Category: The World

The Yin & Yang of Diwali & Halloween

This post was also published in India Currents magazine dated 3rd Nov 2016

Wrinkled brows, scorching cuts and decisive strokes greeted me as I went upstairs a few days before Diwali. We have to get started on our Halloween decorations, said the daughter cutting out a spider. The toddler son was lying on his stomach on the floor, helping his sister by coloring the ghost she had cut out from white paper, white. A cozy, merry scene with the sunlight streaming in from the windows.

When bees create their colonies, I am sure they don’t care about a little mess. Neither did my bee-lings. I navigated the crayons strewn on the floor and walked past the strands of paper littering my path to peek at the objects of art.

A morose sort of skeleton was being drawn and I shuddered at the image. I hated to take a pail of cold water and swamp their enthusiasm with it, but then I did. Sorry guys. That weekend is Diwali and I won’t have skeletons and cobwebs hanging off the front door on Diwali. (This year, Diwali fell on a week-end and Halloween the day after, on a Monday.)

A mutinous roar went up. Amma – Diwali is the opposite of Halloween. It is the festival of lights. You’ll put up those little diyas everywhere and light everything up and then you’ll make everyone dress up beautifully – it is the complete opposite of Halloween.

I disagreed. They may be celebrated differently, but they are both meant to fight evil. Ward off evil – whatever. The concept is to banish your demons. Even the inner demons. So, Diwali and Halloween are like that Yin-Yang thing. Black and white together. Both are there in us and in the world around us.

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I felt like a teapot spouting philosophy from my long snout to a couple of trouts in the stream. I sometimes think children must feel we played tag with Confucius and hide-and-seek with Buddha. I tried desperately to gain ground again.

You can always find light in the darkest of places if only you remember to turn on the lights. Remember who said that?

Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban

Albus Dumbledore! sighed the daughter. Dementors – yes! Maybe we will do dementors also this time.

Also Voldemort – we can draw Voldemort and hang him outside, piped the toddler son. He has no fear of He-who-must-not-be-named, and his sister beamed with pride at her little Gryffindor brother.

Guys! Guys! I won’t have Voldemort hanging on my front porch on Diwali either. Does Halloween have to be gory? Think of some themes and see if you can come up with decor that does not drip blood. Something positive, a call to action and also save our souls. How about that? I said.

When the daughter said, Fine!, I left them to their own devices and pottered around the house.

I must say that I was mighty impressed with the resulting effort.

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We picked your favorite theme, Nature, amma. So, you can put up some of this stuff for Diwali too. Then after Diwali, the next day, we can quickly put up bats and pumpkins all around and we are set, she said.

I agreed.

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On the Diwali rangoli, we placed a large pumpkin surrounded by little lamps. The rain helpfully washed away the rangoli that very night leaving a damp, morose spot for the Pumpkin the next day. All very satisfying.

Happy Diwali and Happy Halloween. May we learn to take care of our World, the living beings we share it with, and balance our yin and yang for a beautiful whole.

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More (मोर) on Sherbat Gula

This post was also published on May 30th 2017 in India Currents Magazine.

Let’s take it easy and go eat at some place nice for a change, I said one lazy Saturday morning. You know, just spend a relaxed, agenda-less morning. Some place I can wear this to. I was fondly looking at my new dupatta, carefully embroidered with dancing peacocks.

The kerfuffle just to spending a relaxed morning doing nothing I tell you! There was hectic activity everywhere: feverishly looking for things, toddler shoes worn on wrong feet, missing cell phones, cell phones without charge all needing urgent handling in a 10 minute interval.

I ignored the daughter as she took charge while throwing me a disdainful look . The little fellow was bossed around, the big fellow was bossed around, the bosser and bossees felt the charges of love and tension squirt back and forth.

Appa! What are you doing? That’s it!

Time for me to take charge around here, she said. Amma, stop dancing! Why are you wearing this fancy dupatta-thing-y now anyway?

Because I can! Dance! Dance! More! I said in a smart repartee and chuckled. Completely lost on them of course. (For the Hindi challenged ones: ‘More’ (मोर )means Peacock in Hindi)

peacock_dupatta

The husband meekly looked up from his game of chess and sighed yet again.  I heard him murmur something about Men’s Freedom as we headed out.

Pretty soon, we found ourselves in an Afghani restaurant sitting quietly. I turned the menu card over and the back of the menu had a picture of the girl taken by National Geographic magazine and became famously one of the pictures that defined the turmoil of war world over. It was the cover picture of National Geographic magazine in 1985

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2002/04/afghan-girl-revealed/

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Sharbat Gula (meaning sweetwater flower girl in Pashtun)

That was enough. The husband and I got a professorial gleam in our eyes and we tripped over ourselves trying to open the daughter’s eyes to the plight of women the world over.

