Ram Manohar Lohia's 100th Birthday

One of my colleagues had his birthday on 23 March. I walked up to him as soon as he came in and wished him a Happy Birthday. As I shook his hand, I said to him, 'Do you know you share your birthday with...' Before I could finish, he quipped, 'Yes, the martyrdom of Baghat Singh and ...' 'No, no, I am talking about Ram Manohar Lohia.' And as I said this, another colleague, who loves a friendly bantering said, 'No wonder, there is something of Amar Singh in the birthday boy..." And we had a a little laugh about it.

This two-minute episode is quite instructive of our political sensibilities at this point of time. Politics for us is either a dead ideal or a living, though sick, cunning. In the middle of these two perceptions, the insights are lost. In contemporary Punjabi folklore Bhagat Singh is an icon of Sikh and not just Marxist pride. There are movies about Bhagat Singh, one of them has 23 March 1931 as part of the title. This has kept his memory alive. The other figure, that of Amar Singh, is as theatrical as any Bollywood film. He epitomises, in public eye, political opportunism at its worst and to the critics, this is what ultimately happens to the political heirs of Lohiaism.

But I want to know the man first hand. I have recently been reading about Ram Manohar Lohia. The trouble is that his books are just not available out there. So I've taken printouts of his few writings, which are scattered on various blogs, and read them off and on. On the 23rd, it was his birth centenary. It is generally a big deal when a political leader of such stature complete 100 years. But apart from one article in Deccan Herald and a report of a seminar in Goa there wasn't much that was available to me online on that day. I picked up a copy of the Hindu to see if there's any editorial or op-ed. Zilch.

I am not a socialist. But to me it was a bit sad to see this amnesia about an important person in our recent history. So I wrote a quick piece for the Herald of India, which the editor was very kind to publish and give a headline too.

One reader responded to the write-up with a very interesting anecdote.

The timely and informative piece, 'Deafening silence on Lohia', took me back to mid- sixties when I heard Lohia for the first time at an open rally in Chandigarh's Sector 15. It still is etched on my mind how he attributed most of our failures to our inherent indecisiveness. I remember even the fine example he gave to prove his point. On visiting a friend, if he offers us a choice between having tea and coffee we fail even to tell him our personal preference or choice. "Kuch bhi chaleyga", Lohia rightly lamented the attitude. He continued by lampooning Lal Bhadur Shastri, the then PM, saying that he too remains indecisive on many issues and he often sees two instead of one face of Shastri in Parliament, yeh bhi theek hai, woh bhi theek hai. -Balvinder

I love such personal memories and anecdotes but this was a particularly intriguing comment because I lived in Sector 15 of Chandigarh for most part of my life. That little connection warmed me up.

Later that day, I got to read the news that Kanu Sanyal committed suicide by hanging himself. Did somebody notice that he chose 23 March as the day of his death? And also, that three other revolutionaries died that way in 1931. Here are a few of links of some remembrances. Rediff, Times of India, DNA, The Hindu.

Converting footnotes to endnotes

Here's the editor at work.

In one MS Word document I was working on this afternoon, I had to change footnotes at the bottom of each page to endnotes, which would appear at the end of the document. It's not difficult at all to do that in Word, but there was one glitch, the endnote numbers changed to Roman (i, ii, iii...) from Arabic (1, 2, 3...). So there was an additional set of steps to ensure the numbers remain the same.

1. Right click on any footnote anywhere in the document.
2. Select Note Options… from the drop-down list.
3. In the dialogue box, click on Convert… button.
4. A small dialogue box will appear with one of the three options highlighted. For our purpose, it will be Convert all footnotes to endnotes. Click OK.
5. Click Close.

That's it! But, in case you want Arabic and not Roman numerals for your endnotes,

1. Right click on any of the endnotes.
2. Select Note Options… from the drop-down list
3. In the dialogue box, change Number format: to 1, 2, 3… Click Apply

Documenting my great rediscovery for posterity.

Disclaimer: I work with MS Office 2003, so it might be useless for those working on advanced versions.

The Digression Teacher

I am sorry! I am not terribly excited about this bright idea of yours Honourable Education Minister. Is it a cover-up for the repeated failure of your ministry in providing a decent education facilities to children in your state? Your teachers are up in arms against you. Students are not coming to schools. The list of failures goes on and on.

Now the best way to divert attention, for her as for other Punjab MLAs, is to rake up the two most emotional issues the state has frequently exploited since Independence, Punjabi Language and Chandigarh.

I just hope there are no agitations in next few days! So tired of traffic snarls already! There are no digressions left for the commuters.

