Mrinalini s Mississippi by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Ministering the Monk by Bob Allen
Magic of Machu Picchu by Riz Mithani
INDIA CURRENTS
Is anger on the rise or is it just a digital phenomenon? By Anita Felicelli february 2014 • vol. 27, no . 10 • www. indiacurrents.com
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Rahinah Ibrahim was a Stanford doctoral candidate on her way to Hawaii for a conference in 2005 when she was stopped at San Francisco airport by federal agents, handcuffed and detained because her name was on the no-fly watchlist. Ibrahim contested her inclusion on the list in federal court and her legal fight has taken eight years to finally result in a decision. In a pared down version of the ruling, kept under seal until April 15th, Judge Alsup, a San Francisco Federal Judge, ordered Ibrahim’s name stricken from the list on January 14, 2014. This is a landmark ruling and of particular importance to the South Asian community. Many of our men and women are pulled out of lines at airports across the country and subjected to intensive screening measures. The post 9-11 compass precludes examination of how any individual is put on the list, even though it is evident that race, religion and country of origin are possibly the main or only parameters for inclusion. The no-fly list, which contained 16 names pre-9/11 had about 21,000 names in early 2012, according to the New York Times. The government admittedly was wrong in Ibrahim’s case. “FBI Agent Kelley Kelly named her to the wrong watchlist, and did
not fill out the form correctly,” testified Debra Lubman, the former director of the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC). Shirin Sannar, a Stanford Law Professor who specializes in National Security and Counter Terrorism Law and who was an expert witness on behalf of Ibrahim’s team, declared that “current procedures to get off the list violates due process.” As recently as 2008, Nelson Mandela was on a United States terrorist watchlist and his name was removed from the list only through a bill signed into law by President Bush. It is no doubt a tough balancing act to ensure the safety of the country while not encroaching on the civil liberties of its people. However, in the face of obvious errors, it should not be the case that the only escape clause is a long drawn out legal battle at taxpayer expense. When it comes to matters of national security the no-fly dragnet has had wider scope and freer range. As Judge Alsup’s ruling makes clear, there needs to be more accountability in the process and a clear engagement with democracy and diversity. Jaya Padmanabhan
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INDIA CURRENTS february 2014 • vol 27 • no 10
PERSPECTIVES
Southern California Edition
1 | EDITORIAL A Fly in the Government Ointment By Jaya Padmanabhan
www.indiacurrents.com Find us on
6 | FORUM Should India Have Backed Down in the Khobragade Scandal? By Rameysh Ramdas, Mani Subramani
15 | OPINION Standing Left of the Right By Dilnavaz Bamboat 16 | ANALYSIS The Quest for EmptyHandedness By Ranjani Iyer Mohanty 31 | ON INGLISH Crushed By the Juggernaut By Kalpana Mohan 36 | PROFILE Aziz Ansari: Comedy and Commentary By Apurva Desai 54 | CURRENT AFFAIRS Why the United States Emperor Has No Clothes By Sandip Roy 55 | COMMENTARY Charm of the Farmer’s Market By Archana Asthana 64 | THE LAST WORD Chia Seeds, Psyllium Husk and a Blender By Sarita Sarvate 2 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
20 | BOOKS A Review of Karma Gone Bad, Pink Sari Revolution By Jeanne Fredriksen, Geetika Pathania Jain 23 | RELATIONSHIP DIVA Choosing Therapy By Jasbina Ahluwalia 28 | TAXES 2013 Tax Saving Guidelines By Khorshed Alam
7 | A THOUSAND WORDS Mrinalini’s Mississippi By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan 8 | PERSPECTIVE A Flood of Memories By Rajee Padmanabhan
LIFESTYLE
30 | ENVIRONMENT Coastal Cleanup By Zenobia Khaleel
10 | Mad, Mad World Is anger on the rise? By Anita Felicelli
34 | Films Dedh Ishqiya and Dhoom 3 By Aniruddh Chawda
18 | Viewpoint The One Percent American Girl By Vibha Akkaraju
58 | Travel
38 | MUSIC February Favorites By Vidya Sridhar 42 | IN MEMORIAM Lakshmi Shankar By Kanniks Kannikeswaran 50 | REFLECTIONS Ministering the Monk By Bob Allen 52 | HEALTHY LIFE Crucial Workout Meals By Malar Gandhi 56 | Recipes Cuttacki Street Fare By Jagruti Vedamati 63 | DEAR DOCTOR Divesting Dependencies By Alzak Amlani
DEPARTMENTS 4 | Voices 5 | Popular Articles
26 | Ask a Lawyer 27 | Visa Dates
Magic of Machu Picchu
61 | Classifieds 62 | Viewfinder
By Riz Mithani
WHAT’S CURRENT 44 | Cultural Calendar 49 | Spiritual Calendar
February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 3
voices Counter Arguments
I find the article by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (Counter Valley Thinking, India Currents, December 2013/January 2014) unnecessarily idealistic. Shashi Tharoor “opted-in,” says the author. This is a bit like saying Asoka was a pacifist. He was, after he did all the required killing. Tharoor has led a charmed life in many parts of the world for decades before “opting-in.” It is clear to me that he likes the good life, living as he does in a Lutyens Delhi setting. Working for a region and working in that region are not necessarily the same. The author likes absolute moral diktats. So “brain drain,” or in other words, voluntary employment seeking, choosing to innovate and working your way up is bad, in all situational contexts? Brain drain was, almost exclusively, the government’s fault. India’s post-colonial efforts to develop an independent nation were economically misdirected. We could have ensured a much better economy. Yet, the nation chose not to. When it comes to brain drain, people must be largely free to pursue careers in distinct parts of the world. There is no fixed pie of misery. One doesn’t have to personally experience living in filth to wish to help those poor chaps actually in that situation. Liberals understand that guilt and masochism for no valid reason is not how one solves the Indian poverty problem. J.S., online The author missed the point of Balaji Srinivasan’s brilliant talk. Either you like Srinivasan’s vision of a better society or not. If you like it, then you can opt-in. If you don’t like it, then go ahead and get dirty with Lok Sabha or whatever floats your boat. In my opinion someone who thinks “software is sexist” will not get along with rational engineering types anyway. Berkeley student, online It is amusing that the activist call is coming from multi-millionaires and billionaires who have been part of the status quo. But then again minority businesses and businessmen (who may or may not be entrepreneurs and innovators) have had to struggle to access both equal opportunity and fair rewards. Opting in and opting out both have its advantages and disadvantages. What matters is examining what one is opting out of, and opting in to? Some people opt out because they can
4 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
fight one or two “isms” in a certain system, rather than three or more in another. An African woman scientist went back to her country because she felt in her homeland she only had to deal with “sexism” among her peers and employers, whereas in the United States she had to deal with “sexism,” “racism” and “classism.” So, you pick the “negative or repressive isms” you want to fight, knowing that many who opt in or opt out, are not real change agents. Dr. MS, online
Author Rebuttal
I’m glad that readers are interested in continuing this conversation. It’s funny that one commenter thinks I like “absolute moral diktats,” when in fact all my columns evidence a preference for the nuances and gray areas that undergird black-and-white propositions like Balaji Srinivasan’s. Indeed, I never said that brain drain is “bad” or that people shouldn’t be “free to pursue careers,” but rather that emigration in the case of the mid-to late-20th century brain drain from India has not been a type of “exit that amplifies voice,” which is what Srinivasan tried to suggest. As for the point that one can simply “opt-in” or not, the idea that any society can be exclusively inhabited and managed by just those techno-libertarians in agreement is laughable. Who is going to perform all the public service tasks like garbage collecting? Who will take on childcare, manual labor, menial work? I suppose the Silicon Valley’s answer will be automation (another myopic solution to the world’s challenges). The fact remains, however, that there will be those who do not “opt-in” but are nevertheless co-opted into labor in Srinivasan’s utopia because of economic pressures, just as sweatshop workers did not “opt-in” to the global economy. Finally, since Srinivasan’s talk was also about opting-out of politics, it’s important to remember the value of the public and the value of the political. American pragmatist John Dewey defined the public as a “large body of persons having a common interest
in the consequences of social transactions.” Srinivasan and his ilk have lost sight of both the common interest and the consequences of social actions and transactions, forgetting also that, in the words of V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, “rights are not of much use unless and until they ripen into duties.” Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Kitchen Tales
The editorial in the year end issue (My Recipe Book, India Currents, December 2013/ January 2014) by Jaya Padmanabhan was interesting and illuminating. I visited the kitchen in my house on odd occasions, for grabbing some forbidden delicacies or to help make “cheedai” for Janmashtami, or to clean up the mess, much against my will, after de-seeding jackfruits. Cooking was not a privilege of males in those days, yet it became a recurring idea in my life. I still recollect reciting the recipe of a Kerala dish: olan. “Mathang nallorilavan brihathee sametham puthan manipayarangathilodi cherthum Alola neelamizhimarithuvechu thannalOlolanonnumathi enthinu noorukoottam!” As a rubber technologist I’ve come across this cooking reference: “many rubber technologists might have seen their wives beating eggs in the kitchen, but few might have realised its importance in latex processing ... rubber technology is just like cooking ...” Those days we never cooked eggs at home, but this was a great motivator, taking away the great burden of remembering complicated organic chemistry or the structure of aceto acetic ester! I’ve maintained my own recipe book compiled from my own experience. It was an adventure collecting recipes over the years. It was a surprise to me in 1990 when my son (then at Denmark) emailed a recipe for Rajma, the first email in our family, and I clearly remember my wife replying using “single finger” typing. Handwritten recipes sent as mail attachments are good morale boosters, especially when one is stuck abroad in monotonous and lonely situations. K.N. Ganesh, Fremont, CA
The Outside Verandah SPEAK YOUR MIND! Have a thought or opinion to share? Send us an original letter of up to 300 words, and include your name, address, and phone number. Letters are edited for clarity and brevity. Write India Currents Letters, 1885 Lundy Ave. Suite 220, San Jose 95131 or email letters@indiacurrents.com.
