Michael Jackson and Balasaheb Thackeray

From Suketu Mehta's Maximum City:Bombay Lost and Found:

Shiv Sena's notions of what is culturally acceptable in India show a distinct bias towards kitsch: Michael Jackson, for example. In November 1996, Thackeray announced that the first performance of the pop star in India would proceed with his blessings. This may or may not have had to do with the fact that the singer had promised to donate the profits from his concert -- which eventually ran to more than a million dollars -- to a Shiv Sena-run youth employment project. The planned concert offended a number of people in the city, including Thackeray's own brother, who saw something alien in the values singer represented. "Who is Michael Jackson and how on earth is he linked to Hindu culture, which the Shiv Sena and its boss Thackeray talk about so proudly?"

The Shiv Sena Supremo responded, "Jackson is a great artist, and we must accept him as an artist. His movements are terrific. Not many people can that way. You will end up breaking your bones." Then the Saheb got to the heart of the matter. "And, well what is culture? He represents certain values in America, which India should not have any qualms in accepting. We would like to accept that part of America that is represented by Jackson." The pop star acknowledged Thackeray's praise by stopping off at the leader's residence on his way from the airport to his hotel and pissing in his toilet. Thackeray led photographers with pride to the sanctified bowl.

Queues at polls

Queues of all sorts fascinate me, and in this season of elections, it is only understandable that they are rampant at polling places. India and Indonesia are having their elections, and so is South Africa. The news from South Africa is that the turnout is massive -- officials are struggling with "angry queues at polling stations and too few ballot papers" [BBC]. The balance between demand and supply is askew and that, of course, is the perfect recipe for queues.

And there's nothing like a good image to tell a story. I love this picture, which I pilfered from the same BBC article: democracy -- or at least one of the steps of modern-day democracy -- expressed by a long, snaking line of people patiently waiting to have their say.

Mr.President, let me teach you batting

For those who may not know, this is batting maestro Brian Lara teaching the President how to hit a good front-foot cover drive. But from the awkward footwork and squatting that is on display, it looks as if the President may splay his feet and rip his pants. Ah, cricket doesn't come easy to the uninitiated. Let's hope this isn't a metaphor for the President's political skills. But at least, you could say, he's trying to learn.

Photo via Amitava.

What it means to be Christian

A Spanish evangelist, Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas, traveling in Peru circa 1560 finds out what being Christian means to the Indians of Peru:

It is of note that the Indians of Peru, before we Christians had come to them, had certain and particular modes of swearing, distinct from ours. They had no assertive oaths, such as 'by God' or 'by heaven' but only execration or curses...e.g. 'if I am not telling the truth, may the sun kill me' they said...Once when I asked a chieftain in a certain province if he was Christian, he said, 'I am not yet quite one, but I am making a beginning.' I asked him what he knew of being Christian, and he said: 'I know how to swear to God, and play cards a bit, and I am beginning to steal.'

This is an excerpt from one of Fray Domingo's books - which interestingly happens to be a book on Quechua grammar. Quechua is a Native American language of South America, still spoken by indigenous people in Peru, Bolivia and also in other countries - there are an estimated 10 million speakers. I found the above excerpt in Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (the link takes you to one of my earliest posts -- way back in 2005, when the earth was cooling).

Atanu Dey on the military-industrial complex

Great piece here on how certain parties in both rich and poor countries have strong incentives to proliferate weapons in the global market, and -- unsurprisingly -- how this is very good for business. Consider the recent news where the US appears to be thinking of selling predator drones to Pakistan. Atanu writes:

The absurdity of the situation is resolved if you consider that the military-industrial complex of the US is involved in a simple dollar auction.

Briefly, the US gives Pakistan drones under some pretext. Since Pakistan is broke, it cannot pay for them. So the US gives military assistance to Pakistan to buy the drones with. Which basically means that the US pays its weapons manufacturers for supplying the Pakistanis. That’s the first-order effect of military aid to Pakistan: US weapons manufacturers continue to be in business.

The second-order effect follows predictably. India now has to match Pakistan’s weapons. India pays the US to buy drones. This means more business for US weapons manufacturers.

The war on terror has to continue because that’s what allows the machinery of the military-industrial complex humming away. The US is a military superpower and any day of the week it actually wants to, it can totally wipe off global Islamic terrorism. That it chooses not to do so is simple: its weapons industry will hurt like hell. Sure the US exports a lot of stuff other than weapons. But the politicians who make the policies are in the pockets of the weapons manufacturers.

All this reminds me of Dwight Eisenhower's prescient Presidential farewell address in 1961. Eisenhower was a military man himself, and he must have known well the ugly nexus that was developing between making of weapons and the making of money. This is the exact sentence he used:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

Nobody seems to have heeded. The military-industrial complex is a reality now -- a major reality, and not just in the US. How do we get out of this one?

Also see, Why We Fight.

Contrasts in history: The example of Prostestant colonialism

History’s biggest insights lie in understanding contrasts. Why did things turn out a certain way in one part of the world and so differently elsewhere? Answers to such questions can be revealing. After Columbus’ journey to the Americas, Europeans sailed to all inhabited continents. The results have been very different: in most of Africa and Asia, they left eventually, leaving the natives to figure out their post-colonial trajectories; in Mexico and South America, they mixed with the natives, giving rise to the mestizo; and in North America and Australia, they almost entirely displaced the existing indigenous population. Understanding these differences and their associated circumstances explains to a large extent why the world is the way it is today. This was also the subject of Jared Diamond’s superb Guns, Germs and Steel.

Recently, while reading Richard Dowden’s Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles (earlier posts here and here), I found a fascinating comparative study that builds on the same idea though on a smaller scale. Dowden’s analysis has to do with Protestant groups that colonized peoples in different parts of the world. He first compares the Afrikaners of South Africa (who were Protestants), and the Ulster Protestants of Ireland:

“While working in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s, I had begun to notice the strong parallels with South Africa. The most striking parallel was between the Afrikaners and the Ulster Protestants. Both had arrived as colonists during periods of religious persecution in seventeenth century Europe. Both embraced orange as their color, derived from the House of Orange, the Dutch monarchy who had stood out against the Hapsburg Catholics. The hero of the Irish Protestants was William III, the Dutch king who finally defeated the Catholic James II and established Protestant British rule in Ireland. The Afrikaners were Dutch Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution in the Netherlands...

The Ulster and South African varieties of Protestant fundamentalism had a lot in common. Theirs was a whole world view, an attitude to the meaning of life, self and land. Both believed that they were God’s chosen people, rewarded for their faithfulness by the gift of the land they now occupied. The fact they had won the land by conquest reinforced in their minds the idea that God was on their side. They also believed in the puritan values of hard work, thrift and honesty. When I heard an Afrikaner clergyman talk of black Africans as lazy, dirty and unpunctual, I could have been listening to some of the militant followers of Ian Paisley, the Ulster Protestant political clergyman, talking about Catholics.

Now throw into the mix yet another Protestant group, which would go on to build one of the most successful and powerful nations in the world, and things become even more interesting:

A third group of migrating Dutch and English Protestants left their homes at the same time as the Afrikaners first settled in South Africa. They sailed west rather than south and helped found the most liberal state known to humankind, the United States of America. They too were informed by the puritan ethic and the gratifying feeling that God had rewarded them with land of their own. But although they were liberal towards each other, the new Americans overwhelmed – and virtually exterminated – the native population. If today’s white South Africans are colonists, so are the non-indigenous populations of North and South America, Australia and New Zealand. The only difference is in the numbers of surviving native peoples. In the United States, descendents of the original inhabitants represent 1.5 percent of the population, in Canada it is 2 percent, in Brazil less than 0.4 percent. Aboriginals make up 2.4 percent of Australians. The Maori make up 14.6 percent of New Zealand’s population, though only 4.3 percent use Maori as their first language. In South Africa, the indigenous people are 75 per cent of the population. I once heard an Afrikaner quip to an American diplomat trying to foist non-racial constitution on South Africa, ‘At least we left our natives alive.’

