On Chandrahas Choudhury's Arzee The Dwarf

Arzee, the endearing protagonist of Chandrahas Choudhury’s first novel, is twenty seven years old and lives in Bombay. He is a small: at three and half feet he is cursed to “smell the shit and dung on the streets and make talk with all the asses and crotches in the world”. But he can do nothing about it. Instead, he can only look ahead and the make the best of what he has. And there is something to look forward to. Soon, Arzee will be the head projectionist at Noor Cinema, a decaying theater in the old style that shows reruns of Hindi movies.

The promotion now means more money – five thousand more rupees. Arzee can now think of getting married, though the painful memory of an abruptly broken relationship still haunts him. All that is in the past, he reassures himself; a bright future now awaits him.

Arzee’s anticipation infects the early pages of the novel, but it is short-lived. The promotion will not materialize because Noor Cinema is closing. Arzee is devastated: his job at the Noor had anchored him in life. He had loved film projection ever since he had first visited the theater with his mother when only thirteen. He loved the large, black projector, Babur (a distortion of the original German name, Bauer), which “for thirty years had been standing in the same place in the same room, breathing out four shows a day”. But no more! It was as if the sun itself was blowing out, ending all life on earth.

For the next hundred pages, we accompany a disoriented Arzee as he drifts around Bombay, searching for new direction. The novel's third person narration remains faithful to the protagonist. Even the punctuation matches well: Choudhury uses exclamations liberally but they are there to convey Arzee’s childlike wonder and curiosity. And every thought, every description contributes to a complex, layered construction of Arzee’s inner world.

Arzee stands at the center of Arzee, but he is surrounded by a constellation of personalities. Only a few, though, play a major part. There is Deepak, a canny and very practical man, full of bluster and cynicism. But his toughness is only a facade; Deepak is quite capable of warmth and empathy. He hounds Arzee regarding a debt, but has an ear for Arzee’s travails even though he pretends not to care. There is Arzee’s mother, whose “soft tyranny” is felt throughout the book; there’s Monique, whose romance with Arzee unfolds beautifully -- before the abrupt end. And, to a lesser extent, there is Phiroz, the old Parsi head projectionist, who is preoccupied with his daughter Shireen’s wedding.

Shireen is in fact one of novel’s sparkling minor characters. Arzee’s conversation with her is one of the high points of the book --her vitality leaps through the pages. She makes such an impact that we fully expect her to reappear and play a bigger role – but that is not how the novel is structured. There are other, similarly striking one-scene characters.

No review of Arzee can be complete without a mention of its superb dialogues. Let’s a look at an exchange between Arzee and Deepak. Our little hero owes a debt to a syndicate, and Deepak, who works for the syndicate, has been set on the case. Arzee has been avoiding the bullying Deepak, but gets accosted one day. After they’ve settled on what should be done – Arzee is very much on the defensive – they get to bantering about movies. Deepak asks what’s playing at the Noor Cinema.

“Saathi. It’s a film from the early nineties….It’s got Mohsin Khan, who used to be Pakistani cricketer of the eighties. Made a double hundred in England once. It’s a hummer.”

“Is it as good as Satya?” asked Deepak. “In my opinion there isn’t any Indian gangster movie as good as Satya.”

“Good choice, Deepakbhai! That’s the best gangster movie you can hope to see if you also want songs and dancing in it.”

“I’ll tell you what I like about the movie. The hero hardly says a word in whole three hours. Talking’s not his thing, action is. Even when he falls in love, he can’t bring himself to say much to his girl. That’s why she finds him sweet.”

“That’s just it, Deepakbhai. Excellent analysis!”

“There’s no need to lay on the butter. I just have a clear point of view, that’s all. I know what I like and what I don’t like.”

“That’s the way to be.”

“And speaking of Pakistanis,” said Deepak, “they shouldn’t be allowed to work in our films until they return what they’ve taken of Kashmir. Make as many double hundreds in England as you want! But don’t come here and steal roles off our heroes and screw our girls. Kashmir first! Then, we’ll see.”

“But what’s Kashmir got to do with all this Deepakbhai?”

“It’s all connected. You can’t put all these things in different boxes. If the Pakistanis are going to come over to this side and eat up our jobs, then let them bring some land over as well! No give, no take.”

“It’s a thought, Deepakbhai. I hadn’t looked at it that way before.”

“You will now. Everything in the world is connected. If something goes up, something else has to go down.”

The funniest parts of the book can be found in the Arzee-Deepak and Arzee-Shireen conversations. In the above excerpt, notice the way ‘Deepakbhai’ is used – it creates a cadence or rhythm that punctuates the exchange. And because free-flowing conversations allow for spontaneity, Arzee’s earnestness (and intelligence, though that's not so evident in the above) are brought sharply into focus.

Choudhury is a prolific Bombay-based literary critic and writer whose best essays are featured in the blog The Middle Stage. With Arzee he has shown he is just as adept at creating his own fictional world as he is at interpreting others'. The beautifully spare prose of the novel, the memorable characters sketched within a short space, the dialogues – all point to a writer well in control of his reins. There is much to look forward from this author.

Finally, here are two more excerpts that occur in different parts of the novel but share the same theme: our perception of the loved one. Dashrath Tiwari, a taxi-driver friend of Arzee – another one-scene character – says this during the course of a long conversation:

“What is love? The loved one is a person just like you and me, a person with a hundred faults and failings. But briefly he or she is transformed into someone utterly beautiful, perfect – a being from the heavens! Love is the true home of the imagination. Requited love – that is the paradise raised from nothing but a pair of synchronized imaginations.”

Much later in the book, Arzee catches a glimpse of himself and Monique in the mirror and thinks:

The mirror made it seem as if there were two of each of them, and this was true in a way, for (Arzee thought about this carefully) she was both the Monique that she was and the Monique he took her to be, and these two were similar but not the same, and he was both himself and the Arzee who belonged to her. And in the gaps and linkages between these real and reflected beings, all kinds of meanings and suggestions seemed to be lurking.

It requires some skill to put so neatly into words that which we know instinctively but are unable to express easily. Pick up Arzee and you'll find plenty such observations scattered throughout.

The women scientists of India

Asha Gopinathan reviews Lilavati's Daughters: The Women Scientists of India in Nature (subscription may be required):

A collection of 98 short biographies, the book stems from a project initiated by the Women in Science panel of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, to provide young girls with inspiring role models (see http://www.ias.ac.in/womeninscience). The diverse personal stories span many disciplines and regions of India — and are inspiring.

The earliest chronological entry is for Anandibai Joshi, the first Indian woman to go abroad and study to become a doctor. From 1883 to 1886 she attended the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia and was awarded an MD degree for her thesis Obstetrics Among Aryan Hindoos. Unfortunately, she contracted tuberculosis and had to return to India. She received no treatment: Western doctors refused to treat a brown woman and Indian doctors would not help her because she had broken societal rules. Joshi died in 1887 at 22 years of age.

[...]

Many of those highlighted were the first to break into male-dominated professions: Asima Chatterjee was the first Indian woman to be awarded a DSc; E. K. Janaki Ammal was elected a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences the year it was founded; Kamala Sohonie was the first female director of the Institute of Science, Mumbai; and Bimla Buti is a former director of plasma physics at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.

It is interesting that many of these women scientists came from ordinary middle-class families. Most grew up not in the nation's big cities but in rural areas, where getting an education in any discipline, let alone in science, is difficult. In rural Punjab, mathematician R. J. Hans-Gill had to pretend to be a boy and wear a turban to attend school — a secret that was kept between her family and the headmaster. Biologist Chitra Mandal was accompanied to school in rural Bengal by her grandmother because the teacher would not let the four-year-old in without someone to look after her.

Reforming healthcare in the United States

I've reproduced the content below from a page that I recently created on my website. Some of the links here have been discussed in earlier posts. Feel free to voice your opinion.

