Me but not wholly me....

I do not know how other authors feel about their writings but always I have a strange sensation when I read something that I had written some time previously. That sensation is heightened when the writing had been done in the close and abnormal atmosphere of prison and the subsequent reading had taken place outside. I recognize it of course , but not wholly , it seems almost that I was reading some familiar piece written by another , who was near to me and yet who was different . Perhaps that is the measure of the change that has taken place in me.

So I have felt about this book also. It is mine and not wholly mine ,as I am constituted today; it represents rather some past self of mine which has already joined that long succession of other selves that existed for a while and faded away , leaving only a memory behind.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Preface of the book ‘The Discovery of India’

Not that I've ever lived in an environment close to being in prison ...but I was thinking about the same thing , it's kind of “the end of an era” point for me right now… every year ,for the past few years, around this time I embark on a ‘big’ journey ..last year it was my India trip after two years , the year before it was from Wellington to Tuscaloosa and prior to that ,Udipi to Wellington…. This time around the shift isn’t going to be as drastic as I imagined ( at some point of time I thought my options consisted of either Mississippi or Southern California :) ) …

Anyway a few days ago I chanced upon my student id card from 2004 … it was from my NZ college and the photograph was from three months before my arrival in NZ , when I was still in India.I realized that I had changed fundamentally from the girl in the picture …now I think …

Would she like me ?? If I had to use one word it would probably be ‘No’, just because I truly believe I was a better person then.. ( I wonder about the series of events that led from that to this..) …

Would she appreciate where I was at this present moment ???? Maybe yes , it’s definitely not what she wanted, but it’s beyond her wildest dreams(at that point…she has had wilder dreams before and after that time period ) ….

I wonder what will happen in the future..When I read these blog entries and see my (then) old id cards... how will I answer those questions?

Personally I feel they serve as good self improvement tools and reality checks :)

On a side note.... I've decided that one characteristic to figure out if I can truly get along with a person is when a phone conversation isn't a chore...

A life less ordinary..

....In a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, this reality is summed up succinctly. In the story, we read the words of an Indian who had come to Boston as a young man on the day the Americans first landed on the moon:

"While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly 30 years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."



"If it can be allowed that the passport is a kind of book, then the immigration officer, holding a passport in his hand, is also a reader. Like someone in a library or even, in the course of a pleasant afternoon, on a bench beneath a tree. Under the fluorescent lights, he reads the entries made in an unfamiliar hand under categories that are all too familiar. He examines the seals, the stamps, and the signatures on them.
He looks up. He reads the immigrant's responses to his questions, the clothes, the accent. The officer's eyes return to the passport. He appears to be reading it more carefully. He frowns. Suddenly he turns around and tries to catch a colleague's eye. It is nothing, he wants more coffee.
You notice all this if you are an immigrant ..."

Passport Photos, Amitava Kumar

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.

The Unknown Errors of Our Lives

"The Unknown Errors of Our Lives"
-Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
………. It would have been the worst error of her life, and she wouldn't even have known it. It saddens her to think of all the errors people make (she has been musing over such things lately)--the unknown errors of their lives, the ones they can never put down in a book and are therefore doomed to repeat………

Indian Pop Art ....and then some..........

Gotta Louuuve Indian Calendar Art ( nothing makes me as nostalgic as the familiar drawings from waay back that I don’t get to see anymore!!! )…Googled Indian Calendar Art and Indian Pop Culture to find the following :









From here and here and here.

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Has anybody else used those educational paper ‘charts’?!?! (I always thought of charts as something involving thick paper ) the ones made of flimsy paper and we’d cut out relevant pictures and paste in our notebooks as kids…pretty neat they were….








They usually were of national leaders or national monuments or national scientists, sometimes domestic animals , national flower(s), types of houses ..and I’m racking my brain to think of the various pictures I had pasted on school books over the years.. wonder if they still make them...
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Let’s stick with nostalgia for a bit …here are some print ads I remember from my Amar Chitra Katha’s , Tinkles, Chandamama’s, Champaks , the Indian Disney comics, and a couple of Mandrake comics I own ….










The above are from the following AWESOME sites this one (Great online desi vintage ad archive) and this one ( Really neat site for people who grew up in 1980’s India ;but some of the content isn’t exactly kid friendly!!!)
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Anyhooo back to the present…………….. aren’t the following pictures really Cute!!! Awwww................




