November 2015 Northern California Edition

Hello, 911? Someone’s Using 409!

by Gayatri Subramaniam

India’s Sports Leagues

by Roshn Marwah

Levitating Yogini in Krakow

by Nagaraja Rao

INDIA CURRENTS Celebrating 29 Years of Excellence

Jinnah’s Daughter november 2015 • vol. 29 , no .8 • www. indiacurrents.com

The turbulence of politics and romance

by Ritu Marwah

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2 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California November 2015

H

Modi’s Invisible Suit

e came to Santa Clara like an Indian messiah, rose up on stage, folded his hands in humble supplication, then stood straight and tall as he let his voice ring out exhorting the jubilant, worshipful crowd to repeat phrases after him at the SAP center on a hot, packed September day. It was Prime Minister Narendra Modi at his persuasive best.

Yet the western media hardly paid Mr. Modi much mind. At the Facebook event, a conversation between Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Modi, the press section was woefully under-occupied. I was present at the event and I met a reporter from CNN’s online technology bureau, a tech reporter from Inc’s SF bureau, and a reporter from the Mercury News. There were a few I did not meet, including a reporter from the Financial Times who wrote a piece which seemed to miss the point that Mr. Modi was in the United States to drive up investment in India and not to entice Indian Americans back to India.

Mr. Modi’s visit coincided with the Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit. Both leaders met with the founders and titans of the technology industry. Both ostensibly for the same purpose: to recognize the buying power of the countries they represented. Mr. Xi more than likely did not receive the kind of reception from Chinese immigrants in the United States that Mr. Modi received from Indian Americans.

Yet there was much discussion before and after the Chinese leader’s visit across U.S. media platforms, and barely a stirring of subtitles about Narendra Modi.

Go ahead, do a quick search on “Xi Jinping’s US visit,” you’ll discover reports from The New York Times, Time, Financial Times, BBC, NBC, and if you do a search on “Narendra Modi’s US visit”: NDTV, the Indian Embassy and Mr. Modi’s own website narendramodi.in are the leading results.

So what does Narendra Modi’s lack of international media visibility signify?

It may have something to do with the contradictions that India and its leader both present.

When it comes to India, the contradictions are all too well known and well documented: spiritualism and materialism, the worship of goddesses and the lack of respect for women, abject poverty and obscene wealth, democratic elections and

autocratic power-mongering …

And, too, with Narendra Modi, there is much to applaud and caution. I admire Mr. Modi’s awe-inspiring work ethic; his ability to break down complex problems into smaller, more manageable subsets; his foresight and vision when it comes to India’s economic growth; his impatience with corruption and bureaucracy; his social media savvy; and his ability to make quick decisions.

It is likely true that no one leader can undertake all the issues that India presents.

It becomes a question of priority and compromise. And with those two inadequate words, there ends up being much to dislike and disapprove.

On stage Mr. Modi is convincing. He tells you that he is an effective administrator, and a passionate nationalist. He is not ashamed of calling himself a Hindu and for bringing up (Hindu) heroes who have fought for India. He asks, no, demands validation, and the arena echoes with exuberant support.

And yet Mr. Modi fills me with apprehension. While I marvel at his grandiloquence on stage, it seems too much

like a mind-altering marketing exercise.

For all of Mr. Modi’s volubility when it comes to his areas of strengths—technology, business, bureaucracy—there is not one ameliorating word spoken on those areas of sensitivity: India’s cultural, religious and social diversity. And I wish he had the kind of bravery, that Abraham Lincoln-like bravery that would compel him to explain his failures as well as his successes, his worries as well as his victories.

So it is no surprise that the imagination cannot come to grips with these contradictions. And hence, it seems, there is a cautious calibration of Mr. Modi’s popularity on a guarded “wait and watch” cycle.

In spite of these contradictions though, maybe the lack of headlines is a testament to Mr. Modi’s successful Silicon Valley sojourn. In the media’s quest for titillating titles, phrases like crisis in crimea, civil war, cyberwarfare sometimes take front page. And hence, as the saying goes, “no news is good news.”

Jaya Padmanabhan, Editor

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 3

INDIA CURRENTS November 2015 • vol 29 • no 8

PERSPECTIVES

Northern California Edition www.indiacurrents.com

3 | EDITORIAL Modi’s Invisible Suit

By Jaya Padmanabhan

Find us on

7 | WORDS AND THINGS There Lived a Certain Man in Russia Long Ago

By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

28 | RELATIONSHIP DIVA Overcoming Anxiety and Getting that First Date

By Jasbina Ahluwalia 30 | BOOKS Review of Discontent and its Civilizations

By Rajesh C. Oza 36 | TAX TALK Tax on Children’s Investments

By Rita Bhayani

8 | PERSPECTIVE Hello, 911? Someone’s Using 409!

By Gayatri Subramaniam 10 | DESI VOICES House #152

By Usha Rao

LIFESTYLE

16 | Jinnah’s Daughter Exploring Jinnah’s relationship with his daughter

44 | MEDIA Without Subtitles: The Sholay Test

By Sandip Roy 59 | SCIENCE The Toll of Scarcity

By P. Mahadevan 67 | COMMENTARY Tulip Mania

By Bharti Kirchner 68 | FICTION Courage

By Vivek Santhosh

By Ritu Marwah

60 | Travel Levitating Yogini in Krakow

By Nagaraja Rao

4 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California November 2015

92 | HEALTHY LIFE From Villain to Victor

By Ronesh Sinha 98 | DEAR DOCTOR Dealing with Reactions to My Pregnancy

By Alzak Amlani 106 | RECIPES A Squashable Festival

By Shanta Sacharoff

26 | Sports India’s Sports Leagues

By Roshn Marwah

108 | ON INGLISH The Sound of My Name

By Kalpana Mohan 110 | THE LAST WORD The Mediocre World of Malcolm Gladwell

By Sarita Sarvate

74 | MUSIC Mahadeva Gets the Nomination!

By Priya Bhatt Das

DEPARTMENTS 6 | Letters to the Editor 9 | Popular Articles 32 | Ask a Lawyer 33 | Visa Dates

40 | Films Reviews of Talvar, Singh is Bliing, The Visit

By Aniruddh Chawda, Madhumita Gupta

WHAT’S CURRENT 74 | Cultural Calendar 86 | Spiritual Calendar

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letters to the editor

Finding Peace

Nirupama Vaidyanathan’s beautiful essay about finding a cure for her loneliness at Costco is a lesson for us all. (“Grief and Costco,” India Currents, October 2015) Just as God is in all of us, peace and harmony as well as a sense of belonging can be found among the aisles of 50 inch televisions, ceiling high packs of Sam-E and endless rows of paper products. I sometimes find that the busyness of the train station at Whitefield or the Civic Center Bart station at 5 p.m. can offer beautiful opportunities for meditation.

There are many places and people in the world to assist us on our spiritual and earthly paths but sometimes the perfect place is where we are. We just have to be sensitive to our needs and be open and aware of what the universe is already providing for our healing.

Warren Rose, Martinez, CA

Diversity and Objectivity

Many thanks for printing my letter in your October issue about Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his governance (in response to two articles in September).

You do encourage diversity, but sometimes it’s misused. Facts are also interpreted and distorted by writers. However, free speech and free writing have no limit.

Yatindra Bhatnagar

Being Unique

Kalpana Mohan’s article about churidars made me pause and reflect (“The Churidar Gets a Nod,” India Currents, August 2015).

We all have our stories. For me, it happened organically. I can’t remember precisely when I started wearing my churidar outfits to non-Indian events. My earliest recollection is that of the early 2000s when I began wearing churidar kurtas to work on casual days.

After an entire generation of women was taught how to “Dress for Success,”

6 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California November 2015

came the challenge of “Appropriate Attire” for casual days. Our employee handbook contained a long list of what was not acceptable for women to wear.

I only had a few churidar outfits but thought they seemed to fit the definition of what was appropriate for casual Fridays. I also thought it would be good to use them more often than just wearing them occasionally to Indian events. So, on Fridays, I donned the Indian outfit. After a few months of double-takes, the comments began to flow ... “Where did you buy that?” “Is that hand-embroidered?”

“Wow, the color of your pants matches the color of your shirt!” “I’ve never seen that design!” Co-workers loved the outfits.

And, these comments came from men and women.

Over the last dozen years, I’ve worn a myriad of Indian outfits to western social events, from fundraising galas to the Ahmanson Theater to Disney Hall to the Hollywood Bowl or just out to dinner. The reception has been unexpectedly fantastic!

Men and women comment on how beautifully breathtakingly elegant the outfits are!

Individuals strike up conversations, from describing their own trips to India, to attending their Indian friend’s wedding or just to remark on the lovely outfit.

I’ve concluded that the positive response I’ve encountered may be due to a combination of factors: perhaps since my husband is Caucasian, we don’t conform to an ethnic stereotype; living in Los Angeles, where creativity rules is definitely a plus; the love affair between Hollywood and fashion is prevalent: Hollywood stars, millionaires and billionaires have admiringly bestowed compliments on my ethnic attire.

SPEAK YOUR MIND!

Have a thought or opinion to share?

Send us an original letter of up to 300 words, and include your name, address, and phone number. Letters are edited for clarity and brevity.

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I feel totally accepted by my American compatriots. The quizzical looks, nonetheless, come from my fellow Indians, who, with their glances seem to say, “Why would I want to wear a custom-made outfit and be uniquely me when I can purchase an off-the-rack outfit and look like everyone else?

Punita Khanna, Los Angeles, CA

Self-help Blame and Shame

The article by Sarita Sarvate on selfhelp (“Annoyed by the Self-help Cult? You Are Not Alone!” India Currents, October 2015) is a ridiculous generalisation. No doubt the “self-help” industry has its share of charlatans and exploiters, but it is absurd to write off the entire sector. Many personal development programs deliver dramatic perfomance improvements, and often inspire their customers to make positive contributions to the quality of life for others.

Derek Deardon, website Having been a part of the new age self help movement for around 15 years, I completely agree with what Sarita Sarvate wrote (“Annoyed by the Self-help Cult? You Are Not Alone!” India Currents, October 2015). Well, maybe not all of it, but a large part of it. People in these scenes have indeed become very narcissistic, blaming others for where they are.

The law of attraction is about the worst thing ever, blaming and shaming people for their circumstances. I’d suggest people go watch the movie Humans on You Tube for a rather large wake up call as to what is actually happening in the world and get over their entitled western atitude.

Pippa Galea, website I know the article by Sarita Sarvate is an opinion piece, but it seems to me that her research is somewhat short. The self-help industry is a billion dollar one and gets a lot of credit for contributing to people’s success. One of the biggest messages you find in the field is the very message Ms. Sarvate subscribes to: Go out and be of service to others. As opposed to sit on the sidelines and criticize.

Andre Darling, website

words and things

There Lived a Certain Man in Russia Long Ago

By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

O

n a Friday night in Chennai in September 2015, we go with friends to drink gin and eat Jack Daniels chicken at 10 Downing Street. Styled as a British pub, 10 Downing Street is actually #50 B.N. Road—but you can see why they would change the name. It is retro night. Retro here means Michael Jackson and a medley from the musical Grease. It means disco and music videos featuring Afro-ed quartets. It also means the second coming of Boney M., a 1970s pop group that I always assumed was British, but was apparently based in Germany and made up of singers from Aruba, Jamaica, and Montserrat.

“Sunny.” “Daddy Cool.” “Rivers of Babylon.” “Brown Girl in the Ring.” My Michigan-born husband is looking at me like I’m crazy, because I know all these songs. Given the curious way that sonic artifacts travel—first, on radio waves; then in the Scotchsoaked nostalgia of reveling immigrants—these German hits from the mid-1970s actually comprised the soundtrack to my late1980s/early-1990s, suburban American childhood.

On Friday nights in the Bay Area, before the first dot com boom and before the bust, we would gather: a group of Indian parents in their thirties (they seemed older to us kids), and us American-born kids, second and third generation Indians with California accents, whose ancestors’ roots and routes variously extended through India, England, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, the United States.

Improbably, “Rasputin,” Boney M.’s 1978 disco masterpiece, which borrows heavily from a Turkish folk song, was our collective anthem. “There lived a certain man in Russia long ago / He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow / Most people looked at him with terror and with fear / But to Moscow chicks he was such a lovely dear.”

“Rasputin” narrates the rise and fall of Grigory Rasputin, the peasant lover of the Russian Tsarina, Alexandra Fyodorovna.

Rasputin, born the same year as M.K. Gandhi, was purportedly a “holy healer” and “Russia’s greatest love machine” (Boney M.’s words), but his “drinking and lusting and hunger for power” (still Boney M.) eventually earned him enough enemies that he was shot to death in 1916.

Even as children, we knew all the words to the song, but it would be years before we pieced together the full story of the reallife Rasputin’s drinking and lusting, years before we understood the implications of the “ecstasy and fire,” poisoned drinks, illicit affair, rumors, entrapment, and assassination that we’d been singing about since grade school. We must have been quite a sight, the dozen of us four-foot Indian Americans, dropping our voices two octaves and narrowing our eyes to end our spirited dance with a menacing: “Oh, those Russians!” (Perhaps, for our parents, it was

something like the cognitive dissonance I experience listening to my two year old singing Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.” “I’m keeping my baaa-by!” she announced recently, to her grandfather’s considerable surprise.)

Of course, my own childhood love affair with “Rasputin” was not singular. Rather, it seems to reflect a broader civilizational preoccupation. In 1994, Bollywood film composers Jatin-Lalit lifted whole musical phrases from “Rasputin” for the song “Sachi Yeh Kahani Hai” in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. Then, in 2012, Pritam explicitly borrowed from “Rasputin” in writing “Steal the Night (I’ll Do the Talking)” for Agent Vinod. So I’m not surprised when “Rasputin” begins to play in T. Nagar. It’s simply another notch in globalization’s belt, a confirmation of the interconnections we have been living all our lives, of the curious tastes that transcend generations, and of the marginal histories we each carry unawares.

Here I am in 2015: a California-born Indian American in a British pub in Chennai dancing to German pop music based on a Turkish folk song sung by a quartet from the Caribbean islands in 1976.

Later I will discover that the German record producer and songwriter, Frank Farian, who started Boney M. was also responsible for the mid-1990s hits “Be my lover” (by La Bouche), “Tonight is the night” (by Le Click), and “Where do you go” (by No Mercy). If you weren’t between the ages of 10 and 20 in the mid-1990s, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about. But if you were, you’ll remember the infectious beats of those ridiculous songs, how they played at the roller palace when you debuted your first pair of roller blades, how alive you felt, how young.

The dance floor at 10 Downing Street is empty until I enter it. I am old enough now not to care how I look, so I begin to jump wildly, hands overhead, and sing the familiar lyrics of “Rasputin.” Other pub-goers get comfortable and move to join me—groups of men in their thirties who dance by bumping chests and linking fingers, in a distinctly Indian brand of unashamed homosociality. I drift into a corner near the DJ booth.

It is not long before Boney M. fades into “Subha Hone Na De” from Desi Boyz, and retro night is officially the stuff of the past.

“This is what I like,” my Chennai-born friend, who has thus far avoided the dance floor, shouts gleefully, as he pumps his fists in the air. “This is my music. At the end of the day, I’m a desi boy only.” n Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 7

perspective

Hello, 911? Someone’s Using 409!

By Gayatri Subramaniam

S

omething has been happening this month. I don’t understand it and I can offer no explanation other than I must be living in an alternate universe as my kids like to say.

You see, a couple of weeks ago, my daughter went back to college. Over the summer, she had come home and for the most part reverted to her charming way of side-stepping any work. Her timing was always impeccable. If I walked in and saw her swatting flies (on a game in her laptop, of course; nothing really active, come on!) and said, “hey, set the table, will you?” I got the perfect “just” response. “I’m just in the middle of enrolling for classes” or “I’m just applying for a summer job”—those very responses that stop a mom in her tracks and decide she must not interrupt this responsible young adult. Well, my instinct was equally impeccable and I just happened to know that she would rather just be doing anything but use a bit of muscle around the house.

Then she announced she had decided to move off campus. I thought another year on campus would have been more prudent since she knew little about cooking and cleaning, paying bills, cleaning, grocery shopping and cleaning. (Did I say cleaning more than once?) But her mind was made up, and the university fortuitously over-enrolled freshmen, so upperclassmen were essentially booted out to fend for themselves. She and her friends found themselves a nice apartment off campus, and it was probably shortly after that I must have hit my head and had a bad concussion, because nothing has made sense since then.

There was a predictable flurry of shopping for a bed, a desk, and some other essentials. Then she started asking for bakeware. “I like to make scones,” she declared. “In fact, it would be best if I got a muffin pan and a bundt pan too, since I like cakes.” Pots and pans came next. I also got a taste of what rooming together in the digital age looks like. It 8 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California November 2015

Now you should know that in my house, the food ranges from sambhar to bratwurst (sometimes on the same day, if the two countries reach an impasse!). seemed we could go nowhere without room-mate input. Every time we stood in front of household goods at any store, the phone was whipped out and conversations flew back and forth. “Did you buy a can opener? Ok, I’ll get the egg whisks then.

What do you think about these matching storage jars <click, send>?”

The weekend came when she decided to move in before her roommates did, so she could get comfortable in her surroundings and find her way to Safeway (no mean feat in her city since you can trip over three organic food stores and four pot shops within 500 feet, even buy a mandala or two, but you have to take three buses to get to Safeway!) That weekend I swung between applauding her independence and thinking about episodes of Criminal Minds that had the general theme “Shemar Moore sexily chases evil serial killer who stalked young women walking to Safeway.” Then the first text arrived … “can you send me your cauliflower recipe and your vendakkai (okra) recipe?” I threw myself on the floor and wept with happiness. She was alive! And more importantly, much, much more importantly, someone wanted an Indian recipe from me! Heck, everyone knows Indian cooking is not my forte. I was clearly approaching some sort of Tamilian mami-hood.

Now you should know that in my house, the food ranges from sambhar to bratwurst (sometimes on the same day, if the two countries reach an impasse!). So why did she not buy ready-to-eat bratwurst at Safeway? Comfort food, it seems,

comes in a container of dal. Pictures came next. “Look, I made ghee so I could have it with dal.” And then, this is when I was certain I must have had a concussion. She said, “I don’t understand it. I have had this compulsive need to clean the kitchen.

I even bought some 409 and scrubbed the hood of the stove.”

“I’m sorry,” I said sadly, “you must have the wrong number. I don’t know you.”

The impostor didn’t stop there. Last weekend, the campus filled with the roommates and other friends, as classes began.

She called again, to tell me that one of her friends tumbled in that morning, bleeding and moaning, after he had fallen off a skateboard and kissed the concrete with his entire face. The domestic goddess child turned into a nurse as she apparently handed him an ice-pack, and found some gauze to bandage his elbows, while the other roommates stared horrified. And then as they pondered where to find medical help on a Saturday, she said with authority in her voice, “What insurance do you have?”

When she found that he had the same insurance we did, she directed him and his girlfriend to the appropriate clinic. And then she cleaned and disinfected the house.

I hung up again with, “sorry, I really don’t know you.” What I know is that my child hates the sight of blood, and used to leave the house when we had to remove a splinter from her younger sister’s hand.

And I swear she knows nothing about insurance! I don’t know who’s taken over her phone and identity, but that girl has some pretty good recipes now and it’s time for her to leave us alone.

Have you seen my daughter? If you find her, will you tell her that her mother misses her and she can come home to the old universe, and all will be forgiven? n Gayatri Subramaniam is a pre-licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Silicon Valley.

She moonlights as a writer when the whim strikes her.

India Currents is available on the Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/IndiaCurrents/dp/B005LRAXNG Follow at twitter.com/indiacurrents on facebook.com/IndiaCurrents

Most Popular Articles Online October 2015 1) Hey, I Need Cash!

Kalpana Mohan 2)Annoyed with the Self-help Cult? You Are Not Alone Sarita Sarvate 3) The Big Fat Indian American Stereotype Jaya Padmanabhan 5) Living with Clay Gautam Banerjee 5) Golu–The Festival of Nine Nights Ashok Subramaniam 6) Does Investing in Gold Make Sense?

Kunal Sampat 7) How I Keep Busy After My Youngest Flew the Coop Hema Alur Kundargi 8) Chasing the Dissertation Mouse Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan 9) Hackers for a Better World Prakash Narayan

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10) Chaos Theory Emma Blanco

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 9

desi voices

House #152

By Usha Rao

I

t was their magnum opus. She didn’t major in the creative arts. Fresh out of high school she was tossed on stage, with her composer.

Mom seemed to have it all under control. The master conductor, she did the planning, strategizing, and delegation.

Dad worked hard on financing the team, setting the broad goals, his third eye always on the budget and silently cheering from the sidelines. Us four, we were no symphony orchestra. The total was fluid— six, plus one or two cousins who boarded with us at various times, a grandchild or two. We had a riot of a time.

The road is narrow, with houses packed on either side; each two stories high. The only greenery in sight is an occasional jackfruit or sampige tree lending its draft of strong fragrance to the summer breeze. Children are enthralled in a gripping game of street cricket, dodging cars, bikes, street vendors and many walkers. On this sweltering hot day, windows open, you can hear the neighbors whisper. As for us, mere murmuring is not an option.

Ours is the fourth house upstairs on the right.

“House #152,” rented.

ties, as artless as it might have seemed. It was always Open House.