There is truth to that assertion (though it's a ridiculous and completely unacceptable excuse for Afrikaner colonialism and apartheid). Whatever the ignominies black South Africans have had to go through, and whatever their troubles in post-apartheid South Africa, they at least have a chance to define their own destiny now. As do other formerly colonized peoples of Africa and Asia. I do not mean to trivialize the problems such nations face. But when an entire continent is silenced through a combination of devastating disease outbreaks (inadvertent) and relentless land-grabbing and conquest – as happened in North America and Australia – there is little a people can do. So, while the Indians of India may rejoice their country’s increasing presence on the global stage, the Indians of North America can only look back and ponder at what might have been.

It is the most tragic thing that can happen to a people: suffering a demographic decline that robs them of their chance in history.

And Indonesia too...

Close on the heels of my post about the logistical complexity and scale of the India's upcoming general election, comes this short one on Indonesia. Yes, Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, with a population of 240 million, also goes to polls this year, and The Economist has a feature on the country in its latest issue.

The poll itself is an exercise whose scale and logistical complexity are second only to those of a general election in India. Across more than 900 inhabited islands, 171m people have registered to vote. They have 38 national parties to choose from, and an estimated 800,000 candidates for the national parliament, known as the DPR, and lower-level provincial and other legislatures. And this is only the start of what may be a three-stage process.

Strangely, Indonesia's national motto is "Unity in Diversity" -- exactly the phrase I heard growing up in India.

Looking back: India's first General Election - Excerpts from Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi

India holds its general elections this month. This is, on paper at least, the largest exercise of democracy in the world. However bizarre democracy and politics in India might be – incredibly fragmented and rife with opportunistic alliances: the economist and blogger Atanu Dey calls it Cargo Cult Democracy, democracy of the cosmetic kind – whatever the shortcomings, you cannot but marvel at the scale and logistics of the election itself. More than 700 million people will have the ability to vote this time. The election will be held in staggered fashion, in five phases – beginning April 16th and ending May 13, with results announced on May 16th. There will be 828,804 polling centers; and as in 2004, the election will be conducted using electronic voting machines – there are 1,368,430 of them across the country.

The Indian general election interests me precisely because of these operational aspects. My doctoral training in an area called operations research, which can be described as the science (or mathematics) of planning well. Needless to say, a general election involving huge numbers of people and parties and covering a vast area requires some very careful planning.

Behind all this is the Election Commission of India (ECI), a remarkably efficient organization – surprising, because it is a governmental administrative organization. ECI was formed in 1950, and set its high standards at the very outset. The first Chief Election Commissioner was Sukumar Sen, who had the unenviable task of conducting India’s first general election in 1951. Born in 1899, Sen was educated in Presidency College and London University, where he won a gold medal in mathematics. And mathematics is a useful skill to have when you have to get the numbers and the coordination right for an election and an electorate spread over the area of a million square miles.

In 1951, India had a population of roughly 360 million. The size of the electorate was about 176 million. The 2009 general election will be a larger operation, but the first election, in 1951-52 (it was staggered then too), was quite the leap in the dark. The country had been independent for just four years and a significant portion of the electorate was illiterate. A successful election meant that an effort of that scale could be confidently mounted again and again over the next decades -- what was daunting then is now a routine business.

Here are some excerpts from Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi about the election of 1951.

1. India’s first election, Guha writes,

was, among other things, an act of faith. A newly independent country chose to move straight to universal adult suffrage, rather than – as had been the case in the West – at first reserve the right to vote to men of property, with the working class and women excluded from the franchise until much later.

2. Numbers from the 1951 election:

224,000 polling booths were constructed, and equipped with 2 million steel ballot boxes, to make which 8,200 tonnes of steel were consumed; 16,500 clerks were appointed on a six-month contracts to type and collate the electoral rolls by constituency; about 380,000 reams of paper were used for printing the rolls; 56,000 presiding officers were chosen to supervise the voting, these aided by another 280,000 helpers; 224,000 policemen were put on duty to guard against violence and intimidation.

3. Geography complicated election logistics, but here’s a peculiar social challenge ECI faced that is also somewhat comical:

A second problem was social rather than geographical: the diffidence of many women in northern India to give their own names, instead of which they wished to register themselves as A’s mother or B’s wife. Sukumar Sen was outraged with this practice, a ‘curious senseless relic of the past.’, and directed his officials to correct the rolls by inserting the names of the women ‘in place of mere descriptions of such voters.’ Nonetheless, some 2.8 million women had to be struck of the list. The resulting furore over their omission was considered by Sen to be a ‘good thing’, for it would help the prejudice vanish before the next elections…

4. How did ECI improvise to accommodate the largely illiterate electorate? Pictorial symbols and multiple ballot boxes. Details:

Where in Western democracies most voters could recognize the parties by name, here pictorial symbols were used to make their task easier. Drawn from daily life, these symbols were easily recognizable: a pair of bullocks for one party, a hut for a second, an elephant for a third, and an earthenware lamp for a fourth. A second innovation was the use of multiple ballot boxes. On a single ballot, the (mostly illiterate) Indian elector might make a mistake; thus each party had a ballot box with its symbol marked in each polling station, so that voters could simply drop their paper in it. To avoid impersonation, Indian scientists had developed a variety of indelible ink which, applied on the voter’s finger, stayed there for a week. A total of 389,816 phials of ink were used in the election.

5. And, finally, a little anecdote that tells us of the earnestness of many election officials who tried their best to make things tick in remote places:

An American woman photographer on assignment in Himachal Pradesh was deeply impressed by the commitment shown by the election officials. One official had walked for six days to attend the preparatory workshop organized by the district magistrate; another had ridden four days on a mule. They went back to their distant stations with sewn gunny sacks full of ballot boxes, ballots, party symbols and electoral lists. On election day, the photographer chose to watch proceedings at an obscure hill village named Bhuti. Here the polling station was a school-house, which had only one door. Since the rules prescribed a different entry and exit, a window had been converted into a door, with improvised steps on either side to allow the elderly and ailing to hop out after voting.

It's true, isn't it: that it takes small and sincere efforts like these to achieve something larger. Even if that something larger -- democracy -- is only, as BR Ambedkar once said, "a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic".

The mathematics of matching kidneys

“Kidneys are unusual organs,” says the blogger and academic Michael Trick, “We are given two, though we can get by with one. So, unlike the heart, say, we each have a 'spare' that we can donate to others.” Indeed, for patients suffering from kidney failure – known more technically as end stage renal disease – one option is transplantation: taking somebody else’s healthy kidney and grafting it in the patient. In the United States, there are estimated to be more than 60,000 patients waiting for such transplants to happen. Kidneys of deceased as well as living donors can be used, and both approaches have their pros and cons. But transplants involving living donors are increasing – in the United States they are 47% of all transplants.

If a transplant involves a living donor, then who might such a donor be? Perhaps someone close to the patient – a sister, a relative, a friend. But it turns out you can’t just use any kidney. You can accept a kidney only if your blood group and the donor’s are compatible. An O recipient can accept only O kidneys; A can accept O and A; B can accept O and B; and AB can accept any kidney. And there may be other medical reasons and patient preferences too that may disallow certain transplants.

