Which brings me back to the No.1 city in the world I would like to live in!!!

Not for a New Yorker the white picket fence and a two-car garage home on a sprawling suburban acre of land, where the closest place to get milk and bread is over a mile away. This is a city where if you can't go down the stairs and get what you need, you're likely to move residence; where 7 out of 10 of your neighbours look nothing like you, and nothing like each other either.

While on the topc of neighbours ..can you imagine my surprise the day I moved to my new apartment complex FYI .., it’s in the city , and not the desi preferred neighborhoods of Alpharetta, Dunwoody etc..and my next door neighbors have rangoli at the entrance and those gold welcome leafs with gods pictures and swastiks and what not that typically decorate doors of a lot of homes in India …

A New York Diary
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Maya Mirchandani

Senior Special Correspondent

Thursday, December 7, 2006:New York

For the last five years, the entire occidental world has debated and discussed the new global order through the lens of Samuel Huntington's paradigm of a clash among civilisations, whether in the context of the war on terror, the war in Iraq, tensions with Iran, the cartoon controversy, or the galloping tensions over the wearing of the veil by Muslim women in Europe.

So much so that this week's CNN's coverage of the Pope's visit to Turkey is headlined "When Faiths Collide".

But in a country that has produced both Samuel Huntington and the most vocal followers of his ideology, also exists a city like New York.

With its own cultural dynamic, sense of community and style - no matter where you come from, how you talk or what you look like, New York manages to find space for you.

How else can you explain a Pakistani kabab diner in the heart of predominantly desi Jackson Heights pulling out of the oven a huge roast turkey, covered in tandoori masala?

As I was ordering a plate of kababs for a visiting friend and myself, I asked him whether that was a special order of some kind. The all in one chef/manager/proprietor of Roti Boti told me, with an ever so subtle smile, "Bibi aaj Thanksgiving hai, na!" Can we carve you a slice, Professor Huntington?
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Two and a half years ago, a piece in the Metro section of the New York Times advised other Americans visiting the city for the Republican Convention on city etiquette.

Having been a resident here for just a short while myself, I brushed it off as Democrat disdain for hillbilly Republicans thronging New York to endorse a man New Yorkers can't stand, as President for a second term.

Now, having lived here a couple of years since then, things are clearer. True New York is Democrat, and true its citizens don't have much patience for President Bush, but the etiquette advice all that while ago was right on the money!

The speed at which to swipe your subway card through the turnstile so that you don't hold others up, walking at a pace that other pedestrians - local new Yorkers in a constant rush to get somewhere - find acceptable (that's the easiest way to spot an outsider), wearing black-always at night, but also advisable during the day, crossing the street anywhere and anytime that traffic is clear instead of waiting for the light, and so on and so forth.

This is a city which is willing to make any outsider one of its own; provided you follow its simple set of rules. Newcomers to New York, refer to the NYT archives of August 2004 for a full list of dos and don'ts.
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New York City might as well be the Independent Republic of New York. It's a complete antithesis to Americana in a way that most other Americans find hard to believe.

Not for a New Yorker the white picket fence and a two-car garage home on a sprawling suburban acre of land, where the closest place to get milk and bread is over a mile away. This is a city where if you can't go down the stairs and get what you need, you're likely to move residence; where 7 out of 10 of your neighbours look nothing like you, and nothing like each other either.

A ride on the subway could be a virtual tour around the world in a couple of hours. The 7 train is even called "the international express". It starts in Times Square, comes through Greek Astoria, goes through South Asian Jackson Heights and ends up in Chinese Flushing.

The F train travels through the city from Forest Hills, an old white American neighbourhood in Queens, through International territory Roosevelt Island (many, many UN officials live there) to Korea town in Manhattan, to Arab Coney Island Avenue to Russian Brighton Beach.

Each area bears the cultural and culinary flavours of its inhabitants. With food as the eternal elixir and dining out a tradition in this city rather than a treat, a scientist friend of mine summed it up quite succinctly.

"Where else can you find American customers, Mexican cooks in an Indian restaurant in Chinatown," he asked!
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There is certainly something to be said about the social fabric of this city. I often wonder why the controversy over wearing the veil hasn't taken on the same contours here in New York, in the way that it has across many European cities.

It's a city that has seen one of the worst acts of terrorism committed in history, and felt the closest thing to communal tension in the days immediately after 9/11.

I know first hand how tough those days were. Five years ago, everyone who looked "Muslim" was suspect. I decided to wear a salwar kameez for a dinner party and found it difficult to hail a cab. Subway riders would rather leave the seat next to me empty than come sit next to someone they weren't sure of. But around the rest of America, things were far worse - we all told ourselves - and braved another day.

Today, a group of friends can get together at a local pub and spend an evening singing Farsi and Urdu ghazals, reading Korean poetry and send out an email inviting people to an evening of "Poetry from the Axis of Evil" without a care in the world.

It's hard to say whether it is because of its overwhelming liberal democrat population, or because of the fact that people of every colour and creed live in such close proximity to each other, that "live and let live" becomes the only way to live here.

It is true that cases of discrimination still flood immigrant lawyers and activist groups on a daily basis, but it's also equally true that for every case that does, there's inevitably a New Yorker raising a voice and fighting against such discrimination.

They may win their cases, they may not - but taking on the challenge is what makes New York resilient.

The Real World: I don't recommend it...

Kenyon College Commencement Speech
May 20, 1990

I have a recurring dream about Kenyon. In it, I'm walking to the post office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't have my schedule memorized, and I'm not sure which classes I'm taking, or where exactly I'm supposed to be going.
As I walk up the steps to the postoffice, I realize I don't have my box key, and in fact, I can't remember what my box number is. I'm certain that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can't get them. I get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle Path, racking my brains and asking myself, "How many more years until I graduate? ...Wait, didn't I graduate already?? How old AM I?" Then I wake up.

Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon is a rich meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will probably burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having the dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of life: that is, not knowing where you're going or what you're doing.
I graduated exactly ten years ago. That doesn't give me a great deal of experience to speak from, but I'm emboldened by the fact that I can't remember a bit of MY commencement, and I trust that in half an hour, you won't remember of yours either.

In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book.
Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.

The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry.
The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was transmitting the spark of life to man.
My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that's what I did.

Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.
If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.
You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of "just getting by: absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your politics and religion become matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you'll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you'll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.
For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I've been amazed at how one ideas leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander. I know a lot about dinosaurs now, and the information has helped me out of quite a few deadlines.
A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you'll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.


So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.

I don't look back on my first few years out of school with much affection, and if I could have talked to you six months ago, I'd have encouraged you all to flunk some classes and postpone this moment as long as possible. But now it's too late.
Unfortunately, that was all the advice I really had. When I was sitting where you are, I was one of the lucky few who had a cushy job waiting for me. I'd drawn political cartoons for the Collegian for four years, and the Cincinnati Post had hired me as an editorial cartoonist. All my friends were either dreading the infamous first year of law school, or despondent about their chances of convincing anyone that a history degree had any real application outside of academia.

Boy, was I smug.

As it turned out, my editor instantly regretted his decision to hire me. By the end of the summer, I'd been given notice; by the beginning of winter, I was in an unemployment line; and by the end of my first year away from Kenyon, I was broke and living with my parents again. You can imagine how upset my dad was when he learned that Kenyon doesn't give refunds.
Watching my career explode on the lauchpad caused some soul searching. I eventually admitted that I didn't have what it takes to be a good political cartoonist, that is, an interest in politics, and I returned to my firs love, comic strips.
For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was forced to accept a real job.

A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the 4-1/2 million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect second where they would earn another 20 cents without doing any work for it.
It was incredible: after every break, the entire staff would stand around in the garage where the time clock was, and wait for that last click. And after my used car needed the head gasket replaced twice, I waited in the garage too.

It's funny how at Kenyon, you take for granted that the people around you think about more than the last episode of Dynasty. I guess that's what it means to be in an ivory tower.

Anyway, after a few months at this job, I was starved for some life of the mind that, during my lunch break, I used to read those poli sci books that I'd somehow never quite finished when I was here. Some of those books were actually kind of interesting. It was a rude shock to see just how empty and robotic life can be when you don't care about what you're doing, and the only reason you're there is to pay the bills.
Thoreau said,

"the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."


That's one of those dumb cocktail quotations that will strike fear in your heart as you get older. Actually, I was leading a life of loud desperation.

When it seemed I would be writing about "Midnite Madness Sale-abrations" for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea.


I tell you all this because it's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.

I still haven't drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.
Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.

Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.
To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.

As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons.
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.
The so-called "opportunity" I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.
What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts.

On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.


You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.
Many of you will be going on to law school, business school, medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within your own lifetime.

But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

I think you'll find that Kenyon touched a deep part of you. These have been formative years. Chances are, at least of your roommates has taught you everything ugly about human nature you ever wanted to know.
With luck, you've also had a class that transmitted a spark of insight or interest you'd never had before. Cultivate that interest, and you may find a deeper meaning in your life that feeds your soul and spirit. Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself.
Graduating from Kenyon, I suspect you'll find yourselves quite well prepared indeed.


I wish you all fulfillment and happiness. Congratulations on your achievement.