Not everywhere can women boss men around like it happens in our home, said the husband. The daughter and I chuckled.

We had not even started on the political turmoil with the Russian occupation of Afghanistan when the pesky waiter came and took the menu cards away. I tchaa-ed with feeling at this tendency of waiters to hoard the menus. The restaurant is empty – what do they want to do with the menus? I am sure they don’t have to read it!

’You finished ordering and what are you doing reading the mutton and chicken section anyway? You are a vegetarian!’, the daughter said in what she thought was a scorching debate point. She thought I would fumble and drop my eyes in repentance, like a puppy told to snuff it while trying to oil the moth eaten rag doll through the door. But she under-estimated my power of repartee: She was talking to the author of the (why-are-you-dancing-now? Because I can! ) response (scroll up).

I caught her eye and took her on a wild ride through the streets of Kabul selling spices and the perils of grocery shopping in times of turmoil, past the beautiful poppy fields and the orchards of apricot, gasping through the crevices of  the Tora Bora mountains and finished with a comparison of Indian, Pakistani and Afghani cuisines.

I got to admit, I like to traipse through the menu even after I’ve ordered. Especially after I’ve ordered. I enjoy reading all the entrees and getting a feel of the cuisine, the culture, the spices and a dip into life in the normal households in the area. I like to imagine their grocery lists, their dinner tables, their lunch boxes and so much more.

The daughter rolled her eyes. I rolled mine.

By the time the food had arrived, we had sent a prayer for World Peace and a goodwill message to Sherbat Gula and hoped her daughters would have a chance at peace and happiness in a strife ridden world.

I read yesterday that Sherbat Gula is now married with three living daughters and is facing deportation from Pakistan back to Afghanistan:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/26/national-geographics-afghan-girl-faces-deportation-pakistan

That evening, I casually left a copy of the book : Because I Am a Girl: I can change the world, in her room. A book that tells the story of girls from different parts of the world, and how we as women can and should play a part in changing lives for the better.

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Subtle as a peacock.

What The Mango Seller Can Teach Us About Voting

This US election season has been a wearying one. I don’t think any other election has been discussed this feverishly and with this much passion for so long by so many people. I have watched as the media fanned people’s guilty pleasures by trumping up Trump – he has given them lots of material and far from ignoring him, the media and the audience have helped boost his megalomania.

Now this is when people look to me like I am going to let drip my own electoral analysis and stump you all with my keen insights and well reasoned theories. The Economist, The Political Strategist, The Clairvoyant you think and look at me with your ears hanging onto my every word. I feel like I am back as a girl in history class in sixth grade again when I could not for the life of me answer why the Mughals had an interest in India, though the teacher held me with an expectant eye. My elder sister had blazed on ahead of me, and consequently many teachers spent their time giving me expectant looks to see if their polite gleam would nudge my hereditary brilliance, but every time I gave them an answer like the blog post below, and had them head to a corner cradling their head in their arms and moaning gently that my poor sister could have been blessed with someone brighter for a sibling.

Anyway, here goes:

The journeys across Tamil Nadu in South India to visit my grandmother in Trichy were affairs filled with anticipation and joy. There were a number of different routes one could take, and a number of different methods in which to travel. Some routes passed through the poorest sections of Tamil Nadu, where female infanticide was rife, education was trying to make its dent, but making no headway etc. Daily life in these belts was and is a struggle.

Frequently, we were on local buses with folks piling in from the local villages and getting off at the nearest town to sell their wares. One journey stands out in my mind in the light of this long drawn election drama between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

The bus stopped at a local stop and several folks clambered on. One was selling fish and the other mangoes. The one selling jasmine was sitting two seats ahead of us and the smell of fresh jasmines was wafting welcomingly with the breeze that a moving bus with open windows entails. The fish and the mangoes would soon be added to this and one wondered what the experience would be like.

My father and I were sitting stretching somewhat luxuriously on a three seater, when the mango-lady eyed us. She had on her broad forehead a large bindi, her ear lobes sagged with the weight of her earrings and her hands were liberally tattooed. She gingerly balanced on her head a large wicker basket of mangoes. She was accompanied by her ten year old grand daughter and the pair of them squeezed themselves, the wicker basket and a bag on a three seater where two of us were already sitting. One she had squashed everyone and everything but the mangoes, she turned and gave us a radiant smile. We smiled back, knowing that mangoes were better than dead fish as neighbors. Life teaches you to look for the silver lining in many ways.