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By all accounts, the United States healthcare system is in crisis. We hear this every day: some 45 million people are uninsured; hundreds of thousands go bankrupt every year because of medical bills. Everybody agrees the current system is dysfunctional. But the solutions are contentious and divisive. Should government play a greater role by introducing a public insurance option in addition to Medicare and Medicaid to cover the uninsured? If everyone is going to be insured, where will the money come from? These questions elicit shrill noises from both extremes of the political spectrum. And there's the question of culture, culture of the nation -- that ambiguous but all-too-influential presence in the background. Mention 'government' in connection with US healthcare and the term 'socialized medicine' will follow like a stigma.

My intent in creating this page was to aggregate content from the internet pertaining to policy issues in US healthcare. This is a daunting task of course, and I am no expert. But in the process of teaching a healthcare class last spring, I came across essays, documentaries, radio clips that I'd like to share. Email me if you think there is material that should be added.

I.

The PBS Frontline documentary Sick Around the World compares the health systems of developed countries -- Britain, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Switzerland -- and reveals the glaring flaws in the US healthcare system. Three key shortcomings emerge. In the countries listed above 1) No one with a pre-existing condition is denied insurance 2) Everyone is covered one way or another 3) Pricing mechanisms are transparent and nobody goes bankrupt because of medical bills. Are these basic things too much to ask in the United States? Sick Around America, another PBS Frontline documentary, focuses on the shortcomings of the American health insurance industry.

II.

It is true that European nations have a much better universal care record. But history played an important role in shaping the insurance structure of these countries. The national health systems of Britain and France emerged as a result of the devastation wrecked by the Second World War. Switzerland, because of its wartime neutrality, took the private insurance route before opting for reform in the last decade. Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande says in Getting There From Here that the experience of the United States is different and that difference must be acknowledged. Hence piece wise reform of healthcare, by building on what currently exists currently in the US, is better than a radical overhaul based on models elsewhere.

III.

Healthcare insurance reform is not healthcare reform, although the two are related of course. True healthcare reform is possible only if costs are brought under control. Atul Gawande explains why healthcare costs are ridiculously high in the United States. Technology can collude with strange monetary incentives to increase health care costs and reduce the quality of care. Physicians are leaning towards more tests, more scans, more surgeries -- all of which generate revenue -- when simpler wait-and-watch alternatives would have been preferable. And there is no conspiracy here: the system in the United States seems to have subconsciously evolved this way because of the incentives in place. Gawande travels to the city of McAllen, Texas and finds that the over utilization of medical resources has sent costs skyrocketing. Only by trimming the fat from the system will Obama be able to finance healthcare reform.

IV.

David Ignautius argues that Denise Cortese, CEO of the famous Mayo Clinic, should be made "medical commander" of Obama's health reform initiative. Cortese's message is similar to Atul Gawande's: Health insurance reform is necessary, but true reform is possible only if medical practices are paid for value (outcomes, safety and service) rather than for the number of services provided. Peter Ubel, a primary care physician, says yes, we must change how we pay physicians, but we must also change how much they are paid in the United States. Certain types of specialty physicians have disproportionately high incomes. Unfortunately, this is an issue no one is willing to tackle politically.

V.

Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt talks with Terry Gross (NPR) about the lack of transparency in healthcare pricing. Each hospital may negotiate a different rate with a different insurance company for the same service; and the prices are kept secret. Indeed, there may be a tenfold difference in prices because of this secrecy. Hospitals have to hire an army of hagglers to negotiate and keep track of prices. This hikes up administrative costs. In other developed countries, pricing is not this opaque.

Reinhardt also discusses the feasibility of a public, Medicare-like insurance option for the uninsured. The private insurance companies don't like this, because they fear they will no longer be able to complete with a government run option that enrolls millions and sets its own prices. Paul Starr, author of the famous 1984 book, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, weighs in with pieces in the American Prospect: Sacrificing the Public Option and Perils of the Public Plan. Finally, this essay in The New York Review of Books discusses the messy political process underlying healthcare reform; and Bill Moyers of PBS interviews scholars and policy experts on various aspects of reform.

The genius of Norman Rockwell

Painting is not my thing. But yesterday, at the museum dedicated to the famous American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), I was stunned. Stunned by Rockwell's eye for detail; his ability to deliver an incredible array of expressions, many of them comic; and the stories that Rockwell conveys in his illustrations. Two examples -- my favorites -- are below. Both appeared as covers for the Saturday Evening Post. The theme of the first (March 16th 1948 issue) is gossip . Look closely at it and you’ll know what I mean by "incredible array of expressions". Not to mention the details – hairstyles, hats, skin tones, gloves – and the funny story that unfolds.




The second (August 30th 1947 issue) is about a family going to and returning from a picnic (click to see a much better version). Look how expectant and eager everyone is while leaving. And how everyone fatigued everyone is while returning late in the evening. What a contrast!

But then there's Granny in the backseat, with a stoic, humorless expression that does not change one bit.

A border is not an end in itself

Sumantra Bose writes in Contested Lands:

In Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus, and Sri Lanka, borders forged by war have become, or will have to become, the basis of peace settlements. But making a fetish of such borders is neither practicable nor desirable. Recognition of those borders is an essential part of the compromise, driven by pragmatism, and not an end in itself. It is extremely important to construct an architecture of peace that enables systematic cooperation across the borders drawn in blood.

This is important partly because those borders – the Green Lines of Israel-Palestine and Cyprus, the Line of Control in Kashmir, the Inter-Entity Boundary Line in Bosnia, and the border between northeastern Sri Lanka and the rest of the country – are a focal point of contention, where one or more of the parties to the conflict do not agree with the trajectory or even the very legitimacy of those lines as political boundaries. It is also important because in the early twenty-first century, an era defined by globalization and its subphenomenon, regional integration and cooperation, it is simply impossible for communities to live in hermetic segregation from one another in ethnonational ghettos. Soft frontiers and the gradual development of ties of cross-border cooperation are the longer-term anchor for the stability of peace agreements, a vital part of the safety net that must be assured to minorities caught on the “wrong” side of the line, and the path to building a culture of coexistence in the world’s most troubled and turbulent lands. The poet Robert Frost famously wrote that “good fences make good neighbors.” But he also wrote:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

When the majority feel they are the minority

Read this recent piece by Robert Kaplan on Sri Lanka. I don't agree with all of his points -- the closing bit about the historically inclusive nature of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and the lesson it holds for the the country's current politicians seemed a little forced, a little pat -- but I liked the essay overall. Kaplan makes two main points. The first is that Buddhism, despite its remarkable worldwide appeal as a religion of peace, is just as likely as any other faith to be distorted by its followers:

Buddhism holds an exalted place in the half-informed Western mind. Whereas Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism are each associated, in addition to their thought, with a rich material culture and a defended territory, Buddhism, despite its great monuments and architectural tradition throughout the Far East, is somehow considered purer, more abstract, and almost dematerialized: the most peaceful, austere, and uncorrupted of faiths, even as it appeals to the deeply aesthetic among us. Hollywood stars seeking to find themselves—famously Richard Gere—become Buddhists, not, say, orthodox Jews.

Yet Buddhism, as Kandy demonstrates, is deeply materialistic and demands worship of solid objects, in a secure and sacred landscape that has required the protection of a military. There have been Buddhist military kingdoms—notably Kandy’s—just as there have been Christian and Islamic kingdoms of the sword. Buddhism can be, under the right circumstances, a blood-and-soil faith.

The second point is that "there is nothing crueler than a majority that feels itself a minority". Kaplan is referring to the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. And this is why they feel that way:

The Sinhalese...see their historical destiny in preserving Theravada Buddhism from a Hindu revivalist assault, with southern India the source of these invasions. As they see it, they are a lonely people, with few ethnic compatriots anywhere, who have been pushed to their final sanctuary, the southern two-thirds of Sri Lanka, by the demographic immensity of majority-Hindu India. The history of the repeated European attacks on their sacred city, Kandy, the last independent bastion of the Sinhalese in that southern two-thirds of the island, has only accentuated the sense of loneliness.

