate delay in their release by a government-controlled electoral commission as is the case elsewhere in Africa.

That's quite impressive; with such accountability, everything should be fine next week. Still, there will always be some some tension; besides the race is close. Fingers will be crossed.

New York Times: Best 10 books of the year

It's that time of the year. Everyone has their own list of best books, and the New York Times has put up what it thinks is best. Toni Morrison's A Mercy is there, so is Joseph O Neill's Netherland, and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth; in non-fiction, Patrick French's comprehensive biography of VS Naipaul, The World is What it is.

Innovation and improvisation in a constrained environment

At Ethan Zuckerman’s blog, My Heart’s In Accra, I came across this remarkable post. It’s all about how the scarcity of resources engenders creative solutions. Some of this creativity is evident in developing countries, where hardware odds and ends are put to unexpected use, or new devices developed from readily available materials. Here are two examples.

1. A pot-in-pot refrigerator

Suppose you are in a developing country with a hot climate. You lack reliable electricity, and a generator is too expensive. Suppose you sell fruits and vegetables. How do you keep your produce from rotting in the heat; how do you prevent it from being swarmed by flies?

The answer: a refrigerator, under $2, made only of earthen pots.

(Figure from here)

The idea seems similar to the earthen pots I used to have wonderfully cool water from in India. Still, this is different. There are two pots involved – it’s a pot-in-pot system – and the apparatus is a lot more versatile. It can store peppers, eggplant, spinach, and they can stay edible for up to twelve days; sometimes even longer. The Nigerian Mohammed Bah Abba, from a family of pot-makers, is credited with the invention. Details:

To the surprise of many, the world’s cheapest refrigerator costs less than $2 dollars to make, uses minimal resources to produce and runs completely without electricity. It’s called a zeer pot, or the pot-in-pot and was developed by Mohammed Bah Abba, who realized that he could put the second law of thermodynamics and transpiration to work for him. The zeer pot, is actually two earthenware pots (I’m assuming they are both unglazed), one pot smaller than the other. The smaller pot is put inside the bigger pot, and the space in-between them is filled with sand. The sand is made wet with water (twice a day) and a wet towel is put on top of the two pots to keep warm air from entering the interior. As water in the sand evaporates through the surface of the outer pot, it carries heat, drawing it away from the inner core, thus cooling the inside of the inner pot which can be filled with soft-drinks, water, fresh fruit, vegetables or even meat. A damp cloth placed on top keeps the inside pot away from hot air. In this way, fresh produce can be kept for long periods of time without the need for electricity, or camping coolers made high embodied energy. Tomatoes and peppers will last for up to three weeks, and African spinach, or rocket, which normally would spoil after just a day in the intense African heat, can and will remain edible for up to twelve days. Eggplants will keep for up to 27 days instead of three. It can even be used for storing sorghum and millets for a long time since it protects from humidity, thus preventing fungi from developing. The zeer will keep water (and other liquid beverages) at about 15 degrees Celsius, and even meat can be kept fresh for long periods.

The new technology is now being used by farmers at the market. Fresh produce is kept inside, with just a couple fresh items displayed on the damp towel resting on top. In this way, most of the produce is kept hidden away from both warm air and insects. In the past, all produce was displayed in the open air, attracting flies resulting in stomach disease such as dysentery. Now food can be kept fresh for longer and kept away from flies...even miles away from electricity or ice.

(Figure from here)

___

2. Pedal-powering a knife-sharpener

The pot-in-pot cooler is something new, designed and produced from readily available local materials. Now consider how something as simple and commonplace as a bicycle can be used, yes, for getting from one place to another, but also for a very different trade: knife sharpening.

Bikes are, as Zuckerman says,

“a platform that’s seen perhaps the most innovation in Africa. With a little bit of hacking, you can turn a bicycle into a cargo vehicle, loading it down with frightening quantities of bananas. Add a wheeled cart behind and a bicycle is an ambulance. Add a tiny one-stroke engine and it’s a motorbike, capable of propelling the rider over long distances… and she can start pedaling when she runs out of gas. In Uganda, bicycles become phone booths, with wireless phones attached to metal boxes mounted on the handlebars.”