As the bus bumped its ways along the tree lined roads, the mango seller started talking. She was not one to hold back her opinions, a trait that must have stood her well in the realm of mango sales no doubt, but one somewhat constricting on a three seater with 3 adults, 2 children, a bag and a comfortably seated basket of mangoes. She roundly abused the Chief Minister of the day, Jayalalitha, and had several things to say about the policy regarding Farmers Markets, raise in bus fares etc.

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My father was listening to her rant on how politicians were out to drown the daily lives of honest hardworking folks like her. He then asked her if she voted. “Of course!” she said.

Would you vote for Jayalalitha? he asked.

She looked shocked. I would not sully my lips with that, she sputtered ominously stewing her betel leaves juice. She then leaned her bulk over us and crushed several co-passengers bones before she spat the betel juice out of the bus window. She settled back in and went on about the various ways in which she thought Jayalalitha was a bad choice for her.

So which symbol will you vote for then? asked the father.

“Why the errata elai (இரட்டை எலை – two leaves) of course!” she said. I gasped. My father then said to her as gently as he could, that by voting erattai elai (the symbol for two leaves), she was in fact voting for Jayalalitha. She looked confused.

I don’t know how much she got of the explanations the father was giving her about symbols, party nominations and such, for as the bus stopped at the town and she heaved herself out, she said doubtfully, “But we have always voted for erattai elai”.

Once the mangoes, fish and jasmine ladies left the bus, we fell to discussing the recent bizarre turn of events. It is the lack of education in these belts that is the problem, said the father sadly. They realize that electing Jayalalitha is bad for them, but they will go on voting for her symbol. Unless education spreads, there is no hope. That ten year old grand daughter of hers stands a chance, if she is sent to school, but look at what she is doing? She is helping her grandmother sell mangoes and listens to her say that erattai elai is the way to go. I wish formal schooling can be extended to everyone, he said and I agreed sadly.

Watching the long drawn election drama between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump makes me realize that formal schooling may not be the solution after all. I watch people head into rallies saying things like ‘Even if we don’t like Trump very much, we will still vote Republican.’

If we continue to vote based on what we have always done, we are no better than that poor, uneducated, old lady selling mangoes and hoping her lot will improve, are we? In the words of Maria Popova: Allow yourselves the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/10/23/10-years-of-brain-pickings/

P.S: Given that the Tamil Nadu electorate has flip-flopped between electing the rising-sun or the two-leaves many times since that conversation, I am sure a good many mango sellers did change their mind over the course of time.

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The 7E Diagnosis

But Amma you are not a lady! yelped the toddler son.

The conversation regarding who is a lady and who is not was an amusing one that lilted with the gentle evening breeze rustling over the early October trees still in bloom and blew all over the place before finishing on the note that I am no lady.

Paati (Grandma) is a lady. You will be a lady when you become a grandma. Now, you are a mom, just a mom, he says firmly.

All these mind altering conversations happen the evening prior to the sixth visit for repairing the despairing spirits who own the dishwasher. The dishwasher itself is beyond repair.

I know what you are thinking. Has the girl (or lady) lost her marbles completely? I thought she filled every available nook and cranny of the blogging space available to her years ago with this dishwashing lark of hers. As if her tales weren’t enough, we also endured those horrendous diagrams.

Dishwasher Chronicles: Do Birds Roar Like Lions?

The Dishwasher Chronicles Part 1

The Dishwasher Chronicles Part 2

The Dishwasher Chronicles Part 3

Not again, you moan. I understand you, and as much as I would like to say that I travelled down a time warp tunnel, it is not so. The pesky d.washer gave up a few months ago. The husband and I tried avoiding eye contact with it for a couple of months to see if rest would jog things along, but we had to finally agree that it was gone. 7E was something even the great wide internet space threw their hands up with. Picture the doctor in the Indian movies taking their glasses off and nodding sadly. I am doing that now. I have my glasses in my hand and I am nodding sadly. But 7E it is and shall be.

The dishes have been flopped and propped about all over the counter every time they are washed for months now. When folks accuse me of slacking off making idlies or critical grandmothers  look the children up and down and say, “Oh how thin they look. Do you feed them enough?” I’d like to invite them over to the sink. Barring the slightly bizarre notion that I revel in washing clean dishes again, how can this many vessels be dirty if I was not feeding them enough?

Anyway, the next day, the technician is downstairs on the call with Samsung technical support.  A mellow fellow whose name I am unable to sing no matter how many times he says it. Each time it sounds different. Tsung or Tshawng. There have been days when I have walked into the kitchen to see the husband crouching next to this fellow and peering into the depths of the dishwasher looking like microbiologists looking for life on Mars.

