The Meaning of Celebrating Christmas

Braj Ranjan Mani

He was born in an obscure village about 2,000 years ago. The son of a simple rural woman, he grew up in the village. He lived there for about 30 years, working as a carpenter and performing other manual duties. He never had a formal education; he never attended school or college. At about the age of 30, he became a spiritual teacher. He left home, and he simply wandered and taught. He had no credentials that people generally associate with greatness. He did not earn wealth. He did not write any book. He did not go for a world tour or travel across the seas. He only travelled within a couple of hundred kilometers of his home village. He had no special status as a religious or political leader. Some people turned against his teachings—and his life. Even without really understanding who he was or what he was speaking about, they viciously targeted him. His friends abandoned him. One friend denied him, and one friend betrayed him to the political and religious authorities. Others put false charges against him, and he was convicted as a criminal. He was hung on a cross between two thieves. Finally, his lifeless body was placed in a grave donated by a friend. But his story did not end there. According to Isaiah,

He grew up before him [God] like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed…. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth…. He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. (Isaiah 53: 2-12, The Bible)

Centuries have passed since then, and we are on the threshold of the 21st century; but he, Jesus Christ, is still alive. He lives in the hearts of millions of men, women and children. Like a lamp that is never blown out by any storm or tornado. Why is it that over time, his importance has increased? Why, day by day, are more people taking shelter under the shadow of this Messiah?

Today, material changes—along with huge advances in science, technology and medicine—have changed the face of the world but they have not changed many old ways of the world. The world remains unkind, fragmented, and violent. Many things in our world and our relationships remain ugly and oppressive. Many old and new woes continue to fester. The vicious circle of injustice, exploitation and violence continues, albeit in new forms and new garbs. Today’s story is very complicated but our social and environmental poverty is clear—and remains the main source of discord, conflict and violence both within the countries and among the countries of the world. Human life is difficult: many people suffer due to internal, personal or family problems but many more are systematically oppressed. Millions of children are denied the basics like sanitation, health care and education. Today, above all, there is a growing feeling of helplessness before the pervasiveness of greed, cynicism and callousness. As injustices and violence persist, we desperately look out for some beacon of hope. We seek and invoke ideals and ethics to keep our sanity, to restore our faith in our common humanity—with a hope to end the hatred, strife and injustices.

Christmas brings us hope. A celebration of dreams, Christmas symbolises the triumph of hope over despair. Whatever the adversities, the life of Jesus reminds us that we have a soul and a spirit capable of endless love, sacrifice, and endurance. Jesus’ unbounded love for humanity inspires and unites all humanity. Especially in the moments of darkness and desolation, Jesus appears with the light of liberating love and wisdom. He shows the way, and brings us together for a just, happy and harmonious world. He promises us not just life but abundant life in which new forms of reconciliation, cooperation and creativity can blossom.

Celebrating Christmas is celebrating humanity by reaffirming our faith in noble values for which Jesus lived, died and resurrected. The life of Jesus suggests that the body of God includes everyone, especially the needy, the suffering, the outcast. The radical inclusion of the oppressed is the distinctive feature of the Christian embodiment. Jesus’ passionate concern with basics of life for all, and his focus on the healing of oppressed, vulnerable, suffering bodies, those who are in pain due to the indifference or greed of the more powerful, overturns hierarchies and destabilises status quo.

Jesus basically taught that we can lead a good life by loving each other, by nurturing relationships with fellow beings. Sensitising the self to the needs of others—comforting the people-in-distress, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, welcoming the outsider, setting free the imprisoned—will generate a climate of reciprocal care, share and service which creates the necessary condition for each person to flourish. Such reciprocal love ensures that there is no malevolence, hatred, and violence, paving the way for the flourishing of each and every individual. All ‘individuals’ will be wholesome, indivisible from others—because flourishing of one individual is dependent on the flourishing of others. Such reciprocal service and love can flourish only among equals, not in an unjust and stratified society. There is nothing grandiose and philosophic about it. Here, the meaning of life is manifested in offering a glass of water to the thirsty, rather than in seeing eternity in a grain of sand. Wholeness, equality and a unity based on it can provide the common ground of love in everyone, inviting everyone to the banquet of life. This is possible for everyone—anyone can lead such a life, a life of caring and loving relationships. To act and live in this way, however, will change the world in an amazing way, gracing everyone with abundant life.