So, from the above discussion, you may end up with an incompatible donor-recipient pair, and this frequently happens in practice. But this is not a dead-end; what you can do is find another incompatible donor-recipient pair, such that the blood group of the donor in the first pair is compatible with that of the recipient in the second pair, and vice-versa. If this is the case, an exchange can happen, as shown below.

Figure 1 (Picture from here)

Both pairs are now set. Simple enough. But if you look at this from the larger, societal point of view, the problem is more nuanced. There may be thousands of such incompatible donor-recipient pairs in the waiting list. If you just go from the point of view of one pair, you are likely to find a match, but you may end up ruining options for others.

How can this happen? Well, let’s look at this simple example involving just five pairs. Each pair is represented using a node, while the edges indicate that an exchange is possible. So an exchange of the type shown in figure 1 is possible between pairs 1 and 2; 2 and 3; 2 and 4; 4 and 5. Since there is no edge between 1 and 5, the pairs cannot exchange – this might be, say, because the donor of 1 belongs to blood group B but the recipient of 5 belongs to O, ruling out an exchange.

Figure 2 (mine)

Now let’s look at possible solutions. If 2 decides to exchange with 4, then only one match is possible. Three other pairs (1, 3 and 5) will have to wait for future pairs to enter the list – until then, the recipient in each pair will be on dialysis, which is extremely expensive. But there exists a better solution: let 1 exchange with 2 and let 4 exchange with 5. Four pairs now get matches, and only one pair has to wait. Thus the latter solution maximizes the number of matches in the graph, while the former solution leaves many dissatisfied.

Imagine now that there are thousands of pairs with myriad linkages – as there indeed are in reality. Can you visually think of a graph of the type above and come up with a solution? Clearly, it’s not feasible – unless we develop the superhuman ability to delineate complex and dense graphs in our minds and traverse them. Fortunately, though, the matching of kidneys turns out to be equivalent to a well studied problem in graph theory called maximum matching. Even better, there exists an algorithm that will give a solution in quick time no matter how large your graph is. Got a thousand pairs in your list? No problem – you’ll get a solution in a few seconds! The algorithm was first proposed way back in 1965, in a groundbreaking paper by Jack Edmonds. Edmonds clearly was not into sleep-inducing technical titles that are the norm in most publications: his paper is stylishly called Paths, Trees and Flowers [1] and can be accessed easily online.

Thus did the solution to a puzzle in graph theory become relevant for a pressing medical problem of today – and it is not always possible to see such happy marriages. Not that this one is perfect: the kidney matching problem in reality is not as simple as the maximum matching problem of graph theory. Medical problems – especially transplantations – are riddled with ethical, political, logistical and cost issues. Despite this, the kidney matching problem (or the paired donation problem) is something to be celebrated. It’s a neat, easy-to-understand application, and its importance can’t be overstated.

Picture from here

The problem became known in the medical community due to a paper in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) [2]. Sommer Gentry and Dorry Segev were the principal researchers. If graph theory in an organ transplantation context seems like a unique marriage, then is it any surprise that it emerged from an actual marriage - between a mathematician and a transplant surgeon? Sommer is the mathematician; Dorry the surgeon. I met Sommer at a conference in Philadelphia last year, and chatted with her over lunch (which is how I became aware of the problem). She is currently at the US Naval Academy, while Dorry is a surgeon at John Hopkins; they live in Anapolis, near Baltimore.

But to return to the paper. There is an extensive discussion in it about the challenges that come up in kidney transplantations: national vs. regional matching, logistical issues, and how to deal with patients with greater need. The national vs. regional question is especially worth mentioning. Local and regional kidney donation programs already exist in the United States, but what if a national system was to be tried out? Clearly the availability of a larger pool of kidneys would mean more matches. But then travel and the cost of transporting organs becomes an issue. But here's the twist: the paper demonstrates that in the national system, the number of matches would increase and yet only 2.9% of the national pool would actually need to travel. Who would have guessed! But this is precisely the sort of counterintuitive insight that a mathematical model is capable of providing.

Finally, why have we discussed only 2-way exchanges so far? Indeed, we can do better. Let's consider three pairs. The donor of Pair 1 could donate to the recipient of Pair 2; the donor of Pair 2 then donates to the recipient of Pair 3; and lastly, to complete the cycle, the donor of Pair 3 donates to recipient of Pair 1. That's a 3-way exchange. Perhaps longer ones can be identified in a pool but what effect does the length of a cycle have on the number of matches in the overall pool? This is a fertile area of research, and some it has already been implemented. Recently, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland, there was a six-way exchange – the largest of its kind – involving twelve people. And the cycle of six was completed because of an altruistic donor who was unrelated to the twelve people involved, yet gave away his/her kidney.

Indeed, if you are going to have an impact on twelve rather than two, wouldn’t you be more inclined to be altruistic?

References

[1] Paths, trees and Flowers, by Jack Edmonds, Canadian Journal of Mathematics (1965).

[2] Kidney paired donation and optimizing the use of live donor organs, Segev D., Gentry S., Warren D., Reeb B., and Montgomery R. Journal of the American Medical Association (2005).

Kashmir's Buddhist past - a quick excerpt

Basharat Peer’s memoir, Curfewed Night, is about Kashmir’s woes, but there are plenty of other interesting bits in the book that have nothing to do with the dark mood of the last two decades. I love the parts where Peer writes of his visits to spiritual places – Sufi, Hindu, and Buddhist – and though some of these places are facing neglect, they are nonetheless indicative of the region’s rich and diverse religious history. For instance, it was Ashoka who founded “Srinagari (the City of Wealth) around 250 BC on the outskirts of what is modern Srinagar … it was from the seminaries of Kashmir patronised by Ashoka that missionaries spread Buddhism to China and Japan.” And here’s an excerpt about the fourth Buddhist Council that might have been held in Kashmir:

“When I was a child my father told me stories of the Fourth World Buddhist Council, which was held in Kashmir in the second century under the rule of the learned Gandharan Buddhist king Kanishka. Every now and then someone claims to have found the true location of the council but most believe it was held near the ancient Garden of Harwan on the northwestern fringe of Srinagar. On a family excursion to the garden – which is lined with waterways and shaded by towering chinar trees – my father had pointed to the hillock above and told me it was where the council was believed to have gathered. I went there a few days after visiting the Srinagar museum. A signboard, ‘Buddhist sites’, guided me to a terraced area where, in 1905, archaeologists found a stupa, prayer hall, and living quarters. In the centre of the site are remains of the stupa. I stared at its stone base and two concentric squares of roughly polished stones covered with wild grass. It was hard to imagine what it might have looked like. To the left, were four fallen stonewalls covered with moss. “That was a vihara, where the monks met,” said Mohammed Khazar, an elderly caretaker of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), which maintains the site. According to the Chinese traveller Hieun Tsang, more than 5000 monks had come together to debate and discuss the faith.”

Where the real apartheid was

Richard Dowden’s Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles was one of the best books I read last year. Dowden has worked in Africa as a journalist for decades, and that experience shows in the book. I’ve already posted on the Somalia chapter, and also meant to post on other countries but got caught up with distractions. Now, however, the book is on my desk again, and looking at the marked sections, it’s clear that there are at least three of four interesting bits I’d like to convey – each bit in a separate post.