Bill Watterson

About how life isn't always a Bollywood movie:)

First Person special

I fell in love - and she flew to Australia

How was 2006 for you? For the five people in our First Person special - from a pregnant teenager to an ill-starred lover - it was the year when everything changed. The first, Carl Carter, tells how he made the greatest romantic gesture of his life
Monday January 1, 2007

Guardian

Saturday

Eight weeks ago I spent £1,000 that I don't have on a flight to Australia. It was leaving that night. I'm no jet-setter, just your average twentysomething: single, flat-sharing and overdrawn. But something amazing had happened that left me with no choice.

It started in a nightclub when a girl called Kat came up and told me I looked bored. This was true - I'd been leaning against the wall, seeking refuge from the sea of sweaty bodies and crap music. The next night we went for dinner. We fed each other dim sum, talked for hours that felt like seconds, marvelling at how much we had in common. We're both passionate about travelling. We can both quote the entire script of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, giggling like schoolchildren into our cocktails. I'll spare you the mushy stuff. Suffice to say, I'd been waiting a long time to meet somebody like Kat. Kat was lovely. Kat thought I was lovely. And Kat was returning home to Australia in three days.

For the next few days, Kat moved in. I cooked her breakfast; we ate on the balcony, hands linked over the table, our breath steamy in the cold morning air. We played Scrabble on the lounge floor, then curled up and watched rubbish DVDs in bed. I took her to Heathrow on a rainy Tuesday night and waved a mournful goodbye. Neither of us talked about whether we'd meet again; I think I was scared I might hear the words "good while it lasted". "Hey, it's just a day away," said Kat, reading my mind. I nodded, gave her a long hug goodbye, and walked away.

Life stubbornly insisted upon continuation. It was the same job, the same house, the same routine, yet Kat was everywhere. She was the discarded cocoa mugs in the sink, the long chestnut hairs still in my bed, the DVD still spinning in the player. I took the plunge and phoned her the next day. I've always hated long-distance calls, but we chatted for hours. The next evening was spent doing the same; this was becoming addictive. I lay on my bed, staring at the same photos and wishing that they weren't of a person now on the other side of the world.

And that was when the idea occurred.

The next day, a week after we first met, I was on a bus back from the travel agent, clutching my plane ticket to Sydney. The flight left in five hours. And I hadn't told Kat.

Sunday

I arrived in Sydney after a torturous 26 hours. All I could think of was how Kat would react. Had I made the right decision by turning up unannounced? There was still time to call, still time to avert disaster, but the romantic in me wouldn't allow it. What was the point in spending a grand on the greatest romantic gesture of my life, only to blow the surprise?

On the drive to Canberra, the highway pushed south for a lonely 272km, giving me plenty of time to play out the following scenario in my head. I'd told Kat she was meeting a friend of mine, who happened to be passing through Canberra with a present from me. There was, of course, no such friend, and the person standing outside David Jones department store, next to the merry-go-round, at 1pm, would be me.

After delighting her with my arrival, the rough plan was to go for a drink, check myself into a hotel for the first night, then ... at this point the plan ended abruptly, as did the highway.

I made my way nervously to Canberra town centre 45 minutes early, and paced around, obsessing over my opening words. I settled on a casual, but jovial, "You're right, it is only a day away!" delivered from behind her back, to be replaced with a large grin when she turned around. Time passed in an odd, juddering way. At 1.02pm I was still pacing. And suddenly there she was. Standing with her back to me, peering around looking for my friend, every bit as beautiful as I remembered.

When she turned and saw me, I forgot everything. Her mouth dropped open and I blurted an odd, weak greeting, as if all this was perfectly normal. We had the briefest of clinches, then she said, "My mum and sister are here." This was very bad news.

She led me to a nearby bench, where a middle-aged woman sat with another in her 20s. "Mum, Hilary," explained Kat (and I could hear in her voice how freaked out she was), "this isn't Carl's friend. This is Carl." They smiled politely. I realised, with fleeting disappointment, that they hadn't been fully briefed. "We were just off to get some lunch," Kat said, and the four of us began walking.

This was not going to plan. All I wanted to do was fling my arms around her and tell her I really missed her, but, instead, I was being forced to assume the role of a placid freak who'd travelled the globe on a whim to "hang out" with a mate. Kat, left to assume whatever she liked, was looking increasingly alarmed. We had a light lunch in a cafe that played out like a Pinter scene with everybody discussing the price of milk and nobody daring to broach the topic of what this Englishman was doing at their table. The trickiest part came when her mother asked, "So, how did you and Kat meet?"

Mercifully, we were eventually left on our own and I drove us to a nearby park where we walked around, hands stuffed in pockets. I tried to put my arms around Kat, but it felt awkward and staged, like an over-eager date trying to cop a feel in the cinema. I sat on a bench and took a deep breath. Time to talk. I began with a stuttered apology for turning up out of the blue, a faltering explanation that I'd not meant it to be this scary.

"I don't know what to say," said Kat, after a pause that felt like eternity. "It was an amazing thing to do. It's just ... I don't know if things can be the same as they were in London. I've only just got home after two years abroad. I only just saw my mother again. I only just came out of a long relationship."

These statements rained down on me like meaty hailstones. I felt sick inside. It began to dawn on me how naive I'd been to assume we could carry on where we had left off. Kat took some of it back, sensing my disappointment and reassuring me that she was glad I was there. But then how could anyone reject me outright after I'd come 10,000 miles? What I had done was such an over-bloated gesture that any attempt at honesty would seem inappropriate. "I'm sorry it couldn't be how you planned," she said. "I think I just need a little time to adjust." I drove to a pokey motel on the other side of town, and sat in silence on the edge of the bed. Kat had half-heartedly invited me into the family home, but I declined; I felt I'd intruded enough already. I turned on my phone and it began to fill with messages from friends at home, tentatively asking how it had gone. I considered my response, and began to cry. A week suddenly felt like a long time.

Monday

I met Kat again. We had breakfast in a cafe like two relatives waiting for bad news in a hospital. After eating, we drove to Lake Burley Griffin and sat on a picnic mat, knees touching our foreheads, a metre-wide chasm between us. I asked myself: what have I done wrong? I'm still the same person she'd met in London.

Finally, I could bear it no longer and declared I was going home. Kat looked surprised, and for the first time I saw a flicker of something behind the gloom. "I really do want you here," she said, "but to be honest - what were you expecting?" The question caught me off-guard. "What you've done is incredible," she said. "Nobody's ever done anything like that for me before. But what the hell were you thinking, you idiot?" I smirked at this absurdity. Kat laughed, too. The tension was finally broken and we hugged tightly for what seemed like for ever.

I postponed my escape, accepting instead an invitation to lunch with the family and then, unexpectedly, things began to look up. The Englishman was a hit. Sitting at a pavement cafe, I shared jokes with the sisters and swapped stories with mum. I saw Kat looking proudly at me and hoped it was a good sign. We spent the afternoon and evening shopping together, but once again it became difficult, alternating between comfortable conversation and strained silences. I tried to play it cool, but I was trapped between Kat's need for an easy life and my own need for reassurance. The tension was driving me mad. Eventually, I came up with a plan. I'd head off to Sydney for a couple of days, give her some time, and return for the weekend. Maybe my second visit would feel more normal than the first.

Tuesday

We grabbed some lunch at a pavement cafe before my sojourn to Sydney. Confident of my plan, I felt less pressure, and conversation flowed easily. As I was talking, I noticed Kat looking at me in a funny way. Then, without warning, she leant forward, put a hand on my shoulder and kissed me, tenderly and warmly, on the lips. As soon as I relaxed and stopped pressuring her, it all seemed to work.

Finally, I was feeling the moment again, and Kat seemed to be, too. I kissed her a long goodbye until the weekend and drove off. I saw her face wrinkle into that cute smile as it receded in my rear-view mirror to a blur, a white dot and then nothing.

And that's the last time I saw her.

After two days in Sydney, I called, eager to make plans for the weekend, but got a shock. Kat sounded evasive. There would be family staying. We might not get time together. It might not be worth my while. I was about to launch into a persuasive counter-argument when something made me stop. And in that instant, everything became clear. There I was, miles from home, having emptied my wallet and bared my soul. If this was to continue, I would need a hell of a lot more back than I was getting. I swallowed hard, then told Kat I agreed. It wasn't worth my while. Maybe some other time. We'd stay in touch. With a heavy heart, I hung up, dialled the airline, and travelled home that same night.

Today

I'm back in London, wrapped in a woollen jumper, gazing out over the bleak winter skyline. It's two months since I stood in that manky nightclub and Kat walked over to alter the course of my life. I've recovered from the journey, but I haven't spoken to her since. She never did call, despite her promises. I still think about her a lot, but my friends are their usual brilliant, supportive selves. There's only been one embarrassing moment when I cried in their kitchen but I maintain that it was the tequila fumes.

In many ways, I've learned a lot. I don't regret going to Australia. If things had worked out, I'd be writing a very different, very smug story. Conversely, if I hadn't gone, I'd regret never knowing. I've always been an impatient romantic, and I now see that it's a selfish combination. I fall for people quickly and then make unreasonable demands on them to have similarly strong feelings back.

My journey has definitely changed me. Strangely, I feel more confident. It may not have worked out this time, but at least I am prepared to go to such lengths to answer life's questions. Would I do it again? Possibly. When you're loved-up, you make spontaneous decisions. But at what point does a big gesture cross the line from romantic to foolish?