The essay by Kalpana Mohan (Step Into My Verandah, India Currents, December 2013/January 2014) on verandahs is a good read. I encountered the usefulness of verandahs when my grandparents, my sisterin-law and my mother-in-law passed away. Their bodies were not kept inside the house. As soon as possible they were moved to the outside verandah where relatives and friends could come and pay their respects and leave. Manian, online
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forum
Should India Have Backed Down in the Khobragade Scandal? India should have exercised restraint
Both countries are at fault
By Rameysh Ramdas
By Mani Subramani
ndia-US relations have been making headlines lately for unfortunate reasons. Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade was arrested for criminal felony counts of visa fraud for paying her maid, Sangeeta Richard, less than the United States minimum wage, contrary to what she stated in the visa application. Khobragade was arrested based on a complaint from the maid. According to U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, she was “accorded courtesies well beyond what other defendants, most of whom are American citizens.” He added that she was arrested “in the most discreet way possible,” and that unlike most defendants, she “was not then handcuffed or restrained.” Bharara acknowledged that Khobragade was “fully searched” by a female deputy marshal clarifying that “this is standard practice for every defendant, rich or poor, American or not, in order to make sure that no prisoner keeps anything on his person that could harm anyone, including himself.” Instead of allowing the law to take its course, the Indian government’s reaction, fanned by local media and politicians, was ballistic. India conveniently forgot that the aggrieved party, the maid, was also an Indian citizen, and called Khobragade the “victim” and pledged to “restore her dignity,” taking retaliatory India conveniently for- swiftly measures against United got that the aggrieved States diplomats on Indian soil and removing party, the maid, was police protection at U.S. in India. The also an Indian citizen consulates only defense that the Indian government offered ... was that Khobragade had “consular immunity” and sought “diplomatic immunity” with her assignment to the United Nations after the fact, absolving her of any obligation to follow the law and impunity to commit any crime with no fear of repercussions. Khobragade’s father went on to accuse the maid of being a “CIA agent.” The Indian government’s discriminatory stance between two of its own citizens in this dispute should be no surprise. India unfortunately has had a long history of “elitism” when it comes to adherence to laws and contracts, and a callous disregard for the rights of lowly workers. Signs prohibiting “servants” the use of the elevator are common, just as the police in India will think twice about arresting a well heeled suspect, as is alleged in the recent car crash by Ambani’s son. India would be better served by using the Khobragade incident as a “teachable” moment for its leaders and diplomats the lesson being that just as in the United States, all are equal under the law, regardless of wealth, power or societal status. And, that all workers, including domestic help, deserve protections and dignity afforded to them under labor laws. India’s response sadly exposed to the world that the nation bestows better citizenship benefits to aristocracy while dismissing the proletariat as not consequential. n
here are no heroes in this story unfortunately. It is true that the Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade executed a minimum wage agreement with her maid Sangeeta Richard, which, it would seem, was solely for the purpose of getting Richard entry into the United States. It is also true that Richard used the agreement to escalate the case to the State Department with allegations against her employer. One would have to be naïve to think that Sangeeta Richard believed that she would get the prescribed United States minimum wage prior to making her trip to the United States. Clearly the diplomat violated United States laws and was liable to be prosecuted. The question is should she have been prosecuted? Is lying on the visa application, which is illegal, the biggest immigration issue facing the United States? Or perhaps it is to make an example of this diplomat. Noble goal indeed! But why not try it here at home first? In the case of Richard Allen Davis, a former United States Army soldier, and a Central Intelligence Agency operative, who was in Pakistani custody for killing three Pakistanis in 2011, the United States demanded his release on the grounds of diplomatic immunity under Both Khobragade and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Richard had an axe to President Barack Obama grind in this tawdry inasked Pakistan to recognize Allen as a diplomat, consequential affair. stating that there was a “broader principle at stake that I think we have to uphold.” In the latest diplomatic scuffle between India and the United States, India was merely reminding the United States that Khobragade was no killer and yet, she was prosecuted like a common criminal. When it comes to Wall Street, there are double standards at play. When it came to JP Morgan’s involvement in the Bernie Madoff scam the best that the U.S. attorney could come up with was a fine with no admission of wrong doing. Whereas in the Galleon hedge fund instance, Rajaratnam received a 11-year sentence (“the longest sentence to be imposed for insider trading in history”) plus a fine. While hypocrisy is obvious and blatant in the Indian system it is also evident in this country especially as it relates to white collar crime. The rich and powerful especially in the financial industry are technically not above the law. Yet large financial organizations are able to craft laws to benefit themselves and to get unfair advantages. Both Khobragade and Richard had an axe to grind in this tawdry inconsequential affair. They both manipulated the United States system to try and benefit themselves. I think too much has been made of this affair and I wish Bharara had excercised better prosecutorial discretion in this case and avoided the brouhaha with the Indian government. n
Rameysh Ramdas, an S.F. Bay Area professional, writes as a hobby.
Mani Subramani works in the semi-conductor industry in Silicon Valley.
I
6 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
T
a thousand words
Mrinalini's Mississippi By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
O
n Christmas day, we go to place a wreath on my motherin-law’s father’s grave. He has rested here, in Indianola City Cemetery in Mississippi’s Sunflower County, for over twenty years. His gravestone is next to that of his older brother and his brother’s wife, his recently departed sister-in-law called “Shirley,” but who, to the surprise of all, has been buried as “Shurley,” making her presence somewhat strange, as if it is another person altogether buried in the family plot. At the graveyard, the talk turns to burials. My in-laws, each born in a different state, currently residing in another, with children scattered across the country, are not sure what to do when they die. Burn? Bury? And where? “Have your ashes mingled,” I say, only half joking. They ask what my parents will do, and I respond that they will be cremated, their ashes submerged in a body of water, though I’ve never thought to ask them where and how they would choose to drift away. Nor have I given thought to my last rites. I balance my seven-month-old on my hip as we consider the possibilities of multiple gravestones, ashes in urns, the finality of final resting places, the roots that will have to be dug up to make room for my grand-mother-in-law’s grave. She, my mother-in-law’s mother, is in her eighties, and contemplating not just the coffin now, but the funereal send-off. She has already written instructions: the songs to be sung, the grandchildren to sing them, the Bible verses to be read, the duration of the viewing. The only problem, she says, is that she wants to hear those songs, those verses. A funeral rehearsal seems morbid. How about, we propose, a comparable birthday celebration, next year? My grandmother is younger, but has for some time said that she is prepared for the call. “My bags are packed,” she says. “I am ready.” She has wrapped up the sari in which she is to be cremated, labeled jewelry according to intended recipients, and even selected a photo for publication in the newspapers along with her obituary. It is a terrible photo, one that hardly does her justice. I do not tell her, because she seems so keen on it, but this is one instruction we will not follow to the letter. At the cemetery, the talk moves from last rites to life insurance. A must have, everyone agrees, for parents of a young child. My husband and I are chagrined. We have assigned no godparents, purchased no insurance policy, written no will. These are things we are supposed to do now that we are responsible for another life. We must think about deaths, our own, and figure out what will suffice in our absence, how much and whom to leave to fill the space we currently occupy. My childless, bachelor brother-in-law chimes in; he has made our daughter the beneficiary of his life insurance. We are touched beyond words, though we don’t want Mrinalini to see a penny of that money. As we talk, our daughter is dancing on her ancestors’ graves. Well, not dancing exactly, but she has recently learned how to bounce with assistance. A little bend at the knee, an excited bop, and the effect is something like samba. Now, she sambas on the grave of Alexander Calvin Pitts, her great-great-great-great-grandfather, born in 1841, the year Martin Van Buren is succeeded by William Henry Harrison as United States President. In India, where extends another line of her family tree, it is still the era of Macaulay, years to go before the Sepoy Rebellion, before direct Crown rule, and all that follows. She will learn some of this in school. But the textbooks won’t