The two bedrooms had half the furniture we owned—the parent’s bed and a steel cupboard. The other half was in the living room: a cane set of four chairs and a coffee table. The oldest four in any group earned the chairs. The younger had strong limbs. Here in this 15 x 12 feet space, we relaxed during the day, entertained most evenings and slept at night on our mats. This was our window to the world at large. Here we discussed sports and politics, wove conspiracy theories, planned weddings, and mourned losses.

It is 2 a.m. and Dad wakes me up with a whisper, standing by my bed (mat). I have a robotic reflex to this—wake up, listen for water drops down the stairs, pick the empty buckets, take my position on the stairs. Dad gets the other bees in position between the house and the water outlet down the stairs and around the house. For the next two hours, we pass buckets of water to the next in line, alternating with quick power naps on the stairs, while the dripping water fills the next bucket.

The fresh morning air is a bonus.

M

L

om didn’t seem to do it deliberately, but the kitchen was an instant hit from the day we moved in. A large area with no furniture, windows always open, this was our war room at dinners and lunches. Here, stories were told, advice traded, judgments pronounced, and justice served. The ritual continued with empty plates, until Dad who always was done first, unceremoniously called an END to it.

The menu was lean and consistent.

With no refrigerator, no appliances and no processed food, we were healthy by design. Mom, considered progressive, was traditional when it came to the art of dining. She cheerfully served us before she dined. We wondered if visitors ever discerned the times she feigned fullness for the benefit of the company of friends, relatives, and even friends of relatives. We took pride in our skillful entertaining abili-

iving upstairs came with its perks. The main door opened onto the balcony.

We spent long hours there, savoring vivid flash backs and magical fast-forwards.

From up there, we were part of a larger family. The drama unfolded in this rich milieu, chapters being written in an Open Book.

Mom’s monthly budget had a modest three columns—description, expenditure, and running total. Money came and left swiftly, with little need to hop in and out of a bank. The top priorities were grocery, rent and school fees. If this balance was disturbed, Dad brushed aside one course from the meals until further notice.

Life was easy. We got bored once a month. When we got bored, we went to the movies. When we went to the movies, we ate out. When we ate out, we ordered either a plate of idly or a dosa. When we ordered either an idly or a dosa, we spent a

10 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California November 2015

Stariway to #152

little more moolah. When we spent a little more moolah, we couldn’t afford boredom for a whole month.

Not everything was so well orchestrated. Often, stuff played hooky—water, electricity, milk, sewage, plumbing, the bus or any combination thereof. There were the spontaneous visits to the doctor, the ration, or the cobbler.

The strategic daily trips for grocery, schools and work had to be woven in.

Festivals were merrily fast forwarded in inverse proportion to the budget. We never let the numerous volunteer opportunities pass by. For, that was the form of giving we could easily afford. We swung between chaos, uncertainty and an element of surprise. We could easily pass off as a novice rowing team with one Bow, a Stern, and many a Cox. This boat sailed the rough seas.

We have all moved on and lived in many cities and homes around the world.

One thing we do with regularity is dig into our treasure chest of memories that “Home #152” afforded us—our masterpiece.

I ask my 14 year old for his definition of happiness, looking for the definite link to money. He does not care about the rung of the financial ladder, he responds, he would be happy as long as there was status quo. Upwards would be good, not necessary. But downward, he says, is a sure path to unhappiness. He did get it right.

Dr. Seuss: Do not cry because it’s over, but smile because it happened. n A technology entrepreneur, Usha Rao is influenced by her children’s flair for writing. She lives in Seattle and can be reached at Ushats. rao@gmail.com.

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cover

“Try and remember me beloved as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread upon.”–Dina’s mother, Ruttie, wrote to Jinnah, her husband.

By Ritu Marwah

Muhammad Jinnah, Dina Jinnah, Ruttie Jinnah; Photos courtesy Dr. Ghulam Nabi Kazi 16 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California November 2015

Nehru and Jinnah had the same problem. Their daughters loved men they did not approve of.

Children of ambitious fathers, Indira and Dina, both, carried their fathers’ hopes and lived with their mothers’ pain. They were daughters who were raised in the mold of the young English ladies their fathers had gone to school with. Jinnah’s daughter, Dina was born in Britain and, like Indira, went to school there.

What the girls did not know was that it was all fine and dandy to wear modern ideas but you don’t go to bed in them. Both girls crossed the line and fell in love with men of another faith.

D

ina was born on the night between 14th and 15th August, 1919. She made a dramatic entry into the world, announcing her arrival when her parents were enjoying a movie at a local theatre in London.

Stanley Wolpert’s Jinnah of Pakistan records: “Oddly enough, precisely twentyeight years to the day and hour before the birth of Jinnah’s other offspring, Pakistan.”

When Dina was introduced to Neville Wadia she was 17 years old. The year was 1936.

Neville was born to a Parsee father and a Christian mother. His father Sir Ness Wadia was a well known textile industrialist in India. Neville was born in Liverpool, England and educated at Malvern College and Trinity College, Cambridge. Mahommedali Currim Chagla, who was Jinnah’s assistant at the time, writes in his autobiography Roses in December: “Jinnah asked Dina ‘there are millions of Muslim boys in India, is he the only one you were waiting for?’ and Dina replied ‘there were millions of Muslim girls in India, why did you marry my mother then?’”

resign his Muslim seat in the Imperial Legislative Council. Ruttie solved the problem by embracing Islam and marrying Jinnah. Love that had blossomed while horse-riding in Darjeeling was sealed with a forbidden kiss.

Ruttie’s father, Sir Dinshaw Petit, a textile magnate and Jinnah’s client was horrified that his only child was marrying Jinnah, a man of another faith, and had forbidden them from meeting each other. Sir Dinshaw went to court and got a restraining order. The couple had to wait for two years before Ruttie reached legal age and was able to marry Jinnah and leave her parental home.

It was love’s early days. According to Haider, when Jinnah, or J as she called him, worked in stuffy offices, with stuffy men, discussing stuffy things, Ruttie, the flower of Bombay, waited patiently in the musty rooms of courts of law. She traveled with Jinnah to meetings including the Congress session in Nagpur and spoke vociferously in favor of HinduMuslim unity in the face of the colonial enemy Britain.

Jinnah admired and indulged Ruttie.

Haider shares an interesting anecdote of

Jinnah and Ruttie

Jinnah, you see, was no stranger to love. We learn about Ruttie and Jinnah from Khwaja Razi Haider’s book Ruttie Jinnah: The Story Told And Untold. Twenty years after the death of his first wife, Jinnah had turned to mush in the arms of 16 year-old Ruttie, Dina’s motherto-be, and a Zoroastrian to boot. They wanted a civil marriage and the law at the time stated that you had to foreswear religion to get married in court. Haider explains that this meant Jinnah had to

Sharing a jovial moment: Jinnah with Gandhi;

Photo courtesy Dr. Ghulam Nabi Kazi

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 17

their dinner at the Government House.

The story goes, Mrs. Jinnah wore a lowcut dress. While they were seated at the dining table, Lady Willingdon, Marie Freeman-Thomas, Marchioness of Willingdon asked an aide-decamp (ADC) to bring a wrap for Mrs. Jinnah, in case she felt cold. Jinnah rose from the table, and declared, “When Mrs. Jinnah feels cold, she will say so, and ask for a wrap herself.”

Then he led his wife from the dining-room; and from that time on refused to go to Government House again.

S. S. Rajputana, Marseilles 5 Oct 1928

nity. Professor Akbar S. Ahmed in his book Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity, records how the Darling thank you for all you have done. If ever in family traveled through Europe my bearing your once tuned senses found any irand dined with friends at Savoy ritability or unkindness, be assured that in my heart and Berkeley during that time. there was place only for a great tenderness and a Gandhi was jailed in March greater pain - a pain my love without hurt. When 1922. Ruttie and Dina saw one has been as near to the reality of Life (which Jinnah throw himself into the after all is Death) as I have been dearest, one only 1923 November Central Legremembers the beautiful and tender moments and islative Assembly elections to all the rest becomes a half veiled mist of unrealities. their neglect. Jinnah fought for Try and remember me my beloved as the flower you adequate representation of the plucked and not the flower you tread upon.

Muslim legislative assemblies even as Gandhi was released I have suffered much sweetheart because I have from jail. loved much. The measure of my agony has been in Haider details how, at accord to the measure of my love. home, Ruttie, and nine-yearold Dina took a back seat in Darling I love you, I love you - and had I loved you Jinnah’s life and for Ruttie the A Precarious Balance just a little less I might have remained with you only psychological stress caused coliHowever, real life has a after one has created a very beautiful blossom one tis to flare up. They moved out way of sneaking up. The first does not drag it through the mire. The higher you of the house in 1928 to the Taj few years of Jinnah’s marriage set your ideal the lower it falls.

Mahal Hotel. Jinnah accepted to Ruttie also coincided with his role in the failing marchallenging times at work.

I have loved you my darling as it is given to few riage, “It is my Gandhi returned to India and men to be loved. I only beseech you that tragedy fault: we both his political tactics were difwhich commenced in love should also end with it. need some sort ferent from those of Jinnah’s of understandconstitutional ones. ing we cannot give.”

During the second and [Haider] third year of his marriage, Jin“Mrs. Jinnah had already sailed for nah was forced to make three remarkable Europe, with her parents, when her decisions that reduced his role in Inhusband left Bombay in April 1928; his dia’s freedom struggle: he resigned from political career in dark confusion, and the Imperial Legislative Council, the his one experiment in private happiHome Rule League and Indian National ness apparently wrecked for ever,” writes Congress. The graph of Jinnah’s career Hector Bolitho in the official biography showed an increasingly downward trend. called Jinnah. It is from Bolitho we learn During the 1920 session of Congress, that Diwan Chaman Lall, a colleague with Ruttie by his side, Jinnah saw Ganand friend took a voyage to England, dhi hijack the movement. As opposed and after the voyage declared, “he is the to Jinnah’s constitutional ways, says Jasloneliest man.” want Singh in his book India, Pakistan Soon after the ship arrived in EngIndependence, Gandhi was taking the land, Jinnah went to Ireland, and Diwan movement to the streets with chaotic Chaman Lall to Paris where Ruttie and demands like Purna Swaraj (complete Dina were staying. Chaman Lall had self rule). “Your way is the wrong way: been in his hotel only a few minutes my way is the right way—the constituwhen he learned that Ruttie was in a tional way is the right way,” Jinnah had hospital, dangerously ill. said to Gandhi. Jinnah parted ways with He described the story to Bolitho, “I the Congress. He held no public office went to the hospital immediately. I had except for his membership of the Muslim Dina Jinnah marries Neville Wadia, All Saints’ always admired Ruttie Jinnah so much: League. Moved from the national stage, Church, Bombay, 1938 there is not a woman in the world today Jinnah now had a smaller platform to Photo courtesy Dr. Ghulam Nabi Kazi to hold a candle to her for beauty and stand on. charm. She was a lovely, spoiled child, father, Jinnah, disagreeing with Gandhi’s Dina was a year old when India and Jinnah was inherently incapable of tactics, took a back seat.

The family imveered in the direction of non-coopunderstanding her. She was lying in bed, mersed themselves in the Parsee commueration and civil disobedience and her 18 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

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with a temperature of 106 degrees. She could barely move, but she held a book in her hand and she gave it to me. ‘Read it to me, Cham,’ she said. It was a volume of Oscar Wilde’s poems.

A few days later Jinnah arrived from Ireland. I waited in the hospital while he went in to see her—two and half hours he was with her. When he came out of her bedroom, he said ‘I think we can save her … I am sure she will pull through.’ Ruttie Jinnah recovered and I left Paris, soon afterwards, for Canada, believing they were reconciled. Some weeks passed, and I was in Paris again. I spent a day with Jinnah, wondering why he was alone. In the evening, I said to him, ‘Where is Ruttie?’ He answered ‘We quarreled: she has gone back to Bombay.’ He said it with such finality that I dare not ask any more.”

Jinnah found it difficult to maintain his position at the national level given Gandhi’s arrival and rapid ascendancy.

In 1928, Motilal Nehru presented the Nehru Report in Calcutta and and came out squarely on the side of Gandhi. Jinnah sensed an unmatchable opponent.

He spoke about the danger of ignoring the insecurities of the minorities. As he left, he said to Jamshed Nusserwanjee, “Jamshed, this is the parting of the ways.” [Jaswant Singh] “Dina, however, maintained that Ruttie died of colitis or something more complicated, but it certainly was a digestive disorder. The disease caused Ruttie excruciating pain towards the end. At one stage, an overdose almost killed her, and even suggested to some people that she had attempted suicide,” wrote Akbar Ahmed in his book Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity. While Jinnah was preoccupied with work troubles, Ruttie lay in the Taj Mahal Hotel with a broken heart.

Dina watched her mother’s life ebb away. Two months later she died—not yet twenty-nine years old.

Jinnah sat in the burial ceremony with Kanji Dwarkadas beside him. He talked of his political worries even as her body was lowered into the ground.

He broke out his reverie when asked to throw a handful of earth. The finality of it hit him. As the idea of a new country birthed in his frustrated mind, his love left him to inhabit another world. He had been check-mated both by his po-

litical rivals and his lover. Ten-year-old Dina watched her father crumble to the ground as he wept uncontrollably. “Ruttie’s death devastated Jinnah, according to Dina … A curtain fell over him, said Dina,” writes Akbar Ahmed.

Motherless Dina left for England with her father who had decided to abandon politics and settle in London along with his sister, Fatima. “I felt so

Dina reached for the toast, Jinnah handed her the book, “Read this, my dear,” he said, “It’s good.” For days on end he talked about Kemal Ataturk. So impressed was he by him that Dina named him Grey Wolf.

Like any teenager, she loved to tease her father. She lightened his dark days.

Dina did not realize her idyllic time with her father was coming to an end as the grey wolf was rising within him, calling him back to birth another child.

“Away with dreams and shadows! They have cost us dear in the past,” Mustafa Kemal seemed to whisper in Jinnah’s ear.

In 1933 Jinnah returned to India. The Hampstead home, where the Grey Wolf had lived, was sold. Dina went to live with her mother’s relatives in Bombay.

[Wolpert]

The Muslim Identity

Dina Wadia

Photo courtesy Dr. Ghulam Nabi Kazi

utterly helpless,” said Jinnah, to the students of Aligarh eight years later, about his exit of 1931, recounts Akbar Ahmed.

Grey Wolf

They moved into West Heath House in Hampstead, a three story villa built in the style of the 1880s with a tall tower which gave a splendid view over the surrounding country. Stanley Wolpert in To Charisma and Commitment in South Asian History writes about Dina and Jinnah’s time in London. “Dina would have morning tea with her father, sitting at the edge of his bed. Breakfast was sharp at nine o’clock. Bradbury, the chauffer took Jinnah to his chambers in King’s Bench Walk thereafter. On Saturdays and Sundays they walked on the Heath to Kenwood-past Jack Straw’s Castle, the inn where Karl Marx had sat drinking root beer with his daughter.”

One day, home for the holidays from her English school, Dina came down for breakfast to find her father engrossed in, a book by H.C. Armstrong on Kemal Ataturk called The Grey Wolf, an Intimate Study of a Dictator. As thirteen-year-old

20 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

Young Muslim graduates thronged to Jinnah as their leader. Rising on the wave of their adoration Jinnah finally saw the world he had wanted all along and he was not willing to risk it for any ideals. Gone was the man who had stood up for his wife’s low cut blouse. In his place was a man who, Akbar Ahmed wrote in his book Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity, when visiting Baluchi tribes, agreed with his host that it would not be wise for his sister, Fatima, who did not wear a purdah, to go before the more traditional Baluchi tribesmen. He scolded his hostess when she protested “You are trying to ruin four years of building up sympathy for the Muslim League among the tribesmen,” he said.

Later in his Presidential address Jinnah would say, “Women can do a great deal within their home, even under purdah.

As Jinnah basked in the adoration of the Muslim masses and nurtured the idea of birthing a country, nineteen-year-old Dina spent more and more time with her mother’s family and the Parsee community. She turned to someone who was older than her and carried her mother’s spirit. She had found, it seemed, a combination of her parents, a lively, Parsee gentleman eight years her senior who had grown up, like her, in England— Neville Wadia.

Ruttie had been the only daughter of a textile magnate. And fatefully, Dina who had been 14 years of age when her

mother died, married Neville Wadia, a textile magnate, within five years of her mother’s death. Neville Wadia would one day succeed his father as chairman of one of India’s successful textile concerns, Bombay Dyeing.

Nehru, Mountbatten and Jinnah working on the Partition Plan along with Lord Ismay, Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff;

Photo courtesy Dr. Ghulam Nabi Kazi

Marriage and Estrangement

Jinnah was livid that his daughter had not chosen a Muslim husband.

Dina married Neville in 1938 against her father’s wishes, writes Chagla. In 1939 Jinnah pulled down the house of memories in Mount Pleasant Road and built a mansion. Jinnah asked for “a big reception room, a big verandah, and big lawns for garden parties,” recalled the architect Claude Batley as related by Akbar Ahmed.

The new mansion with its wide balconies, broad high rooms, marble portico leading to the marble terrace was fit for the great leader that he was working to become. On his 64th birthday Jinnah moved in. This house, a perfect backdrop for the future Quaid-i-Azam (the great leader) was not frequented by Dina. According to Chagla, Jinnah had disowned his daughter.

Dina and Neville had two children, a daughter and then a son. But Dina, like her mother, Ruttie, proved to be unlucky in love. Within five years of her marriage, she left Neville. They got separated in 1943, though the divorce never took place.

On July 20, 1943, an assassin entered the house with a knife to kill Jinnah, but was overpowered. Contrary to what Chagla wrote, Dina telephoned and then rushed to the house to see her father, writes Akbar Ahmed in Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity. In 1943 Jinnah became seriously ill and had to take a vacation in Srinagar to recover from an ailment in his lungs. As time passed Jinnah’s temper got shorter and his aloofness grew. He focused single-mindedly on the negotiations with the Congress and the British to ensure the creation of Pakistan. “There is the petulance that goes with such illness as Jinnah was suffering from,” said his doctor Dr. Patel.

[Ahmed]

Papa Darling

Jinnah succeeded in his fight for a separate homeland for the Muslims of India. Akbar Ahmed reveals that on

hearing the news about Pakistan on 28th April 1947, even though she herself had no intention of moving to the new country, Dina wrote to her father.

“My darling Papa, First of all I must congratulate you-we have got Pakistan, that is to say the principal has been accepted. I am so proud and happy for you-how hard you have worked for it.

I do hope you are keeping well–I get lots of news of you from the newspapers. The children are just recovering from whooping cough, it will take another month yet.” She ended the letter with “Take care of yourself Papa darling. Lots of love & kisses” She wrote to him again in June 1947 from Juhu: “Papa darling, At this minute your must be with the Viceroy. I must say that it is wonderful what you have achieved in these last few years and I feel so proud and happy for you. You have been the only man in India of late who has been a realist and a honest and brilliant tactician-this letter is beginning to sound like a fan mail, isn’t it? “ She again ended with “Take care of yourself. Lots of love & kisses and a big hug.”

Jinnah was seventy-year-old when he boarded the plane on August 7, 1947 and flew to Karachi forever as the Governor General and Baba-i-Qaum of his new born child, Pakistan. As he stepped onto the aircraft, Quaid-i-Azam looked back towards the city in which he was leaving behind forever his beloved Ruttie, whose grave he had visited the previous evening; their daughter Dina; a grand-

daughter, a four-year-old grandson, Nusli holding on to his grandfather’s hat; and a house on the hill. [Haider] He said, “I suppose this is the last time I’ll be looking at Delhi.” [Akbar Ahmed] He bade a final goodbye with a smile on his face. She would not go to her father’s new home with him and he would die in a year’s time.

His lungs, riddled with tuberculosis, finally caught up with him.

Jinnah visited Ruttie’s grave a day before he left India forever. Dina did not travel to Pakistan until her father’s funeral in Karachi in September 1948. Their relationship would become a matter of legal conjecture and hair splitting. [Wiki] Dina’s son, Nusli Wadia, became a Christian, but converted back to Zoroastrianism and settled in the industrially wealthy Parsee community of Mumbai.

He is the chairman and majority owner of Bombay Dyeing, chairman of the Wadia group, and one of the savviest businessmen of India. The Economic Times described Nusli Wadia as “the epitome of South Bombay’s old money and genteel respectability”. He has two sons Ness and Jeh. Dina is ninety-nine years old and lives in New York with her daughter.

Dina’s daughter-in-law, Maureen said to Mumbaiwala about her, “I think she’s a true New Yorker and she’s doing very well. She knows when the Bloomingdale sales are on, and she’ll tell you when to go down to Saks. We all make it a point to go and see her at least once every two months. When the weather is good in summer, we spend at least a couple of months with her. Nusli visits her very frequently.”

Dina fought for her inheritance, the Jinnah House in Mumbai but she never fought for a place in history. Pakistan, her sibling, does not recognize her, just as she never accepted the entity who stole her childhood and her mother’s life. n Ritu Marwah has pursued theater, writing, marketing, startup management, raising children, coaching debate and hiking. Ritu has a master’s degree in business and worked in London for the Tata group for ten years.

Ritu is social media editor at India Currents.