The Sinhalese must, therefore, fight for every kilometer of their ethnic homeland, Bradman Weerakoon, an adviser to former Sri Lankan presidents and prime ministers, told me. As a result, like the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, the Jews in Israel, and the Shiites in Iran, the Sinhalese are a demographic majority with a dangerous minority complex of persecution.

The Hindu Tamils, for their part, have been labeled a minority with a majority complex, owing to the triumph of Hinduism over Buddhism in southern India in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and the subsequent invasions from India’s south against the rich and thriving Buddhist city-state of Anuradhapura in north-central Sri Lanka. These invasions resulted in the creation, by the 14th century, of a Tamil kingdom that, in turn, helped lay the groundwork for Tamil majorities in the north and east of the island.

Sri Lanka’s post-independence experience, including its civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils, has borne out the worst fears of both communities. The Sinhalese have had to deal with a guerrilla insurgency every bit as vicious and suicidal as the better-known ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Tamils, for their part, have had to deal with coercion, discrimination, and the utter failure of Sinhalese government institutions to protect their communal rights. There is nothing crueler than a majority that feels itself a minority.

I have not read much about Sri Lanka, so I won't comment on whether this is a correct assessment. Readers are welcome to share their views. But the majority feeling like a minority -- that's a striking thought, isn't it? We see the same sentiment in other countries and regions.

Groundwater depleting rapidly in North India

From Science (subscription required):

Farming is a thirsty business on the Indian subcontinent. But how thirsty, exactly? Satellite remote sensing of a 2000-kilometer swath running from eastern Pakistan across northern India and into Bangladesh has for the first time put a solid number on how quickly the region is depleting its groundwater. The number "is big," says hydrologist James Famiglietti of the University of California, Irvine—big as in 54 cubic kilometers of groundwater lost per year from the world's most intensively irrigated region hosting 600 million people. "I don't think anybody knew how quickly it was being depleted over that large an area," Famiglietti says.

A little busy

It's only my first year in academia, yet I've been lucky to have two students who will be defending their master's thesis on August 24th. The students work very hard. They are unaware that I am lazy -- that I am interested more in the humanities than going through the hundreds of graphs, tables and numbers they send me.

Yet, work is work, and it is this work that pays my bills, lets me travel to new places, have my own schedule for four long summer months. So, pardon the lack of posts -- especially long essays. All that shall come in due time. But now, I need to return to editing theses drafts.

By the way, did you know that an advisor feels as nervous about a student's defense as the student himself?

Four new blogs

These are discoveries I've made recently: the incredibly diverse and informative 3 Quarks Daily; Seriously Sandeep, an angry blog, but which also tells us of the nature of Indian philosophy and Sanātana Dharma; Nilanjana Roy's literary Akhond of Swat; and finally the erudite and well traveled Namit Arora's Shunya's Notes.

This blog, by the way, turned four on July 21st. And as of August 8th yours truly not only has thirty letters in his name, he is also thirty years old.

Syādvāda: The Jain concept of relativity of knowledge

Chandradhar Sharma writes in A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy about a central concept in Jainism, Syādvāda:

Syādvāda is the theory of Relativity of knowledge. Reality has infinite aspects which are all relative and we can know only some of these aspects. All our judgments, therefore, are necessarily relative, conditional and limited.

The Jainas are fond of quoting the old story of the six blind men and the elephant. The blind men put their hands on the different parts of the elephant and each tried to describe the whole animal from the part touched by him. Thus the man who caught the ear said the elephant was like a country-made fan; the person touching the led said the elephant was like a pillar; the holder of the trunk said it was like a python; the feeler of the tail said it was like a rope; the person who touched it on the side said the animal was like a wall; and man who touched the forehead said the elephant was like the breast. And all the six quarreled among themselves, each one asserting that his description alone was correct. But he who can see the whole elephant can easily know that each blind man feels only a part of the elephant which he mistakes to be the whole animal. Almost all philosophical, ideological and religious differences and disputes are mainly due to mistaking a partial truth for the whole truth. Our judgments represent different aspects of the manysided reality and can claim only partial truth. This view makes Jainism catholic, broad-minded and tolerant. It teaches respect for others’ point of view.

*
Why, you may wonder, this noticeable increase in posts to do with religion? Because I have never understood religion in any substantive way. The time has now come to fill that gap. And what better place to begin than with ancient Indian schools of thought. I grew up in the Hindu tradition but never was I told that there was more to practicing religion than rituals and boring visits to temples. I knew about Shankaracharya, but it was only last month that I learned that there is such a thing as Advaita Vedanta, which he preached; I was told Hinduism was polytheistic but only now am I beginning to learn that it is polytheistic only in manifestation, and that the Upanishads actually suggest the unity of all life, of everything in fact.

But let me not get carried away with details: all I wanted to say was that I need to catch up with reading of a different kind, and that there will be more posts to come on similar themes.

700,000 acres in Ethiopia

Rana Dasgupta writes of the profligacy of Delhi's affluent: their obsession for fancy foreign cars, diamonds, wasteful parties, bodyguards and the like. But what interested me most was this conversation with MC, the son of a billionaire, who has a major business plan:

‘We’ve just leased 700,000 acres for seventy-five years; we’re opening up food processing, sugar and flower plantations.’

He is so matter of fact that I’m not sure if I’ve heard correctly. We have already discussed how laborious it is to acquire land in India, buying from farmers at five or ten acres a time. I can’t imagine where he could get hold of land on that scale.

‘Where?’ I ask.

‘Ethiopia. My father has a friend who bought land from the Ethiopian president for a cattle ranch there. The President told him he had other land for sale. My dad said, This is it, this is what we’ve been looking for, let’s go for it. We’re going in there with [exiled Russian oligarch] Boris Berezovsky. Africa is amazing. That’s where it’s at. You’re talking about numbers that can’t even fit into your mind yet. Reliance, Tata, all the big Indian corporations are setting up there, but we’re still ahead of the curve. I’m going to run this thing myself for the next eight years, that’s what I’ve decided. I’m not giving this to any CEO until it meets my vision. It’s going to be amazing. You should see this land: lush, green. Black soil, rivers.’

MC tells me how he has one hundred farmers from Punjab ready with their passports to set off for Ethiopia as soon as all the papers are signed.

‘Africans can’t do this work. Punjabi farmers are good because they’re used to farming big plots. They’re not scared of farming 5,000 acres. Meanwhile, I’ll go there and set up polytechnics to train the Africans so when the sugar mills start up they’ll be ready.’

Shipping farmers from Punjab to work on African plantations is a plan of imperial proportions. And there’s something imperial about the way he says Africans. I’m stunned. I tell him so.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

‘What is on that land right now?’ I ask, already knowing that his response, too, will be imperial.

‘Nothing.’

MC is excited to be talking about this. His spirits seem to be entirely unaffected by the recession that currently dominates the headlines. He orders another beer, though we have exceeded the time he allotted me. All of a sudden, I find him immensely charismatic. I can see why he makes things happen: he has made me believe, as he must have made others believe, that he can do anything. I ask him how he learned to think like this.

‘I’m only twenty-eight,’ he says. ‘Why not?’

He becomes flamboyant.

‘We’re going to be among the top five food processors in the world. You know the first company I’m going to buy? Heinz.’

I’m interested in his Why not? Is it on the strength of such a throwaway reason that nearly three-quarters of a million acres of Ethiopia are being cleared and hundreds of farmers shipped across the world? I wonder what the emotional register of this is for him. It seems as if, somewhere, it’s all a bit of a lark.

"Religion means...spiritual realization."