Ambani/Mittal and Lohia: A Tentative Remark

One of the news that most Indian news portals flashed persistently throughout today was about Mukesh Ambani and Laxmi Narayan Mittal being the richest Indians. We, the Indian readers, are supposed to be waiting for one of these men to become THE richest man in the world. Because that will strengthen our tentative hopes that India is indeed becoming a developed nation. We are in a hurry to overtake America and other Western societies. We want to be rich like them. We want to be like them in all aspects. And in all this we forget that one of the reasons, besides others, for them becoming rich was colonialism. They were able to find a way to boost their economies at the cost of other nations.* Ram Manohar Lohia (on whom I am sipping lately) had an interesting insight about this. He said that we can't be advanced like West unless we ourselves become colonizers.** Either we find colonies on other planets or "colonize" the people within our own country. The latter is indeed happening. Singurs and Nandigrams are examaples of this internal colonialism. We can stretch it further to Kazakhstan where Mittal was accused of slave labour. Mukesh Ambani did not want to think beyond his profit in last year's gas crisis, completely overlooking public interest. Of course, the issue also exposed the inaptness of the petroleum ministry. It's ironical that these men have become mascots of our national pride.

We want more and more to look like Westerners in the way we do our business and the way we evaluate it's benefit to our society and our people. Is that the only way? The recent global recession and, closer home, the Satyam fiasco, should propel us to look for alternatives.

(16 March 2010: Apparently that insight came to Lohia via Gandhi, who expressed similar thoughts in his journal Young India on 7 October 1926 [cited by Kishan Pattnayak in his Vikalphin Nahin Hai Duniya, New Delhi:Rajkamal, 2000, p 87.])

______________________________

* One can counterbalance this with Max Weber's idea of puritan ethics and developement of capitalism in Western Europe but that's for some other time.

** Lohia also recognizes the fact that the 'greatness' of modern Western civilization owes to spiritual dynamics of faith, which has been ultimately undermined by an unbridled cult of 'industrialism'.

Women's Day: Little Poetry, Little Pondering

It's Women's Day today. Women colleagues at the office were cajoled to treat us with some dhokla and gulab jamuns. But there must be more to this day of the feminine. Wife is away, so the second-best thing is to celebrate it with poetry. Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Women" is a hit with most women. I am immediately drawn to few poems of my own liking. I think of Nissim Ezekiel's "Poet, Lover and Birdwatcher" in which the "woman slowly turns around" as "myths of light/With darkness at core" or twists frantically in pain as the mother in the "Night of the Scorpion", who is grateful even after having been bitten by the scorpion when she says "Thank God the scorpion picked on me/And spared my children". The sensuousness of the former, in particular, has transfixed me every time I read it. This to me is one of the ultimate "woman" poems, besides some Neruda.

But then, also follow lines from Jayanta Mahapatra's "The Lost Children of America" (the text once available online is now only found in fragments), in which the poet makes a reference to a horrific event:

In the Hanuman Temple last night

the priest’s pomaded jean-clad son

raped the squint-eyed fourteen-year fisher girl

on the cracked stone platform behind the shrine

and this morning

her father found her at the police station

assaulted over and over again by four policemen

dripping of darkness and of scarlet death.

Oh! I wanted to concentrate on the positives. But tragedy is quite inextricably woven in the acts of reflection on contemporary times. How I wanted to identify with Ezekiel the aesthete but am not able to shake off the crude reality of violence that's so much a part of men's psyche. Wait! Why only men's psyche? Sujata Bhatt interrogates the revered figure of mother in "Voice of the Unwanted Girl". Extracts from the poem follow:

Mother, I am the one

you sent away

when the doctor told you

I would be

a girl – In the end they had to

give me an injection to kill me.

Before I died I heard

the traffic rushing outside, the monsoon

slush, the wind sulking through

your beloved Mumbai –

I could have clutched the neon blue

.....................................no one wanted –

No one wanted

to touch me – except later in the autopsy room

when they knew my mouth would not search

for anything – and my head could be measured

and bent and cut apart.

I looked like a sliced pomegranate.

The fruit you never touched.

Mother, I am the one you sent away

when the doctor told you

I would be a girl – your second girl.

These are the first two paragraphs; the actual poem is slightly longer. It is from Sujata Bhatt's anthology My Mother's Way of Wearing a Sari (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000).

As I had a baby, a son, recently I can in a strange way relate with this poem. The instinctive actions and reactions of a child (my mouth would not search for anything) are so vivid in my mind that it breaks my heart to read this poem. I am also aware of unspoken yet tremendous pressure created by family, society and part of our inner selves to bring forth a son, that I think I will always feel tender for a girl child.

Confession of a selfish father

Tomorrow is Holi. Sonny will spend the festival of colours with his mother's side of the family. He will be there for a couple of months or so. Wife was looking forward to this period as this is her first really extended stay with her native family, especially her mum, after our marriage. It was amazing to see the way she and mum-in-law confabulated about so many things, from the correct posture and position to feeding the child to number of layers of clothes to wrap him in, to decide how hot the water should be before bathing him. Mum-in-law was here for all these 17 days, besides my own sister who had come down with her two kids for spending winter vacations with us. It was great to have them here, as well as my own parents. Though I did change and wash nappies occasionally, it would have been too much for me to do that sometimes as frequently as thrice in five minutes and that too at about 3.30 in the morning.

But these days were busy for me in so many other ways and to be honest, I don't quite mind this break.

Tomorrow may be a different story, though!