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 21

W

Indira’s Journey

hy did Dina and Indira marry the men they did? I think Indira speaks for both of them when she says of her mother, “I saw her being hurt and I was determined not to be hurt.” Their choice of husbands may not have been politically wise, as per their fathers, but both chose men their mothers would have been safe with. It falls on daughters to right the wrong done to their mothers. The girls crossed their father’s line and fell in love with men of another faith and yet stayed within their mothers’.

Dina was two years old when Indira was born in November 1917. Like Dina Indira too would grow up with a young mother who had frequent bouts of sickness. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru who later became the first Prime Minister of independent India, like Jinnah, was often away, directing political activities or being incarcerated in prison, while her mother, Kamala, was frequently bedridden with illness, and later suffered an early death from tuberculosis.

Nehru was a Kashmiri Brahmin who, like Jinnah, had gone to school in England and trained to be a barrister. Upon his return to India, he enrolled at the Allahabad High Court, and was mentored into national politics by his father Motilal Nehru and Gandhi. Nehru, though, did not marry for love.

Seventeen-year-old Kamala was a match arranged by the family. Unlike Ruttie Jinnah, Kamala was a quiet girl who spoke no English. In his autobiography, Jawaharlal Nehru, referring to his wife, stated “I almost overlooked her.”

Later, as recorded by Pupul Jayakar in her biography of Indira, Kamala would write, “I am not worthy of anyone’s love.”

Like Dina, Indira grew up watching the strange marriage of her parents and her mother’s pain. She scolded her father in her letters, “Do you know that when Mummie was in a very bad condition the house was full of people but not one of them came to see her or sit a while with her ?”

Indira Gandhi; A wiki image

When Indira was sixteen, much to her horror, her grandmother thought it was time to suggest suitable Kashmir Brahmin suitors to her. Indira wrote “I wept and wept because I was so terrified at the very idea of marriage.” At that time Feroze, who was almost a part of the household, showed interest in Indira.

Feroze Jehangir Ghandy was born to a Parsi family. He met Indira and Kamala in 1930 during a protest march by a wing of Congress Freedom Fighters, the Vanar Sena. Indira and her mother Kamala were among the women demonstrators picketing outside Ewing Christian College. Kamala fainted due to the heat of the sun and Feroze went to comfort her. In the subsequent years Feroze was a big support to Kamala and tended to her when she became irrecoverably sick.

Kamla along with Indira, like Ruttie, went to Europe for treatment and there was hope that she would recover but the will to live comes from a fulfilled life. Kamala was thirty-seven years old when she died. At that time Indira was eighteen.

It was about the same time that Jinnah sold the house in Hampstead and

22 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

moved to India with Dina, that Nehru returned to India after the death of Kamala. Jinnah set about the task of becoming Quaid-i-Azam and establishing a new country, and Nehru got elected as President of Congress and became the Veer (brave) who would establish ramrajya (Kingdom of Rama, an idyllic world).

Motherless and neglected, Indira and Dina both lost their fathers to the national movement at a time when one was eighteen and the other sixteen years of age. When Indira wrote, “for I am lonely too–terribly lonely,” it could very well have been Dina writing it. Both carried the loneliness of their mothers in their hearts and sought to fill it by marrying a person their mother would have approved of.

Pupul Jayakar hints that Indira was maybe in love with her German teacher whom she had met during her time at Shanti Niketan. When it came to marriage however, she agreed to marry Feroze, her mother’s constant companion.

According to some accounts, Indira and Feroze married in London but their marriage was again formalized in Allahabad with Vedic rites.

Indira’s father Jawaharlal Nehru had opposed her marriage and approached Mahatma Gandhi to dissuade the young couple, but to no avail.

Like Dina and Neville, Indira and Feroze had a wonderful five years of marriage and birthed two children and then it all fell apart. Indira parted with Feroze, a man she had fought the entire world to marry. However, unlike Dina, Indira joined her father and became his successor.

Feroze died in 1960 leaving behind two sons, Rajiv and Sanjiv. Rajiv would soon follow his mother’s footsteps and become prime minister. Sanjiv or Sanjay died in an accident. Indira herself lived up to the age of sixty-seven, her life abruptly cut short by her assassin bodyguards.

If she had lived she would have been 97 years of age today. n

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 23

24 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

OW EYEBR ING D THRE$A 00

5

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 25

sports

India’s Sports Leagues

By Roshn Marwah

M

eet Indian Insanity—an overarching name applied to four new national competitive sports in India: a collegiate basketball a collegiate American football a professional basketball league, professional American football

leagues league, league, and a league.

The name of the game is entertainment.

The Philanthropic Game

Not entirely so, say the group behind Indian Insanity who believe that their mission is philanthropic. They seek to help expand and grow the sport while giving Indian children opportunities that they have never had before.

Sunday Zeller, the Co-CEO, said that she initially thought of expanding these sports leagues in Africa, but then came to the realization that India has the infrastructure to support such leagues due to its size and propensity for quick education and quick adoption of western culture.

She went on to say that a large part of the organization’s mission is based around creating opportunities for the players and creating avenues through which children, who previously may not have been in a position to attend schools, can be educated.

The group has created the first ever football scholarship and plans to create more sports scholarships. In an attempt to ensure that this success grows and continues they are asking that any college that joins their collegiate leagues, sets aside special resources to help the players get into and through college.

Hoop Dreams

The rise of Satnam Singh and Sim Bhullar, has put an international spotlight on Indian basketball like never before. The same way Yao Ming and Dikembe Mutombo led the expansion of the National Basketball Association (NBA) into China

and Africa and in particular Congo. The new Indian NBA big men, while not yet as great as the two aforementioned players are beginning to spread excitement.

Basketball despite its recent increase in popularity in India is by no means a new sport to the country. The first national tournaments in India came about in 1934 and the Indian national basketball team became a member of FIBA, the International Basketball Federation, in 1936. The Indian national team has only qualified for the Olympics in basketball once in 1980, but has placed fourth in the FIBA Asia championship. Currently the Indian national basketball team ranks 61st in the world and 11th in Asia.

Today national level basketball competitions are mainly under the governing body called the Basketball Federation of India or BFI. The BFI has for years been attempting to set up a national professional league, but has been utterly unsuccessful. The Universal Basketball Alliance University (UBA-U), is the name of the collegiate league that has been set up to serve as a feeder into the Universal Basketball Alliance league (UBA).

The professional UBA league consists of eight teams with an expansion into 12 teams occurring in the upcoming season.

The current eight existing teams are the Pune Peshwas, the Delhi Capitals, the Haryana Gold, the Punjab Steelers, the Chennai Slam, the Mumbai Challengers, the Bengaluru Beast, and the Hyderabad Sky. As of right now the league owns all of the teams, however as the league expands the plan is to sell the teams to investors.

According to Zeller, there has been much interest from big Bollywood stars, who wish to purchase teams, but as of right now there is no specific plan as to how to determine sellers. Abhishek Bachchan has been spotted at the UBA’s games. Zeller indicated that prior to the

26 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

UBA’s arrival into India, there were national leagues, but they played in barns and lacked organization and exposure.

While the UBA does not have an exclusive television deal just yet, TEN Sports, Asia’s leading sports network, has been broadcasting their games and is reportedly very interested in striking up an exclusive deal very soon. Currently TEN sports broadcasts the UBA-U’s final eight-team knockout stage of the tournament. A deal with TEN sports would ensure that for the first time in India there will be a televised basketball draft, in which players would be selected from the UBA-U into the UBA. When looking back at a successful season that ended with the Chennai Slam easily disposing of the Pune Peshwas in the championship with a final score of 81-49, Zeller says that the next big improvement step will be improving the quality of the coaches, and expanding the marketing team.

Touchdown Frenzy

Unlike basketball, American football has never before been present on any type on national level in India. This brings it’s own unique set of challenges to the Elite Football League of India (EFLI), the national competitive American football league and the EFLI-U, the collegiate or university league.

Zeller says of the challenge of educating the Indian population about the rules and how to play football, that the company has been infiltrating into not only schools from elementary to college, but also businesses, stating that many business men have taken to playing football on the weekends.

According to Zeller, the Indian public is very receptive to ideas and trends coming from the west, especially America, and that American football is picking up very quickly now that the first couple seasons have come to a close.

The skill level in the EFLI still needs a lot of developing, but shows promise with the establishment of the EFLI-U to serve as a feeder league where players can first develop their skills before playing in the professional leagues.

In addition to the feeder league and training camps, the EFLI had ten thousand walk-ons all striving to make the

team, “with the biggest players coming out of Punjab,” says Zeller.

Unlike the UBA, many of the football teams are owned not by the league itself but by investors, both inside of and outside India. The EFLI is currently made up of 24 teams including teams in Pakistan, with an expansion to 32 teams coming in the future. The league is currently being broadcast on TEN Sports, with the league coming to an exclusive agreement with the network, for free television time over the next five years.

The 2015 Super Bowl had a record number of 114.4 million viewers and is one of the most widely awaited and watched events around the world. It is not news, by any means, that domestic leagues, regardless of the sport, have the ability to grab national attention and to build people around a country into a jubilant frenzy.

One of the largest frenzies surrounding American sports is March Madness, the collegiate basketball tournament that captures the attention of millions of viewers and generates billions in revenue. The single elimination tournament is run through the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

The idea of March Madness is what led to the naming of the Indian sports organization that is taking the country by storm, Indian Insanity.

One of the slogans of the organization is “All India, All the Time.” This slogan is meant to show that all of the players and coaches and infrastructure for the league is Indian, and not simply foreign players playing a foreign sport in India.

The goal of this according to Indian Insanity is to have the Indian public identify with the sport and see it as something that can be a part of their weekly TV watching, their possible future as athletes, and ultimately their identity.

The league states that they are taking a grass roots approach to spreading the game, by sending players out into the public in order to spread the game as a way of demonstrating public loyalty and unity. n Roshn Marwah is a longtime Bay Area sports fan and is majoring in economics and computer science at Purdue University. He can be reached at rmarwah@purdue.edu.

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 27

relationship diva

Overcoming Anxiety and Getting that First Date

By Jasbina Ahluwalia

Q

I’m writing on behalf of my brother, because I know he’ll never ask for help himself. He gets really nervous at the thought of approaching women. Any suggestions for him?

A

What a supportive sister you are!

Anxiety is very common and can stop a guy from talking to a woman he’s attracted to—or flubbing the encounter if he does. Here are five of the most effective ways to do it: i) It starts non-verbally The old story about eyes meeting across a crowded room is a classic for a reason. Just about all communication begins non-verbally, and you can get a sense of whether a woman will be receptive to talking with you before walking over.

Start by catching her eye and smiling; if she meets your gaze and smiles back, it’s likely an invitation to approach and get to know her better.

ii) Find on Site conversation-starters If you see a woman you’d like to talk to, scan the area for something unusual that you can casually bring up to her. If a guy is acting ridiculously in the vicinity, for example, you could point to him and say, “Hey, you should really keep your boyfriend on a shorter leash!” You’ll likely get a laugh and have an inroad to further conversation. iii) Make use of overheard comments If you’re sitting within earshot of an interesting woman as she’s talking to friends, listen for key elements in the conversation.

Use this information to your advantage.

For example you could approach her and say something like, “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about the World Cup … I’m a huge soccer fan!” If she responds positively, ask for her number. You’ll both know you already have something in common for your first date!

iv) Ask her opinion Asking her opinion is a great way to get the conversation flowing to see if you’re compatible. An example might be, “Hey, I was just talking to a friend earlier today and he seems to think _______, but I don’t agree. What’s your take?” v) Be genuine Finally, the most important element of communication success is to be genuine.

Be yourself! You want her to like you for you anyway, so bring out what’s cool about you as you’re talking and see if she responds. If she doesn’t, she’s probably not a good match anyway. n Jasbina is the founder and president of Intersections Match, the only personalized matchmaking and dating coaching firm serving singles of South Asian descent in the United States. She is also the host of Intersections Talk Radio. Jasbina@intersectionsmatch. com.

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books

A Fundamental Reluctance

By Rajesh C. Oza

DISCONTENT AND ITS CIVILIZATIONS–Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London by Mohsin Hamid. Riverhead Books, 2015. 226 pages. Hardcover $18.71 and paperback $16.00. )

G

rab a pen and paper and try the following two-part thought experiment: i) Write: “Time-traveling back to a snowy day in Denmark of 1812, I met Hans Christian Oersted, who was a close friend of the fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen, and who also coined the term Gedankenexperiment, which means ‘thought experiment’ in German.” ii) Now move the pen to your other hand and write: “It’s more difficult to write this shorter sentence.”

Perhaps the above test of your ambidexterity has disabused you of the notion that writing is easy, so easy that an author of fiction can easily switch over to nonfiction or vice versa. If one first knows a writer as a gifted novelist, the bar is set high for that writer’s nonfiction; hence the challenge that this reviewer faced in reading Mohsin Hamid’s collection of essays in Discontent and Its Civilizations.

With his novels, Hamid has created cohesive and compelling worlds that the reader inhabits: Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013).

While all three novels possess a narrative inventiveness that pulls in the reader, it is The Reluctant Fundamentalist (TRF) that tensely straddles Lahore and New York, and is thus contrapuntal to the “dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London” sprinkled throughout Discontent and Its Civilizations (DaIC) TRF opens and closes with the protagonist, Changez, in a monologue with an American: Changez is a Princeton-

educated, former investment banker, who has returned from America to his native Pakistan, returned from New York’s cleanshaven and cologned financial seat of power to an uneasy, bearded relationship with the world of the seemingly powerless of Lahore; the American is, perhaps an “undercover assassin” or perhaps just a bulked-up guy listening to the life story of someone who is a “potential terrorist.”

And then there’s that dividing beard. This “symbol of [Changez’s shifting] identity” is a conundrum of sorts. In this era when facial hirsutism is the young man’s way of projecting a hip attitude, Changez gently confronts the American on a doublestandard: “it is remarkable … the impact a beard worn by a man of my complexion has on your fellow countrymen.”

DaIC was written by Mohsin Hamid, a bearded, Princeton-educated, former management consultant who grew up in

30 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

Lahore and now shuttles between Pakistan, the United States, and England; and DaIC has been read by critics like myself, “undercover assassins” if you will. More seriously, this serious book has probably been read most by those living in the English-speaking world. This world of EuroAmerican interests is not infrequently at odds with the rest of the world; and readers from this Western world have been socialized to believe the following definition of terrorism memorably conveyed in TRF: “terrorism … was defined to refer only to the organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by killers not wearing the uniform of soldiers.”

The power of the italicized “not” can be attributed to Changez and/or Hamid.

In TRF, the implication of the italicization is tacit and thus a punch in the gut; in DaIC, it is explicitly explored in multiple essays and thus a rebuke of the mind.

The punch is not matched by the rebuke, especially because DaIC is not written as one cohesive essay, the way V. S. Naipaul wrote India: A Wounded Civilization.

While both books aim high with heavy words like “discontent,” “wounded,” and “civilization,” (and although both books fall short of their “big idea” ambitions), Naipaul’s Wounded Civilization at least has focus. Hamid’s Discontent and Its Civilizations is a stitching together of previously published essays into three parts: “Life,” “Art,” and “Politics.” The introduction (“My Foreign Correspondence”) is well integrated, but the rest of the book makes an unreasonable demand that the reader connect the dots.

The first section, “Life,” is highly readable and entertaining. The reader learns that in the process of shuttling back and forth between Pakistan and America, Hamid lost his Urdu and in the bargain gained the mentorship of esteemed writers

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of the English language. There is also a touching piece about how Lahore’s members of the opposite sex do not touch in public. And there is a powerful piece about the ever-growing gulf between America and Pakistan. Titled “The Countdown,” this essay was published in The New York Times shortly after the Taliban-inspired tragedy of 9/11. While the violence of that day at New York’s World Trade Center and elsewhere has been seared into the American psyche, what Hamid does through the frightened eyes of his mother in Pakistan, is to re-frame the conversation: “‘I have complete sympathy for the Americans,’ she says. ‘It is terrible what happened. But now they are so angry. They talk about a war on terrorism. But they never seem to think what they do terrifies normal people here.’”

Some 160 pages later, in “Politics,” there is a less personal and more polemic piece titled “Why Drones Don’t Help.”

While this second piece does raise “grave doubts about the legality of US drone strikes in Pakistan,” there’s so much in between the two essays that the power of Hamid’s mother’s plaintive words is lost.

“Art,” the middle section of the book, is delightful, but it could have been dropped altogether, except for a powerful reflection on how The Reluctant Fundamentalist evolved from an early pre-9/11 draft to the final version that was published some six years after the World Trade towers fell.

Hamid writes of his split American and Pakistani selves in a way that moves anyone who pledges allegiance to more than one land: “People often ask me if I am the book’s protagonist. I wonder why they never ask me if I am his American listener.

After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself.”

In some ways, DaIC has a classic five-paragraph framework, but it lacks a conclusive final paragraph. Whether by design or by omission, this enables (or requires) the reader to do his/her own sensemaking. Perhaps that is the “co-creation” that is central to Mohsin Hamid’s fiction and politics, that is central to his hope of “people coming together to invent a world that is post-civilization and hence infinitely more civilized.” n

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ask a lawyer

How Can I Travel to Get Married and Bring My Wife Back if I’ve Just Filed for a Green Card?

By Indu Liladhar-Hathi

Q

My priority date for my employment based green card is current and I am eligible to file my application to adjust my status. After filing my application, can I travel to get married, and will my wife be able to accompany me to the United States?

A

Since you are filing your application to adjust your status (I-485), you can apply for your advance parole –AP (Travel Authorization), at the same time. You must wait for your AP to be approved prior to departing the United States. If you get married before your application (I-485) is approved, then your wife is eligible to obtain her green card as your dependent. When you return to the United States, please ensure that you enter on your H-1B/L-1 status so that your wife can enter on her H-4/L-2 status. If you return on your AP then you cannot bring

your wife on H-4/L-2 visa; and your wife will need to wait outside the United States until after your green card is approved and will need to “follow to join” through the U.S Consulate in your home country.

Note: if your application (I-485) is approved before you get married, then your wife will not be able to get the dependent green card. You will need to file a separate petition for her as a spouse of green card holder, which may mean that she will have to wait for about a year or two,

Q

I am on H-4 status and I have received an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) based on my spouse’s approved I-140 petition. I heard that the H-4 EAD rule is being challenged in court in the same way as the OPT STEM extension (Granting 17 months of EAD to F-1 STEM students). Please comment.

32 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California November 2015

A

It is true that the same court (different judge) will be reviewing the validity of the H-4 EAD rule that went into effect in May 2015. Save Jobs USA (a group of former Edison employees who lost their jobs to H-1B visa holders) has filed a lawsuit in April 2015 seeking to stop the H-4 EAD rule, arguing that this rule should have gone through formal legislation (as opposed through regulation).

Note: The H-4 EAD rule underwent proper notice and comment period (unlike the OPT STEM rule). Therefore, it cannot be vacated on that basis, and I am fairly optimistic that the rule will remain intact. n Immigration and business attorney Indu Liladhar-Hathi has an office in San Jose.(408) 453-5335

legal visa dates Important Note: U.S. travelers seeking visas to India will now need to obtain them through Cox & Kings Global Services Pvt. Ltd. Call 1-866-978-0055, email enquiriesusa@ckgs.com or visit www.in.ckgs.us for more information.

November 2015

T

his column carries priority dates and other transitional information as taken from the U.S. State Department’s Visa Bulletin. The information below is from the Visa Bulletin for November 2015.

In the tables below, the listing of a date for any class indicates that the class is oversubscribed. “Current” means that numbers are available for all qualified applicants.

FAMILY PREFERENCE VISA DATES Preference Dates for India 1st Feb 22, 2008 2A May 15, 2014 2B Feb 08, 2009 3rd Jun 15, 2004 4th Mar 01, 2003 NOTE: F2A numbers subject to percountry limit are available to applicants beginning with priority dates beginning April 01, 2014 and earlier than May 15, 2014.

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Tax On Children’s Investments

tax talk

By Rita Bhayani Important Tips •

•

Schedule an appointment to discuss year-end tax planning strategies If you moved this year, let your tax consultant know so he or she can help you complete Form 8822, Change of Address, and report the change to the IRS.

Tax on Children’s Investments Does your child have investments, such as interest, dividends, capital gains or other unearned income? If these types of investments are in your child’s name, you should be aware of certain factors that might lead to the investments being taxed at your rate rather than at your child’s rate.

The tax rules state that the child’s tax must be figured using the parents’ rate if the child has investment income of more than $2,100 and meets one of three age requirements:

i) Was under age 18 at the end of the year; ii) Was age 18 at the end of the year and did not have earned income that was more than half of his or her support; or iii) Was a fulltime student over age 18 and under age 24 at the end of the year and did not have earned income that was more than half of his or her support.

If certain conditions are met, you may be able to avoid having to file a tax return for your child by including the child’s income on your tax return. I can help you with these filing requirements.

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that taxpayers report the social security number of all dependents over the age of five. (Now there is no age limit; the rule requires all dependents to have a SSN). That year, seven million American children disappeared from the nation’s tax returns, representing a ninepercent drop in the 77 million dependents claimed the previous year and $2.9 billion more in yearly tax revenue. The tax agency said about 20 percent of the vanished dependents were children who had been claimed as dependents by both parents after a divorce. Under the law, only one parent may claim the child as a deduction. n Rita Bhayani is a Certified Public Accountant and a Certified Management Accountant practicing at Pleasanton, CA and she protects the clients from the IRS. She provides tax planning, accounting, payroll and outsourced CFO services too. For more information log on to www.ritacpa.net. Reprinted with permission from the National Association of Tax Professionals.

