August 2014

Two Daddies

by Sujatha Ramprasad

Heavenly Kailash Mansarovar

by Anita Kainthla

A Bag of Ashes

by Ravibala Shenoy

Bollywood ies, Literary Knots august 2014 • vol. 28 , no . 5 • www. indiacurrents.com

A conversation between two authors, Manil Suri and A.X. Ahmad, on Bollywood and literature.

Edited by Jeanne E. Fredriksen

The Heart of India I confess. I am guilty of the same careless rhetoric that has marked many conversations post an India vacation. “Clogged roads, smoggy skies, packed malls and dirty, filthy streets,” I could be heard postulating. “Nothing’s changed and nothing ever will,” I continued, in an attempt to further amplify the differences between my past and present. Nods of assent immediately followed my assessment.

In the days since my return, however, I’ve been considering what I had, maybe unconsciously, left out of these explanations. There is no doubt that what I had expounded was the truth. But it wasn’t the only truth. The bridge between one truth and the other occurred on a hot sweltering day in Delhi.

We decide to visit a local market to pick up trinkets for friends and family back home. After a robust round of haggling, pleased with our purchases we make our way back and spy a group of women sitting on a ledge peddling mehendi (henna) applications. After a quick series of negotiations, allowing myself to be cajoled into parting with more money than is seemly, my eighteen-year old twins and I sit down on the ledge.

A few minutes later, a young boy, barely 10 years old, arrives with a shoeshine kit.

He is barefoot, his face is grimy and his

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clothes are threadbare, but he sports an unmistakeable twinkle in his eyes. I am struck. He approaches us and demands to polish our moccasins, sandals and flip-flops.

We laugh at his gall. Encouraged he does a jig and then proceeds to enumerate all the English words he knows: “No, yes, come, go, cheap ...” he says. The mehendi ladies scold him and tell him to be off. He imitates them and then he stares at the deft way they use their cone applicator before proceeding to give them advice. One woman swats at him, and he moves back pretending to fall.

It’s all an act, I tell myself, but I cannot help be charmed.

Once we finish, I pull out some money and hand it to him. He takes it with an impish grin. We have just started walking away, when he comes running and stops us.

Now what? I think. He kneels down and proceeds to tie my daughter’s laces.

As he stands up I meet his ink black eyes and in that moment, I see the paradox that is India.

A land where it is possible for a shoeshine boy to make money despite the fact that none of his customers are wearing polishable shoes.

It is not the conditions of India that define the country. It is its people.

Jaya Padmanabhan

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August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 1

Congratulations!

C

At the award ceremony held at Crowne Plaza in Foster City, CA, India Currents was identified “as a fearless team ready to take on any issue!”

Overall Excellence  Second place: India Currents

“India Currents Magazine,” Vandana Kumar

Editorial  First place: India Currents

“Sandberged and Prototyped,” Jaya Padmanabhan

Columns-Feature  First place: India Currents

 100 Years After the Nobel by Anita Felicelli  The Supplement Cocktail by Arpit Mehta  The Price of Living Long by Lakshmi Mani

Feature Story of a Light Nature  Third Place: India Currents

“From the Man Village into the Jungle,” Kalpana Mohan

Feature Story of a Serious Nature  First Place: India Currents “The Last Straw,” Kavya Padmanabhan

Analysis  First place: India Currents

 Approximating H-4 and

Epsilon’s Worldly Possessions

by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan  Tea by Sarita Sarvate

INDIA CURRENTS

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India Currents took home six prizes at the 37th Annual Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards organized by the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club. An impressive 392 entries were received from media professionals in the 11 Greater Bay Area counties. The awards honored work done in 2013. Entries were judged by the Press Clubs of Cleveland, Florida, Houston, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Orange County, and San Diego.

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2 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

INDIA CURRENTS August 2014 • vol 28 • no 5

Washington, D.C. Edition www.indiacurrents.com

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LIFESTYLE

PERSPECTIVES 1 | EDITORIAL The Heart of India

By Jaya Padmanabhan

32 | BOOKS Reviews of City of Devi and The Last Taxi Ride

By Jeanne Fredriksen,

6 | FORUM Should Marijuana Be Legalized?

By Rameysh Ramdas, Mani Subramani 7 | A THOUSAND WORDS Rehearsing Return

By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan 8 | COMMENTARY Blind

By Gayatri Subramaniam 10 | POLITICS Not Enough to Like Facebook

By Shashi Tharoor 22 | PROFILE Poetic Alchemy

By P. Mahadevan

34 | FINANCE Capital Flows

By Rahul Varshneya

12 | Bollywood Ties, Literary Knots Authors Manil Suri and A.X. Ahmad discuss Bollywood and its influence on their work Edited By Jeanne Fredriksen

24 | Fiction A Bag of Ashes

46 | PERSPECTIVE The Making of a Movie

By Parveen Maheshwari

44 | RECIPE Street Food Entertainment

By Jagruti Vedamati

DEPARTMENTS

Reviews of Bobby Jasoos and Ek Villain

4 | Voices 5 | Popular Articles

By Aniruddh Chawda

18 | About Town 47 | Viewfinder

36 | Travel 48 | THE LAST WORD Otranto—An Italian Poem

By Sarita Sarvate

43 | DEAR DOCTOR Consequence of Careless Words

By Alzak Amlani

By Ravibala Shenoy

30 | Films 28 | PARENTING Two Daddies

By Sujatha Ramprasad

43 | RELATIONSHIP DIVA Is My Friend’s Girlfriend Cheating on Him?

By Jasbina Ahluwalia

Heavenly Kailash Mansarovar

By Anita Kainthla

WHAT’S CURRENT 40 | Cultural Calendar 42 | Spiritual Calendar

August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 3

voices

A Wake-Up Call

I am writing to thank you for publishing the cover story by Jayshree Chander (Hazards of Toxic Spills and Leaks, India Currents, July 2014) about the 1984 Union Carbide Gas Disaster in Bhopal, India and the chemical leak by Freedom Industries earlier this year in West Virginia.

Chander’s article is an important “wake-up” call to citizens and government regulators alike. Thank you to Jayshree Chander for the well-written article, and thank you to India Currents for having the courage to print such an important story.

David Strayer, Los Angeles, California

Reasonable Hindus

Gopi Kallayil’s article (How to Float to the Top, India Currents, July 2014) is a fine piece of literature. Life in this world is full of troubles. How to remain peaceful in a strife-torn world is the question on every mind. Gopi rightly says “Yoga is the answer.” Internet may cost money, but the inner-net costs nothing. Connecting to self is connecting to God. A googler has become a bugler who blows his bugle in praise of yoga. This article is like a bottle of healthy tonic offered free of cost to an agitated mind. When you write, “... most reasonable Hindus. They may not care for the ultra-nationalism and minority-abusing that some Hindutva leaders did, but they do care about their religion, their nation and their place in the world,” you speak for the balanced nationalists who care about India and that goes for many people of Indian origin all over the world.

T.S Krishnamurthi, San Ramon, CA

Want Miracles?

Why are we allowing the Congress to be condescending to Mr. Modi and his achievements in the article by Minister of Parliament Shashi Tharoor (Narendra Modi 2.0?, India Currents, July 2014)?

Modi is the first Prime Minister since Independence who is attempting to do good for the country and make it secular and at the same time safe for the Hindus, and we want miracles. There was little to nothing accomplished in the 67 years

4 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

prior, except divide and rule, and now we want a successful, rich, progressive India in a 100 days or less.

If only we were as critical with the past, we won’t be in such a sorry state now.

Three cheers to Modi.

Usha Kris, India

Teacher Evaluations

Regarding the editorial (Teachers—The Best of Us?, India Currents, July 2012) I think most of us recognize the complexity of teaching and the cognitive demands it makes. We can also agree that there is a small percentage of mediocre teachers with tenure. Mediocre teachers need coaching and mentoring as in any other profession.

Firing them will certainly not help the looming crisis—a 1.2M teacher shortage over the next couple of years. The escalating fight against teacher tenure has less to do with firing bad teachers (frankly, if they were awful teachers, they should not have been granted tenure in the first place) and more to do with school boards and city governments manipulating and stonewalling to gain some advantage over teacher hiring to minimize their bottom line. As in most situations, “follow the money” to the source of the real issue.

I agree with Jaya Padmanabhan—Why join the conflict? Why not propose solutions toward effective professional development and fair evaluation processes? And if all else fails, then by all means, dismiss teachers through a peer review that guarantees due process. After all, tenure does not guarantee employment for life, it only enforces due process dismissal over employment-at-will.

Chandana Reddy-Sinha, Los Altos Hill, CA The ruling by a California Superior court judge, Rolf M.Treu, declaring that teacher tenure protection in California schools is unconstitutional brings to mind a folk story from India in which a grandpa got upset when his visiting grandchildren complained that they were scared at night hearing mice in the attic of the house scratching on the wood frame. Grandpa chose the obvious remedy: he burned the house down to kill all the mice.

Jaya Padmanabhan points out in her editorial that job guarantee is one important incentive to attract and retain good teachers. The learned judge struck that down first. The much maligned teaching profession is still the only group to whom we entrust our greatest asset, our children,

during the most impressionable years of their early life. It is very possible that the nine students who filed the complaint with the court are just a front for the ideologically motivated backers to push their anti-union crusade against the teaching profession. Perhaps these students have good teachers even now. They maybe too distracted to notice the difference.

To be fair, I admit that a two year evaluation is inadequate to sort out the good from the bad teachers before granting tenure.

P. Mahadevan, Fullerton, CA

Motherhood, Change and Love

Several articles in your July 2014 issue resonated with me: Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan on the value of “change,” Dilnavaz Bamboat on the value of “motherhood,” and Vibha Akkaraju who clearly loves her Mac Air and her domesticity. All are beautifully written and make us stretch ourselves.

They are curiously, connected.

Change being inevitable, be it babies, bodies, businesses, the issue actually is: how do we assimilate the new and/or let go of the old? Cultivating “motherly love” or “maatru bhava” helps. It requires of us a host of paradoxical qualities: devotion and dispassion, empathy and discipline, nurturance and sacrifice. We need both Eros and Logos qualities to grow life’s network, to keep it flowing, to keep it trim, to “see” value.

We can sense the presence or absence of this love-quality—be it a family, a website, a book, a business, a person. And of course, it need not be “tethered” to a uterus.

Mala Setty, Long Beach, CA

Contributing to America?

The article by V.V. Sundaram (The Journey to Citizenship, India Currents, July 2012) is great on paper but are the majority of the people immigrating to the United

SPEAK YOUR MIND!

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States doing this for their own selfish motives or just because it suits them and their children? How many are paying taxes on their world wide income and abiding by the laws of this country or even acclimatizing to the American way. There are so many immigrants who are using this for convenience of travel and to receive social benefits. Definitely NOT because they love this great land or for doing volunteer work for numerous organizations and helping others.

Path to Citizenship should not be this easy for this category who are mostly

retired people. Majority of us are hard working tax paying American citizens and struggle to make a living each and every day. We are exhausting our resources by sponsoring people who are not going to really contribute to America but only be a burden on the system. How long will future generations keep paying for this?

The children who sponsor them should be responsible for paying for their medical, not the states who are broke and cannot even take care of their tax abiding citizens.

Jessica, NY

India Currents is now available on the Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/IndiaCurrents/dp/B005LRAXNG Follow us at twitter.com/indiacurrents on facebook.com/IndiaCurrents Most Popular Articles Online July 2014 1) Frenzy on the Maidan Kalpana Mohan 2) Hazards of Toxic Spills and Leaks Jayshree Chander 3) An Ode to My Mac Air Vibha Akkaraju 4) Blood and Guts Vidya Pradhan 5) Motherhood Above All Dilnavaz Bamboat 6) Naredra Modi 2.0?

Shashi Tharoor 7) Counter Valley Thinking Part 11 Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan 8) Pickling Mangoes Sahana Rangarajan 9) A Migratory Bird Flies West Geetika Pathania Jain 10) Women’s Rights and Modi Government Krishan Jeyarajasingham

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forum

Should Marijuana Be Legalized?

No, the cost is too high

Yes, it should be legalized

By Rameysh Ramdas

By Mani Subramani

A

A

Rameysh Ramdas, an S.F. Bay Area professional, writes as a hobby.

Mani Subramani works in the semi-conductor industry in Silicon Valley.

ny impediment to a harmful substance is a good thing.

Keeping marijuana illegal keeps consumption lower than if it was legal, and puts barriers to the sale and access to this drug for teenagers. In support of legalization, the libertarian view is that individuals should be allowed to put whatever they want in their bodies and the liberal view is that the war on drugs has failed and that it has disproportionately impacted minorities. Either is not a sufficient argument to legalize a substance for recreational use that seriously impairs one’s judgment and health.

According to Drugfreeworld.org, “Marijuana smoke contains 50% to 70% more cancer-causing substances than tobacco smoke.

One major research study reported that a single cannabis joint could cause as much damage to the lungs as up to five regular cigarettes smoked one after another. Long-time joint smokers often suffer from bronchitis, an inflammation of the respiratory tract.” Per a recent study by the International Journal of Drug Policy, “Marijuana use among United States high school students is likely to increase as the drug increasingly becomes more legally available.” Similarly, a Colorado State University study estimated that the legalization of pot in Colorado would add over 640,000 rec... is not a sufficient reational users, not argument to legalize a counting “marijuana substance for recreational tourists.” The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiuse that seriously atry (AACAP) warns impairs one’s judgment that legalization would increase access to adoand health. lescents. Researchers at Columbia University found that drugs are playing an increasing role in fatal auto accidents—28% of those in 2010, with marijuana specifically contributing to 12% of that number, up from only 4% in 1999.

Some who advocate legalization have a misperception that our prisons are filled with pot offenders—a Caulkins and Sevigny study found that the percentage in prison for marijuana related offenses was a miniscule 1-2 percent of the population. Obviously, we want those intercepted to be offered treatment and rehabilitation, rather than incarceration.

President Carter got it correct when he said—“I do not favor legalization. We must do everything we can to discourage marijuana use, as we do now with tobacco. “We have to prevent making marijuana smoking from becoming attractive to young people, which is, I’m sure, what the producers of marijuana ... are going to try and do.”

While some states like Colorado and Washington are starting a trend of legalizing marijuana hoping to use it as a cash cow to raise tax revenues, the greater good of society and future generations are sacrificed in the process.

There is not a libertarian, conservative or liberal reason to support the legalization of marijuana. n

6 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

Gallup Poll in late 2013 revealed that a majority of Americans (58%) are now in favor of legalizing marijuana. 23 states and DC have enacted laws to legalize marijuana, most recently, Maryland, Minnesota and New York and there are efforts in place to decriminalize the drug.

Marijuana use is not as harmful as it is made out to be. In fact tetrahydrocannabinol or THC contained in marijuana has been shown to have significant health benefits. CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, wrote in an article titled Why I Changed My Mind on Weed: “Medical marijuana is not new, and the medical community has been writing about it for a long time.

There were in fact hundreds of journal articles, mostly documenting the benefits. Most of those papers, however, were written between the years 1840 and 1930. The papers described the use of medical marijuana to treat ‘neuralgia, convulsive disorders, emaciation,’ among other things.”

Certain formulations have been known to be one of the most effective cures for seizures. Medical marijuana helps as a sleep aid; helps combat nausea due to chemotherapy; and helps with muscle tension, spasms and chronic pain.

In fact Further, marijuana is shown to be much less tetrahydrocannabinol or addictive than cigarettes THC contained in or tobacco. A 2010 study

by The Lancet indicated marijuana has been that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, shown to have significant heroin, crack cocaine, health benefits. methamphetamine, cocaine, tobacco and amphetamine. If alcohol and tobacco are legal, then why shouldn’t marijuana be legal, given that it is less lethal, and less addictive?

Indeed, there have been no deaths reported of marijuana overdose.

These factors have encouraged several states to legalize this drug. As the understanding of this drug expands the more harmful strains can be discouraged in favor of the less harmful or even beneficial strains. This can occur only if it is legalized and controlled.

The status quo is beneficial to drug traffickers and illegal growers. These illegal drugs find their way into the American market and poison our young. According to a recent report on NPR conservative estimates of illegal marijuana trafficking from Mexico run in the billions and account for over 20% of the overall illegal drug money that are going to Mexican warlords. Illicit growers in the country at a minimum are a severe drain on resources like water, energy, and take up a significant portion of the crime fighting resources of counties and cities. On occasion heat lamps used for illegal growing have known to cause forest fires.

For all these reasons legalization of marijuana at a minimum can reduce illegal cross border trafficking, reduce illicit pot farms and create a more effective and regulated market for meeting the obvious demand for this drug. n

a thousand words

Rehearsing Return

By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

T

his month, my mother and brother are making the annual pilgrimage to India, with essential visits to grandmothers, a routine trip to the bank to request ATM pin re-activation, the hasty organization of forgotten stitching and repair work in the days before departure, and a weekend in a tea estate or at the beach, so that they can feel, against all evidence to the contrary, like they’re on vacation.

My mother, who left India in 1979, still insists on traveling “home” with a Ziploc full of stopped watches, a Samsonite with a broken handle (“the mochi will fix it”), and clothes for alteration (a day’s work for the roadside tailor). This, like her well-meaning purchase of chocolates and cologne to distribute amongst bemused relations, is a relic of a different time, when not “everything” (capital speaks the language of inflation) was available for purchase in India, but cheap services were. In our suburban home, a basket of crumpled clothes sits in the laundry room, unironed, awaiting the day that airlines will increase our baggage allowance, and we can schlep the wrinkled kurtas to our favorite press-wala, with his intuitive grasp of creases and pleats.

I’m not going to India this year. It’s the first time in over a decade I’m not making the trip. And, since I live across the country from my parents, I didn’t help pack my mother’s suitcases, either. I didn’t wrap wine bottles in socks, tape shut containers of perfume, label bags with mints and children’s art supplies for their intended recipients, match jewelry and petticoats to saris and shoes for whatever functions we’re planning to attend. I didn’t inventory the family members we’d be seeing (new brides, babies, their ages) and their respective milestones (housewarming, graduation), for which we will congratulate them with gifts of golden raisins, almonds and pistachios, and California wine.

In my family, packing for India is almost as much a production as the trip itself. My mother rushes out the night before we are to leave to pick up one more box of Almond Roca or another body spray. I stamp my feet and tell her that “nobody in India wants these things,” that her gestures are futile, that everyone will laugh at her self-conscious performance of the plenitude of diasporic return. But she ignores me. And year after year, my mother returns to India with suitcases full of gifts for an ever-growing extended family of cousins and second cousins and nieces once removed, all of whom, her overweight luggage seems to say, she feels she has in some way left behind.