But using a bike for knife sharpening has an altogether different appeal. It is remarkably simple and intuitive, as most improvisations often are. And it reminded me of something from my school days in India, in Ahmadabad and Nagpur.

My parents bought me a large, rather cumbersome black bicycle; I believe it was one of those hardy Hero bicycles. Others – I envied them – used colorful, pink and red ones, the BSA SLRs, with a side stand. This last detail about side stands is important. Mine didn’t have a side stand: the stand went symmetrically over the back wheel; you had to pull the weight of bicycle backwards to park it. The delightful thing about this feature was that you could sit and pedal in parked position, and the wheel would spin without the bicycle moving. It was always a pleasure to pedal like this, just for timepass.



But the power generated by the pedaling can be put to good use. And so it has been:

Bikes get really interesting when you let them change function. In my single favorite video on Afrigadget, Peter Kahugu shows off his knife-sharpening bicycle in Nairobi. I love the video because I owned the same damned bicycle when I lived in Ghana in 1993. It’s a heavy, Indian-made beast, but it’s indestructible, and has some cool features. One useful feature is a huge kickstand that surrounds the back wheel. This lets you park the bike with the rear wheel off the ground… which allows you to ride the bike and spin the rear wheel without the bike going anywhere.

That’s the key to Peter’s business, as he uses the power of that back wheel to turn a belt which turns a grindstone mounted on the handlebar… which lets Peter sharpen knives and scissors, a trade that pays him a solid wage, roughly $10 a day. His business is entirely portable, which lets him bring his services to his clients. And he can take his tools home at the end of the day. The bicycle is still a transport tool, but it’s also a power generation tool.

(Figure from here.)

Interesting, isn’t it? In India, I remember the knife-sharpener coming once in six months or so, checking if we had any work for him. I remember him riding a bicycle; I remember also the steady hum of his sharpener. But did he use the same system described above for generating power? I don’t seem to recall very clearly.

But Indian readers - maybe you have a better recollection?

Attacks in Mumbai - again

Came back from a road trip, to learn the horrifying news about Mumbai. Varnam provides some useful links; Amit Varma writes about his experience. And Sonia Faleiro writes a moving piece. Both Amit and Sonia were very close to where some of the shooting happened. I was also glad to hear that my friend Chandrahas is safe.

Salil Tripathi has a piece in the Far Eastern Economic Review. And his son, the 19-year old Udayan Tripathi, has a beautiful essay on the attacks, quoted by that inexhaustible blogger, Prem Panicker, who himself has a series of links and updates (if access to his blog is spotty, press refresh enough times and you'll get there). And from the WSJ: India's antiterror blunders. And more: Suketu Mehta, author of one of the best books about Mumbai, Maximum City, in the New York Times; and Desipundit aggregates a number of updates and provides links to more articles and essays.

The real story behind American Thanksgiving

Most facts in this piece are from Charles Mann's thrilling book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.


I.

The story of American Thanksgiving is linked to the United States' beginnings: to the tenuous coastal Massachusetts colony in Plymouth. The colonists, about a hundred of them, later came to be known as “Pilgrims”. They were a religious group, and identified themselves as separate from the Church of England. Fleeing the volatile political situation in England, they first went to the Netherlands, and eventually found investors to fund a venture to establish a colony in North America.

They sailed on the now famous Mayflower in 1620. It was a badly planned voyage: the Pilgrims had little clue as to where they were precisely heading. When they landed in what is today coastal Massachusetts – on Nov 9th, 1620 – they realized they had no real means of producing food. They had not brought domesticated animals to ensure a supply of meat; they had not planned to farm either. They planned to fish and export fish, but their fishing gear turned out to be useless in New England.

The colonists would have perished – indeed half of the hundred or so that arrived died the first winter – but they survived because of assistance offered by the Indians of New England. Chief among the helpers was Squanto who taught the colonists techniques to grow maize (corn). The colonists, using this new knowledge, survived, and had a bountiful harvest. To express their gratitude, they had a magnificent thanksgiving feast with Indians. That’s the feast that the picture of Jean Louis Gerome depicts: splendidly feathered Indians, surrounded by the Pilgrims, partaking in what must have been a sumptuous meal.