Effective Fixation

Psychologists shouldn't get involved with their patients. Teachers shouldn't fall for their students. Editors shouldn't get obsessed with the books they are supposed to be only making ready to go to print. In the last case, there's nothing overtly ethically dubious, or so I think, hence, I'll continue to read after lunch, Chapter 3 Learning, Motivation, and Performance from P. Nick Blanchard and James W. Thacker's Effective Training: Systems, Strategies, and Practices, 4th ed, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010). Why am I so hooked to this chapter is perhaps because of some contextual reasons. It is that time of the year when we get to know the result of our yearly performance assessment as reflected in the increment letter we get. That of course makes one nervous, excited, disappointed, elated, but on the whole, I think, this gives us a time to self-evaluate honestly without being influenced by any external seduction of a raise or a bonus. Also, as I start a new year and new projects come my way, I want to be more deliberate about all that I do this year and, thus, find myself interested in theories of motivation, learning, etc.

No, there must be another reason too. As I read this, I also recall my years in teaching, both in formal and informal settings. I was eligible to teach after my MA, but except the fact that I cleared an exam, I didn't have any formal training in how to teach. It is interesting that those of us who teach undergraduate or postgraduate students did not have to bother with teaching methodology or theories of learning. We did it with a gut feeling. I think why I am enjoying this chapter is beacause I an subconsciously comparing how I taught and how teaching/training should be done. I am thinking of things I did right and things I didn't.

Anyway, can't spend too much time pondering over this. Lunch time is over. I need to get back to business.

Acknowledged Christ, Unacknowledged Disciples

I had always wanted to read this book and this evening as I met a friend at his house and shared a bit about my trip to UTC, Bangalore, haunted by spectres of Bangalore theologians, I asked him if he had a copy of M. M. Thomas's The Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance. He immediately pulled out a copy. I was pleasantly surprised to see the original 1970 edition published by The Christian Literature Society, Madras. I expected some kind of photocopy, originals of such books being rather rare, more so in my city, which is very far from Bangalore, in terms of distance as well as in nurturing theological reflection (I, in fact, remember once glancing through a photocopy of this title long time back).

The blurb of the book reads as follows:

A good deal has been written in recent years on the 'hidden' or 'unknown' Christ of traditional Hinduism. Mr. M.M. Thomas deals here with 'acknowledged' Christ of renascent Hinduism which was integral to the total Indian awakening. He surveys how some of the great spiritual leaders of the Indian renascence—leaders like Raja Rammohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi—sought to understand the meaning of Christ and Christianity for the new India that was emerging. And he studies, as part of his theological evaluation, the salient features of the dialogue that went on between these men and some of the Christian spokesmen in India.

In the preface, Thomas lays out his thoughts behind writing this book:

..I am deeply concerned with men's reflections on the truth of Jesus Christ in the context of their grappling with the meaning of life in concrete situations of history ... The theological fragments of this book relate to one historical situation, namely the awakening of Indian nationalism in the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century.

What I have done in this study is to survey how some of the foremost spiritual leaders of the Indian renaissance, especially of Neo-Hinduism, sought to understand the meaning of Jesus Christ and Christianity for religion and society in renascent India...As part of the survey, I have also tried to study how the Indian Church, in the thought of some of its theologically-minded representatives, has attempted to enter into dialogue with the ideas of these leaders and to formulate its own faith in Christ and the meaning of Indian nationalism.

This must be the most important book to be rediscovered by both Hindus and Christians of India, and of Karnatka in particular, a state that has witnessed some of the ugliest expressions of communal and cultural bigotry. I wish more people read and discussed this book and its author.

It's going to be a slow read. I am a slow reader. And given the battered condition the book is in (it's a 40-year-old paperback) it needs to be carefully handled. It needs to be carefully handled because it belongs to a friend and in a strange way the book belongs to the history of my city. It originally was part of Mr J. S. Dethe's library. On the full-title page there is rubber-stamp mark, upside down, that gives the particulars of its first owner, his name, designation, address and a three-digit phone number. Mr Dethe was one of the senior architects in the team that planned and developed the city of Chandigarh. I am intrigued to know that an architect was interested in matters theological. One wishes one could meet and talk to late Mr Dethe about his ideas about developing structures for human habitation and also his notions about developing a framework for biblical theology in India. Mr Dethe was also a member of a small group that got the church built in Sector 18. It would have been interesting to know what he felt about this book and how much did Thomas, who himself wasn't a trained theologian, influenced his efforts in community building. That church today is called Christ Church and is part of the Church of North India's (CNI) Diocese of Chandigarh. I have been told that Pratap SinghKairon, the then chief minister of Punjab, wanted only one church, one temple, one gurudwara and possibly one mosque in the newly built capital city of Chandigarh. For that reason Dethe and others had aimed to build this one church as an interdenominational/non-denominational church, where Christians from all doctrinal backgrounds may come and worship. Ravi Kalia, the author of Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City, mentions the fact that Maxwell Fry had a 'Quaker background' and Le Corbusier had a 'Calvinistic upbringing' and these affected the work of these two architects of Chandigarh। In this context too, it would too be interesting to know Dethe's church background.