Jesus’ sublime legacy is legacy to all humanity without any distinction of caste, race, class, gender, language, religion, political and other opinion. Celebrating his birth in our life requires pursuit of peace and harmony. Pursuing peace and harmony, however, is a risky business in a world divided by caste, class, gender, and other exploitative structures. For, it demands commitment for an exploitation-free world. It demands risky willingness to take on the immensely powerful forces of discrimination and domination. It demands the “cross” in some form or another.

Exploitation—covert or overt, social or economic, political or cultural, whatever its colour—is violence. Peace cannot prevail in a society founded on the axis of caste, race, class, and gender; such a society is essentially an unjust, unbalanced, sick society in which violence is inbuilt and pervasive. To rebel against such a society—and dismantle the matrix of domination that supports it—is the first and foremost task for any seeker of justice and reconciliation.

Vested interests and morality stand in opposition to each other—they are antithetical. And so are democracy and concentration of power and wealth in a few hands. Those who love peace and humanity have to necessarily oppose the entrenched interests. It is important to understand that the enemies of privilege are not the enemies of peace. Those who stand by peace stick out their necks for justice which brings in its wake genuine reconciliation. The rest are part of the problem—for, their ‘peace’, the peace of the rich and privileged, generates violence of one kind or another. Giving a loaf of bread to a crying child is not pursuing peace; pursuing peace is to change the system that produces millions of hungry children. Standing for peace means prioritising life of children of the poor over the power dinners of the rich. Unless we give justice to the oppressed, this world cannot be peaceful.

Differences and diversities are not to be confused with discriminations. Diversities are beautiful; let a hundred flowers bloom. Different people would always want different things from life, this is part of the human condition, and perfectly understandable; the trouble erupts when someone tramples on another’s feet for one’s success and excellence. Without a level-playing field, or equality of opportunity, the claims of talents and achievements are fraudulent. Such successes are built on the bricks of deception and exclusion. Exclusion breeds fertile ground for brutality by dehumanising both the victim and perpetrator.

It was for this precise reason that Jesus radicalised the divine love by stressing that God’s love is unbounded and oriented towards especially the oppressed. Jesus befriends the poor and powerless. Whoever the oppressed, Jesus reaches out to them. His love is destabilising. By overturning the conventional dualisms of righteous and sinner, rich and poor, he destabilises hierarchies and structures of exploitation. His life teaches us in crystal clear terms that peace cannot prevail without embracing the suffering humanity. Harmony cannot prevail without including the neglected oppressed. As long as the world remains divided between the winners and losers, the victims and victimisers, peace will continue to elude us.

Radical inclusiveness is at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. Solidarity with the oppressed, solidarity of each with all is at the core of his morality. In its active form, it exhorts us to rise in rebellion against oppression; in its passive form, it coaxes us to suffer with those who suffer. In either form, it motivates us to side with the devalued, the discarded, the destroyed. It teaches us that a just, compassionate treatment of other people is the prime condition for our own thriving. Prayers, individual and collective, are meant to motivate us for action based on love and truth.

The truth shall make us free, as Jesus said, but before freeing us, the pursuit of truth, beauty and happiness puts us through many trials and travails. Are we ready for that? If we are, we are celebrating Christmas. Merry Chrismas!!

*****

 …One great champion of the downtrodden, the holiest of the holy, the great sage and lover of Truth, Bali Raja [Jesus Christ], came into this world…and gave of true and holy knowledge and granted everyone an equal right to it…He undertook the task of releasing the poor, the oppressed from the bondage of slavery…and strove to establish the kingdom of God on earth. 

—Mahatma Phule in Gulamgiri (Slavery)

Artwork by a 6-year-old neice

O Korea Re...