Check out the website here .

12 Days of Christmas

What the …… but it is funny…
First of all the guy has an ambiguous accent like Apu from the Simpsons…. If these are in fact desiboys singing why can’t they impersonate an Indian accent properly??
Nonetheless it IS funny, and really good animation, listen till the end!!!…. If you haven’t checked it already from Sepia Mutiny..Here is a Desi Version of the popular X’mas carol Twelve Days of Christmas….Enjaaai??!?!!!!!

Sar Kiye Yeh Pahar - Strings

Hindi movies and movie songs kick ass( most of the time…) but when it comes to rock songs and TV serials …our friends across the border do a better job!!! I mean I’m listening to this compilation of songs from Pakistan and they sound so good.. sounds like rock and roll and its in Urdu/ Hindi ( which is the same thing really.. Pakistani neighbors have asked my mom and dad “ Aap itni acchi Urdu kaise bolte hai?? “ ..(of course they wouldn’t say the same thing to me)…… anyway was listening to Sar ki yeh hai pahar after maybe 12-13 years…Awesome song..Good thing the boys from Strings are still rocking :D

Amul Ad's

Aren’t Indian advertisements the best!!?!?!? It’s really cool that Amul has posted some of its hit billboards on its website…I used to like seeing the ads the few times I could holidaying in Mumbai or Chennai.. (unfortunately not many Amul hoardings in small towns…)it’s good to go over the ads over the years.. kind of touch on a few key events of the past three decades…




Take on the hilarious and entertaining Bollywood film - Lage Raho MUNNA BHAI - September '06




Manmohan Singh's liberalisation policy encouraged multinationals to come to India and gave Indians the taste of Coke, Pepsi and good times.1994



Lots more here.

Happy Navratri

Can you believe I’m spending Friday night listening to Falguni Pathak (probably because it’s Navratri)… not much time till Diwali…. !!! I’m so tired really should go to sleep…. what I wouldn’t give for just five minutes wear a salwar kameez ( or sari )catch a rickshaw(or bus) or just go with dad … and eat Indian fast food (in India) ..with these Indipop/film songs in the background…..just for five minutes mind you !!


From 'The taste of India' camapign 1982-1983

On the occassion of Navratri festival.



Begin with Amul after the Roza fast.

Tell me about it!!!

Thank you for the lines Sups… they make a lot of sense!!! ..I actually called my mom after reading this ..ok ok was gonna call anyway..but will say this for dramatic effect :)..seriously 'Lage Raho' …is immensely watchable…something I can watch with my parents without my dad changing the channel.. and it appeals to all demographics me thinks…..

Shehar ki is daud mein doud ke karna kya hai?
Agar yahi jeena hai dosto, to phir marna kya hai?
Pehli baarish mein train late hone ki phikar hai?
Bhul gaye, bhigte hue tehalnna kya hai?
Serial ke khirdaron ka saara haal hai maaloom,
Par maa ki haal puchne ki phursat kahan hai?
Ab reth pe nange paav tehalte kyon nahi?
Ek sau aat(108) hai channel, par dil behalte kyon nahi?
Internet pe to duniya se touch mein hain,
Lekin padose mein kaun rehta hai, jaante tak nahi...
Mobil, landline, sab ki bharmaar hai
Lekin jigri dost tak pahunche aisi taar kaha hai?
Kab doobte hue suraj ko dekha tha e yaad hai?
Kab jaana tha sham ka guzarna kya hai?
To doston, shehar ki is daud mein doud ke karna kya hai?
Agar yahin jeena hai to phir marna kya hai?

Out of India

Think of your husband as a lover from another life,
And wonder what you did to deserve him.

From 'How to live in Suburbia when your heart is in the Himalayas' by Gwen Davis

Enchanting thought isn’t it… just extending it could lovers in this life become husbands in another.. wishful thinking and I wonder what we would have done to deserve it..also maybe husbands in previous lives appear as lovers or people we encounter in this life!!! just a cosmic joke giving us a glimpse of what had been once ….Goes back to the whole eternal reccurance idea… life is just the sum of finite experisnes and people that you keep going back to

Actually went to the library to borrow “White Mughals” by William Darlymple, but chanced upon ‘Out of India’ a collection of snippets from Indian Writing through the ages… a very interesting read, given that I am so interested in collecting vignettes myself . Also got introduced to “Meghdoot” by Kalidas..i think I may have read bout it before ..but it was good to read it again…