Who was it, a cousin asks, who used to go to Greenville every day, to wait for a train that never came? Beulah, it turns out. Beulah, who could never have guessed that a little Mrinalini would call her kin, visit her grave, and ensure that her memory stays alive well into the 21st century. talk about Fannie A., wife of Alexander Pitts, her great-great-greatgreat-grandmother born in Maysville, Alabama. If she wants to know about her foremothers Dorothy Baird and Ruth Brandon she must come here, to Indianola, and breathe the bayou air and stand in the grass grown of their bodies, the small sprouts that show, as Whitman said, that “there is really no death… / All goes onward and outward …” As for my side of the family, Mrinalini has met one great-greatgrandmother in the flesh, held bony finger in chubby fist, sat on her lap for a multi-generational family photo, and even smiled. It will be difficult to know much about the family that came even before, the great-great-great-grandmother who died in childbirth, the other greats, all of whose flesh has gone up in smoke and who are long submerged, consumed by fish, drunk up, and scattered. All of my ancestors have been cremated with the exception of one greatgrandmother, buried sitting down in the samadhi position reserved for saintly people. My daughter won’t have a graveyard to visit, just this one unmarked platform, now in someone else’s backyard in a small village in central Kerala. We move through the Allen plot, then the Pitts, stopping to speculate about Edna and Beulah, Meredith and Julian. Who was it, a cousin asks, who used to go to Greenville every day, to wait for a train that never came? Beulah, it turns out. Beulah, who could never have guessed that a little Mrinalini would call her kin, visit her grave, and ensure that her memory stays alive well into the 21st century. Not my kin, but my daughter’s. Not my Mississippi, but Mrinalini’s. My Mrinalini, for whom I need to purchase life insurance, but who is, it turns out, far more powerfully the insurer of mine. She ensures that I am alive to connections I couldn’t see before. She ensures that I look at trees, that I watch the dust blow over a grave, and read the names of people past with wonder. She offers up her bloodline, her ancestry, her roots to me to share in, to write about. She is at home in both India and Indianola among the living and the dead. And she is squealing now, a baby’s perfect sort of reverence. n Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 7
perspective
A Flood Of Memories By Rajee Padmanabhan
E
A Creative Commons Image
ver wondered why in India, of all places, every residential neighborhood is referred to as a colony? One would imagine that after a few centuries of foreign colonization with enough scars to last another few, India would banish the term. But no, instead a lot of us have unforgettable memories of the little colony we grew up in. Well, mine was called Vinayaka Nagar. As the name indicates, the colony was built around a temple dedicated to the remover of impediments, Lord Vinayaka. Located a few miles upstream from the lush banks of the Karamana River, before it merges onto the Arabian Sea, the colony started out in the 70s with about fifty families living in individual bungalows on spacious plots. The main road out of the colony connects to National Highway 47, a right turn on which leads to downtown Trivandrum in ten minutes. A left turn on the other hand, if you had a couple of hours to spare, will take you straight to Kanyakumari, where the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean commingle to create a dazzling palette of blues that no artist could ever dream up. In the mid-70s, as part of the second wave of constructions, our family of four moved into our newly built home, “Pavithram” (Sacred Home), as my father presciently named it. My youngest brother was born soon after and I was carted off to the nearest kindergarten to give my mother and brothers a break from the menace that I was. My earliest recollection from those times is of circumambulating the temple, holding my mother’s pinky, watching the “vallams” (the traditional boats) traversing the river, rowed by men in lungis carrying mounds of sand dug up from the river bed. The calm, green river was a part of our colony like the breath is to a human body, unobtrusive but essential. Right behind Vinayaka Nagar was a strip of land where some of these oarsmen lived in modest tenements, usually thatched roof huts. Men wore colorful lungis folded up to their knees while the women wore long blouses with full length skirts with a matching head scarf. Sayippu was the de facto leader of that area. A big man with a fairas-a-winter-lily skin, and a mighty mustache
8 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
curling up on both sides up to the middle of his cheeks, he made an instant impression. Kerala has two seasons, unceasingly pursuing one another—a rainy season followed by a dry spell followed by an even rainier season. And the year 1978 was an especially wet one. Edavappathy, the Southwest monsoon in June, had drenched the area. Colony residents had watched the rising river with increasing alarm, as the banks were almost breached. But then the monsoon moved away. Thulavarsham, the Northeast monsoon, started lashing the area at the end of October. Every day rain fell relentlessly, inexorably. Puddles formed in every little ditch and trench, much to the childrens’ delight. Our paper boats sailed from one puddle to the other. The adults were starting to worry and keeping a keen eye on the measurement stick whose black rungs, marking every ten centimeters (3 inches) of water height, were rapidly getting eclipsed by the steadily rising river. My parents were having it rough, too— three kids recovering from chicken-pox, one after the other. Appammai, my paternal grandmother, had come to stay with us to help them get through the triple-whammy. The rains continued unabated for five full days. Day one saw the river slightly swollen on one side, like the gums after a painful root canal. Day two saw the water level measurement stick dwarfed and drowned. My father started each day with a visit to the temple, which became the unofficial command center where the colony elders convened to monitor the latest developments and discuss plans of action. By day five, the
river had swollen to her utmost capacity, resembling a full-term pregnant woman ready to give birth. The morning of November 4th, a Saturday, began with a short respite from the downpour. But the concern on my father’s face was unmaskable. I heard him talk about how a trickle of water, growing by the minute, had breached a half a kilometer (onethird mile) upstream. He asked my mother and Appamai to move us kids upstairs and went out again to check the state of the river. No sooner had all of us gone upstairs with whatever we could carry, we heard a deafening thud. I ran out to the balcony with my mother to watch the fifty meter rear compound wall keel over like a wall of Lego bricks, as the water gushed in. That was the most traumatic, as well as the most exciting, moment in the life of my five-year old self. It left such an indelible mark that every time I watch a movie with a flood scene memories of our colony flood with the crumpling compound walls come rushing back. Our home was the gateway to the flood that took over the colony. We watched in sheer horror as the water engulfed the rose garden, then flooded the house and inched up to the windows. My mother’s anxiety level was rising too as my father was still out. Meanwhile, he was at the other end of the colony, desperately trying to get home. The main street was starting to fill up fast, but luckily he found a side street yet to be fully submerged, got out to the road via that street and then waded through water from the colony entrance back to the house. In a blink of an eye the water level had climbed up to almost 10 feet, up to the switchboards inside the house. Electricity was gone, the phone line was dead. Amidst all this water, ironically, the faucets went dry. An hour or two must have passed and our home started resembling a one-story structure with the downstairs pretty much completely under water. Finally, there was a flicker of hope in the form of a boat. We saw a familiar broad-shouldered figure rowing towards our house. It was Sayippu. My parents were so relieved to see Sayippu that they wasted no time in corralling all of us out to the sun shade to board his boat. My
grandma went in first, then my mother and us kids. Sayippu did a return trip to get my father out. Once we got to dry ground on the highway, I clearly recall the sense of relief that washed over my parents’ faces when my uncle, my father’s elder brother whom we kids called “Big Appa” (literally “Big Father”), greeted us with a warm smile and a car ready to take us back to our ancestral home where he still lived. My father remembers getting back a week later to a house ravaged with mud, snakes and other creatures crawling all over. Nothing was left unturned. The master bed was jammed into the bathroom door. Kitchen utensils were strewn all over; the pressure cooker was on the stairs, on the seventh step to be precise. Whole almirahs were toppled over. My mother’s wedding saris were all washed out. My silk skirts had all turned into a mix of colors as if in an experiment of fabric dyeing. Slowly life returned to normal. The school, which had been flooded, re-opened. The temple was cleaned up and services re-started. After all this mayhem, the stone idol was still in place, rooted to the sanctum sanctorum. Even the mighty waters could not move the “Remover of Obstacles.” Every house in the colony had a tale to tell. We heard a lot of stories of heroism—a police constable losing his life trying to save a child. A seven-day old baby was rescued, as well as some pets, by kind souls ignoring significant personal risks. For our colony, Sayippu was the true hero. He and his men had taken family after terrified family to safety. The whole colony was immensely grateful for his efforts. You see, Sayippu was a Muslim, living adjacent to a Hindu colony. His house was thirty yards away from the temple. His family woke up each day to the sounds of tolling bells emanating from it. In today’s India, this would be held up as a model of communal harmony. But in those days, it was much simpler—a compassionate human being extending an act of kindness to another in distress; and a colony profoundly grateful for his timely help. Our family lost a lot of valuables in the flood, but we gained an invaluable understanding—to see the benevolence of humanity. n Rajee Padmanabhan is a perennial wannabe— wannabe writer, wannabe musician, wannabe technologist. She lives with her iPad and iPod in Exton, PA, occasionally bumping into her husband and son while either of her iPals is out of charge.
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Mad, Mad World By Anita Felicelli
Certainly, if you follow people on Twitter, it appears that there is more hostility floating around the atmosphere than there was in, say, the nineties. I can spend just a few hours on the Internet these days and, in spite of a happy home life, satisfying work and a good standard of living, quickly feel physiological changes—my heart rate increasing, my temperature rising, perspiration forming and that hot, red blinding sensation of rage.