(I am grateful to the publishers of The Herald of India for accommodating this write-up on their news portal. The editor's little note adds a great value to it. I am humbled)

Krishen Khanna reminisces

(I found this IANS piece on the Yahoo! Web site this morning. There are not so many stories out there on Indian painters and on modern Indian art in general. So wanted to save this one here. By the way, that he is a Punjabi and painted Jesus is not incidental to this act of preservation. The original story is found at http://in.news.yahoo.com/43/20100111/812/tnl-i-ve-gone-back-to-childhood-in-lahor.html. The image above is a painting by Khanna titled "Christ Carrying His Cross" found at www.artnet.com)

I've gone back to childhood in Lahore: Artist Krishen Khanna

Mon, Jan 11 08:45 AM
New Delhi, Jan 11 (IANS) In his new series of works, leading Indian contemporary artist Krishen Khanna has travelled back in time to his days in pre-partition Lahore, which today lies in Pakistan.

'They are mostly a recollection of events that I have seen in my early childhood - when tension between the British rulers and Indian freedom fighters was escalating,' Delhi-based Khanna told IANS in an interview.

The 84-year-old artist is preparing for a retrospective exhibition at the Lalit Kala Akademi Jan 23 to be organised by the Mumbai-based online gallery Saffronart.

Khanna has completed five large format oil compositions in monochrome, which he says are an extension of his memories of Maclagan Road in Lahore, where he lived in a cosmopolitan neighbourhood 'with Parsis, Sikhs, Christians and Muslims'.

'The series begins with an oil drawing of Gurbaksh Rai, an old homeopathic doctor saying goodbye to his family after being arrested by police. He was an ardent Congressman. I have used monochrome because if there is something I want to say, it is best to avoid the dynamics of colour. Then you are not dealing with the man - the subject matter - any more,' Khanna said.
The artist then moves on to terrorists 'trying to find a target in the way Bhagat Singh scouted for one' and also 'reminisces about an English lady who taught his mother how to read and speak the language'.

'One of my canvases depicts my uncle going to Pakpattan, a neighbouring town, with his family. He is stopped by the police, who threaten to shoot him. Fortunately, they don't.

'Another composition is about the ethnic cleansing that took place soon after partition where a woman finds herself at the bottom of a horse cart during the ethnic cleansing and a former Parsi armyman turned dentist in Lahore,' the artist said, describing his new body of works.

The retrospective spans six of Khanna's works from 1943.

'One had to be choosy about the art works, but several of my compositions - especially the black and white series - are abroad in the US and Europe. There are a lot of holes in the chronology,' Khanna said.

Walking down memory lane, the artist said he enjoyed working on his black and white series of ink sketches that he started on while in Honolulu.

'I worked in a bath tub because I feared messing up the room. Most of them were shapes that I saw at the bottom of the tub. I used to pour water through the sides of the papers in rivulets to smudge the colours on the surface for a blurred look. It was a convenient method. I took most of my black-and-white works for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Charles Egan Gallery,' Khanna recalled.

'You can see five of them at the National Gallery of Modern Art in the capital, which is also planning another retrospective,' the artist said.

Khanna lamented that 'his friend Tyeb Mehta, who grew up with him Lahore, could not manage a retrospective'.

'I am lucky that I did,' he said.

Born in 1925 at Faislabad in Pakistan, Khanna grew up in Lahore. He studied art after graduating from the Mayo School of Fine Arts. In 1947, his family moved to Shimla after partition. It found a way into his early works.

Most of Khanna's works are figurative. 'I used to do abstractions earlier, but now I have moved to human forms,' he said.

Khanna has always 'loved connecting to the masses through his art'.

'In the 1970s and the 80s, I painted a series of trucks ferrying workers - and coloured them with the shades of people and goods the vehicles were carrying. They were mostly monochromatic pictures,' he said.

Around the same time, the artist started working on Christ as a subject. 'I was looking at Jesus Christ as a holy and otherworldly person striving and going through existence. He was a carpenter's son and the state rose against him,' Khanna said.

'I know the Bible,' he added.

'If you look at my series on the Bandwallahs - whom I remember from my days in Lahore where the sahibs and the memsahibs used to listen to them - there is something sad about those people despite the colourful compostions. I have always tried to capture human emotions in my compositions - not make life studies,' Khanna said.

The artist, who has exhibited all over the world in his career spanning more than six decades, has been bestowed several honours, including the Lalit Kala Ratna from the president of India in 2004 and the Padma Shri in 1990.

(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in)
Madhusree Chatterjee

My New Year's Eve Meditation

Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the LORD. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt? and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?

(Amos 9:7, KJV)

In the context of the Old Testament, this verse is quite stunning. The Old Testament is an exclusive record of God's special favour on the chosen people, the Hebrews. The way their history unfolded was the result of how they responded to the loving-kindness and guidance of Jehovah. In time, they began to believe that their being chosen by God meant that all the others were rejected by Him. But this verse shows that the historical experiences of other peoples too were guided by God's favour and mercy. God did choose to reveal Himself more fully to the Israelites but He did not disappear from the scene as far as the other nations were concerned.