Let me begin with South Africa and the apartheid system that existed there. This is what Richard Dowden (who, by the way, is a British), experienced while traveling in that country in 1979:

At the coach station in the center of Johannesburg I got off and went to find a lavatory. It was round at the back and stank as if it had not been cleaned for months. As I came out a black man walked in. He looked startled – or was it fear? He said something angrily but I didn’t understand. Then I looked back and saw a pale patch on the wall where a notice had been taken down. This was a lavatory for blacks only. It was not the first occasion that I encountered black resentment at a white crossing the apartheid frontier.

The South African government at the time was taking some cosmetic steps that would make the country look less of an apartheid state. What kind of impact did they have? Dowden writes:

Whites and blacks had completely different experiences of what apartheid actually was. In white areas, where only a handful of the black population ever went, apartheid meant the signs saying Whites Only or Non-Whites Only. In black areas like Soweto, however, there were no Non-Whites or Whites Only signs. So while for whites for those signs were the most visible manifestation of apartheid, most blacks never even saw them. The removal of the signs – welcomed by the liberals – did not affect blacks at all.

This is a key insight, something that may not have occurred to the casual observer. The real apartheid and its debilitating effects were to be seen in black townships, places whites never visited:

Whites never went to see Soweto or Winterfeld or New Brighton. They had no conception of what life was like in these officially created slums. These places were what blacks experienced as apartheid. Systematically dispossessed of land, homes and the opportunity to work, to have a family and a future, they were a slave class whose sole purpose was to provide cheap labor for whites. Above all, apartheid stripped them of their rights as citizens and their dignity as human beings.

China's excesses, past and present, through Yu Hua's eyes

Pankaj Mishra gives us an engrossing and elaborate portrait of the Chinese writer, Yu Hua, author of Brothers, a provocative, best-selling novel about the excesses of China’s Cultural Revolution – by any yardstick, a surreal moment in 20th century history – and the unfettered capitalist boom of the last two decades. Excerpts:

Though nearly 50, Yu, who wears his hair short and spiky, looks relatively young. He speaks in emphatic bursts, his face often flushing red, and he is quick to laugh. It was, in fact, his boisterous laugh that almost got him into trouble on the morning of the solemn announcement of Mao’s death. Responding to orders that blared out from loudspeakers, he assembled with hundreds of other students in the main hall of his small-town high school. “Funereal music was played, and then we had to hear the long list of titles that preceded Mao’s name, ‘Chairman,’ ‘Beloved Leader,’ ‘Great helmsman . . . ,’” Yu recalled. “Everyone loved Chairman Mao, of course, so when his name was finally announced, everyone burst into tears. I started crying, too, but one person crying is a sad sight; more than a thousand people crying together, the sound echoing, turns into a funny spectacle, so I began to laugh. My body shook with my effort to control my laughter while I bent over the chair in front of me. The class leader later told me, admiringly, ‘Yu Hua, you were crying so fervently!’”

[...]

Brothers strikes its characteristic tone with the very first scene, as Li Guang, a business tycoon, sits on his gold-plated toilet, dreaming of space travel even as he mourns the loss of all earthly relations. Li made his money from various entrepreneurial ventures, including hosting a beauty pageant for virgins and selling scrap metal and knockoff designer suits. A quick flashback to his small-town childhood shows him ogling the bottoms of women defecating in a public toilet. Similarly grotesque images proliferate over the next 600 pages as Yu describes, first, the extended trauma of the Cultural Revolution, during which Li and his stepbrother Song Gang witness Red Guards torturing Song Gang’s father to death, and then the moral wasteland of capitalist China, in which Song Gang is forced to surgically enlarge one of his breasts in order to sell breast-enlargement gels.

[...]

Later in the taxi home, sitting next to the driver, Yu spoke of a threat to artistic expression in China newer than state control. “I am really worried about the new nationalism,” he said. “Anything slightly critical of China appears in foreign media, and the nationalists are swarming online, attacking it. I tell these angry youth that The New York Times doesn’t criticize China as much as it criticizes America. Basically they are ignorant. They think the American media is always praising American presidents. The problem is that the younger generation hasn’t lived through poverty, collectivism; it is lacking in restraint, its references are very few, the experience is so limited...

These young nationalists have no sense of ambivalence, no idea of life’s ambiguities. But when times are hard, their attitude will change, become more mature, and because capitalism in this form cannot go on in China, it has to end, those hard times will come soon.”

A back-channel peace process

While still on Kashmir, here's a recent piece by Steve Coll that tells us of a secret peace process the Musharraf and the Manmohan Singh administrations together tried to develop -- and apparently they were making progress. Of course, with Musharraf's fall, this has been put on hold. Just to clarify, my link is not meant to be an endorsement of Musharraf or Singh. I linked because the essay, though a tad long, has a great summary of the history and broader geopolitics of the region in addition to the new angle on India-Pakistan relations. Basharat Peer of Curfewed Night is also mentioned.

(I'd forgotten to link to the essay -- my apologies to those readers who may have come here, and muttered: "Which essay is this guy talking about?")

Kashmir in Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night

1.

Basharat Peer was born in 1977, in Seer village in the southern corner of Anantnag district of Kashmir. His childhood, as he describes it in his book, Curfewed Night, was idyllic. To be sure, Kashmiris at the time were still opposed to Indian rule. But this dislike had not turned militant yet. In the late 1980s, though, when Basharat was in boarding school, violent struggle for an independent Kashmir pervaded every aspect of life. Young men offered themselves to fight for the cause. The Indian military, intent on crushing the movement, set up bunkers in Basharat’s boarding school. Basharat himself toyed with the idea of joining the militants before he was dissuaded by his family. Pakistan stepped up its support. Kashmiri men walked across the Line of Control (LoC), got trained, and came back to fight against Indian rule. Many men viewed this journey across the LoC as a matter of pride – a duty, a calling. As Yusuf, one of Basharat’s friends, says in Curfewed Night:

“ [Going to Pakistan] is like a certificate, a degree that you are a real militant! Otherwise people wouldn’t take you seriously.”

The Indian army brutally suppressed the separatists and set up torture chambers -- Papa II on Gupkar Road, Srinagar's own Green Zone, was the most terrifying -- in which lives were irreparably damaged. In the fight between soldiers and militants, thousands of people lost their lives. Soldiers shot down innocent protesters – the cruelest perhaps the Gawkadal Bridge Massacre – and raped women. Radical Islamic groups became stronger even as Kashmir’s Sufi traditions suffered. Those of us who are not Kashmiris know of the conflict from newspaper reports and television. But it has remained rather abstract – this blast or that blast, number of people dead, where it happened and so on. In Curfewed Night, Basharat provides a view – a deeply personal one – from the inside.

And what a disturbing view it is.

Basharat nearly lost his parents in 2001 to a mine blast, specifically meant to kill his father; one of his cousins suddenly decided to become a militant, crossed the LoC, returned, and was later killed; his Hindu Pandit friends escaped Kashmir for the safety of Jammu and other Indian cities. Basharat himself left Kashmir after finishing school. He went on to become a journalist in Delhi, and wanted badly to write about Kashmir.

Curfewed Night is a result of that yearning. From the courtyards of families who have lost their sons to the conflict, to the empty streets of Srinagar, to Sufi and Hindu shrines: Basharat carefully chronicles the embattled landscape of Kashmir in richly descriptive prose. As Chandrahas writes in his essay, Curfewed Night is “so good because it moves skillfully between close-ups of people and the long view of history, and because it describes the scars not only on the physical but also the psychological landscape of Kashmir. He treats his subjects with sensitivity and sympathy, and they respond graciously in turn.” Despite the book’s charged material – the accounts of the humiliations Indian soldiers impose on Kashmiris and the deeply personal nature of the topic – Basharat’s writing is not of the accusatory kind.