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for strong emotions—including anger—by surrounding myself with supportive people and a flexible work schedule. Luckily the antics of my toddler and my two dogs and the ability to unplug tend to defuse any anger I might feel towards the faceless. But rising Internet use affects emotions. The Internet exposes us to viewpoints different from our own, often stated by people in relative positions of authority (namely, politicians, celebrities and journalists) in short forms free of nuance, over an extended period. It can
A Creative Commons Image
I
n an interview with CNN in May 2013, the author Salman Rushdie said, “[W]e live in an age of identity politics in which people have been encouraged to define themselves by what makes them angry. You know, I mean, I would say that the more healthy definition of the self is to define it in terms of the things you value and care about and love, you know. But now, we seem to be—or many of us—seem to be defining ourselves by what we hate. You know, and that rage, as you say, becomes a badge of identity—becomes a kind of selfhood.” Certainly, if you follow certain people on Twitter, it appears to be the case that there is much more hostility floating around the atmosphere than there was in, say, the nineties. No doubt, I am particularly afflicted by this type of anger as someone who spends significant amounts of time online for work. Within a few hours on the Internet, I can feel the physiological changes—my heart rate increasing, my temperature rising, perspiration forming and that hot, red blinding sensation of rage. I have learned to regulate my propensity
feel like gunfire, this barrage of disturbing images and opinions that seem to be unfair or uninformed. Face-to-face with another human being, we are usually reminded that there is context to their opinions—people’s lived experiences give them different lenses through which they perceive events. Online, however, many of us respond to this onslaught with unbridled anger. There was plenty of disappointment and rage expressed towards Indian American actor Kal Penn when he tweeted support for New York’s Stop and Frisk policy in August 2013. There was actually nothing too surprising about Penn’s position if you’ve followed his interviews over the years, except that it came from a brown person and some of us assume people of color know better than to support racist policies. Let me explain. In spite of being an icon for young Indian Americans as a result of his roles in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and The Namesake, Penn has said some variation of this at a number of interviews: “I don’t actively go around being Indian every day. I don’t think of myself in terms of race
or ethnicity.” Penn has also made it clear he feels no responsibility not to take roles that contribute to stereotyping of Indian Americans. It is not surprising that someone who has routinely supported the status quo would also support Stop and Frisk policy. Nonetheless, the outrage expressed by his core fans ultimately led to him retracting his tweets. This is just one of many recent examples of celebrities apologizing or retracting unpopular opinions due to fan anger. Or consider the recent response when Nina Davuluri became the first IndianAmerican Miss America last fall. The media spent less time celebrating her victory than exposing the racists that came out in full force on Twitter to express their feeling that she wasn’t American enough to deserve the title, that she had terrorist or 9/11 connections, that she was “Arab.” The younger generations of South Asian-Americans on Twitter had a divided response both to the victory and to the media response. A few of us were annoyed; who cares about or watches a pageant that objectifies women anyway? Like the media, I was initially more interested in the phenomenon of racism in our supposedly postracial world—in my view, calling out racism is how real progress happens. Many deleted their racist tweets, just as Kal Penn withdrew his support for Stop and Frisk. The negative attention and commentary curbed their behavior. By the time the fuss died down on Twitter, I understood how important and symbolic the win was for a large number of people in our community, even if the feminist side of me didn’t see a pageant win as progress. More importantly, it became clear to me that Twitter is a great tool for mobilizing rage in order to effect social change. (Whether it causes real social changes or simply drives certain perceptions underground still remains to be seen.) Rushdie’s claim that the rise of identity politics has made us define ourselves by our rage certainly appears to be true when looking at the Internet’s response to virtually any controversy, but particularly those disputes involving race, politics, ethnicity, gender and religion. Unlike Facebook communities that are often made up of people who know each other in real life, Twitter encourages you to follow (and unfollow) strangers. If all those tweeters were expressing their anger in real life, it would be equivalent to constant rioting. Frankly, as someone who has experienced plenty of anger in the past but who mostly follows the etiquette rules of a Jane Austen heroine, that level of rage in a real life setting would be terrifying to me. In our ordinary lives, however, most of us do not encounter riots and anger continues to
Part of the problem with hitting somebody on the street to express anger is the possibility that the person will hit you back. But if you don’t have to identify yourself on the Internet, you can spew all this anger without fear of reprisal. operate by the same rules as it always has.
Are We Angrier?
Psychiatrist Bibi Das of Palo Alto explained, “I don’t think people are feeling more angry. It’s just that there are more avenues to express anger. Part of the problem with hitting somebody on the street to express anger is the possibility that the person will hit you back. But if you don’t have to identify yourself on the Internet, you can spew all this anger without fear of reprisal.” In fact, chronic explosive anger is also a mental health disorder called “intermittent explosive disorder.” Das noted that she doesn’t have any Indian patients with this disorder and that most of her Indian patients are “nice” and “compliant” people. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t have rage,” she says. “They’re not aggressive, but there is so much anger in them. They’re so resistant to acknowledging their anger. It’s important to remember that passive aggressive behavior is still aggressive.” She recounted the story of one patient who has been angry with his parents, but dealt with his anger by not visiting them for seven years. There was no effort to talk to his parents about what was making him angry in order to resolve it. This refusal to articulate anger, Das suggested, is what distinguishes the Indian
A Creative Commons Image immigrant’s experience of anger from anger in the general American population: a hierarchical script. Everyone experiences anger, but how it is expressed may vary from population to population. According to Das, Indian immigrants usually follow the same static and hierarchical scripts that were in play in India. This means that there is no effort to communicate one’s negative emotions to someone seen as an authority figure: a father, a mother, a teacher or a boss. You aren’t supposed to release negative emotions on somebody above you in the hierarchy. The anger, however, doesn’t dissipate because it is not expressed directly to the person who is triggering it. Instead, it transforms into anxiety or passive aggressive behavior. Expressing one’s actual emotions in a constructive fashion might be a key to managing them.
Can Anger Be Useful?
A constructive way to look at anger was offered by Shubha Herlekar, a Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT) and candidate in psychoanalysis, also in Palo Alto. Herlekar explained that the cutting edge of psychoanalytic thinking about immigrations and populations of color is concerned with family stories about immigration and the story of the family left behind. These stories, often going more than one generation back, matter quite a bit in how emotions are expressed. Each individual family places certain demands on children and grandchildren based on the meaning of immigration for that family, and this in turn affects how emotions are expressed, including anger. Herlekar explained that the emotion of anger represents information about the self. Sometimes what produces anger is a violation of a boundary, or information that someone’s genuine internal self is not aligned with what a situation is asking of him or her. One psychiatrist I talked to last year described diagnosing an elderly Indian immigrant with depression based partly on her February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 11
description of rolling out chapatis differently than she had before in India. Herlekar noted that whether or not a patient is inclined to speak directly about his or her emotions depends on how much expressing anger (or another emotion perceived as negative) fits with a desirable self-image. A person who sees him or herself as being amiable, caring or supportive, may have a harder time acknowledging anger and trying to use it in a useful way. Those whose self-image is more balanced may be more attuned to their anger and can use it constructively. Like Das, Herlekar made reference to an example that suggests hierarchical scripts can get in the way, though she did not interpret the situation the same way that Das did. She mentioned the adult male whose work situation is demoralizing, who comes home and displaces his frustration about the workplace on his son. In Indian culture, it is acceptable to have high academic standards whereas it is not as acceptable to directly express anger at an authority figure, so the father feels comfortable expressing anger towards the child rather than telling his boss he has a problem with him. Often, however, the rage will be magnified and disproportionate to the situation. Herlekar was quick to note that she’s seen men and women have the same difficulty in articulating and understanding the beneficial element of the emotion in a clinical setting. What’s allowed at home depends on the individual family as well as, possibly, generational differences. Herlekar explained that women who were first wave immigrants during the ‘60s and ‘70s have a greater tendency to internalize their emotions. The demands of proper womanhood were different for them than the expectations of those who came of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
What Makes You Angry?