Keep the Faith, and Keep Dwindling

I like this article, maybe it’s because one of my only two first cousins (so in actuality REAL Cousins ) who are married ;is married to a Parsi … ( FYI ..the other is married to an American.. ) …I wonder what precedent that sets for me ..being next in line and all ….anyhow.. there’s kind off a running joke in my dad’s side that goes something like “ I don’t what it is with these kids and Parsis!!” …my second cousin got married to his Parsi girlfriend last year, adding to the Parsi connection on Pop’s side … so yea my cousin's in-laws and her kids (being half Parsi) have been very, very good exponents of Parsi Culture for me…. that’s it though ; not having been brought up in Mumbai ;I don’t have many Parsi friends , but for what it’s worth …Family Matters and A Fine Balance are two of my favorite books !!! Yes I have an affinity for that community , though my connections are through intermarriages; I wonder how much the traditionalists will like that??!?? … I checked out all the links in the Sepia Mutiny article ..

Here’s the NYT Article that inspired it … I feel it means a lot to all of us, how people from a dwindling community marry outside for love ; and how us folks who might belong to communities in no danger of getting wiped out ,stick so strongly to community for marital purposes ..( I belong to a largely endogamous community myself , not getting wiped out soon.. I can relate to parts in the NYT article where they speak about maintaining age old traditions , but I can also relate to the Parsi girls dilemma of ,for whatever reason, not finding a person to marry in the small subset she had to choose from. )