Do not care for doctrines, do not care for dogmas or sects or churches or temples. They count for little compared with the essence of existence in each man, which is spirituality, and the more this is developed in a man, the more powerful is he for good. Earn that first, acquire that, and criticize no one; for all doctrines and creeds have some good in them. Show by your lives that religion does not mean words or names or sects, but that it means spiritual realization. Only those can understand who have felt. Only those who have attained to spirituality can communicate it to others, can be great teachers of mankind. They alone are the powers of light.

That’s Swami Vivekananda telling us the message of his guru, the famous Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-1886). Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's search for God, the life of renunciation and austerity he led, are indeed remarkable. The Wikipedia link I've provided gives all the details, but the story is most poignant in the words of his disciple -- it is from one of Vivekananda's essays, Great Teachers of the World that I've excerpted the above.

Rape of the Congo: Adam Hochschild essay

Nowhere is the plight of women as poor as it is in the Congo -- Eastern Congo particularly. Rape is an epidemic there, and there are some heartbreaking stories in this piece by Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost. Congo seems never to have recovered after King Leopold brutalized it in the late nineteenth century. Further, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict of Rwanda has spilled over into the country and still smolders there . And the profusion of mineral wealth --" gold, tungsten, diamonds, coltan (a key ingredient of computer chips), copper, and more" -- has only worsened the situation.

Hochschild writes:

Where does such cruelty come from? Four problems, above all, drive Congo's unrelenting bloodshed. One is long-standing antagonism between certain ethnic groups. A second is the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the two million or so people who flowed across Congo's porous border in its aftermath: Hutu killers, innocent Hutu who feared retribution, and a mainly Tutsi army in pursuit, bent on vengeance. The third is a vast wealth in natural resources—gold, tungsten, diamonds, coltan (a key ingredient of computer chips), copper, and more—that gives ethnic warlords and their backers, especially Rwanda and Uganda, an additional incentive to fight. And, finally, this is the largest nation on earth—more than 65 million people in an area roughly as big as the United States east of the Mississippi—that has hardly any functioning national government. After Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001, his son Joseph took power in Kinshasa, and won an election in 2006, but his corrupt and disorganized regime provides few services, especially in the more distant parts of the country, such as Goma, which is more than one thousand miles east of the capital.

Evidence of the nation's riches is everywhere. Battered Soviet-era Antonov cargo planes continually descend into Goma airport filled with tin ore from a big mine at Walikale, in the interior, now controlled by Congolese army officers. On a country road, a truckload of timber, stacked high, passes by, heading out of the rain forest toward the Ugandan border. And then one day in Goma, while I am walking with Anneke, Ida, and another foreigner, a man approaches and asks: Would we like to buy some uranium?

[...]

After two weeks my notebooks overflow with such [horrifying] stories [of rape and cruelty]. But looking at people I meet, even an entire encampment of young gold miners who are almost all ex-combatants, do I see those who look capable of killing hospital patients in their beds, gang-raping a woman like Rebecca Kamate, jabbing a young man's eye with a bayonet? I do not. People are warm, friendly, their faces overflow with smiles; seeing a foreigner, everyone wants to stop, say " Bonjour!" and shake hands, whether on a small town's main street or on a forest path. I've never seen more enthusiastic hand-shakers. At night, when the electricity works, the warm air echoes with some of Africa's best music. There is no shortage of ordinary acts of human kindness. When our car's left front wheel goes sailing off to the side of a remote mountain road, leaving one end of the axle to gouge a long furrow in the dirt, the driver of a passing truck, piled teeteringly high with goods and then with people sitting on top, immediately stops and crawls under the car, using his jack in tandem with ours to solve the problem and get us on our way.

What turns such people into rapists, sadists, killers? Greed, fear, demagogic leaders and their claim that such violence is necessary for self-defense, seeing everyone around you doing the same thing—and the fact that the rest of the world pays tragically little attention to one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of our time. But even the worst brutality can also draw out the good in people, as in the way Kamate has devoted her life to other raped women. In Goma, I saw people with pickaxes laboriously hewing the lava that had flooded their city into football-sized chunks with flattened sides, then using these, with mortar, to build the walls of new homes. Can this devastated country as a whole use the very experience of its suffering to build something new and durable? I hope so, but I fear it will be a long time in coming.

In a Chennai city bus

It was only six in the morning but the heat in Chennai was already oppressive. I was in a city bus headed to Perambur, where my grandmother lives. The journey was about forty minutes, yet there wasn’t a dull moment. When the bus started from the terminus in Koyambedu, an alighting old man was almost crushed by the crowd rushing in to grab seats. Many had staked their claim by hurling their bags or newspapers from the outside onto seats through the open windows.

Tempers were frayed: the old man, still unable to get off the bus, was quarreling with the teenager he had collided against. The fight threatened to escalate, but the two were blocking the entrance and a cessation of hostilities was in everyone's interest. Besides, nobody had the time.

I was lucky to get a seat; it was at the very back of the bus. Minutes later, two flower-vendors got in. Both were dressed plainly and their features were so similar, they could have been sisters. They carried capacious, sturdy-looking baskets. In pink and green polythene bags they carried the flowers they planned to sell for the day. One of them glared at me and said boldly, with a sense of entitlement, “Get up!” I obliged willingly. Later she made sure her sister – who was quieter, more soft-spoken – was seated next to her. The two began counting the money they had. The less assertive one said the numbers weren't adding up correctly, but her companion silenced her with a detailed, authoritative explanation. I wondered about their routine: how early they started their day, the markets they had to go to for bulk purchases, and how they chose the place to set up shop for the day. And they were selling perishable commodities -- how long would the flowers last? What prices would they set? So much to think about!

Just then a crowd boarded from the rear – all men except for a very frail old lady. She stood next to me. She was less than five feet tall. Her gray hair was thinning and she had a pony-tail that was no more than a centimeter long. When the conductor asked for her fare, she took offense: “Why do you ask me first? There are so many around you and yet you have to ask me! That’s because you think I am a vagrant woman of the streets, a beggar! You think I won’t pay for the ticket – that’s what it is.” In indignation, she searched her small pouch and took out a five rupee note. The conductor replied angrily that he was just doing his job.

The lady kept talking to herself in a low tone. I wasn’t able to hear clearly but the few words that I did catch suggested she was having a tough time, that nobody cared for her in this world, no one was willing to feed her a meal. Her hands were shriveled and dry – they had a peculiar, gray-white complexion, as if all life had been sucked out of them; and the same could be said about her face. She wore a checked red sari and a green blouse with a gold border. The dress was faded, but it added a hint of elegance to her bearing.

Laissez-faire in matters of the spirit

A little later, the old woman was at the window seat, next to the two flower-vendors. She continued mumbling incoherently as she looked out. Then she did something remarkable. If the bus passed by a temple, she would join her palms, close her eyes and pray. Nothing unusual in that. But if the bus passed by a mosque – and there were at least two on that route – she would pull the end of her sari over her head and cup her hands as if she was kneeling and praying to Allah. It was genuine and it was striking. Once the mosque or temple had passed, she would continue her recitation of complaints, oblivious to everything around her.

She had switched faiths so easily, so unselfconsciously! I was touched. It was a glimpse of faith at a very personal level; the comparison may not be apt, but the old lady's spontaneity contrasted sharply with the canniness and deliberation that goes with the political appeasement of religious groups in India.

A week later, in Kumbakonam, I was at the famous Guru Kovil – a temple dedicated to the planet Jupiter. I was lighting candles for the deity when I noticed four Muslim women next to me – they too were lighting candles.

The women showed no discomfort; they went freely around the temple, went to the main worship area, and prayed exactly as I did. Like the old lady in the bus, they saw no contradiction: faith was a personal thing and they could choose as they pleased. They were exhibiting “laissez faire in matters of the spirit”, to borrow a phrase M.G. Vassanji uses in his book A Place Within.

The picture above is of the four women enjoying a cup of tea outside the temple, after the morning’s worship. And let me make clear that I do not mean to infer anything broader about Tamilnadu or India based on what I have described in this post -- that would be too simplistic.