Korean sitcoms are a hit in Manipur

I just came across this story in the magazine Caravan about Korean "invasion" of  Manipur. Published in the October issue, the story narrates how the vacuum created by a ban on Hindi-Bollywood TV/Cinema in Manipur is being filled by DVDs of Korean sitcoms and serials. Koreans—South Koreans, that is—are not really surprised about this. Korean popular culture has already made way into countries across Asia, from China to Iran. This success is because Korean movies, serials, etc., are able to combine entertainment with traditional values that are shared by many Asian societies. Now this is quite an intriguing piece in itself. But I perhaps wouldn't have blogged about it if I didn't have another Korea story ruffling in my mind.

We, the FORWARD Press magazine, have just gone to press with our November issue and in it we are carrying an article by Vishal Mangalwadi titled "Moving Forward: Korean Style". It is a short study of a village called Yong Am in South Korea and the spiritual-cultural forces that transformed this impoverished village "hidden in a mountain and covered by snow for more than three months in a year" into one of the richest rural communities where the average annual income of a small farmer is Rs 28 lakh! This Korea story also has an India connection, the people (and the NGO) that brought about this transformation in Yong Am, and many a Korean wasteland, are helping the people in Bihar improve their farming.

When it  comes to Asia, people world over are talking about China and India, but Korea might be the dark horse that will perhaps lead the way in this part of the world. The former two countries have the size and political clout. Korea seems to have the confidence and capability to more than compensate for these pluses its two continental cousins have.

And yes, Korea has been inspiring talented Indian musicians too. Take a look at this song.

Ten. X. 10

It has to be a perfect day. The eldest son of my eldest sister turns 11 on this 10th — the first of the third generation in our immediate family. And even though he is now living thousands of miles away, it didn't stop his nani to cook some gurh wale chawal. He is supposed to be getting some kind of a video game but I am sure he will miss this grandma special for the dessert.

I could not cook up something as original or delicious as this. But at the back of my mind were some verses by Nissim Ezekiel. He wrote 14 short "blessings" that I wanted this growing boy now living in England to read.

One my most favourites from among the 14 is this one:

III

Be drunk, occasionally,

but not with gin

or whiskey. May the Lord

use you up for ends

beyond your means,

so you know what drunkenness

really means. 

And it is also a Sunday. The day of rest. The day of meditating on being "drunk". The day of the dessert. It is 10/10/10.

Some Post-seminar Thoughts

The magnificent IIAS at Shimla. 

In a recently concluded seminar in the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, I caught on to two remarks that continue to resonate in my mind. The first remark was made almost unconsciously when AGR started reading her paper. As she read out her seminal thoughts, from the lectern, she could see that people were not really with her. In that moment, which could well be termed epiphanic, she said she could see people yawning at the postcolonial jargon that her paper doled out so generously. I said to myself, we are supposed to be a "postcolonial" society and the postcolonial theory has been with us for about three decades. Some of the best-known postcolonial critics and writers are Indians. Why do we still yawn at, and yet yearn for, the theorizing postcolonial. It seemed that a language that is fashioned in the academic-culture factories of Europe and America will not help us in a meaningful way to discuss our own problems. Is it possible that our critics, teachers, researchers are lost in academic navel-gazing without having much to say to people outside the universities and academic institutions? They make fine start, their awe-inspiring verbal acrobatics do give the impression of something profound being said and performed. But then why does a well-respected, and well-published scholar, end up saying what AGR said above?

The second comment was in some ways related to the one above. In the evening as we were winding up the seminar, participants and observers began sharing their thoughts. Professor GS said one thing very categorically  — along with theoretical work our researches should be based on empirical data. And, for me what was more important, was his later assertion that this balance, or amalgamation, of theory and factual data is what will lead to "social transformation". All fields of knowledge – natural sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities – must be geared towards this. Not many people want to use this term social transformation. For that one has to make value judgements, seek fundamental changes and propose radical alternatives, and our current academic stances are ill equipped for this. And thus if our academic discussions only result in audience yawning should we not become suspect of our "scholarly" enterprises?