Is there a message in this for the Church today, or am I on the way to a heresy?

Not a bad scripture to reflect upon as one year, no, a decade, comes to close and the other one begins

Christmas emotions!

Christmas this year was a solemn affair. Grandmother went to be with her beloved Father on 22 December 2009. She was very old and died at the ripe age of, going by my father's estimate, 104 years (my own guess is 97). She passed away peacefully in her sleep. All this meant that life would go on as usual. I thought I would be able to celebrate Christmas like I generally do, catching up with friends and extended family from next day onwards. But on 23 morning I knew it wouldn't be the case. I woke up not wanting to socialize. Didn't even go to the church for Christmas worship service, simply because I couldn't visualize myself mingling well with people. On Christmas eve, my celebrations were limited to listening to some Christmas carols (many versions of "Silent Night" and Boney M's "Mary's Boy Child") on Youtube and singing "Make me a channel of your peace" with wife. Later in the night, I spoke to my sister on phone and told her that I didn't feel like going to church and she agreed with me that the old women did deserve a period of mourning.

This Christmas I also miss my older nephew a lot. Since last few Christmases, I had gotten used to listening to him singing at full throttle "Mary's boy Child". He being the first child in our family has always been a bit special, especially because, I think, he replaced me as the youngest child of the family. He was also a trend setter for the kids who followed. During last two years he must have become a better caroller; he is part of his school choir In England, I heard. But he should know that his best audience is back here in India.

Melancholy and nostalgia were dominant emotions for me for this Christmas.

Indian Christianity on a furlough

(The article was originally written for The Herald of India and was published under the title 25, yet no Christian)

THE WEEK, one of India's leading current-affairs magazines, has a cover story on 25 most valuable Indians. This Independence Day Special issue aims at celebrating, in the words of Shobhaa De, who wrote the opening note on values, "people who have impacted one billion lives directly or indirectly during the past one year". Whether they did have an impact on the entire one billion and also if these are truly the most eligible 25 valuables are questions that I wish to put on hold for a while.

Though the publication of this list wasn't supposed to be an Independence-Day event we have in schools, where all major religions are needed to be adequately represented in a show of 'unity in diversity', the ideal behind our national ethos, what I found intriguing is the absence of a Christian from the list. And one shouldn't be too hasty in pointing out the inclusion of Ashis Nandy. To be fair to the publishers, they seem to have conjured a 'facts-based' list, where the religious backgrounds hardly mattered. But on the eve of the sixty-second anniversary of Independence, this might give something to Christian communities of India to think about.

Christianity claims to have been around in India for over two millennia, but it seems it took a break for entire last year; perhaps it was too nervous about Madam Sonia Gandhi's Catholic connection resurfacing in the election year, or perhaps too shocked since killings in Kandhamal last August.

Had Mother Teresa been alive, she probably would have made it to the list, if nothing else then perhaps just for the sense of balance, religious as well as that of gender. There are three women as compared to 22 men in that list. And though T.N. Seshan believes Mata Amritanandmayi is a great soul too, he chose to pen the paean for Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, whose educational work in rural areas he highly appreciates and whose Sudarshan Kriya keeps the 76-year-old former Chief Election Commissioner 'energetic'.

For far too long, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, had been a sole representative of the Christians, for the Roman Catholics as well as non-Catholics, and definitely within the media. I remember, once a friend wanted to work on a documentary about the nurses in India, and he asked a reputed Indian journalist, a liberal Muslim, for some clips he had, which my friend thought he could use. Apparently the journalist replied that if it were something involving Mother Teresa, he would have given it but not now!

One of our most celebrated artists, M.F. Husain, paid glittering tributes to the diminutive frail nun from Albania by painting her as Mother Mary nursing the bruised body of the crucified Christ, a symbol of the sick and the poor dying uncared for on the streets of India. On the flip side that also means legitimising only one aspect of Christian faith.

Christianity in India cannot merely remain a religion of uncommitted piety, uncommitted to social, political and economic changes, that is. The poor and the suffering of the country need impartially dispensed compassion, but they also need ethically inspired intellect dedicated to press for structural changes at all levels of our shared life. The hand of compassion must be joined with the hand of critical engagement in a gesture of service to the nation. The task of moral and spiritual regeneration of the country that was visualised by every concerned Indian in that watershed year of 1947 could not be wished away by Indian Christians.

And today when we celebrate the anniversary of our Independence, the burden of the promise of new India must weigh heavy on the Christian chest.