September 6, 2006
Zoroastrians Keep the Faith, and Keep Dwindling
By LAURIE GOODSTEINBURR RIDGE, Ill. — In his day job, Kersey H. Antia is a psychologist who specializes in panic disorders. In his private life, Mr. Antia dons a long white robe, slips a veil over his face and goes to work as a Zoroastrian priest, performing rituals passed down through a patrilineal chain of priests stretching back to ancient Persia.
After a service for the dead in which priests fed sticks of sandalwood and pinches of frankincense into a blazing urn, Mr. Antia surveyed the Zoroastrian faithful of the Midwest — about 80 people in saris, suits and blue jeans.
“We were once at least 40, 50 million — can you imagine?” said Mr. Antia, senior priest at the fire temple here in suburban Chicago. “At one point we had reached the pinnacle of glory of the Persian Empire and had a beautiful religious philosophy that governed the Persian kings.
“Where are we now? Completely wiped out,” he said. “It pains me to say, in 100 years we won’t have many Zoroastrians.”
There is a palpable panic among Zoroastrians today — not only in the United States, but also around the world — that they are fighting the extinction of their faith, a monotheistic religion that most scholars say is at least 3,000 years old.
Zoroastrianism predates Christianity and Islam, and many historians say it influenced those faiths and cross-fertilized Judaism as well, with its doctrines of one God, a dualistic universe of good and evil and a final day of judgment.
While Zoroastrians once dominated an area stretching from what is now Rome and Greece to India and Russia, their global population has dwindled to 190,000 at most, and perhaps as few as 124,000, according to a survey in 2004 by Fezana Journal, published quarterly by the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America. The number is imprecise because of wildly diverging counts in Iran, once known as Persia — the incubator of the faith.
“Survival has become a community obsession,” said Dina McIntyre, an Indian-American lawyer in Chesapeake, Va., who has written and lectured widely on her religion.
The Zoroastrians’ mobility and adaptability has contributed to their demographic crisis. They assimilate and intermarry, virtually disappearing into their adopted cultures. And since the faith encourages opportunities for women, many Zoroastrian women are working professionals who, like many other professional women, have few children or none.
Despite their shrinking numbers, Zoroastrians — who follow the Prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek) — are divided over whether to accept intermarried families and converts and what defines a Zoroastrian. An effort to create a global organizing body fell apart two years ago after some priests accused the organizers of embracing “fake converts” and diluting traditions.
“They feel that the religion is not universal and is ethnic in nature, and that it should be kept within the tribe,” said Jehan Bagli, a retired chemist in Toronto who is a priest, or mobed, and president of the North American Mobed Council, which includes about 100 priests. “This is a tendency that to me sometimes appears suicidal. And they are prepared to make that sacrifice.”
In South Africa, the last Zoroastrian priest recently died, and there is no one left to officiate at ceremonies, said Rohinton Rivetna, a Zoroastrian leader in Chicago who, with his wife, Roshan, was a principal mover behind the failed effort to organize a global body. But they have not given up.
“We have to be working together if we are going to survive,” Mr. Rivetna said.
Although the collective picture is bleak, most individual Zoroastrians appear to be thriving. They are well-educated and well-traveled professionals, earning incomes that place them in the middle and upper classes of the countries where they or their families settled after leaving their homelands in Iran and India. About 11,000 Zoroastrians live in the United States, 6,000 in Canada, 5,000 in England, 2,700 in Australia and 2,200 in the Persian Gulf nations, according to the Fezana Journal survey.
This is the second major exodus in Zoroastrian history. In Iran, after Muslims rose to power in the seventh century A.D., historians say the Zoroastrian population was decimated by massacres, persecution and conversions to Islam. Seven boatloads of Zoroastrian refugees fled Iran and landed on the coast of India in 936. Their descendants, known as Parsis, built Mumbai, formerly Bombay, into the world capital of Zoroastrianism.
The Zoroastrian magazine Parsiana publishes charts each month tracking births, deaths and marriages. Leaders fret over the reports from Mumbai, where deaths outnumber births six to one. The intermarriage rate there has risen to about one in three. The picture in North America is more hopeful: about 1.5 births for one death. But the intermarriage rate in North America is now nearly 50 percent.
Soli Dastur, an exuberant priest who lives in Florida, is among the first generation of immigrants who started the trend. Mr. Dastur grew up in a village outside Mumbai, where his father was a priest, the fire temple was the center of town and his whole world was Zoroastrian.
He arrived in Evanston, Ill., in 1960, where he knew of no other Zoroastrians, to attend college on a scholarship provided by one of the Parsi endowments in Mumbai, which have since provided scholarships to many others. He earned a Ph.D., worked as a chemical engineer and married an American Roman Catholic he met on a blind date 40 years ago.
Mr. Dastur is a priest in much demand to perform ceremonies because of his melodic chanting of the prayers. He and his wife, Jo Ann, have two grown daughters. Neither married a Zoroastrian.
“They’re good human beings,” Mr. Dastur said. “That’s more important to me.”
The very tenets of Zoroastrianism could be feeding its demise, many adherents said in interviews. Zoroastrians believe in free will, so in matters of religion they do not believe in compulsion. They do not proselytize. They can pray at home instead of going to a temple. While there are priests, there is no hierarchy to set policy. And their basic doctrine is a universal ethical precept: “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.”
“That’s what I take away from Zoroastrianism,” said Tenaz Dubash, a filmmaker in New York City who is making a documentary about the future of her faith, “that I’m a cerebral, thinking human being, and I need to think for myself.”
Ferzin Patel, who runs a support group for 20 intermarried couples in New York, said that while the Zoroastrians in the group adored their faith and wanted to teach it to their children, they in no way wanted to compel their spouses to convert.
“In the intermarriage group, I don’t think anyone feels that someone should forfeit their religion just for Zoroastrianism,” Ms. Patel said.
Despite, or because of, the high intermarriage rate, some Zoroastrian priests refuse to accept converts or to perform initiation ceremonies for adopted children or the children of intermarried couples, especially when the father is not Zoroastrian. The ban on these practices is far stronger in India and Iran than in North America.
“As soon as you do it, you start diluting your ethnicity, and one generation has an intermarriage, and the next generation has more dilution and the customs become all fuzzy and they eventually disappear,” said Jal N. Birdy, a priest in Corona, Calif., who will not perform weddings of mixed couples. “That would destroy my community, which is why I won’t do it.”
The North American Mobed Council is so divided on the issue of accepting intermarried spouses and children that it has been unable to take a position, said Mr. Bagli, the council’s president. He supports accepting converts because he said he can find no ban in Zoroastrian texts, but he estimated that as many as 40 percent of the priests in his group were opposed.
The peril and the hope for Zoroastrianism are embodied in a child of the diaspora, Rohena Elavia Ullal, 27, a physical therapist in suburban Chicago.
Ms. Ullal knew from an early age that her parents wanted her to marry another Zoroastrian. Her mother, a former board president of the Chicago temple, helped organize Sunday school classes once a month there, enticing teenagers with weekend sleepovers and roller-skating trips.
The result was a core group of close friends who felt more like cousins, Ms. Ullal said recently over breakfast.
Both of her brothers found mates at Zoroastrian youth congresses, and one is already married. Ms. Ullal stayed on the lookout.
“There were so few,” she said. “I guess you’re lucky if you find somebody. That would be the ideal.”
Ms. Ullal’s college boyfriend is also the child of Indian immigrants to the United States, but he is Hindu. [They married on Saturday and had two ceremonies — one Hindu, one Zoroastrian.] But Ms. Ullal says that before they even became engaged, they talked about her desire to raise their children as Zoroastrians.
“It’s scary; we’re dipping down in numbers,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt his parents, but he doesn’t have the kind of responsibility, whereas I do.”