Twang looked miserable at the thought of picking up that phone to get on with his technical customer support buddies and took a long gulp of water before calling. Every time he sees 7E, he looks like lightning struck again. The husband and I exchange a look that says (Gandhi-died-in-1948. 7E-started-months-ago. Deal with it.)

dishwasher_7e I heard the static from the phone line, the clipped tone in which the customer service rep recognized him, and I heard the faint groans from Tsung and the dishwasher. After what seemed like an hour, I went downstairs to give him (the repair guy not the dishwasher) some moral support. Tsung had the customer service rep on speaker. At long last, I asked him if I can talk to him instead. He nodded and asked him, “Customer wants to talk to you.”

“No. No! I don’t want to.” responds this technician on the other side quite unaware that he is on the speaker.

What a useful device the phone must be in these situations. If the fellow was fumbling along with instructions in Isting’s ear in person, he would have found it a dash sight harder to avoid my piercing eye and my necessity to ask him man to man, I mean lady to gentleman, I mean mom to man (for I don’t know whether the guy on the other end is a dad.)

Ysung ties himself  in knots and is deeply embarrassed by his colleague and tells me that he will have the service desk call me again.

As promised, the day after Tsung mopped himself out of the house, I got another call from the Samsung Service Desk. I crackled and bristled a bit. I told the voice on the other end of the call that we are very busy folk who have important places to be with important things to do. I asked them what it would take for them to just replace the unit since nothing but the outer casing is the version of what we bought two years ago.

This is where I have got to admire the gall of the person on the other side. The sheer cheek. She said, “Can you hold”, and before I could answer, smartly switched on the hold-music designed to extract ear worms through your nostrils. Just like that she had un-bristled me and un-crackled me with one brilliant stroke.  When she came back on, I felt like telling her off and asking her a crisp question or two  on what she meant by putting this infernal music on when she was the one who called me, but I used her tactic on her. Brusque. And I asked her to call back when it is convenient for me and hung up.

The son is right: I suppose I am not a lady yet.

The Cry of Natural Symphonies

Regular readers of this blog know what a pesky cricket I can be when it comes to babbling about nature. If I see one of those news articles about hippos dwindling in number, I grieve.  The day I saw a ninety foot tree logged in our neighborhood, I grieved. I had seen the number of birds that roosted in the tree every evening as dusk fell, and I felt that we lost out on all that natural chitter for no good reason.

I moon about hills and flop around pictures of beautiful Mother Earth and all that in spite of negligible botanical and zoological knowledge. Ducks and Canadian Geese I will bucket as one, hippos and rhinos I draw about the same (one with a horn and one without).

I am also one for natural sounds – I like to listen to the cascading brook or the patter of the rain. I like to be able to say, “Coo! Did you hear that blue kingfisher? Easily distinguishable by that rich guttural sonic burst.” So, one can readily imagine why I picked up a book called ‘The Animal Orchestra’ by Bernie Krause. I must say the book was a revelation of sorts.

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Most of us have an idea about the damage we are wreaking on Earth. We are aware of over population, we are aware of shocking deforestation and we are aware of global warming. What this book gives us is another perspective to the problems that face Earth.

Bernie Krause is a musician who has since turned to recording the natural sounds around him. He has recorded the forest areas before and after selective logging operations, he has dipped his receivers into a coral reef to hear the natural sounds, he has recorded in the depths of the rain forest, and the great barren deserts and the frozen tundra.

I have written about Biophony before with a link to Bernie Krause’s recording on NPR before: https://nourishncherish.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/cacophony-for-biophony-socialization-for/

Recording:listen-as-a-california-forest-grows-quiet-over-time/

Birds
Birds

What Bernie Krause finds with his recordings is that the human touch affects biophony in unimaginable ways. You can hear some of his recordings at thegreatanimalorchestra.com. Even if unable to read the book, please try to listen to some of the sound tracks on the site. It makes for an enriching experience.

There are a number of passages in the book that I can go back to re-read any number of times. One such passage is the one where he refers to a beaver recording. In a remote lake in Minnesota, some wardens of the preserve, blew up a beaver dam killing most of the beaver young and females. The recording was taken later that evening, and describes the sounds of the grieving beaver male. He says that to date it is the most heart-rending sound he has ever heard made. A poignant sadness to it that the most heart-rending human music cannot even come close to.

Or of the time he describes the sonic variances between the sounds of orcas in captivity and the sounds of the pod from which the orcas were captured in the wild. The ones in the wild were always “filled with energy and vitality”. While the captive vocalizations were “palpably lethargic and slow”.

He talks off a recording he took where a logging company resorted to selective logging i.e. deliberately taking a few trees here and there so as to not disturb the ecosystem much. However, the sounds recorded before the logging operation and after have perceptibly changed. The pictures taken later show a fairly decent rebound of the wilderness, but the biophonic recordings  give us a different perspective – the more disturbing and truthful perspective. Though the area looked wild enough, the great natural symphony never bounced back.