2.

My copy of the book is full of notes – I’ve never learned so much about Kashmir, its people and what they have to go through as I have in this book. Let me give a few examples.

1. Kashmiris dread the sight of an Indian soldier. It was only on his first trip away from home that Basharat realized the fear of Indian soldiers is restricted to the state’s borders. While traveling out of Kashmir in a train,

“…two soldiers entered my compartment. Like me, the soldiers had made a twelve hour journey through the high mountains to the railway station in Jammu. Ahead of us was a fourteen hour train ride to New Delhi. The soldiers smiled and dropped their bags in the aisle. ‘Will you please make room for us?’ one of them asked a middle-aged man reading a newsmagazine. ‘We are going home after a year in Kashmir and don’t have any reservations.’ The man was unmoved. The soldier repeated his request, and as I squirmed in my seat, another passenger pointed at the floor of the dirty aisle and said, ‘You may sit there.’ I was stunned. Grandfather and I looked at each other. Unlike people in Kashmir, our north Indian fellow passengers had no reason to be scared of the soldiers: they ordered them around and the soldiers obeyed.”

2. And a return to Kashmir always means being searched, or “frisked” by soldiers – a strangely familiar routine.

We were at Banihal tunnel, which had been bored through the mountain by Swiss engineers in 1953, crossing which you see the valley of Kashmir. Two soldiers boarded the bus and began checking our luggage; the passengers walked in a queue towards a bunker serving as a security checkpost. One by one the passengers entered the checkpost, their hands raised above their shoulders. The soldiers stared at our identity cards and frisked us. There was a strange familiarity with this ritual. It was oppressive and intimate at the same time. In some perverse way, it did signal reaching home.

3. Have you ever seen lights being used in auto-rickshaws at night in India? I’ve never traveled in one with a bulb – and if there was one, I’ve never seen it used. But lights in auto-rickshaws are important in Srinagar:

“From the city centre, Lal Chowk, I boarded an auto-rickshaw. The driver switched on a bulb that cast a bright yellow light over both the driver and the passenger. You always switched on that light so soldiers could see you.”

4. Finally, an old marriage custom in Kashmir – the groom leaving for the bride’s place – was done after sunset, but this is no longer the case. Here’s why:

“Women and girls formed a circle, held hands and sang. They moved back and forth, tapped their feet on the ground, shook their heads, raised and lowered their voices. It was an old custom practiced before the groom left for the bride’s house; grooms left for the bride’s place after the sunset and returned after a late dinner. Kashmiris had discarded that centuries-old tradition the evening of May 16, 1990, when Indian paramilitaries fired upon a marriage party and raped the bride.”

Mr. W

The optimal sifting of waste

The economics of recycling is explained in this recent Economist article. India, it appears, does a great job recycling. This is because the sorting of trash, something you might have never thought about, is done extremely well. India's poor do it and they have a financial incentive -- however small that might be -- to do it well. One example from Bombay, below, of meticulous, nuanced sorting:

The swarming flies and sickly, fetid smell that fill the shed do not seem to put her off her [Mrs.Hiyale's] work. She sits on a low, pink plastic stool, behind a mound of unsorted goods which she is gradually dividing into smaller piles. Copper wiring goes in one heap, aluminium foil in another. Iron and steel is divided by thickness; the heftier pieces fetch a higher price. The same goes for plastic bags. Cloth, leather, Tetra Paks—each has its own pile. Coconut shells go into a bag hanging from the rafters.

Another woman comes in, carrying a load of plastic bottles several times her own size on her head. She will sort it by type of plastic and by colour. In another part of the shed a third woman stands knee-deep in waste paper which she is separating into cardboard, newspaper, office paper, glossy paper, coloured paper and envelopes—which, she says proudly, fetch four rupees a kilo, against just one rupee for the newspaper. [Link]

In general, "the narrower the categories into which recyclables are sorted, and the more meticulous the separation, the easier they are to process, and the higher the price they fetch." Rich countries, with their mechanized equipment designed to sift and sort, may not be as effective; machines may be more error prone and are not yet capable of recognizing nuanced categories. But rich countries can't have people in their own countries do it manually -- as happens in India -- because it is too expensive.

For more such insights, read the full piece.

Kumar Sangakkara on the Lahore shooting

The truth is we owe our lives to the courageous Mohammad Khalil, the driver. I will forever be grateful to him. The tyres of the bus had been shot out and he was in grave personal danger, exposed to gunfire at the front of the bus. But he was hell-bent on getting us to safety and, somehow, he got us moving again. Had Khalil not acted with such courage and presence of mind most of us would have been killed.

Standing still next to the roundabout we were sitting ducks for the 12 gunmen. We only found out afterwards that a rocket launcher just missed us as we began moving and turned for the stadium gates, the rocket blowing up an electricity pylon. Khalil saw a hand grenade tossed at us that failed to explode. Someone must have been looking over us because right now it seems a miracle we survived.

[...]

From a Pakistan perspective, it is tragic this has happened. Pakistan is a great country with a strong cricket tradition and very hospitable people. We like playing cricket here, but the presence of a small minority pursuing their own agendas at any cost will surely prevent tours for the foreseeable future. I sincerely hope that a solution can be found with time but assume Pakistan will first need a neutral venue solution for their home games.

Will I go back? When you have been through what we have experienced, when you have been targeted by terrorists yourself and been so fortunate to escape, it changes your thinking. It is a big question which cannot be answered now. I suspect, too, for us it can only be answered as an individual. Our families will never feel the same about us leaving to play in Pakistan. That is sad - for Pakistan and world cricket. [Link]

"Indian": Perhaps the most abused term in history

VS Naipaul explains why in his brilliant essay East Indian*:

…this word Indian has been abused as no other word in the language; almost every time it is used it has to be qualified. There was a time in Europe when everything Oriental or everything a little unusual was judged to come from Turkey or India. So Indian ink is really Chinese ink and India paper first came from China. When in 1492, Columbus landed on the island of Guanahani he thought he had got to Cathay. He ought therefore to have called the people Chinese. But East was East. He called them Indians, and Indians they remained, walking Indian file through Indian corn. And so, too, that American bird which to English-speaking people is the turkey is to the French, le dindon, the bird of India.

So long as Indians remained on the other side of the world, there was little confusion. But when in 1845 these Indians began coming over [as indentured laborers] to some of the islands Columbus had called the Indies, confusion became total...

But what were these immigrants to be called? Their name had been appropriated three hundred and fifty years before. “Hindu” was a useful word, but it had religious connotations and would have offended the many Muslims among the immigrants. In the British territories the immigrants were called East Indians. In this way, they were distinguished from the two other types of Indians on the islands: the American Indians and the West Indians. After a generation or two, the East Indians were regarded as settled inhabitants of the West Indies and were thought of as West Indian East Indians. Then a national feeling grew up. There was a cry of national integration, and the West Indian East Indians became East Indian West Indians.

This didn’t suit the Dutch. They had a colony called Surinam, or Dutch Guiana, on the north coast of South America. They also owned a good deal of the East Indies [Indonesia], and to them an East Indian was someone who came from the East Indies and was of Malay stock. (When you go to an Indian restaurant in Holland, you don’t go to an Indian restaurant; you go to an East Indian or Javanese restaurant.) In Surinam there were many genuine East Indians from the East Indies. So another name had to be found for the Indians from India who came to Surinam. The Dutch called them the British Indians. Then, with the Indian nationalist agitation in India, the British Indians began to resent being called British Indians. The Dutch compromised by calling them Hindustanis.