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)

God is in your heart and on your computer screen!!!

I was about to rant in the previous entry about how distressed I was during my trip to India ,when I couldn’t enter the temple of the deity, whom I looked for help in my past two years away from family . I guess I wasn’t destined too go in at that time!!! My dad felt for me , though I behaved like a brat at the time, and reminded me that it’s not visiting temples that counts because after all God is in your heart…he took me to Siddhi Vinayak and Mahalakshmi Temples in Mumbai to make up for it( incidentally the last time he was at Mahalakshmi Temple was on his wedding day, some twenty six year before that day in January).

Anyway why am I bringing this up and why am I not ranting? Because I believe religion is personal , and I don’t think I’ve faced religious discrimination as a woman,atleast not in a way that truly affects me because I choose to let it not affect me, though at times I think we have a Da Vinci code type scenario happening in our own backyard as well!!!

That isn’t the point of this post though, I’ve been pretty much browsing the net like nobody’s business the past few months , but today was the first day when searching for information for the previous blog I keyed in Devi in wikipeida, and saw stuff I already knew , then I thought “Well specifically I ought to click on Durga”; and I did , and I read the Durga Mahishasur story, and scrolled down the page , and I see four links and the last one is about the very temple I was feeling bad about not being able to visit, I was happy but really surprised ,there are many other more famous Durga temples in India and in South Kanara as a matter of fact!!! It wouldn’t be a big deal if it was a large famous temple because then of course there would be wiki about it , but it’s actually a small temple in a rural ( and I mean rural!!!) part of South Kanara, most of the devotees are from the village, I’m sure if my dad hadn’t married my mom he might not have heard of the temple. The priest mentioned in the article is the temple priest , and he’s a Wikipedia celebrity !!!! We usually take our family deity from our mothers side , Durgaparmeshwari is like my guardian angel, and I carry a picture in my wallet , wherever I go, I usually get questions about the picture , which I happily answer.

I guess it goes back to my dads principle of God being in your heart , and I found God when I was thinking about her the most!!!

What's your ecological footprint???

Try this quiz to measure ( to an arguable degree of accuracy) your ecological footprint (i.e. how your existence and lifestyle has affected planet earth !!)
Earth Day Footprint Quiz

My Result
When I did the quiz for my lifestyle in the US my total Footprint was 9 ,as compared to a US average of 24. If everyone lived like me, we would need 2.1 planets.

For India my total foot print was 2.7 compared to India’s average of 0.8 global hectares per person!!! If everyone lived like I do in India ,we would need 1.5 planets to live in.

What type of Hindu are you???

What kind of Hindu are you ???
My result
You are a traditionalist.
You are a traditionalist, staunch in your conviction that the authority of the Vedas (scripture), Shastras (rules of conduct), and Parampara (traditions) contain all that Hindus need to know about how to live. You have great reverence for the past and for tradition. You're most unwilling to cast aside what is tried and true in favor of passing fads or modern interpretations of Hinduism.

hmmmmm.............

Well religion is personal and I practice mine… so if traditionalist be it, that’s what I am!!! Though I think an American probably developed this quiz….. tell me what u get ..you can try it out here.. they have a test for most religions ……
Belief net Test

about a girl.....

In today’s New York Times “ Doctor In India Jailed for telling Sex of a Fetus”… “In 1991 ,there were about 945 girls born per 1,000 boys ,but this dropped to 927 by 2001, according to a national census”

Anyway the article got me thinking ….In spite of being born in a country where the “cultural preference for sons has distorted the sex ratio“ ..amazingly I haven’t felt much by way of discrimination..