Maddeningly, I still don't know. It scares me that one person can make me behave so irrationally and lay my heart open to such massive damage. But the world needs some craziness, otherwise it would be a very dull, predictable place. Maybe I'll just limit myself to European flights next time.

Amitava Kumar on English Textbooks

The Hindu, Literary Review, October 2, 2005
Textbook of Laughter and Forgetting

We have repeatedly witnessed in recent years, almost like the seasonal outbreak of a distressing form of cholera, controversies over the contents of history textbooks.
But why is there no discussion about what school-children are asked to read in their English textbooks?


I have very little memory now of what I had read in the books used in my history classes, although I do remember the attention with which I would copy out on clean sheets of paper the line-drawings that represented the portraits of emperors. Akbar’s moustache drooped. Humayun was thin and wizened, already preparing, it seemed, for a premature death. The rounded lines in the portrait of Shah Jahan contained all the sorrow of love’s futile striving. Nearly everything else in those books escapes me at the moment.

This might be entirely because I was a mediocre student and, like the uninspired everywhere, I found my classes stultifying. But the fact remains that I still have vivid and exact memories of what I read in my English textbooks. It was there that I read George Orwell’s account of shooting an elephant in Burma, Dom Moraes on a trip to the Thar, Khushwant Singh’s depiction of life in the village of Mano Majra, Somerset Maugham describing the solitude on his seventieth birthday.

When I was sixteen, I left my hometown Patna to go to school in Delhi. The school where I got admission, Modern School on Barakhamba Road, was a prestigious enclave where the children of the rich and the powerful came each day as if they were visiting a familiar club. Our teachers, for the most part drawn from the Punjabi middle-class, could only use a puritanical and unimaginative pedagogy to prop themselves up against the display of wealth. They knew in their hearts that they were superfluous and stuck to the dull routine of making us read and repeat the words in the textbooks prescribed by the school board.

Nevertheless, the English textbooks that I read and reread during those two years gave me a sense of language and an idea of how to express my own sense of the world that I inhabited. This is what literature can do, even without your knowing it. Shouldn’t there be wider debate, then, on what our students read in their books?
I recently received a letter from an editor at Macmillan-India. He had written to say that he was preparing a textbook for the Intermediate level students in Bihar and he wanted permission to use an essay of mine in which I had written about a visit to the Khudabaksh Library in Patna.*

The letter brought back the mixed memories from my youth. In my reply to the editor, I readily granted permission. I didn't ask for any payment. It seemed to me that even one poor student reading me in Bihar would be worth a thousand readers in South Delhi or abroad.

When I remembered my own alienating classroom experiences, it gave me pleasure to think that now a reader in Bihar would be able to rediscover his or her own world in my writing. The names of places as well as the people, the sentiments shared by the writer, even the dust on the streets—all of this would be familiar to the student in towns like Ara or Motihari. How many times before had Bihari students found their lives reflected in the English textbooks prescribed for their courses?
Then, just last week, the postman brought a registered package from India. It was the textbook with my essay in it. I read the book quickly. The search for relevance by the education council had meant not only the inclusion of Bihari writers like Tabish Khair among the contributors but also pieces that provided urgent social critique. A good example was a poem "Voice of the Unwanted Girl" by Sujata Bhatt, written in the voice of a destroyed foetus, presenting a protest against female infanticide. Textbooks elsewhere in India should include writings like this that touch the heart and challenge the mind.

Our students need to be freed from the claustrophobia of the classroom. The prose and poetry that we offer them should appear to them fresh and enlivening. The Macmillian-India book began with a brilliant, hopeful piece by Jawaharlal Nehru, its elegant rhetoric paying homage to the arrival of Gandhi. I felt my senses lift while reading the essay. However, I'd like to see students also reading well-written critical pieces on subjects as seemingly trivial as Bombay films. Let's give them Ashis Nandy's incisive essay on P.C. Barua and Devdas. It will engage—and educate—students as much if not more than Shakespeare and Blake.

Why is it that English textbooks, including the one I was sent, are top-heavy with hagiographies of our national leaders? I have rarely seen letters printed in these books. There is very little travel-writing. There is no space ever for quality journalism. In general, we should also be publishing more women writers. To my students in America, I have taught Mahasweta Devi, Ismat Chughtai, Urvashi Butalia, and Arundhati Roy. Why are these writers not being taught in the places where I studied in India?

In the textbook that sparked these reflections, I found a story by O. Henry called "After Twenty Years." I had read this story in my English class twenty years ago. The lines of dialogue and the characteristic, surprising O. Henry twist at the end of the story came flooding back as I turned the pages. But this experience also made me distrust my pleasure and my nostalgia. Why are textbooks so remarkably unchanged even after decades?

The most disturbing aspect of the controversies over the history textbooks has been the extent to which current political interests determined what was taught in the classroom. That was detrimental, no doubt, but in the matter of English textbooks the opposite has been true. Our textbooks have remained for the most part trapped in the bubble of their own past. They continue to be hodge-podge collections of quaint pieces, somewhat suspect in their usefulness, a bit like the clay-objects strewn beside a corpse in a ceremonial grave. It is no surprise that in our professional use of the English language, as a people, we remain stiff, formal, awkward. Unless these textbooks are radically changed, our teachers will remain mummy-makers, wrapping cotton around our children's mouths.

Words to live by

The Sufis advise us to speak only after our words have managed to pass through three gates. At the first gate, we ask ourselves, 'Are these words true?' If so, we let them pass on; if not, back they go. At the second gate, we ask, 'Are they necessary?' At the last gate, we ask, 'Are they kind?' -Eknath Easwaran (1911-1999)

- from my favorite quote book …. And here it is in its original context

Meditation by Eknath Easwaran
Chapter 5, Training the Senses
Section 7 of 9

Selecting Entertainment


“……………………..In the name of hard-hitting communication, the media increasingly also offer us debased language – a few shopworn vulgarities, hauled out to serve every occasion. Presumably they are supposed to shock us, but what I find shocking is that people will allow the full range of their expressiveness to be encapsulated in a few stale interjections. It may seem old-fashioned, but I would recommend standing guard over the gate of the mouth to ensure that only the right kind of words come out. It is another form of sense training. Vulgar speech, sarcasm, gossip, even pointless chatter, should all be denied exit visas.

The Sufis capture this idea in a splendid metaphor. They advise us to speak only after our words have managed to issue through three gates. At the first gate we ask ourselves, “Are these words true?” If so, let them pass on; if not, back they go.

At the second gate, we ask, “Are they necessary?” They may be true, but it doesn’t follow that they have to be uttered; they must serve some meaningful purpose. Do they clarify the situation or help someone? Or do they strike a discordant or irrelevant note?

At the last gate we ask, “Are they kind?” If we still feel we must speak out, we need to choose words that will be supportive and loving, not words that embarrass or wound another person. All of us understand what blows can do to someone, but we do not realize that words can create a more painful injury, one that can last for many years. Nor do we understand the terribly destructive impact words can have on the consciousness of the person who uses them………………….”

Behind the Veil

Barkha Dutt

Managing Editor, NDTV 24x7

Saturday, October 28, 2006:

It's the classic cliché: meek eyes staring out from behind miles of cloth; the grim black color making the perfect style statement for suppression.

But is it really that simple?

Is the veil a symbol of equality or entrapment? Does it stand for religious freedom or retrograde ritualism? At a time when the globalisation bulldozer is swiftly flattening out individuality and turning us all into assembly line productions, is the veil a healthy assertion of multiculturalism? Or is it simply sexist in the extreme?

Jack Straw, England's former foreign secretary, kick-started the row when he declared that he would prefer Muslim women in Britain to completely discard the full veil. Salman Rushdie was even more blunt: the veil, he said, "sucks" and was just another way of taking "power away from women".

And Tony Blair joined the chorus: the time had come, he said, to step outside the boundaries of political correctness and debate the place of the veil in a modern, secular society.

So which side of the debate are you on?

I have to confess that despite being an unabashed liberal feminist, I'm pretty confused.

Sure, I'm instinctively revolted by religious dogma and sickened by the subtext: stifle female sexuality in swathes of impenetrable dark cloth. I have always argued that certain principles of equality must override and supersede religion. So while Jack Straw's comments were restricted to the niqab that cloaks women from head to toe, personally I find even the hijab or the headscarf scarily suggestive of subservience.

But it disturbs me only as much as the ghungat in Hindu homes of rural India or the feudal chic of urban socialites who dress up in fancy chiffons and pearls and then demurely drape their heads and reach for their husband's feet if required. The veil offends my notion of equality just as much as temples that deny entry to women or churches that believe priesthood to be the preserve of men.

The fact is that gender is always on the wrong side of faith. And so by definition, the classic feminist position is always at loggerheads with tradition.

The problem as many feminists (including myself) have discovered is this: our ideology often doesn't have the width for the world's complexities. It ignores socio-economic realities and how inextricably culture and identity are linked.

In real life, context is everything: and the truth alters as the context shifts.

I remember being in Kashmir in 2001. A shadowy militant group was trying to push women behind a blanket of black: the veil was being enforced in a valley where many women traditionally never wore it. Outspoken young girls went on record to protest the infringement of their freedom and the distortion of their culture. As we aired these reports on television, a fatwa was slapped on my head warning me against traveling to the state.