Hilarious, isn’t it?

*East Indian is an essay in the collection Literary Occasions, by VS Naipaul

The story of numbers

One of India’s greatest contributions to the world is the number system that everyone uses today. What the world knows today as Arabic numerals are really Indian numerals – including the controversial Zero. In the first millennium AD, they traveled from the Indian subcontinent westward to Baghdad, where the mathematician Musa Al Khwarizmi – who also initiated the field of algebra (al jabr) – wrote a treatise on them. At the time, Europe was using the cumbersome Roman numeral system. Watch this playful video that describes this history; watch how Indians used zeroes and ones to create stupendously large numbers.

(I should mention also that ancient Mexico also had its own sophisticated number system, and this system also included zero. Their inventions however are not always acknowledged in the history of mathematics - partly because history is not just Eurocentric, it is "Old-World centric".)

Video via Atanu. Also: An earlier post on the same topic; and the mysterious Ishango Bone of Africa.

My class and the US healthcare system

I am teaching a class this semester focused on the use of quantitative methods to improve the delivery of healthcare. Such things as: How can patients get faster access to medical appointments with their primary care doctors? What are the dynamics of supply and demand? How can emergency room operations be improved? Can medical practices be reorganized and if so how much improvement will it bring?

I like what I am teaching, but I don't want students to get bogged down just analyzing models and crunching numbers. I'd like them to know the big picture as well -- especially what's going on currently in the US healthcare system, how it compares to other countries. I want to bring social aspects into consideration. Some may say this borders on activism and should be avoided in a class meant for engineers. But are engineers not supposed to work for the greater good?

Anyway, in my second class, I screened this documentary -- available free online. 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. As to how those flaws should be fixed -- well, that's too difficult a question. Recently, an academic whose research is on improving healthcare in developing countries said to me: "You can improve and make things better in poorer countries. But the US health care system - well, I don't think that is going to change."

Three key shortcomings emerge from the documentary. 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?

And last week, I had students read and discuss this essay by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. The essay is a few years old now, but the the issues raised are still relevant. Gladwell asks the question: Why doesn't the US have universal healthcare coverage? He posits that US policy-makers fear moral hazard, the idea that people may overuse the healthcare system if they have insurance. But is moral hazard really an issue in healthcare? Would you really increase the number of times you visit the hospital if you had better insurance?

Gladwell begins the essay with an intense description of tooth decay, a seemingly peripheral condition. But as he shows, those without insurance often ignore their teeth - with no health insurance, a dentist's visit is too expensive. Their teeth rot as a result. Their social skills plummet as they become increasingly conscious of the decay.

People without health insurance have bad teeth because, if you're paying for everything out of your own pocket, going to the dentist for a checkup seems like a luxury. It isn't, of course. The loss of teeth makes eating fresh fruits and vegetables difficult, and a diet heavy in soft, processed foods exacerbates more serious health problems, like diabetes. The pain of tooth decay leads many people to use alcohol as a salve. And those struggling to get ahead in the job market quickly find that the unsightliness of bad teeth, and the self-consciousness that results, can become a major barrier. If your teeth are bad, you're not going to get a job as a receptionist, say, or a cashier. You're going to be put in the back somewhere, far from the public eye.

Bad teeth, thus, become an "outward marker of caste" -- the caste of the uninsured. Disturbing stuff. Go read the full essay.

Conversations in cabs

I get along extremely well with cab drivers. I can hardly remember a ride without an enriching conversation. Many drivers in the major cities of the United States are immigrants; most I met were from Africa. In Washington DC there is a fifty percent chance your driver will be Ethiopian. My discussions have always been political: I ask about how things are going in this or that country; we then talk about India. Invariably, the drivers tell me about Indian acquaintances in their respective home countries – Indians settled as teachers, doctors, professionals. I also use these conversations to test my still-evolving notions about Africa.

Let me present here two vignettes. These two don’t follow the trajectory I’ve described above -- well at least not entirely -- but they are the ones that stand out in my mind.

1.

I met Steven in 2007, in a small suburban town in Maryland. Steven was from Ghana; his demeanor was hurried and his tone aggressive. But this turned out be just an external manifestation, a habit. Steven was friendly and eager to talk. Like many other drivers I've met, he was well traveled. He had even been to India: he had visited Calcutta in the late eighties, remarkably, to participate in an international ping-pong tournament, and had been impressed. What had he found striking?

“Well, you guys have your own cars, and you have your own transportation systems. I could tell you were well on your way to becoming a superpower.”

I wasn’t surprised with the superpower part – that was a common refrain in the Western media as well. I was surprised because Steven’s conclusions were based on an India glimpsed before the country’s economic liberalization. The cars he was referring to were hulky Ambassadors, and the transportation system, Calcutta’s trams. Many Indians lament the period before the economic reforms of the 90s, when growth in India was sluggish and stifled by bureaucracy.

Steven, in contrast, had been impressed by the achievements of the Indian state. Admittedly, he could not have learned much from one short visit. But perhaps Steven looked at it that way because African states, with a few exceptions, provide little for their people. I told him I thought Ghana was doing well. He did not think so. “There are no jobs,” he said unhappily, with something approaching rage. “What do you do when you have no work?” He wasn’t convinced that other parts of Africa were doing well either. “People say South Africa is doing well. But it’s just the white people, a small minority. For the blacks, it’s the same story.”

Steven wasn't the only one with such cynicism. The same sentiments constantly resurfaced in almost all my conversations. There was frustration and helplessness over the divisive, ethnic nature of politics in Africa. What I’ve heard from Africans only provides anecdotal evidence that supports a well-known fact: that Africa’s nations – whose borders were decided rather arbitrarily in European capitals in the 19th century and not on any templates from African history – are not nations fully yet.

2.

In Atlanta earlier this week, I rode with a driver whose accent suggested he might be African-American. But I was mistaken. Paul was from Jamaica. And since the Caribbean is full of people of Indian origin, it wasn’t surprising that Paul had several close Indian acquaintances; his own half-brothers were half-Indian. To top it off, Paul, like me, loved cricket. As we headed towards Midtown Atlanta, we were bogged down by the morning traffic. But I didn't mind at all: we had plenty to talk about.

I called Paul again in the evening for a ride back to my hotel, but he was busy, and instead sent someone else. This time, it was a middle-aged man, Olivier Kone, from Côte d'Ivoire. It felt like a relay: one interesting cabbie was passing me to another. I had never met anyone from Côte d'Ivoire before. But I did remember VS Naipaul’s long travel essay about the country, The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro. Yamoussoukro is the capital of Côte d'Ivoire – rather it was made into a political center by the country’s first leader, Félix Houphouët-Boigny. In the 1960s and 70s the country was booming: exports in cocoa and coffee fed the economy. Naipaul, writing at the time of the boom, had presciently stated it would all collapse. He saw an excessive reliance on French expertise. The country unraveled in the 1990s after the death of Houphouët-Boigny; I am not fully cognizant of the reasons, but ethnicity – Africa’s bane – played a role here as well.

I discussed all this with Olivier. As we approached my hotel, he asked what I had seen in Atlanta. I told him I’d been too busy. I'd been considering the Coca Cola Center -- which many recommended -- but I was much more interested in the Martin Luther King Center on Auburn Avenue in downtown Atlanta. Atlanta had been King’s home and is where he is buried. The Ebenezer Baptist church, where King and his father had pastored, is also in the neighborhood.