I’m not going to India this year because I am moving house, which will take enough time, and because I am finishing my doctoral dissertation, which will take even more. If it were just a matter of flying to India for ten days, I would suffer the days-long journey and go, because I miss and love my grandmothers and it would make them happy (even if, from the moment of my arrival, they’d be consumed by the thought of the inevitable goodbye).

But now I have my own child, who is barely fifteen months old, and does not know that she is the inheritor of my filial piety.

Frankly, I don’t want to deal with her jet lag, sleep regression, possible allergies, and her (ok, my) life’s disruption. I took Mrinalini

I wasn’t born in India. I never left.

Return to India isn’t my calling, but, as Amit Chaudhuri has written of his childhood trips to Calcutta, I’ve “been rehearsing that journey for years.” to India when she was six months old, and it was a remarkable trip.

But I am not yet prepared to make a yearly commitment to return to India on her behalf.

“Return” is the diasporic subject’s imperative, the cross you bear when you leave your community and move to the other side of the world—if, that is, you have a robust sense of familial obligation and the resources (time, money) with which to travel. My parents took my brother and me to India approximately every other year when we were growing up—on the off years, my grandparents would come to us—and somewhere along the way I embraced and internalized the imperative of return as my own.

But I didn’t leave India. I’m not the one who has to return with suitcases brimming with all-American sundries. So why do I feel so bad about not going back?

One of things I work on in my research is the relationship between narratives of arrival and return. The story of diaspora has always been about the competing attachments of a subject between homes, one who returns again and again to an (imagined) origin, whether by pen or by plane. The pull of home, as it has often been remarked, is only matched by the impossibility of ever really going home. Of course, every diaspora has its own story with its own dynamics, whether that is the exclusivist politics of the right of return to Israel, or the slave routes that have had to stand-in for the roots of so many around the world. Return might be chosen, but it is also compelled; deportation is another version of this story. Return to India (Asia more generally) is lately being described as “economically motivated,” but that’s only one face of the beast. Bound up in every assertion that “the East is the new West” are the ambivalent attachments and preoccupations borne of having left the first place that you called home.

I wasn’t born in India. I never left. Return to India isn’t my calling, but, as Amit Chaudhuri has written of his childhood trips to Calcutta, I’ve “been rehearsing that journey for years.” The packing, the arrival, the reunion, the parting: performances that are as much a part of my muscle memory as the first day of school and Christmas morning. Not going to India feels like not brushing my teeth before leaving the house. Something is not quite right. Later, it will come to me—the knowledge of the thing undone, and the resolve to make amends.

Until then, everything will feel just a little bit off. n Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 7

Blind

commentary

How do we deal with cultural insensitivity?

By Gayatri Subramaniam

L

ast week, I was at a Notary Public office, getting some papers signed to send to my mother in India. I had taken a couple of witnesses with me—my friend Prema and my husband. A woman came into the office and engaged in some banter with the notary for a few minutes.

They appeared to be friends or sisters and the exchange had an argumentative edge to it. The banter subsided as the notary started to work with me, and the woman decided to make small talk with my introverted husband, starting by complimenting his clothes. I could see she’d crossed a boundary with him and invaded his space, but it was not my priority at the moment.

As I was explaining to the notary that I was re-doing the paperwork because the Indian bureaucracy had not approved of some small detail, her friend chimed in that we should have put in $20 in an envelope if it was for India, and that would have solved everything. A bribe, in other words.

I continued to focus on the notary, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw my husband whip around and say to her, “That is quite offensive.” I flinched slightly, but I could see his point. The woman responded with a surprising, “Yes, it is.” (In retrospect, I think she thought the idea of having to pay a bribe was offensive, not her comment!) Then the conversation became white noise in the background as I focused on the paperwork and said my goodbyes to the two women.

As we walked out, my husband said, “I cannot believe you were so nice to that woman! I wanted to cut off all conversation with her and there you were, happily saying goodbye as if nothing had happened.”

Apparently, I’d missed the part where the woman had gone on to say, “This is a huge problem over there (in India). We do things differently here. They really need to fix it.” My husband couldn’t believe that she could call an entire country of people corrupt, when there were two Indians in the room who were not. And there was something about the distancing and dismissive “they” who needed to fix things unlike “us” who are seemingly perfect here, that really irked him.

I’ve been thinking about this conversation all week. Did my husband overreact?

8 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

A Creative Commons Image Did I underreact? The thing is … although there are times when I might be offended and simply do not find the nerve to speak up, this was not one of them. No doubt I thought it was the truth. After all, if another Indian had said it to me, we would’ve ruefully shaken our heads together about the palm-greasing that moves things in India. Even the Broadway hit (Avenue Q) pays a playful tribute with the song, “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist:” Ethnic jokes might be uncouth, But you laugh because they’re based on truth.

Don’t take them as personal attacks.

Everyone enjoys them—So relax!

Perhaps I was trying to allow her that gaffe, given that I felt bad for largely ignoring her while I was working with the notary, even though the woman had been rude in the first place to interject herself into a business conversation that did not concern her. Whatever my reason maybe I was supposed to have been as offended as my husband was.

Oh, did I mention that my husband is not Indian?

A few years ago, I took a class with a professor who went to great lengths to explain white privilege. As a white man, he continues to struggle with it and he is very focused on teaching people to recognize the subtleties of privilege imbued in the dominant culture. At the time, I argued with him that I had seldom, in my 30 years in this country, felt the ugly glare of discrimination. My experiences were

in graduate school and the Silicon Valley workforce—not your typical place to call out my race or country of origin. I have Indian friends who would disagree. However, I told him, when I think someone is being unpleasant to me, I simply attribute the attitude to their having a bad day and it having nothing to do with me. Or maybe growing up in India as part of the dominant culture (with the privilege of education, and an unspoken understanding of what an upper caste assignment entails), gives me a certain immunity even when transplanted into another culture. The professor did not say much, but I’m fairly sure he thought I was being blind or passive.

I have not felt the need to defend India or my Indianness to anyone (except other Indians who accuse me of not being Indian enough because I don’t love the spiciest of spicy foods or wrapping six yards of sari around my small frame). And yet, my husband seems to see things and stand up for things I do not feel the need to defend.

I suspect subtle racism is there all the time.

I don’t necessarily mean overt acts of hostility, but stereotyping, and assumptions, based on one’s life experiences, are par for the course.

When my daughter was a toddler, she was at Macy’s with my husband, laughingly pushing her stroller up against his legs as he paid at the counter. The saleswoman snapped, “Ugh, wonder where the child’s mother is! I’m so sorry.” My husband replied that it was all right, and he was the child’s father. The woman responded, “No, you’re not.” Granted, my genes won in this case and there is not a trace of German in that beautiful little being I call my child, but my husband, shocked, and not knowing whether to laugh or be insulted, repeated that he was the dad. The woman retreated quickly with, “Oh, she just looks so exotic …” Nice save, lady, but not enough. Calling my child exotic did not negate all the insinuations of the previous five minutes.

I say this now, 15 years after the event.

And yet … I was absent at the time, but I know that if I had been there, I would not have reacted to that situation either. I might’ve cringed internally at her tone, but I would not have taken it into the broader realm of the distinctions between “us” and

Gayatri Subramaniam is a San Jose-based instructional designer and writer. She is an ardent tennis fan who believes that if she had only been taller, stronger, faster, and blessed with more talent, she would’ve been a Grand Slam champion.

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“them” that was probably the undercurrent of that conversation. No, I would’ve smiled and said “thanks.”

So what is my point? The event last week made me look again at the delicacy of the boundaries of what is acceptable to say and by whom. I don’t often see discriminatory behavior until someone points it out to me. I wonder if I have thicker skin than most or of it is my reluctance to confront anyone because I don’t want to be thought of as hypersensitive or having a chip on my shoulder. Or is it that piece of middle-class educated India that taught me that dignity meant being polite, brushing off insults and holding my head up high?

I believe earnestly in what Kofi Annan had to say on the subject—“Our mission … is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity.” There is nothing there about being offended and reacting with anger. Still, encounters like the one we had last week nag at me as I get older, and it is unsettling. It’s not that I have suddenly discovered the existence of subtle insults; it’s deciphering my responsibility when I am faced with them. I now carry that dubious label of “mature with life experience” so it might be my lot to educate, as my husband attempted to do.

Then there is role modeling to consider, as I wonder if my kids view my conciliatory ways as classy and dignified, or lacking in assertiveness. Unlike my old self of 20 years ago, I could not even be annoyed with my husband last week for what I would have called “making a scene” in public. Age, wisdom, and my children’s experiences growing up as first generation Americans have made me zoom in on nuances I used to miss.

I need bifocals these days, and yet, in another sense, it’s as if a little windshield wiper went across my eyes and brought some things startlingly close. Blindness, clouded vision, or passivity—call it what you will, it was a comfortable and comforting place to be. But tendrils of discomfort and irritation are curling around me, because when I am forced to look at the subtle yet complex nature of cultural and racial denigration, I have to make choices about how to deal with it. It’s like having had a cataract operation I did not want. Ironic … since my husband is an optometrist! n

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politics

Not Enough To Like Facebook

E

very once in a while a story slips through the media net that might have received more attention at a different time.

A week before Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presented this year’s budget to the Lok Sabha, Prime Minister Modi met Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg in Delhi. The fact that he thus became probably the first Prime Minister anywhere to devote time to a social media executive should not surprise us—he has, for some time now, shown his considerable penchant for 21st century methods of mass communication. That he asked her, in his own words, “about ways through which a platform such as Facebook can be used for governance and better interaction between the people and governments” is fascinating too, and I can’t wait to see what new methods of government-citizen interaction emerge from their conversation. But what I found most striking was the news that the key issue Modi asked Sandberg to help India with was sanitation.

Public hygiene was, of course, one of the topics that candidate Narendra Modi had raised in his election speeches, and it featured among the issues mentioned by Prime Minister-elect in his first public address in Varanasi after his victory. Many will recall the backlash he received from his usual supporters on the Hindu right when he declared some months ago that toilets were more important to him than temples. Still, it seems an odd topic to raise with a Facebook executive. The Economic Times reported that when asked by Sandberg how her company could help the Prime Minister achieve his objectives, he mentioned sanitation. “India has vast tourism potential but poor cleanliness standards hold it back,” the paper reports Modi as telling the Facebook COO. On the face of it, it’s an odd request. But the Prime Minister confirmed it was raised, in his own Facebook post: India intends, he declared, “to commemorate Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary year (2019) with a special focus on cleanliness and I spoke to Ms. Sandberg on how Facebook can assist us in this endeavour.”

How exactly will Facebook do that?

It is quite common these days for technoenthusiasts to turn to social media for pretty much everything ... but cleaner streets? Better waste disposal? More and cleaner public toilets? Surely matters like open defecation are far too tangibly physical to lend them10 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

By Shashi Tharoor

Surely matters like open defecation are far too tangibly physical to lend themselves to “virtual” solutions? selves to “virtual” solutions? The call of nature, after all, doesn’t occur in cyberspace, but in the real and limited public space we all live in, and for too many of our fellow Indians, in open fields, against walls, and on our roadsides.

There isn’t much detail on offer from Sandberg herself. Sure enough, she publicized the meeting on Facebook. The Indian Prime Minister “believes that direct communication with people all over the world is critical to effective governance and he plans to continue using Facebook and other social media to communicate with the people of India and the world,” Sandberg revealed.

No surprises there. But sanitation didn’t feature big in her post. “The prime minister asked us to develop local content and reach out to more languages,” Sandberg declared (Facebook is currently available in nine Indian languages). So can we look forward to multilingual versions of that quaint wallsign, “Make No Nuisance?”

Jokes apart, how exactly would Facebook “assist the government in all its endeavours,” as Sandberg is believed to have assured Modi? More precisely, how would Facebook help India address its vexed, visible and smelly problems of public hygiene?

No clue. Apparently when Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad asked Sandberg about the areas in which Facebook could assist the Indian government, she replied by proposing “cooperation in the fields of health and education, referring to her experience as a World Bank research assistant in Madhya Pradesh in 1991,” according to the Economic Times again, the only publication that seems to have taken an interest in the content of the meeting.

What little we know officially about the entire episode, in other words, raises more questions than it answers. One obvious use of social media outlets like Facebook is in putting out information about what the government is doing and seeking public participation, suggestions and feedback as inputs into the process. Doing this for a campaign on sanitation would not only raise public awareness—the usual “agenda

setting” function of any media, including social media —but also promote civic engagement. Since Facebook has 100 million users in India, a number that keeps growing, it could serve as the catalyst for a major national effort to engage the Indian public in the cause of improving public hygiene.

(And, since Modi is nothing if not a shrewd politician, add to his support base of followers and fans, and expand his multi-million strong list of potential backers in the next election.)

But—there is a “but.” The sanitation problem is neither caused by, nor affects the basic existence of, the 100 million Indians who are educated enough to use Facebook.

It’s a nuisance and an inconvenience to have around us, but India’s internet users are unlikely to live in homes without toilets, or have to take a lota to the fields in the morning, or seek to perform our ablutions when it’s too dark to be observed. The challenge of addressing public sanitation in our country is to reach those who suffer those privations.

So Facebook can serve as a springboard, but not as an exclusive platform. It can at best help kick-start the process of constructing a virtual community to mount a campaign on cleanliness. But to reach and help the people most affected, the government will need grassroots engagement, and Facebook can’t provide that by itself. It will take a concerted effort by central and state governments, political workers, the best brains in the advertising community, the most committed activists in the non-profit sector, and sanitation specialists like Sulabh International, to come together in a massive public education effort that actually mobilizes people to transform our culture of public hygiene.

And even that won’t be enough. Awareness is half the battle, but only half. Then the government will actually have to go out and build the toilets, install the dustbins, improve the drainage facilities, create waste management systems and improve public sanitation. You can’t do that on Facebook, Modiji. But getting the denizens of social media to spend more time on toilets than trolling would be a good place to start. n Shashi Tharoor, MP from Thiruvananthapuram and the Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development, is the author of 14 books, including, most recently, Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century. This article was first published on NDTV.

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cover

Bollywood Ties, Literary Knots In conversation with authors A.X. Ahmad and Manil Suri Edited By Jeanne Fredriksen

Manil Suri

A.X. Ahmad

Manil Suri, author of Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva, and City of Devi and A.X. Ahmad, author of The Caretaker (IC, September 2013) and the recently-released The Last Taxi Ride—books one and two of the Ranjit Singh Trilogy, first met at one of Suri’s evening readings. They chatted politely despite being famished. When both confessed their hunger, they ended up becoming friends over dinner. This conversation of literary minds took place at Suri’s home, where they sat at his dining table and transported themselves to India via their conversation about Bollywood’s influence on society, their lives, and their writing.

AX: When did Hindi movies become “Bollywood?” We used to call them “Hindi movies” in childhood.

MS: I don’t know, I think for me there was a gap. I left India in 1979, and they were called “Hindi movies.” Then I didn’t see Hindi movies while I was here in the States. By the time I went back to India and started seeing them again, they had become “Bollywood.” Things changed somewhere along the way. I think even in the 70s once in a while you would see the term “Bollywood” used in film magazines like Stardust.

I confess I used to read it.

AX: My grandmother used to get Stardust! It was the most glamorous magazine around. So 12 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

was your first interest in the movies through Stardust, or did you get interested in the movies and then read Stardust?

MS: I was interested in the movies for a long time, and that led me to Stardust and all the other magazines—Filmfare, Star & Style, Film World. We used to borrow them from the local circulating library, which would rent out each magazine for 25 paise.

AX: So, what are your earliest memories of Bollywood and your favorite movies?

MS: I’m trying to remember the first movie I ever saw. I remember I was dragged to some old black-and-white movie with Mala Sinha, and I started crying. That was a horrible experience! After that, I remem-

ber some of the older movies like Sangam.

I remember that was a big one. I saw it five times! Also, Shammi Kapoor’s movies kind of stick in my mind, especially Junglee.

What about you?

AX: Pakeezah sticks in my mind. I think that was the early 70s, and I must have been about five or six. My grandmother was a big movie fan, and we lived in Park Circus in Calcutta which had these socalled “movie houses.” They were really run down, and the same movies would play forever. People would just go and watch them over and over. I remember watching Pakeezah and seeing Meena Kumari dancing. It made a big impact on me, and I ended up mentioning that movie in my

Meena Kumari in Pakeezah

new novel, The Last Taxi Ride.

MS: I remember Pakeezah became big once Meena Kumari died just after it was released. That’s when it started getting the “house full” signs. Sholay, of course, was destined to be this huge movie. Before that, the other movie that comes to mind was Mera Naam Joker, which was a big flop. Some rival producers were trying to make it a flop by buying up tickets and then selling them for one rupee! The next one was Bobby. My mother actually stood in line for about eight hours at Metro Cinema in Bombay for the advance booking so we could get tickets for the first week.

AX: The same Metro Cinema which you blew up in your latest novel, City of Devi?

MS: Yes! That’s right!

AX: You have a great description of the blownup movie theater in your novel—the front of it destroyed so that one could see all the seats inside. It had become an amphitheater, like a coliseum!

MS: It was strange because I started City of Devi in the year 2000, and at that time, Metro was still just one theater. By the time I was midway through, it became a Cineplex, so I had to make a little change in the novel.

AX: You have the Metro Cinema in your book, and I have the Eros Theater in Mumbai in my book. Those art-deco movie halls from the 30s were beautiful—huge and gorgeous. I have this movie star called Shabana Shah who has a small role in a movie. She goes incognito with the director to Eros Theater to watch the first showing and to see how the crowd reacts. They boo the main heroine, but they really like Shabana. So Shabana and the director go across the road to wait in a chai shop. They know that if the audience, especially the young guys, like the movies, they are going to go back and see it again. In my book, all the young guys go and pee against the walls, buy their one cigarette, and go back and buy tickets. Shabana’s first movie is a hit!

MS: I remember I used to stand in line every Monday. I used to come back from school at 4:30, and then we would take a bus and stand in line, usually at this small theater called Lotus in Worli. It’s closed down now, but it was a nondescript place, and you could easily get tickets. I think we watched English movies once in a while, but we used to watch Hindi movies much more often. I think by the time I got to college, it had started switching. English movies had become much more interesting by then, and Hindi movies had started abating.

AX: Because Hindi movies were so formulaic?