Before Selective Logging
After Selective Logging

From a BBC program titled ‘A Small Slice of Tranquillity‘: There were certain sounds such as breathing, footsteps, a heartbeat, birdsong, crickets, lapping waves, and flowing streams that people described as tranquil. Researchers demonstrated that such sounds stimulate the limbic system in the brain, resulting in the release of endorphins and a feeling of serenity. The program says that tranquillity is an elemental acoustic foundation upon which we can rest our mental processes.

By definition a tranquil area is one that is this many miles from the nearest road, away from the sonic boom of aircraft etc. In the 1960s UK had more than 40 tranquil areas, now there are less than 5.

Bernie Krause concluded that  the book on a note that I cannot help agreeing with. He says that he is asked almost at the end of every lecture what we can do to help preserve our remaining natural environments. He says: “It’s easy: leave them alone and stop the inveterate consumption of useless products that none of us need.”

9/11 Fifteen Years Hence

On a recent vacation to the Middle East, I chose from my sister’s pile of books, an intriguing book titled, ‘Growing Up Bin Laden’. It is a book about Osama Bin Laden as told to the author, Jean Sasson, by Osama Bin Laden’s fourth son, Omar Bin Laden, and his first wife, Najwa Bin Laden. From accounts of his first wife and fourth son, Osama seems to have been a kind husband to Najwa, and a strict, tyrant of a father to his children.

I have always felt sympathetic towards children of tyrants. Given that tyrants aren’t particularly loved by their subjects, this opens the children to endless persecution not to mention the harrowing experience of living with the tyrant themselves. If one does not agree with any part of their philosophy, how can a young child carve out an ideology for themselves? When it isn’t easy to fall out with a parent as an adult, it must be phenomenal to do so as a teenager, especially in the Arab world where obedience and respect are weaved into the culture for good or for bad.

The Bin Ladens lived a sheltered, rich, privileged existence with little knowledge of Osama bin Laden’s activities in Saudi Arabia. When they moved to Sudan, it was evident his fortunes were waning. By the time they were in Sudan, Osama Bin Laden was banished from Saudi Arabia, and his anger at the West was already seething. It is interesting to see the genesis of Osama Bin Laden’s hatred towards the West. Ironically, it was Saudi’s reluctance to continue to parade him as a war hero (after his efforts against USSR in Afghanistan), and take US help with the Iraq-Kuwait issue that seemed to have finally caused the rift. It was during the period that the family lived in Sudan that Omar bin Laden as a growing teenager first got whiffs of his father’s nefarious activities. The hectic activity, feverish planning and the subsequent euphoria in his father’s camps after the US embassy bombings in 1998 were his first clues.

As for Najwa Bin Laden, I must say that she sounds like a phenomenal lady. Her calm and un-quavering mind seems to have been the one place of security for the children. Probably the reason that none of them as adults sought to follow their infamous father in his footsteps. Hers is a sheltered and domestic life that few can imagine. A mother to 11 children of Osama, she was also his first cousin and first wife. Osama went on to marry 5 times in his lifetime, one ended in divorce. As the eldest wife, it was Najwa’s lot to maintain harmony: between wives, between her children and between the children of the various wives. She seems to have done so with her characteristic grace and charm. Osama went on to have 23 children, and towards the end of the book the author tries to figure out the fate of each of them. It was thanks to the persistent Omar bin Laden who had broken away from his father at 19, that Najwa left him mere weeks before the 9/11 attacks with her last three. Neither of them had any idea as to what was planned, just that something bad was going to happen.

The book does not condone any act nor do I. The truth is extremism has no rationale. Why do certain buy into extremism? No one knows.

It is a common malady of the West to try to bring everyone to their view of thinking. Often times, it is done with little understanding of the cultural forces in these places and that results in enmity and animosity that is quite baffling to the West. It is why I find it fascinating to read about other cultures. Diversity in reading. The conviction that different people bring to their way of life, the belief that works for them.

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I am now following up with two books that offer food for thought:

  • Al Qaeda, The Jihadist State and the Islamist State by Daniel Byman &
  • The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama.

The Audacity of Hope was written by Barack Obama when he was a Senator in 2006. While some of the chapters are pedagogical, one chapter that is worth reading is the one titled ‘The World Beyond Our Borders’.

There are some questions that are worth pondering about through they are not the mainstay of the chapter. Why did US invade Iraq and not North Korea? Why intervene in Bosnia but not in Darfur? What about countries that are liberalizing economically but not politically like China?