In the year 1971, when the nation was still in its 20s, Nayantara Sahgal published her, if I remember correct, sixth novel, The Day in Shadow. The novel was inspired by real events in the author's life and like her other novels, this one too is imbued with her concern for emergence of a more humane India, which is fast sinking into a stupor generated by corruption in high places, petty politics and cruelty in human relationships. The reason I am reminded of this novel is because it is one of those rare ones where you find a 'Christian' character unbound by stereotypes. Raj Edwin Garg, who though doesn't share his father's religious convictions, brings Christian values, and occasionally Christian 'language', into public discourse. He is a 'brilliant, rising Member of Parliament', an independent, who seeks to find ways to propel the country out of the impasse between the 'Reds' and the 'reactionaries.'

He often enters into a good-humoured banter with his mentor, and father's friend, Rama Krishna, who in the last pages of this open-ended novel seems to have come terribly close to resolving the conflict between Hinduism and Christianity and finding a way to harness the energies of these two mighty streams of spiritual energy for the regeneration of the nation. Even though a work of fiction, this novel testifies to a time and occasion, or at least a possibility, when Christian thought was neither considered alien, nor marginalised, nor a minority view in relation to the so-called mainstream. Most importantly, it wasn't a dialogue between a Western Christian and an Indian Hindu. Here you have Indians on both sides examining the problems from two different angles and towards the end more sympathetic to the other view.

After all, the object of their concern was the same. Just as a note for those who think that the depiction of Christians in novels is not really a matter of particular concern and this novel by Sahgal is not a special achievement, one only needs to look at some of the recent novels, for instance, Tarun Tejpal's The Alchemy of Desire, where the only achievement of one Christian character is the number of bottles of whisky he has piled up in his backyard, or one can look at M.G. Vassanji's The Assassin's Song, in which the blind drunk presbyter of the Shimla church, tumbles into the protagonist's room, and has to be escorted home by his son. That is indeed the image of a Christian in many a mind, a jolly good fellow fully committed to having a good time till the Second Coming, untroubled and unmindful of any such list.

As for Ashis Nandy, the only hardcore academician in that list, he will agree that my observation, which set me off, is not that flimsy. Ashis Nandy comes from an elite Bengali Christian family; he really makes it look that he has come out of it.

Nothing sentimental about college education

I just came across an interview Tarun Tejpal gave to a career magazine. The interview had a rather catchy title "India's rich fund temples, not educational institutions", but what was of interest to me was his recounting of his college days. I felt a bit lofty that he did his BA from my city, though not from my college. DAV College in Sector 10 would too be proud of its alumnus. There is only one problem—Tejpal admits that he did not attend a single class in those entire three years! That obviously means that his "education" happened outside the institute and his college was merely a document-provider, giving him an official-looking piece of paper, a testimonial that he is a graduate. And barring some elite institutions, which mostly teach sciences, colleges in India are perfect breeding grounds for autodidacts. Two of my classmates immediately come to my mind, one has ended up being a bureaucrat while I saw the other selling vegetables in a mandi, sitting alongside men, most of whom, I am pretty sure, never had the chance to see how a degree college looks like from inside. College education was incidental to life pursuits of these two classmates of mine. I am increasingly of the opinion that for most of us Indians, it is not the education system that decides what we will end up doing in life but other things such as our family background and the web of social relationships we are part of. In this sense, perhaps, Indian education system is still a bit medieval if not ancient, where things like caste and class limit one's vocation in life. This, of course, is not to generalize, individual freedom does exist and perhaps in many other cases children find it easy to slip into the role their parents once performed (talking about roles, Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan are examples of individual freedom and family legacy respectively), but there have been umpteen number of cases where undeserving candidates get selected at the cost of people really cut out for a particular position. We do meet such professionals who are there because of a plug and not because of merit alone.

Sunday that Splintered Humanity

(The article originally written for The Herald of India, published as Black Sunday)

In 1992, just like this year, 6 December was a Sunday. We got up early morning to claim a cricket pitch before some rival teams came and denied us the chance to have a game on a much-awaited weekly holiday. We won the spot but I think we lost the match; and, when we got back home in the evening we heard the news that Babri Mosque has been pulled down. The news did not have much meaning for me. I was neither a Hindu nor a Muslim and lived in a largely non-politicized city. There weren’t any Muslims among our playmates and, as hindsight, we were saved the exchange of uncomfortable glances. Most guys I played with were Hindus and Sikhs but they seemed not too interested in this news item either. Those were the days when Sikh terrorism was still palpable in our parts; Hindu–Muslim conflict belonged to the Partition era. In any case, all of us teenagers loved our cricket more than anything else and were more interested in India playing first one-day international cricket match against South Africa the next day. I was fascinated by the Proteas; by the fact that they were no minnows though they had just started playing international cricket. I had fallen in love with that electrifying fielder at backward point, Jonty Rhodes and worshipped White Lightning Allan Donald. The historic match was played on 7 December 1992 at New Lands, the first ODI to be played in South Africa. India lost that match, much like our team the previous day. India’s best fielder and captain, Mohammad Azharuddin, another of my idols, dropped not one but two catches. Catastrophic as it was, it was a sort of thing that happened on a cricket field and an Indian fan had learnt to make peace with such debacles.