MS: Probably. I had just watched a lot of them and started thinking, “OK, I’m above this somehow.” I was in college and wanted to show that I was cool.

AX: I think that says something about India in the 70s. There was this big divide between homegrown versus foreign. All the Hindi movies were homegrown and easily available. The foreign movies, the English movies, came two or three years after they were released in the West.

I thought they were very glamorous, especially something like the latest James Bond. That was an incredible escape into another world.

MS: I think back then we were always looking to the West for what was really good, and there was this tendency to look down upon desi stuff. Now that’s not so much the case.

AX: I went to boarding school in Dehradun in the 1970s, and we had to watch movies on Saturday nights. It was called “Compulsory Entertainment,” so my memory of Hindi movies is sitting out in an amphitheater. They’d put up a sheet and screen the movies. I was a small kid then, and for some of the movies, I would fall asleep in the middle. I would wake up half an hour later, but I still knew what was happening because the plot was so predictable.

We watched Sholay, and everybody at school could recite the dialogues from Sholay.

MS: I think the one thing we didn’t say about Bollywood is that the term started as a funny thing. It was not serious. Then it just seemed to gain more respectability, but there was always something disreputable about it, a little bit self-deprecating. Something that implied that the movies were over the top, that they were not completely serious. But even now, do you think it is a straight term?

“Do people know what Bollywood is?” The only guy in the room who didn’t know it was in his eighties. Everyone else said, “Oh yeah, Bollywood, we know what it is!” I think a lot of it has come through the film Slumdog Millionaire because it has some Bollywood elements.

I read in an interview on the book blog “Bookslut” that you said your father was connected to Bollywood as a music director.

MS: He was an assistant music director who worked with Madan Mohan and then with Laxmikant-Pyarelal. He helped them do mostly recordings, so I would go to the recording studio called “Famous Labs.” That was interesting, but the more interesting thing was seeing some of these movies in previews before they were released. The one I remember the most was Caravan.

AX: Did you think your dad had a glamorous job?

MS: Not really. It was more technical.

Once in a while, Lata Mangeshkar or Asha Bhosle would be downstairs, and my father would talk to them from the balcony about the next day’s recording. The glamorous one in my family was actually my aunt who was an actress. She came to Bombay and became an actress. Her father had to come from Lahore to take her back, but meanwhile she had

AX: I think it’s become a straight term, an unironic term. I did a reading at a book festival recently with an American crowd. I asked, August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 13

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in 1966. That was one of the big ones. The one that really stands out is An Evening in Paris from 1967. You don’t just see Paris, you see everything. You see Lebanon, Beirut, Switzerland. In one scene, they are in Paris, then someone says, “OK, meet me at Mt. Rushmore tomorrow,” and they end up at Mt. Rushmore in the United States, and they have their final climactic fight there!

AX: People weren’t critical of it because they really wanted to travel through the movies. For some reason Switzerland was big. You’d always see the Alps.

MS: The snow!

already acted in two films! This was in the 40s, just before Partition. One of her movies Safar, was a big hit in 1946; the other one wasn’t. She was an actual heroine. Her screen name was Shobha.

So your grandfather also wanted to be in the movies?

AX: My grandfather’s is not such a glamorous story because he had a tea and jute business that he inherited from his father. But he knew all of the latest Hindi film songs, and he would sing them. He had a big gold ring, and he would go shh shh, and make sounds with his ring as he sang. It’s actually quite sad because my grandfather was completely unsuited for business. In fact, he ended up going bankrupt and then died of a heart attack. Many years later, my uncle was cleaning his house out and said, “Nana has all this stuff. I don’t know what to do with it.” I saw that my grandfather had ten or fifteen notebooks—those exercise books. He had composed his own songs and written them in the books. I still have those notebooks of his.

MS: There are a lot of people who came to Bombay with dreams about Bollywood.

One of my cousins’ daughters came to Mumbai to see if she could become a film actress. She had won beauty contests and all, but the casting couch is still very much in evidence. The lecherous, leering producers would say, “Well, come and meet me at 2 a.m.” It was so awful, she fled back to London. I think that’s why so many of the actors you see are children of established actors. They don’t have to go through this.

AX: Did Bollywood influence our imaginations? For me, at least, my first glimpse of abroad was through Hindi movies. It would be a big deal if there were a scene shot in Switzerland.

MS: Absolutely. Who used to go abroad in the 60s? I remember seeing Love in Tokyo

AX: And people singing songs and running through the Alpine meadows! I remember at one point there was also a craze in South Indian restaurants: one entire wall would be a wallpaper of the Alps.

MS: The movies at that time were very escapist. Even now, you still see the same thing. It’s just a little more integrated into the plot. I just saw Queen. That’s about this woman who gets jilted on her marriage date, and she decides to go on her honeymoon anyway, so she ends up in France and Amsterdam.

AX: So why do you think the Bollywood formula has such a hold on the Indian imagination?

MS: If you look at the history, at the beginning, Bollywood movies were similar to Hollywood musicals.

AX: Like Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock.

MS: Somehow the musical persisted in India, this escapist masala idea. In Hollywood, it died down. Also, things in India advanced much slower. If you look at the 50s through the early 80s, things remained the same, whereas in America, things were changing more rapidly. India never had the hippie culture of the 60s and all those waves of different influences because it was much more protected. It makes sense that the entertainment, too, would stay the same.

AX: There’s been so much of an overlap between my childhood and my parents’ childhood. It was pretty much the same. The same books. The same kind of things. Even the cars remained the same for years: Ambassador, Fiat, and a few Standard Heralds. For years those were the only cars on the road. I would go back from the States, and years would pass, but it would feel exactly the same.

MS: Bollywood has changed so much in the last few years, and that makes sense because there’s so much influence now from the outside. It’s become so much

more international.

AX: Here’s a follow-up question: Is Bollywood the most important binding element among Indians and why?

MS: I think that when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, it was definitely the most binding element for all of Indian society. Someone on the street would know the names of the famous actors, and the wealthiest person would as well. That’s still true. If you go to India, and you see newspapers like Times of India with its Bombay Times insert, out of eight pages, at least five or six are devoted to Bollywood. Just photographs of these people, articles on these stars. Then, for expatriate Indians, there’s a question of nostalgia and trying to keep up your cultural connections. Bollywood is one of the easiest ways that you can plug back into India, especially in this country.

If you go and see a Bollywood movie in a theater on a Friday night with an Indian audience, you can almost imagine you’re back in India. What’s interesting is that Indian-Americans who grew up here are also plugged into it.

AX: Bollywood is fun. It’s sexy.

MS: And people who didn’t grow up in that culture in India also see Bollywood movies. These are kids who are born here— who are going to let’s call them white American schools—they see these movies at home, which maybe their parents were watching on video, and they are so addictive that they get hooked. I know some people who grew up here and are avid Bollywood moviegoers. So yes, there is something to the statement that Bollywood is really one of the more important elements that binds Indians together.

AX: Let’s talk about Bollywood and our writing. I really enjoyed your latest novel, City of Devi. There is a Bollywood movie in your book that has a devastating effect on the country and leads to a situation where the whole city of August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 15

food, live in basement apartments, and spend all their time driving. I used some Bollywood masala storytelling, but you have really taken it to the next level in your novel.

MS: I was trying to be more tonguein-cheek. I’m trying to play with the Bollywood genre.

An iconic scene from the movie Sholay with Sanjeev Kumar and Amjad Khan

Mumbai could be wiped out.

MS: City of Devi has this make-believe movie called Superdevi. In it is this child from the slums who has superpowers. I wanted to play on the Jai Santoshi Maa phenomenon where the movie of that name just took over the country. It was about a previously almost-unknown goddess who people made very popular. The same things happen with Superdevi. People start thinking she’s real. I also wanted to play with the phenomenon of the television series, Ramayana, which was shown on TV all over India, because that show had a political component. Some people say that it helped the BJP come to power. Everyone watched it, there was a resurgence of religious feeling in the country, and the country turned towards the right. I wanted to show that aspect, too, so in my novel, Superdevi results in the country turning toward the right, riots breaking out, and minorities coming under fire.

AX: I believe this could happen. You just took reality one step farther.

MS: Essentially, what I’m trying to say in jest is that Bollywood is going to destroy the world! Superdevi is its dark side! The book is made to reflect on some of the larger-than-life aspects of Bollywood movies. The Superdevi herself arrives in one scene, she’s made up like a Bollywood star, and there are special effects and all of that.

Once I got into this, the whole book became immersed in this Bollywood imagery.

AX: And Bollywood story-telling, too.

MS: Yes. It was a deliberate playing with the genre. My book is about the end of the world seen through the eyes of Bollywood, and that was something I liked because it gave the novel the right flair.

You don’t want the end of the world to be depressing! If you’re going to go out, go out in Bollywood style!

AX: Did you extrapolate apocalyptic scenarios 16 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

from television series like the Ramayana? Or did you start out writing a post-apocalyptic novel?

MS: I never knew whether there would be an apocalypse or not, but it was definitely a pre-apocalypse! There’s definitely this danger of the apocalypse possibly occurring. Then I had to explain where it came from, so I made Bollywood the culprit. So tell me how you use Bollywood in your new novel, The Last Taxi Ride.

AX: For me, the Bollywood connection came from real life. I was having lunch in a cab driver restaurant, Curry in a Hurry, in Murray Hill in New York City. A lot of cab drivers go there to eat, and these two desi cabbies were sitting next to me. One kept insisting that he had given a ride to film star Shabana Azmi in his cab, and the other guy said, “No, Shabana is not in New York City, you’re making this stuff up, you’re crazy.” I listened to them argue for half an hour while eating their lunch. I never thought of Bollywood film stars being in New York, so I created a fictional Bollywood film star, a beautiful woman who has come to New York because her career is over. She’s made some bad moves; her movies were financed by the Mumbai mafia, and once that was revealed, her career was over. So now she’s living in New York and trying to restart her life.

MS: This really happens in Mumbai.

The film world and the mob are connected!

AX: Anupama Chopra has written a great book on Bollywood. I used some of the real-world incidents she describes and extrapolated them into fiction. So the movie star in my novel—Shabana Shah—is now in New York, and she gets murdered. I tell her entire life story, from the time she was a young girl, in flashbacks that are interspersed throughout the book. Her life has a very Bollywood arc because she has a lover who disappears, and she doesn’t know if he’s dead or still alive. Her life is glamorous, like a Bollywood movie, and that’s juxtaposed with this other New York cab driver world which is grim. The cab drivers eat bad

AX: So what book should be made into a Bollywood movie but hasn’t?

MS: I think in terms of a Bollywood movie, City Of Devi is ready! I also keep thinking of my first novel, Death of Vishnu, which I would love to see as a Bollywood musical.

AX: Wow! Death of Vishnu is a very realistic novel. It’s about a man who is dying, and he lives on the landing of an apartment building in Mumbai.

MS: Vishnu is fantasizing, and there are many dream sequences. The reason I started thinking about a musical is because there is so much information in that novel that could be passed on through song. That would be an easy way of immersing people in what’s going on. Have the songs as part of the storytelling!

AX: If City of Devi was made into a Bollywood movie, you’d lose the irony. It would be made straight up. Could you do it ironically?

MS: I think all Bollywood films are sort of ironic. They always have a tinge of irony or self-referential humor, but I think that most people don’t get irony anyway.

AX: My novel, The Last Taxi Ride. I could see it as a cool indie-type Bollywood movie.

MS: It’s set in New York, which is great for Bollywood, too.

AX: Unlike you, I lack the ability to create the Bollywood fantasy element. I tend to write depressing stuff.

MS: Just throw in a few songs! The taxi driver could be driving his car and singing along!

AX: That’s a great idea! Now hopefully someone will read this interview and make our books into Bollywood movies! Thanks, Manil. This was a great conversation. n For reviews of The Last Taxi Ride and City of Devi, see pages 32 and 33.

Jeanne E. Fredriksen lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where she freelances in advertising and public relations. Between assignments, she writes fiction, enjoys wine, and heads to the beach as often as she can.

August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 17

South Asian Film Festival R

enowned filmmaker Prakash Jha and accomplished actor, director and social activist Nandita Das will be among headliners at the third Washington, DC, South Asian Film Festival (DC SAFF), in Gaithersburg, MD, from September 12 to 14.

Executive Director, Manoj Singh

The festival will start on September 12 with a red carpet gala reception followed by the opening ceremony, which be attended by acclaimed artists from India, according to the organizers.

“The theme of DCSAFF 2014 is Experience different culture through films,” the festival Executive Director Manoj Singh said in an interview. He said the festival will feature Hindi movies, as well as regional films from India and movies from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

A prominent feature of the festival, hosted by Ceasar Productions, will be a retrospective of Jha, who is known for socio political films such as Gangajaal and multi-starrers Rajneeti and Satyagraha. The veteran director-actor-writer’s two critically acclaimed works, the1985 film Damul and 18 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

Bawandar (2000) and Before the Rains (2007).

Pakistani director Iram Parveen Bilal, whose film Josh will be screened, is another filmmaker from the subcontinent who is scheduled to attend the festival. Singh said names of more directors and actors that will be attending the festival will be announced soon.

In all, more than 15 features films and short Nandita Das and Shabana Azmi in Deepa Mehta’s Fire films will be screened during the three-day festival.

1997 movie Mrityudund, will be among The DCSAFF will also pay tribute to the main attractions this year. the late actor Farooq Sheikh by screenDamul, set in the Bihar of mid-1980s, ing his last film Club 60. Sheikh, who depicts bonded labor, exodus of laborers died last December, attended the festival and caste politics. It won the National in 2013.

Film Award for Best Feature Film in 1984.

Singh, who runs Ceasar ProducMrityudund, which deals with social and tions, along with his wife, Geeta Anand gender politics in Bihar, featured three Singh, said the first and second editions celebrated actors, Madhuri Dixit, Shabana of the festival each attracted more than Azmi and Om Puri.

3,000 film buffs. “We received great Das is known for her performances in reviews from our visiting artists on our classics such as Fire (1996), Earth (1998), website and attendees.”

For the first time, the DCSAFF will be screened at movie theaters this year.

Singh said by moving the venue to AMC Loews Rio Cinemas, festival goers can have a true movie experience this year.

The inaugural festival was held at the Universities at Shady Grove campus, while in the second one was at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Gaithersburg, MD. Film personalities who attended the festival in the first two years include, besides Sheikh, Shyam Benegal, Deepti Naval, Manisha Koirala, Goutam Ghose, Sarita Joshi, Sanjay Suri, Pooja Batra, Avinash Singh, Jaideep Verma and Meher Jaffri. n Director, Prakash Jha

Catch ’em Young Entrepreneurship Boot Camp

By Kevin Manuel

W

hat are the keys to becoming a good entrepreneur? How can one translate a good idea into a great company and a fabulous product?

What are the best ways to raise money for your first business? These are some of the fundamental questions that all start-up founders grapple with.

In July, some 41 students from various high schools in the Washington metropolitan area learned and practiced the skills needed to be successful innovators at a 10day boot camp held from July 7 to 18 at the George Mason University.

The TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) bootcamp was organized by Satyam Priyardarshy, chief data scientist at Halliburton Corporation, and Mahesh Joshi, director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at George Mason. Priyadarshy is also the president-elect and a board member of TiE DC. It was the fourth installment of the entrepreneurial boot camp.

Mahesh Joshi

The camp featured presentations by leading professionals in the area of business, entrepreneurship and law, including the Pillsbury Law Firm, which gave a presentation on the legal aspects of running a business. Additionally, students were given a chance to form groups and work together

Students at the TiE boot camp with Satyam Priyardarshy and Mahesh Joshi.

to create entrepreneurial plans for a business or idea of their choice.

“I see a great change in terms of confidence, being more aware of the world and a willingness to take rejection,” said Joshi.

“Part of my job is listening to students’ ideas and telling them why it will not work.

So they have to tweak it and tinker with it… I promote tinkering of ideas. The biggest benefit I see from Day One to Day Ten is students tinkering with ideas.”

The program was also attended by Kavitha Priyadarshy, daughter of Satyam Priyadarshy, and a budding entrepreneur herself. This year she got a chance to work on a new project that required using the skills she learned at previous camps.

“We came up with a safety wrist band connected to an app which would help stop attacks on kids and college students,” she said, while describing her experience at the camp. “I’ve been attending the camp for the past three years, but this year I really got to apply that into our business plan.”

Satyam Priyadarshy has seen the camp flourish from its inception just five years ago. “There is need for training young people to become entrepreneurs,” he said, “and the best time to start, based on my experience, is during high school.”

The students have also matured dur-

ing these camps and Priyadarshy is aware of this fact. “We have seen their overall presentation style, engagement with the team, their leadership scores, and now they understand the various nuances of an entrepreneurial business. They can talk more effectively in terms of what the financial model should be, what product and service they should be doing, and they can research better and become competitive in the market,” he added.n

Satyam Priyardarshy August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 19

Bharatanatyam Arangetrams

Amanda Abraham of Baltimore MD, student of Janaki Sivaraman, Artistic Director of Nrithyashala, had her aranagetram on June 14. Amanda, has won several awards in dance competitions, and is planning to attend the George Washington University in Washington, DC, this Fall.

Monica and Sarah Perumattam of Severn, MD, are students of Revathi Kumar, Artistic Director of Abhinaya Natya Sala in Ellicott City, MD. Their arangetram took place in Owings Mills, MD, on June 21. Monica plays violin in the Maryland Youth Symphony Orchestra, and is planning to attend the Washington University in St. Louis this Fall. Sarah is currently a sophomore at the Catholic High School of Baltimore.

Sunitha Venugopal, a Baltimore resident and a pediatrician by profession, is a student of Vatsala Srinivas, Artistic Director of Natya Kala Mandir School of Indian Classical Dance in Cockeysville MD. Venugopal had her arangetram in Bel Air, MD, on July 13.

Shivai Patel of Dulles, VA student of Sheela Ramanath, Artistic Director of Kalavaridhi Center for Performing Arts, Herndon VA, had her arangetram on June 28. Her performance took place at the Ernst Community Cultural Center in Annandale VA.

Meghana and Samira Annadata of Reisterstown, MD are students of Janaki Sivaraman, Artistic Director of Nrithyashala. They had their arangetrams on June 15. Besides her passion for dance Meghana’s interests include singing, piano and flute. She is planning to attend the University of Maryland in College Park. Samira, who is a 9th grader at Pikesville High School, has folk, ballet, jazz and tap among her other dance interests.

Photos: Bala Chandran, Asian Ocean Media.