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films

Clouded Blood Trail

By Aniruddh Chawda

TALVAR. Director: Meghna Gulzar. Players: Irrfan Khan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Neeraj Kabi, Gajraj Rao, Sohum Shah, Sumit Gulati, Tabu. Music: Vishal Bharadwaj.

Hindi with Eng. sub-tit. Theatrical release: Junglee Pictures.

R

eal life news stories can be tricky to transfer to the pseudo-fictional setting of the large screen the minute the source “material” becomes murky. In the case of Talvar, which is based on a 2008 story about a doublemurder near Delhi, the “reality” of the narrative gets instantly muddied by inaccurate or incomplete eye witness accounts of key players. What to do with a murder case when everyone is implicated and yet no one appears completely guilty or entirely innocent? As Gulzar and company’s brilliantly staged Talvar would have it, the possibilities are endless.

The quiet of a suburban Delhi morning is permanently shattered for one family when the family’s 14-year-old daughter and the family’s 45-year-old chauffeur are found horrifically butchered. One line of circumstantial evidence points to Nutan Tandon (Sen Sharma) and her husband Ramesh Tandon (Kabi) as educated professionals who may have resorted to murder upon stumbling on their daughter and chauffeur together in her room after her curfew. Or, as some other circumstantial evidence suggests, could it have been Kanhaiya (Gulati), the Tandon’s house servant?

In Vishal Bharadwaj’s well-written story, the extremely high-profile real life persona of the oft-boggled investigation is fronted by Indian federal investigator Ashwin Kumar (Khan) who is called in after local cops practically butcher the initial police involvement. The sense of hopelessness about to engulf the entire case is summed up by the local constable Dhaniram (Rao) who unknowingly and egregiously destroys crucial first-account clues that could possibly have decided the outcome. Without solid evidence, practi-

cally all that is left is building a “case” based on circumstantial evidence.

The Indian legal tradition of allowing circumstantial re-telling of “what must have happened” may appear shocking to alternative or even non-Indian jurisprudence based on observable, physically verifiable crime restructuring. Only one judge needs to be convinced. The conflicting and clouded-by-now blood trails lead to a monumental quasilegal quagmire. Ashwin’s virtual entrapping of an already unlikable character to confess to the crime on a lie detector test—with results that can’t be used in court—greatly undermines Ashwin’s credibility and the government’s case along with our sensibilities about “innocent until.”

This fleeting hope and diminishing glory scenario is strongly put forth by director Gulzar and Bharadwaj’s gifted story writing. It is well acted and easily carried by the sheer force of the character-driven vignettes from each principal suspect as they recount their involvement. The frustration that sets is not because we want to believe who did it but more because, in perfect hindsight, we druthers that one small detail or that one bloodstain could have been viewed sooner or in a different light. If only!

As “real” as the story is, the filmmaker’s thumb-prints cannot escape positing a certain view the filmmaker would like to leave us with. And then we are back to that internal tug. There are brilliant caricatures that drive home the key artifacts about provincial legal affairs, at least as depicted here. The local police—often poorly trained or underpaid—call the first shots on “declaring” what must have happened. And dammit, they will not be con-

40 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California November 2015

fused by the facts. On the other hand, when federal hot shots are called in, there are still the professional jealousies and personal judgment that can and often do cloud the formal outcomes.

If only!

There have been many noteworthy recent Hindi movies based on real or historical accounts including No One Killed Jessica, Bhaag Mikha Bhaag, Guru, Madras Café and Mary Kom. By extending the core definition of real-life to include historical accounts, the list can include Bandit Queen, Bawander, Jodhaa Akbar, Gangs of Wasseypur, The Attacks of 26/11 and even Ragini MMS as based on some semblance of actual events. Of these, the most culturally perplexing are those compelling court dramas where the outcome is not so certain, say, No One Killed Jessica or Talvar. In Gulzar’s book, Talvar serves as an insightful etching of a collective soul-searching.

Do we simply walk away knowing that this is handled wrong while being weighed down by a sinking feeling of helplessness?

Oh and oh, only if! n EQ: A

Skin Deep and Candy Floss SINGH IS BLIING. Director: Prabhu Deva.

Players: Akshay Kumar, Amy Jackson, Lara Dutta, Kay Kay Menon, Rati Agnihotri, Kunal Kapoor. Music: Meet Bros Anjjan, Manj Musik, Sajid-Wajid. Hindi with Eng. sub-tit.

Theatrical release: Eros

T

o be up front, Singh in Bliing has no connection to Kumar’s huge 2008 hit Singh is Kinng, other than both movies feature Kumar as an ethnic Punjabi character. In a way of life where well-placed, strategic name-dropping can set expectations—realistic or not—and pre-sell an allusion of success, Singh is Bliing wants to finish first in that school of cinematic succession. Shallow in writing, skin deep with acting chops and yet nailing some pedestrian comic timing, thanks to Kumar’s presence, Singh is Bliing gets to the finish line and has the last laugh.

For Raftaar (Kumar), coming of age as the scion of his Punjab village’s biggest land-owning family means only one thing —more partying with his equally deadbeat friends and stealing opportunities to break out the bhangra at the drop of a hat.

Threatened with disinheritance or worse —being married off to a village tart he doesn’t like—Raftaar accepts his father’s (Yograj Singh) offer to travel to Goa to work for his father’s friend (Kapoor).

Arriving in Goa, Raftaar fibs his way into landing a job as a bodyguard even though he does not speak English—a key job requirement. The linguistic challenged Raftaar’s gig gets a booster shot of complications with the arrival of his boss’s gorgeous daughter Sara (Jackson) from Europe. He does not understand English and she is not savvy with Hindi. As a go-between, they hire the mousy translator Emily (Dutta), who may have a trick up her sleeve. Just about everything goes haywire when Sara’s European past, and her having crossed paths with the lecherous Mark (Menon), catches up with her in Goa. For comic-adventures with a short leash on storytelling, the primary visuals are setting, setting and more setting. We go from striking eastern European castles and medieval walled hamlets to sunny beaches in Goa to golden grain fields of Punjab

bursting with new crop at the bat of an eye. With just a touch of flair from director Deva’s almostconstantly moving filming style, it somehow all gels. The scenery and color saturation are pleasing. The action starts soon enough after Mark arrives to make mischief and that too is engulfed by the breezy delivery paced by the action sequences.

To add accent to the visual motif, having appropriate eye candy on hand can help tremendously. The beauty quota of the three leading actors—Kumar, Jackson and Dutta—amounts to one young female beauty queen and model (Jackson), one male hunk with super-model looks (Kumar) and one former Miss Universe (Dutta). With this much visual nibbling within reach, there is little room for complaining.

Newcomer Jackson is a young British beauty who was spotted by Indian filmmaker A.L. Vijay, who offered her a lead in his Tamil language Madrasapattinam (2010). After appearing in several movies from South India, including S. Shankar’s mega-budget I (2014), and with no prior acting experience or family connections to movies whatsoever, Jackson has become a sensation. Virtually unknown in her homeland, she is mobbed by Indian fans as soon as she arrives on the sub-continent.

From her stints in modeling, Jackson knows camera angels and lighting—and so far those factors have helped her get a footing in Indian movies.

The only drawback to this sizable-budget movie is the music. None of the tunes stand out as chart-busters, even though “Singh & Kaur,” voiced by Manj Musik, Nindy Kaur and Raftaar, offers a brief respite. Having multiple music directors

on the same soundtrack has not worked especially well for Hindi movies over the years and that is not about to change.

Perhaps the most notorious element to the packaging of Singh is Bliing was an early publicity poster that featured not only a slightly different title (Sing is Bling, with one I in Bling) but also a turban-clad Kumar holding a gun. Bowing to religious groups, Indian censors made the filmmakers revise the poster, though the poster remains widely available online. Even with the musical limitations in tow, Singh is Bliing still scores with no hits, no homeruns and yet no major errors either. n EQ: B Globe trekker, aesthete, photographer, ski bum, film buff, and commentator, Aniruddh Chawda writes from Milwaukee.

LATA’S FLICK PICKS Well  All Is rs  Brothe tti  Katti Ba  Phantom come Back   Wel

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 41

Horror in the Family

By Madhumita Gupta THE VISIT. Director: M. Night Shyamalan. Players: Olyvia De Jonge; Ed Oxenbould; Deanna Dunagan; Kathryn Hahn; Peter McRobbie; Benjamin Kane.

Theatrical Release: Universal Pictures

A

fter the debacle of After Earth and The Last AirBender, Manoj Night Shyamalan re-surfaces with The Visit, a thriller with a comic trail. While horror is not new to the Oscar nominated director (for The Sixth Sense), weaving it with a chuckle-worthy comedy is perhaps a new genre for him.

And he does succeed in his effort.

The premise is vintage Shyamalan —a children’s perspective; a broken marriage; a single mother; the “everything is normal” beginning and then enter unease and yes, the final twist in the tale. But it steers away from other Shyamalan films as there is no heavy-handed, self-important deep meaning in it. It has a light-hand, which makes it rise to an entertaining, unpretentious film.

The Visit is in the genre of “found footage” films (a pseudo documentary where much of the film is presented as if it were discovered), which Becca (De Jonge), the poised teenager, an aspiring film-maker, is making about their week-long visit to their grand-parents’ home in rural Pennsylvania.

Her apprentice is her precocious younger brother Tyler (Oxenbould), who has been given a camera of his own and likes to pep everything up with his rapping. The unusual thing about this visit is that the kids have never seen their grandparents before as their mother has been estranged from her parents for 25 years.

Yes, the lady hasn’t seen her parents since she walked out of their home after a bitter argument about the man she was marrying. Even though the husband has since abandoned her and she is battling life on her own, she hasn’t gone back to her parents. This is the first time that she has melted enough to let her kids visit them for a week.

The Visit which unfolds as regular

children visiting loving but strange grandparents—Nana (a very convincingly odd Dunagan) and Pop-Pop (McRobbie), gets a bit uneasy very soon. The children are told that they are not to come out of their room after 9:30 p.m. and they are not to go into the basement due to “mold.” And, of course, that makes them do just that —and they make bewildering, unsettling discoveries.

Nana, the benevolent granny who insists on cooking and feeding the children during the day does strange things at night. Pop-Pop disappears in his shed and appears to be a different man altogether at times. The children discuss the goingson on web-chats with their mother, but are told to give the old couple a chance as they are, well, old. And old people are odd people.

But when the eccentricity gives way to downright scary behavior, the children realize it is not just “old-age,” but something a lot more eerie. And this prepares us for a twist but when it comes, it is unexpected, unless you happen to be an Agatha Christie fan.

The performances of both the kids are exceptional, even in the glossed-over bits about coming to terms with their dad abandoning them. Oxenbould is endear-

42 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California November 2015

ing as the cleanliness freak rapper, while De Jonge has turned in a pitch-perfect condescending older sister. Dunagan is superb as she transitions from a loving granny to the one who is not above smilingly asking a grandkid to climb “right-in the oven” to clean it and slamming the door shut on her as a chilling joke. Hahn, as the mother, does justice to her role.

The writing, by Shayamalan himself, perhaps could have been tighter as the film does lose pace intermittently and later appears to rush towards the end. Some scenes are unnecessarily long and remain unexplained. Mercifully, The Visit comes without any trappings of high technology, intricate messages or even camera gimmicks and is all the more refreshing for it.

In fact, it makes one wonder if the irrepressible Tyler, with his hand-held camera and Becca, as a budding film-maker are not Shyamalan’s tongue-in-cheek references to himself as a kid.

Well done, Shyamalan, here’s looking forward to more from you. n EQ: A Madhumita Gupta is a freelance writer and a teacher.

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media

By Sandip Roy

I

grew up in one of those Bengali families that rarely went to the theater to watch a Hindi film. Despite its sixty golden jubilees even Sholay could not breach that snobbishness. Haathi mera Saathi did but that was more about the elephant than Rajesh Khanna.

I watched Sholay years later, an act that was in part catching-up, and part atonement. Outside the rarefied environs of a missionary school, my Bollywood ignorance was proving to be a serious handicap in fitting in an engineering college.

By the time I went to see Sholay with an equally deprived friend, almost everyone in the audience had seen it umpteen times and could recite great spaghetti strings of dialogue en masse as if at a prayer revival meeting. I felt very embarrassed but thankful that the darkness of the theatre could hide my Sholay virginity.

A film that I had only known from the Holi song telecast every year on Chitrahaar (a Bollywood music television program telecast in the 1970s) unfolded in front of me in technicolor splendor. I did not care that it had been described by some as a “curry western.” To me it was thrilling.

Perhaps it was the over-compensation of a new-found convert but I quickly became a sort of Sholay missionary. On repeat viewings Basanti’s chatter would grate sometimes and Asrani’s Little Dictator act was not quite as funny but the film still held together. I knew everything by then—the loaded coin, what lay under Sanjeev Kumar’s shawl, what terrible fate awaited young Sachin. But it didn’t matter. The film’s melodrama just sucked me in every time.

When I moved to the United States, homesick and lonely in college campuses in the Midwest, streaky pirated Bollywood movies were our magic carpet rides into nostalgia for an hour or two or three.

Sholay was the ultimate comfort food.

Moving to California there were Indian grocery stores, lunch buffets, and even a rather shabby theater that showed Bollywood films while the snack counter sold stale samosas. It was our bonding time

with other Indian friends. Our American friends, partners, coworkers were not part of that experience. Slumdog Millionaire had not yet brought any “Jai Ho” cool to Bollywood yet.

Then one day some local desi nonprofit brought Sholay to the big screen.

“We must go see it,” I told G, my very all-American partner. “It is THE iconic Indian film.”

G was nonplussed. “Didn’t you say that about Pather Panchali?”

I had to admit I had said that. And we had been to see Pather Panchali at a film festival screening. The film seemed to be on its last legs, frayed, tattered, the subtitles lost against the black and white. I had felt helpless in my frustration at how much of the film, damaged and crackling, seemed to get lost in translation.

“Yes,” I replied patiently. “But that’s the iconic Indian ART film. This is the iconic Indian Bollywood film.”

“Three hours?”

“Yes, but it has everyone,” I said enthusiastically. “Amitabh Bachchan, Jaya Bhaduri, Dharmendra, Hema Malini, Sanjeev

44 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California November 2015

Kumar, Amjad Khan, Helen …” I stopped since I might as well have been reciting the names of exotic reptiles in the Amazon.

“But you have to see it,” I said. “It’s like part of my cultural DNA.” It was not exactly true but emotional blackmail works.

We went to the film together surrounded by dozens of Indians, techie couples, their visiting parents, even some ABCD types. It was some kind of charity screening and the film started late.

Then the train chugged into view onto a sun-baked platform, the supersized titles rolled across the screen and I settled down in my seat.

“Mujhe do aadmiyon ki zaroraat hai.”

As I awaited the arrival of Jai and Veeru, G leaned over and said dubiously “Doesn’t this film have subtitles?”

And I realized to my horror it did not.

Thus began Sholay, the whispered translation version, in a dark theater.

“See these guys are small time crooks.

They are being recruited by this guy …”

“I get that.”

“Ok this khota sikka (bad penny) line is important. Remember it.” There was some

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“Now it’s a flashback, this train scene.”

When the screen exploded in fisticuffs I heaved a sigh of relief, able finally to suspend my running commentary. The Indian couple behind us moved to another seat. For the first time I regretted what felt like Sholay’s cast of hundreds. I wished there were more songs so that we could just enjoy the spectacle without worrying about the plot.

I tried to do the shorthand version.

This character Basanti is just talkative. She talks too much. It’s not that important to know what she’s saying I said reassuringly even though the audience was laughing uproariously at the well-worn patter. My audience of one merely grunted. Amjad Khan’s dialogues in my translation seemed pedestrian, stripped of all their lazy menace. “How many people were there?” was just not loaded enough but I struggled on gamely, afraid that my iconic Bollywood experience was slipping away with every word I spoke.

My faith in Sholay was redeemed. It When intermission came I steeled myhad crossed over even without subtitles self expecting a demand to go home right into my interracial relationship where the away. But for some reason—love, pity, experiences of my growing up had always resignation or perhaps a combination of felt so foreign, so beyond translation. I all three—we stayed put as the lights went picked up the program to see what Hindi down. I splurged on the buttered popcorn film was on offer the next week but then —bribe cum peace offering. decided not to push my luck.

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science

The Toll of Scarcity

By P. Mahadevan

S

carcity, in general, steals mental capacity from those in need just like poverty impairs the ability to make sound decisions. If the mind is focused on one thing, other abilities and skills—attention, self control, reasoning ability also suffer.

The poor are poor not because they make bad decisions but bad decisions are made because they are poor. So believes Sendhil Mullainathan, a tenured professor of economics at the Kennedy School, Harvard University who noticed critical changes in his own parents when faced with scarcity. Mullainathan’s father emigrated from India to work as an aerospace engineer in the United States in the 80s and found himself disqualified to continue in the same field of work because of security classification requirements of the defense industry. As reported in Harvard Magazine, “‘This was the first time I felt real economic insecurity,’ Mullainathan remembers. It was also the first time he saw scarcity’s effects in action.” Mullainathan goes on to elaborate that he saw his parents change when his father could not get a job. “They were much more stressed out and short-tempered, as if part of their personalities was different.”

According to Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, who did extensive research on the problem, behavioral patterns of scarcity can be seen in situations where people are cash strapped, experiencing fewer opportunities because of their race or performing poorly in school.

In some cases, once you enter conditions of scarcity, it is very difficult to escape them, especially in our current society.

The Spiral of Scarcity

Take the case of pay day lending (PDL) schemes. It is estimated that there are over 23,000 such lenders registered in the country, exceeding the combined total of all the McDonalds and Starbucks fast food outlets. They provide “quick and easy” cash in exchange for payroll checks for those who do not have bank accounts.

The cash paid out is, after deducting a

commission and an upfront discount, at least a few percentage points less than the check amount. Every payroll check, in effect, becomes a short term loan deed with stiff interest rates, penalties and the like.

The payback period could be as short as a week or two. If the full amount is not paid back, the balance due obviously carries higher interest and penalties. In effect, every transaction of this type is a turnstile for debt. The borrower builds his own perpetual debt trap. The cumulative interest charged can exceed 400 percent.

Unlike the United States, most countries, large and small have postal savings banks available at very low cost for those who cannot afford the costs of commercial banking. In this way, the United States is unique in how it deals with banking opportunities for the poor. This is another skillfully built-in security blanket for regular banks to operate with minimum competition. It is estimated that about 12 million Americans are trapped in the pay day loan sink. Very few states have any meaningful control on this problem.

Escaping the Scarcity Trap

Several leaders have tried to redefine policies to help people in situations of scarcity. In a panel discussion on race and poverty in America recently, President Obama briefly traced attempts to tackle the problem in recent American history, starting with President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” slogan of the sixties to President Clinton’s “make work pay” for low income families. There was a sizeable fall in poverty rates during President Clinton’s term of office. The situation has worsened since then. President Obama has been making a case for the channeling of resources toward education and infrastructure in chronically poor communities in the country. This, in his estimation, would provide options for escaping the scarcity trap.

Education and Poverty

Shortfalls in scholastic achievements in the K-12 public schools in the United

States is a hot topic in the blame game series. A contrarian analysis was presented by the screen-writer, actor, director and movie producer, M. Night Shyamalan. He came up with the astounding conclusion that “American schools are not failing.”

His findings are presented in the book I Got Schooled. Shyamalan found a key poverty link to the analysis of the data collected from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). This international test for achievement evaluation is given to fifteen year olds every three years. Demographics show that about 20 percent of the United States student body comes from inner city schools. They come from low income families at poverty levels exceeding ten percent. This segment of students bring the rankings to unacceptably low levels.

The reason for this is that a large percent of these inner city school students are hungry all day long. They cannot be motivated to achieve anything unless the root problem is solved. It is a shame that the richest country in the world faces hunger in this abysmal way. It also goes to prove Mullainathan’s postulate that much is known about the economics of poverty and far less of the “psychology it creates in individual populations.”

It is interesting to note that the problem of scarcity as well as the topic of scarcity is a much researched one. Recently the Nobel committee awarded the economics prize for 2015 to Professor Angus Deaton of Princeton University for his work on the toll of scarcity on various demographics. This recognition is the second one given to an economist for working on this same topic in the last two decades: the first went to Amartya Sen in 1998. n P. Mahadevan is a retired scientist with a Ph.D. in Atomic Physics from the University of London, England. His professional work includes basic and applied research and program management for the Dept. of Defense.

He taught physics at the University of Kerala, at Thiruvananthapuram. He does very little now, very slowly.

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 59

travel

Levitating Yogini in Krakow

By Nagaraja Rao

main square, 60 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California |The November 2015 gloriously bright during the day, and magically lit up at night

W

e’d never been to Central Europe. That is most of us in my family, except for my daughterin-law Renata who hails from a village in Czech Republic, and my son, Ravi, who visited her there. Therefore, we decided to explore that part of the world that gave us one whom we call our own.