A few months later, 9/11 shook the world, and I was in New York. This time, there were threats too, but of an entirely different kind. Muslim women were being compelled to discard the safety and comfort of the hijab.

At the city’s community center for Arab-Americans, social workers were advising women to dress in a way that would blend them into the mainstream: no headscarves, skirts and dresses, if possible. At a peace vigil, I met a Bangladeshi woman who suddenly broke down and wept; it was the first time she had stepped out her house without wearing the customary salwar-kameez.

Freedom had really become another word for nothing left to lose. And suddenly what could have been a symbol of oppression in another place, at another time, had transformed into an emblem of religious pride.

So when Jack Straw says that the full veil is a "mark of separation" and a custom that segregates the community, it raises all sorts of other questions. The assimilation debate is always a dangerous one; must Muslims conform to an anglicised notion of dress to be considered regular people?

London-based journalist Zaiba Malik was one such "integrated" Muslim who had never worn a veil before, but decided to conduct a little experiment. She shrouded herself in black and walked across the city. Among the slew of comments heaped upon her: "You Paki terrorist, go back home".

Reading about her experience, I thought that one remark would have enraged me enough to want to wear the veil forever.

On the other hand, there is also no doubt that across the world, there is a crisis of modernity and leadership in Muslim communities. As terrorism plunges the world into a Samuel Huntington styled clash of civilizations, Mr Straw is right in saying that cities must not be split into self-contained ghettoes. The question is this: did his controversial remarks actually end up achieving exactly that?

There are no simple answers. Modern politics has got caught in the polarisations of the West vs Islam battle, and the modern gender debate is tragically trapped in extremes as well.

Read the furious bloggers on Jack Straw’s comments. One of them, a young Muslim, demands to know: "What are Straw's views on teenage pregnancy, on young girls going out dressed in next to nothing?"

Beyond the obvious cultural clash, the comment got me thinking. Would there ever have been a public debate over whether women dressed in handkerchief skirts and bikini blouses were appropriate role models?

Of course not.

Today we believe women have traveled a long way because we are able to flaunt our sexuality and strut our stuff. To question to that is to be labelled prudish and backward. And yet, I often wonder, is this progress or merely the circle completing itself?

The debate reminds me of one of my favourite stories, one, some readers of this column would have heard before. I first met "item girl" Momed Khan during the recording of a television show on censorship. The sultry, long-haired, short-skirted Momed, best-known for her seductive serenade in the hit song Dekh Le, sprang to her feet, and pointed aggressively at the skirt riding up her leg.

This is what women wanted to be, she said, almost yelling. The age of the salwar-kameez was over. As the audience applauded, I thought: here's a 19-year old Muslim woman from conservative Lucknow, in Thackeray's Mumbai, defying convention and norm. That seemed pretty radical by any standard.

Yet I kept thinking: What did she really stand for? The manufactured sexuality, the crafted coquettishness — it seemed to me that we had just gone and replaced an old stereotype with a new one. Had she turned up draped in a full veil instead, would she have been a different woman beneath the black?

Somehow I'm not so sure.

Modernity is a confusing business, and sometimes moving forward is the same as going back.

Mates: A literary history

Matching sock, erotic target or fellow damned soul chained to your wrist? From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Kundera, a guided tour of the Big Two.
By Gary Kamiya
October 14, 2003 |

Mate is a comfortable and companionable word. Its world exudes a kind of biological or metaphysical rightness: a place where human beings, like those smiling giraffes shown boarding the ark in tandem in children’s books, contentedly pair off forever. It is a cosmic laundry in which no sock ever goes missing.

But the aspirant to this mately heaven is haunted by fears of inadequacy. The founding myth of the mate, after all, derives from Plato’s Symposium. In that dialogue, one of the speakers, Aristophanes, asserts that the primordial race of men and women (and hermaphrodites, but to explore that would take us too far afield) was divided in half by Zeus. Ever since then, goes on Aristophanes—who, it should be noted, claims to be suffering from a severe hangover—we have been destined to search for our complementary halves, without which we will not be complete. In an age in which the soul-elevating yearnings and courtly ordeals of Provençal love have been replaced by sixty-second dating and sexual encounters negotiated on the Internet, this theory raises the bar of matedom dauntingly high. Hence, perhaps, the preference, in our modest age, for the neutral “husband” or “wife” or the still more poker-faced “partner,” which could refer as easily to the relationship between Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley as to that between Dante and Beatrice. Still the mate ideal beckons, like a horizon.

Of course, you cannot visit a horizon—which is one of the reasons why literature so rarely deals with long-term romantic relationships of the sort that could be characterized as mately. Byron anatomized this omission in Don Juan: “All tragedies are finished by a death, / All comedies are ended by a marriage; / The future states of both are left to faith, / For authors fear description might disparage / The worlds to come of both, or fall beneath, / And then both worlds would punish their miscarriage. . .” In Tristram Shandy, the first modern, smarty-pants novelist, Laurence Sterne, slyly alluded to the problem of depicting ideal happiness by inserting a blank page on which the reader could draw his beloved.

Throughout most of literary history, marriage—particularly happy marriage—might as well be one of those empty spots on old maps inscribed with the words “Here be monsters.” For every Kitty and Levin, the lovingly observed couple in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina who find grace as they work their way together through life, there are hundreds of Karenins, Madame Bovarys, and Casaubons—a vast, dreary entourage of miserable spouses, doomed adulterers, and hideously mismatched souls. There are plenty of lusty young stallions crashing through fences, but very few mates grazing contentedly together in the meadow. As an old man, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno said, “I do not feel anything when I brush against the legs of my wife, but mine ache if hers do.” Though existent, these kind of poignant observations are hard to find in fiction.

Some of this void can be attributed to the uninspiring historic reality of marriage, which until fairly recently could be summed up as a business deal with bad sex. But the reasons are deeper. Stories are driven by change, not permanence: once the hero and heroine make their safe harbor, the wind goes out of the story’s sails. From a narrative standpoint, happiness is boring—a truth summed up by Tolstoy’s famous dictum that “Happy families are all alike.”

There is also the uncomfortable possibility that mately happiness may be boring even to those allegedly enjoying it. We return to perhaps the world’s most depressing marriage counselor, Lord Byron, who wrote, “Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign / Of human frailty, folly, also crime, / That love and marriage rarely can combine, / Although they both are born in the same clime; / Marriage from love, / like vinegar from wine— / A sad, sour, sober beverage—by time / Is sharpen’d from its high celestial flavour / Down to a very homely household savour.”

Who would sing the joys of even the finest aged Modena balsamic when there are so many sweet young bottles of Taittinger yet to be popped? (Although it is worth noting that Georges Simenon, the great Belgian writer who claimed to have made love to ten thousand women, created one of the most memorably contented couples in literature in Inspector and Madame Maigret, who walk together in happy silence. Could it be that exhausting, Wilt Chamberlain-level promiscuity is required to direct a writer’s precious mental fluids toward consideration of mately bliss?)

But even if we reject Byron’s discouraging words and insist that mately love is more like aged Bordeaux than oxidized rotgut, there is a deeper reason that writers rarely explore it. Fiction’s “happily ever after” syndrome betrays its deep roots in fairy tales and fables—simple, archetypal forms that reveal both the eternal human drive to affirm a state of permanent happiness and the difficulty of doing so. Even the most sophisticated modern writers, who do not believe in fairy-tale endings, are still drawn to convey an irreducible and transcendent union between two people. But just as in fairy tales, they cut away at precisely the moment when it is to be revealed. It is as if only by looking away can one convey the unknown land denoted by the word “happiness.” Like Orpheus bringing Eurydice out of the underworld, it seems the novelist cannot look directly at love without losing it. The light flashes only out of fragments.

Sometimes writers act like officers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Language, attempting to increase the value of the l-word by restricting its circulation. In Czeslaw Milosz’s memoir Native Realm, for example, the word “love” appears, I believe, only once—as literally the last word in the book. It’s an extraordinary and unexpected move that falls like a thunderbolt. Or take the famous last sentence of The House of Mirth, when Lawrence Selden says goodbye to the dead Lily Bart: “He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.” The word, presumably, is “love.” But the fact that Wharton refuses to name it gives it far greater power. Silence breathes the ineffable.

The ending of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being reveals another strategy of indirection. It attempts to resolve the question posed at the outset of the book: How can you know if your decision to settle down with one person is driven by love or sentimental exhaustion—what Kundera calls “hysteria”? The problem with questions like this is that once they are asked, there is almost never going to be a satisfactory answer. And the book’s protagonist, Tomas, is nothing if not a bed-hopper and question-asker. Kundera needs to assert that Tomas has experienced some kind of romantic epiphany that has made him choose Tereza once and for all, but he is also too sophisticated to be satisfied with that answer.

He falls back first on a venerable narrative device: prolepsis or foreshadowing. The reader is told that Tomas and Tereza are both going to die in a truck crash. This omniscient knowledge bathes their last scene in a golden glow; it becomes doubled, like a vista observed by a man with cancer uncertain he will ever see it again. Yet even with this doubling, which would perhaps have allowed Kundera to get away with a sentimental portrayal of marital happiness, he distances himself. “Tereza leaned her head on Tomas’s shoulder. Just as she had when they flew together in the airplane through the storm clouds. She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was form, the happiness was content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.”

Which comes first, happiness or sadness? In this dialectical game of tag, in order for us to believe in the happiness that the author is asserting, it is also necessary for us not to believe in it. Without shadow, no light.