Sara, a first-wave, female immigrant in her sixties told me she did not believe there were different gender expectations regarding anger for men and women from her generation. She explained she gets angry when people accuse her of something she did or didn’t do, when she sees people “do not follow the rules,” and when people “do not
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show consideration for others.” Sara explained that when she was younger, she was hot-tempered and lashed out at the person making her angry. Over the years, she realized that lashing out did nothing to improve the situation. She said, “These days, I take a deep breath, and try to reason with the other party, but if they don’t respond, I just walk away, even if only temporarily.” Leela, a thirty-five year old woman, told me some of the things that made her angry were “inconsiderateness, classism/racism/sexism/shadeism, parental miscalculations, toddler machinations.” She was also angry about the difficulty of reconciling her idealized self with the more “banal” version of herself that was presently unfolding. She noted that as an artistic person, strong anger was “hard to sustain” while also being creative. Like Sara, Leela admitted that in the past, she has let anger build “to an unhealthy level before letting forth an explosive outburst,” but more recently, she has tried moving to another room or area. She said, “[I remove] myself into a stony silence while I let out the enormous pressure of my anger, leaving behind a barely bitter aftertaste.” Leela explained that as she’s gotten older, she tries to channel her anger into offline pursuits, such as acupuncture, journaling and refocusing on the sadness behind her anger. However, she occasionally uses a locked Twitter account to vent her angry thoughts, explaining, “My digital self quivers and shakes with varieties of emotions, but rarely are they meant to be taken in their full dosage.” Herlekar commented that younger Indian-Americans seemed more attuned to their emotions, but there are times when they have difficulty using their anger in a “muscular way.” It is difficult for their anger to be channeled towards a constructive use. Viraj is a twenty-something IndianAmerican whose rage on Twitter is apparent. One manifestation of his rage is to tweet (and retweet) openly hostile statements to strangers that he feels are attacking his friends. Most often these arguments with strangers involve identity politics, just as Rushdie mentioned. Viraj expressed a long list of things that make him angry, about which he seemed to feel powerless to do anything in real life. It seemed apparent that, as Herlekar suggested, his genuine internal self was not aligned with what situations were asking of him. This is what makes him angry: “The comfort with which people will espouse blatantly sociopathic/hateful i d e a s based in misogyny, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia ... that justify violence against the marginalized. The cognitive dissonance, denial, doublethink involved in
liberal racism and its globally pervasive, casually victim-blaming nature. The value of a brown body in the world ... My creative paralysis and inability to find a place in the world.” Somewhat like Sara, Viraj noted a disconnect between his ideals and his real life. When I asked him what he does to deal with his anger, he replied “I drink a lot. I listen to music. I sometimes tweet about it.” When I commented about the rage in his tweets, he explained he wouldn’t be able to express his rage in real life. On Twitter, he was able to find solidarity with other people who felt angry about the same things. To me, this suggests Twitter functions for some people as a fantasy public space in which they feel comfortable expressing negative things they feel unable to express in their real lives.
Recognizing Out-of-Control Anger
Herlekar and other mental health professionals have explained that in a clinical setting, it is common for Indian and Indian American patients to somatize their negative emotions. To “somatize” is to express psychological conflicts through bodily symptoms. In other words, many are not comfortable articulating their rage, sadness, anxiety or depression using words, so instead they make mention of stomach aches, headaches or other bodily sensations. Learning to handle negative emotions may counteract the physical effects. Laine Morales D.C., C.M.T. has said, “If you are angry and just try to repress it, the molecules are still made in your body and are usually made more chronically because you did not have an emotion, express it, and then let it go. You left it unattended in your subconscious ready to reap [sic] havoc on your body.” Out of control anger, however can lead to a host of health problems. For example, the stress that accompanies a temper is a risk factor for many issues, including stroke, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. MySahana.org (a nonprofit dedicated to increasing awareness about mental health in the South Asian community), points out that these are three ailments for which South
Asians are already at high risk. Often, being perceived as someone with a temper can impact close relationships. It can also cause cognitive impairments and impact judgment. At work, someone with unmanaged anger may find it difficult to move forward on a career path. The organization lists these common causes for developing anger management issues: (i) witnessing poor anger management (ii) experiencing abuse (iii) mismanaged stress (iv) being taught that expressing emotions is unacceptable (v) low self-esteem (vi) low tolerance for frustration (vii) hiding other emotions (viii) not sleeping enough (ix) medications Those who experience significant amounts of anger, particularly when it affects their health, sleep or job performance, might want to consider consulting a professional. A safe space in which to express and deal with what is making you angry can be helpful.
Is Anger on the Rise?
Salman Rushdie implies that identity politics is a problem. Perhaps. But it seems natural to me that those who have been
“minority” voices—those who have been silenced and adversely affected by their identities—will exploit the great equalizing force of the Internet to try to achieve a better situation and to find like-minded people. Why shouldn’t they? In the recent past, those who upheld the status quo were more likely to be heard and those who tried to challenge the status quo were more likely to be silenced. Nowadays, social media can level the playing field. A medium like Twitter makes the platforms of people who might not otherwise be heard more equal to the platforms of those celebrities, authors and public figures that have been heard in the past. The Internet as it currently exists contains a big barrier to effective communication of emotions. Because it does not allow you to see facial expressions or the intensity of someone’s gaze, it is all too easy to misinterpret other people’s words and to develop strong emotional responses to the threats perceived in those words. Interpretation occurs without any of the social and cultural modulation—or fear of blowback—that occurs when two people are face to face. Earlier this year, Beijing researchers released the study “Anger is More Influential Than Joy: Sentiment Correlation in Weibo.” (“Weibo” is a Twitter-like service in China that was launched in 2009.) The researchers
noted that people not only flocked to others who were like themselves in terms of friends, age, race, and interests. They also flocked to people with similar psychological states. The researchers found that anger had a stronger correlation between connected users than joy or sorrow did. The paper concluded that anger spreads, both, more quickly and more widely than joy. Online, anger is more influential than joy or sadness. Das said as much to me, noting that genocides and deaths have been happening forever: “We don’t have more angry people around, just that we have YouTube, smart phones and Internet to make it public.” The publicizing of anger, in turn, helps it to spread, giving some of us the sense that there is more anger. Whether this is something you see as a positive or negative development may depend partly on how much you have invested in our existing social structures. The rise in rage may have at least one simple solution. But it is a solution that most people today are likely to dismiss: spend less time online. n Names of interviewees, other than psychologists and public figures, have been changed to protect anonymity and encourage honesty. Anita Felicelli is a writer and attorney who lives in the Bay Area. She is the author of the novel “Sparks Off You” and other books.
February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 13
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opinion
Standing Left of the Right By Dilnavaz Bamboat
T
he institution of marriage resembles a lock with multiple combination codes. Different permutations can be applied to different generations and societies. Among the numerous types of marriages we have witnessed through history, human society has resisted some forms and embraced others based on religious, moral and personal values. Like that other institution that our world believes important—religion—marriage and its acceptable definition has been in the eye of many a moralistic and intellectual storm, and the matter is clearly far from settled yet. On our planet of seven billion people, you only need to look around you to know that the number who have either chosen or been compelled to enter into one of marriage’s many avatars is far from small. Yet others, who want in, are barred by virtue of whom they wish to share that relationship with. As the majority definition of a single man-single woman contract (or sacrament) closes in around us, it leaves exposed and unprotected a pool of humanity that chooses alternative views of the bond, specifically, the gay, lesbian and queer communities. In spite of the overall number of married folks in the United States dropping by 20 percentage points since 1960, there remain a staggering number of individuals who choose matrimony over singledom or cohabitation. I believe in love. Taking-out-the-garbage love. Grocery-shopping-together love. Don’t-speak-until-I’ve-had-coffee-in-themorning love. There are many who believe an institution, marriage, in this case, is of more value than the people within it, but what use is a crusty shell of a social structure if it doesn’t benefit those who want to occupy it? Personally, marriage for me is being with the man I love. I’m just lucky I happen to be straight, so the world doesn’t give me huge grief about it. Being a part of the institution means people will view you differently once you sign on the dotted line, but if you change the way you look at each other, you’re in trouble, my friend. I get that not everyone shelters under its umbrella for love. People, Wikipedia informs us, marry for “legal, social, libidinal, emotional, financial,
spiritual, and religious reasons.” For several of us, marriage is security, a stable way of life where we can moor our boat as we pursue milestones. But for some, believe it or not, it is about sharing a life with just this one person, not one picked from among a lineup of suitable matches or socially compatible suitors. Who owns marriage? Who sits on its board? Who drafts its rules and guidelines in an imaginary general body meeting of all who said “I do?” If you don’t want to expose your children, born of your old-school union, to an evolving zeitgeist, there’s always contraception. Because millions of same-sex couples in this country (or anywhere on the planet, for that matter) shouldn’t have to be second class citizens just so you don’t have to answer a child’s curious questions. Marriage is the sharing of life and heart and people; the His and Hers relegated to embroidered towels. I believe in compatibility. And companionship. And yes, a degree of compromise. But when that extends to changing who you are deep inside, it is detrimental to society. Unhappy, unfulfilled citizens don’t contribute much to the world. Whatever be your reasons for marriage— and I am not naïve enough to believe they’re always about love—know this: we are merely minions of a cooperative movement who like to believe our choices should be socially or religiously validated. Well, news flash: the time for egalitarian existence is upon us. At least to the extent we can make it happen. There are many things about our planet that
are unfair and/or unequal, a framework of laws doesn’t have to be one of them. On November 3, 2011, the Defense of Marriage Act bill (DOMA, enacted in 1996) was debated in Congress. During the debate, Senator Feinstein noted that DOMA denies same-sex couples more than 1,100 federal rights and benefits that are provided to all other legally married couples: rights to Social Security spousal benefits, protection from estate taxes when a spouse passes away, and the ability to file taxes jointly and claim certain deductions. On June 27, 2013, Section 3 of the DOMA was decreed unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, allowing people of all sexual orientations to equally choose to be bound in matrimony. Who knows, the institution may be redundant in a few decades and the need to partake invalidated, but as long as someone’s left out, they’ll want in, so let them reap the social and economic benefits, and in this age of individualism, may we go back to the very first building block: the human being, and the very first step: inclusion. n Dilnavaz Bamboat manages communications and social media for a Silicon Valley non-profit, is a scriptwriter for iPad applications for children, a writer and editor at IDEX (idex.org), a section editor at Ultra Violet (ultraviolet.in), a feminist blogger at Women’s Web (womensweb. in) and a founder member of India Helps (indiahelps.blogspot.com). She shares a home in the San Francisco Bay Area with her spouse and misses the Bombay monsoon madly. February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 15