Daniel Byman is an academic with a focus on Middle Eastern policies and his book analyzes the organization Al Qaeda to see how the organization profiles its recruits. But it is baffling to the point of no coherence. Students in western universities who feel alienated are just as good candidates as a rich businessman’s son in Europe. How this ideology appeals to people no one knows. How they drift towards extremism, no one knows.

The truth is that our actions are too complex. The ripples of our action interweave too intricately with other ripples to determine one cause and one action. Having the humility to know that we know not what the consequences are is worth cultivating.

The Dalai Lama’s world view in this article could possibly help us.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/09/pico-iyer-the-open-road-dalai-lama/

Quoted from the article: Book by Pico Iyer on The Dalai Lama and how he erupts so often into his famous giggles:
Seen from the vantage point of one who meditates several hours a day, traveling to the place where everything is connected, much of our fascination with surface or with division seems truly hilarious.

An Asian Reading Fest

Regular readers of the blog know that we recently returned from an Asian vacation. Every time I take a vacation with the sister in the Middle East, she has a set of books ready for me to read. The books she had laid out for me this time included books written by Jean Sasson, who happens to be one of her favorite authors. Jean Sasson  was a nurse by profession and spent a little more than a decade working and living in Saudi Arabia. One of the princesses of the Al Saud family solicited Jean’s help in telling the inside story of a Saudi princess’s life. She has since written eleven books dealing with various problems faced by middle eastern women.

This time, the book I chose from her pile was ‘Growing Up Bin Laden’. It is a book about Osama Bin Laden as told to Jean Sasson by Osama Bin Laden’s fourth son, Omar Bin Laden and his first wife, Najwa Bin Laden. She uses their alternating voices in the book to tell the story of his life. It is the first book of the kind and is an interesting read.

I am following up this book with two books that I hope to write about soon in conjunction with Growing Up Bin Laden:
Al Qaeda, The Islamist State And The Jihadist War by Daniel Beaman &
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

I suppose I expect to get a glimpse of the view from within Bin Laden’s family, from a professor on Middle Eastern Affairs and a President who finally caught Bin Laden, but is abetted by a world that is still host to a variety of terrorist organizations.

Serious fare thus far you will agree, so I followed it up with delightful fare.

What better mode to release those endorphins than by paying a visit to Malgudi?

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I fell in love again with R.K.Narayan and his writings. Every time I read one of his books, I am amazed at how simply, how nonchalantly he takes you on a stroll along the Sarayu river after passing through the tantalizing wares on Market Street or on quieter days muse and saunter along Vinayak Mudali Street, passing Albert Mission College on the way. The charm of Malgudi never stales. I have come back and scoured the local library for books on R.K.Narayan and find very few.

Note to self: Buy some books by this great writer and donate to the library the next time I visit.

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While I visited the hills of Dehradun with Ruskin Bond, or Malgudi with R.K.Narayan, the husband took off on his own into the Tamil world of Sujata.

Blissful are the days when one is visiting another world while sipping tea in a cool room.

Counting Hadadas in East Africa

For as long as mankind could dream, birds and flying have held a fascination for us. But the kind of flying we do in airplanes that start with a roar like a hadada, is far from the soaring of the soul that the birds seem to enjoy.  Fascinating creatures, birds. Every time I set out on a walk, my ears pick up trilling and cooing and cawing of the birds. One evening, I gazed upon two pretty swallow-like birds with maroon plumage on their chests. Such beautiful little things, and yet when they trilled, I could not believe the volume that emanated from them. I also realized, to my dismay, that I could not identify them. When I do identify birds, I seem to get them wrong quite cheerfully and confidently. Like the last time I called a Canadian Goose a Duck. Both species took umbrage, not to mention fellow human beings.

I needed to rectify these aspects, I thought to myself severely.  That is why you would have seen me with my beak buried in a book called ‘A Guide to the Birds of East Africa’ by Nicholas Drayson. I see your puzzled expr. Why East Africa? Why not America. Well, for one, the book cover looked better, and for another, I thought why not East Africa? I might visit Kenya one day, and that time, I shall be prepared to dazzle and stun all with my ornithological knowledge.

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As it turns out, the book turned out to have quite a few bird names, but little to identify species. It was, however, a thoroughly delightful tale about an upper class club boasting members of the rich Indian community in Kenya, called the Asadi Club. In the book, Mr Malik takes the bird-watching tour every Tuesday morning with Ms Rose Mbikwa, after his doctor ordered him a hobby if he wished to spare his old heart an attack. That is how efficient, quiet and sincere Mr Malik learns to enjoy bird watching, and his guide to bird-watching Ms Rose Mbikwa.