Well , my parents have two kids- my sister and me …. I’ve led a pretty sheltered life as long as I was in school and stayed with my parents .My mom and dad; especially my dad, mom too but if you know my dad you know he pretty much rules the homestead !! made sure that my sister and I weren’t cut any slack especially in the area of education
(thank fully my parents don’t say things like you’re girls; we cant spend on your education lets save for your dowry!!! My relatives might say such things ..but I don’t stay with my relatives. )..And it wasn’t just too keep up with the Joneses that my parents sent us to school or something..(if you know my immediate family , you must already know that we’re a rather hippie type family…)

Well my dad’s older sister is a PhD, arguably the first lady PhD in our community (incidentally my aunt worked in the Indian institute for reproductive sciences , carrying out research in the same field the Indian doctor was sent to jail for ‘mis’ using…. ), my first cousin from dad’s side has graced the cover of national magazines and has appeared in many print and television ad’s,( mind you this was in the late eighties- early nineties, when modeling was cool but not the fad it is now (yes, yes she’s modeled with Milind Soman!! :) ), and for a community that’s got a lot of people in the industry now ,she was one of the first ones . So needless to say my dad’s side of the family consists of progressive ladies ….

Really if my dad wasn’t my dad , my life would have been slightly if not drastically different, so you can imagine that coming from an environment where my immediate family hasn’t made me or my sister feel as if we ought to deserve less from life because we are female.
… I get really ticked of when random people make me aware of the fact.. don’t get me wrong ..I’m not a trailblazing Amazon.. but I don’t take kindly to the comment “You’re like a boy..” or something to that effect (and they don’t mean it as a compliment !!, I’ve only heard that once in New Zealand by a desi guy… in America the desi guys have some brains ..ok ok NZ desi’s, pretty much all of them were amazing ,but there were a couple of keeda’s from the motherland!!!! ) especially when its said by some guy my age. I mean just because at the age of 24 I don’t want to ask my parents for spending money and therefore work part time while going to school ? Because I don’t need a guy to drop me in his car when I need to do shopping?? Because I can cross the road without holding a guys hand??? … THAT makes me less of your concept of what a girl should be like!!!!

News flash buster…. Each and every girl would like to do the above things ..its just because people like you exist that they cant…

Well back to the story so till school and even undergrad in India I don’t think I suffered much!!??!! Apart from weird dress codes and suchlike… but even guys couldn’t come to college in shorts and pajamas so fine!! Well thankfully most guys I’ve met are great , apart from a occasional keedas, who were just acquaintances and not friends anyway.

In the US ,the situation is good, all the girls here have overcome certain obstacles (or not ) ,but are certainly living their dream of coming out here ..my hats off to the sisters, I know gals who’ve worked at mid night as night watchmen, washed dishes in restaurants,worked as parking lot attendants and worked thier way through school, girls who lived in the superdome in New Orleans when Katrina struck(what you thought an Indian girl couldn’t survive that ??) people who marry their soul mate irrespective of creed ,caste or community, people who earn more than their partners , yes all are desi, all are my friends and I’m proud of them and proud of the guys they are with!!

But I’ve had certain sources tell me that certain guys here don’t want to get married to girls who are studying here .. prefer girls in India …hmmm I wonder why????? ( actually not :P)

Well I pity the poor Indian girls who pay bucket loads of dowry to eventually get married to such a person ..poor gals will be dreaming of their cool American prince charming and life in the land of opportunity … Well gals here…. I break the illusion ( or at least part of it ) .. I held on to this idea as well before I came here….. Here it is…. JUST BECAUSE A GUY LIVES ABROAD ,DOESN'T MEAN HE'S COOL!!!

Sure there are great, cool guys out here , and the concept of an American Prince Charming isn’t a fairy tale ….but you have equally cool guys in India …and those psycho types you thought could exist in India only ..yupppp they’re here a s well!!!!!

Well , I’m sure all the gals would have read most of this . Hope it wasn’t too long!! But I just got on a roll with this topic ....

As for the guys ..Well if I’ve scared you off ……Thank goodness !!!!..That was the aim!!!..
For those guys who did read…. Thanks .. I hope it wasn’t too long and I hope it was enlightening to read how some one from the other side views things …

As I was writing this I had the newspaper with the article open next to me.. an American guy sitting next to me saw the bold headline of the article and said CRAZY!!! Well that’s what I said when I first saw it too!!!!