analysis
The Quest for Empty-Handedness By Ranjani Iyer Mohanty
A
ll I’ve asked for Christmas for several years now is a pocket, but once again, I didn’t get it. I’m beginning to wonder if this Santa guy is for real. Today, when we need to be contactable 24/7 and pronto, I find myself perpetually holding a cell phone in one hand. So one hand is always occupied. When I do put the phone down somewhere to work unhindered with both hands, that’s invariably when my husband will call wondering why I didn’t answer the phone, my daughter will call from school about something urgent, and there will be two unexpected calls from clients. And when I put the phone down, I also tend to forget about it; phoning my phone later to find it is a daily occurrence. The last straw was last weekend. I was sitting on my verandah reading with my phone on my lap because I was expecting an important phone call. Later, forgetting it was on my lap, I stood up. Like the penultimate scene from Godfather III, I replicated Michael Corleone’s silent scream as it fell down on the stone floor and the screen cracked. This would never have happened had it been safely ensconced in a pocket. However, none of my clothes have pockets and I wear a variety of them: saris, kurtas, dresses and pants. Saris have never had pockets. I’ve known some sari-clad women to tuck their cell phone into their cleavage—but for that you need a cleavage. Men’s kurtas have pockets but women’s generally do not; grounds for pocket envy. And unfortunately, voluminous pockets on women’s skirts and pants went out with Katherine Hepburn. Some may shrug this off as an insignificant issue and say, “Carry a handbag.” Does one carry a handbag to answer the front door, mow the lawn, fix the leak on the roof, play catch with the kids, or go for a long
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akin to asking Sisyphus or Atlas to do their thing, while holding a phone in one hand. Since God or evolution after millions of years has given us two hands, it seems a shame to put one out of commission. Lao Tzu would have agreed that it’s the emptiness of the hand that makes it useful. While it’s important to be in constant touch, we also need both our A Creative Commons Image hands free to do the many things we want to and have to. So it would not just walk? Me thinks not. I’ve also tried various be nice but empowering to have a pocket. other contraptions. I’ve tried a small sling It’s said that necessity is the mother of bag only to get it caught repeatedly on door invention and here we’re faced with a subhandles and practically strangle me. I’ve tried stantial mother. Just like Coco Channel revoa clip on the waistband, but that works only lutionized fashion for the better in the 1920s if you have Scarlett O’Hara’s 18-inch waist by getting rid of the corset, shortening skirts, and wear your shirts tucked in or are in the and in general making practical clothes that IT industry. I’ve even tried a waist pouch women could move around in—we need which makes me look either pregnant, like a another paradigm shift now in women’s kangaroo, or both. clothes: voluminous, stylish pockets that are Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura had the a staple of all women’s clothing in order to ideal solution. She looked great in a formfree up our hands. After all, pockets and fashfitting yet practical uniform, had both hands ion need not be mutually exclusive. The best free to click various important switches, and of men’s clothes have had pockets for years, when visiting hostile planets merely tapped whether that be in pants, suits, tuxedos, or her shoulder to call the bridge. Mind you, even shirts. I think bridge was the only place she could Maybe my mistake has been in askcall; she didn’t have the option of a private ing as a single individual. Surely if women tete-a-tete with Spock or Jim. Now Google as a gender ask for a usable pocket as part Glass and Vuzix’s similar product can act as of their clothing, Santa and the fashion Bluetooth headsets. They don’t yet replace industry would have to listen. This is not the phone itself, but there’s no reason why merely an act of charity; there is a big profit such wearable technology shouldn’t lead up to be made. Christmas is now nearly a year to wearable phones in the future. away. If Santa talks to the houses of Chanel, But for now, as long as we have handDior, and Zara now, they could put it into sets, there’s a crying need for pockets. their next winter’s collection. And by next I know there are still important femiChristmas, clothes with big, deep, wonderful nist issues to resolve and in the scheme of pockets would fill the stores. things this seems irrelevant. But is it? What Then, once more, I could believe. n a cruel joke to emancipate women—at least to this degree—and free them for the great Ranjani Iyer Mohanty is a writer, editor, and and noble tasks of life, only to curse them currently pocketless. by tying up one hand with a cell phone. It’s
February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 17
viewpoint
The One Percent American Girl By Vibha Akkaraju
R
ecently, there was a big blowa wild stroke of luck (okay, and some out party for the American Girl talent!), she was able to earn money store opening at Stanford Mall. dancing for an opera. With a freshly Our youngest daughter was ready to flush bank account, the first thing hand over her piggy bank. I was ready she bought herself was an AG. Fair with my rant: In short, American Girl enough. is 99% unAmerican. #2 started her campaign the day Those of you who have somehow #1 got her AG. She made a pretty managed to escape this over-priced, reasonable case that it is unreasonable over-hyped craze that possesses girls to expect a kid to earn this much monat around age five and doesn’t let go ey, especially as we didn’t give allowfor a decade, let me bring you in: this ances then and didn’t pay for chores. 18” tall, made in China, plastic and What was she to do? First she didn’t fabric doll is de rigueur for the doll-age get picked for the opera and now this? crowd. And sometimes for the crowd’s Still, we fought back for two years. moms, too. And it’s not just one doll. But on Christmas after she turned No, there is Caroline, Ivy, Ruthie, Kaya, nine, we surprised her. Or, shall we Kit, Addie, Josephia, Rebecca. And say, she surprised us. She is just not those are just a few in stock. There into dolls anymore, she announced, are dolls of the year, doll babies, dolls’ and tossed it over to #3. horses, dolls’ dogs. And if you can’t find The surprise continued when a doll among this lineup that speaks we found that #3, instead of being to you, you can design your own girl satisfied, was only just bitten. She doll or baby doll. It’s a sneak-peak at wanted the full complement. Dresses, genetically designing your babies. You pajamas, furniture, babies, more dolls, can choose its skin color, hair color, hair more of everything. I tell her she is my texture, and eye color. You get the idea. American Girl, but she has an IndianAfter you pick a doll and plunk American mother, and our breed just down the $110 to $124 for one of these doesn’t buy overpriced doll gear. I tell beauties, you can start filling out its her to ask her sisters to sew clothes American Girl doll A Creative Commons Image universe. Start with the books, which for her dolls, and to fashion furniture are not bad, actually. They are historic out of cardboard. It was good for her, or contemporary fiction, some are mystery I told her. I might as well have been talking miss her beauty regimen while she recovers. and advice books, and seem to be at least to a plastic doll. It’s madness. Who can afford these outbetter written than, say, Disney books. That’s Fast forward three years. A shift in allowrageous prices? Maybe they should call it a low bar, and AG hurdles it handily. ance policy in our house allowed #3 to gaththe one-percent girl. Maybe, if, as the name But a girl can’t live on books alone. She er $86 to spend on whatever she wants. After suggests and image portrays, these AGs needs clothes ($68 for a holiday dress, for a a year of anticipation, the much-ballyhooed and their accessories were lovingly made in start); she needs furniture (Rebecca’s bed: AG store was finally opening at Stanford middle-America by mom and pop artisans, $125); she needs hair accessories ($12-$49) mall. She took her sisters and dad for the you could understand $90 for a Lilliputian and ski gear ($38) and horses ($75). To be grand opening. I held off initially, but joined table and chair. But it’s commissioned by truly dolled up, she needs her hair done. Any later when curiosity got the better of me. Mattel and made in China! How are people AG girl store will set you up with an apI went to the mall knowing that I would not outraged by the hypocrisy? pointment for a $25 hair do-up. If she gets be collecting material for my writing. I knew What hypocrisy, yawn my girls. In fact, “sick,” she can be sent to the “Doll Hospithere would be throngs of people who had with all these temptations, how is a girl tal,” where, for some undisclosed fee, they drunk the spiked AG Kool Aid, that I would not to start a-dreamin’? Ours were no difwill do minor or major surgery, and return have the opportunity to take pictures of ferent. Daughter #1 begged for an AG for the doll back to its worried-sick owner before moms and daughters toting multiple dolls. two years before I got her an 18” very unthe holidays. She might still need a wheelMy cynicism was having a field day. American doll. $30 from Target. It snoozed chair ($38) for a while. And you may have Initially, I thought I was dead on: The her alarm, but didn’t shut it off. The pleadto buy her a spa chair ($110) so she doesn’t line to get into the store was comically long ing soon resumed, and continued, until, in
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(1.5 hour wait just to get a number, after which it would be several more hours to enter Xanadu), so we bowed out and just reveled in the festivities. The entire mall was swept up in the frenzy. Hundreds of shoppers watched a variety show AG had organized, with fresh-faced girls singing songs about the multiplication tables and other wholesome subjects. Booths invited kids to take pieces of modeling clay and make mini sculptures. Each kid was handed a bag full of goodies that would wind up in the garbage in a week. When we got hungry, we could go to almost any restaurant and just say “American Girl” and get a discount on the bill. Burgers, pizza, cupcakes—everything was cheaper. And who can resist an easy bargain? Just being at the mall on that day meant you were part of the American Girl party. The whole thing was enough to make me pine for my Barbies. But later, a new thought challenged my cynicism: I realized that the AG hype might be the essence of “American.” After all, this is how our economy runs. We all have to collectively convince ourselves that we need newer, better, more things, and the more we buy the better the consumer-confidence index, and more smoothly hums the economic engine. We could all take a lesson from the AG marketing people. They are brilliant—indeed geniuses—at selling their stuff. They have picked a message and they stick with it. Wholesome and hugely hyped. They could have hired real singers and dancers, but opted for the homegrown talent that would warm the hearts of their market share. They could have charged us to play at the craft booths, but that would be akin to charging for cigars at your baby’s birth. The folks at AG not only dance to their own tunes, they get everyone else to join in too. To be in the “in” crowd on opening weekend, you really needed to be sporting an AG doll. What could be more effective advertising? To be a savvy shopper, you needed to go to stores where pledging your love to AG would get you a discount. Surely, nothing could be more American than propelling our consumerism. Maybe even consume more than we can afford. And the whole “Made in China” thing? Heck, at this point, even that seems American. I’m taking notes. Look out for the grand opening blowout for my blog. n
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INDIA CURRENTS Celebrating 27 Years of Excellence
Vibha Akkaraju is a mom of three girls, all energetic and excitable, at times temperamental, sometimes maddening, mostly endearing. When she’s not cooking, cleaning, organizing, planning and shuttling, she likes to read and sometimes write. February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 19
books
Embracing the Difference By Jeanne Fredriksen
KARMA GONE BAD: How I Learned to Love Mangos, Bollywood, and Water Buffalo by Jenny Feldon. Sourcebooks, Inc.: Naperville, IL. $14.99. 336 pages. sourcebooks.com, jennyfeldon.com, karmacontinued.com. Available as a trade paperback and for digital readers.