This is also the story Americans kids learn in school. All nations attach special relevance to their beginnings, and the Pilgrims are a vital part of America’s national narrative. But the story, while true, is told in isolation, without a proper context; there is a sense of idyll about it. And the way it is told propagates a broader myth: that European settlers settled a largely empty expanse of North America, a vast natural wilderness. Sure, there were a few tribes here and there, some friendly, some hostile, but what could they do? They were destined to lose.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The textbook version of Thanksgiving not only obscures the broader socio-political context of the time; it also hides an immense tragedy.

II.

New England before European contact was teeming with different Indian groups: a mosaic of shifting alliances and confederacies. The population is estimated to be 100,000. Certainly not as high it was in some of the dense parts of the world at the time – the region around Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), for instance – but significant for the 15th century nevertheless.

The population was growing as well. Maize (corn) was a staple and was farmed abundantly along with squash and beans. The presence of this triumvirate – maize, squash and beans – is especially significant. All three were first domesticated in Mexico. For them to have made it this far north meant that there was an extensive network through which such ideas of cultivation were relayed.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, European shipping vessels – British, French, Spanish and Italian – began to rove the eastern coast of the United States. By 1610, Britain alone had about three hundred such vessels. Many of them attempted to stay put and settle, but could not, except for short periods. Why? Because they weren’t always welcome. The Indians were happy to have the Europeans stay for some time and trade with them, but the moment the visitors overstayed, they were asked to leave, sometimes with a hint of force. All accounts of European explorers who sailed in these ships confirm the coast was thickly populated.



(Southern New England in the 16th and 17th centuries: at the time of European exploration. Click for a much better view.)

Prominent among Indians groups in southern New England was the Wampanoag confederation, whose chief was Massasoit. To the north was the group called Massachusetts – which incidentally was also the name of the language spoken in the region – and to the east, in Cape Cod, were the Nauset. These groups were allied together, and were hostile to the Narragansett alliance immediately to the west. There were also the Nipmuck, and the Western Abenaki to the northwest. In New England, the Indians belonged to one of two different language groups: Algonquian and the Iroquoian.

To reiterate: the New England before European contact wasn’t a vast wilderness with a few scattered tribes; far from it. But something happened around the time that Europeans began to explore the east coast; something that damaged the equilibrium and irrevocably shifted the balance against the Indians.


III.

That something was disease.

Indians had no immunity to European diseases, which had their roots in the domestication of mammals – such as cows, horses, and pigs, which the Americas did not have. Most infectious diseases we know – smallpox and measles for example, and more recently AIDS – were once diseases in animals that mutated and adapted to human populations. Since Eurasian agrarian societies had a great number of domesticated mammals and were in close contact with them, their populations were inevitable targets for such diseases. Epidemics took a heavy toll on Europe during medieval times, as we all know. Large numbers of Europeans died, but the population developed some immunity over time.

Indians, on other hand, had no domesticated mammals (why that was so is too big a question to answer here), and hence had fewer diseases that could affect Europeans and inadvertently hinder settlement. Conversely the lack of immunity to European diseases proved devastating to Indian communities throughout North and South America. It paved the way for European colonization.

Indeed, it was disease in conjunction with conquest that brought about the decline of the Indians. If only conquest had happened and the effects of disease had not been catastrophic, Indians would have surely fought the Europeans back and eventually gained their independence, like other people the world over. And if only disease had affected them and no conquest had happened, Indian populations would have declined initially, but would have later rebounded back – as Eurasian populations did after the epidemics of medieval times.

What eventually unfolded, though, throughout North and South America, was a combination of disease and conquest. This crushed Indian communities everywhere. That is why, instead a North America full of indigenous peoples – with their own nation states and flags – you see a North America full of the descendants of Europeans, Africans and now Asians. American Indians are now a mere 3-4 million of the total United States population of about 300 million.


IV.

How did disease play a role in New England of the early 1600s? Plymouth, the part of Massachusetts where the Pilgrims landed, had once been a thriving coastal Indian community, called Patuxet. But nearly all of the inhabitants of Patuxet had died because of viral hepatitis. The disease had apparently been transmitted by way of prior interactions with Europeans, before the Pilgrims’ arrival (the epidemic is estimated to have struck around 1616).