We signed up with the Globus tour company, which took us to Budapest (Hungary), Bratislava (Slovakia), Cesky Krumlov and Vienna (Austria), finally ending up in Prague (Czech Republic).

From there we extended our tour to the village of Dobre to visit Renata’s family, where she, Ravi and my three-year-old granddaughter Zoya Nayani joined us.

Our very memorable last stop was Krakow in Poland.

Yes, Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi concentration camp, located an hour and half drive from Krakow, was a place we wanted to visit. We knew full well that it would be a difficult experience.

I had spent my pre-teen years contentedly in South India, somewhat oblivious of what was happening so far away in a cruel war. Occassionally, I would hear of reports of war in our newspapers. Radios were very rare and needed a government permit to operate one. My own experience of war was not too harsh. There was food rationing, which also meant shortage of food and other necessities. There were days when we had to be content with one meal a day, and we’d have to assure ourselves that others were in the same state that we were.

There were some days of terror when Japan, which had entered the war, bombed parts of northeast India and I remember that there was general confusion in the country as to which side we were on. Reports of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s meeting with Adolf Hitler vaguely meant that we would be free of the British rule with Hitler’s help.

Of course, Mahatma Gandhi decided, rightly so, to temporarily suspend the independence movement against the British, recognizing that the demonic Nazi war was really against all humanity. With these recollections, I set foot in Krakow, Poland.

The main square is a wonderfully busy place with several streets converging into

a cohesive amalgamate of activity of open air eateries, A saffron-clothed yogini street vendors, sculptures, (female yogi) sits smilingly in horse drawn coaches and international tourists. A beaufront of the church in an ascetic tiful church in one corner posture. She has a stick in front of along with high end shops, chic hotels and restaurants her which she holds with her one surrounding the square make arm. Suddenly you realize that it delightful.

Open air gymnasts, musishe is sitting about two feet in the cians, vendors of every sort air above the side walk. make up for a passing show that entertain the visitors during the day and late into the night with a rock concert finale.

A saffron-clothed yogini (female yogi) sits smilingly in front of the church in an ascetic posture. She has a stick in front of her which she holds with her one arm.

Suddenly you realize that she is sitting about two feet in the air above the side walk.

We don’t know how she got herself elevated—we did not see her doing that. She sits unmoving, like a statue, and A typical passage between rows of inmate dormitories children check to see if there is any invisible support by waving their hands underneath her. People drop coins on the ground in front of her. It is perhaps some kind of illusion that appears as a genuine yogic position. It seems incongruous. She does not belong to the passing show.

Not far from the city square is the Wawel Royal Castle which sits on a picturesque hill with a large spectacular vista of beautiful gardens and palaces. Currently, added to its charm is the exhibit of One of the gas chambers Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “Lady with an Ermine.” After Also near the square is the city’s Jewwaiting for a short time, we ish quarter where once about 30,000 Jews enter a darkened room and see the lighted lived their vibrant lives, now decimated to painting on the wall. It is a small, but 700 or so.

You cannot but feel the scope splendid portrait painted around the year of tragedy that engulfed them. Our guide 1490. For those of us who are not art crittakes us to a small square, which is a reics, it is just magical. mainder of their rich heritage. A little November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 61

Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “Lady with an Ermine”

garden, a synagogue and old row houses make up the scene. We are told that some of the scenes from the movie Schindler’s List were shot here. On one side of the square are a row of present day restaurants.

We are taken to see the larger part of the quarter starting with an exhibit on an open ground with a lot of metal chairs placed in disarray. This reminded us acutely, if symbolically, how the Nazis rounded up the Jewish tenants of the apartment houses and hurled their furniture out onto the streets.

We saw the locations of the entrance gates for the then walled-in Jewish Quarter. An exhibit of a small stretch of the wall is a stark reminder of what a horrific turn of events it must have been to this proud and gentle people.

It was a relief to visit Schindler’s factory with exhibits displaying how, in the middle of the horrible Nazi enterprise, a self professed member of the Nazi party came to rescue hundreds of Jews from the cruel life of concentration camps. This building also serves as a World War II exhibition.

The visit to Schindler’s factory was a somber foreboding of what was to come the next day on our visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The camp site is about an hour and a half drive from Krakow. Soon after our arrival at Camp A, we formed a line to enter the site and after security check we got our headphones and set out with guides taking groups of about 15 people each. Our English speaking guide led us through the entrance gate

Schindler’s desk at the Schindler Museum

for what was a heartrending experience.

We had seen movies and documentaries before, but this was different. The physicality of it, the mere scale of it, created an overwhelming feeling of horror. Building after building and room after room spoke of endless unimaginable cruelty imposed by one human being on another. The collection of old aluminum plates and bowls seemed painfully representative of the hunger that the inmates were subjected to. Large heaps of children’s glasses and shoes in an exhibit bore silent testimony to the atrocities inflicted on those innocent little lives.

The horror was somewhat softened because of the sanitization of the site. All the human elements, such as skeletons, bones, etc., have been deliberately removed. But, still, the torturous intention of the Nazi regime is unbearably clear. The acute closeness of human beings packed together on tiered bunks; stalls with just enough space for a standing person; a total absence of washing and bathing facilities; exposure to cold in the non-heated rooms; and finally the cruelly designed gas chambers required little imagination to realize what had taken place.

One cannot even imagine the bitterly cold mornings when roll call took place out in the yard. The inmates who were able to stand, dragged themselves out in their insufficient clothing and torn shoes—they were allowed to keep their shoes on for the ease of being herded here and there and lined up while the Nazi officer conducting the roll call stood within

62 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

a shelter. The camp commandant’s family including his children lived in his quarters just outside the gate!

At Camp B, we see huge open railway platforms for unloading the unsuspecting human wave. Here, on a hot day, the area appeared infinitely endless, cleared of all vegetation, at the end of which were the now collapsed crematoriums. In the middle of the railway lines and platforms, a lonely wagon stands representing all those spaceless, airless vehicles that came in, packed with countless human beings.

There were more buildings in this area, perhaps for the newly incoming unfortunate victims.

At the end of it all we were so exhausted by the experience that we had become totally numb, feeling rather guilty even to belong to the human species.

On our flight from Krakow back to United States I visualized the main square.

It seemed that Krakow has moved on, as though untouched by the the Holocaust, by brutal events of human history, oddly like the levitating yogini detached from the ground.

However, the presence of the Auschwitz Camp in the vicinity remains a reminder of the cruel slaughter of innocent citizens, not just for Krakow but for entire human race. n

Nagaraja Rao is a retired engineer and lives in Fremont, California with his wife Chandra.

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 63

64 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 65

66 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

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By Bharti Kirchner

s a child growing up in India, I spent many enjoyable hours reading Alexandre Dumas’ 1850 novel titled, The Black Tulip. Although not as popular as his Three Musketeers, this novel, especially its obsession about flower-growing, gave free rein to my young imagination. The story concerns itself with a tulip fancier in the Netherlands, passionate about cultivating a rare black variety, and meeting with competition from another grower, another lover of tulip.

The book had other themes, some rather disturbing, such as lynching and imprisonment. I skipped those sections and went to those pages dedicated to the serene, gentle, beloved tulips.

If truth be known, I hadn’t seen a real tulip. In the eastern part of India where I lived with my family, we cultivated roses and jasmine, but tulips were not to be found. I could only recall a picture of the flower, which resembled a rose, its u-shape holding a mystery, as it were. But a black tulip? Does such a shade really exist?

My family and teachers couldn’t answer that question satisfactorily and after a time I forgot all about it. As luck would have it, many years later, as an adult, I went to Holland to work and found myself in tulip country. “It’s our flower,” a Dutch man told me, “plain and simple.” He insisted that although the flower was believed to have originated in the Ottoman Empire, it was the Dutch who have been historically captivated by it. He informed me, somewhat proudly, that the Dutch tulip traders were responsible for bursting the economic bubble in the 17th century (the first such collapse in the world) by constantly raising the price of the bulbs.

Might I find a black tulip somewhere?

In the organization in Amsterdam where I worked, my colleagues routinely grew tulips and took pride in them. They’d have a friendly competition as to who

produced the largest number of tulips, the biggest, or the most colorful. Everyone

A Creative Commons Image by Inside Lancashire

was knowledgeable about this topic. Several colleagues insisted that there existed a deep purple variety that comes closest to Dumas’ coveted black hue, but no one knew for sure where I’d see one. At the end of the year, I left Holland, with memories of visiting many bright tulip fields, but without ever encountering the black shade. The little hunger in me remained.

Tulips didn’t let go of me. Now, many years later, I find myself living in Seattle, where that flower is very much a part of the landscape. In my flower patch, I grow the red and yellow cup-shaped variety.

But walking around the neighborhood, I see others: fringed, ruffle-edged, and red-streaked. What Washingtonians feel about azaleas, we (in the other Washington) feel about tulips. Our biggest spring celebration, the Tulip Festival, takes place in Skagit Valley, located north of Seattle.

Every April, we, in the Pacific Northwest, brave rainy weather and horrendous traffic to visit Skagit, where more than 700 acres are dedicated to tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths. We stand before fields blazing with red, yellow, pink or orange colors.

I haven’t encountered the amazing black tulip yet, but I tell myself, I can live with that mystery. n Bestselling author Bharti Kirchner’s sixth novel Goddess of Fire is due out in early 2016.

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 67

Courage

fiction

atha i tion ontest

onora le

ention

By Vivek Santhosh

L

ola headed straight for us.

My son and I were seated in the Westfield Mall’s food court. The last time I had seen her was on a cold, depressing day at Dulles departures.

From then, she had shed every bit of doubt from her gait, walking towards us with the confidence of someone who knew what she was doing. I half got up to greet her, possibly give her a hug.

“Hello, junior Rajesh.” She knelt on the floor and kissed the back of my toddler’s palm. She still pronounced my name as ra-zh-ush. I sat back down. It’s ra-jaysh, baby.

“His name is Abhay,” I said. Cheese was smeared across his right cheek and caked on his arms. The blue bib was squeaky clean.

“Now that’s a name I get,” she said.

She puffed up her cheeks. My son giggled. He wrapped his mac-n-cheese fingers around her pinky.

“I bet your wife chose it,” she said, looking up. Her eyes glistened with contempt.

“Actually, I did.”

I fished out Abhay’s dessert from a green Whole Foods bag. “Wow, it’s been so long, right?”

She stood up and smoothed down her mustard skirt. “Five f***ing years, Rajesh,” she hissed.

I winced at the bowl of thinly sliced apples. To a casual observer—of which there were many in this food court—the fruit had simply oxidized too much.

“You know, you look just as beautiful,” I said. It was true. There was a glint of diamond in one ear. I couldn’t see the other, covered by her wavy blonde hair.

“I gave you more than one chance.”

“It was a long time ago, Lola.”

A Creative Commons image by RecoilRick “All you had to do was ask. We would have been on that plane together.”

I got up. I made sure Abhay was strapped to the infant’s seat properly and pulled her aside.

“I am sorry.”

She moved closer. I breathed in rose and jasmine. She pulled out the locket of

“You haven’t changed one bit, have you?”

She noticed my work badge lying on the table beside us and picked it up.

“PreciSoft,” she read. I snatched it from her hand and stuffed it in my pocket.

How dare she just show up and rip my peace apart like that?

“Now that’s a name I get,” she said. She puffed up her heeks y son giggled e wra ed his ma n heese fingers aro nd her inky et yo r wi e hose it she said looking er eyes glistened with contempt.

her necklace from under her black shirt and held it out. It was a red heart I had known intimately in another life.

“What about this promise?”

The locket held a grain of rice with Lola engraved on one side and Raj on the other. It was a promise I hadn’t kept.

“You know how it is with Indian parents,” I said. My hands clenched. “You knew everything!”

68 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

“Does PreciSoft send its employees to shoot lions in the lower Zambezi?”

“No.” “So how do you manage this and wildlife photography both?”

“I don’t. That never happened.”

Lucy took two steps back. She was incredulous.

“That too?” She laughed out.

My hands unclenched. Yes, that too.

Then, the blaze in her eyes cleared.

Something had dawned on her. Something about me. She walked over to Abhay and planted a kiss on the top of his head.

“At least teach your son to stand up for himself.”

And she left, just like she had come, her steps unwavering, purposeful, like she was going somewhere important. Not just that day, in life.

She walked down the aisle to the far end of the food court. Without a break in her stride, she removed the necklace and left it on a vacant table. Then she turned the corner and disappeared. A sudden sadness clutched my stomach, wringing from it a certain will. A will to go on.

My son had stopped eating long ago.

He held a slice of fruit between his tiny fingers, staring at it in wonderment, ready to see how far it would fly. I decided to clean him up before the wife returned from shopping. Maybe one day he would wield a camera perched on a tree in the Zambian wilderness. After all, wasn’t Abhay his name? n Vivek Santhosh is a writer based in the San

Francisco Bay Area. He was raised in India and Oman. An engineer by profession, he lived in Atlanta and Boston before moving west to Silicon Valley. His first flash fiction piece “Separation” was published by Black Heart Magazine. He is currently working on a collection of short stories exploring life in a small town in Kerala, India. When not writing or traveling, he enjoys running and playing Ultimate Frisbee. You can find more about Vivek and his works at www.viveksanthosh.com.

Katha 2015 Results FIRST PLACE: LWALA Unsaid by IQBAL PITA a Cherry Valley, Californi

About the Judges:

SECOND PLACE: JYOTHI Miss, Dolly and Hulk by ia Ind re, VINOD, Bangalo

Vikram Chandra’s works include Red Earth and Pouring Rain (a novel), Love and Longing in Bombay (collection of short stories, Sacred Games (a novel) and Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, The Code of Beauty (non-fiction).

THIRD PLACE: NGULY, San 10-4 by SANJOY GA Jose, California

Sonia Faleiro is the award-winning author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, acclaimed as one of NPR’s Five Best Travel Memoirs of 2012, CNN’s Mumbai Book of the Year, and The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year.

ION: HONORABLE MENT HOSH NT SA K Courage by VIVE a rni lifo San Francisco, Ca

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dance

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November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 73

music

Mahadeva Gets the Nomination!

By Priya Das

O

ver the last few decades, slokas, bhajans, and ghazals, even tabla and mridangam bols and kannakols (enunciated beats), instead of being practiced by the learned few Indians, have become a global interpretive art, finding a spot in trance, jazz, new age, world music, and Hollywood, of course.

This inclusion has led to growing recognition of the music and musicians.

And so it is, that David Vito Gregoli and Mala Ganguly’s Mahadeva has been nominated for The Hollywood Music In Media Awards® (HMMA) in the World music genre. The HMMA recognizes and honors the music of visual mediums (film, TV, movie trailers, video games, commercials, etc.); the talented individuals responsible for creating, producing and placing it; and the music of artists, both mainstream and independent, from around the globe.

The winners will be announced in November 2015.

You will have heard Ganguly’s voice in movies such as Eat Pray Love, Mission Impossible 4, An American Affair, and The Man from Elysian Field. And also perhaps, from recordings such as Prana and Bhajan (Re)Beats, of which Mahadeva is a part.

“It was yog (preordained) that I live in the United States,” Ganguly reminisces.

“I came to learn from Ustad Ali Akbar Khan in the 80s. I was in the middle of a talented pool of people—my bar was high, since Kolkata in those days was the hub of all music activity. I performed a few times here and was inspired by the appreciation and respect I received. The Sengupta family of Covina was generous enough to host me. So I just stayed!”

Ganguly’s mom was a gifted singer herself, so her childhood was spent receiving classical training in music and the performing arts. By 12, Ganguly was already singing on the radio and performing at concerts; as well as dabbling in dancing and acting.

Around that time, she was offered a role in the Bengali movie Parineeta, but it was time to make a choice about where to focus her energies; music was it. The fa-

Mala Ganguly

mous film director Hemant Kumar chose her as the playback singer for many of his Bengali movies, such as Bandhan, which was later made in Hindi as well.

Ganguly is well-versed in many genres—ghazals, classical, Rabindra Sangeet, Nazrul Geeti, etc. This talent and her voice wins over skeptics, “The L.A. Punjabi audiences at first rejected a Bengali singer, ‘Bengalis cannot possibly correctly pronounce Urdu words!’—but then, the first event lasted for hours, ending at 4 a.m. the next day.” For Ganguly, that was an omen of the trajectory her career would take. “I never had a business card, [still] the invitations were endless, just through word of mouth. I am grateful to supporters such as the late Ranjan Guha, a family friend.”

Ganguly expanded her repertoire by singing for Anjani Ambegaonkar’s Kathak ensembles, which took her, over the next three decades, to prestigious stages such as at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, the Hollywood Bowl, and New York’s Lincoln Center.

In 1995, she was approached by Ustad Zakir Hussain for lending her voice to a film called Saaz. Many will remember that the movie was about music and musicians.

However, Ganguly had green card issues

74 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

and had to decline. That same year, she found herself doing a Nike commercial during the basketball season.

The commercial won an award and her relationship with mainstream U.S. media was cemented.

There were other commercials such as with Ameritrade and eBay, her voice was cast in Hollywood movies, the first being Hallmark’s Christmas Box, which was aired repeatedly. She was also approached by other musicians to collaborate on recordings, such as Gregoli. Gregoli is a multiinstrumentalist with a deep connection to Asian spirituality, as is evidenced in the name of his recording label “Dharmapala” (keeper of dharma or true way of life).

Ganguly is also a spiritual person, elaborating that “Music is my strength, my inspiration. I worship Lata Mangeshkar, Mehdi Hassan, Pratima Bannerji, Ustad Amir Khan … When Ustad Ali Akbar Khan used to perform, he would be one with God. That is what I seek, too, that caliber is what I hold as my goal.” Her current projects include forming and creating music for a fusion band called Butterflies, which she has “dreamed of for many years.”

Incidentally, Ganguly is also a visual artist, the album cover art for Bhajan Rebeats/ Mahadeva was designed by her. n Priya Das is an enthusiastic follower of world music and avidly tracks intersecting points between folk, classical, jazz and other genres.

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November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 75

events NOVEMBER

California’s Best Guide to Indian Events Edited by: Mona Shah List your event for FREE! DECEMBER issue deadline: Friday, November 20 To list your event in the Calendar, go to www.indiacurrents.com and click on List Your Event

Check us out on

special dates Dhan Teras

Nov. 8

Diwali

Nov. 11

Govardhana Puja

Nov. 12

Bhai Duj

Nov. 13

Guru Teg Bahadur Day

Nov. 24

Guru Nanak’s B’day

Nov. 25

Thanksgiving Day

Nov. 26

CULTURAL CALENDER

November

1 Sunday

Samudra Manthan—A Bharatanatyam Operatic Ballet.

Directed and Choreographed by Shreelata Suresh, Artisitc Director of Vishwa Shanthi Performing Arts. She performs with a cast of over 35 dancers. The Demigods and Demons, arch-rivals, are in the competition for supremacy over the three worlds. Seeking the help of the Supreme Gods, Vishnu and Shiva, they

An Indian Opera—Maya Kherani plays the lead in the River of Light, Nov. 14-15

come together to churn the divine ocean to extract the Nectar of Immortality. The ensuing conflicts, drama, obstacles, and deceit unfold in this magical tale filled with a cornucopia of Indian mythological characters. Organized by Vishwa Shanthi Performing Arts. Woodside Theater, 199 Churchill Ave., Woodside. Sponsors $100, VIP $50, regular $30, $20. (408) 6917508, (408) 306-3812. savithas@gmail. com, bhanu_mahesh@yahoo.com. samudramanthan.eventbrite.com.

November

6 Friday

The Forgotten History of India’s WW2 with Raghu Karnad. Introducing his book Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War, which tells the forgotten epic of India’s WW2 through

76 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

the lives and deaths of a single family.

Organized by WW Norton and Company.

7 p.m. Green Apple Books and Music, 506 Clement St., San Francisco . (415) 3872272. query@greenapplebooks.com. www. facebook.com/events/1650718008537196/.

November

7 Saturday

Karnatic Instrumental Concerts.

2:30-3:30 p.m. Vishnu Vijayakumar on keyboard accompanied by Akshay Prabhakaran on mridangam. 3:45 pm-4:45 p.m.

Revathi on veena accompanied by Shreyas Ramaswami on mridangam. Organized

by SR Fine Arts. 2:30-4:45 p.m. Community of Infinite Spirit, 1540 Hick’s Ave., San Jose. (408) 569-0860. dirsrfa@gmail.com. www.srfinearts.info.

recommends

An Indian Opera

By Priya Das

A

n ancient Savitri verbally spars with Yama, the God of Death; a modern, immigrant Meera vocalizes a pang of longing and responsibility: on stage, in English, in operatic style.

The two characters are part of a program presented by (East) Bay Area based Festival Opera Association. “In addition to pursuing works of great power, beauty, wit and heart, Festival Opera is on a quest for true resonance with our community.

With the Indian community burgeoning in our region, it seems vital that we tell stories that are meaningful to them and honor the rich Indian culture,” says Sara Nealy, General Director.

As many probably know, Savitri is a heroine from ancient Indian mythology who argues with Yama to bring her husband back to life. Meera is the central character in River of Light, a modern career woman who gets pregnant and realizes that she needs to pass on her Indian heritage to her child.