Meanwhile, the reports of Babri demolition and subsequent analyses were multiplying every single day. For a brief moment, next day, I listened to a panel discussion on the same. What caught my attention was what one panelist said. If my memory serves me correct, he very categorically declaimed that that event had disconcerted each and every Muslim in this country; how else could one explain Azhar grassing those straightforward chances. Is this true? Or is it just a fantastic conjecturing—I asked myself but could not decide. This was something far more disturbing than India’s capitulation in Cape Town could ever have been. In fact, it was at that moment the name Mohammad Azharuddin began signifying the notion of Muslim to me. Before that it only meant a dashing middle- order batsman and a supremely agile fielder to me, whose feats I secretly wished to emulate.

As a child, after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, I had learnt to neatly divide humanity in three—Christians, Sikhs and Hindus. After Post-Mandal agitation, as a pre-teen, I became aware of another set of categories to divide my friends and acquaintances—General, SC and OBC. While I was knocking at the gates of adulthood, in December 1992, humanity further splintered.

These divisions were real as I once found a younger man explaining to me the difference between Hindus and Muslims. We are so different—he said to me—We worship full moon and they worship new moon; we pray with our palms joined together but they keep them apart; we pay obeisance to the rising sun looking east, they turn towards west to pray.

Surface differences like these became creeds of separate nationalities.

Those who wanted to begin a movement of one people only gave birth to unbridgeable differences between one individual and the other. Those who thought they had won that spot in Ayodhya on Sunday, 6 December 1992, lost their souls bit by bit, category by category.

The house I left behind

I forget the context but wife said, "It seems we have been living in this house for a long time." "Yes," I said, "in fact, to me it seems that we never lived in that old house." That old house is a government accommodation where we spent first three years of our married life and where before that I had lived about seven and a half years of my bachelorhood. That was a house from where we married my sisters. The house my nephews and nieces fondly called 'nana home' and my mother's side of the family, 'guddi da ghar'. Nearly eleven years of my life were spent in that house and about another seventeen in that same, what we call, colony. But I do not miss it. Why? Why am I not nostalgic about that house? I only think about it when I am thinking of changing address in one document or the other. And even then I only think about the combination of some numbers and letters that comprised our address line. Nothing more.

Perhaps, we always knew that we had to leave it one day. Perhaps because my peers had all gone (one of them from this world), their nurse mothers having retired or, at least in three cases, died. Perhaps it was simply that we were at last able to move out from the unmindfully architectured and hurriedly fabricated dwellings. I use the term fabricated deliberately, because these belied the idea of decent housing.

But those houses shaped us. Gave us invaluable lessons in space management, for example. We were taught to be thankful for what fate (State) bestows upon us. And in turn, we continually shaped them. We tried and made those our own by experimenting with things like furniture and paints, doorhandles and commodes, by constructing extra rooms with corrugated-iron roofs, by growing a mulberry tree in the backyard, where we often saw some of the most exquisite birds stopping by to amuse our kids and make us adults curious.

After all this, if I am not nostalgic, am I ungrateful? I don't think so. Individuals in the service of the State deserve respectable housing for themselves and their families. The architects, the builders and the contractors must be sensitized to the needs of people who, though will not personally commission them and whom they will perhaps never meet face-to-face, inhabit the city envisaged by that savant of an architect, Le Corbusier.

Maybe, by nature I am not sentimental about places. But I do feel strongly about the arrogance, and callousness, with which government houses are constructed. And this strong feeling overpowers any amount of nostalgia my old abode can hurl at me.

My Orkut "Today's Fortune"

I am no sucker for those trite thought-of-the-day quotes, though I have begun to enjoy the occasional "Today's Fortune" on my orkut page. There was one I quite liked some time back and I had sent it to some of my friends, especially the ones suckling gloriously on Facebook, which incidentally, with some notable exceptions, gathers every triviality under the sun under its imbecile aegis. Well that day the fortune was:

Watch what you say — of those who say nothing, few are silent

But what I got today made me write a blog post. I did send that one too but without any catty design. It was, in fact, I must admit, a moment of edification. Some friends did reply. Here are some of the responses:

1. I miss orkut :(
2. Couldn't agree more. Thanks for sending it my way. Here is something similar: Imagination is the reality waiting to be created. Or, Imagination is reality-in-waiting.
3. Fabulous quote. True and liberating.

I was glad that these words did have a power to lighten up quite a few of us. It seemed to provide a key to some of the issues we continue to grapple with inside ourselves. It did give us a reason to be hopeful. It spoke gently and confidently to something deep inside us that refuses to surrender to hedonistic cynicism of the times. And most importantly, it became alive because we shared it among ourselves. By the way my orkut "Today's Fortune" read:

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

First blogger's park

Five of us met for the pretentiously named "First Blogger's Park" on Tuesday, 3 November 2009. I was glad that we all could make it despite it being a weekday. We already have one blog post on that meeting. Fellow bloggers it was great to spend time with you! Writing has meant so much, and so many things, to each one of us. I am sure we can have a series on this one topic alone—what has blogging done to, or done for, me. There were many things that we randomly picked and mostly left unfinished but perhaps that's a good sign; we all are brimming with ideas, which would sooner or later be turned into "written expressions". And while I hope we are encouraged to spend more time in solitude tapping on the keys, I also want to make some time in coming months to sit and unwind in the same company. Looking forward to meet you more and grow together with you all. One regret! We did not click any picture. So I am putting this painting I came across by chance on the Internet, by "a professional quilter, author, fabric and pattern designer". (Picture: http://valoriwells.typepad.com)

Dirty education!