W
hen Jenny Feldon learns she and her new husband would be moving to India for two years, her imagination runs wild. Exotic locales! Fabulous food! Colorful experiences perfect for posting on her blog, Karma in the City! Her life’s rhythm emanated from the non-stop energy of Manhattan, draped head to toe in designer labels, and she imagines that lifestyle will continue forever. But that’s not how it turned out. With as much self-deprecating and honest humor as hard-learned realizations, her travel memoir, Karma Gone Bad, candidly chronicles her valiant fight as a corporate wife trying to survive life and marriage in India. When she steps out of the airport in Hyderabad, she is knocked over by the heat, smells, and thick damp air. As she and Jay await their contact, they encounter a sea of brightly-colored fabric and brown skinned faces staring at them. That’s the moment when she realizes everything is wrong about her: her skin, her hair, her clothing, her inability to keep the shock off her face. Once in their temporary apartment and equipped with life-saving PB&J for sandwiches, Jenny recognizes how ill-prepared she is for this move. Passing the days in a fog-laden bewilderment, trying to find something familiar or relatable, she experiences disappointments and obstacles such as bad coffee, “Delhi Belly,” shopping trips during which expats battle over a blackmarket bag of Doritos, unannounced electricity outages, more stares, and a thorough lack of privacy. Worst of all, she suffers a debilitating loneliness in one of the most heavily-populated places on earth. “Without a job to go to or classes to attend (and having failed at my attempts to get a work visa), I felt like I was spinning in
20 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
space for a long time,” she told me in an e-interview. “In the beginning, [Jay came] home full of new stories to tell and experiences to share, and the most I’d have done was brave a trip to the vegetable stand or managed to hang a load of laundry on a clothesline. I felt useless and irrelevant, especially at work functions when every conversation went right over my head.” Feldon lays her life wide open with her easy storytelling and comic wit. After countless desperate (and, yes, entertaining) attempts to navigate her new life, Jenny sees that her marriage is failing and finds herself on the brink of despair. A visit home, awkward husband-wife heartto-hearts, and the specter of divorce propel Jenny into action. Determined to make both her marriage and India work, she returns to Hyderabad armed with big goals, new hopes, a pile of Us Magazines, and bags of Cape Cod potato chips. She falls in love with Bollywood. She hires a man who cooks for her, and a cleaning woman who some might avoid. She visits local sites with a new perspective and begins Hindi lessons. The biggest surprise for her happens when, through her blog—then renamed Karma in the (Indian) City—she meets Anjali, a young Hyderabadi woman who puts Jenny on the simple path to enlightenment, telling her to love India for what it is: the mangos, the sunshine, the festivals, the col-
ors, the whatever. “Anjali’s advice … really hit home hard for me,” Feldon admits. “Choosing to celebrate rather than despair, choosing to search for things in my new life that made me happy instead of fixating on why I missed my old one was how I began to crawl back from the hole I’d dug myself into.” Better than five years have passed since Jenny and Jay returned to the United States, and they’ve welcomed two children into their family. I was curious how her experiences in India impacted her life for the long haul. “India fundamentally changed who I was as a person. Not in every way, but in some
big ways,” she says. “My life now is based on gratitude, on feeling thankful for every moment I’ve been given, on finding ways to pay that gratitude forward and teaching my children to see beauty and wonder in everything around them. Believing in the universe and focusing more on what I put into the world and less on what I take out is also a big part of who I’ve become thanks to my experiences there.” So based on her experiences as an expat living in India, I asked what advice she would give someone who is about to move to a different country with a vastly different culture. “Don’t fight it. It will be different, and it will be scary, and it will be hard. But I learned the hard way that holding on to your old life with a death grip will only increase the misery. Love wherever you are for the things it is and try not to hate it for the things it isn’t. Also, figure out what your most essential “creature comforts” from home are and try to bring some with you.” Karma Gone Bad is an enjoyable read overflowing with angst, humor, the intricacies of culture shock and loveable characters. From the neighborhood expats to her driver Venkat and his charm; from the mâitre d’ at the local restaurant to the landlord who enters the apartment at will; from the family who lives on Feldon’s front porch to Anjali, Feldon provides us with the diversity that ultimately made her fall in love all over again. There are lessons to be learned from her journey, and those lessons would serve us well no matter what our destinations may be. “In the book, I’m the true villain—and I think for many of us that’s the case regardless of our circumstances. We stand in the way of our own happiness, become blind to what’s real and honest and beautiful,” Feldon says. “I had to learn to trust the universe more, to be mindful of the energy I was putting into the world and how my own expectations were ultimately causing my failure. If there’s one thing I’d like readers to take away from the book, it’s that the way we see the world is directly linked to the kind of life we live in it…and that we have the power to change our perspectives, and our lives along with it. Love life for the mangos and live in the small moments. Be grateful every single day, even for the bad ones.” 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.
Protesting in Pink By Geetika Pathania Jain
PINK SARI REVOLUTION: A TALE OF WOMEN AND POWER IN INDIA by Amana Fontanella-Khan. August 5, 2013. Published by W.W. Norton & Companu. $26.95. 304 pages. (Available in Hardcover)
S
ampat Pal emerges as a courageous grass-roots organizer of woman power in one of the most lawless and least developed districts of India. She is an unlikely heroine. Illiteracy and teenage motherhood have not held her back from heading a women’s vigilante group that fights for the rights of women who have been denied justice in the traditional patriarchal system. Consistent with the notion that “well-behaved women rarely make history,” the Pink Sari gang employs fierce and shaming methods such as gherao (surrounding buildings or people), thoo thoo (spitting) campaign, and the chappal ka haar (garland of shoes). Sampat Pal can hardly be called Gandhian; yet despite her skirmishes with the law, she has stopped short of becoming a Phoolan Devi style outlaw. Sampat Lal, an illiterate woman appears to be working quite effectively against not only gender norms and class, but also the caste system. Her iconoclastic and heretical behavior has earned her many enemies, but also the loyalty, trust and adulation of the lieutenants of the Pink Sari gang members. The book has an interesting narrative style—a journalistic story that unfolds like an action novel with anthropological detail. Fontanella-Khan frequently lets actions speak for themselves. Sampat Lal has left the home of her husband, and lives with her mentor, Babuji, but the relationship remains unacknowledged. Neither is the author keen to gloss over the frequently contradictory and unflattering details of this heroine’s life, including her incarceration, criminal relatives, and a bombastic, self-aggrandizing style. A fine example of self-help organizations emerging from low technology contexts. n Geetika Pathania Jain is a Bay Area resident. She is currently teaching at DeAnza College.