Not only that, the disease raced into the interior, killing nearly ninety percent of the Wampanoag Confederacy, of which Patuxet was a part. Ninety percent! Here is a passage from Charles Mann’s 1491 that describes the devastation, with quotes from Thomas Morton, a merchant who witnessed the aftermath of the tragedy:

The Indians “died in heapes as they lay in their houses,” the merchant Thomas Morton observed. In their panic, the healthy fled from the sick, carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities. Behind them remained the dying, “left for crows and kites and vermin to prey upon.” Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. “And the bones and the skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle,” Morton wrote, that the Massachusetts woodlands seemed to be a “new-found Golgotha,” the Place of the Skull, where executions took place in Roman Jerusalem.

With his people suddenly on the verge of being exterminated, Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoag confederacy, took a risky decision. He felt threatened by the Narragansett to the West. (Presumably, since relations between the Wampanoag and the Narragansett were frigid, there hadn’t been much exchange between the two; the latter had thus not yet been affected greatly by the epidemic.) So when the Pilgrims landed in 1620, about three years after the epidemic struck, Massasoit, in a desperate move – reversing his earlier policy which discouraged European permanency on Wampanoag territory – allowed the Pilgrims to settle. In exchange the Pilgrims would have to formally ally themselves with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett.

What precise advantages, you might ask, would an alliance with the Pilgrims bring? The Pilgrims themselves had barely survived. There might even be a risk of more disease: though epidemics were unexplained at the time and were attributed to the realm of the supernatural, surely it might not have been lost on the Indians that interactions with traveling Europeans had brought disease. Perhaps it was advantageous to associate with the Pilgrims because they possessed new weapons. Firearms were new to Indians, though they quickly realized that the “British were terrible shots, from lack of practice – their guns were little more than noisemakers.”

But most likely Massasoit wanted to make an alliance with the Pilgrims just to deter the Narragansett. Since the Narragansett were farther inland, the Pilgrims with their firearms might have seemed like a uncertain and unpredictable threat. They might think twice before attempting a takeover of the Wampanoag.

Massasoit’s alliance with the Pilgrims happened in 1621. Squanto, a former resident of Patuxet, was one of the key players. His true name, in Massachusett, was Tisquantum. Some years before the Pilgrims' arrival, Tisquantum had been kidnapped by a European shipping vessel – the kidnapping of Indians was quite common – and was paraded in Europe’s capitals as an Indian specimen, a curiosity. But Tisquantum was smart; he learned English, became proficient, maneuvered his hosts and returned back to New England. When he reached Patuxet, hoping to rejoin his community, he found it no longer existed. Instead, there was now a British settlement.

Tisquantum’s story is the most poignant: imagine his grief and sense of desolation upon discovering that the community he'd known so well and had grown up with had been all but exterminated by disease. Charles Mann argues in 1491 that Tisquantum helped the Pilgrims with an eye to somehow rehabilitating Patuxet. That is a fair thesis. Tisquantum might have also had broader ambitions, which is why Massasoit was ever suspicious of him.

But to return to the point. In 1621, Massasoit took a chance and allied with the Pilgrims. Tisquantum helped the Pilgrims and soon became indispensable. It was his assistance that led to the Pilgrims' bountiful harvest that year. Massasoit and his men joined the feast with the Pilgrims; together they had a great time and complained about the Narragansett.

Hence Thanksgiving.

V.

Thanksgiving, thus, was as the product of a calculated move by Massasoit, a decision that he took with the Indian political-social context in mind. Naturally, he could not have evaluated the long term consequences of his decision.

It turned out to be a critical moment in American history. With the Pilgrims’ alliance and permanent settlement, the British now had a foothold in America. Farther south, the Jamestown colony, founded even earlier than the Plymouth Colony, in 1607, had also managed to survive. In the decades that followed, thousands more from Britain would arrive – leading to more wars with the Indians: the Pequot War and King Phillip’s War; the latter particularly brutal.

The floodgates had now opened. The stage was now set for the European competition for Indian land in North America. The creation of the United States was not too far away.