Savitri was considered revolutionary when written in 1908, by Gustav Holst, a famous British music composer, arranger, and teacher. It was the first English chamber opera since the end of the seventeenth century. The libretto (lyrics for the Opera) for River of Light have been written by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, music is by Jack Perla. The conductor and music director for the production is John Kendall Bailey.

The idea to pair the two stories was Nealy’s, who explains, “The ancient Savitri is the underpinning for the production and the contemporary world with its challenges of assimilation tugs to that potent and rich past. How powerful to have the character of Savitri be portrayed by the singer we see in the second opera, River of Light, as a modern Indian-American

woman! It helps us understand that, even though she may not be in touch with it, we feel the power of where she comes from, her heritage. In River of Light Meera discovers this herself.”

Playing the lead character in both is Maya Kherani, an Indian-American Soprano (singer with highest vocal range) artist. India Currents interviewed Kherani.

IC: How come you do Opera instead of Indian classical? Most desi kids don’t get the option or opportunity in the United States.

Maya Kherani: Opera is something I fell into in college, but I always had a passion for western classical music growing up.

I started singing in choir in elementary school, and started western voice lessons at the age of 11. I also studied Karnatik music at the same time, but since the techniques were pretty different, I found myself having to choose. I also loved the acting/theatrical aspect of western classical vocal music—I could relate to the texts…I love the intellectual challenge of learning music and the emotional challenge of bringing a character to life.

IC: When did you first hear opera?

MK: I first heard opera in 7th grade choir, when my science teacher’s sister, who was a professional opera singer, came and sang an aria from La Boheme for my choir. I admit, I wasn’t hooked right away, but I always loved hearing the un-amplified voice.

IC: How did you decide what you wanted to do career-wise?

MK: I majored in Mechanical Engineering at Princeton University, but I was very involved in the University’s Music Department. I sang in my first opera in 2008, as Barbarina in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, I was completely hooked. That

summer, during my summer research internship at MIT, I checked out every CD of opera at the music library and would practice arias in my dorm room (much to the chagrin of those with whom I shared walls). I got in to the SF Conservatory of Music, I knew it was something I could do with my life.

IC: How much is acting a part of opera?

MK: Acting is a huge part of opera. The whole point of opera is to tell stories through music, and a big part of that is embodying the character. Though to some it may seem unnatural to sing instead of speak, I believe it’s the intensity of emotion that leads us to sing instead of speak. Finding truth in that intensity is the challenge all opera singers face. A generation or two ago, opera was much more static. Nowadays, we are trained in physicality, stage combat, and dance.

IC: What has been your experience with this production?

MK: Savitri is a beautifully written, haunting piece. I have loved exploring the character’s power and true sincerity.

Though Meera was born in India, she takes to her environment in the United States with aplomb and enthusiasm.

However, she looks back at her roots and tries to reconnect. I think this is the true immigrant story, which many of us (of all ethnicities) face in today’s America.

How do we keep that connection alive while still being an American? How do we honor our past while still living in the present? These are questions that River of Light illuminates, quite literally!n Sat, Nov 14, 2 p.m., 8 p.m.; Sun, Nov 15: 4 p.m., Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 9th St., Oakland. http://indianopera. bpt.me.

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 77

events

California’s Best Guide to Indian Events

Rithvik Raja in Concert. Organized

by South India Fine Arts. 4 p.m. Sai Parivar, 1221 California Circle, Milpitas. www. southindiafinearts.org.

Diwali Ghazal Concert and Dinner

By Sharad Gupta. Organized by Brah-

ma Kumaris World Spiritual Org. 5-8:30 p.m. Anubhuti Retreat Center, 420 Bel Marin Keys Blvd., Novato . Free. (415) 8842314. anubhuti@brahmakumaris.org. www. anubhutiretreatcenter.org/?option=com_ ems&view=singleevent&event_ids=364.

An Evening of Indian Slide Guitar with Debashish Bhattacharya and Subhankar Banerjee. Special tabla introduction by Aarchick Banerjee. 7:30 p.m. The Ali Akbar College of Music, 215 West End Ave., San Rafael . $25 General, $20 members, seniors/students. (415) 4546372. office@aacm.org. www.aacm.org.

November

8 Sunday

Morning Ragas by Bhuvanesh Komkali. Accompanied by Sanjay

Deshpande (tabla) and Vyasmurthi Katti (harmonium) This concert is for the benefit of Sankara Eye Foundation, Indore Hospital. Organized by Swar Sudha and SEF. 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Serra Theater, 200 Serra Way, #37, Milpitas. $20, $30, $50 (VIP). (510) 919-3584, (408) 461-8390, (925) 913-0992. swarsudha@swarsudha. org. www.swarsudha.org, www.sulekha.com/ swarsudha.

A Celebration of Dipavali. Talk on

The Life and Compositions of Adi Sankaracharya with Shyam Kotagal. 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Cutural Integration Fellowship, 2650 Fulton St., San Francisco. (415) 668-1559. culturalfellowship@sbcglobal.net. www. culturalintegrationfellowship.org.

SACHI Annual Event: Rama and Company Come to the Asian. An

Introduction to a upcoming exhibition on the Ramayana by Forrest McGill Wattis, Senior Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Asian Art Museum, and Chief Curator of The Rama Epic.

Followed by a conversation with Rama-

Morning Ragas by Bhuvanesh Komkali, November 8

yana scholars Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland Goldman. In a concluding piece, visiting artist Mallika Sarabhai will enact a segment from her stage production, Sita’s Daughters. Organized by SACHI: Society for the Art and Cultural Heritage of India. 2-4 p.m. Samsung Hall, Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin St., San Francisco. Free, after museum admission. info@sachi.org, aarti@johri.com. www.sachi. org.

Tabla Solo by Subhankar Banerjee.

Accompanied by his son Aarchik Banerjee on tabla and Manoj Tamhankar on harmonium. Organized by SPICEMACAYStanford and Parag Chordia. 5-6:30 p.m.

Campbell Recital Hall, Stanford University, 541 Lasuen Mall, Stanford. Free, registration required. paragchordia@gmail.com. www.eventbrite.com/e/tabla-solo-by-panditsubhankar-banerjee-and-aarchik-banerjeetickets-19124122766.

November

9 Monday

Dasra Philanthropy Forum. Join

78 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

over 100 leaders from philanthropy, business and the social sector to make a greater impact on India’s pressing development challenges. Engage with experienced social entrepreneurs and philanthropists from India and the US working to improve the lives of millions of Indians living in poverty. Learn about path-breaking initiatives and partnerships that are tackling some of India’s greatest problems including water, sanitation and hygiene and empowering adolescent girls. Organized by Dasra. 9 a.m.-6 p.m.

Stanford University. $500. dpf_us@dasra. org. www.dasraphilanthropyforum.org.

Book Reading and Discussion

by Vikram Chandra. From Raghu

Karnad’s Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War. The book tells the forgotten epic of India’s WW2 through the lives and deaths of a single family. Organized by English Department and Institute of South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley. 6 p.m. Wheeler Hall, 300 Wheeler Hall, Berkeley.

events November

13 Friday

Krishn Anubhavam—Experience the Divine. With Indumathy Ganesh,

Artistic Director of Nrithyollasa Dance Academy, Akshaya Ganesh and students.

Organized by Global Oraganization for Divinity. 4 p.m. CET-SOTO Theater, 701 Vine St., San Jose. $18, $15 student/senior.

(408) 431-5688, (408) 425-7836, (510) 857-3714.

Ayurvedic Remedies for Tinnitus. A talk by Ashok Jethanandani. Do you have a ringing or buzzing sound in the ear? If the origin of the sound is within you, it can be a condition called tinnitus. In Ayurveda, it is described as karna-pranada.

In this talk we will discuss foods, lifestyle measures, and remedies that balance vata and alleviate this annoying condition. 6-7 p.m. India Community Center, Classrooms 2/3, 525 Los Coches St., Milpitas . Free, but please pre-register. www.indiacc.org/ayurveda.

November

14 Saturday

Book Launch with Signing. Jaya’s Golden Necklace: A Silk Road Tale. Writ-

California’s Best Guide to Indian Events ten and illustrated by Peter Linenthal. In this picture book, Jaya’s father receives a royal order to carve a statue of the Buddha while her mom is at the king’s palace cooking for his birthday. Peter will read the story of Jaya’s adventures transporting a special present with her dad. On their journey, the gods on Jaya’s golden necklace suddenly appear, showing her strengths she didn’t know she had. The story takes place in the ancient Kushan Empire on the Silk Road where Greek, Indian and Iranian cultures combine and where the first Buddha images were made. 2:30 p.m. SF Main Library, Children’s Center, 100 Larkin St., San Francisco.

Bhakti, East Meets West—A Dance Drama. A journey through various forms

of devotion through a dialogue between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore.

The end of the show convinces the audience that science and philosophy are two faces of a single coin. Produced by Pampa Dance Book Reading by Raghu Karnad, Nov. 6 Academy, and choreographed by Nirmala Madhava. Music is by Praveen Rao and San Jose . $25, $50, $100, $250, $500. (408) script by Purna Prasad. All proceeds from 416-3624, (408) 416-3521, (408) 888-1762. this program would go towards building nagendrau84@gmail.com. www.bhakthidevofund for Shri Krishna Vrundavana Temple tion.org, www.skvtemple.org. in San Jose. Organized by Sri Krishna Vrindavana Temple. 5-8:30 p.m. San Jose Center Indian Chamber Operas. Festival for Performing Arts, 255 S Almaden Blvd.,

Opera journeys to the richly-nuanced culture of India for two noteworthy operas: Gustav Holst’s Savitri and Jack Perla and Chitra Divakaruni’s River of Light. The story: Having moved from India, Meera loves her new husband, her high-powered job, and the Houston lifestyle until the birth of her daughter makes her long for her Diwali traditions. The score draws on North Indian ragas, and joining the orchestra are Nilan Chaudhuri (tabla) and Arjun Verma (sitar). Coloratura soprano Maya Kherani will sing the principal roles Savitri and Meera in each of the two operas. Ends Nov. 15. Organized by Festival Opera. 6 p.m. Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 9th St., Oakland . $35-$55.

(800) 838-3006. mimi@festivalopera.org. www.festivalopera.org, indianopera.bpt.me.

Mela—A Festival of Short Plays in Multiple Languages. A bouquet of

Sitar concert by Sugato Nag, Nov. 21

short plays, each witty and humorous, each in a different Indian language. The

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 79

scripts are by playwrights all over the world, including masters such as Satyajit Ray, Anton Chekhov and Dorothy Parker.

Each show will consist of nine short plays staged in quick succession, and will have super-titles in English. Ends Nov. 22.

Organized by Naatak. 6-8 p.m. Cubberley Theater, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto.

General $22, VIP $32. (408) 499-5692. tickets@naatak.org. www.naatak.com/portfolio/mela.

Gautam Tejas Ganeshan in Conert—New Directions in Indian Classical Music. 7-9 p.m. Subterranean

Arthouse, 2179 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. $15$30. info@subterraneanarthouse.org. www. brownpapertickets.com/event/2207803.

Sitar Concert with Hasu Patel.

7-8:30 p.m. Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center, 1185 Vicente St., San Francisco. $20.

(415) 681-2731. sanfrancisco@sivananda. org. sivanandasf.org/topic/homepage, sivanandasf.org/course/5166.

November

15 Sunday

Marathi Movie Screening—Deool Band. Story of a modern atheist scientist

and his interesting interaction with Swami Samarth. Starring: Mohan Joshi, Gashmeer Mahajani, Mohan Agashe,Girija Joshi and Nivedita Saraf. Directed by Praveen Tarde. Organized by Swar Sudha.

1:30-4:45 p.m. Serra Theater, 200 Serra Way, #37, Milpitas. $10. (510) 579-8211, (408) 398-8160, (510) 304-7488. swarsudha@swarsudha.org. www.swarsudha. org, www.sulekha.com/SwarSudha, events. sulekha.com/deool-band_event-in_milpitas-

Rita Sahai performs in Jalaranjani, Nov. 21

ca_303770.

Ramakrishnan Murthy In Concert.

Accompanied by R.K.Shriramkumar (violin) and K. Arun Prakash (mridangam). Organized by SanKritiLaya. 4 p.m.

CET—Soto Theater, 701 Vine St., San Jose. www.sankritilaya.org.

November

Book launch and signing, Nov. 14

20 Friday

Kash—A Performance. Akram Khan’s first collaboration with sculptor Anish Kapoor and composer Nitin Sawhney, yielded his company’s first full-length evening work in 2002. This revival continues Akram Khan’s quest to build bridges between the worlds of contemporary dance and the Indian classical dance form kathak. Ends Nov. 21. Organized by San Francisco Performances. 7:30-9:30 p.m.

YBCA Theater, 700 Howard St. (@ Third

80 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

St), San Francisco . $65, $55, $40. (415) 978-2787. info@sfperformances.org. sfperformances.org/performances/1516/AkramKhanCompany.html.

November

21 Saturday

Sitar Concert by Sugato Nag and Snehesh Nag. Accompanied on tabla

accompanied by Shubhankar Banerjee.

Organized by Basant Bahar. 5:30 p.m. Jain Temple Auditorium, 722 S Main St., Milpitas. $25, Basant Bahar members, free.

Jalaranjani—The Moods of Water.

Rita Sahai, composer, singer and teacher of Hindustani classical music, presents a choral concert composed by her and performed by her multi-age Vasundhara Choir and Bay Area musicians. The performance is about attuning to the different moods of water; the journey of life.

Mela, a festival of short plays, presented by Nataak, Nov. 14-22

Organized by Rita Sahai/OSMJ Music. 7 p.m. Ohlone College, Smith Center Theatre, 43600 Mission Blvd., Fremont. $35. (510) 943-4328. sadkulk@gmail.com. events. sulekha.com/jalaranjani_event-in_fremontca_302429, ritasahai.com/events/.

November

22 Sunday

Smaran Dance Festival. A platform

for young bay area classical dancers to showcase their talent. Five artists from different genres will perform: Archana Raja (bharatnatyam) Divija Bhimaraju (kuchipudi) Jeevika Bhat (odissi) Meena Vemuri (kuchipudi) Supriya Sasikumar (mohiniyattam) The biggest highlight of this year’s festival is a performance by bharatnatyam exponent, Indira Kadambi, from Chennai. Organized by Smaran Performing Arts. 2:30-6 p.m. Hoover Theater, 1635 Park Ave., San Jose . $25. (408) 8131364. lakshmi.k.raghu@gmail.com. www. smaran-arts.com/#!sdf/c104b, www.facebook. com/even

November

26 Thursday

Thanksgiving Celebration. The annual program will begin with a concert by Laxmi Ganesh Tewari, Hindustani vocalist and a long time professor of music at Sanoma State University. Accompanied

by Ravi Gutala (tabla) and Vivek Datar (harmonium). Vegetraian dinner will be served. 3 p.m. Badarikashrama, 15602 Maubert Ave., San Leandro. Free. (510) 278-2444. badarik@pacbell.net. www. badarikashrama.org.

December

5 Saturday

Nritya Dhaara—Flow of Dance.

Featuring Love Exquisite, the timeless concept of passionate love and Abhinaya’s signature pieces portraying contemporary reflections on the earth and the environment. Choreography by Associate Artistic Director and principal dancer Rasika Kumar. Live Music by: Artistic Director

Mythili Kumar, Malavika Kumar, Asha Ramesh, N. Narayan, Shanthi Narayan, Ashwin Krishnakumar, Ravi Gutala, and A. Mahadevan. Ends Dec. 6. Organized

by Abhinaya Dance Company. 7-9 p.m.

Mayer Theater, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara . $50 VIP, $25 general, $20 student w/ID and senior.

(408) 871-5959. abdanceco@gmail.com. www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2327706, www.abhinaya.org.

December

6 Sunday

Lecture by Aditya Das. The talk outlines the diplomatic and external policies of Gilbert Elliot, the first Earl of Minto, Governor-General of Bengal from July 1807 to October 1813. Minto’s period of office coincided with the last years of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, which had their inevitable repercussions in the colonial sphere, and influenced the shaping of Minto’s foreign policy. Napoleon’s treaty with Russia at Tilsit (July 1807),the

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 81

events

California’s Best Guide to Indian Events

Mallika Sarabhai performs a segment from her stage production, as part of SACHI’s annual event, November 8

treaty of Finkenstein (May 1807) with Persia, and the predominance of French influence in Turkey and Persia, created a short-lived alarm for the security of British interests in India. The main aims of Minto’s foreign policy were the defense of the Company’s trade and territories in India, and the expulsion of the French from the neighboring states of Asia and from bases in the Indian Ocean. 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Cultural Integration Fellowship, 2650 Fulton St., San Francisco. (415) 668-1559. culturalfellowship@sbcglobl.net. www.culturalintegrationfellowship.org.

December

12 Saturday

Yeh Jo Mohabbat Hai. A journey of

popular music through time, featuring Praveen and Ritee Chaddha along with Bay Area artists and musicians. Organized

by Shanamo Entertainment. 6:30 p.m.

JCC/Schultz Cultural Arts Center, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto . General $35, VIP $50.

(510) 798-5440. management@shanamo. com, praveen_chaddha@yahoo.com. www. shanamo.com.

Gautam Tejas Ganeshan in Conert— New Directions in Indian Classical Music. 7-9 p.m. Subterranean

Arthouse, 2179 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. $15$30. info@subterraneanarthouse.org. www. brownpapertickets.com/event/2207804, www. brownpapertickets.com/event/2207804.

82 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

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84 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

Spiritual Growth

VEDIC SAMPRADAYA RITUALS

Thanksgiving Dinner & Concert November 26th, 2015

ALL TRADITIONAL HINDU PUJAS & HOMAS LIKE:

Thurs. @ 3:00pm Concert by Pt. Laxmi Ganesh Tewari Ravi Gutala on tabla Vivek Datar on Harmonium

• Ganapati, Navagraha Homas • Upanayana, Seemantham, Marriages • Sradha, Funeral Services Classes in Puja Vidhi & Veda Chanting

Pt. Laxmi Ganesh Tewari

Samuhika 108 Sri Satyanarayana Swami Puja & Katha Cond. By Swami Omkaranandaji Maharaj

INDIA CURRENTS GRAPHIC (408) 324-0488

Sunday December 6th, 2015 10:30 AM Samuhika 108 Sri Satyanarayana Swami Puja, ancient worship for the health, happiness, spiritual and material prosperity of all humankind.

Throughout the years many devotees, joining Swami Omkarananda, have experi-enced the uplifting serenity of this worship. The 108 families and individuals sponsoring the Puja will sit for worship with kalasha provided by the temple. Those who cannot attend may sponsor by mail, and their names will be included in the prayers. We urge you all to share in this group Vedic worship renewing our faith and devotion, and invoking the blessings of the Lord.

10:30 a.m. Kirtan: Rita Sahai & students 1:30 p.m. Aarti and Mahaprasad www.badarikashram.org

15602 Maubert Ave. San Leandro CA 94578 | 510-278-2444 | badarik@pacbell.net

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JAI MATA DI

HINDU WEDDING PRIEST

Acharya Ji

HINDU PRIEST & VEDIC ASTROLOGER Please contact for

ASTROLOGY & RITUALS Also available for all types of Poojas and Horoscope/Matchmaking

(925) 449-0620

E-mail: panditravi@comcast.net

BALU SHASTRI is now available in the Bay Area to conduct all Hindu religious rituals both in North and South Indian manner.

• Poojas of all Kinds • Ceremonies • Homams, etc.

Please contact: Phone: (408) 738-0571 Cell: (408) 393-7722 Email: balushastri@hotmail.com

6211 Prospect Rd., San Jose, CA 95129

ö XI m;;F;e n;m;/ All kinds of Hindu traditional Pujas and homas Ganapathi, Navagraha, Vasthu, Ayushya Homas, Marriages, Seemantham, Nama-karnam, Upanayanam, Sathyanarayana Puja, Lakshmi Puja, Durga Sapthasathi Yanthra Puja. Hiranya Sradha and last rites. American born children’s horoscopes.

880 E. Fremont Ave., #302 Sunnyvale, CA 94087

Email: hindupriest01@hotmail.com

990 Lakewood Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Veda Pandit • Sahitya Siromani 1193 Bluebell Drive, Livermore, CA 94550

Pt. Ganesh Shasthry

(408) 480-5477 (Cell) (408) 400-0513 (Home)

www.hindupriestusa.com DURGA JYOTISH MANDIR

PANDIT RAVICHANDRAN

Pandit Krishna Kumar Pandey Acharya Ji

Home (408) 245-5443 Cell (925) 209-7637 Kabalikarpaga@hotmail.com

l;ek:; s;m;st;; s;uiK;n;;e B;v;nt;u IF THERE IS A NEED FOR THE SERVICES OF A PUNDIT FOR ANY AUSPICIOUS, CELEBRATORY OR SAD OCCASION THEN YOU MUST CALL

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 85

SPIRITUALITY & HEALTH

November

1 Sunday

November

9 Monday

Lecture on Sunyata: A Way out of Pradosam Shiva Sri Rudra AbSuffering by Elliott Isenberg. 11 a.m.- hisheka. Followed by aarti and manthra

12:15 p.m. Cultural Integration Fellowship, 2650 Fulton St., San Francisco. (415) 6681559. culturalfellowship@sbcglobal.net. www. culturalintegrationfellowship.org.