“What’s there to see in the Coca Cola center man? They charge you $25 to see a beverage! Go see King’s place. It's free; and it’s a special place. In fact call me tomorrow morning; I’ll take you there and drive you back to the airport. I won’t charge you for the time you spend watching the exhibits.”

We agreed on a time and set out together the next morning. The Atlanta skyline was ahead of us as we took the interstate. When we got to the center, Olivier took off the Taxi sign from the roof of the cab and accompanied me -- he wasn't a cabbie for this visit. The King Center comprised of about three buildings, all with drab exteriors. That was disappointing: I expected the place to be grander; it was, after all, commemorating one of America's greatest leaders. The emptiness on Auburn Avenue that morning only added to the seeming insignificance of the place. The interior was better and consisted mostly of black and white pictures from the 1950s and 60s and sound clips of King’s rousing speeches.

Olivier was keen to show me the large, dark-brown statue of a walking Gandhi – a gift from India – outside one of the buildings. He led me also to a room dedicated to Gandhi; there were pictures of King visiting India in 1959 -- one picture showed him shaking hands with Lal Bahadur Shastri. King was born in 1929, sixty years after Gandhi. Gandhi’s non-violent struggle against the British had inspired King; but King’s achievement, in my opinion, surmounts Gandhi’s. The legacy of slavery and segregation is far more humiliating than of colonialism. It is also harder to fight against: the struggle is as much in the mind of the oppressed as against the policies of the oppressors.

It was time for me to get to the airport. As Olivier and I walked back to the cab, it struck me that ours was a special visit. We were certainly an unusual pair: he was from Côte d'Ivoire; I was from India. We hardly knew each other and yet it did not feel that way. Olivier is black and the struggle for civil rights no doubt resonates strongly with him. I was aware business was one reason why he had suggested I call him in the morning. But there was also earnestness: Olivier genuinely wanted to show me the place, especially the Gandhi statue and exhibits. He wanted to take pictures for me and was disappointed I did not have a camera.

And to think that it was all chance. Had Paul, the Jamaican cab-driver, not sent Olivier, I would have never met him. And but for Olivier’s insistence the previous night that I visit the King Center and his offer to take me there, I would have never gone.

But then itineraries do change unexpectedly -- I am glad mine did.

Nigeriatown in China, like Chinatown in Nigeria

Perhaps globalization's most visible symbol is the ubiquity of Chinese products everywhere in the world. China in Africa is an especially big story these days. But what you might not have heard is the growing presence of African immigrants - many of them Nigerians - in Guangzhou, China. Take a look.

Let's kindle reading passions

How? With this product that will allow both the structured reading of books and unsystematic browsing. I am sold.

Ramble on! And pictures from Mexico

I've been overwhelmed with work. The downside of being an academic in the US, especially if you are in engineering or the sciences and at a research university, is the relentless emphasis on getting grant money -- from federal sources such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (if you work in healthcare). And grants carry even more weight as universities struggle with budget cuts in the current economic situation.

There are positive things about the process: once you get a grant, students get funded, research happens, new discoveries are made. But boy, is the process sapping! And grant writing is strange also because the content is largely triumphant and runs roughshod over skepticism. No one will give money unless you sound completely sure. The best writing, though, comes from intense introspection: great literature is all about doubt and fallibility.

I have couple of deadlines coming in a week. Which is why this space has been idle so far this month. I expect this to be a slow month for blogging. But since this might be one of the few chances I may have to write in the coming days, let me keep typing - or rambling.

I've written only a couple of essays about my Mexico trip; I had been planning to do a whole lot more. It may still happen but here are some pictures meanwhile, with some narrative. Please make sure you click on the pictures - you'll get a much better view.

1. I took this picture during the southern approach to Mexico City. The Valley of Mexico is a high valley - Mexico City sits in it at 7000 feet. And all around are mountains, some of them volcanic. When Cortes met Montezuma in Mexico City (then called Tenochtitlan) on Nov 8th, 1519, one of them could be seen in eruption. Let's imagine, then, that the mountain you see below was the one Cortes saw.


2. This one I took before the final approach to Mexico City. The sprawl of Mexico City is partially captured here. The city and its immediate surroundings are home to about 20 million people, like Bombay.


Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that the plane was approaching Mexico City on Nov 8, 1519, at the same moment that the Spanish conquistador Cortes had that historic meeting with the Mexica ruler, Montezuma. What would we have seen? First of all, the valley would have been filled with lakes, almost none of which exist today. Secondly, in the middle of one such lake, would be a city that would keep you spellbound. Pyramids, towers, markets, long arrow-straight causeways, neatly swept streets, stunning botanical gardens, canoes flitting in the lake like butterflies, and hundreds of thousands of people.

What a sight that would have been!

3. The Spanish destroyed the lake city, and built Mexico City on top of the Aztec capital. The lakes were drained. The debris from Aztec monuments and buildings was used in the construction of churches. Curiously enough in Mexico, the surviving great monuments are from a much older time. Like this one below, the Pyramid of the Sun (part of Teotihuacan), dated to around 500 CE (no connection to the Aztecs). It is the third largest pyramid in the world. The largest pyramid in the world is - are you ready? - also in Mexico, in Cholula, Puebla. It is not, as you might have thought, the Giza pyramid.


The little figures you see crawling atop the pyramid are people (like I said before, click for a better view). In Mexico, tourists fall upon ancient ruins as an army of ants upon tasty crumbs. Most tourists are Europeans. They are generally fascinated by the ancient cultures of Mexico. This is really an extension of the European reaction to the splendors of the Americas when they were "discovered". Most cultures place themselves at the center of the world (China, for example, is The Middle Kingdom);the Europeans were no different . They were bewildered upon encountering the civilizations of the Americas. How could it be that others had independently figured out the nuances of architecture, astronomy and mathematics? This disbelief mixes with a horrified fascination for the brutality of pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico: many of them practiced ritual sacrifices.

Yes, human sacrifice is a bad thing, and the Spanish were right in being shocked. But how many heretics did Spain burn at the stake during its inquisitions?

Karina's world

I met Karina at Casa Na Bolom, a hotel and an archaeological research institute in the highland city of San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. Once headed by Trudy and Francis Bloom – she was a Swiss anthropologist and photographer, he a Danish archaeologist – Na Bolom has always been committed to serving the indigenous groups of Chiapas, especially the Lacandon, a small community who live in the rainforest near the Mexico-Guatemala border. Lacandonese families can stay at Na Bolom; they can get medical treatment if necessary; and there are also education initiatives for their children.

Karina was one of these children. She was playing in the courtyard – a beautiful courtyard enclosed by bright yellow walls – with her brother and sister. She was about five years old. She had wide face, and her features were very much like those of the other indigenous children and women I met during my travels in Chiapas. Her mother, Maria, sat in the courtyard selling beads.

I met Karina shortly afterward. She readily sat next to me on the wooden bench, a big smile on her face. She wasn’t shy. I did not speak Spanish, so we communicated in gestures.

“Hari,” I said, pointing to myself. She was smart and understood immediately: “Karina,” she said.

We played for a bit. I made a rocket out of the map of San Cristobal and pretended it was headed towards me and I was fleeing unsuccessfully. Karina laughed heartily. She insisted that I repeat it. I did, and within minutes we were like good friends.

That was the last I saw of her. But the next day I traveled from San Cristobal down to the rainforest along the Mexico-Guatemala border – coincidentally, to the little village of Lacanja, where Karina had been born. When I realized this, Karina became an accompaniment to every detail I observed during my travels: the hike through the rainforest, the other Lacandonese I met, the villages I passed by on my drive. I wanted to understand the milieu she was growing up in, how she must be beginning to view the world around her.