Gujarati cotton trade in the 11th century: A lesson in market responsiveness

At the beginning of the second millennium AD, maritime trade in and around Asia was quite well developed. It spanned North and East Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and China; and covered the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and the China Sea. Merchant communities commonly traveled abroad and sometimes even settled in places along the network. For instance, trade was one reason why Jewish merchants from the Middle East and North Africa came to live in the thriving cities on India’s western coast.

India’s location – between Africa and East Asia – ensured that it played a significant role in the maritime trade. Ships from say Aden, in present-day Yemen, never made a direct journey all the way to Southeast Asia or China; that was too risky. They stopped at ports on India’s western coast before sailing farther.

Many different things were traded – spices, silk, ingots, glass beads. One of the major exports from India was cotton; and Gujarat was one the main centers of the cotton trade:

“Cotton was a major export from India and almost certainly would have been on board. Many documents that date from the period of the shipwreck, from the Middle East to China, concern the trade in Indian cotton. Recently discovered archaeological evidence is more direct, specific, and exciting. Several digs in the garbage dump of the old city of Fustat, south of Cairo, have turned up hundreds of fragments of printed cotton fabric that date as far back as the eleventh century, though many of these pieces are from the subsequent two centuries. The dry climate of the Cairo area has preserved these fragments for nearly 1000 years. Analysis of the twist patterns of the selvage style, and the wood-block printed patterns places their origin in Gujarat on the western coast of India. These small pieces of cotton were from simple, functional clothing, quite different from the use of silk in Indonesia…Gujarat had many specialized centers of cotton cultivation, dyeing and weaving spread through the countryside.” [From Stuart Gordon's When Asia Was the World]

That Gujarati cotton was found in Cairo isn’t news by itself. What is surprising though, is how responsive the cotton centers of Gujarat were to their markets thousands of miles away. Indonesia and the islands of Southeast Asia also appear to have been a market. But preferences about how that cotton should look and feel differed vastly from Egypt to Indonesia. The cotton producers of Gujarat were up to the task; they smartly and flexibly adjusted their production to meet varied tastes:

“Gujarat became subtly responsive to distant market demand. Researchers have recently located intact cloths in the islands of Southeast Asia that are virtually exact matches in weave and selvage to the small pieces found in Egypt. The only differences are in color and block printed pattern. Blue, being an inauspicious color in Southeast Asia, never appears. Green patterns sold well in Egypt. Animal patterns were sent to Southeast Asia, but not to Islamic Egypt. These archaeological finds suggest that traders did not simply take Gujarati cotton out to distant lands hoping to sell it. Instead there was a sophisticated return flow of information from traders to manufacturers on what sold well and what did not. There is even some archaeological evidence that Indonesian patterns were brought back to Gujarat and copied to meet market tastes.” [From Stuart Gordon's When Asia Was the World]

____

We live in a complex world today; we are more connected than ever before in history. But our globalism blinds us: we tend to overlook the fact that the world a thousand years ago was in some sense just as interdependent and complex – despite the hindrances to travel. Globalization was nothing new to Gujarat or Cairo or Indonesia even then: the wealth of their economies depended on it.

Fast forward a thousand years and the same market responsiveness that Gujarat demonstrated is vital for the corporations of today. It is true that modern day globalization is more instant and accelerated – perhaps that is why many communities feel it is harsh and intrusive– but the basic idea is very old indeed.

The professor's webpage

is up. You'll find a picture of yours truly - with a silly smile - and a resume full of impossible-to-understand terms: combinatorial optimization, genetic algorithms and suchlike. Isn't that what academia is all about - parading the incomprehensible and the esoteric?

More seriously, I'll try to write in this space - which has focused on history, current affairs, literature and travel - about my research as well. If and when I write about my research, I promise to make it as accessible and readable as possible (this recent post, for instance, is related to one area that I study: queuing).

But if you still fall asleep...well that's not such a bad thing.

How I helped Obama win in eight states

In August this year, as I moved from Minnesota to Massachusetts, I drove through eight states. Amazingly – and I realized this just recently – Obama won all these states. So here goes a quasi-satirical, fictional piece that follows my journey: the places I mention here are places and people I actually met. But I’ve twisted the actual narrative to have some fun.