Namit Arora on Nalanda University

Namit Arora has a very informative essay on the splendors and historical context of the ancient Nalanda University. Exceprts:

Nalanda University arose in early 5th cent. CE during the reign of Kumara Gupta, though references to precursor sites associated with teaching and learning go back a thousand years to the time of the Buddha and Mahavira. Between Hiuen Tsang and I-Tsing, we have a compelling portrait of the university’s curriculum, the life of the monks, buildings, and other general features of the community.

Nalanda was more like a school of higher learning than an undergraduate college. Prospective students had to be at least 20 years old and submit to an oral exam at the university entrance. They had to demonstrate deep familiarity with a host of subjects and with old and new books in many fields. No more than two or three out of ten were admitted, and even they were promptly humbled by the caliber of their teachers and co-students.

When Hieun Tsang visited Nalanda, there were 8,500 students and 1,500 teachers in 108 residential monasteries, which often had two or more floors. Excavations thus far have revealed many exquisitely carved temples and a row of ten monasteries of oblong red bricks directly across a row of stupas in brick and plaster. Each monastery has rooms—either single or double occupancy, with wooden doors back then—lining four sides of a courtyard, a main entrance, and a shrine facing the entrance in the courtyard. Rooms typically had chairs, wood blocks, small mats, and utensils stored in niches cut out in the walls.

[...]

Buddhism began waning in India after 800 CE. By then, Hinduism had assimilated many of its features—vegetarianism, insider critiques of the caste system, ending animal sacrifices—and embraced the Buddha as the ninth avatar of Vishnu. A bigger factor was the rise of Bhakti, or devotional Hinduism, and its great appeal to the masses. One could say that the religious market was shifting to a more user-friendly product, and as a result, Buddhism lost much of its royal patronage. The Palas were the last major royals to support Nalanda as a center of learning and the arts (stone and bronze sculpture in particular). A museum on-site, which houses many finds from Nalanda and the nearby region, has many curious sculptures from this period: Buddhist deities trampling on Brahmanical ones, such as Shiva, Parvati, and Ganesh. A Buddhist goddess has mighty Hindu gods like Indra, Vishnu, and Shiva as her ‘vehicle bearers,’ while she carries the severed head of Brahma in one hand. A plausible explanation is that the Buddhists were on the defensive—they had to resort to more dramatic imagery to assert their religious superiority to the ambivalent.

In 1193 CE, Nalanda was put to a brutal and decisive end by Bakhtiyar Khilji, a Turkish Muslim invader on his way to conquer Bengal. He looted and burned the monastery, and beheaded or burned alive perhaps thousands of monks. The shock of this event lives on in local cultural memory; during my visit, I too heard the legend that the three libraries of Nalanda—with books like the ones Hieun Tsang and I-Tsing carried back to China—were so large that they smoldered for six long months.

The MGR phenomenon

I am referring to MG Ramachandran (1917-1987), one of the most important figures of Tamil politics, who, with help from other prominent leaders of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), including the crafty script-writer Karunanidhi, seamlessly moved between cinema and politics as if the two were one. In the process they created a politics that had all the drama of movies and movies that were overtly political. Later MGR broke with Karunanidhi, formed his own party, the AIADMK (All India Anna DMK), and used his power as a star to cast a kind of spell on Tamil Nadu. I would like to give you a flavor of the MGR phenomenon using excerpts from Vaasanthi’s Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars, which I wrote about briefly here.

1. Cinema with a pint of blood

Blood donations in Tamil Nadu and MGR movie premieres were strangely connected -- this is the sort of anecdote that just about proves that reality can be more bizarre than the wildest fiction:

It looked as if every young man in town was eager to donate blood. The hospitals noted a record number of donors. Young Sadanand Menon, who was just out of college and joined the Indian Express, as a reporter, was intrigued. And also deeply touched. The editor had asked him to look into the new phenomenon. It was strange indeed. But Sadanand found out that the crowd of donors peaked on Thursdays, declined on the following days and rose again from Wednesday. The donors were paid five rupees per pint of blood. The blood was sold to buy cinema tickets for the new releases on Fridays. He confirmed that whenever a new MGR movie was released, the queue for blood donation was the longest on the previous day.

2. Sipped juice is holy water

India Today -- as quoted in Vaasanthi's book -- on MGR:

For close to a decade, the matinee-idol-turned politician had monopolized the floodlights as only a man who has straddled Tamil Nadu's intertwined worlds of cinema and politics can. As a hero of scores of films, his name was a household word for more than twenty years. And his well-known acts of personal charity -- distributing food and clothes to the poor -- had earned him a special affection bordering on worship. If he merely sipped a glass of orange juice offered to him at a public meeting, the rest of the liquid would be diluted in buckets of water, which would then be passed around for his fans to drink as theertham -- holy water. Slumlords in the industrial town of Coimbatore used to pull down giant film hoardings of MGR and hire them out to slum women to sleep on at night.

3. Cultivating an image

The importance of image was not lost on MGR. These are his own words:

It is not enough if you are good man, you must create an image that you are a good man. Every man must have an image. Take Nagi Reddy or S.S. Vasan or myself. Each of us have a distinct image. The image is what immediately strikes you when you see a person or hear his name. You put forward an image of yourself if you want to get anywhere.

Vaasanthi writes:

MGR’s entire career can be termed as a synthesis between acting and politics. His fans and supporters were so carried away by the image that they could see no difference between the screen characters and the real person...it was believed that he would agree only to play roles that corresponded to his personal values and commitments.

4. MGR and women

Narendra Srinivasan makes an interesting observation in his book Ethnicity and Popular Mobilization. ‘Women were sensitive to the basic issues MGR raised – the availability of food and water, as they are homemakers; and temperance, as excessive male drinking bled their family budgets and often led to violence against them.’ Rural women desired protection against a culture that was associated with alcohol, violence and the perception of women as whores. MGR gave them status and a sense of dignity by calling them ‘thaikulam’, community of mothers.

And women loved MGR, no matter what he called them. With the advent of cinema halls, there was a newfound freedom they enjoyed within the darkened walls with just their hero on the screen. They could consort with the beloved hero in their imagination, identifying with MGR’s various heroines. ‘The intensity of this identification,’ Subramanian says, ‘meant that support was readily transferred after MGR’s death to Jayalalithaa, who was one of MGR’s popular screen heroines through the 1960s and the early 1970s.

Interestingly enough, Rajnikant, the other cine star Tamilnadu is crazy about, is not so popular with women. Vaasanthi reasons that this is because of "Rajni's anti-hero image -- the irreverent, smoking, drinking, woman-bashing hero -- appealed only to the diaffected male in search of an identity, and definitely not a female audience."

5. The poor, Sri-Lankan born Malayali

And finally here’s a very short biography of MGR that may help complete the picture. I present this deliberately at the end, rather than give an up-front introduction – that’s because sometimes you get fascinated with a person’s deeds and then want the details: “Who was this guy?” “What was his background?” In short, MGR was Malayali and was born in Sri Lanka into a very poor family. But here's more:

Marudur Gopalmenon Ramachandran was born on 17 January 1917, in Kandy, Sri Lanka. MGR’s father, Gopala Menon, died when was still a child and left the family penniless. Ramachandran’s mother Sathya moved to India with her children and settled in Kumbakonam, Tamilnadu. Hunger claimed the lives of two of his sisters and an elder brother. Driven by extreme poverty, MGR began his acting career as a theatre artist at the age of seven, and joined the Madurai Original Boys Company, owned by M. Kandasamy Pillai. Ramachandran was fair-complexioned and pretty as a girl, and it was said that it was common for the wealthy, land-owning young men of Thanjavur district to sexually abuse such kids. This, according to a chronicler, may have affected MGR’s psyche. After a long struggle M.G. Ramachander, as he was then called, got a break doing small roles in mythological films followed by action films that became his forte. Critics never thought much of his limited talent as an actor though his films broke records at the box office. He also won the National Award for acting in Rickshawkaran.