And then, having adjusted his chiaroscuro perfectly, the author in the book’s last lines retreats altogether and turns things over to the God of narrative. Tomas and Tereza retire to bed. A butterfly flies up. “The strains of the piano and violin came up weakly from below.” The greatest intimacy can only be communicated by the neutral turning of the world.

There is, of course, far more to the mately story than these kind of deconstructive and reconstructive finesses. Byron is wrong: not all comedies are ended with a marriage—many, in fact, begin with one. Marriage may be rarely chosen as a romantic subject, its intimacies and their meanings may be terra incognita, but it frequently serves as a kind of rumpus room, an arena where all the furniture can be wiped off, the laugh track is always going, and the wet bar is well stocked. Literature is filled with companionable, often jesting and jawboning mates, an endless procession of Nicks and Noras and Mr. and Mrs. Bennetts. Statistically, matedom is comic. But comic matedom is simply taken for granted, as background; it no longer has any meaning, any fizz. Love’s daemon is dead—and you can often discern a distinct element of thank god—and pure vinegar reigns.

Far from indicating an era’s creeping spiritual death, vinegar literature can be a sign of its maturity. It would be foolish to generalize, but ages that are only obsessed with the ecstasies and agonies of the carnal may well turn out to be intense but callow. Whatever the case, the greatest psychological novelists, like Stendhal or Flaubert, combine vinegar and wine—the disillusioned but smiling perspective of the mate with the erotic obsession of the lover.

Standing off to the side of these romantic partners is a closely related type of mate, perhaps indeed the beau ideal of erotic mateship in its approaching-vinegar phase: the mate as friend. This mate appears at the very beginning of written literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh, written as early as 3,000 b.c., recounts the love of the half-divine King Gilgamesh for his human friend Enkidu, a love that leads the heartbroken king to travel to the underworld to try to bring his dead friend back. “I thought my friend would come back because of my weeping,” Gilgamesh laments, in words that echo down the millennia. A mate in this sense is traditionally male, though there is no reason the word can’t stretch beyond its British nautical roots to include women. (As Octavio Paz argues in his erudite, heartfelt exploration of love and literature, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, the comparative absence of great female friendships in the canon is due to social constraints on women, not to the feminine shortcomings alleged even by so great a thinker as Montaigne.)

A mate is no ordinary friend: he or she is a bro, a dude, a homeboy, a pard, a pally—someone who’s got your back, who’s connected to you by a kind of tribal bond, like those found in Clifford Geertz or the Crips and the Bloods. Since American men notoriously pursue loneliness and bowl alone, the Ur-mate is British or Australian: American male friendship tends to be too jumpy and self-centered. The most powerful contemporary portrait of mates I know is in Graham Swift’s exquisite Last Orders, the tale of a gang of aging, working-class East Londoners who carry out their promise to dump a pal’s ashes off Margate Pier. These men are of the generation that fought in World War II, which is telling: one of the two quintessential mate types is the soldier. The friendships in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and his powerful, little-known sequel, The Road Back, are not deeply developed, but they are unforgettable.

The other quintessential mate locale is, of course, the Old West. The friendship of Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, that rare book that is at once a potboiler and a literary masterpiece, is truly epic: it reaches sublime heights in the book’s long, heartbreaking denouement when Call honors his promise and travels alone, carrying the coffin of his friend from Missouri to Texas to bury him.

The mate need not even be human. In Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling, the love of young Jody Baxter for his fawn Flag culminates in Jody’s initiation into the heartbreak of adulthood—a passage captured in the book’s beautiful closing:

Flag—He did not believe he should ever again love anything, man or woman or his own child, as he had loved the yearling. He would be lonely all his life. But a man took it for his share and went on.
In the beginning of his sleep, he cried out, “Flag!”
It was not his own voice that called. It was a boy’s voice. Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.

In the greatest novels, friendship becomes as rich, strange, and spiritually complex as a great love affair. This is emphatically true in the greatest Western novel of all, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The relationship of Jim and Huck, with its racial audacity and the haunting ambiguity in which the slave is father to the fatherless boy and the fatherless boy is father to the slave, stands as one of the supreme examples in world literature of friendship, a friendship that breaks the bounds of our understanding of that category as decisively as King Lear and Cordelia break through our received understanding of fathers and daughters.

The turning point in Huck’s understanding of Jim, and of himself, comes when he decides to turn Jim in. At first Huck is overjoyed, knowing he is finally doing a good deed that will send him to heaven; but then he gets to thinking. “And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.”

The climax of this passage, when Huck decides not to turn Jim in and says, “All right, then I’ll go to hell,” is justly famous. But it is the sentence “But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind” that has always moved me, with its humility, the pathos of its involuntary love.

And unlike Kundera’s couple, whose final closeness is sublime yet haunted by a hint of artificiality, Huck and Jim are together effortlessly. “It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed—only a little kind of a low chuckle.” Nothing really happens in this scene, but it is as close to idyllic as anything in modern literature.

We have only touched on the first, second, and third mates—the Starbucks, Stubbs, and Flasks of the literary world. But the gallery is endlessly, gloriously varied: Bertie and Jeeves, Elizabeth and Darcy, Prince Hal and Falstaff, Helena and Hermia, Dean and Sal, Lear and Kent, Tristan and Isolde, Hamm and Clov, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Poldi Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. (The entire plot of the most important novel of the twentieth century culminates in the moment when Young Joyce and Old Joyce, having finally met, piss together—an action that could be considered the apotheosis of male matedom.)

These pairs have nothing in common except the fact that they are together. They may be blood brothers, or conspiring fools; master and servant, or husband and wife; father and son, or the most complicated of friends. It doesn’t matter: what matters is that for some reason, as they made their way through the world, they found each other, found solace, or an answer, or a wilder music, and for a moment, or a lifetime, two turned into one. Falstaff’s plea to Prince Hal, who he knows is about to drop him, could speak for them all, that great pageant of lovers and friends: “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”




This essay originally appeared in the "Mates" issue of Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story magazine, featuring stories by Louis Begley, Mary Gaitskill and Robert Olen Butler and artwork by the Clayton brothers. For more information about Zoetrope and the Mates issue, go to www.all-story.com.

From salon.com

Innocence Versus Insight

"So many questions. Inquiring minds want to know. Innocent minds might not want to know."

Innocence Versus Insight
by Robin Hanson, September 9, 2006.

There seems to be a fundamental tradeoff between innocence and insight. This tradeoff occurs at both personal and social levels. Adam and Eve are said to have lost their place in Eden because they ate from the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil;" their knowledge cost them their innocence and comfort. Our insight often comes at a similar price.

Innocence is a central concept in human affairs. It appears often in literature, but has been largely ignored by social science. Let us try to do better.
Innocence seems to be a potentially attractive kind of ignorance. Apparently, in many social contexts ignorance can be a good thing, in part because helps to preserve idealism. Idealism is a simplified view of the world that supports optimism about the abilities or motives of oneself, one's associates, one's groups, and of related social processes. So why might idealism be a good thing, and how could ignorance help it? Consider some examples.
First, consider marriage. In societies with strong arranged marriages, the marriage relation is more innocent. Married people there have not had several deep and perhaps sexual relations before they are married. This supposedly helps spouses become more deeply attached to each other, with fewer threats from other past or future or concurrent relations. This attachment comes at the cost of less exploration, which presumably means partners are not as well matched with each other.
Cultural variation in marital innocence might represent multiple equilibria. In a society where most people experiment, those who do not experiment may seem timid and undesired. In a society where most people do not experiment, those who do experiment may seem to lack self-control and an ability to commit.
Second, consider patriotism and travel. Someone who has had little contact with other nations or cultures might find it easy to innocently presume that his nation and culture are superior. Because of this, in some places those who travel may be suspected of being less loyal to associates and the local community, and of being more at risk of adopting disapproved foreign attitudes and customs. In other places, travel may be celebrated, because those who travel more show they have more social contacts, wealth, and knowledge of the world, while those who travel less appear dull and timid.
Third, consider attitudes toward careers, as expressed for example by students applying to graduate school. In their statement of purpose, some students focus on their enthusiasm for a certain world of ideas, while other students focus on their personal career ambitions. In a discipline where most students focus on career ambitions, those who focus on ideas may seem naive and perhaps unwilling to compromise enough to succeed. In a discipline where most students focus on ideas, those who focus on career ambitions may appear to have insufficient interest to keep them in the field over the long run. One equilibria may select more ambitious and realistic students, while the other one may select more honestly interested but naive students.
Finally, consider self-deception. Humans naturally think more highly of themselves and their communities than their evidence can justify, but deny that they are biased in this way. This sincere confidence helps people to convince others to think highly of them, and to convince their group of their strong attachment to it. If you force yourself to face facts squarely you may gain better insight into yourself and human nature, and perhaps even signal a certain rare ability to achieve this result. Buy you may less convince others of your other abilities, and to convince your group of your loyalty.
What can we learn from these examples? We can see that idealism, a simplified optimistic vision of abilities and motives, can help one to become more deeply attached to associates and groups. This innocence often comes at the expense of insight however, and people often prefer to signal that they have the ability to gain insight.
It should be noted that innocent idealistic visions of the world can be quite negative about some things, as long as they are positive about the innocent person and his associates. For example, an innocent might see sex as dirty and disgusting, to support a romantic vision of relationships. Or an innocent might see all politicians as corrupt, supporting a vision of ordinary voters as uncorrupted.
There are so many interesting questions about innocence. To start, idealistic people often seem to know how acquiring more insight would on average change their attitudes. For example, the young often know about the attitudes the old have on average toward marriage, careers, nations, and so on. Young who do not acquire insight from this fact need to explain such age differences in differing preferences or abilities, rather than differing information. Are they right, or do they fool themselves?
Another obvious question is whether we expect on average to see too much insight or too much innocence. Excess signaling could push it either way, as far as I can see. We could avoid insight too much to signal our loyalty and confidence, or we could pursue insight too much to signal our ability and courage. Which is it?
A related question is the optimal personal tradeoff between innocence and insight. There are always things we could do which would teach us more about ourselves, our local associates and community, and about how much we approve of local customs and mores. If we take such actions, we may gain the benefit of insight, but we may run the risk of seeming less attractive and attached to our associates, and of becoming less bound to common mores.
It seems clear to me that the optimum choice is interior, containing both insight and innocence. Extreme examples can make this point clear. For example, consider the possibility of having sex with animals. I expect that if I tried this, I would learn more about myself, and I might find out that I liked and approved of such acts. But I know that this would horrify the people around me. Even my being willing to experiment with such things might scare the begezus out of them. So it seems prudent for me to just preserve my innocence on this subject.
At the other extreme, the idea of living in a small tight community which avoids outsiders has some attractions, but mostly repels me. There the benefits of innocence seem to clearly come at too high a price. But what is the optimal tradeoff in-between these extremes? Do I too easily assume that the tradeoff my local culture rewards is globally best?
So many questions. Inquiring minds want to know. Innocent minds might not want to know.
For their comments I thank Colleen Berndt, Bryan Caplan, Yan Li, and Alex Tabbarok.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence, http://hanson.gmu.edu/openhide.html, http://hanson.gmu.edu/metacynic.html