________

I moved from Minnesota to Massachusetts in August this year. I drove for three days and through eight states to get to my destination: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and finally Massachusetts. Look carefully at that list. Do you notice something? Yes, they are all states in which Obama won; and they include some of his more memorable victories: Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.

I am here to take credit for his successes. I hope the Obama campaign takes notice. After all, I traveled and spread Obama’s word in Midwestern prairie towns; I climbed lonely silos and shouted, so his message of change and hope could reach every barn and every farmhouse. And when I crossed the Mississippi – that most important American territorial and cultural marker – and entered Wisconsin, I set sail large paper boats with a “Yes, we can!” emblazoned on them, so the message would travel down the river, all the way to St.Louis, in the bellwether state of Missouri, where the race still remains tied.

And that night - the first of my journey - I ate a hearty meal at King of Falafel, a restaurant in downtown Madison. I encouraged the Egyptian owner to vote for Change. When he complained that life was tough and business was slow because of a fierce Lebanese competitor whose restaurant was right across, I said to him:

“There is no Egyptian America or Lebanese America – there is only the United States of America.”

________

The next morning I was in Illinois, a state already well converted. As I drove through the notorious south side of Chicago – a place Obama had made home and where he’d done his community organizing work – I thought I saw a young and skinny Obama walking the streets, knocking on doors, helping frame and sign petitions, helping people pick up their lives as the steel factories closed.

I saw him slip on the sidewalk, fall, and twist his ankle; his papers, containing hundreds of signatures flew and scattered all over the street. But he collected them with the same patience and poise with which he ran his Presidential campaign. Later, I saw him addressing a group of just twenty people – yes just twenty people, not 200,000. Big audiences certainly do not develop in a day. I saw him stumble and stutter and lose his sentences - unfortunately there wasn't a teleprompter to channel his eloquence.

________

Twenty five miles south of Chicago is the town of Gary, in the state of Indiana. This predominantly black town would probably vote for Obama – unlike the state which was a toss-up – but I thought I had to do my part nevertheless. Every town counted; every person counted. White folks in Minnesota had advised me to avoid Gary; I was told to “gas up and avoid everything south of Chicago downtown; these are bad parts.” In America, as many of you well know, “bad” parts of town in the public discourse are generally an indirect reference to “Black” or “Hispanic” parts of town.

I made my way through Gary’s deserted main street, full of strangely empty buildings. I stuck a hundred Obama fliers on the walls, alongside tattered messages that said: “Gary: Celebrating one hundred years; Steel Strong!” But the heavy industry halcyon days were in the past. Now there wasn't much going on.

At a crowded gas station at the end of the street, I found the owners – an Indian-American man and his son – conducting transactions behind a bullet-proof glass partition. I said to them:

“Change is coming; it will break these barriers of suspicion and distrust that we have erected.”

I repeated this to a middle-aged black lady who arrived in posh red SUV. She was in a foul mood, and had begun cursing the two ragged men lounging outside the store. The men, she claimed angrily, were eyeing her car.

“Get a proper job!” she told them. Those behind me in the line grinned wryly.
________

A little farther east in Indiana is the town of South Bend. Here too, the downtown buildings were empty; the economy seemed to have stagnated. And as with other cities in the US, the demographic in and near downtown was mostly black. This contrasted sharply with the brilliantly landscaped campus of Notre Dame University a few miles away, where the rich sent their offspring. I wandered around the well maintained boulevards trying to find students who could energize the campaign in South Bend.

I came across a group of students and professors at a small hangout called Lula’s Café. Cosy and comfortable, the café’s interior was a world very different from downtown. The walls were full of murals; students discussed in groups. Some played drums; others played the flute: the atmosphere was very much like it is in organic cafes and stores. This was a community conveniently absorbed in its own world, its own bubble, seemingly impervious to the situation just a few miles away. Most of them were already Obama supporters, but I had something to say to them:

“We can't have a Hippie America and a New Age America and a Yuppie America and a Ghetto America. We can't have a rich college-going America and a poor high-school dropout America. We must have only the United States of America!”