20 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

BAPS Health Fair

S

cores of medical professionals volunteered their time and knowledge to help serve patients in need of healthcare at the 12th Annual BAPS Charities Health Fair in Beltsville, Maryland, on July 16.

The turnout for the fair was extraordinary, with 84 paramedics and 45 additional medical professionals servicing more than 500 patients. Doctors who gave their time to the health fair were specialists in fields such as cardiology, ophthalmology, pediatrics, dentistry, and psychiatry, to name a few.

The Health Fair was one of 37 that BAPS has hosted, and they plan to host more over the course of this year as part of a series of health fairs that aim to raise awareness of obesity.

Maryland Delegate Guy Guzzone, who represents Howard County, was present at the health fair and lauded the initiative that BAPS and the attending healthcare professional showed in providing free treatment to hundreds of individuals.

“I’m inspired by the spirit of unity of the Health Fair,” he noted. “When one of us is healthy, it helps all of us; when one of us is sick, it is a hurt to all of us. The recognition of that to the greater good to society is what is so important about what BAPS Charities does.”

The BAPS Charities center was also presented with a Governor’s Citation dur-

ing the Fair as a “recognition of [BAPS’] efforts to help communities” around the country.

BAPS Charities is affiliated with BAPS as an independent charity and social services arm. The 55,000 BAPS volunteers networked in over 3,300 centers around the world provide over 12 million volunteer-hours of service annually.n

A pediatrician examines a girl at the BAPS Charities Health Fair

Sir Syed Memorial 40th International Mushaira

Saturday, August 30, 2014 at 6:30 PM Universities at Shady Grove Auditorium 9630 Gudelsky Drive, Rockville MD 20850

Poets: Abbas Tabish (Pakistan) Nusrat Mehdi (India)

Ambareen Haseeb “Amber” (Pakistan) Dr. Nausha Asrar, Alig (TX) Muqsit Nadeem (NY) Rafi Raz (NY) Mona Shahab (MD)

Sarfraz Shahid (Pakistan) Nilam Ahmed Bashir (Pakistan)

Tickets available at www.amudc.org General: $30 VIP: $50

Proceeds from the event will benefit education of unprivileged children in India

For more information please contact: Mona Shahab 443-525-8195 | Dr. Zeenat Hashmi 443-538-0670 | Sheeba Naved 240-401-4355 | Dr. Rehan Khan 202-236-7338 | Tariq Alvi 404-423-7141 August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 21

Poetic Alchemy

profile

Vijay Seshadri wins the Pulitzer!

I

t seems that a rare confluence of stars propelled Vijay Seshadri to win the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for English Poetry in 2014. The star, however, is Vijay Seshadri himself. The citation by the selection committee “for a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness from birth to dementia” is titled 3 Sections.

Seshadri established at least three scholastic records with the award. He is the first Asian American and Indian American to win the honor for English poetry. He is the fifth Indian American to be so recognized.

The previous four of Indian origin are: Gobind Behari Lal (1937), Jhumpa Lahiri (2000), Geetha Anand (2003) and Sidharth Mukerjee (2011). As with many among the Indian diaspora Vijay, at age five, arrived with his parents from Bangalore and settled in Columbus, Ohio.

“It’s really an incredible thing to get it (the Pulitzer) as a poet,” Seshadri told Desi Talk, a newspaper published in New York.

He celebrated his achievement by taking his wife, Suzanne Khuri, to Battersby, an upscale restaurant in Brooklyn. “We rarely go there, but the occasion demanded it,” he said.

He grew up in Columbus where his father taught chemistry at Ohio State University. His undergraduate education started at Oberlin College, Ohio, a four year liberal arts institution and music conservatory.

“I started at Oberlin in mathematics—the school in fact has a distinguished science curriculum—and slowly drifted into philosphy.” From there he went on to Columbia University in New York where he graduated with a Master in Fine Arts (MFA) degree.

Seshadri thus diverged from the stereotypical Indian American immigrant pathway towards science, engineering or finance.

In between colleges, Seshadri also worked as a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and Vijay Seshadri as a crewman in Photo credit: Pulitzer.org a salmon fishing 22 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

By P. Mahadevan trawler in the choppy waters of the Bering Sea. Both of these called for intense physical labor and may have fleshed out his propensity for introspection and deliberation.

He has been on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, close to New York, since 1998 and currently occupies the Myers Professor in Writing Chair.

He teaches 20th century non-fiction writing and has given, inter alia, one special course in rhetoric which nobody else has given there.

Seshadri reads plenty of fiction, but has not written any as yet. In a phone conversation, he revealed that he knows Jhumpa Lahiri, but has not kept up with other Indian or Indian-American writers. He is currently writing his memoir, which is likely to be published next year. Seshadri has a son who just graduated from college and is not considering writing as a profession.

Seshadri claims a three-B association: born in Bangalore, works at Bronxville, and resides at Brooklyn.

The 3 Sections compendium consists of his newest poetic works under 32 different titles, an essay detailing his arduous work with the salmon fishing industry in the Bering Sea and a personal essay, which could variously be described as a day dreamer’s soliloquy, a delirium, comments under inebriation, hallucination or even dementia.

His poetic compositions in the compendium, which earned him the Pulitzer are thought provoking and explorative.

Reviewers have characterized his effort as philosophical meditation, rare adventure in consciousness and a self scrutinizing effort.

Though, when I asked Seshadri about the philosophy behind the elegant comparison in the first poem of 3 Sections that the “soul is an impossibility that has its uses,” he responded saying that “It’s, of course, poetry, not philosophy.”

The first poem under the title “Imaginary Number,” is as follows: The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed Is not big and is not small Big and small are Comparative categories and to what Could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed be compared?

Consciousness observes and is appeased The soul scrambles across the screes, The soul, like the square root of minus 1

Is an impossibility that has its uses.

There is an elegant mathematical analogy in this short poem and this is my annotation of the lyrics: When the Universe is destroyed, one mountain still remains. We cannot say whether it is big or small because there is nothing to compare it with. Our consciousness (ability to estimate dimensions, length, width and height), is able to do it but not in empty space. It needs a housing, the Soul.

In turn, it evaluates the debris around the mountain. But the Soul is as unreal and illusory as the square root of minus one. Just as the square root can help solve equations, the soul can assist consciousness to size the mountain. They are linked. If the conscious becomes the unconscious as with anesthesia, where is the soul? If consciousness returns, will the Soul reconnect?

A few more excerpts, selected at random from other titles follow, for purposes of comparison.

“Urdu Poems. Momin Khan Momin:” I don’t know why she still keeps my heart As useless to her as an unpaired sandal.

“The Dream I didn’t have: I felt along my length his long riverine incision.

Outside, it was Chicago.

“Yet Another Scandal:” I opened my offshore accounts to scrutiny.

I turned my wife in.

“Appreciative readers of Seshadri’s poems can recognize his expert assimilation of American poetry from Frost to Lowell, Bishop, and Ashbery, their tutelary spirits resplendently alive in a tradition he himself is significantly shaping with his own alchemical brand of poetic magic,” the New Yorker said in praise of his contributions to the literary cannon.

“Were you surprised at receiving the Pulitzer?” I asked Seshadri. “I knew the book was a good one, and I imagined it would gain some sort of recognition, but the Pulitzer was definitely a happy surprise,” he responded. Let us join in a salute to Pulitzer laureate Vijay Seshadri. n P. Mahadevan is a retired scientist with a Ph.D. in Atomic Physics from the University of London, England. He does very little now, very slowly.

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fiction

A Bag of Ashes Katha Fiction Contest 2014 • Second Place

H

er father had fallen and needed stitches on his forehead, Leela’s sister, Meera said over the phone from London. She was filling her in about her recent visit to Mumbai. He is okay, she added, still Leela had immediately taken the next available flight out of Chicago.

Her mother warmed her hands around the teacup. Outside, the sky was grey. Leela was wide awake, even though she had only arrived a little after midnight.

“You like cats, don’t you?” Meera had adopted a stray cat during her stay. Her mother continued, “Meera found this halfstarved cat on the streets. She was feeding it. She said, ‘Ma, Leela will take care of it after I leave.’”

“Meera expects me to look after this cat?” Leela asked. “Typical!”

That morning Leela accompanied her father on his walk. They emerged from the colony and walked along an uneven road edged with piles of gravel from the multitowered apartment complexes that were coming up. Despite the early hour, Leela observed, there were trucks laden with cement braking noisily, auto-rickshaws idling, cars passing and buses rumbling by.

Maids walked briskly, talking into their cell phones. To Leela, each visit to Mumbai seemed like a shoe falling. How many more trips, before one of her parents died? She wondered. How much time before there was no longer any need to visit?

Returning to the colony, a burly man in a white pajama kurta came towards them. Shankar Kaka had been a former pilot. “Inbound or outbound?” he asked when he saw Leela.

“Inbound,” Leela grinned. “I just arrived early this morning.”

“What! No jet lag?”

“Not yet. I don’t get jet lag when I am here.”

“You are in good health.” He flourished his arms up and down, and then brought them together in a namaste. He asked, “Do you know why we do namaskar?” Bringing his hands together again, he said, “Let me give you the secret of a long life.”

Her father interrupted him. Vasanthi, the fishwife, was doing her rounds, calling out the names of the different varieties of 24 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

By Ravibala Shenoy

A Creative Commons Image fish in the basket on her assistant’s head.

Her voice rang like a buzzer. “Not now, I have to buy fish,” he said.

Arriving home, Leela observed Vasanthi’s assistant lifting the basket from his head as he prepared to sit on his haunches in the front courtyard. Cats had appeared miraculously, writhing with desire.

Her father was telling Vasanthi, “Our daughter’s here, give us the best fish.”

Protesting that she only sold the best fish, Vasanthi brought her cleaver down with a thud on the wooden slab, filleting kingfish, gutting roe, and beheading shrimp.

There were heavy nose studs on each of Vasanthi’s nostrils and Leela could see the paving of the front yard through the holes in Vasanthi’s ear lobes.

“There’s our cat,” Leela’s mother pointed to a cat with a satiny, sable-colored coat, elegant as a mannequin, with eyes like Audrey Hepburn. She must have been a Burmese or at least the poor cousin of one, a princess fallen on hard times. A Siamese tom, another stray, timidly snuck behind her. These cats would be prized in the States.

Here they are strays, Leela thought.

The cook was telling Leela’s mother about the commotion at the sea front, the previous night. When it was dark, young lovers used the rocks against the sea wall as a trysting place. A young Parsi couple had been sitting on the rocks; they were to be married in a few weeks. The man’s fiancée had dropped her wallet into the dark water. He tried to retrieve it, but must have slipped and hit his head against a rock because he never came up. All night long, the

coastguard vessels plied the waters looking for his body, their lights dim as matchsticks. It was almost new moon. The cook described the anguish of the young man’s parents, an elderly Parsi couple: the blind father tapping with his cane the ground of the causeway, the mother breaking into sobs as she pleaded with the coastguards, “Please find my son.” There had been only fifty rupees in the fiancée’s wallet. Such is life, the cook said.

There was fish for lunch, both fried and in a coconut curry. Burmese Princess was making a ruckus on the window sill.

She sprang from the terrace, clattering down the corrugated iron roof of the shed and had now landed on the sill. After everyone had eaten, her mother carefully gathered all the leftover fish heads, fish skins and bones and put them in a Formica dish. She unlatched the dining room door leading to a slightly damp passage where dripping clothes hung on a clothesline during the rainy season. Shuffling slowly, she entered the tiny backyard crowded with a coconut palm and a nutmeg tree that gave no fruit, and lowered the dish on the uneven ground. Supporting herself against the outer wall, she slowly raised herself up and turned back.

The tomcat lingered behind Burmese Princess (BP). The pair reminded Leela of Vasanthi and her assistant. BP sent the tomcat packing, then finished eating, making a mess around the plate, before scampering away.

“Go clean the mess,” her father said.

Leela refused. She refused to touch the Formica dish or the mess in the backyard.

Finally, it was her mother who cleaned up. By this time it was raining hard. Her mother rinsed the Formica dish in the rainwater that cascaded from the overhang.

Every day her mother performed this new task of collecting all the fish skins and bones and putting them in BP’s dish and calling out to her.

“Yaww! Come!” Her voice echoed in the backyard.

“Don’t you have a name for her?” Leela asked.

“No, we just call her cat. We don’t want to get too attached.”

**** Two weeks passed since Leela’s arrival.

Burmese Princess had not shown up for some time. At first, her parents were glad; then they wondered what had happened to her. Leela and her father were on their usual evening walk. The courtyard of the Devi Temple resounded with the cries of boys playing cricket. A couple of cats were prowling around.

“What’s happened to our cat?” Furrowing his eyebrows her father said, “She must have been raped by the tomcats.”

They walked around the colony, Leela chatted about her life in Chicago: her sons, her husband, her job, painting a positive, glowing picture. Her father spoke about the neighbors and passersby. Some of the older residents, who first arrived when this colony had been built some forty years ago, were still around, but younger families with infants and toddlers, even teenagers, now occupied many of the houses.

Her father pointed to a salmon-colored bungalow. “Salvi there, lost his wife to cancer,” he said. They passed the home of someone with a son in California, the parents had just returned after visiting him.

Leela had given up asking her parents to visit Chicago. She knew what the answer would be. Once her father had told her plainly, “Our age is such that the end could come at any time, so it is important for us to be near our roots.” They saw Shankar Kaka walking towards them.

“Inbound or outbound” he asked Leela. Leela blinked, uncertainly. He beamed at her. “Do you know why we do namaste?

This is an ancient recipe for long life.”

“Yes, yes, you already told me,” she said.

On their return journey, Leela and her father walked through the park. From the nagchampa tree came a sound: Plink!

Plink!

“What was that?” Leela asked.

“A bird,” her father said.

“But, what kind of bird?” Leela asked, looking up at something hidden in the tall branches. “If you had the Internet, I could tell you.”

“You can get that from the Internet?” her father asked.

“Yes.” Encouraged, Leela said, “And if you had the Internet, I could email you.”

“Not interested. I have no interest in learning anything new now.”

Her parents seemed frailer every year.

She shuddered remembering a recent scene: her father wobbling as he flung a bucket of water to clean up the mess made by the cat in the backyard. Rain pelted the ground just as thunder rolled and lightning flashed. ***

Her mother had been going blind for forty years. Her eyesight had started failing at forty. After breakfast, Leela’s job was to put a drop of the juice of onions and ginger in each eye—an ayurvedic remedy.

“Does this work? She asked her mother.

“Very much! You don’t know how much my eyes have improved.”

Her mother insisted on making breakfast. There had been some leftover clam cakes in the fridge. Her mother thought they were boiled potatoes and added them to the beaten rice poha. Those who ate the dish were none the wiser. When her mother stuck her head in the fridge, groping for the clam cakes for lunch, she could not find them. “Who could have taken them?” she wondered. Only later did she realize that the clams had been added to the poha.

At such moments she would admit, “I really can’t see anything, Leela.”

Around 4:00 pm, her mother sometimes joined the other women who sat on the stone benches around the swing in the park. It was the usual group of elderly ladies and an occasional elderly gentleman.

Gubbi who had been a teacher, was the senior most, and presided over them all.

Leela thought about her sister’s hour-long phone call from London regaling her with tidbits from her last visit to Mumbai, “…One day—can you believe it?—a monkey, about four feet tall, popped up from behind that stand of bamboos. He sat on the swing next to the stone benches where these ladies sat.

They were terrified! He was rocking himself coolly back and forth. Gubbi stood up. Staring over the rims of her glasses in a school-mistressy way, she shook her head at the monkey.

“Go away, Baba”, she said, raising her umbrella, “Go away. You should not be sitting here.”

The monkey bared his teeth and snarled.

Gubbi leapt backwards. All the other women sat rigidly, avoiding the monkey’s gaze. When the monkey left, Gubbi turned on them angrily. “None of you stood by me and helped. You just kept staring into your laps.”

“What could we do?” They protested. “He would have attacked us!”

“Monkey?” her mother said, “I thought a man was sitting there. I cannot see anything.

Don’t you know?”

The sisters had laughed then, but later Leela had been concerned. *** Despite her poor vision, her mother watched the cooking channel and four soaps on TV regularly, pulling her chair close, leaning forward and peering into the screen. On the cooking show, today, they were talking about tofu pizza. Her mother memorized all the ingredients.

“I won’t eat that. I am telling you right

now,” Leela’s father announced as he came slowly down the stairs, his slippers slapping against the concrete of the steps.

Her father came down to watch their favorite soap about a joint family where everyone was at war with everyone else.

On this episode, the hero announced that he was going to take sanyas, renounce the world.

When it ended, her father said. “That is what I should do now. Take sanyas.”

“You can’t have your whisky if you take sanyas.” Her mother reminded him. “And you won’t get dosas for breakfast.”

“I would find it difficult to do without those,” he admitted.

At dinner, Leela said. “Do you realize how much coconut there is in this fish curry? Do you know how high in cholesterol this is?”

“Have we not lived this long?” Her father said.

Leela had read that in Oregon, a doughnut place had begun offering doughnuts to senior citizens after 11:00am. Seniors could eat all the doughnuts they wanted for free.

There was a letter in the paper complaining. Doughnuts had fats the letter said; they were full of carbs and were bad for health. The doughnut shop stopped offering free doughnuts to seniors. The seniors were furious; they picketed the store with placards, shouting: “We want our doughnuts!” “We want to have our cake and eat it too.” “Who are you to tell us what to eat?” Her father would have approved. “If only I had my sight.” Her mother said one afternoon. “Then everything would be al-

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right.”

“Can you see nothing then Ma?” Leela asked.

“I can just see an outline. It’s a blur.

But my eyesight has improved so much. All the blackness around the edges has gone.

Ever since I started doing the acupressure and pranayama ... It’s just the glasses.” Her mother’s mouth twisted. “This pair gives me a headache. If only I could get the correct prescription! I need someone to take me to a doctor who can give me the correct pair of glasses. It’s very hard for your father to travel that far and cross roads.”

“I’m here. I can take you.” Leela said to her mother.

“Do you think I would not have taken her?” Her father said before turning to go up the stairs. Addressing Leela sotto voce, he said, “She does not have any lenses in her eyes.”

“Let’s make an appointment, then.”

Leela said turning to her mother.

“It’s far.” Her mother said doubtfully.

“We’ll take a cab.” The expression on her mother’s face was unreadable.

“Let’s at least try. What the name of that specialist?”

“Kama Atya sang the praises of Sardesai.”