A South Asian Taxi Driver in New York

I might add one more thing. There is this general tendency in human beings to blame the other for all their maladies, which, unfortunately, spills over into our academic enterprises too. Yes, there is inequality in this world and consequently oppression and dominance but should this make us communally paranoid? Does that absolve one from any kind of introspection? For example, there was a presentation on the behalf of a group that is spreading awareness about dangers of illegal emigration. Hundreds and thousands of Punjabi youth endanger their lives when they tie up with these emigration racketeers. Now the presentation was about how this group reaches out to the young and explain to them the dangers of such enterprises through lectures, songs, skits, etc. In the ensuing discussion one participant mentioned that the host countries leave certain loopholes in their immigration laws and thus encourage such practices because they want cheap labour from the so-called Third World. The idea was clear, it is "they" who are to be blamed. There would have been a consensus on this but for the interjection by RH. He immediately intervened and said that it is our own people there who are responsible for pitiable condition of many of the immigrant labourers. It is not the host country that exploits them. They have their adequate laws in place. They pay adequately. It's their fellow-countrymen who swindle the immigrants' hard-earned salary. Now this was an argument no one could challenge.

(Photos: http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/malariamonday/1/1277062587/tpod.html; http://thefacesisee.blogspot.com/2009/05/may-26-43rd-street-new-york-ny-usa.html)

Right to Education and the Privilege to Ignore!

After dwelling briefly on the achievements of institutes of higher education in India, especially the IITs and the IIMs, Amartya Sen had this to say in his essay, "The Indian Identity":

Yet the underdevelopment of Indian school systems, especially in socially backward regions of the country and particularly among disadvantaged groups, has been equally extraordinary. This is both deeply inefficient and amazingly unjust. The smart boy or clever girl who is deprived of the opportunity of schooling, or who goes to a school with dismal facilities (not to mention the high incidence of absentee teachers), not only loses the opportunities he or she could have had, but also adds to the massive waste of talent that is a characteristic of the life of our country. If we have not yet been able to seize the economic opportunities for the manufacture of simple products in a way that has happened in Japan, Korea, China and other countries in east Asia, not to mention the West, India's remarkable neglect of basic education has a decisive role in this handicap. (emphases added, excerpt from The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, New Delhi, Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005, p. 344.)

About ten days back, I was part of a group that came together to discuss the Right to Education Act that came into force on 1 April 2010. It was an initiative of a friend who is a strong believer in the transformative potential of this new fundamental right. There were some hopefuls and some cynics in the group. In any case, there were some interesting things to be learnt. The right not just seeks to empower the children in the age group of 6 to 14 but also gives a tool in the hands of the parents themselves to ensure that their children get free, compulsory and quality education. That tool is participation in the SMCs or school management committees. The government schools are now supposed to have an SMC, in which the proportion of parents will be 75% and 50% of members should be women. The medium of instruction will be the mother tongue. Teachers will not be burdened with non-academic work, except election duties (in best case scenario, once or twice in five years) and during instances of natural calamities. There are other liberating features: No child can be declined admission in case he or she cannot produce a birth certificate. For those who want to learn more, the "right" can be downloaded from here.

While there were some who pointed that there are flaws in this law, my believer friend was quick to point out that RTI and NREGA are also two such tools that are fraught with problems but they have also delivered. Even if limited, their gains are huge. Same can happen with this act! I think so. By the way, my concern is that we must have motivated young men and women, not just motivate but idealistic in that old-fashioned way, who are ready to dedicate themselves to teaching in such schools. Do we have that breed anymore? Or am I being a being a dreamer in a foolish way? Can't say.

We certainly need more awareness and discussion on this. This is quite a revolutionary act, but strangely no consistent follow-up is being done. There are no front-page stories. Nothing by way of urgent-sounding op-eds either. Since India's leap into big league of global economic powerhouses is dependent on the springboard of quality education, it is surprising to see that corporate India is not talking about it. Or have I missed something? Meanwhile, here's one article that discusses some core issues.

(Photo: http://advocacynet.org/wordpress-mu/tmathys/blog/tag/nizamuddin/)

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.