________

Onward from Indiana to Ohio, yet another critical state. I drove and drove until I came to the town of Toledo. I was exhausted and slept long that night in one of the highway-side hotels. But next morning I was up early. I set myself up in the breakfast room, with other hotel guests – senior citizens, families with many children– shaking a packet of Quaker’s oatmeal, toasting English muffins, slicing boiled eggs, and having weak coffee.

I didn't have to do much. The television was on; Obama was addressing a large rally, reading eloquently from the teleprompter, his eyes moving left and right, following the prompts.

“Vote for him!” I said passionately. My audience in the breakfast room looked at me in the uncertain manner of undecided voters, but my passion must have roused something deep in them.

And I can claim safely now that that same passion came to fore in Ohio when Obama carried it last week.

________

I could go on and on: describe my stop at Cleveland, Ohio; my stops in the small towns of Pennsylvania, yet another battleground state; and finally the easy home stretch through Upstate New York and western Massachusetts, through quaint towns that were ready to vote for Obama anyway, and where yards proliferated with Obama signs. But that wouldn’t be interesting.

It shall suffice to say that I did my bit; that during this journey – from the plains of the Midwest to the hills of western Massachusetts, covering nearly 1200 miles, and experiencing, if only for a little bit, the stark social realities that face the country today – it shall suffice to say that on this journey, I planted a seed on all my stops along the way: an Obama seed that grew and prospered on Election Day.

Why I blog

Some answers to the question are contained in Andrew Sullivan's wonderful essay in The Atlantic.

For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.

In light of Joe, the Plumber

There’s been much talk about Joe, the Plumber, in the soap/drama that is the US Presidential election. For those who may be unaware, Joe the Plumber is an actual plumber - albeit with a different name - who earns about $40,000 but has aspirations to buy a 250,000/year earning business. Joe met Obama while the latter was campaigning in Ohio and is now a celebrity, ever since McCain mentioned him some dozen times during the third presidential debate.

For the two Presidential campaigns, Joe is a convenient stand-in for the “honest, hardworking” American – just like other generic stereotypes: Jill the engineer; Molly the dental hygienist; Jack the electrician; Chuck the truck driver. In my travels to American cities – Chicago, DC, Seattle, Minneapolis, Philadelphia – I’ve come across plenty of these so-called “ordinary” Americans, whom the Obama and McCain campaigns invoke at every turn. Here, then, are a few of my glimpses – a few of the many such I’ve met over the years.


1. The Shuttle Driver

A few days ago, I took a ride on a shuttle from Amherst, Massachusetts to the airport in Hartford. The shuttle service was called Bluebird. Joe, the driver, picked me up at 5 am. He was a tall man, perhaps in the early or mid-sixties. As we drove, I learned Joe owned Bluebird. He was in fact, the owner and the only driver. The minivan, fitted with a GPS, was his only vehicle. Joe used to work with Valley Transporter, a larger service with many employees, but had quit and begun Bluebird recently.

“So you must be one of the small businesses that the Presidential campaigns constantly refer to,” I said with a laugh.

Joe smiled and said yes, but there was a bit of a pause.

“I get one or two calls per day, but it’s been awfully quiet the last few weeks. I thought I wouldn’t get any more calls.” he said. “It must be the economy. Everything is expensive. I pay a hundred dollars a month to Google to ensure my shuttle reservation website shows up among the top results when prospective customers search on the internet.”

Joe lives in South Hadley, a small Massachusetts town very close to Amherst. His family consists only of his daughter, who went to college in the area, and is now attending hairdressing school.

I asked Joe where he stood politically.

“Well, I don’t prefer either of the candidates. Both are not liberal enough for me. I’d like someone who is a lot more liberal. Someone who’ll get us out of Iraq quickly. I still cannot believe we are in this mess. But if I vote, I’ll vote for Obama.”

Nothing surprising there: this was Massachusetts after all. In fact, I’ve seen only one McCain sign so far in my drives around the towns here. I was surprised, though, that Joe didn’t mention anything about the economy affecting his choice of candidates. Especially since Joe himself was feeling the pinch.