So would one want to return to innocence ??maybe not…..
From here via here.

Does Money Buy Happiness

Status Dimensions

But this is a problem only if you are determined to compete in that status race. If you are so determined, and you’re having a hard time of it, that’s your problem. You are not suffering from inequality; you are suffering from your preferences, and, within fairly broad limits, our preferences are under our control.

Read the entire article here.

Also the article that sparked it all ...Does Money Buy Happiness?

The International Herald Tribune
Economic View: Does money buy happiness?
By Robert H. Frank The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2006

Interest in the lifestyles of the rich and famous varies with economic conditions. Just as someone who is seven feet, or two meters, tall may seem almost normal at a National Basketball Association practice session, the purchases of the wealthy typically attract little notice when inequality is low and stable. But when inequality is high and growing rapidly, luxury purchases are sometimes as hard to ignore as a seven- foot sixth grader.

When "The Great Gatsby" was first published in 1925, income and wealth disparities were at record levels. It is thus no mystery that F. Scott Fitzgerald's saga of wealthy Americans during the Jazz Age became an instant best-seller.

Inequality diminished rapidly during the Great Depression and remained low until the 1970s. But since then, it has again been rising sharply. Disparities today are once more at record levels, which may help explain the resurgence of interest in Gatsby. Fitzgerald's novel was recently selected, for example, for common reading programs at Cornell and other universities, programs in which students, faculty, alumni and staff are encouraged to read and discuss the same book as the academic year begins.

With my last literature course, taken in high school, just a dim memory, I was naturally apprehensive when Cornell administrators asked me to speak at the university's Gatsby convocation for incoming freshmen last week. In the process of preparing for that assignment, however, I was delighted to discover the extent to which my economics training actually seemed to illuminate important elements of the novel's story line.

Consider, for example, the link between wealth and personal attractiveness. Everyone wants a house in a safe neighborhood with good schools, but those with low incomes cannot be sure of getting one. So, economists are not surprised that women mention earning power at or near the top of the list when surveyed about traits they find attractive in men. Gatsby understood that his humble station in life made him an unlikely suitor for his coveted Daisy. And so he labored with singular focus and determination to achieve material success on the grandest scale possible.

The theory of compensating wage differentials helps illuminate a particular detail of this quest. This theory holds that the more unpleasant and risky a job is, the more it pays. Some of the largest available pay premiums, it turns out, are those paid to highly qualified people who are willing to do morally questionable work. Tobacco industry consultants, for example, were once paid extremely high fees for their willingness to testify under oath that smoking had not been shown to cause serious illnesses. Gatsby realized that to have any chance of achieving his goal, he could not be cautious or squeamish.

Fitzgerald never reveals the precise details of how Gatsby amassed his fortune. But he leaves little doubt that Gatsby's work was not just morally suspect, but also well outside the law. Gatsby surely realized that if he were caught and punished, his dream would evaporate. But no matter. A less risky path would have meant certain failure.

The burgeoning literature on the determinants of human well-being also sheds light on events in Gatsby. Once the almost exclusive domain of psychologists, happiness studies began to attract the attention of economists after Richard Easterlin posed a timeless question in an influential 1974 paper. Does money buy happiness? Current research supports seemingly contradictory answers to this question.

One is that in any given country, the average level of measured happiness remains essentially unchanged over time, even in the face of substantial growth in average incomes. But if getting more money does not make us happier, why do people often struggle so hard to earn more? An answer is suggested by other studies showing that within any given country at a single point in time, people are happier, on average, the more money they have. To the extent money influences measured happiness levels, then, it is relative, not absolute, income that seems to matter.

But since Gatsby's income was enormous, in both relative and absolute terms, why wasn't he happy? Researchers have identified other factors that affect happiness levels far more than income does. For example, happiness levels rise substantially with the number of close friends someone has. One of the most striking scenes in the novel is of Gatsby's funeral, which almost no one bothered to attend. In his single-minded pursuit of material success, he appears to have developed no real friendships at all.

Gatsby's unhappiness may also be explained in part by the finding that those who focus most consciously and intensely on material success also tend to experience low levels of measured happiness. This is a singularly important finding for the many incoming freshmen whose only apparent goal is to become fabulously wealthy by age 25.

A far more promising strategy, according to the happiness literature, is to seek work you love. Those who find such a calling typically become deeply engaged in their professional lives. And engagement, in turn, leads to expertise, which in some fields, at least, leads to wealth. Finding work that you value for its own sake is thus not only a promising path to happiness, it may also increase your chances of becoming rich. But even if not, it will improve your odds of becoming an interesting person, someone who is attractive to both friends and potential mates alike.

F. Scott Fitzgerald probably would have appreciated this finding. For although the novelist himself married a wealthy woman, he advised others not to marry for money. "Go where the money is," he counseled, "then marry for love."

Robert H. Frank, an economist at the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University, is the co-author, with Ben Bernanke, of "Principles of Economics." E-mail: rhf3@cornell.edu

Khushwant Singh

Man how come I haven’t posted a Khushwant Singh article..he’s one of the first Indian authors I’ve read more than one book by…. Grew up reading his joke books..thank you very much!!! How much I understood at the time is open to question………..

Oh, That Other Hindu Riot Of Passage
By Khushwant Singh


07 November, 2004
Outlook Magazine

There are two anniversaries so deeply etched in my mind that every year they come around I recollect with pain what happened on those two days. They occurred 20 years ago. One is October 31, when Mrs Gandhi was gunned down by her two Sikh security guards. The other is the following day, when the 'aftermath' consummated itself: frenzied Hindu mobs, driven by hate and revenge, finally killed nearly 10,000 innocent Sikhs across north India down to Karnataka. Four years later, Mrs Gandhi's assassins Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh paid the penalty for their crime by being hanged to death in Tihar jail.

Twenty years later, the killers of 10,000 Sikhs remain unpunished. The conclusion is clear: in secular India there is one law for the Hindu majority, another for Muslims, Christians and Sikhs who are in minority.

October 31, 1984: The sequence of events remains as vivid as ever. Around 11 am, I heard of Mrs Gandhi being shot in her house and taken to hospital. By the afternoon, I heard on the bbc that she was dead. For a couple of hours, life in Delhi came to a standstill. Then hell broke loose-mobs yelling khoon ka badla khoon se lenge (we'll avenge blood with blood) roamed the streets. Ordinary Sikhs going about their life were waylaid and roughed up. In the evening, I saw a cloud of black smoke billowing up from Connaught Circus: Sikh-owned shops had been set on fire. An hour later, mobs were smashing up taxis owned by Sikhs right opposite my apartment. Sikh-owned shops in Khan Market were being looted. Over 100 policemen armed with lathis lined the middle of the road and did nothing. At midnight, truckloads of men armed with cans of petrol attacked the gurudwara behind my back garden, beat up the granthi and set fire to the shrine. I was bewildered and did not know what to do. Early next morning, I rang up President Zail Singh.

He would not come on the phone. His secretary told me that the president advised me to move into the home of a Hindu friend till the trouble was over. The newly-appointed prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was busy receiving guests arriving for his mother's funeral; home minister Narasimha Rao did not budge from his office; the Lt Governor of Delhi had no orders to put down the rioters. Seventy-two gurudwaras were torched and thousands of Sikh houses looted. The next few days, TV and radio sets were available for less than half their price.