“Kama Atya!” That was Leela’s father’s older sister who had passed away four years ago at the age of eighty-nine.

“Your father will take me.”

“I’ll make an appointment. Right now!”

“Yes, but,” her mother stalled, “It is not that easy to get an appointment. It takes months to see these specialists. In a few days you will be in Chicago. What can you do? *** One afternoon, Leela tried to organize the kitchen. Some drawers were empty, some spoons were missing. The storage containers were empty. There were stainless steel pots and pans that looked untouched.

“What are you saving these for?” She wondered. “I’ll go to the store and get you an immersion heater,” she told her father, “so you don’t have to heat water on the gas stove, every morning”.

Her father was offended. “Can’t we get it ourselves?” he asked. “Do you think we are incapable of looking after ourselves?

That we are so backward and you have come and teach us? And what will happen after you leave?”

That evening when they went for their walk, her father pointed out to Leela a house along the way. He told her how years ago when he was on his customary walk, an old woman who used to live there ran to the balcony and called out, “Good you came. Have you brought your pistol?

Do dham! Finish off that daughter-in-law of mine.” He could not remember the old woman’s name who was by now long deceased.

Next day, her father confided that sleep had eluded him because he could not remember the old woman’s name, “But when I asked your mother,” he said admiringly, “from the depths of sleep she said, ‘Mrs. Godbole!’” *** Leela was returning from the dhobi at the edge of the park with a load of freshly ironed clothes wrapped in a newspaper when the sky suddenly turned dark. From a distance she saw Shankar Kaka crossing the park. He appeared to stumble and fall.

By the time Leela reached the spot, a knot of had gathered and were carrying Shankar Kaka away. Apparently, he’d tripped over an exposed tree root. Later, she heard the ambulance.

The rain was drumming on the roof.

Her mother lay on the downstairs divan, saying her prayers, seeing Leela, she remarked, “In just another week, you’ll be off. We keep waiting and waiting for your arrival, and before you know it, it’s time to go.”

Leela appeared preoccupied. “Ma, are you afraid of dying?” She asked.

“No, not at all!”

She had asked her father the same question when he lay on his bed after completing his Sudoku puzzle. It was one of the difficult ones and it had taken him nearly four hours, but he had completed it, he noted with satisfaction. “I’ll tell you later, hunh! I’ll have my nap first.”

The next evening a circular came around that Shankar Kaka had died in the hospital. How could that be? Leela thought.

She had just met him the day before and he had commented on her health.

A few days after Shankar Kaka’s cremation, her father attended the memorial at his house. Returning home, he murmured to himself, “In the end what it comes down to is—a bag of ashes.”

Leela and her mother were seated at the dining table. Her mother was chopping onions; the cook’s bangles jingled as she rolled out chapattis for dinner. She was telling them how a couple days ago, in one of the high rises, a servant’s child had been clowning on the ledge of the servants’ quarter balcony. The girl lost her footing and hurtled down four stories. She was rushed to the government hospital, “But,” the cook added, with a smile that showed her paan-stained snaggle teeth, “She survived!”

“Now you’ve said something good.”

Leela’s mother said. “Your news that day about the Parsi youth was very depressing.”

“Yes, that twit of a girl has a good destiny,” the cook admitted.

They heard a familiar meowing from the boundary wall. It sounded like Burmese Princess. “She’s alive!” Her father said entering the house. His face shone with joy.

Has the cat replaced me in my parents’ affections? Leela wondered. Even she felt hopeful. She picked up a bowl, carefully pouring a stream of milk into it, and opened the door.

“Look!” Her mother exclaimed, “Leela’s feeding the cat!” n Ravibala (Ravi) Shenoy lives in Naperville, IL. She won the first prize in the 2007 Katha contest for her short story, The Sacrifice. She has been published in Sugar Mule, The Copperfield Review, The Chicago Tribune and VOYA: Voice of Youth Advocates. A retired librarian, she has been a reviewer for a wellknown professional reviewing journal since 2007 and is a book review editor for Jaggery.

The judges were Indu Sundaresan and A.X. Ahmad.

Indu Sundaresan: “A Bag of Ashes touches upon a very real fear among the Indian diaspora—aging parents and a chasm of miles separating them from their grown children. The story is a keen examination of a moment of time measured in two short weeks and a complete picture of the lives of the protagonists, their pasts and their present.”

A.X. Ahmad: “A very quiet, literary short story that is an exploration of an issue faced by so many Indian Americans: the plight of our parents, who are growing old back in India. Beautifully written, and I enjoyed the character of the former pilot, who creates a narrative arc for the story, and the use of the cat to show the protagonist’s transformation.”

Indu Sundaresan was born and brought up in India and came to the United States for graduate school. She’s the author of five novels and a collection of short stories. The Twentieth Wife (book #1 of the Taj trilogy) won the Washington State Book Award. Her latest novel, The Mountain of Light, is based on the Kohinoor diamond and its last Indian owners.

More at:www.indusundaresan.com A.X. Ahmad is the author of The Caretaker, the first in a trilogy featuring ex-Indian Army Captain Ranjit Singh. His second book, The Last Taxi Ride, will be published in June 2014. A former international architect, he lives in Washington, D.C. and teaches writing. www.axahmad.com August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 27

parent principle

Two Daddies

An airplane ride leads to questions and considerations

I

was headed east from California on a red-eye flight. As soon as I boarded the plane I buckled up, covered myself with my very own red blanket and tried to fall asleep. I have heard some pretty colorful stories about the way in which the airline blankets are cleaned so I always remember to bring my own. The usual chatter was going on in the P.A. system asking folks to bring their larger carry-on items to the front of the plane for a “courtesy checkin.” I closed my eyes and prepared to sleep.

Moments later I heard shuffling in the seats next to me. Then an infant began to cry loudly. I shut my eyes tighter. For some very strange reason my brain seems to believe that shutting the eyes tightly will magically close the ears. Well, it didn’t help. Not only did I clearly hear the infant crying, a second sound track of a toddler wailing wafted by.

I opened my eyes and took stock of the situation. My neighbors were two men.

Seated immediately next to me was a tall, well built gentleman with a brown t-shirt (we’ll call him Mr. Brown). Settled on his lap was the chubby toddler boy about twenty months old. Next, to him was Mr. White (you guessed right—he was wearing a white shirt) holding a most adorable, blue-eyed little baby girl. The whole situation was quite unusual. Being an observant person (read nosy) I could not pass up on the opportunity to learn more about the couple. So, I decided to bag my sleep and put it in the over-head bin or beneath the seat in front of me.

My eyes raced to their fingers. Both of them were wearing identical wedding bands. Mr. White was wearing a thick, leather bracelet as an accessory on his wrist. Googling would reveal its name—a “mangle.” GQ magazine had listed it as a men’s fashion statement.

Mr. White was busy rummaging through a diaper bag. The bag was dark brown, quite manly and well designed. It had nice little compartments for bottles, diapers and wipes. The main well of the bag was filled with clothes, towels and other sundry items. He managed to pull out a bottle of Benadryl, sucked the medicine into the filler and deftly squeezed it into the children’s mouths. I was surprised.

28 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

By Sujatha Ramprasad I remember the times when I traveled with my little daughter—I always made sure no one else watched when I gave the sleeping doses. I didn’t want to be judged as a bad mom. On long flights, I knew that Benadryl must be given to the children on the sly—in absolute secrecy. This gentleman had just broken that untold mommy law.

I have not interacted with gay parents before. Gay couples—yes, but never gay parents. My mind was ballooning with questions. Do you both work or does one of you stay behind and look after the kids? Do the kids go to day-care? Are one or both of you biological parents? Or, are both the children adopted? Was a surrogate mother involved? Did money exchange hands? Was it the same surrogate mother for both the children? Is the mother someone whom you folks know closely? Who does the dishes? Do you have diaper duties?

Shushhhh I told myself, clearly all this is none of my business.

The baby started to whimper. She was wearing white coveralls with blue elephant print—the blue matched the color of her eyes, perfectly. The material of the coverall looked soft and comfortable. The baby had chubby cheeks and a round, bald head. She looked so tiny on her dad’s broad shoulders. Her tiny legs covered with the overalls started kicking her dad’s chest. What had began as a whimper rose into a fullblown wail. Mr. White patted her bottom.

“She needs a diaper change,” he declared.

He artfully removed the seat belt with one hand and picked up the diaper bag with the same hand before heading towards the bathroom. A few minutes later, the much happier baby, and dad headed back to their seats. Mr. White handed the baby over to Mr. Brown saying he wanted to use the restroom himself.

Mr. Brown now held the baby in his left hand and the boy in his right. He kissed their heads fondly. The baby was gurgling and was ready to fall asleep. The toddler was still fussing. Mr. Brown told the little boy that he would buy him a large hat when they got to the beach. They must be heading somewhere warm for a vacation I thought, as I pulled my blanket closer. The boy whined and said, “I am hungry. Can I have something to eat?” Mr. Brown placed

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How will it be for the little girl to grow up in a household with two male parents, I thought—especially during her teenage years? the boy on his lap and moved his hand. I presumed that he was going to press the call button and ask the flight attendant for a glass of milk but instead he pulled a Styrofoam take-out box from his bag and gave the kid a handful of fries. Unconventional?

Yes. But, it did the trick. The boy fell asleep after munching a couple of them. Mr. White came back to his seat and took back the sleeping baby. The family of four dozed off, looking perfectly serene.

The baby smiled blissfully in her sleep.

Her smile melted my heart. How will it be for the little girl to grow up in a household with two male parents, I thought—especially during her teenage years? Would she be comfortable discussing the changes in her body with her dad(s)? I hope she would be able to talk to her grandmother or her aunt during her adolescence.

The only girl that I know, who was raised by two dads is Rachel from Glee. She grows up to be a totally driven and competitive teenager with a single-minded goal of becoming a performer on Broadway.

Rachel’s dads stand by her, every step of the way. She revels in the affection showered by her dads, but this does not prevent her from trying to get in touch with her biological mother. Rachel is, however, disappointed when she meets her mother. She

realizes that they could never connect at the mother-daughter level. Rachel, otherwise, is portrayed, as a normal girl who falls in love, suffers through breakups and goes through life like any average girl. But Rachel, I told myself, is only a fictitious character, a figment of a writer’s imagination.

How would a real life teenage girl feel?

Later, I would ask a teenage girl how she would have felt if two dads raised her.

Her reply came back like a dart. “It surely beats being raised in an abusive or a broken family.” Unlike Rachel, I hoped that the little girl in the plane would never pine for her biological mom.

Mr. Brown’s breaths morphed into a mild snore. I was fully awake and watched the kids intently. Would the little girl and boy marry within the same gender? It did occur to me that two or three generations down the line there might be a little girl who grows up with two dads and four grandfathers.

Another hypothetical scene ran through my mind. A scene set in a society where same-sex marriage becomes the new normal. In that society would procreation just be a business dealing with a member of the other sex? The practice of producing an offspring outside of marriage, in cases where the couple could not have children of their own seems to have been accepted in puranic times.

In fact, this practice called Niyoga features several times in Mahabharata. When Vichithravirya dies without an heir to the throne his mother Sathyavati calls Vyasa to help save the lineage by performing Niyoga with the widows Ambika and Ambalika.

Similarly, when Pandu is cursed to die if he became intimate with any woman, his wives Kunti and Madri have children through Niyoga. According to Niyoga the paternity of the child lies with the husband and wife and the person performing Niyoga is forbidden from having any attachment to the child. Would the laws set in the Puranic times be applicable today, I wondered.

While I had cheered on heartily when Blaine proposed to Kurt, in Glee’s Season 5 premiere, I considered only the fate of two people in love and not the destiny of the their offspring.

The P.A. system came alive and the captain warned us about the upcoming bumpy ride. I tightened my seat belt and prepared for the tumultuous times ahead. The baby girl opened her eyes and smiled at me. n Sujatha Ramprasad loves to read poetry and philosophy. She is an ardent fan of Harry Potter.

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August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 29

films

Biryani and Gumshoe

By Aniruddh Chawda

BOBBY JASOOS. Director: Samar Shaikh.

Players: Vidya Balan, Ali Fazal, Kiran Kumar, Rajendra Gupta, Supriya Pathak, Tanvi Azmi, Zarina Wahab, Arjan Bawja. Music: Shantanu Moitra. Hindi with Eng. Sub-tit.

Theatrical release (Reliance).

D

irector Shaikh got his technician chops working in the background of such hits as Dhoom (2004), Bunty Aur Babli (2005) and Dhoom 3 (2013). Transitioning from technician to calling the shots with his directorial debut in Bobby Jasoos, this much is certain. While Bobby Jasoos may not go to garner any huge following, it does employ a script gimmick or two and breaks from convention long enough to give Shaikh’s film a worthy pause. Bumbling, meandering and sometimes anemic, Bobby Jasoos is nevertheless an acceptable detective-comic drama that works mostly because of Balan’s presence.

Bilqees Ahmed, aka Bobby (Balan) is smugly unsure of only two things. One, she is not sure if she is interested in romance, men or even kissing. Two, as an aspiring self-trained p-eye, private detective for those not in the know, she is equally unsure if it’s only a matter of time before she stumbles on to a Big Case that will change her fortunes. Whittling away her time spying on cheating spouses and digging up dirt to throw would-be arranged marital alliances into disarray­­—all for a fee, Bobby’s life indeed takes a turn for the unknown when a mysterious benefactor (Kiran Kumar) hires Bobby to trace down a number of missing individuals.

Bobby’s home life—a father (Gupta) not supportive of his oldest daughter dallying in non-feminine detective pursuits, a supportive mom (Pathak) and an alwaysquestioning step mom (Azmi)—overlaps Bobby’s so-called circle of clients, all of whom exist not so peacefully in a working class Hyderabad inner-city neighborhood.

Helping a dashing budding TV star (Fazal) fend off unwanted suitors may be one thing. How one of her sister’s relationships with the thuggish Lala (Bawja) may be connected to Bobby’s new mysterious cli30 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

ent may be a whole another matter.

Balan is one of few performers that can inject a pseudo-real street credibility by going from homebody to streetwise sassiness with the same ease that Bachchan could go from suit and tie to t-shirts and bellbottoms. In pursuit of her prey, er, cases, Balan’s Bobby drags up various disguises— everything from a burqa, a buxom uppity auntie, a butch cart attendant hawking bangles at the corner bazaar, a beggar and an idiotic astrologer with buck teeth. Witnessing Balan’s Bobby disappear into no less than five different masculine characters is as much a testament to Balan’s versatility as it is fun to watch.

The Muslim social was a distinct subgenre in the age of romantic Hindi movies.

At their height in the 1960s, this genre tapped into a rich vein of delicately constructed melodramas such as Mere Mehboob (1963), Ghazal (1964), Mere Huzoor (1965) and Mehboob Ki Mehndi (1970). As late as 2000, there was Fiza that featured principal characters who were incidentally Muslim. Bobby Jasoos is a nice nod to a genre that, after 9/11, had all but disappeared.

While not in the same class of romantic trappings captured in the titles from the 1960s, it is refreshing to catch a neutral-

perspective snapshot of middle class Muslim life in a secular country such as India.

As a frothy urban backdrop, Shaikh captures Hyderabad’s crowded bazaars beautifully. On a side mission to track down a certain biryani house where a specific catering order was delivered from, Bobby and her kin must sample every biryani house within shouting distance. The resulting tour of the city’s biryani houses offers stops at a mouth-watering array of post-card worthy biryani joints. Bobby’s detective agency name might as well be Biryani and Gumshoe!

Assamese singer Papon does absolute wonders with Shreya Ghosal on the gorgeous duet “Teri Mera Afsana.” Richly overlaid with qawwali-like contours, Moitra’s composition is an ear-worthy tune.

Just as he did with the “Piyu Bole” number from Balan’s debut in Parineeta (2005), Moitra displays a polished style. While Balan’s role is not as weighty as what she assailed in Kahaani (2012) or No One Killed Jessica (2011), Bobby Jasoos still ends up in the plus column for her. n EQ: B

Primary Colors EK VILLAIN. Director: Mohit Suri. Players: Siddharth Malhotra, Riteish Deshmukh, Shraddha Kapoor, Shaad Randhawa, Remo Fernandez. Music: Ankit Tiwari, Mithoon.

Hindi with Eng. Sub-tit. Theatrical release (Balaji Films).

M

ohit Suri’s success with the sequels Raaz: The Mystery Continues (2009), Murder 2 (2011) and especially with the blockbuster Aashique 2 (2013) helped raise the young director’s profile into phenom filmmaker. In the wake of that success and aided by Suri’s affiliation with Mahesh Bhatt and Mukesh Bhatt (Suri is their nephew), Suri landed the much-anticipated Ek Villain. Bringing to fore the fast-climbing Malhotra (Student of the Year, Hasee To Phasee) and Kapoor (Aashique 2), Ek Villain, while shiny in its production delivery occasionally trips on its own tension-building tripwires to emerge merely as a lukewarm suspense thriller.

The script, co-written by Tushar Hiranandani and Milap Zaveri, is clever enough in drawing two overtly grey-shaded characters. Guru (Malhotra) is a strongarming detective with a violent past. When a serial killer’s brutal killing spree grips a city, Guru and his team come under tremendous pressure to catch the killer. It is only with a stroke of luck that the cops eventually tie the killings to the otherwise non-descript desk-jockey Rakesh Mahadkar (Deshmukh), a meek working-class nobody by day and a homicidal maniac by night.

But wait, that is only half the story. The other half involves Aisha Verma (Kapoor), a social worker who draws the stoic Guru out of self-imposed hard shell long enough to fall in love in him. Guru and Aisha’s lives take a swift and unexpected turn as the serial killer sets his eyes on Aisha.

A deadly cat and mouse game sets in as Guru tries to snare Mahadkar into an evertightening and violent loop.

Even though the narrative unfolds through numerous flashbacks that recount the lives of more than one of the killer’s victims, the sub-plots get on the exact parallel groove in a surprisingly seamless fashion.

The crux of the action, however, doesn’t get truly going until Mahadkar shows up.

Profiling the killer’s mind and motivations provide enough leads and misleads, including suspicion that Guru’s former under-

world handler Caesar (Fernandez) may be involved.

The story is passable, even though it bears more than a passing resemblance to the 2010 Korean thriller I Saw the Devil.

Kapoor’s Aisha strikes the right balance between her social worker outreaches and keeping her love life in check. As protagonist and antagonist, respectively, Malhotra and Deshmukh are roped into roles that are not their career primary colors. Malhotra is the dashing newcomer previously only found in edgy romantic roles and not edgy violent roles. Deshmukh’s forte has been comedy where he is group-cast in slapstick matinee entries (Humshakals, Housefull) often as a mere prop.