But perhaps Joe was thinking broadly: if billions hadn’t been spent in a meaningless war, perhaps they could have been put to better use at home.


2. The Mechanic

In April this year, while traveling on an Amtrak train from Washington DC to Baltimore, I met Joe, a short, potbellied man in his mid forties with somewhat ragged clothes and large, calloused hands. My first impression was that this was one of the “working class men” that the television networks were constantly talking about at the time. The Democratic primaries were still going on; the Obama-Clinton contest was still undecided. The general wisdom floating around was that to win states like Pensylvania, the candidates would have to win over working class voters.

Joe was talkative. He had a wily look about him; he came across as someone who knew well the ways of the world. He had been in the military, loading bombs during the first Gulf War. He had traveled to India too, to Kerala; he’d also been on a secret plane that had flown over Russia, and had almost been hit by a Russian missile. He said all this with an easy pride.

Joe earned his living now as a mechanic. He had grown up in Philadelphia, in the south side, near “hardware docks”, where things were assembled and disassembled. That experience had fascinated him. He had a special love for cars and trucks. “Automobiles,” he claimed, “ran in his blood.” He worked in what seemed like a high intensity environment, where cars and trucks had to be fixed quickly. He bragged of a rough but macho life: those who worked with him were tough. Sometimes, in accidents, mechanics lost the tops of their fingers, and yet pretended that nothing had happened. They covered the fingers with tissue and kept on working.

As he talked, I began to sense something different. This wasn’t a “working class” man - at least he wasn't anymore. He was paid more than 100 dollars an hour. His boss, in order to keep him from moving to a more lucrative job elsewhere, pleaded with him to stay and kept increasing his pay. Joe dictated the terms of his increase every year.

“In America, everyone wants to blame others for their situation these days,” he said, talking of political and social matters. “They say: I am in this situation because of you. Pointing fingers. It’s all a blame game.” I couldn’t help wondering if he was referring to the black community.

His views were very conservative. “I hate liberal democrats,” he said. “Global warming is something democrats have cooked up to take our money, tax us. In the Midwest, right beneath American land, there is oil there for the taking. But the democrats won’t want take it; they want to steal money from us. So my advice is: Never vote Democrat.”

It made sense now. Joe was well off; he had probably earned his wealth the hard way and was now protective of it. A Democrat government meant taxes, and that might mean some of his wealth would be siphoned away.

We got off at Baltimore Penn Station. When I’d first seen him in the train, his ragged clothes had suggested that he might be frugal, that upon reaching Baltimore, he’d get home in a bus. But at the station, as we parted ways, Joe said he would call a taxi. He said it in a tone that suggested he called taxis all the time, without hesitation.

How mistaken initial impressions can be.


3. And finally, Jane

I’ll finish with a note about a lady named Jane I met in Minnesota. Jane was 52. Unlike the shuttle driver in Amherst and the mechanic in Baltimore, Jane had nothing political to say, but she was full of warmth and spoke with great earnestness. She talked to me – while we rode on the shuttle van from Minneapolis to Rochester, Minnesota – of her family, and of how she had left Rochester only twice in her lifetime, this trip of hers to Minneapolis being one of them. I was fascinated by that fact: it contrasted sharply with my own life. I had moved a lot, even while in India. The other trip Jane had made outside Rochester, Minnesota had been to the Appalachian country in Kentucky. That to her had been like a visit to a foreign place.

Jane was one of eleven children. Her father had grown up during the Great Depression and had struggled. But he had worked hard to provide for his children. Jane was the third child, and she had only brothers after her.

One of Jane’s brothers worked as an electrician; another as a brick layer; yet another as a carpenter; one had been in the navy; her sister worked as a beautician. Jane herself worked as a nurse who cared for the elderly. Remarkably all of them lived in Rochester. Jane did not have to call a service when she wanted something fixed at home; her brothers would do it for her. They were a close knit family.

Joe the Plumber was just one person, one example of your “ordinary, hard-working American”. But here was a family whose occupations sounded like a roll call of the unspectacular, plebeian jobs. If the Presidential candidates had known of Jane's family, they might have come rushing to use them as an example.

This, they would promptly claim, was the type of hardworking American family they would fight for when they were elected to office.