Overcoming Nervousness. Sunday Service. Organized by Self-Realization Fellowship. SRF Center Sacramento, 4513 North Ave., Sacramento. (916) 483-9644. SRF Center Los Gatos, 303 E. Main St., Los Gatos. (408) 2525299. Berkeley Temple, 3201 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 984-0084. www.yogananda-srf. org. Contact temples for times.

November

7 Saturday

Sri Sundarakanda Ramayana of Goswami Tulsidas. This group chanting

tells the heroic story of Sri Hanumanji’s journey to Lanka in search of Mata Sita.

2:30 p.m. Badarikashrama, 15602 Maubert Ave., San Leandro. Free. (510) 278-2444. www.badarikashrama.org.

November

8 Sunday

A Spiritual Approach to World Peace.

Sunday Service. Organized by Self-Realization Fellowship. SRF Center Sacramento, 4513 North Ave., Sacramento. (916) 483-9644. SRF Center Los Gatos, 303 E. Main St., Los Gatos.

(408) 252-5299. Berkeley Temple, 3201 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 984-0084. www. yogananda-srf.org. Contact temples for times.

pushpa. 6 p.m. Sri Lakshmi Ganapathi Center, 32B Rancho Drive, San Jose. (408) 226-3600. www.siliconvalleyhindutemple. com.

November

10 Tuesday

Naraga Chathurdasi Snanam Deepavali Festival. Sri Venkateswara Suprabhatam, aarti and archana. 9 a.m. Sri Lakshmi Ganapathi Center, 32B Rancho Drive, San Jose. (408) 226-3600. www.siliconvalleyhindutemple.com.

Dipavali Celebration. Meditation, readings by Nome, puja to Lord Siva and Sri Ramana with singing of bhajans followed by prasad. 7:30-10 p.m. Society of Abidance in Truth (SAT Temple), 1834 Ocean St., Santa Cruz. Free. (831) 4257287. sat@cruzio.com. satramana.org/web/ events/festivals/dipavali/.

November

11 Wednesday

Sri Maha Lakshmi Puja for Deepavali. 7 p.m. Badarikashrama, 15602

Maubert Ave., San Leandro. Free. (510) 278-2444. badarik@pacbell.net. www. badarikashrama.org.

November

12 Thursday

Dipavali Special: The Life and Com- Happiness Program. Ends Nov. 16. positions of Adi Sankaracharya— Organized by Art of Living Palo Alto.

Classical Ragas and Lecture. 11 a.m.- 6:30-9:30 p.m. Saint Marks, 600 Colorado

12:15 p.m. Cultural Integration Fellowship, 2650 Fulton St., San Francisco. (415) 6681559. culturalfellowship@sbcglobal.net. www. culturalintegrationfellowship.org.

Sri Bhagavad Gita Talk and Kirtan

by Suman and Sargam Shah. 11 a.m.

Badarikashrama, 15602 Maubert Ave., San Leandro. Free. (510) 278-2444. badarik@ pacbell.net. www.badarikashrama.org.

Ave., Kennedy Room, Palo Alto. Regular $395, student $295. (650) 804-8050. mala. ramakrishnan@artofliving.org. www.artofliving.org/us-en/program/135980, www. artofliving.org.

November

14 Saturday

Deepavali Celebration. The program

86 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

Happy Diwali! Celebrations around the Bay.

will begin with a Mahalakshmi Homa followed by a children’s program. To conclude will be performance by Arabhi Sundararajan and Revathi Narayanan, senior students of Hinduatani singer Shubhangi Sakhalkhar. Accompanied by Panch Chandrasekaran (tabla) and Rohan Joshi (harmonium). 3 p.m. Badarikashrama, 15602 Maubert Ave., San Leandro.

Free. (510) 278-2444. badarik@pacbell.net. www.badarikashrama.org.

Diwali Celebration. Live music, classical dances, spiritual insights, meditation and vegetarian dinner. Organized

by Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual Org. 5:30-7:30 p.m. San Francisco Meditation Center, 401 Baker St., San Francisco . Free. (415) 563-4459. sfoffice@ us.brahmakumaris.org. www.brahmakumaris.org/us/california/sanfrancisco/ Events%20Calendar/specialevents.

November

15 Sunday

Habit: Your Master or Your Slave?

Sunday Service. Organized by Self-Realization Fellowship. SRF Center Sacramento, 4513 North Ave., Sacramento. (916) 4839644. SRF Center Los Gatos, 303 E. Main St., Los Gatos. (408) 252-5299. Berkeley Temple, 3201 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 984-0084. www.yogananda-srf.org. Contact temples for times.

November

17 Tuesday

Skanda Shasti. Meditation, readings,

puja to Skanda with singing of devotional chants, followed by prasad. 7:30-10 p.m.

Om Sri Mathre Namaha Vaidica Vidhya Ganapathi Center SRI LAKSHMI GANAPATHI TEMPLE

(408) 226-3600 32B Rancho Drive, San Jose, CA 95111

(Capitol Expressway West and Montrey Road Junction, Opposite and 1 Block from Capitol Cal Train Station)

www.vvgc.org or siliconvalleyhindutemple.com

Monday November 9 Th At 6.00 Pm Pradosham Shiva Sri Rudra Abhisheka Aarati and Manthra Pushpa Tuesday November 10 Th Naraga Chathurdasi Snanam Deepavali Festival Temple Opens At 9.00 Am Sri Venkateswara Suprabhatam Continued With Shiva Abhisheka Aarati and Manthra Pushpa Continuous Archana Night At 10.00 Pm Sri Lakshmi Aarati And Jai Jagadeesha Hare Aarati For Balaji Ekantha Seva Temple Closes Wednesday November 11 Th Temple Opens At 9.30 Am Sri Venkateswara Suprabhatam Continued With Shiva Abhisheka Aarati and Manthra Pushpa Continuous Archana Night At 10.00 Pm Sri Lakshmi Aarati And Jai Jagadeesha Hare Aarati For Balaji Ekantha Seva and

Temple Closes Thursday November 12 Th Gujarati New Year Skandha Sashti Begins Night At 8.00 Pm November 12 Th 13th 14th 15th 16th Sri Valli Deva Sena Sametha Sri Subramanya Sahasranama Archana

Sarvalaya Deepam, Annna Malai Deepam Vaikanasa Deepam Aarati And Manthra Pushpa Evening At 6.00 Pm Pournami Vratha Sri Sathya Narayana Swamy Vratha/Pooja All Are Welcome To Participate With Family

Tuesday November 17 Th At 6.00 Pm Skandha Sashti Soora Samharam Kavadi Festival Night At 8.00 Pm Sri Hanuman Chalisa Night At 8.30 Pm Sri Ayyappa Mandala Pooja Begins (Ayyppa Mandala Pooja Begins November 17 Th to January 15th Makara Sankaranthi Ayyppa Mandala Pooja Ends

Thursday November 26 Th Thanks Giving Day Week End Timings Evening At 5.00 Pm Shiva Abhisheka Aarati and Manthra Pushpa Pancharathra Deepam

Monday November 23 Rd At 6.00 Pm Soma Pradosham Shiva Sri Rudra Abhisheka Aarati and Manthra Pushpa Wednesday November 25 Th Temple Opens At Evening 5.00 Pm Shiva Abhisheka Kritikai Sri Valli Deva Sena Sametha Sri Subramanya Abhisheka

Friday November 27 Th Day After Thanks Giving Day Week End Timings Evening At 4.00 Pm Sri Bhuwaneswari/Sri Lalitha Devi Abhisheka Continued With Sri Lalitha Sahasra Nama Parayana Aarati and Manthra Pushpa Sunday November 29 Th Evening At 4.00 Pm Sri Sankata Hara Chathurthi Sri Lakhsmi Ganapathi Homa/ Sri Lakshmi Ganapathi Abhisheka Aarati and Manthra Pushpa

Please Make A Note:: Temple Address:: 32 Rancho Drive, San Jose CA 95111 Temple Timings: Week Days Morning 10.00 Am To 12 Noon, Evening At 6.00 pm To 8.00 pm - Week Ends And Holidays 10.00 am To 8.00 pm FOR BHAJAN'S RELIGIOUS DISCOURSES, MUSIC AND DANCE PERFORMANCES, PRIVATE POOJAS PLEASE CONTACT TEMPLE FOR FURTHER DETAILS MANGALANI BHAVANTHU,SUBHAM BHUYATH,LOKA SAMASTHA SUKINO BHAVANTHU, LOVE ALL SERVE ALL LOVE IS ALL

For Pujas & Rituals Contact: PANDIT

880 East Fremont Ave #302, Cupertino Villas, Sunnyvale, CA 94087 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Home: (408)

GANESH SHASTHRY 245-5443 / Cell: (925) 209-7637 E-mail: srikalahatheeswara@yahoo.com

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 87

INDIA CURRENTS GRAPHICS (408) 324-0488

Sunday November 1 St Day Light Savings Time Ends

Society of Abidance in Truth (SAT Temple), 1834 Ocean St., Santa Cruz. Free. (831) 425-7287. sat@cruzio.com. satramana.org/ web/events/festivals/skanda-shasti/.

November

19 Thursday

Happiness Program. Taught by Suchitra Ramadas and Krishna Ramadas. Ends Nov. 23. 6:30-9:30 p.m. Art of Living Cupertino Center, 21040 Homestead Road., Suite 101, Cupertino. $395, student $295.

(408) 616-0424. elaavanya@gmail.com. www.artofliving.org/us-en/program/136113, www.artofliving.org.

November

20 Friday

Ramana Darshanam. Silent meditation, reading and commentary by Nome.

8-9:30 p.m. Society of Abidance in Truth (SAT Temple), 1834 Ocean St., Santa Cruz. Free. (831) 425-7287. sat@cruzio. com. satramana.org/web/events/calendar/, satramana.org/web/events/ramana-darshanam/.

November

22 Sunday

Giving Thanks for Life’s Blessings.

Sunday Service. Organized by Self-Realization Fellowship. SRF Center Sacramento, 4513 North Ave., Sacramento. (916) 4839644. SRF Center Los Gatos, 303 E. Main St., Los Gatos. (408) 252-5299. Berkeley Temple, 3201 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 9840084. www.yogananda-srf.org. Contact temples for times.

Sri Satyanarayana Puja and Kirtan.

11 a.m. Badarikashrama, 15602 Maubert Ave., San Leandro. Free. (510) 278-2444. badarik@pacbell.net. www.badarikashrama. org.

November

25 Wednesday

Karthikai Deepam. Meditation, read-

ings by Nome, puja to Lingodhava with chanting of devotional songs, followed by prasad. 7:30-10 p.m. Society of Abidance in Truth (SAT Temple), 1834 Ocean St., Santa Cruz. Free. (831) 425-7287. sat@cruzio. com. satramana.org/web/events/festivals/ karthigai-deepam/.

November

29 Sunday

The Purpose of Life. Sunday Service.

Organized by Self-Realization Fellowship.

SRF Center Sacramento, 4513 North Ave., Sacramento. (916) 483-9644. SRF Center Los Gatos, 303 E. Main St., Los Gatos. (408) 2525299. Berkeley Temple, 3201 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 984-0084. www.yogananda-srf. org. Contact temples for times..

Sri Ramanama Sankirtana and Meditation. Ramanama Sankirtana is a

singing meditation. 108 stanza’s compose the entire Ramayana. The meditation will be part melodious singing and part silent meditation. 11 a.m. Badarikashrama, 15602 Maubert Ave., San Leandro. Free.

(510) 278-2444. badarik@pacbell.net. www. badarikashrama.org.

Sri Sankata Hara Chathurthi. Sri

Lakshmi ganapathi homa, abhishekha, aarti and manthra pushpa. 4 p.m. Sri Lakshmi Ganapathi Center, 32B Rancho Drive, San Jose. (408) 226-3600. www.siliconvalleyhindutemple.com.

December

3 Thursday

Sri Akhanda Ramayana of Goswami Tulasidas. Ramacharita Manasa

of Goswami Tulasidas is based on the practice of Bhakti,Shradha and seva. Join 28 hrs of Sri Ramayana group singing at Badarikashrama. Sunday at 1 p.m. aarti and mahaprasad. Ends Dec. 4. Organized

by Badarikashrama. 9 a.m.-1 p.m. 15602 Maubert Ave., San Leandro . Free. (510) 278-2444. badarik@pacbell.net. www. badarikashrama.org.

December

88 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

ing tells the heroic story of Sri Hanumanji’s journey to Lanka in search of Mata Sita. 2:30 p.m. Badarikashrama, 15602 Maubert Ave., San Leandro. Free. (510) 278-2444. badarik@pacbell.net. www. badarikashrama.org.

Bringing Bharath to the Bay. Indian cultural program, with skits, kid’s musical and food. Organized by Pastor Samuel. 4 p.m. Christ Church of India, 460 S. Cypress Ave., San Jose. (408) 247-5673.

December

6 Sunday

108 Samuhika Sri Satyanarayana Swami Puja and Kirtan. This puja

happens twice a year at the ashrama, bringing families together where they perform the puja with their own Kalasha.

Swami Omkaranandaji Maharaj is visiting. Music from Rita Sahai and students.

10:30 a.m. Badarikashrama, 15602 Maubert Ave., San Leandro . Free. (510) 2782444. badarik@pacbell.net. www.badarikashrama.org.

December

10 Thursday

Srimad Bhagavata Saptaha Mahotsavam. Ends Dec. 16. 6:30-8:30 p.m.

SVCC Temple, 40155 Blacow Road, Fremont. www.namadwaar.org.

December

12 Saturday

4 Friday

Ribhu Gita. Silent meditation, reading and commentary by Nome. 8-9:30 p.m.

Society of Abidance in Truth (SAT Temple), 1834 Ocean St., Santa Cruz. Free. (831) 425-7287. sat@cruzio.com. satramana.org/ web/events/calendar/, satramana.org/web/ events/boundless-wisdom/.

December

Sri Sundarakanda Ramayana of Goswami Tulsidas. This group chant-

5 Saturday

Bringing Bharath to the Bay. Indian cultural program, with skits, kid’s musical and food. Organized by Pastor Samuel.

4 p.m. Christ Church of India, 20801 San Ramon Valley Blvd., San Ramon. (925) 364-5247. © Copyright 2015 India Currents. All rights reserved. Reproduction for commercial use strictly prohibited.

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 89

God's Unfailing Love……

Do you have the real Joy, Peace and happiness in your life? Have you ever asked this question What is the purpose of my

existence in this world? What is a person profited, if he/she shall gain the whole world, and lose his/her own soul? (Or) What shall a person give in exchange for his/her own soul? Is there anyone in this world who can truly love me? Many times we are lost and finally end up asking these questions. There is no one in this world, who can truly love us, except God. Initially, God created human kind (both man and woman) in HIS own image. The purpose of creating mankind was to be with God. But human kind sinned against God and lost the greatest gift of being with HIM. God is Holy. A person with sin cannot dwell or exist with God. Also with sin, human kind earned curses from God. The result of sin was death & curses.

What is sin?

Anything we do that separates us from God’s presence is called SIN. We cannot hide anything from God. God knows our troubles, problems & everything. What the World can offer us is the Lust of flesh, the Lust of eyes & the Pride of life.

Anyone who takes what the World offers ends up committing sin against God.

What is the result of committing sin?

The result of committing sin is a broken heart & soul,having guilt which makes us weak before God, with sadness, no peace, sickness, curses and separation from God. The Bible says, when we were born, we were born with sin because our parents brought us into this world with a sinful nature. For all have sinned, and come short of the Glory of God. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. The wages of sin is death.

No one in this world including our parents or spouse or kids or friends or relatives can love us more than God. The Bible says, God is Love and HE manifested HIS love by sending God's only Holy SON Jesus Christ into this world to save us from all our sins and redeem us from this sinful world. For God so loved the world, that HE gave HIS only begotten Son Jesus Christ, that whosoever believeth in Jesus should not perish, but have everlasting life, the life after death with God in Heaven.

Jesus came to this earth only to die for us and shed HIS blood so that we can be saved by HIS grace and then receive HIS gift of Salvation. Without HIS shedding of blood there is no redemption from sins. So God sent Jesus Christ to this world to die for you and me. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sins. If we confess our sins to Jesus, HE is faithful and just to forgive us from our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Jesus said "Come unto ME, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

For every sin we commit, we need to pay the penalty individually. However, Jesus took all our sins upon himself, when HE died for us. By giving HIS every drop of blood, we are and free from the penalty of sin2015 & death. Jesus 90 |saved INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November

died for our sins and on the third day, HE rose again from death and became victorious over death, hell and sins. Jesus is a living God. HE is the same yesterday, today & forever. In the Name of Jesus there is Victory, Deliverance from sins & curses and there is Healing from sickness & Miracles in our life.

Jesus Christ is the ONLY WAY to God the Father, HE is the Truth and HE is the Life. No one can go to God the Father & Heaven, except through Jesus Christ.

Our family or friends, our caste or creed, our education or position, our money or riches or status, or by doing charity or by doing yoga or by doing fasting will not take us to God or to Heaven. When we accept & ask Jesus Christ to come into our heart & cleanse our sins with HIS precious blood, Jesus comes into our heart and makes us a new creature, by giving us HIS Love, Joy, HIS Peace, Hope & eternal Life with HIM. This is the TRUTH and the truth shall set you free.

Now how can I redeem HIS gift of Salvation in my life?

All we have to do is to believe Jesus, accept HIM into our heart & ask him to cleanse our sins by HIS blood by repeating this simple prayer. (Prayer means talking to God in your heart)

Lord Jesus, Thank you for coming into this world for me and my sins. I truly accept you just as I am.

Come into my heart; cleanse me and my sins with your precious Blood. Be in my heart forever and help me to live and lead a Holy life like you. I also invite YOU & Your Holy Spirit to come into my heart and give me the Joy, Peace, Happiness, Deliverance from sins, bondages and sickness forever. Thank you for giving me the assurance of being with me forever. In Jesus name I pray Amen.

If you have truly meant this prayer, then you have accepted Jesus into your heart. HE will be with you forever. HE will not leave you nor forsake you. If you need prayers or would like to know more about Jesus, then you can visit nearby Churches or email us at info@christforworld.org

November 2015 | Northern California | www.indiacurrents.com | 91

healthy life

From Villain to Victor Clinical insights on Coconut Oil

By Nihaal Karnik and Ronesh Sinha

M

any folks have been raised to think coconut oil is the central culprit in the cast of dietary characters responsible for heart disease and chronic disease. Coconut oil can be a powerfully effective nutritional tool in our quest to improve body composition and reverse diseases. Medical student, Nihaal Karnik reviews the research behind coconut oil, and then our clinical dietician Prerna Uppal and I will share some of our experiences from the clinic at the end.

I cannot remember the last meal I cooked without some coconut oil.

Although a variety of misconceptions exist about the safety of coconut oil with regards to diet, scientific literature has begun to emerge that supports the use of coconut oil.

Let’s explore everything coconut: from the beginning of the theory concerning its health hazard to modern research which

Introduction

Like every young Indian kid in America there is nothing I dreaded more than the blue bottle: yes….the coconut oil bottle my mother would heat on a weekly basis.

No, mom was not ahead of the curve with regards to consuming coconut oil.

Like every other Indian mom she was absolutely hell bent on heating that greasy stuff and working it into our hair for a good 45 minutes. And like all children, I fussed, squirmed, and went to bed with a grease soaked scalp promising I would never ever buy this stuff when I am an adult. Fast forward 20 years and I am at the grocery store about once every two months buying a massive jar of coconut oil for myself.

Am I using it for my hair? Well…. moms are always right, so yes. But the majority of that oil goes towards my daily cooking. Whether I am frying eggs or heating up some ground turkey,

proves otherwise.

Key Terms and Background

Before exploring the science of coconut oil, it is important to look at some terms that will be used throughout this post: Saturated Fats—Simply put, saturated fats refer to any fat that remains a solid at room temperature. Traditional nutrition has decried the use of saturated fats in one’s diet, however they are not the devil of a healthy diet. In fact, when processed

92 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

sugars and excessive carbohydrates are replaced with saturated fats we tend to eat a diet more in line with those of our early ancestors. Remember, coconut oil is technically a saturated fat.

Medium Chain Triglycerides (MCTs)—These refer to a class of fatty acids that are intermediate in length. For instance, most fat in the body is long chain form; most fats from cow’s milk is short chain. A growing body of evidence suggests MCTs (such as coconut oil) help burn body fat and lead to weight loss.

Coconut Oil. Let’s dig a bit deeper into this MCT. Unfortunately, the recent trend to incorporate more coconut oil in the diet has led to a slew of cheap alternatives which are not good forms of coconut oil. Like all foods we eat, not all coconut oil is created equally. If you are going to use coconut oil, then don’t skip out on spending an extra $1 or $2; it’s well worth the investment. Prerna Uppal, a dietician suggests “virgin coconut oil (VCO) as it is the least refined and has the higher number of antioxidants.” She recommends “Nutiva organic virgin coconut oil.”

So Why Has Coconut Oil Been Labeled as a Bad Thing

Thomas Brennan, a professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell University, offers a simple explanation of why it has been implicated as a heart disease risk factor. In a 2011 interview with the New York Times, he tells us, “Most of the studies involving coconut oil were done with partially hydrogenated coconut oil, which researchers used because they needed to raise the cholesterol levels of their rabbits in order to collect certain data.” This simply means

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there was a pre-conceived bias since researchers were using processed coconut oil (remember what we said about all coconut oil not being equal?” He further states, “Virgin coconut oil, which has not been chemically treated, is a different thing in terms of a health risk perspective. And maybe it isn’t so bad for you after all.”