Mid-morning, a Swedish diplomat came and took me and my wife to his home in the diplomatic enclave. My aged mother had been taken by Romesh Thapar to his home. Our family lawyer, Anant Bir Singh, who lived close to my mother, had his long hair cut off and beard shaved to avoid being recognised as a Sikh. I watched Mrs Gandhi's cremation on TV in the home of my Swedish protector. I felt like a Jew must have in Nazi Germany. I was a refugee in my own homeland because I was a Sikh.
What I found most distressing was the attitude of many of my Hindu friends. Two couples made a point to call on me after I returned home. They were Sri S. Mulgaonkar and his wife, Arun Shourie and his wife Anita. As for the others, the less said the better. Girilal Jain, editor of The Times of India, rationalised the violence: the Hindu cup of patience, he wrote, had become full to the brim. N.C. Menon, who succeeded me as editor of The Hindustan Times, wrote of how Sikhs had "clawed their way to prosperity" and well nigh had it coming to them. Some spread gossip of how Sikhs had poisoned Delhi's drinking water, how they had attacked trains and slaughtered Hindu passengers. At the Gymkhana Club where I played tennis every morning, one man said I had no right to complain after what Sikhs had done to Hindus in Punjab. At a party, another gloated "Khoob mazaa chakhaya-we gave them a taste of their own medicine." Word had gone round: 'Teach the Sikhs a lesson'.
Did the Sikhs deserve to be taught a lesson? I pondered over the matter for many days and many hours and reluctantly admitted that Hindus had some justification for their anger against Sikhs. The starting point was the emergence of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale as a leader. He used vituperative language against the Hindus. He exhorted every Sikh to kill 32 Hindus to solve the Hindu-Sikh problem. Anyone who opposed him was put on his hit list and some eliminated. His hoodlums murdered Lala Jagat Narain, founder of the Hind Samachar group of papers. They killed hawkers who sold their papers.

The list of Bhindranwale's victims, which included both Hindus and Sikhs, was a long one. More depressing to me was that no one spoke out openly against him. He had a wily patron in Giani Zail Singh who had him released when he was charged as an accomplice in the murderof Jagat Narain. Akali leaders supported him. Some like Badal and Barnala, who used to tie their beards to their chins, let them down in deference to his wishes. So did many Sikh civil servants. They lauded him as the saviour of the Khalsa Panth and called him Sant. I am proud to say I was the only one who wrote against him and attacked him as a hate-monger. I was on his hit list and continued to be so on that of his followers-for 15 long years-and was given police protection which I never asked for.
Bhindranwale, with the tacit connivance of Akali leaders like Gurcharan Singh Tohra, turned the Golden Temple into an armed fortress of Sikh defiance. He provided the Indian government the excuse to send the army into the temple complex. I warned the government in Parliament and through my articles against using the army to get hold of Bhindranwale and his followers as the consequences would be grave. And so they were. Operation Bluestar was a blunder of Himalayan proportions. Bhindranwale was killed but hailed as a martyr. Over 5,000 men and women lost their lives in the exchange of fire.
The Akal Takht was wrecked.Symbolic protests did not take long coming. I was part of it; I surrendered the Padma Bhushan awarded to me. Among the people who condemned my action was Vinod Mehta, then editor of The Observer. He wrote that when it came to choosing between being an Indian or a Sikh, I had chosen to be a Sikh. I stopped contributing to his paper. I had never believed that I had to be one or the other. I was both an Indian and a Sikh and proud of being so. I might well have asked Mehta in return, "Are you a Hindu or an Indian?" Hindus do not have to prove their nationality; only Muslims, Christians and Sikhs are required to give evidence of their patriotism.Anti-Sikh violence gave a boost to the demand for a separate Sikh state and Khalistan-inspired terrorism in Punjab and abroad. Amongst the worst was the blowing up of Air India's Kanishka (June 23, 1985), which killed all its 329 passengers and crew, including over 30 Sikhs. Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, who signed the Rajiv-Longowal accord (July 29, 1985), was murdered while praying in a gurudwara just three weeks later. In August 1986, General A.S. Vaidya, who was chief of staff when Operation Bluestar took place, was gunned down in Pune in August 1985. The killings went on unabated for almost 10 years. Terrorists ran a parallel government in districts adjoining Pakistan which also provided them arms training and escape routes. It is estimated that in those 10 years over 25,000 were killed. Midway, the Golden Temple had again become a sanctuary for criminals. This time the Punjab police led by K.P.S. Gill was able to get the better of them with the loss of only two lives in what came to be known as Operation Black Thunder (May 13-18, 1988). The terrorist movement petered out as the terrorists turned gangsters and took to extortion and robbery.The peasantry turned its back on them.

About the last action of Khalistani terrorists was the murder of chief minister Beant Singh, who was blown up along with 12 others by a suicide bomber on July 31, 1995, at Chandigarh.It is not surprising that with this legacy of ill-will and bloodshed a sense of alienation grew among the Sikhs. It was reinforced by the reluctance of successive governments at the Centre to bring the perpetrators of the anti-Sikh pogrom of October 31 and November 1, 1984. A growing number of non-Sikhs have also come to the conclusion that grave injustice has been done to the Sikhs. Several non-official commissions of inquiry-including one headed by retired Supreme Court chief justice S.M. Sikri, comprising retired ambassadors and senior civil servants-have categorically named the guilty. However, all that the government has done is to appoint one commission of inquiry after another to look into charges of minor relevance to the issue without taking any action. The Nanavati Commission has been at it for quite some time: I rendered evidence before it over two years ago. It has asked for further extension of time, which has been granted till the end of this year. The only word I can think of using for such official procrastination is disgraceful.

I have to concede that the attitude of the bjp government led by Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani towards the Sikhs has been more positive than that of the Congress, many of whose leaders were involved in the 1984 anti-Sikh violence. Some of it may be due to its alliance with the principal Sikh political party, the Akalis, led by Parkash Singh Badal. It also gives them a valid excuse to criticise the Congress leadership. Nevertheless, I welcomed the Congress party's return to power in the Centre because it also promises a fairer deal to other minorities like the Muslims and Christians. And I make no secret of my rejoicing over the choice of Manmohan Singh, the first Sikh to become prime minister of India and he in his turn selecting another Sikh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, to head the Planning
Commission.

The dark months of alienation are over; the new dawn promises blue skies and sunshine for the minorities with only one black cloud remaining to be blown away-a fair deal to families of victims of the anti-Sikh violence of 1984. It was the most horrendous crime committed on a mass scale since we became an independent nation. Its perpetrators must be punished because crimes unpunished generate more criminals.

From his column in the Hindustan Times
Taking refuge in nostalgia...

Khushwant Singh | with malice towards one and all...

August 26, 2006

There was a time I made three visits to Khan Market everyday. It is across the road from my flat. The first was in the mornings, when the shops opened, to buy provisions. The second would be in the evening to see the raunaq, pick up magazines, browse over books and have some gup-shup with the proprietors. We had much in common: all were Punjabi refugees from Pakistan, mostly from the Frontier Province, a few like me from Lahore. The third visit was after dinner, mostly at the insistence of our dog, Simba. My wife, I, our son and daughter would follow him as he would lead. At Khan market, my wife would buy him an ice-cream cone. We would then proceed to the paanwala buy the rolled up betel leaves and go back home.
With the passage of years, things began to change. The first generation of Khan Market shopkeepers died. The paanwala’s shop became a fancy general store. Simba died. My son moved to Bombay, daughter got married and moved to her husband’s flat. My wife died. I became too old to cross the road. I could only look longingly at the Khan Market shops. No one missed my disappearance: most thought I had joined my forefathers. As a matter of fact, I was still around but somewhat alienated. I felt they were dishonouring the name of Dr Khan Sahib, elder brother of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, ‘Frontier Gandhi’ after whom the market was named.

The impasse was broken by an exhibition of photographs taken by the Time-Life’s Margaret Bourke-White of the massacres of innocents during Partition. It was Pramod Kapoor of Roli Books’ idea to match the pictures with extracts from my first novel Train To Pakistan. Huge posters were on display round the market. Sheila Dikshit, CM, Delhi, inaugurated the exhibition. I was asked to be present. I went reluctantly.
Was it worth opening old wounds which had healed? I felt it was. The wounds may have filled up but the poison of communal hatred was still in our minds. It keeps erupting periodically in different parts of our country. For the murder of Mrs Gandhi by two Sikh bodyguards, thousands of Sikhs were murdered in cold blood. Destruction of Babri Masjid was followed by bomb blasts in Bombay. There was massacre of innocent Muslims in Gujarat following a train set on fire at Godhra. It was a timely reminder of what happened in the biggest mass migration in the history of the world (over 10 million uprooted and a million innocent people — Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, butchered).
The lesson is clear: if you don’t want these things to happen, purge your bodies of communal virus in your blood stream. Repeat Bapu’s words like a mantra: “Hate kills the man who hates.”