The Brahmin and the Buddhist

At a stall in a Bangalore temple, I found a little book – the size of a pocket book, seventy odd pages thick, and priced at ten rupees – on Swami Vivekananda’s famous Parliament of the World Religions speech in Chicago, 1893.

The book contained the text of Vivekananda’s address and there was a section titled Buddhism: The Fulfilment of Hinduism. I was drawn immediately. Like many other Indians, I’ve always wondered why Buddhism, after having been so dominant for a millennium in India, receded so comprehensively even as it expanded eastward. What was the relationship between Buddhism and Hinduism? The former, with its suspicion of ritual worship and caste, seemed like the latter’s adversary; it also seemed as if the latter had reasserted itself strongly and caused the former's decline. To such an extent that Buddha is considered by many today as an incarnation of Vishnu.

Vivekananda’s reading is different: to him the Buddha was “the fulfilment, the logical conclusion, the logical development of the religion of the Hindus.” Rejecting the ceremonial side of Hinduism, the Buddha had instead taken the spiritual route. Caste was not a barrier to enlightenment: “a man from the highest caste and a man from the lowest may become a monk in India and the two castes become equal...there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution.” And Vivekananda speaks admiringly of the Buddha’s “wonderful sympathy for everybody, especially for the ignorant and the poor.” Because Sanskrit was largely the language of ritual and not spoken, the Buddha wanted his teachings to be written in the vernacular of the day.

But it is in the final two paragraphs that Vivekanda reveals his thesis: how Buddhism and Brahmanism (which I assume refers here to Hinduism -- at least the Hinduism of the Vedic kind) complement each other, how without one the other cannot survive.

As Buddhism died out in India,

Brahmanism lost something – that reforming zeal, that wonderful sympathy and charity for everybody, that wonderful leaven which Buddhism had brought to the masses and which had rendered Indian society so great that a Greek historian who wrote about India of that time was led to say that no Hindu was known to tell an untruth...

Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism. Then realize what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhists cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin without the heart of the Buddhist. The separation between the Buddhists and the Brahmins is the cause of the downfall of India. That is why India is populated by three hundred millions of beggars, and that is why India has been the slave of conquerors for the last thousand years. Let us then join the wonderful intellect of the Brahmin with the heart, the noble soul, the wonderful humanizing power of the Great Master [the Buddha].

It’s a striking thought, since there are indeed places in the world today -- India is one, of course -- where the two religions exist independently, without the other.

Ma for the brain, Pa for food and sex

Maternal and paternal genes don't contribute equally to the child's genetic makeup, this Scientific American article suggests; they actually compete to silence the other's influence. This is pretty normal, but if the process goes awry, neurological disorders result. And here's the interesting bit: apparently mothers are more responsible for cerebral stuff -- stuff to do with language, thought and complex activities -- while fathers are more responsible for pleasures of the senses: eating and mating.

Needless to say, all this is emerging knowledge, and is to be taken cautiously. But the next time you meet your parents, you may look at them strangely now that you have read the article. Ah, so this is why, you will secretly think, I have this strange, unmentionable fetish; this is why I love jalebis and candy; this is why I am poor in music and math!

Key concepts from the article [link]:

1. When passing on DNA to their offspring, mothers silence certain genes, and fathers silence others. These imprinted genes usually result in a balanced, healthy brain, but when the process goes awry, neurological disorders can result.

2. Imprinting errors are responsible for rare disorders such as Angelman and Prader-Willi syndromes, and some scientists are beginning to think imprinting might be implicated in more common illnesses such as autism and schizophrenia.

3. Even typical brains are the result of asymmetric contributions from Mom and Dad. Higher cognitive function seems to be disproportionately controlled by Mom’s genes, whereas the drive to eat and mate is influenced by Dad’s.

Vaasanthi on the world of Tamil politics

I have just read the introduction of Tamil journalist and writer Vaasanthi’s book Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars: The World of Tamil Politics, and I already know I am going to enjoy reading the book, that it is going to tell me things about my home state that I am completely unaware of. After my travel last week through cities in Tamilnadu’s interior, I am eager for analysis that can provide perspective. Vaasanthi's is just the right book. Here she is, telling us why politics in Tamilnadu is so regional:

The most striking difference has been the regionalization of party politics in Tamil Nadu when compared with other states. While ethnic forces were gaining ground in other parts of India as well, it was in Tamil Nadu that they dominated party politics. It is this that has, till today, prevented the growth of parties with an all-India face in the state. By transforming Tamil language into a object of passionate attachment, by introducing notions of self-respect and regional pride and by providing their version of Tamil cultural history, the DMK spokespersons came out as better Tamil nationalists than the Congress, for instance. The party created what has been described as a ‘hegemonic hold over Tamil political life and culture’. The Congress has long since been marginalized in the state for this reason.

The Tamils cannot relate to the BJP’s Hindutva either for the same reason. The increasing religiosity in evidence now in Tamilnadu should not be attributed to the spread of the BJP. The BJP with its North Indian, Hindi-speaking, Hindu-fundamentalist veneer has made little dent on the Tamil psyche. The pronounced religiosity that is strikingly visible in Tamil Nadu is another contradiction that might baffle an outsider who has heard about the Dravidian movement and its atheist protagonist, Periyar. Ironically, the growing religiosity is the direct result of the shift in the caste hierarchies thanks to the Self-Respect Movement and the reservation benefits and the resultant upward social mobility, which has brought about a silent and willing ‘Brahminization’ of the backward communities who tend to project their caste status through their religiosity.

During my trip, I witnessed this “pronounced religiosity” that Vaasanthi mentions – and it was news to me that it wasn’t there, say, twenty or thirty years ago. But the last sentence in the quote explains a lot: it is precisely the sort of insight I am looking for.

Healthcare costs: the Atul Gawande New Yorker essay

Do expensive state of the art medical facilities correlate with better health outcomes? In this superb essay, surgeon and writer Atul Gawande tells us how, in certain places in the United States, technology can collude with strange monetary incentives to increase health care costs and reduce the quality of care. Physicians are leaning towards more tests, more scans, more surgeries -- all of which generate revenue -- when simpler wait-and-watch alternatives would have been preferable. And there is no conspiracy here: the system in the United States seems to have subconsciouly evolved this way because of the incentives in place. Atul Gawande travels to the city of McAllen, Texas and makes the argument that the overutilization of medical resources has sent costs skyrocketing. And he tells us that only by trimming the fat from the system will Obama be able to finance healthcare reform.

Development in dangerous places

In 2001 the United Nations announced the Millennium Development Goals, pledging to end global poverty by 2015. I argued then that it needed to focus its concern on a much smaller group of countries than it had identified. There is, as I argued in The Bottom Billion, an essential difference between a poor family in China and an equally poor family in Chad. Although both enter into the global headcount of families living in extreme poverty, the poor family in China has credible hope that its children will grow up in a society of transformed opportunities: China will be part of the future global economy. Credible hope for the future of one’s children makes poverty bearable; that was the condition accepted by millions of immigrants to America. In contrast, Chad has not offered its population a credible basis for hope.

Chad is not alone. It is one of a group of about 60 small, impoverished, post-colonial countries that “came unnatural into the world.” With neither the social unity needed for cooperation, nor the size to reap the benefits of larger scale, they are structurally unable to provide the public goods—such as security—that are critical for decent quality of life and imperative for economic development. They have diverged from the rest of mankind. They will never tap their vast reservoir of frustrated human potential unless the international community, at least for a time, supplies basic public goods that go beyond the typical aid agenda. This, stated baldly, is the thesis of my new book, Wars, Guns, and Votes. It is a troubling thesis. I have come to it reluctantly, and the international community has shied away from it, as have the societies of the bottom billion themselves.