So what’s missing? Actually, it’s the sense that it is all too convenient. The pieces fall into place way too smugly for the story to gel—but not the movie. The unspooling of various plot elements—affairs, friendships, careers—that emerge unfulfilled leave behind a void that has more to do with the delivery than how the story ends.

The mother-daughter team of Shobha Kapoor and Ekta Kapoor—they are wife and daughter, respectively, of popular veteran actor Jeetendra—have created a noteworthy mini-kingdom in Hindi movies.

The Kapoors, (no relation to Shraddha Kapoor), under their Balaji Films label, are easily the most powerful behind-thecamera women in Hindi movies currently.

Their signature on some of the most popular Hindi language TV soaps and movies (Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai, Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai Dobara, The Dirty Picture, Ek Thi Daayan and Lootera)

has increased their reach even farther.

Plot connivances and storyline smugness aside, Tiwari and Mithoon’s soundtrack has raced up the charts. Mohd Irfan’s “Banjaraa” and Mustafa Zahid’s “Zaroorat” are lush ballads held together by simple melodies. For their part, the Kapoors are marketing aces. Their bankrolling of Ek Villain, heavily boosted by pre-selling of the hit musical score, has garnered Ek Villain the biggest opening and one of the biggest overall box office takes in 2014. It all proves that smart selling and smart music still can outsell an overall lacking movie. n EQ: B Globe trekker, aesthete, photographer, ski bum, film buff, and commentator, Aniruddh Chawda writes from Milwaukee.

L ATA’S

FLICK PICKS

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August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 31

books

Love Is in the Aril

by Jeanne E. Fredriksen

CITY OF DEVI by Manil Suri. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York. February 2013. wwnorton.com manilsuri.com Available in hardcover, paperback, digital book, MP3 CD, or Audible book.

W

hat if a Bollywood film was the genesis for what threatens to be the end of the world? Manil Suri’s third novel, City of Devi, explores that possibility with romantic passion, humanitarian distress, and twisted humor. He has a keen eye, a sharp wit, and a blazing pen with which he delivers the tale of a goddess, three lovers, and the impending annihilation of the world as they—and we—know it.

Following the Bollywood/Hollywood box-office super-duper hit Superdevi, religion in India meant “Hindus only.” The country took a harder turn to the religiopolitical right than ever before, manifested in gigantic Mumbaidevi statues all over the film capital, including areas strategically meant to irritate Muslims and Christians.

Now nicknamed “City of Devi,” Mumbai had its own Devi logo which was required to be displayed by every establishment and place of worship, Hindu or not. Entrepreneurs jumped into the capitalistic fray, cashing in on Superdevi’s success with offerings like McDonald’s movie tie-in action figures; Pizza Hut’s Devi mouse pad giveaway; plus Superdevi and religious location tours. So began the current that incited riots, grew into war, and threatened nuclear destruction courtesy of Pakistan, China, and India.

Mumbai is in ruins, bombed and shattered. Most residents have fled, gangs have flourished, food is scarce. As a young, educated, and patient wife, Sarita needs two things in Earth’s four remaining days: a pomegranate and to find Karun, her scientist husband who vanished a fortnight before. As a symbol of their delicate movement toward the consummation of their marriage, the fruit is an imperative when they reunite. Meanwhile, Jaz, a flip, confident hipster who is always on the hunt for his next conquest, needs to find the one who got away, the man with whom he has fallen hopelessly in love.

Sarita and Jaz first meet in a bomb shelter and again on a train that derails on its 32 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

way to Bandra, where their respective journeys should end. But Sarita is a Hindu, and Jaz —Ijaz—is a Muslim. That’s a dangerous combination, and teaming up turns out to be a necessary evil in order to survive crossing through unfriendly religious territories in the search for their loved one. What they find when they reach their destination is not what either expected.

The story is beautifully told as an allencompassing romance and present-day end time saga via alternating sections of Sarita’s and Jaz’s chronicles. Moreover, their stories internally alternate between past and present until there is nowhere to go but to move forward together.

The constant theme of the trinity, the triangle, the trimurti swirls throughout the story, engulfing Sarita, Jaz, and Karun with triangular satellites orbiting around them.

Likewise, City of Devi itself forms the trinity of Suri’s novel—The Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva, and now Devi, the debated alternate third in place of Brahma.

This lusciously-told tale scandalizes, criticizes, and fantasizes, and why not when the end is near?

As Suri says in his conversation with A.X. Ahmad, “You don’t want the end of the world to be depressing! If you’re going to go out, go out in Bollywood style!”

Everything required of a Bollywood extravaganza can be found in the novel: action, drama, comedy; politics, religion; rag-to-riches; suspense, magic; sex, a romantic triangle; and crowds of worshippers that clamor for a glimpse of the Devi.

There is, however, a serious side to the novel. Suri takes a sobering look at grave issues including religious warring/ gang mentality; the dark side of religion and power; and how much we, as humans, can endure and how resourceful we can be when faced with the suggestion of our own mortality. He easily covers so much ground that to say the novel is multi-layered is being conservative.

Extremism rears its ugly head more than once. In one scene, while Sarita is in the bomb shelter, we are treated to an explanation that, “... the new coalition government’s edict to mollify their loony right fringe [was that] all cartoon characters must now have traditional Hindu names.

Bugs Bunny has become ‘Khatmal Khar-

gosh’ ...” Shortly thereafter in the shelter, a man is accused of being a Muslim. He is beaten, about to be lynched, but then discovered to be Hindu. Oh well, so sorry, have a cigarette. One example is tongue-incheek regarding homogenization, the other frighteningly close to a possible reality.

Like a pomegranate, City of Devi is overflowing with arils, seeds that are covered with a fleshy outer layer. For some, a pomegranate is sweet, while for others, tart. So it is with City of Devi. Nearly all religions have used the pomegranate as a symbol of many of mankind’s fundamental desires—life/death, birth/eternal life, fertility/marriage, abundance/prosperity. In City of Devi, these human desires are plentiful, Bollywood flamboyance included.

S

uri, a professor of mathematics and affiliate professor of Asian studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is working on his next book.

“It’s called The Godfather of Numbers, about a mysterious entity that controls not only mathematics but also the universe,” he explained. Then he added, “In case readers are worried about the math aspect, fear not. It’s especially geared towards nonmathematicians.” n

When Worlds Collide THE LAST TAXI RIDE by A.X. Ahmad. St. Martin’s Publishing Group, Minotaur Books: New York. June 2014. $24.99. 368 pages. minotaurbooks.com axahmad.com

B

uckle your seat belts and hang on tight! Ranjit Singh (The Caretaker, Review published in India Currents September 2013) is in trouble again in A. X. Ahmad’s second novel, The Last Taxi Ride. Following the incidents on Martha’s Vineyard, Ranjit relocated to New York City and has been working as a cab driver and moonlighting as security for a company that imports human hair from India. A chance fare by famed-but-fading Bollywood actress Shabana Shah and an unscheduled reunion with an old army buddy at the famous Dakota, where the actress lives, set Ranjit’s newly-quiet life on an unwanted trajectory.

Implicated the next morning in Shabana’s grisly murder, a stunned Ranjit has ten days to clear his name.

The problem is that the only person who can vouch for him has disappeared. Plus the deeper he looks, the closer he gets to the new arm of the Mumbai mob now working in New York.

This time around, it’s not men in overcoats and SUVs hunting for Ranjit. Instead, Ranjit becomes the shikari, searching for Shabana’s killer and the evidence that will prove his innocence. His logic-based search takes him all over New York from the diner where cabbies eat to the teeming world of immigrants in Little Guyana and Jackson Heights to the famed Dakota apartments, all the while contrasting the scrimp-and-save lives of cabbies with the designer lives of the rich and famous. As per character, his detective work lands him in harm’s way more than once.

Ranjit, ever the staid warrior he was trained to be, always looks to do the right thing, even when warned off by those who know better. However, sometimes he— with proper regret—makes the decision to employ unconventional methods in order to fulfill promises made along the way. He can’t do it alone, so as needed, he enlists the

help of the colorful Ali, a fellow cab driver; Kikiben, a worker at Nataraj Imports owned by the shady Jay Patel; and Leela, a young mixed Guyanese woman who works at a night club catering to nameless clientele, including select members of the Mumbai mob.

The book is filled with “Don’t Do It!” moments for both Ranjit and Shabana.

The intensity in The Last Taxi Ride differs from that in The Caretaker because the storytelling alternates between Shabana’s life over the decades and Ranjit’s real-time immediacy. As a result of this duality, there is double the suspense as if both parties were scaling different faces of Mt. Everest in a race to meet at the summit.

Shabana’s struggles with her manager, who is her twin, and her association with the mob and mob-funded films belie the sparkling, confident woman on the screen.

Her story reads like the gentle-growngossipy retrospective of one actress’s life straight out of the pages of Stardust or Filmfare magazine: her humble beginnings,

a fortuitous screen test, constant pressures to produce box-office hits, the tethering to the mob, her supernova career, and a rapid plummet into dusty history books. Her story is a peek into the grim side of Mumbai’s star factories in contrast to the glitz and glamour that the audience sees. She is part victim, part diva, and the more dependent she becomes on those who control her, the more she longs to break free. When she does, there is tragedy worthy of a Bollywood film.

As Ahmad mentions in his conversation with Manil Suri, the seed for Ranjit’s new occupation and the notion of a Bollywood actress in New York City came from a real life experience. As for the connection between Bollywood and the Mumbai mob, he gleaned information from Anupama Chopra’s King of Bollywood (India Currents, September 2007) to add that extra touch of realism.

That realism is as much a part of The Last Taxi Ride as is the starstudded hopes and dreams of the silver screen. In fact, Ahmad’s realism is so strong that there is often the sense of a thin, unobserved layer of dust that permeates the surfaces of places haunted by the working poor and those who wish to remain anonymous, the places where it’s never truly spotless, literally or figuratively, a distressing reminder of one’s station in life or morals. For Shabana, her anguish is so palpable that she is easily pitied despite her many faults and transgressions.

The Last Taxi Ride can be read as a stand-alone book, which was a smart move on Ahmad’s part. One needn’t have read The Caretaker to enjoy its sequel, but certainly, having read the second, the uninitiated reader will be prompted to read the first.

For those who are keeping up with Ranjit Singh’s thrills and chills, fear not!

The third book is in progress with a working title of The Hundred Days. n Jeanne E. Fredriksen lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where she freelances in advertising and public relations. Between assignments, she writes fiction, enjoys wine, and heads to the beach as often as she can.

August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 33

finance

Capital Flows Understanding effects on exchange rates, the economy and policy

By Rahul Varshneya

C

apital has always been intertwined in our history. In ancient times, humans used to trade precious stones and metals in exchange for food, drink and services. By the time the United States drafted the Declaration of Independence, precious metals had given way to payment in the form of gold and silver. Fast forward to the 20th century, gold had been replaced by different currencies, connected to one another through supply and demand driven exchange rates. Gold and silver was used solely to back the credit-worthiness of this currency.

In 1944, representatives of 44 nations converged at the Bretton Woods conference and agreed to tie all currencies to the US dollar. They further allowed the convertibility of the US dollar to gold at $35/oz.

However, with the increased popularity of currency usage, the Bretton Woods model began showing cracks. The supply of US dollars was increasing exponentially due to international trade, while the gold reserves stayed the same. The increased supply of dollars put pressure on the $35 conversion price and could could no longer be supported by the unchanged gold reserves. In 1971, the United States decided to end the Bretton Woods model and abandoned the usage of gold in backing currency. This decision led to the adoption of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This action also led to many countries transitioning to a free floating currency and creating the modern day concept of exchange rates.

Currency Movement

Even with drastic changes on the world economic stage, the US dollar continues to be the world’s reserve currency. Currency popularity is determined by its spread—the difference between how much you can buy and sell that currency. Less popular currencies have bigger spreads due to the inherent risk—you have to pay more to get them and receive less for selling them.

In contrast, the US dollar has the smallest spread of any currency as it is the most active. Demand for currency is determined by two factors—the number of transactions in that currency and the country’s economic 34 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

conditions. The majority of international transactions are conducted in dollars, pounds, yuan or euros making them the most in demand.

Economic Impacts of Currency

Currency appreciation and devaluation directly affects a country’s purchasing power and therefore its economy. Countries invest a significant effort to ensure their currency remains stable and strong.

China has circumvented the supply and demand effects completely by pegging its currency to the US dollar. Pegging a currency to another reduces devaluation and volatility. China had pegged its currency at 8.62 Yuan to 1 dollar for many years.

This peg is the main reason why China has accumulated such a trade surplus (sales minus purchases) against the United States.

By not allowing its currency to devalue, China’s purchasing power stayed strong allowing it to sell expensive goods and import goods for less.

Currency and Government Policy

On the other end of the spectrum, the recession has played havoc with the US dollar and its economy. With the recession affecting all sectors of the economy, the Federal Reserve was forced to reduce interest rates to increase the money supply.

Looking through the lens of macroeconomics, with increased supply of the currency, its value will go down. Due to lower interest rates, investors began pulling their money out of the US dollar in order to pursue higher yield environments—creating lower demand for the dollar. These two effects working together ensured a significant devaluation in the US dollar. With the US dollar devaluing, the United States federal deficit ballooned to $1.27 trillion in 2011.

At the time, experts had no idea when the recession would end and had to adjust its policy accordingly.

The two biggest drains on the United States budget were defense and healthcare —with a combined expenditure of about $900B. The government was forced to make cuts in defense—fewer fighter planes

and ships, reduced benefits for veterans and reduced spending for Homeland Security etc. While reduced weapon spending doesn’t affect citizens domestically, everyone can appreciate the fact that programs like the Transportation Security Authority (TSA) does a lot of good for the country—fewer resources at their disposal could have disastrous results. Similarly, reduced spending for social security programs and Medicare had an immediate impact on United States citizens.

Our Impact

A question often posed in our lives is why paper currency is so valuable when it is just paper. At a micro level, currency represents the promise of a nation. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the revenue generated by a country for all of its goods and services in a year. Each dollar that is spent is contributing to the GDP, the proxy for a country’s economic power. The reason why the US dollar is the reserve currency is that the United States is the most powerful economic entity on earth. It’s for this reason that the United States can perpetually defer its interest payments on the immense debt it has racked up. There is an accepted truth that the United States isn’t going anywhere, which is why every country is confident that they will eventually get paid.

We might not personally be affected from this phenomenon but with every dollar we invest, we get it back in social programs such as school funding, infrastructure improvement and defense, not to mention maintaining United States relevance on the world stage—something we can all be proud of. n This article is the opinion of the author and is not shared by India Currents or any of its staff.

All investors should conduct their independent analysis before taking any actions and should not make any decisions on the information provided in this article alone.

Rahul Varshneya graduated from the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University with a degree in finance and is working in the technology industry as a financial analyst.

August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 35

travel

A Heavenly Pilgrimage Dipping in Mansarovar and trekking to Kailash

By Anita Kainthla

Trekking to Kailash

Pilgrims taking a dip in the holy Manasarovar Lake

36 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

K

ailash Manasarovar—two words, two names, one pilgrimage—and means more than a name, more than even a pilgrimage for followers of five of the world’s major religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Bon. The Hindus believe that Lord Shiva is the creator of the universe and Mount Kailash is his abode.

According to the Jainist belief, Lord Rishabha traveled to Mount Kailash to engage in a spiritual quest and he gained liberation in front of Kailash.

Guru Nanak Dev—the founder of Sikhism and first in the line of the ten illustrious Sikh Gurus—met and had an extensive dialogue with the Siddhas (ascetics) there.

This dialogue has been compiled into a text called the Siddh Gosht.

The indigenous Tibetan Swastika Bon religion propounds that Mount Kailash and Manasarovar are the holy lands, which were consecrated by its founder Thonpa Shenrab Miwo who lived, taught and disseminated the religion from this location.

For Buddhists, Mount Kailash is known as “Mt Meru,” the mythical image of the King of Mountains, positioned at the center of the universe.

My pilgrimage began when I became a member of the Isha Yoga foundation in Coimbatore, India. Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, the spiritual master and founder of this organization was the inspiration and sole reason for me to undertake this journey.

I boarded the Mumbai-Kathmandu flight, dizzy with a sense of a deeper spiritual yearning and sheer excitement.

At the Solatee Crowne Plaza Hotel in Kathmandu the entire Isha group traveling to Kailash Manasarovar got together—a 120 strong contingent. After the introductions, some from the group ventured into the city, visiting ancient temples or shopping at the Thamel market. I preferred to sleep off a headache. The hotel is considered one of the best in Kathmandu. It’s tranquil gardens made it seem like a haven among the hustle and bustle of the city, though the interior furnishings could have done with some uplift.

The next day began with a visit to the Pashupatinath temple, the ancient Shiva (Pashupathi is a manifestation of Shiva, meaning Lord of Animals) temple on the banks of the river Bagmati, about a few miles northwest of Kathmandu. The temple is barred to non-Hindus. It is a square pagoda temple with ornate doors. The inner sanctum features a linga with four faces.

From the temple it was a short ride to the ancient town of Patan. Patan is filled with traditional carvings, hand crafted statues and ornate temples. It is one of three royal cities in the Kathmandu valley.

Early the next morning we left Kathmandu in buses headed to Zhangmu (in China), via the Nepalese border hamlet of Kodari. On the way my bus partner and I compared notes about how preprepared we were for the yatra (pilgrimage) ahead.

A couple of months prior to the actual journey, the organizers had emailed extensive instructions on the whys and hows of physically preparing for our adventure: yogic practices, brisk walking and jogging were recommended for two months leading to the actual pilgrimage. Immersed in such conversations and entertained by the meandering and roaring River Kosi, we barely realized that Kodari was already at hand.

Scenic, would be insufficient to describe this locale. Located at an altitude of 8,251 feet, the panoramic view of the Himalayas at Kodari is breathtaking. From Kodari in Nepal, to enter into Chinese territory, a “friendship bridge” must be crossed on foot. After passing through passport scrutiny at the bridge, by both Nepalese and Chinese army men and successfully clearing immigration, we crossed over into the Southern Chinese town of Zhangmu.

Standing at about 2,300m (7,546ft.), Zhangmu enjoys a subtropical mild and humid climate, unlike the cold and arid one in the rest of Tibet. Zhangmu, across from Bhote Koshi River, was a night halt for us. Independent travelers should be pre-warned—the Zhangmu PSB won’t give you an Alien Travel Permit to head north into Tibet unless you have a guide, a driver and the mysterious Tibetan Tourism Bureau (TTB) permit!