Hello? Hello?
I simply can’t understand why my telephone goes dead almost every month. Having only one line and no cell-phone, I have to beseech my neighbours to lodge a complaint on my behalf.
Recent deaths of my phone have fallen into a pattern. Two yamas (they always come in twos) come to examine the box outside. I sit back and relax. The phone goes dead again in a few days time.
I get somebody to lodge a complaint which is duly noted down and numbered. Nothing happens for a couple of days, usually on weekends or holidays. Ultimately, the same two men arrive, tinker with wires and reanimate my instrument. For the trouble they take, I give them a tip and cup of chai. I ask them what had gone wrong. The usual answer I get is ‘Cable Fault’ — whatever that means. I have stopped giving baksheesh or chai. So my telephone gets killed more often. It did not happen when BM Khanna was the big boss because people working under him knew he was a good friend. Nor when I was an MP and later member of the Social Audit Panel. It happens now because I am a nobody. My neighbour Reeta Devi of Cooch Behar has devised a way of restoring life back to my telephone. She asks some high-ups, some Minister’s PA to tell the telephone wallas that Minister Sahib wants to speak to me; so would they put life back in my phone — ek dam! It works. The only word I can think of is disgraceful.
Fixing papa
Teacher: How old is your father?
Sunny: As old as I am.
Teacher: How can that be possible?
Sunny: He became a father only after I was born.
Bapu’s gift
Teacher: Because of Gandhiji, what did we get on 15th August?
Students: A holiday.
(contributed by Vipin Bucksey, New Delhi)

The idea of India

From here.

18 January 2006
The idea of India
Shashi Tharoor on India's mosaic of multiplicities

India’s constitution recognises 18 official languages, and there are 35 that are spoken by more than a million people each

When India celebrated the 49th anniversary of its independence from British rule in 1996, its then prime minister, HD Deve Gowda, stood at the ramparts of Delhi’s 16th-century red fort and delivered the traditional Independence Day address to the nation in Hindi, India’s ‘national language’. Eight other prime ministers had done exactly the same thing 48 times before him, but what was unusual this time was that Deve Gowda, a southerner from the state of Karnataka, spoke to the country in a language of which he did not know a word. Tradition and politics required a speech in Hindi, so he gave one – the words having been written out for him in his native Kannada script, in which they, of course, made no sense.

Such an episode is almost inconceivable elsewhere, but it represents the best of the oddities that help make India India. Only in India could there be a country ruled by a man who does not understand its ‘national language’; only in India, for that matter, is there a ‘national language’ which half the population does not understand; and only in India could this particular solution have been found to enable the prime minister to address his people. One of Indian cinema’s finest ‘playback singers’, the Keralite K J Yesudas, sang his way to the top of the Hindi music charts with lyrics in that language written in the Malayalam script for him, but to see the same practice elevated to the prime ministerial address on Independence Day was a startling affirmation of Indian pluralism. For the simple fact is that we are all minorities in India. There has never been an archetypal Indian to stand alongside the archetypal Englishman or Frenchman. A typical Indian stepping off the train, let us say a Hindi-speaking Hindu male from Uttar Pradesh, may cherish the illusion he represents the ‘majority community’, an expression much favoured by the less industrious of our journalists. But he does not. As a Hindu, sure enough, he belongs to the faith adhered to by 82 per cent of the population. But a majority of the country does not speak Hindi. A majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise when you go there. And, if he were visiting, say, my home state of Kerala, he would be surprised to realise a majority there is not even male.

Worse, this archetypal Hindu male has only to mingle with the polyglot, multi-coloured crowds – and I am referring not to the colours of their clothes but to the colours of their skins – thronging any of India’s major railway stations to realise how much of a minority he really is. Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of his majorityhood, because his caste automatically puts him in a minority. If he is a Brahmin, 90 per cent of his fellow Indians are not. If he is a Yadav, or another ‘backward class’, 85 per cent of his fellow Indians are not. And so on.

The question of nationhood

If caste and language complicate the notion of Indian identity, ethnicity makes it worse. Most of the time, an Indian’s name immediately reveals where he is from or what her mother tongue is: when we introduce ourselves, we are advertising our origins.

Despite some intermarriage at the elite levels in our cities, Indians are still largely endogamous, and a Bengali is easily distinguished from a Punjabi. The difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonality. A Karnataka Brahmin shares his Hindu faith with a Bihari Kurmi, but they share little identity with each other in respect of their dress, customs, appearance, taste, language or even, these days, their political objectives. At the same time, a Tamil Hindu would feel he has much more in common with a Tamil Christian or a Tamil Muslim than with, say, a Haryanvi Jat, with whom he formally shares the Hindu religion. What makes India, then, a nation? What is an Indian’s identity?

When an Italian nation was created in the second half of the 19th century out of a mosaic of principalities and statelets, one Italian nationalist (Massimo Taparelli d’Azeglio) wrote ‘We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians.’ It is striking that, a few decades later, no Indian nationalist succumbed to the temptation to express a similar thought. The prime exponent of modern Indian nationalism, Jawaharlal Nehru, would never have said ‘we have created India, now we have to create Indians’, because he believed that India and Indians had existed for millennia before he articulated their political aspirations in the 20th century.
Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time; a state that divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time; a state that asked a Keralite peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pundit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time.

So, under Gandhi and Nehru, Indian nationalism became a rare animal indeed. It was not based on any of the conventional indices of national identity. Not language, since India’s constitution recognises 18 official languages, and there are 35 that are spoken by more than a million people each. Not ethnicity, since the ‘Indian’ accommodates a diversity of racial types in which many Indians have more in common with foreigners than with other Indians – Indian Punjabis and Bengalis, for instance, have more in common ethnically with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, respectively, than with Poonawallahs or Bangaloreans. Not religion, since India is a secular pluralist state that is home to every religion known to mankind, with the possible exception of Shintoism. Not geography, since the natural geography of the subcontinent – the mountains and the sea – was hacked by the Partition of 1947. And not even territory, since, by law, anyone with one grandparent born in pre-partition India – outside the territorial boundaries of today’s state – is eligible for citizenship. Indian nationalism has therefore always been the nationalism of an idea.

It is the idea of an ever-ever land – emerging from an ancient civilisation, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy. India’s democracy imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens. The whole point of Indian pluralism is you can be many things and one thing: you can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite and a good Indian all at once. The Indian idea is the opposite of what Freudians call ‘the narcissism of minor differences’; in India we celebrate the commonality of major differences. If America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.

So the idea of India, as Rabindranath Tagore and, more recently, Amartya Sen have insisted, is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, colour, conviction, culture, cuisine, costume and custom, and still rally around a consensus. And that consensus is about the simple idea that in a democracy you don’t really need to agree – except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.

Hindutva and history

That consensus has been threatened in the last two decades by the rise of Hindu nationalism, offering an alternative view of Indian identity – one that is explicitly narrow and definitional (pro-Hindu and pro-Hindi, sectarian and anti-secular). Its followers asserted their idea of Indianness most spectacularly in the destruction of a disused sixteenth century mosque, the Babri Masjid, in 1992, and most brutally in the murder of up to 2000 Muslims in sectarian killings in the state of Gujarat ten years later.

To them, an independent India, freed after nearly a thousand years of alien rule (first Muslim, then British), and rid of a sizeable portion of its Muslim population by Partition, had an obligation to assert an identity that would be triumphantly and indigenously Hindu. They are not fundamentalists in any meaningful sense of the term, since Hinduism is uniquely a religion without fundamentals: there is no Hindu Pope, no Hindu Sunday, no single Hindu holy book, and indeed no such thing as a Hindu heresy. They are, instead, chauvinists, who root their Hinduism not in any of its soaring philosophical or spiritual underpinnings – and, unlike their Islamic counterparts, not in the theology of their faith – but rather in its role as a source of identity. They seek vengeance in the name of Hinduism-as-badge, rather than of Hinduism-as-doctrine. To most Indian Muslims, the debate over identity goes to the heart of their place in Indian society. For decades after independence, successive Indian governments had guaranteed their security in a secular state, permitting the retention of Muslim Personal Law separate from the country’s civil code, and even financing Haj pilgrimages to Mecca. Three of India’s presidents have been Muslims, as also innumerable cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals, and Supreme Court justices (and chief justices). At least until the mid-1990s, India’s Muslim population exceeded Pakistan’s. The destruction of the mosque and the killings in Gujarat seemed an appalling betrayal of the compact that had sustained the Muslim community as a vital part of India’s pluralist democracy.

The irony is that the advocates of Hindutva are profoundly disloyal to the religion they claim to espouse, which stands out not only as an eclectic embodiment of tolerance, but as perhaps the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. All ways of worship, Hinduism asserts, are equally valid, and religion is an intensely personal matter related to the individual’s self-realisation in relation to God. Such a faith understands that belief is a matter of hearts and minds, not of bricks and stone. The true Hindu seeks no revenge upon history, for he understands that history is its own revenge.

Geography helps, because it accustoms Indians to the idea of difference. India’s national identity has long been built on the slogan ‘unity in diversity’. The ‘Indian’ comes in such varieties that a woman who is fair-skinned, sari-wearing and Italian speaking, as Sonia Gandhi is, is not more foreign to my grandmother in Kerala than one who is ‘wheatish-complexioned’, wears a salwar-kameez and speaks Urdu. Our nation absorbs both these types of people; both are equally ‘foreign’ to some of us, equally Indian to us all.

For now, the Hindu chauvinists have lost the battle over India’s identity. The sight in May 2004 of a Roman Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) – in a country 82 per cent Hindu – caught the world’s imagination. India’s founding fathers wrote a constitution for their dreams; we have given passports to their ideals. That one simple moment of political change put to rest many of the arguments over Indian identity. India was never truer to itself than when celebrating its own diversity.