Why is outside intervention necessary? The countries of the bottom billion are, paradoxically, too large to be nations, yet too small to be states. They are too large to be nations because, with rare exceptions, too many different peoples, with too many distinct ethnic and religious identities, live in them. This is not because they have large populations: on the contrary, the typical bottom-billion country has only a few million people. But these populations have yet to forge a strong sense of national identity that overrides older sub-national ethnic and religious identities. Considerable research shows that where sub-national identities predominate, it is more difficult for people to cooperate in providing public goods.

That's Paul Collier in the Boston Review. Link via Amitava Kumar. Update: William Easterly launches a scathing critique.

Away traveling

I will most likely be unable for post for the next ten days. That's because it is time to travel again, talk to people, and see new places. This time, I am traveling in the home country: I will be following an arc through the upper half of Tamilnadu. I will be visiting temples in Tiruvanamalai, Kumbakonnam, Thanjavur, Tiruchirapalli, before returning to Bangalore through Erode and Sathyamangalam. I hope in the process to get a better sense of Tamilnadu's history and its religious traditions. I know it instinctively, since I am Tamil myself, but I have not looked at it as rigorously as I have looked at, say, Native American or Mexican history.

And along the way, I will be reading two interesting books: UR Anantha Murthy’s classic Samskara, and, Arzee the Dwarf, the just-released first novel of my friend, Chandrahas Choudhury, whom I met in Bangalore last Friday at the book launch, and had some very good conversations with over the last three days.

Does language shape our worldview?

Lera Boroditsky thinks so. And she presents a fascinating example:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

On Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

(Spoilers ahead for those who haven't read.)

What if sudden misfortune strikes someone in a family? What if the misfortune is of the kind where the member is disabled or becomes diseased but does not die? What does it feel like to be helpless?

Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is about these questions.

Gregor Samsa of Prague, the only breadwinner of a family struggling to make ends meet, wakes up one morning and finds he has metamorphosed into a gigantic insect with “many legs pitifully thin compared to the rest of him”. He is lying in his room and has to get to work, but is unable to move in the usual human way. As pleas from his parents and his manager from work who has come to ask about his absence mount, Gregor slowly gets to the door, succeeds after much labor in opening it and reveals his new self. His family is shocked, the manager runs away, and his father shoos Gregor back into his room.

Gregor can still think as before but his speech is unintelligible. His appearance is grotesque but he is not harmful in any way. He has the best of intentions. It is his sister, Grete, who now takes care of Gregor and feeds him, even though they cannot communicate. Gregor and Grete had shared a wonderful relationship. Gregor appreciated his sister’s talent for music and was putting away some earnings to send her to music school. The two siblings had planned to announce this to their parents during Christmas. Now, with Gregor's metamorphosis, that plan is no more.

And yet, Grete tries her best to help Gregor. He reciprocates the best he can. This a moving part of the story:

To find out about his likes and dislikes, she brought him a wide assortment of things, all spread out on an old newspaper: old, half-rotten vegetables; bones left over from the evening meal, caked with congealed white sauce; some raisings and almonds; a piece of cheese, which two days before Gregor had declared inedible; a plain slice of bread, a slice of bread and butter; and one with butter and salt. In addition to all this she put down some water in the bowl apparently permanently earmarked for Gregor’s use. And out of a sense of delicacy, since she knew that Gregor would not eat in front of her, she left hurriedly and even turned the key; just so that Gregor should know that he might take himself as comfortable as he wanted.

Since his appearance has the potential to unsettle, Gregor scurries and hides under the couch as his sister enters the room to lay the food on the floor. But Gregor's head is still visible. To make sure his sister does not get a glimpse when she brings food, he struggles painfully with his legs to arrange a bed sheet in such a way that he is completely invisible. Grete is grateful. In turn, she also recognizes that Gregor, when he is alone, might benefit from positioning himself, difficult though such a maneuver is, against the window to look outside – it was something he did frequently before. She adjusts the chair every day so Gregor is able to do this in his present vermin state.

But is Grete’s compassion endless? The latter part of the story – the tragic part – is the family’s gradual realization that Gregor has become a liability. To keep the family going and to pay back the mortgage, Gregor’s retired father has to return to work; his mother turns to sewing clothes; Grete becomes a saleswoman. Over time, Grete becomes irritable. She stops cleaning Gregor’s room. Dirt and crumbs gather. Gregor loses interest in food and spits it out. He begins to starve, walks in his own filth, and becomes weak. One morning, after an altercation, his father hurls apples at him, one of which gets lodged painfully in his scaly back.

As the story draws to a close, Kafka seems to be posing the question: How unconditional is our love for those whom we consider close and how much can we endure for them? The Metamorphosis does not give a clear answer, but we are able to intuit the internal lives of those trapped in such a conundrum. Kafka achieves this in fifty pages of spare, well-controlled prose. No wonder The Metamorphosis is considered one of literature’s greats.

And here is an essay on recent book on Kafka's relationship with his father.

Mexico travel notes – San Juan Chamula and Zinacantan

Other posts on my Mexico trip: Traveling to Mexico City, A whirlwind summary of Mexico, Ganesha in Mayan country, Karina's world, Arqueologia and Cibersexo in Mexico City, and Along the Usumacinta. Together they might give a better sense of the trajectory of my travel and the themes I am trying to explore.
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Near the highland town of San Cristobal de las Casas in southern Mexico are the towns of San Juan Chamula and Zinacantan. These are Mayan towns. The people are short in stature, their complexions are dark, and their eyes small. As in many places, skin color here is an indicator of socioeconomic status. In Mexico, most people are of mixed Native American and European descent but the darker you are, the more indigenous you are, and therefore – given the history of subjugation – the more likely you are to be poor. Spanish is the lingua franca throughout Mexico, but Tzotzil and Tzetzal, both Mayan languages, are spoken in this part of the country. And the religions practiced are a blend of Mayan and Christian beliefs.

In San Juan Chamula I went to a “church”. I use quotations because this wasn’t a typical church, even if from the outside it looked like one. The picture above (I know, it’s a bad picture, and features a stranger's head prominently) is of the large, haphazardly organized market facing the church. San Juan Chamula is a materially poor place. It is not unlike an unclean and crowded small town in India. Food stalls flanked the main road. Children ran around visitors trying to sell trinkets. The day I visited, a ceremony was in progress near the church entrance, where a group of men, women and children had gathered for a slow dance. In commemoration, some town officials – wearing shawls and sporting wide, sombrero-like hats – set off rockets at regular intervals. I have missed Diwali in India for the last nine years, but the fireworks at this December event in southern Mexico made up for it somewhat.

Inside the church there were no pews; the floor was strewn with aromatic pine needles. Along the sides were figurines of saints in glass cases, whom the locals, seated on the floor, worshiped with great reverence. But it was the altar that was striking. There was no visible statue or image of Christ. All I could see was an excessively decorated space: the principal adornments were banana leaves and balloons. I was startled by this use of banana leaves. In south India they are everywhere of course: they may be used as, say, disposable plates, or to build makeshift arches at entrances to weddings and religious events. But I had not expected to see them used in somewhat similar fashion in Mexico. And there was a further similarity: getting a glimpse of the decorated altar in the church felt akin to getting a darshan of an overdressed, impossible-to-see deity at a crowded temple in India.

Later in the afternoon, I went to Zinacantan, to a house where textiles were sold. The building was a simple, single-storied structure. The interior was cool and the floor earthen. A living room led to an enclosed courtyard where clothes in bright colors and patterns – scarves, blouses, skirts, bed sheets – were displayed for sale. These were also the colors and dresses that the women of the region wore. Bright blue seemed to be a favorite, like the dress of the woman in the picture (she’s demonstrating the weaving process). The house seemed like the communal space of a large family. The sellers were all women; the men stared shyly from a distance.