At Zhangmu, we were joined by our Sherpas, who collected our duffle bags and prepared lunch for the group. For the remainer of our pilgrimage the Sherpas would not only be our luggage carriers but our chefs, waiters, high altitude advisers and friends.

Early the next morning, ably assisted by our “friendly neighborhood” Sherpas, we boarded Chinese tourist buses. It was

going to be a long ride, made longer by the winding roads and increasing altitude. We traveled through Saga County, a military town standing at over 16,000 feet and stretching across from the Brahmaputra, which begins its journey from the Jima Yangzong glacier near Mount Kailash.

Saga made us slow down, it made us gasp, it made us feel its altitude.

The decreasing air pressure Patan, Nepal —One of the three royal cities in Kathmandu; that on account of its altitude, is a center for fine arts, Buddhist and Hindu culture. made breathing a little harder, but at the hotel our team of dedicated doctors wouldn’t let Saga do us in. Mandatory medical checkups, warm food, cozy rooms, made us realize that Saga might be cold and uncomfortable, but we were well tended.

At Saga is where acclimatization occurs. So we broke journey here for two nights. During this time we shopped for essentials.

This was the last stop before we began our climb and hence the last place to shop for the journey ahead.

Our guides instructed us to walk with slow small steps, Monks, mostly women, at Pashupatinath Temple take our daily doses of Diamox, a medication used to fight high altitude sickness and persist with to be a fragment of the ancient Tethys Sea our yogic practices. and of having a mineral density of 400 milThe next morning at 6 a.m. it apligrams per liter. peared unusually dark, the reason being Somewhere around lunch time, Mathe Chinese time zone was situated a long nasarovar loomed into sight and its limdistance off at Beijing. This causes a major pid blue waters caught our already weak discrepancy between the sun’s position and breaths in a cumulative gasp. Chinese disalthe time; our watch might say 6 a.m. but it low private buses to go right up to the lake, was actually 4 a.m. according to the posibut there is a well structured tourist center tion of the sun! In this confused state of from where the buses transport the traveltime we left Saga in complete darkness and ers to the lake. a dripping sky.

The blue of the lake took on many Between Saga and Manasarovar lie 450 other hues even as we stood before it in Kms (279 miles) and even despite the silence and awe. Crying, joining hands early hour, the challenging altitude, the in reverence, prostrating and photographwet weather and the cold, the collective aning—there was intense activity among our ticipation of the group was so thick that it group. And among all this there was the seemed to have an identity of its own. Thus camp site. The Sherpas had done it again! we began the bus ride—Sherpas, duffle They had pitched tents for our two night bags, backpacks, et al. stay on the banks of the mystical ManasaManasarovar is the world’s highest rovar and prepared a hot meal for us even freshwater lake, 90 km (55 miles) in length before we had reached our site. There were and stands at an altitude of almost 15,000 the toilet tents, the medical screening, the ft. Geological survey confirms Manasarovar August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 37

38 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

emergency, the dining and the sleeping tents, all numbered for our convenience.

And as if this wasn’t enough, suddenly there he materialized—Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev—my spiritual master, mentor, guide, friend and more. He had just returned from Kailash with another group of Isha meditators.

The rest of the morning, the master was with us, initiating us, talking to us and answering our innumerable queries. For a while, time lost its grip. Dinner that night was a quiet, reverential affair.

The next morning we prayed for the rain to yield and the sun to appear so that we could complete our pilgrimage to Manasarovar with a dip in its waters. Even as we sat on the banks of the lake on the cold, dreary, drizzly morning, there was a miraculous retraction of cloud cover.

The sunlight spread itself in a weak haze, enough for us to scramble out of our heavy woolens and into the cold waters of the Manasarovar. Manasarovar resounded with cries of “Shiv Shambo.” We had been strictly instructed not to remain in the icy waters beyond ten minutes and we did not need more.

That night the tents were fervent with packing just enough for a two-day stay at Kailash; the rest of our belongings would reach us later on our way back. From Manasarovar, we boarded the government buses that took us to Yam Dwar via the town of Darchen. Securing our walking sticks, ponies and porters we began our trek from Yam Dwar to Deraphuk. As instructed we began with small steps, guided by a chant of “Shiv Shambho” to match our strides.

The mighty Kailash stands at almost

22,000 ft, making it one of the highest points of the Himalayan Range. All around this magnificent mystical mountain, the landscape cannot be captured by any device—verbal, written or photographic.

One parikrama or circumambulation around the mountain is 52 km (32.31 miles) long and takes about three days.

Our trek had to be shortened, since the previous night it had snowed at Deraphuk.

It was considered safe to trek only about 17 kms (10.5 miles) to the north face of Kailash. But no one complained.

Along the way, the makeup of the group shifted and changed. Some trekkers needed medical attention, mostly due to difficulty in breathing. There were many doctors with us and so were oxygen supplies and medications. It took about six hours for the entire group to reach Deraphuk, with some reaching in under four hours and some in over eight hours. However, despite all the physical complexities that we had endured, the fact that we had caught a brief glimpse of Kailash on the way was all that we chattered about. Most of us managed to capture that transitory view using our cameras and there was an excited sharing of images at the dinner tent.

The “Kailash Hotel” was a two storied barrack styled affair—with no bathrooms or toilets. We had been warned about this.

It was cold, dark and overcast when we reached the hotel, but the rooms had warm, cozy beds and the Sherpas had a hot meal ready for us, as usual. Among the excited chattering in the dinner tent, there was a sudden squeal followed by silence and then noise. And then someone explained, “Kailash. North Face. Clear view.” In a matter of seconds the tent was empty and the entire assemblage was out in the cold, dark night, prostrating, crying, joining hands— Kailash stood unbelievably close, strangely sacred and incredibly majestic.

That night as I crept into bed, the Kailash clearly visible from my window.

There was a feeling of having reached—not a place, not a mountain—just an inner destination. n Anita Kainthla is a published writer and poet. She has been nominated for the Pushcart award. She writes features, travel articles and short stories for national and international magazines.

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events AUGUST

Your Best Guide to Indian Events Edited by: Mona Shah List your event for FREE! SEPTEMBER issue deadline: Wednesday, August 20 To list your event in the Calendar, go to www.indiacurrents.com and fill out the Web form

Check us out on

special dates Raksha Bandhan

August 10

Indian Independence Day

August 15

Krishna Janamashtami

August 17

Ganesh Chaturthi

August 29

Labor Day

September 1

Onam

September 7

CULTURAL CALENDER

August

1 Friday

Arijit Singh in concert, August 1

UCarnival Washington DC 2014.

Ethnic fashion festival. Ends Aug. 3. Organized by Utsav Fashion. 10 a.m. Tysons Corner Marriott, 8028 Leesburg Pike, Tysons Corner, VA 22182. (800) 824-9156.

Arijit Singh Live in Concert. Or-

ganized by Kavila Entertainment. 8 p.m.

Warner Theatre, 513 13th St NW, Washington, DC 20004. $39-$259. (202) 246-2285. www.kavilaentertainment.com.

40 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

August

8 Friday

Mika Singh and Sunny Leone Live in Concert. Organized by Intense

Entertainment. 8 p.m. Patriot Center, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030. (202) 596-2784. www.intenseus.com.

August

16 Friday

Alluring RT Facts Exhibition and Sale. Range of Tanjore paintings, Rajast-

hani miniature paintings, brass and bronze items, and many other original handicrafts from India. Organized by Latha Kotha.

10 a.m. Loudoun Valley 2 Clubhouse, 43100 Barnstead Drive, Ashburn, VA 20148. (571) 315-3384.

Janmashtami (Sri Krishna Jayanthi) Puja, Homams and Celebrations.

10:30 a.m. Vedic Temple Of Virginia, 21580

events

Best Guide to Indian Events

Atlantic Blvd, Sterling, VA 20166. (703) 723-0033.

Guldasta—Film Music, and Sufi Melodies. Organized by Rangeela Sanjay (Mike) Mehta. 7:30 p.m. F. Scott Fitzgerald Theatre, 603 Edmonston Drive, Rockville, MD 20851. $30-$100. (301) 792-9768, (571) 445-0123, (703) 932-1905. www. dcdesi.com.

August

17 Sunday

Independence Day Celebrations.

Parade, flag hoisting and cultural program.

3-6 p.m. Northern Virginia Community College, Ernst Community Cultural Center, 8333 Little River Turnpike Annandale, VA 22003. Free. (240) 453 0580, (571) 314 8275, (301) 356-4565.

August

22 Friday

Bollywood Ladies Night. Organized

by Sadhna Jain and Movida Entertain-

ment. 9 p.m. Sitara Banquet Hall, 44260 Ice Rink Plaza, Ashburn, VA 20147. $20. (540) 413-6555.

August

30 Saturday

Sir Syed Memorial 40th International Mushaira. Poets from India, Paki-

stan and the United States, among them Abbas Tabish (Pakistan), Nusrat Mehdi (India), Sarfraz Shahid (Pakistan), Nilam Ahmed Bashir (Pakistan), Ambareen Haseeb “Amber” (Pakistan), Dr. Nausha Asrar, Alig (TX), Muqsit Nadeem (NY), Rafi Raz (NY) and Mona Shahab (MD) will take part in the mushaira. Organized

by Aligarh Muslim University Alumni Association, Washington, DC. 6:30 p.m.

Universities at Shady Grove Auditorium, 9630 Gudelsky Drive, Rockville MD 20850. $30, $50. (443) 525-8195, (443) 538-0670, (240) 401-4355. info@amudc.org. www. amudc.org.

September

12 Friday

Selecting the right lender

is just as important as choosing the right community for your family. MVB Mortgage provides the financial foundation to help build dreams. Whether you are a first time buyer, looking to move up, build your custom dream home, remodel your existing home, or are perhaps down-sizing, I am committed to finding the perfect financing options and providing the highest level customer service.

South Asian Film Festival (DCSAFF).

Celebrates alternative, independent cinema from the global South Asian community by providing filmmakers, actors, and industry professionals a platform to showcase their work. Ends Sep. 14. AMC Loews Rio Cinemas, Gaithersburg, MD 20878.

(301) 502-0850. info@dcsaff.com.

September

14 Sunday

Mega Health Fair. A community service event launching the enrollment of Americans and Permanent Residents to comply with Federal Government Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Free flu shots administered at fair as well as basic blood work for the under-privileged and a host of other tests and health education. Guru Nanak Foundation, 12917 Old Columbia Pike, Silver Spring, MD 20904.

(240) 330-9421. © Copyright 2014 India Currents. All rights reserved. Reproduction for commercial use strictly prohibited.

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events SPIRITUALITY & YOGA

August

8 Friday

Vara Lakshmi Vratham. 7:30 p.m. Vedic Temple Of Virginia, 21580 Atlantic Blvd, Sterling, VA 20166. (703) 723-0033.

August

9 Saturday

Satyanarayana Swamy Vratham.

6 p.m. Vedic Temple Of Virginia, 21580 Atlantic Blvd, Sterling, VA 20166. (703) 723-0033.

August

10 Sunday

Rig Upakarma and Yajur Upakarma (Jandhyala Upakarma). 7 a.m. Vedic

Temple Of Virginia, 21580 Atlantic Blvd, Sterling, VA 20166. (703) 723-0033.

Satya Narayana Swamy Vratham.

5 p.m. Vedic Temple Of Virginia, 21580 Atlantic Blvd, Sterling, VA 20166. (703) 723-0033.

August

15 Friday

Vara Lakshmi Vratham. 7:30 p.m. Vedic Temple Of Virginia, 21580 Atlantic Blvd, Sterling, VA 20166. (703) 723-0033.

August

17 Sunday

Krishna Janmastami Celebration.

Ends Aug. 18. ISKON of DC, 10310 Oaklyn Drive, Potomac, MD 20854. (301) 2992100. info@iskconofdc.org. iskconofdc.org.

August

25 Monday

Shravana Masam. 5 a.m. Hindu Temple of Virginia Balaji Temple, 22510 S Sterling Blvd, Sterling, VA 20164. (703) 373-7326.

August

27 Wednesday

Swami Bhoomananda Tirtha’s Pro-

42 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

Best Guide to Indian Events grams. A renowned exponent of Vedanta, Swamiji will be accompanied by Sannyasin Disciple Ma Gurupriya. The programs include spiritual discourses, interactive satsangs and Vishnusahasranaama Maha Yajna. Ends Sep. 9. Organized by Center for Inner Resources Development. 7-8:30 p.m. American Legion, 1355 Balls Hill Road, McLean VA 22101. Free, registration required. (703) 642-8593, (301) 464-2117, (703) 748-8405. events@cirdna.org. www. cirdna.org/2014Events.

August

30 Saturday

Sahasra Suvasini Puja and Namasankeerthan Mela. 1000 Suvasinis

(married women) will be seated as Divine Mother and puja will be performed individually on each woman to invoke the divine energy of the Supreme Being. Each woman will be provided with a Sari and dressing items. Ends Aug. 31. Organized

by Gnanananda Seva Samajam Inc. Chinmaya Somnath, 4400 Blue Spring Drive, Chantilly, VA 20152. (301) 528-5851.

Saturdays Balaji Suprabhatha Seva. Group

www.dahnyoga.com.

Sundays Bhajans. 6-7:30 p.m. Mangal Mandir, 17110 New Hampshire Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20905. (301) 421-0985.

60+ Senior Citizens Club. 3 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mangal Mandir, 17110 New Hampshire Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20905. (301) 421-0985.

Geeta Discussion. Explanation of vari-

ous chapters of Karma and Bhakti Yoga.

Organized by Rajdhani Mandir. 4:15-5:30 p.m. 4525 Pleasant Valley Road Chantilly, VA 20151.

Gita Study Group. Organized by

Chinmaya Mission. 10 a.m. Vision Learning Center, Grove Park Square 11537A Nuckols Rd, Glen Allen, VA 23059. (804) 364-1396. http://www.chinmayadc.org.

Sanskrit Class. Emphasis on Sanskriti

(culture). Taught by Moti Lal Sharma.

Organized by Rajdhani Mandir. $60. 3-4 p.m. 4525 Pleasant Valley Road, Chantilly, VA 20151.

chanting of Balaji Suprabhatam. Vishnu Sahasra Namam, Balaji Astothram, Lakshmi Astothram and Balaji Govinda Namam. Followed by prasad. 9:45-11 a.m. Rajdhani Mandir, 4525 Pleasant Valley Road, Chantilly, VA 20151.

Yoga Classes. Self-guided and instructor

Yoga Classes. Self-guided and instructor

assisted. 7-9 a.m (Self-Guided), 9-10 a.m. (instructor assisted). Rajdhani Mandir.

4525 Pleasant Valley Road, Chantilly, VA 20151. (703) 378-8401.

lowed by prasad and Priti Bhoj. Organized

by The Hindu Temple of Metropolitan Washington. 5 p.m.10001 Riggs Road, Adelphi, MD 20783. (301) 445-2165. http:// www.hindutemplemd.org.

Balgokul. Help children learn and

Balagokulam. Learn and appreciate

appreciate Hindu values through participation in Hindu festivals held at the temple, yoga, games, bhajans and shlokas.

10:30 a.m. Sri Siva Vishnu Temple, 6905 Cipriano Road, Lanham, MD 20706. (703) 338-5637, (703) 732-4732. ssvt.balgokul@gmail.com. www.ssvt.org.

assisted. Organized by Rajdhani Mandir.

7-9 a.m (Self-Guided), 9-10 a.m. 4525 Pleasant Valley Road, Chantilly, VA 20151. (703) 378-8401.

Prarthana, Satsand, Prabachan. Fol-

Hindu values through games, shlokas, story-telling, music, and group discussions.

Organized by The Hindu Temple of Metropolitan Washington. 5:30 p.m. 10001 Riggs Road, Adelphi, MD 20783. rsdiwedi@ comcast.net. (301) 345-6090. http://www. hindutemplemd.org.

Yoga Classes. Organized by Dahn

Yoga. 10 a.m. 700 14th Street NW, Washington, DC 20005. (202)393-2440. washingtonDC@dahnyoga.com. http://

© Copyright 2014 India Currents. All rights reserved. Reproduction for commercial use strictly prohibited.

relationship diva

Is My Friend’s Girlfriend Cheating On Him?

By Jasbina Ahluwalia

Q

My best friend’s been dating his girlfriend for about 8 months, and in the last couple of days he’s confided to me that he’s begun to suspect she may not be faithful. He’s a pretty private guy like me, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only one he’s confided to. He’s always been there for me, and I hate to think there’s even a possibility his girlfriend isn’t showing him the loyalty he deserves. Any suggestions?

A

Trust is one of the most important aspects of a relationship, and being confident of his girlfriend’s faithfulness is crucial to the success of your friend’s growing relationship. While context is important, and the below signs are certainly not black-and-white, here are four signs to share with him: (i) She has become more interested in her appearance: Caring about her health and desiring an attractive appearance is normal. However, if all of a sudden

dear doctor

your friend’s girlfriend becomes obsessed with her appearance, wants to make drastic changes, begins buying an excessive amount of new clothes, obsessively tries to lose weight or suddenly changes her hair color, this could be a sign of infidelity. (ii) She refuses to make solid long-term plans: If your friend’s girlfriend is cheating or thinking of cheating, she will likely be hesitant to make any long-term plans. For example, if she isn’t interested in where your friend should go on vacation this year, or she doesn’t want to talk about plans for holidays, or she just doesn’t seem interested in discussing anything to do with the relationship’s future, this could be a sign that she is cheating. (iii) She flirts with other men in front of him: If she has no problem batting her eyes and throwing herself on other men in front of your friend, he has to ask himself what she does when he isn’t around. If she doesn’t respect him and their relationship

enough to refrain from flirting, that doesn’t speak well of their relationship. (iv) She starts hinting that she is unhappy in her relationship: If his girlfriend begins speaking to him about how unhappy she is with various aspects of their relationship, she may be getting ready to tell him that she has found someone else with whom she is happier.

As mentioned last month, the signs listed above can potentially all be clues that his girlfriend is cheating. Importantly, however, all of them can be attributed to other factors as well.

Your friend is lucky to have such a caring friend. 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.

Consequence of Careless Words

By Alzak Amlani

Q

I recently had a difficult encounter with a friend that I have known for about two years. We work in the same company and have worked on projects together and spent time going out to lunch and on walks. We have shared a lot about our personal lives and been quite vulnerable with each other.