A little distance from the new house we have recently shifted to is a slum. Our house is in Mohali and the slum technically belongs to the union territory of Chandigarh, the quintessential modern city that was supposed to be "unfettered by past" especially the filth that that past has accumulated over centuries. While I drove with my wife this morning past that slum, euphemistically called a "village", we wondered what happened to the residents in the monsoons, for some houses were actually built over the sewers while a channel of dirty water flowed below them. And as we were trying to clear the scenes of that obscenity from our minds, I caught sight of two little girl students of a local school relieving themselves in the open. They were in their uniform so they couldn't have been two urchins who were never taught the rules of propriety and the need of hygiene. Their classmates played close by and some of them would have taken a "bathroom break" sooner or later. Yes, it was a school.

A naïve question. Is one allowed to run a school without a bathroom? Schools are being run without libraries. Schools are being run without classrooms, furniture, blackboards. Schools are being run without teachers. Who gives a damn about bathrooms when schools are being run without conscience? The conscience of a nation is dead when two little school-going girls have no option but to sit on a garbage heap close to their playground to pee. The conscience of a nation is dead when the poor are deceived with empty rhetoric of Right to Education. The conscience of a nation is surely dead when, quite literally, the filthy rich businessmen begin running the education show, and that too with only one aim—to find ways to fish for another rich man's fortune through the fishing rod of his child with a bait of "world-class" education.

This is not a one-off incident. Today itself I found two reports in the city edition of The Tribune about abysmal conditions in our schools. One is about a school in another "village" around the city of Chandigarh, where 200 students share one toilet and about four are locked for the use of teachers. Another one is a story about a school in Fatehgarh Sahib where fire-fighting equipments are thought to be as useless as bathrooms in our neighbouring "village".

(Pictures: From the two news reports)

Before I lose more

While clearing my table this afternoon, I came across a piece of paper on which I had scribbled something while I was in Goa in April. On the last day of our national sales meet, just before the closing, I wrote this in a jiffy. I might lose the paper sooner or later, so posting this here.

I thought I lost my pen
But what I lost were
My thoughts
A 24-hour journey from Delhi to
Goa was spent
Playing cross and noughts
Without the pen, of course

The mind was at work
Though it couldn't quite work out
The whole point of journeys
Of life, the mystery of
Lost clout
A pointless discourse

Many things were going on
Were all put on hold
One thing went on unstoppable
You see, couldn't help growing old
Nothing else got worse.

— 9 April 2009, Cidade De Goa, Goa

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Elections 2009 – II

The good was, of course, the freshness of youth. Young MPs have been in focus and to many this is sure sign that politics of this country will change for the better. But this optimism is paradoxical. The good and bad are not that distinct perhaps. Vir Sanghvi has made a point. Most of the young MPs are actually second- or third-generation politicians, heirs of a family business. Commenting on this he says, "A disturbing proportion of them were born into political families." Disturbing indeed, as he goes on to name the political heirs running the nation. And mind you, not all are young : Farooq Abdullah, Prithviraj Chavan, Salman Khurshid, Dayanidhi Maran, Selja, G.K. Vasan, M.K. Azhagiri, Parneet Kaur, Ajay Maken, Bharatsinh Solanki, D. Purandeshwari , Tushar Choudhary, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot, Jitin Prasada, R.P.N. Singh, Prateek Patil, Agatha Sangma, D. Napoleon. And then Sanghvi goes on to name other dynasties. Naveen Patnaik, Chandrababu Naidu, H.D. Deve Gowda and his son. I think he gave a special thought to this sentence when he wrote about the Badals: "In Punjab, the Akali Dal is a family business run by Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal and his millionaire son, Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal." I found that truly amusing. He points out dynasties in BJP: Vasundhara Raje, whose son Dushyant Singh is an MP, Manvendra Singhand so on. Towards the end of his Counterpoint in today's Hindustan Times he makes a chilling observation:

But family-dominated politics is a closed shop. Entry is open only to those with the right credentials of birth. Outsiders are banned from entering. And slowly but surely, true democracy is replaced by a kind of feudalism in which the peasants are given the right to choose between various aristocrats. The peasants can never enter the ruling class because the wrong blood flows in their veins.

Good and bad are in front of us. Intertwined. Can we begin a process of untangling the two? Sanghvi pins his hope on the "dynast" to free politics from the clutches of "dynastyism". But shouldn't the reviver search for talent beyond the obvious quarters. Maybe he is doing his best. But maybe the aam aadmi shoudl do his bit. Perhaps there is a way the youth of this country can serve in politics despite the lack of the dynastic patronage. That will be good indeed.