Grants, writing and a poem

Apologies for the sluggishness this month. I got busy with a grant application to a federal agency under the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This type of writing is not fun. You have to sound very assured and gung-ho about your research but that’s not how you feel inside. That is why grant writing and writing for technical publications can never have the same tension that writing of the personal kind has. The term “personal” is to be interpreted in the broadest sense: I do not mean writing about oneself, but writing honestly about topics and themes one feels deeply about.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been planning two pieces. The first is about the dogs, both pets and strays, I came to know while living in Nagpur for five years. We lived in a third floor flat and our place had four balconies. I could observe neighborhood dogs closely early in the morning when I was supposed to be studying. I became familiar with two generations of dogs; there are many small stories I want to weave together and tell.

The second is about my first year of college in Tiruchirapalli -- at the Regional Engineering College (now National Institute of Technology). The experience was special. By design, regional engineering colleges are meant to bring together students from the local state and students from all parts of India. So we had representation from every state. We had people of all complexions: there was an incredibly fair guy from Kashmir, and my austere and studious roommate for the first year was very black . All the major languages of India could be heard in the corridors of hostels. It was my first lesson in diversity.

These are going to be long pieces. It will take me a while to write them, and maybe in the process, I’ll get bored and distracted, as so often happens. But my hunch is something will materialize. Pardon the lethargy meanwhile.

Since this is a post without much direction, I have the license to ramble a bit. Let me share with you a poem I wrote in my third year of college. I was a prolific poet then and spammed online bulletin boards with my work: early indication that I would become a blogger. This is a dark poem, very cheesy: it expresses my rage against deforestation. Keep in mind, before you nitpick about my very "black and white" view, that I was 18 or 19 then!

The wood-cutter and the woodpecker

Chunk! Chunk! goes the woodcutter's axe;
Peck! Peck! attacks the woodpecker.
When the two pairs of eyes met,
there ensued a conversation:

"Why, dear man, do you cut the tree?" the pecker asks;
"For the same reason that you peck the tree."
"Your answer does not satisfy; it puzzles me."
"A living exists for us because of this tree;
you pick insects and thus subsist
while I sell timber and get money."

"But does not the tree die
as the axe hacks the bark away?
Does not the squirrel flee
to another tree miles away?
Do not the eggs break on falling
much to the mother-bird's dismay?"

"True - but for the living of one
another has to succumb.
It is this rule of survival
that we experience every day.
Woodpecker, do you not eat
insects embedded in the bark of trees?
do you not kill them?
impale them with your pointed beak?
Talk not of my cruelty;
think of your own shame."

Shocked by what had been said,
the woodpecker withdrew.
Lashed at by man's vicious tongue
decieved by his sincere talk
and cloaked in guilt and shame,
it never ate insects again;
and of hunger died one day.

Today, in the forest, there remain only stubs
of the trees the axe brutally cut.
All the woodpeckers have died of shame;
all the squirrels have run away;
and all the birds have flown away.

Today, in the forest, remains barren land,
in the middle of which wooden houses stand.

Who's eating under the table?

Details here and here. Photo credit: Ritesh Uttamchandani.

Still searching for: Dinner With The President

In June 2007, I saw a preview of Dinner With The President, a documentary about democracy in Pakistan. I’ve been looking for the movie ever since but have not been able to find it. In the meantime, all the teaser clips that I see of the movie only make me long for it more. In the two years that have passed, much has happened in Pakistan: the President of the documentary’s title is no longer the President; a political icon has been assassinated; and the Pakistani Taliban are posing a serious challenge. Yet, my sense is that Dinner With The President still remains relevant.

The President of the title is of course Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf surprisingly agreed to a dinner interview with Sabiha Sumar, one of the makers of the documentary. But Musharraf is not the only person Sabiha interviews. She talks to the young and the elite; she travels to a tribal area presumably in Pakistan’s west or northwest and talks to elders. The latter meeting is particularly tense. There is not one other woman at this gathering. Undaunted, Sabiha asks questions that make all the assembled men squirm. What does democracy mean to them? Why do they insist on strict interpretations of the Quran? Where does it say in the Quran that women are supposed to wear head scarves?

The responses is not all uniform. There are few dissenting men who seem to be against the intransigence of some of the elders. At the end, Sabiha's questions become so disconcerting to the assembled group, some men walk out, while others stay and talk to her.

The full clip of this interaction – a must-see in my opinion – is here.

King Leopold and Mobutu

King Leopold II of Belgium owned the Congo in the late 1800s; it was called the Congo Free State. He treated it like his personal property. He did this suavely and charmed his European contemporaries. But terrible things were happening in the Congo. Leopold never visited this profitable African patch of land (as large as Western Europe), but he was well aware and responsible for all the atrocities. He let others, like Stanley, do the dirty work. Congolese were being enslaved by force; their hands were chopped off if they refused to cooperate in the lucrative rubber production enterprise that Leopold was running. Millions of people were murdered. Yes, millions: it is a holocaust most of us don’t even know about. Leopold, meanwhile, lived lavishly and built mansions all over Europe. (For more on this forgotten chapter of 19th century history, read King Leopold’s Ghost.)

The demons of history keep reincarnating. A hundred years later, the Congo – now renamed Zaire, a word with Portuguese roots – came to be ruled by another despot, a homegrown one: Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, which translates roughly to “an all powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.” That is how the man called himself.

The world knew him simply as Mobutu. He wore a leopard hat and carried a cane. He was America's ally in Africa's cold war intrigues. He ransacked Zaire, embezzled huge amounts of money, and built palaces everywhere. But he lavished special attention on his ancestral home, near Zaire’s border with the Central African Republic. There he created a gaudy town called Gbadolite. As Richard Dowden writes in Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles:

“As if spraying his territory, he built a palace in every major town in Congo, but at Gbadolite there are three. The rest of the town is there simply to serve them. So it has an international-sized airport so that Mobutu’s family could hire Concorde to go shopping in Paris or New York and a Coca-Cola factory in case they needed a drink…

Kawele Palace was the private home. The entrance is a triumphal arch and at the back there is a vast swimming pool on two levels and a banqueting hall of royal proportions. From the terrace you can see across to what was once Mobutu’s zoo and a European-style farm with cows flown in from Switzerland and sheep from Argentina.”

In other words, an incongruous but not unusual juxtaposition: a flagrant display of wealth in an extremely poor place. A century ago, King Leopold sucked the wealth out of Congo and built mansions in Europe, but his 20th century reincarnation built mansions in Congo in addition to building some in Europe. But let me not go on and on about this – all my knowledge about Congo comes from books, and a real engagement with a place is possible only after some serious, focused travel.

Let me instead finish with an anecdote about Mobutu which shows what a bizarre life he led (the anecdote is from Dowden's book as well). Like many rich and powerful men, Mobutu had a wife and a mistress. The mistress was the wife’s twin sister. To please his wife and ensure she did not know of the time he spent with his mistress, Mobutu played an elaborate game of hide and seek:

And the middle of the town [Gbadolite] on a low hill is a palace for Kosia, the twin sister of Mobutu’s wife, Bobi. In public the twins accompanied him, dressed identically. In private, I am told by a former guard, it was a different matter. Bobi was very possessive and when Mobutu wanted to spend time with Kosia, he would tell his wife that he was going to Kinshasa. The presidential convoy would swoosh off to the airport but Mobutu would sneak back to Kosia’s palace. A Mobutu lookalike complete with leopard hat and cane, would mount the steps of the plane and wave to Bobi – you can see the runway from the presidential bedroom – then the plane would leave for Kinshasa. A few days later the process would be done in reverse. The guards at Kosia’s place were under separate command from those at the President’s house and were forbidden to talk to each other on pain of death.

Imagine that: a Concorde takes off with an impostor in it; it travels all the way to Kinshasa, 710 miles away, and then returns a few days later. Just to keep the rigmarole going. It’s both hilarious and grotesque.

Update: Please see Alex Engwate's thoughtful comment, where he clarifies where the name Zaire comes from (I have mistakenly called it a word with Portuguese roots).