In some ways, I’ve also put her on a bit of a pedestal.

Recently, I said some things about her family and she got very angry and has pulled away from me. She felt misunderstood and offended, she informed me. At first it was difficult for me to understand what I did that was so offensive.

After thinking about it and talking to other people, I can see how I was a bit judgmental. I feel awful about my blunder. I find myself crying about it, feeling guilty, anxious and worrying that she won’t ever be my friend again. I keep going over the conversation and critiquing myself, but it just makes me feel worse. I don’t think she wants to talk about it. I don’t know how to go forward and resolve this situation.

Can you advise?

A

Sounds like you feel trapped in this dilemma. Often when we feel closer

to someone, something big like this can happen. Sometimes the intensity and vulnerability of the closeness is scary and people need to break the contact in order to protect themselves. This is often unconscious. Whenever we share our deeper selves with another, there is the possibility of hurt feelings. It is a risk to expose ourselves because we don’t know how it will be received and what triggers a person has that we will step on. There seems to be genuine care between the two of you. If that is so, take a few moments to actually remember and recognize that reality. Let it steep in your body and feelings for a bit.

Sounds like you are starting to be very hard on yourself. We all make blunders. It is valuable to inquire into what you were feeling when you said the things to your friend that she found hurtful. Was there aggression, fear, jealousy or other emotions there? If so, look more deeply into them and it can be an opportunity to learn about yourself and grow. Close friendships can bring up a lot of our own family issues, especially with siblings. See if your friend reminds you of anyone from your family or

experiences from your past. When we hit a very challenging place with someone, it often has baggage from previous significant relationships, especially from the family of origin.

See if you can cultivate the ground of self-compassion by realizing that you are human and that means you have been hurt in life and are conditioned and flawed, and therefore, will from time to time hurt another person. How you feel about that and how you are willing to change, makes all the difference. Owning your limitations, speaking them and forgiving yourself will help you move on. This will also make room for a healing dialogue if your friend is ready. If she chooses to stay away, then you can, from a distance, send positive thoughts of well being and care. This will free you from negative worrying and soothe the hurt and fear. n Alzak Amlani, Ph.D., is a counseling psychologist of Indian descent in the Bay Area. 650-325-8393. Visit www.wholenesstherapy.com August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 43

recipes

Street Food Entertainment

By Jagruti Vedamati

I

n our frenzied and increasingly impersonal world of late nights at work, crazy schedules with kids, and conveniently located restaurants luring us with elaborate menus, where’s the time or inclination to cook? It seems that the burgeoning restaurant scene seems to have found its ideal, loyal clientele—busy professionals with little patience and plenty of money As more and more people opt to go out for dinners abandoning the age old tradition of making their own meals, it gives me pause as to what our next generation is going to learn. What culinary traditions will we pass forward? Are we giving rise to a generation that has been deprived of the sensuous art of cooking? A generation that finds solace in restaurant-bought food over home cooked meals?

Creating and enjoying a home-cooked meal is a great way to add the personal touch to life. Food has the ability to bring people together in celebration. It adds in oodles of love to our daily meals as well as

important occasions, like birthdays.

Speaking of birthdays, they have always been extra-special for me, filled with the honor of being treated as a special person for one entire day. These days, it has become a reason to get together with friends and family to celebrate the year gone by while welcoming the new one.

With distinctive memories of our birthdays, my husband and I wanted to make our guests feel special by making them a home-cooked meal for my birthday.

After going through scores and scores of recipes, Ragda Patties was finalized (based on the ease of preparation and its mass appeal factor).

Famous in most parts of the country, this Indian street food has different names in different regions—Ragda Patties in the

west, Aloo Tikki Chaat in the north and Aloo Gughuni Chaat in the east and it is as tasty in all its numerous versions. n Jagruti Vedamati writes from Los Angeles and is currently juggling a hectic Ph.D. life with food blogging. You can find her recipes at turmerickitchen.blogspot.com.

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44 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

Ragda Patties This strikingly colorful, savory Indian street food is a delightful combination of aromatic potato patties served with a dollop of spicy yellow pea curry. Generous sprinklings of assorted chutneys, crispy sev (fried chickpea noodles) and chopped onions add the extra sparkle to this dish.

Ragda/Gughuni (Yellow Peas Curry) Ingredients: 2 cups whole yellow/ white peas (Soaked over night) ½ tsp turmeric powder ¼ cup oil 4 medium sized tomatoes— chopped 3 tbsps tomato ketchup 1 tbsp sambhar powder 1 tsp chili powder ¼ tsp sugar Salt to taste 1 tsp amchur (dried mango) powder.

Method: i. In 1 cup of water make a paste with tomato ketchup, sambhar powder, chili powder, sugar, salt and amchur powder ii. Boil the peas with salt and turmeric powder till just done. Set aside. I use a pressure cooker for quick results. iii. In a deep pan, add in the oil and once the oil heats up, add in the chopped tomatoes and let it cook till soft and mushy (~ 2-3 mins). iv. Add in the paste one spoon at a time and wait till the masala mixture is dry.

Continue till you finish all of it and the oil floats to the top. v. Now add in the boiled peas and cook over medium low heat till soft and mushy (~ 5 mins). vi. Adjust for salt and amchur powder.

Potato Patties

Ingredients: 4-5 medium sized boiled potatoes 1 cup finely chopped mint ½ tsp dry ginger powder powder 1 tsp cumin powder 2-3 finely chopped green chilies ½ tsp garam masala powder 2 tbsp rice flour or corn flour ½ tsp chaat masala a pinch of sugar salt to taste

1 cup bread crumbs Oil to fry.

Method: 1. Mash the boiled potatoes along with all the other ingredients.

2. Divide the dough equally into palm sized rounds. Now flatten the mashed potato rounds, roll them in bread crumbs (for the crunch!) and shallow fry till golden brown.

Tamarind Date Chutney

Sweet and slightly tangy, this delectable date chutney is a must have for this street delicacy.

Ingredients 8-10 pitted whole dates 1 cup water 1½ tsp tamarind extract 1 tbsp jaggery ½ tsp dry ginger powder ½ tsp cumin powder A pinch of black salt ¼ tsp chili powder (Optional) Method i. Soak the tamarind separately in lukewarm water for about 10 minutes till both are soft. Squeeze out the tamarind pulp from the soaked tamarind. ii. In a pan over medium heat, add water and the chopped pitted dates. Cook till it boils gently and the dates look softer (~ 3-4 mins). iii. Then add in the rest of the ingredients and adjust the sweetness with jaggery according to your taste. Switch off the stove once the mixture looks glossy (~ 2 mins more after adding the rest of the ingredients).

Green Chutney

Spicy and savory, this coconut and cilantro chutney adds that much needed peppery hint.

2 cups cilantro leaves ½ cups frozen shredded coconut ½ tbsp chopped Green Chilies ¼ tsp sugar ¼ tsp rock salt (Optional) Salt to taste ½ tsp lemon juice Grind the cilantro leaves to a paste, along with the green chilies, coconut and a little bit of water, if required. Mix in sugar, salt, lemon juice and adjust according to taste. This chutney should not be very watery, so avoid using too much water.

Assembly: Place the patties on a plate Pour a dollop of the yellow pea curry.

Drizzle it with tamarind date chutney and green chutney. Sprinkle chopped onions, sev and chaat masala.

Savor it with all your senses!

Some useful notes: • Soak the peas overnight and boil the next day. Store it in the refrigerator for the day of the event.

• You can prepare the patties the day before the event and refrigerate it. Fry it just before the party begins. That way the patties hold together much better leaving you with little work to do on the day of the party.

• You can even prepare all the chutneys beforehand and refrigerate.

• After you are done frying the patties, cover the dish with aluminum foil and keep it hot in the oven (250 degrees fahrenheight) till the guests arrive. n August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 45

perspective

The Making of a Movie

By Parveen Maheshwari

Lead actors Pankaj Dubey and Zoe Winter

W

e are connected to films in different ways. My journey started in 2004 when I took my first film production class. It took many years of hits and misses before I had the opportunity to co-produce a 32-minute film called Heart Has Reasons. The story was based on the increased risk of heart disease afflicting South Asians. Upon completion of the film, Kiran Harpanhalli, who edited and provided the background music score, proposed that the team focus on a full length feature as our next project. So began the journey of Love Pyar Whatever.

I managed to get funding only because of my day job as an accountant. Several of my clients were happy to invest because it was their “childhood dream to make a movie.” I had a six-figure budget and managed to get 12 investors.

The Plot

When the concept for the movie was being developed, we wanted to capture the dreams of professionals and students from India who come to the United States every year and the reality of the cultural and communication differences, including dating issues, they have to face once they arrive in their new country. For our Indie film to compete with high budget Bollywood films, we agreed that the plot must be a romantic love story with a tinge of raunchiness.

The story of Love Pyar Whatever is about a young Indian student who travels to the United States in search of his true love. After a series of mishaps, he finally meets the girl of his dreams. Will his inexperience cost him the girl or will he finally find what has been missing from his entire life—everlasting and true love?

The Right Director and Cast

Carlos Mora, a filmmaker of Latin American descent and very active in the

46 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

Vijay Rajvaidya and Shalini Chaudhuri

Karina Lamar and Pankaj Dubey

San Francisco film scene, agreed to be our director and took up the tedious task of writing the screenplay. He was intrigued by our suggestion that the movie have Hindi Bollywood style songs. We met several times to go over the screenplay and fine tune it until it had the right balance of American and Indian sensibilities.

Pankaj Dubey, an accomplished dancer and actor, was selected to play the lead role of the young Indian student coming from India. Zoë Winter, the lead actress, came with several years of experience and she delivered a performance that is emotionally charged.

One of the critical functions was that of the the 2nd Assistant Director, Natteri Varadarajan, who was instrumental in organizing and scheduling actors and crew.

This was a monumental task since this project had multiple locations and many actors. The movie’s cast of over 45 actors is a blend of professionals from both Indian and American backgrounds. There were 121 scenes to be shot and over 15 locations to be negotiated.

There were instances when we could not get volunteers to show up for critical scenes. One was the airplane scence. We had rented an aircraft for four hours and sent out word for volunteers to show up.

At the appointed time, very few people came and we had to scramble to convince our close relatives to drop everything and be a part of the production.

At a shoot at the Ohlone College (when the campus was closed), we needed students as part of the scene and the only way we could persuade them was to offer them a $20 remuneration. I remember walking around campus with a wad of notes and distributing it to students who came to the sets.

making shorts in San Francisco, I was told that every good movie has to have three “Oh My God” scenes and one “Oh Fucking Shit” scene in order to be successful.

When I think back to Love Pyar Whatever, I can easily identify the one enactment that fits the latter prototype. It is a beautiful portrayal where the hero helps the heroine drape a sari around herself. The scene is tasteful and sensual.

The movie making business is a hard nut to crack. First we must be convinced that our movie has legs, only then can we sell the movie to theaters. Even if we have a good movie, there are distribution hurdles to cross. In August 2013, I went to India with a rough cut of the full film. We met with many film industry producers and distributors, without making much headway.

We screened the film at Eros Cinema in Mumbai and invited college students to serve as a focus group. They compared the movie to the commerical blockbuster Chennai Express and gave us feedback that we took heed of. I believe distribution will happen if the movie works. And I am convinced that the movie will work.

The Movie Has Legs

Parveen Maheshwari is the producer of Love Pyar Whatever

In one of the classes I attended on film-

Looking Back

My journey started when I was asked to create my “tombstone” story or “How will you like to be remembered?” pitch at an event I attended 10 years ago. In that soul-searching process I came to realize that my obituary would read a little lacklustre.

While I had a few professional degrees to my credit, there was nothing in my resume and accomplishments that struck me as “remember-worthy.” So I began to think about what I would really like to do and stumbled upon movie production. The rest, I hope, is history. n

viewfinder

Naturally Indian

By Susmita Khan

er

n win

L

ast year, we visited the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas— an enormous Buddhist center of worship, monasticism and education, and the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere—in Ukiah, California. Perhaps to reinforce the spiritual atmosphere of the community, live peacocks festooned the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas. They pranced their way amongst the surroundings, crossing pathways and blocking

doors with impunity. This photograph highlights the surreal combination of the old-fashioned, wooden doorway and the peacock’s regal plumage, decked in full splendor. n Susmita Khan is a full-time parent. With a daughter in college and son in high school, she is a partial empty-nester and spends time on reading, photography, and traveling.

India Currents invites readers to submit to this column. Send us a picture with caption and we’ll pick the best entry every month.

There will be a cash prize awarded to the lucky entrant. Entries will be judged on the originality and creativity of the visual and the clarity and storytelling of the caption. So pick up that camera and click away.

Send the picture as a jpeg image to editor@indiacurrents.com with Subject: A Picture That Tells a Story.

Deadline for entries: 10th of every month.

August 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 47

the last word

Otranto—An Italian Poem

By Sarita Sarvate

W

hen I applied to a writers’ residency in Otranto, Italy, I did not even know where the town was. I filled out the paperwork half-heartedly, not sure if I wanted to go. So, when I got the letter of acceptance, I reviewed a map and located the place, a tiny dot on the southern tip of Italy’s Adriatic coast.

I decided to let myself be surprised. After all, a web search had produced only a scant description, leading me to imagine Otranto as a rustic backwater, windswept and rural, with perhaps only a shop or two to boast of.

Riding the train from Rome, I watch rolling hills covered with vineyards. Hay bales are arranged in a geometrical pattern in farms stretching for miles. This is an agricultural country, a producer of some of the best wines, cheeses, olives, olive oils, and sausages. I note that the fruit here taste the way fruit once tasted in California, not like cardboard, but with a flavor that winds its way deep into your soul.

When the landscape slowly gives way to pale ochre earth cradling pink lantana blossoms and acacia trees reminiscent of my native India, I am pleasantly surprised. Then the train begins to hug the blue Adriatic along a flat peninsula and my excitement mounts.

Arriving in Otranto, I discover a place straight out of an Italian film; cobblestone alleys twisting and turning I around yellow and white buildings; windows with blue and brown wooden shutters; sit on the cast iron balconies overflowing with terrace in the flowers. The old town is encased a fortress complete with a morning sipping inside moat, creating a scene straight out the Red Label tea I of Game of Thrones, a fantasy kingdom protected from invasions by have brought with sea or by land.

In my apartment, which I share me and admire the with two roommates, I walk out on view. All of life’s to the terrace overlooking the finger of land jutting out to the blue sea in traumas melt away, an arc, with a tiny, white lighthouse at dissolve into the the end, and my breath stops.

Before the advent of jet travel, the sea breeze.

Adriatic was a gateway to the East. You can see the mountains of Albania from here and a ferry will take you to Greece. An ancient Greek community still survives here in small pockets, its dialect far removed from its parent country, its music rustic and haunting. There are Messapi ruins here, left by the aborigine inhabitants of the peninsula that date back to the eighth century BC. Paola, the program’s founder, takes us on a walk to some pre-historic ruins at sunset on June 21, the summer solstice, which also happens to be my older son Ravi’s birthday. We enter a long tunnel, and as the clouds lift, a shaft of sunlight enters underground, and reflected by the strategically placed walls, illuminates the prehistoric burial chamber in a golden light.

In the 1400s, a Turkish invasion killed eight hundred men of Otranto. The town’s cathedral still keeps their bones on display in glass cases. It was only in 2013 that Pope Francis canonized these martyrs. This fact troubles me; I recall George W. Bush invoking the crusades in a speech justifying the invasion of Iraq. Can’t bygones be bygones, I wonder. Or should we display the bones of those killed in the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre in a temple somewhere too? But then again, Catholics think nothing of preserving body parts of their saints; I still recall my shock and revulsion at the sight of Saint The48 | INDIA CURRENTS | August 2014

resa’s finger in a jar in a church in Avila, Spain; Hindus on the other hand, would find such an act too macabre.

Notwithstanding its bloody history, Otranto is one of the most peaceful and friendly places on earth. Passers-by greet you with a Buona Sera or just Sera, and strangers give you a hand with your bags. Maybe it is the siesta everyone has every afternoon during la pausa, the break, that keeps people so mellow. Or maybe it is the pleasant sea breeze that lulls you into a feeling of harmony. Whatever the reason, one is unable to rush around here. Every meal is served slowly and with care, and educated Italians like Giuseppe Conoci, who owns a local publishing company for music and books, sit in cafes, discussing philosophy.

The shallow bay is calm and warm to swim in the summertime and Italian children are in evidence everywhere; American tourists have luckily not discovered this place yet. Riding around the countryside in an elegantly decorated auto-rickshaw locals call the appetino, I see olive groves stretching as far as the eye can see. When I dip a piece of fresh bread—which goes hard in a day indicating a lack of preservatives—into the oil and take a bite, my throat tingles. It is the oil’s anti-inflammatory property that causes the itch, my roommate Sophie says. And sure enough, within days, the sore throat and congestion I have had for months in drought-ridden California is gone.

Vegetarians would have no trouble surviving here; pasta and sauces are of course ubiquitous like everywhere in Italy, but beans and nuts are in abundance too; chick-pea pasta is a local specialty and so is breaded, fried zucchini, marinated or grilled eggplant, a kind of fava bean paste which is served like a soup, and tarelli, a spiral bread stick. Ordering the vegetarian antipasti—appetizers—of the house in a restaurant with my fellow writers, I stuff myself so that I can hardly touch the pasta and there are two more courses to go.

I sit on the terrace in the morning sipping the Red Label tea I have brought with me and admire the view. All of life’s traumas melt away, dissolve into the sea breeze. I have come here to write, but words seem to fail here so I am glad I have taken up watercolor painting lately; I sit on the terrace painting the scene.

It is the art in the day to day things that takes my breath away, not the statues and paintings stored in museums.

On my last evening, I persuade my young roommate Sophie, who is a lithe dancer and an artist, to walk with me along the coast toward the other lighthouse. The cliffs, the fields marked by medieval stone walls, the fresh sea breeze, the blue, blue waters, mesmerize us. And I marvel that only a month or two before, I had not even heard of Otranto.

At the residency show, I share my paintings and my writing.

As I read aloud my essay about my solo travels, I begin to shake, my voice fails, I am on the verge of tears. Otranto has made me vulnerable, raw, brittle. It is the most wonderful feeling on earth, as if all restraints have been removed.

And I am free. n Sarita Sarvate (www.saritasarvate.com) has published commentaries for New America Media, KQED FM, San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune, and many nationwide publications.

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