It is clear that improper science, a lack of using proper coconut oil, and repeated misinformation has labeled coconut oil as a villain to any advocate of a healthy lifestyle.

Dificile (a really nasty bacteria). It is a major cause of severe diarrhea and a very hard pathogen to treat. That said, a study shows that laboratory testing (called in vitro) of this super nasty bug with VCO is effective. In other words, VCO is so potent as an antimicrobial agent it has promising abilities to treat tough bacterial infections.

Quality of Life Among Breast Cancer Patients. Another study found consuming VCO during chemotherapy improved functioning and quality of life among 60 patients who received VCO as part of the diet.

From Villain to Victor: Emerging Research Supporting the Use of Coconut Oil

Final Thoughts

I could devote pages upon pages to emerging research about potential benefits. Instead, I will try to highlight the main points by presenting a simple list.

Lipid Maintenance and Fat Burning.

Researchers at the University of Kerala recently published a study in the British Journal Of Nutrition. In this study the group points out that VCO 1) helped improve lipid panel results and 2) directly reduced fat formation. The group further concluded that these two findings suggest that a diet in coconut oil could reduce one’s risk for coronary heart disease (CHD).

Anti-Inflammatory/Antioxidant Properties. Anti-inflammatory and antioxidant rich foods are important for a healthy diet. Both are essential in maintaining a body free of cellular damage.

New research shows VCO may be such a potent anti-inflammatory agent, that it could help treat various forms of arthritis (remember, a lot of arthritic conditions are due to a pro or high inflammatory state). The biggest selling point of VCO is its antioxidant property. The problem with cooking with other media such as olive oil concerns high heat and oxidative damage. Simply put, when we fry things in olive oil, the olive oil is so hot that various chemicals become oxidized or rather damaged. So even though olive oil may be good for us, at high temperatures the chemical changes are actually damaging at a cellular level. Conversely, VCO does not oxidize or get damaged at high temperatures. In fact, current research shows that this lack of damage has heart healthy benefits.

Antimicrobial activity. One of the nastiest hospital infections is Clostridium

A brief review of history shows that coconut oil was unfairly cast as an evil oil due to misinformation and poor science.

Dogmatic adherence to outdated studies still casts fear about its usage with doctors, patients, and wellness experts.

The growing body of literature surrounding VCO is promising. However, more laboratory and human trial research needs to be done.

Furthermore, one of the most important things to take away is knowing that not all coconut oils are created equally. Remember, try to buy organic and virgin coconut oil as it has the most antioxidants (the good stuff that protects our cells).

As a medical student I constantly evaluate the medical science of new advancements. As much as I am on board with the VCO train there are two things I would like to see. First, would be long term research in a large patient population using VCO. It is not that I am a skeptic; rather the gold standards of medical claims are supported by these types of studies.

Second, I would like to see dietary research where VCOs replace carbohydrates, processed foods,and sugar as an energy source. To date, few if any studies assess this model.

Tips on getting nuttier with coconut oil. Remember, adding saturated fats and MCTs to the diet are only beneficial if we eliminate unnecessary carbohydrates, processed foods, and sugar. Furthermore, make sure you buy the right stuff. Feel like reading this topic on your own? Then definitely look at any studies that assess VCO, not just any regular coconut oil.

So I guess, mom is always right. About once a week I squirm, fuss, and moan.

This time it’s about pouring over text-

94 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California | November 2015

books (mainly because I have procrastinated) while I have a scalp soaking in greasy coconut oil. As I lie in bed tonight (with a towel over my pillow of course), I can go ahead and rest knowing that maybe coconut oil for everyday use is not so crazy after all.

Clinic Insights from Dr. Ron and Prerna

I know the information about coconut oil and saturated fat in general can be very confusing. I suggest you follow our general principle of self-experimentation.

There is enough compelling evidence to suggest that safely using coconut oil in reasonable portions does not have harmful effects, and may in fact promote health benefits. As Nihaal mentioned, Prerna and I recommend it in conjunction with healthy anti-inflammatory foods and lifestyle habits. So many patients we see in the clinic have direct evidence of suffering from chronic inflammation, and simply adding coconut oil to an inflammatory diet and lifestyle not only is ineffective, but can be harmful as well. Remember, even the highest quality fats are not immune to the dangerous process of oxidation which occurs from consuming unhealthy foods.

Once these foods are removed and coconut oil is added, we do not see cholesterol and inflammatory markers go up.

We see this effect in our Indian patients from regions like Kerala where coconut oil is a staple food. Although prior studies suggested coconut oil may be a potential cause of increased heart disease risk in Kerala and other parts of Southern India, in our experience we have noted that it is the excess carbohydrate consumption and sedentary lifestyle which are predominantly responsible.

We consistently see insulin resistance markers and metabolic syndrome reduce or resolve when our South Indians reintroduce coconut oil in the context of a healthier nutrition and lifestyle plan. Not only do risk numbers improve, but energy levels increase, and body composition trends in a healthier direction with reduced waistlines/visceral fat.n Ronesh Sinha, M.D. is a physician for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation who sees high risk South Asian patients, he blogs at southasianhealthsolution.org, and co-hosts a South Asian radio show on health.

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dear doctor

Dealing with Reactions to My Pregnancy

By Alzak Amlani

Q

I am pregnant for the first time after many years of trying and medical concerns. So, I feel this is a major achievement and at first I couldn’t even believe it was happening. Now that it’s been about twenty weeks, it’s settling in: I am really pregnant and I am going to have a new baby. I am a school teacher working with a lot of children each year. I have told the administration that I will need to be on maternity leave and now I am telling the students as well. I am surprised by their reactions. Some are certainly excited that I am pregnant, but others are quite upset. They feel that I will never return; they are not as important to me anymore; are clingy, sad or even angry and a bit envious about my having my own baby. I didn’t expect so much reaction and quite honestly don’t now how to respond. Where is all this coming from?

A

school with young children. I trust many of these students feel your maternal presence and care and are a bit attached to you in this way. With very busy parents these days who are often working, children are not getting enough parenting. So, they are hungry for caring adults to offer mentorship and nurturance. You may be playing that role in their life.

The kids know you will be leaving to care full time for this baby and they will be without you. This reality needs to be acknowledged for some of your students.

So, when they get clingy, angry, distant, resistant or sad inquire into it a bit. You can ask things like: Are you upset that I am leaving in a couple of months? I know I will have a baby of my own; maybe that makes you upset? I understand if you are not happy about that. This can be said in a contactful, caring and sensitive way, where the kids feel your attachment and concern.

Listen to their feelings, stories and

It’s good that you want to understand yours students’ reactions.

Teachers have a parental role in

ideas about your leaving. You may also find out what is going on at home with their parents. Your caring and listening presence will do a lot for them.

Then you can remind them that you will be thinking about them while you are away and that you will miss them and will hear about them through the substitute teacher and will look forward to coming back, so you can be with them all. You can even give them a little gift, that will be like a transitional object they can hold that will remind them of you. These words and small rituals convey connection that children need. n

Alzak Amlani, Ph.D., is a counseling psychologist of Indian descent in the Bay Area. 650-325-8393. Visit www.wholenesstherapy.com

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recipes

A Squashable Festival

By Shanta Nimbark Sacharoff

T

here are various stories of the origin of Thanksgiving in America. One tale tells that the Wampanoag tribe of Native Americans showed the settlers at Plymouth, Massachusetts how to hunt, fish and grow life-sustaining crops like corn and squash. This subsequently resulted in a bountiful harvest and a food-sharing celebration: the first Thanksgiving!

Today Thanksgiving is a non-religious holiday that unites people with food and festivities. It is also a sad reminder of the devastating persecution suffered by Native Americans at the hands of European settlers.

Turkey is the customary main dish.

Although the President pardons one lucky

Illustration by Serena Sacharoff

turkey every year, some 50 million turkeys are sacrificed each year for American Thanksgiving dinners. However, a Thanksgiving menu does not have to center around turkey, or contain any meat at all. Californiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s diverse population includes people of many backgrounds, palates and lifestyles, gathering for a Thanks-

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giving meal.

Americans are increasingly eating lighter meals, creating menus with from a variety of seasonal ingredients cooked with ethnic flavors and techniques. The following two recipes, Kabocha Squash Curry with Sweet Potatoes, and Wild Rice with Fresh Pomegranate Seeds and Pine Nuts, go together well, and exemplify this fusion of ethnicities, featuring flavors from around the world, and using seasonal ingredients. n Shanta Nimbark Sacharoff, author of Flavors Of India: Vegetarian Indian Cuisine is a co-owner of Other Avenues Food Cooperative in San Francisco. Serena Sacharoff is a chef, an illustrator and an art student.

Kabocha Squash Curry with Sweet Potatoes Ingredients: Makes eight to ten servings 1 medium size Kabocha squash (2 to 2 ½ lbs.), enough to yield approximately 8 cups of chunks 2 large Garnet sweet potatoes (1/2 lb.), to yield approximately 3 cups of chunks 2 cups of water for steaming the vegetables 4 cloves of garlic, peeled ¼ tsp cayenne powder 1½ cups light coconut milk whisked together with 2 cups water 3 tbsp cooking oil 1 onion, finely chopped ½ red bell pepper cut into small pieces after removing seeds and veins 2 tsp minced or finely shredded fresh ginger 1 tsp salt Juice of a freshly squeezed lime or lemon 2–3 tbsp fresh cilantro leaves for garnish Method Using a sharp knife, cut off the stem of the squash and then cut the squash into halves. Cutting hard squash can be intimidating at first, but it gets easier with practice. Remove the seeds and fibers from the halves, and cut each half into wedges or large pieces. Cut the sweet potatoes into 2 or 3 pieces each. Arrange the squash and sweet potatoes pieces in a steamer basket.

Place two cups of water in a large pot or a kadhai (wok) with a tight fitting lid. Set the filled steamer basket in the pot and cover.

Steam the vegetables for 15 minutes, just long enough to soften them slightly and loosen their skin. Transfer to a large planter to cool. When cool, peel them with a small sharp knife and discard the skin. Cut into smaller, bite-size pieces and set aside.

Next, prepare a garlic-cayenne paste as follows: Using a mortar and pestle, or a rolling pin, mash the garlic pieces with the cayenne powder to make a coarse paste.

Whisk the garlic-cayenne paste into the coconut milk and water, mixing until well blended. Set aside.

Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Saute the onion for a few minutes until it is wilted, and then add the red pepper and ginger.

Stir-fry for two minutes. Add the squash and potato pieces and stir fry the vegetables for a five minutes. Then add the coconutmilk mixture and salt. Stir again, cover, and

A Creative Commons image by TLexano

cook gently for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir the vegetables gently so that all of the pieces are cooked evenly, but not crushed, and nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan. The curry is done when the sauce has thickened and the squash and potato pieces are soft.

Add the freshly squeezed lime or lemon juice, stir gently, and garnish with fresh cilantro. Serve with rice, or the wild rice entrée below.

Wild Rice with Fresh Pomegranate Seeds and Pine Nuts

Wild rice is not actually rice, but the seed of an aquatic grass native to the Great Lakes region of the United States. Native Americans have harvested it by hand for centuries. Wild rice has a unique, nutty flavor and is very nutritious, containing more protein and fiber than brown rice.

The addition of pine nuts and pomegranate seeds makes this dish festive.

Ingredients: Makes eight to ten servings 2¾ cups of water ½ tsp salt (optional) 1 tsp oil (optional) 1 cup wild rice, rinsed in warm water and thoroughly drained ¼ cup pine nuts, lightly toasted in a dry frying pan for a few minutes

(do not burn) ¼ cup fresh pomegranate seeds Method Boil the water with the optional salt and oil. Add the rinsed and drained wild rice, stir, and allow the mixture to come to a boil again. Turn the heat down to simmer. Cover and cook for 45 minutes.

The rice is done when half the rice kernels appear to have been opened (the inside looks white) and most of the water is gone. Cover again, and turn off the heat, and leave the lid on for 10 to 15 minutes. Then uncover and check to see that the water is evaporated.

Freshly harvested wild rice cooks more quickly than older rice, but it’s difficult to know the age of the rice when you purchase it. If, after 45 minutes, the rice appears done but there is still too much water, cook for a few minutes uncovered over a medium-high flame to evaporate the water, or simply drain off any excess water. (Save this nutritious water for a soup base).

Fluff the rice gently and transfer it to a serving bowl. Top with the roasted pine nuts and fresh pomegranate seeds, and serve. Wild rice is flavorful, chewy and substantial, so a serving of 1/3 to 1/2 cup per person is sufficient. n

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On Inglish

The Sound of My Name

By Kalpana Mohan

name, noun. before 900 < a word or a combination of words by which a person, place, or thing, a body or class, or any object of thought is designated, called, or known. < from Sanskrit nama ...

I

During the Third Reich, everyone was required to prove believe the choice of a name is every man’s birthright. Yet a four generations of German ancestry to qualify as a native label is foisted on us even before we have learned to agree or German. The Hitler regime sifted, tossed, and trashed Jewdissent. When I tried to trace the root of the English word ish names and possessions, thus ensuring that the past could “name,” I discovered that the word shared common ancestry in not be stripped away through the name. several ancient tongues: nama in Old English; namo in Old High Poet Gertrude Stein wrote that “a rose is a rose is a rose.”

German; nomen in Latin; onoma in Greek; naman in Sanskrit; and In her mind, a label had so many feelings associated with namam in Tamil. it that merely invoking the name excavated all manner of What I found more intriguing than the origin of the word itfeeling surrounding it. In Hitler’s Germany, Jews bearing self was the punch packed into the “name” that we’re each assigned first names of “non-Jewish” origin at birth. The sound of my name is one were required to adopt an additional of the first sounds I heard as my ears name: “Israel” for men and “Sara” for tuned to the world, as my eyes focused Even today, the sound of my women. In the autumn of 1938, all on life. Little do we ponder this, but name called out in public recalls Jewish passports were also stamped unless one is James Bond, our name with an identifying red letter “J” and is also the word we will spell the most trepid moments from my distant by 1941, Jews were forced to wear a of any word through the course our and recent past ... the chirpy call yellow six-pointed Star of David on lives. It’s the invisible unique RFID the left side of the coat “as large as (radio frequency identification) tag and greeting from a nurse at my the palm of a hand” whenever they that will cause us to swell with pride, yearly physical as she handed me alighted in public. sometimes, and dwell in discomfort at the urine cup and I realized that In my mind, the narrative on the other times. many meanings of “name” assumed Even today, the sound of my name my bladder didn’t have even a several forms at Berlin’s Jewish musecalled out in public recalls trepid moum where architect Daniel Libeskind ments from my distant and recent drop to drown an ant. has designed a memorial conceived past: an unmentionable grade anon three axes. nounced by my physics teacher and my solemn recognition that On one axis, that of the holocaust, the names of those while all free-falling objects had a gravity of 9.8 m/s², my grade, murdered is presented with photographs, documents, keepgiven its nonexistent mass, accelerated faster towards the earth; sakes and stories. A second path, the axis of the exile, listed the dour look of the clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles the names of cities where people were reduced to mere when I had failed my driving test a second time and kept insisting names: Lublin, Warsaw, Treblinka, Sachsenhausen, Auswich, to the clerk—even as she and I knew deep inside that I may not Ravensbrück, Dachau. But on a third axis, that of continuhave pressed the clutch—that my rotten Mazda stick shift always ity, rose other names, like flight destinations at an airport groaned when I shifted gears; the chirpy call and greeting from a terminal: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, New York, London, nurse at my yearly physical as she handed me the urine cup and I Bombay, Shanghai, Haifa, Rio de Janeiro. These were the realized that my bladder didn’t have even a drop to drown an ant. names of places to which an oppressed migrant community Thus, the uttering of my name can be a knell sometimes and, fled to locate a nest. naturally, during a recent return from Germany, I started when an Just as I was about to board my flight back to the United Airline agent called out my name into the PA system. I had already States, the agent greeted me with “Hello, Ms. Mohan” even checked in. When I walked up to talk to the agent at the counter, before I handed her my boarding card. I she told me it was about the identification tag on my bag, a minor smiled, surprised that a woman who stared matter. I was relieved. all day at rosters of names had actually reLike that baggage tag, a person’s name is much more than an called my face and my name. n identification label. It hints at arrivals. It speaks of transits and transformations, of paths taken and not completed. Stamped on it Kalpana Mohan writes from California’s Siliis also an idea of home, a place of belonging. con Valley. To read more about her, go to http:// The consequences of inheriting a name were obvious on my kalpanamohan.com. walking tour through the old Jewish neighborhood of Berlin.

108 | INDIA CURRENTS | Northern California November 2015

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the last word

The Mediocre World of Malcolm Gladwell

F

By Sarita Sarvate

Social scientists and psychologists have long challenged or decades, I have wondered about the Malcolm Gladwell Gladwell’s theories and conclusions. But to no avail. His books phenomenon. His nonfiction books sell like hot cakes, his keep on selling. appearances fetch enormous fees, and people claim he is In The Tipping Point, the author explains how fads work. He a genius. Yet, when I read his books with the eye of a scientist, quotes, at length, the example of Hush Puppies shoes, which, I find them full of hyperbole. according to him, became popular because two hipsters walked After trying for years, I finally slogged through the Tipping around New York wearing them. He calls such people “connecPoint and Blink recently. Now, more than ever, I feel that the tors.” He then coins other terms such as “stickiness” of certain Gladwell myth is exactly that, a myth. His position as a staff phenomenon and the “power of context.” writer for the New Yorker has undoubtedly given him credibility To prove his theory of “connectors,” Gladwell uses the and a prestigious platform. But is his success well-deserved? famous experiment of “six degrees of separation,” developed In Blink, the author postulates that intuitive judgments in 1967 by Stanley Milgram, who set out to prove that it about people or situations are often better than detailed took only six acquaintances to pass a letter between two analysis. On the surface, this sounds like an attracYet, The randomly selected people. What most readers don’t tive hypothesis. But then he elaborates with examknow is that the experiment has long been debunked. ples that, with the help of a Niagara of words, he Tipping Point Yet, the Tipping Point was a huge success, perhaps tries to fit into his theory. His first example is was a huge sucbecause corporations, wanting to use Gladwell’s the purchase of an ancient Greek statue by the Getty museum. Expert analyses led the cura- cess, perhaps because theories for marketing and advertising purposes, invited him to speechify. tors to believe that the work was authentic, Ever since the first skeptical review of the Tipyet, on the basis of a visual inspection, other corporations, wanting ping Point in the New York Times, scientists intelexperts concluded that it was a fraud. to use Gladwell’s theolectuals, and journalists have pointed out the thin Does this example prove Gladwell’s point? Not quite, because the Getty still ries for marketing and premises based on which Gladwell over-reaches ended up using chemical and physical analyses advertising purposes, his conclusions. David Brooks, in a Times review of Blink in 2005 quipped that while the “thinto reach its final conclusion. invited him to slicing” part of his brain was enamored of Gladwell’s Sometimes Gladwell reverses course, as in theories, the “thick-slicing” part wanted more than the example of the infamous shooting of Amaspeechify. entertaining anecdotes; he wanted a comprehensive dou Diallo in the Bronx in 1999. In that case, the theory of the whole. And he wanted to know more about cops allegedly inferred that a black man could not be how our brains performed these miracles. Other reviewers standing outside his apartment late at night unless he have pointed out that Gladwell makes the common mistake of was armed, and killed him. You would think that this example confusing correlation with causation. disproves Gladwell’s theory that intuition is superior to analysis Reaction to Gladwell’s latest books, Outliers and David and but he gets around the problem by theorizing that darkness Goliath, have finally reached a crescendo of negativity, so much compromised the cops’ “mind reading” abilities. He claims so that one critic quaintly observed that we may finally be at a that in crisis situations, we suffer from “temporary autism” and tipping point of a realistic assessment of the author’s works. postulates that we can hone our “mind reading” powers by overWhy then do his books keep selling? Another critic explained coming our prejudices. Is your head reeling already? it this way. “Malcolm Gladwell’s books sell because he makes Gladwell coins new expressions like “thin-slicing,” which, dumb people feel smart.” roughly translated, means the ability to discern a situation based I could not agree more. After all, Gladwell himself said, “If on bits of information. “Listening with your eyes,” and “rapid my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then he/she cognition” are also some jargon terms that he manufactures. is not the audience!” What Gladwell is saying is that anyone The trouble is that each of these processes uses a slightly differequipped to properly review the author’s work should not read ent skill. it.

For example, Gladwell quotes a Chicago cardiologist, who, Most writers want just the opposite from their readers. I based on only four diagnostic factors, successfully predicted his could not agree more. n patients’ heart attacks. But, obviously, this was not a case of “mind reading” or “listening with your eyes.” The four factors Sarita Sarvate (www.saritasarvate.com) has pubwere developed after years of painstaking collection of data, lished commentaries for New America Media, which was then “thin sliced.” So what is Gladwell’s point? That KQED FM, San Jose Mercury News, the Oaksometimes intuition works and sometimes it doesn’t or has to land Tribune, and many nationwide publications. be supported or contradicted by data or other skills? What else is new?

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