I feel I must tell you the short tale of counting hadadas to entice you to read further or not, depending on your sense of humor. Some people like that kind of thing, some others screw up their noses, look dignified and turn away with a disdainful look on their face.  Neither can thrive while the other survives.

In the book, the members of the Asadi club are reading the newspaper which carries a research article that states on average man farts 101 times a day. This fact is hugely debated by members of the club. Member #1 cannot understand how that is possible purely from a mathematical point of view, since that amounts to 4.208 farts an hour, and he is pretty sure he has not let off 4.208 farts just in the past hour alone.

Valid point.

Member #2 feels that an average takes the high frequency hours with the low frequency hours and the past hour cannot be a reliable indicator.

Also valid point.

Enter Mr Singh, a retired magistrate, and the betting vein is tapped. Mr Singh gets the bets going, and sets terms and conditions to decide the condition. Since one cannot count the flatulence levels or fart frequency during sleep, all parties agree that a count during a 12 hour period should suffice. If a member is able to notch up 51 in 12 hours, Member #2 wins, if not, Member #1 wins. As they look around for a reliable person for the actual counting, poor sincere Mr Malik is roped in. Everybody agrees that if it has to be an unbiased outcome, it has to be vetted by someone with the efficiency and sincerity of Mr Malik’s calibre.

So it was that Mr Malik’s help in the house, a lad from a nearby village, is assigned the task of noting down the farts. To spare the boy the details, Mr Malik, an ardent birdwatcher tells the boy that he will tell him every time he sees a hadada, an ibis like bird that makes a loud noise haa-daa-daa hence the name, that is native to the African savannah. The boy dutifully notes it down, though seriously wondering how on earth Mr Malik saw several dozen hadadas, when he himself saw at most 4 or 5.

hadadas

It is a tale with many diversions and one thing leads to another and before he knows it, Mr Malik is up against Harry Khan, in a bird watching competition to see who can ask Ms Rose Mbikwa’s hand for a ball, and the hadada-counting boy from the village lends Mr Malik a hand (As it turns out, the boy has superior ornithological knowledge by virtue of growing up around plenty of birds).

A delightful read, if you don’t wish to exercise the bean much, and one in which you get to know the names of many birds even if you cannot identify them. As you amble along with these characters, you get to take a peek into Kenyan culture and life.

Also, Counting Hadadas is a useful euphemism to employ in public. You are welcome.

Mockery Bird In Zenkali

I sat in the garden in my backyard, relishing the mild breeze after a hot day. I looked up to see that my fruit trees looked green, and played host to plenty of animals still, but the fruits were no longer there. Could the trees have lived past their prime? I do not know. My botanical knowledge is excruciatingly narrow for one who enjoys nature so much. I watched squirrels scurry up and down on the very trees I was looking at, with a sense of purpose. How sincere, how single minded in their pursuit and yet, how completely at ease on the trees they were and how beautifully they fit into the complex pattern of life and their place in the food chain?

Colors

As I looked at the little creature who was mildly peeved at finding me in my own backyard, I realized with a shock that in spirit he knows and accesses the fruit trees far more than I do, and he probably helps the trees in my backyard by seeding them elsewhere.  Then I think about how little I do know about the complex interdependencies of species. We all learn, while young, about the food chain and all that, but we need something to remind us about these marvels every now and then.

Sometimes that gentle reminder comes in the form of a marvelous book. Every once in a while you stumble upon a book that you wish you can thrust upon everybody and have them read it. But they don’t.  Do you give up? No! You write about it, you read snippets out to them in the hope that they will relent and read the book.

TheMockeryBird

Image: First Edition Cover Art by Hanife Hassan

There is nothing quite so lovely as observing nature and seeing how we are all interdependent species within this planet. Mockery Bird by Gerald Durrell is one of the most endearing books I have ever read. It is a beautiful tale of man’s ignorance and greed. Set in the picturesque fictional island of Zenkali, the book is humorous and satirical to the point of wanting to read it back to back again. It shows us how we are all part of an ecosystem – trees, flowers, insects, birds and man.

In The Mockery Bird, I sat amongst the Ombu & Amela trees, and took in the exotic scents of the tropical island, immersed in the world of Kingy, Peter Foxglove, the tribes, the side sweeps at religion, the absurdity of greed, and the twisted aims and means of the media. The book sparkled with laugh out loud moments. Like the one and only newspaper of the Island run by Damiens, that contains so many typesetting errors, it is a beauty it functions at all.

“Poor old Damiens is like that. he threw the nursing fraternity into a rare state of confusion some time ago with his article on Florence Nightingale entitled ‘The Lady with the Lump’.”