___

A trail in the Lacandon Rainforest (picture mine)

Already, Karina was bilingual: she spoke Spanish fluently, but with a slight accent; I had also heard her speak her mother tongue, Lacandon, with her mother and siblings. Karina had probably spent most of her time growing up in Lacanja. She would have been used to walking with elders through the rainforest, an experience that will instill a wonder for the natural world in her.

Karina would have been told she was Mexican; and that Guatemala was short distance away, on the other side of the Usumacinta River. But the talk of nations and boundaries may not have made much sense. She was first and foremost Lacandonese. And she would realize, as she grew up, that hers was a very small community - and a community that was changing fast. Lacanja may be remote, but roads have brought tourists and economic opportunities in the last few decades.

Karina probably knows already that her people are materially poor. In fact, if you look at pictures of the Lacandon, you would think they were an isolated tribe of hunter-gatherers living in the pristine rainforest. But appearances are always deceptive, and the twists and turns of history always humbling. Very close to the Lacandon rainforest are breathtaking Mayan ruins – in Bonampak, Yaxchilan, and Palenque. The Lacandon may have come from Yucatan, another region where Mayans were once dominant. Karina will come to know, upon visiting these ruins – some of which her people consider sacred – that she is Mayan. Lacandon, in fact, is a Mayan language. Her ancestors built spectacular city states in the first millennium AD, and excelled in astronomy and mathematics.

Once upon a time, then, Karina’s people must have led a different sort of life.

With the coming of the Spanish, however, the Lacandon retreated to the rainforest. In the 1940s they were connected again with the broader world. Due to their isolation, they had, unlike indigenous communities in Mexico, retained many of their Mayan beliefs.
___

Moss-covered Mayan ruins at Yaxchilan (picture mine)

Karina will quickly realize as she travels the cities of Chiapas that other Mayan groups (Mayan language diversity in Chiapas is impressive: Tzotzil, Tzetzal, Tojolabal, Chol, Chuj and Zoque) are also poor, but have more experience with modernity. She will also learn of the Zapatista movement - more precisely EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional), named after Emiliano Zapata, a leading figure in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) - which surprised everyone by capturing cities on Chiapas on the Jan 1st, 1994. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect the same day. This was not a coincidence: the Zapatistas were and still are against neo-liberal economic policies.

A board I spotted close to Lacanja

The army is still attempting to hunt these rebels. There are many checkpoints on the way to Karina’s village, Lacanja. There are also plenty of signs that the Zapatistas have sympathizers - they are, after all, on the side of the Chiapas' poor Mayan communities, who form a significant portion of the state's population. Perhaps on one of her trips from San Cristobal to Lacanja, Karina will see this board that I saw, and wonder what it is about.

“Muera el sistema capitalista” or “Death to the capitalist system.”

But if Karina travels to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the sprawling capital city of Chiapas (almost eight hours away from Karina’s birthplace: how inexorable distances can be in this small state!), she will notice that the capitalist system is thriving. American stores are everywhere. The modern bus station in Tuxtla – sparkling white and red – is part of a humongous mall that could easily shame some of the ones I’ve been to the US. It is also superbly maintained: for every little blemish on the floor, there emerges, dutifully, out of nowhere, a new janitor.

This, Karina will know instantly, is a place very different from the Chiapanecan hinterland she belongs to.
___

Karina’s world, then, has been shaped by many forces, spanning both space and time: the dense rainforest of Chiapas and the incessantly mountainous terrain; Mayan city states; the multitude of languages; the Spanish conquest of the 16th century and its lingering effects; the blending of Christian and Mayan faiths; the modern Mexican nation state, which is sometimes like an extension of Spanish subjugation; NAFTA and the Zapatista Rebellion.

Consciously or otherwise, Karina will carry all of these with her.

Why does India neglect its classical languages?

Asks Sheldon Pollock, in this essay in The Hindu.

At the time of Independence, and for some two millennia before that, India was graced by the presence of scholars whose historical and philological expertise made them the peer of any in the world. They produced editions and literary and historical studies of texts in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu — and in Apabhramsha, Assamese, Bangla, Brajbhasha, Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya, Persian, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Urdu — that we still use today. In fact, in many cases their works have not been replaced. This is not because they are irreplaceable — it is in the nature of scholarship that later knowledge should supersede earlier. They have not been replaced because there is no one to replace them.

[...]

Today, in neither of the two great universities in the capital city of India, is anyone conducting research on classical Hindi literature, the great works of Keshavdas and his successors. Imagine — and this is an exact parallel — if there were no one in Paris in 2008 producing scholarship on the works of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Not coincidentally, a vast number of Brajbhasha texts lie mouldering in archives, unedited to this day.

[...]

Nine years ago, H.C. Bhayani, the great scholar of Apabhramsha, passed away. With his death, so far as I am able to judge, the field of Apabhramsha studies itself died in India. To my eyes, the situation with Apabhramsha is symptomatic of a vast cultural ecocide that is underway in this country. And not just language knowledge is disappearing but all the skills associated with it, such as the capacity to read non-modern scripts, from Brahmi to Modi to Shikhasta.

[...]

There is another Sanskrit proverb that tells us it is far easier to tear down a house than to build it up (asakto ham grharambhe sakto ham grhabhanjane). The great edifice of Indian literary scholarship has nearly been torn down. Is it possible, at this late hour, to build it up again? [...] Why should India not commit itself to build the same kind of institute to serve the needs of its culture — not just dance and art and music, but its literary culture? Why should it not build an Indian Institute of the Humanities devoted not just to revivifying the study of the classical languages, but to producing world-class scholarship, as a demonstration of what is possible, a model for universities to follow, and a source of new scholars to staff those universities?

Indeed, why not? The state of affairs is best illustrated by my own ignorance of Apabhramsha - I know what it refers to now, but if you had asked me just a few minutes ago, before I encountered it in Pollock's essay, I would have had no clue. So it goes.

Also: a recent post on Sanskrit.

Nadeem Paracha's Blow Daddy

While still on Pakistan, here's a brilliant piece of satire from Nadeem Paracha in Dawn, one of the country's most prominent newspapers (credit for pointing this out goes to a good friend of mine from Pakistan). Just as the Dalrymple essay linked in my previous post meticulously lays bare the danger that Pakistan faces due to the military's courting of Islamic extremists for dubious ends, so this piece by Paracha lays bare, with comedy that is as chilling as it is hilarious, how narrow the world of the extremist is, and how it is built on lies. Paracha cleverly uses the format of a conversation between a father and his son to illustrate his point - a short extract below:

Daddy?

Yes, son.

Are we going to have a war with India?

Perhaps.

Oh, goody. We will thrash them, right? Like we did in 1857!

It wasn’t in 1857, son.

Oh, okay. But whom did we thrash in 1857?

The British, son…

And the Hindus too, right?

Well…

Did Quaid-i-Azam fight in that war along with Muhammad bin Qasim and Imran Khan?

No, son. The Quaid and Imran were born much later and Muhammad bin Qasim died many years before.

Then who ruled Pakistan in those days?

There was no Pakistan in those days, son.

But there was always a Pakistan! It has been there for 5,000 years!

Who have you been talking to, son?

No one. I’ve just been watching TV.

It figures.

Daddy, why are all these people against us Arabs?

Arabs? But we aren’t Arabs, son.

Of course we are because our ancestors were Arabs!

No, son. Our ancestors were of the subcontinental stock.

Sub-what?

Never mind.You seem to like wars, son.

Read on