The Mockery Bird, became extinct due to the culinary prowess of the invading French colonies some years prior. The Mockery Bird is the God to one of the tribes on the island, and obviously they were not happy with the extinction of the bird. It turns out that the Ombu trees survived only because the Mockery Birds ate the fruit of the Ombu tree and not being able to digest the seed, germinated them elsewhere. Now with the Mockery Birds gone, there was only one surviving Ombu tree on the island. Plans to have an ugly airstrip through the dense forests in the island are thwarted when Peter and Damien’s daughter accidentally see that 30 Mockery birds are still alive deep in the forest amongst a long lost patch of Ombu trees. This throws the island into a state of chaos, and the ruler, Kingy, is stretched to find a solution that satisfies the international community, the locals and the environment.

Zenkali

Does anyone remember Lorax? Written by Dr Seuss, in which he shows us what greed and ignorance can do, and made into a lovely movie? Now imagine a similar theme, written with endearing characters, a brilliant sense of humor and an exceptional setting? That is Mockery Bird.

It is a pity this book was not made into a movie. If you can read the book, please do.

Baboons In An Orchestra Aid Bold-And-Beautiful Actress

We played host to a few relatives from Tamil Nadu, India lately. Uncles-in-law & aunts-in-law have been taking in a spot of the Californian sun and we added ourselves a few pounds of weight with all the cooking and eating that ensues. In all the hustle and bustle that visiting folks entail, I was not entirely surprised to see that Tamil TV serials reared their ugly heads in the television too.

Before I start, I want you to imagine a cage with a baboon waiting to get near an orchestra of badly tuned musical instruments nearby. Bear with me, I shall explain why a baboon is caged nearby.

I was cleaning up in the kitchen after an impressive sort of meal while the visiting folk switched on the Tamil serials. I need not have worried that I had not been following the serial for the past year and a half. In ten minutes, I knew the whole plot: Rohit and his father were bad, bad men and bold-actress-with-lots-of-make-up, had filed a police complaint against Rohit. Bad Rohit’s bad father clutched his heart when his Rohit was arrested and was carted off to the hospital with a weak heart. Rohit’s mother came to plead with bold-and beautiful actress with lots of make up, who was sitting at home and reading a magazine, to take back the case, and cried a river. All with me so far? Good. For it is here, that we wade into murky waters.

Bold-and-beautiful actress said she could withdraw the complaint but she had one condition.

The baboon breaks out of his cage and is now letting loose on a harmonium, while thumping his feet on the drums and the horrendous background music prepares everyone in our house, and the neighbor’s house too, that impressive stuff is about to happen.

B-and-B actress goes to visit ailing father in hospital and tells him her conditions for withdrawing the police complaint. Baboon is warming up now and lets you know that. Apparently, reprehensive Rohit had raped poor Divya, gotten her pregnant and not only had he abandoned her, but bad Rohit and his bad father then tried their best to get poor Divya killed.

The baboon now tries a windpipe sort of instrument that makes one forlorn and wane.

The B-and-B actress sets forth her condition: Rohit must marry Divya.

The baboon bangs, clangs and deafens one with the din on an impressive scale.

baboon

There are loud murmurs of approval from the audience, and I am shocked. I should know better than to expect anything else from a TV serial, but I still am shocked. I mean to condemn that poor girl Divya with a rascal of a husband is nothing short of criminal. She could have carved out a life for herself (and her baby if she wanted to keep the baby that is) with dignity and self-respect. Who wants her to be saddled with the rapist for life?

The maudlin entertainment pulled my attention when the parents or parents-in-law were here several times previously. There the heroine is:  impeccably groomed, dressed like she is going for a party, to receive her abusive husband or to confront angry relatives. She babbles on paying no heed to the social cues, and pretty soon, there is an explosion of sorts and everything thuds to a stop with a slap on her face. The glycerine acts immediately and there are tears and dubious sentiments on culture and I gag (once again) in the confines of my home.

For all our efforts at education, social reform and trying to open the mind to gender equalization, I think we have an epic fail with the Television serials. The producers may say that in the end, good triumphs, and after three years of bearing abuse, the emancipated young lady defies that kind of ill-treatment in the last one week of the television show and their souls are salvaged.

But where is my apology? Where is the apology to the audience? For three years, you send misogynistic messages every evening to the audience – an audience comprised of young, impressionable children, parents of married daughters, parents of daughters-of-marriageable-age, parents of young sons,  parents of sons who are married, not to mention every human-being, who actively seeks or passively receives the entertainment. What is the social message you are sending them? There is no subtlety there – the socially disgusting messages are there in Techni-color with dialogues.

Like my young daughter says, “Oh. In Tamil TV, everybody slaps the women when they don’t want to talk about something anymore. They never just walk away!”

That feels like a slap. Let loose baboons on drum now.