Edited transcript of the conversation between Amana Fontanella-Khan and Geetika Pathania Jain, held at City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco. (September 19, 2013) Geetika Pathania Jain: It has been said that well-behaved women rarely make history, and I think we will see much evidence of this fact as we proceed with this evening. What is the book about? Amana Fontanella-Khan: So the book is about the Pink gang. They were founded in 2006, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in the north of India. They fight for women’s rights. They take on abusive husbands, corrupt politicians, crooked police, and they really do that in a muscular, feisty way. They go on to the streets with their sticks and their pink saris, and they really take on oppressors in a part of the country that has been described as lawless, it’s kind of this Wild West. Sampat Pal is the founder, and the commander-in-chief of the gang. She’s the woman who was married off at the age of 12, and had the first of her five children at 15. And she is the face of the gang. I read in your book that the mission of the Pink Sari gang is “equality and justice for women, the lower castes, and the poor.” Some of Sampat’s very fierce and shaming methods are remarkable, February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 21
with lots of public humiliation of the offending powerful person. I don’t think these are Gandhian methods, Amana. What do you think? (laughter) Do you want to comment on how she might have gained something from another famous protestor? Amana Fontanella-Khan: They’re definitely not Gandhian methods. Sampat, even though she has a lot of respect for Gandhi, is someone who wants change now. She wants to seize the opportunity to challenge people in power, and she takes her opponents head on. Her experience is that people will not give you freedom, you have to snatch it. So, yes, in terms of her methods, she uses a lot of humiliation. She’s also very witty, and fun, and she understands that in order to attract media attention, you have to deliver protests that get people talking. Yes, they regularly use these kind of playful protests. On one occasion, there was a local Chief Minister called Mayawati who suggested that Sampat and her organization were terrorists. So Sampat organized a prayer at a local temple and she invited journalists to come, and once they arrived, she started making these offernings to the deity, and prayed out aloud for the sanity of the local administration, because, clearly, they had lost their minds. She does these tonguein-cheek protests that people just love. Most of the time, yes, she’s using her mind and NOW A VAIL AB LE ON AMAZO N .C O M KINDLE EDITIO N
creativity over muscle. So, while, it may not be Gandhian, it’s certainly not that aggressive. While they are armed with sticks, they rarely go about beating anyone. They like the muscular, aggressive image, because it helps keep everyone in line. And it announces that they mean business. But they understand that their power comes from their ability to get their message out to the media, to get support, and that is something that they’re very good at doing. It’s amazing how well orchestrated this group is. It started off as being a self-help group, and now they have a 200,000 strong membership without access to Facebook or any social networking or technology. Each woman calls five neighborhood women to show up. So, it’s a remarkably effective, low technology social movement. Tell me, what made you interested in this story? Amana Fontanella-Khan: I happened to hear about this from a friend. He was an interpreter, he was working with Sampat Pal, and he was telling me about the organization, and I was just struck by it. You hear so many stories about women in India who are oppressed, who are suffering, who are being tortured and abused. And it’s very easy to focus on women as being victims of fate. That they’re born into situations, and they can’t do anything about it.
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When you live in India, there’s such a huge gap between the haves and the have-nots, that if you are somewhat privileged, you find yourself looking at people living in slums, or people living in small villages, who are very poor, and asking yourself—what would I have done if I were in that situation? How would I have turned out if I were born in a context like this? And for the longest time, I dreaded pursuing that train of thought, because it just felt so horrible to think that I wouldn’t have had any agency. But what I’ve learned, and what attracted me to the Pink Gang was that absolutely anyone, regardless of background, regardless of the circumstance in which they were born, have agency, and can have power to direct the course of their lives. This was something that I was really drawn to; the gang represents this story of hope and victory over victimhood. That is a really important message. While it’s important to talk about the suffering of women, if that’s all we’re talking about, then we’re dehumanizing women. You’re talking about them as if they have no agency, that they’re just passive. And these women are anything but passive. I really wanted to hear their story. And what a fascinating story it is. Thank you, Amana! Amana Fontanella Khan: Thank you! n
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Choosing Therapy By Jasbina Ahluwalia
Q
In last month’s column, I recall that you had responded to the question of a woman whose husband had just requested a separation. One of the suggestions you had made was for her to ask her husband if he’d go to marriage counseling. Any suggestions as to how to go about doing that?
A
When one person is requesting a separation, just waiting and hoping for that partner to eventually come around could be a mistake. It is unrealistic and wishful thinking to think the marriage will just fix itself due to the passage of time alone, without teamwork and/or some form of outside professional support. When choosing a counselor or therapist, it may help to choose one that the partner requesting the separation would likely be most comfortable with, since they may be apprehensive about seeking therapy, as many people can be. For example, if you think they would be more comfortable talking to
a woman vs. a man, choose accordingly. It will increase your chances of their agreeing to go. Once the initial fears about therapy are calmed and you both feel comfortable with your therapist, the first step will have been taken and the real work can begin. A therapist will be able to pinpoint the root of your marital tension without laying blame on either of you, while gently guiding the two of you on to a more unified, productive course for your relationship. This should put your mind at ease. If the therapist believes that either of you has issues unrelated to the marriage, he or she may recommend individual sessions for you both in addition to your couples appointments. Working on yourselves independently is not only good for you personally, it is extremely effective in re-establishing communication between the two of you, bringing you back to the point in your relationship when you felt more attached. Knowing when to let go is a process. The
first step to knowing is doing everything in your power to resolve the problem. Keeping an open mind, being patient with each other (even when the other person is not) and being completely open and honest will help you succeed. If, after doing the necessary work, you find there is no way to reconcile your differences, you will then know it is time to let go. If you believe your relationship’s foundation was once strong and you wish to rebuild it, now is the time to put everything you’ve got into saving it. Whether you stay together eventually, or not, you will know in your heart you did your very best and that will give you the peace of mind you deserve. n Jasbina is the founder and president of Intersections Match, the only personalized matchmaking and dating coaching firm serving singles of South Asian descent in the United States. She is also the host of Intersections Talk Radio. Jasbina@intersectionsmatch.com.
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Q A
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Since most of my practice is courtappointed criminal defense, I occasionally hear this question. I feel like a public defender. Since San Mateo County doesn’t have a formal public defender’s office, I am a private attorney. The United States Supreme Court decided Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963. In that case, the Court voted unanimously that state trial courts must provide lawyers for criminal defendants who cannot afford counsel. Since then, every county in the United States has devised some system of ensuring that every person accused of a crime has the benefit of a lawyer, whether or not financially capable of obtaining one. Unfortunately, the “lawyer” part often seems lost from the “public defender” appellation. Apart from believing that public defenders do not care about their clients and/ or are lazy, many people seem to think that public defenders are not actually attorneys. I’ve been the recipient of the “Would it be
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better, if I hired a real lawyer?” question as well. I inform the askers that court-appointed attorneys are “real” attorneys. They went to “real” law school and passed the “real” bar exam before being allowed to represent people in court. The “Will my case get better?” typically arises during a discussion of the plea agreement. Would hiring another attorney make the outcome better? In most cases, resoundingly “No!” Public defenders practice exclusively in their county, and as a result, know the judges, the local practices and the district attorney’s office intimately. Besides which, the attorney’s identity should not change the offer, and a court-appointed attorney will get the same type of result as any retained attorney. The attorney a person is assigned by the court-appointed system, whether that is a public defender’s office or some other courtappointment system, could be an excellent attorney or could be mediocre. The same goes when you search the Internet and hire an attorney. Unless you know the person’s work and prior performance, there really is
no way to ensure that you have a great attorney. If you qualify for the assistance of a public defender, you would be best served by meeting with your court-appointed attorney, asking around about that person’s reputation and qualifications and seeing whether you can get along with the person before deciding that you need to hire a lawyer. After all, one of the most important aspects of good criminal defense representation is for the client to feel empowered in the face of an overwhelming and harsh criminal justice system. The accused must feel like the representation vindicated his or her rights regardless of the outcome. So, please meet with the court-appointed attorney, develop a relationship and see if you trust the person. Only hire another attorney if it seems that the court-appointed attorney is not making the effort to defend the case properly. Hiring an attorney by itself will not make the case any better. n Naresh Rajan is an attorney in San Mateo County. Email nrajanlaw@gmail.com.
legal visa dates Important Note: U.S. travelers seeking visas to India will now need to obtain them through BLS International Services. Call (415) 609-4965 or visit http://www.visa. blsindia-usa.com/ for more information.
February 2014
T
his column carries priority dates and other transitional information as taken from the U.S. State Department’s Visa Bulletin. The information below is from the Visa Bulletin for February 2014. In the tables below, the listing of a date for any class indicates that the class is oversubscribed. “Current” means that numbers are available for all qualified applicants. “Unavailable” means no numbers are available.
FAMILY PREFERENCE VISA DATES Preference Dates for India 1st Jan 01, 2007 2A Sep 08, 2013 2B Jul 08, 2006 3rd May 15, 2003 4th Oct 22, 2001 NOTE: F2A numbers subject to percountry limit are available to applicants with priority dates beginning Sept 01, 2013 and earlier than Sept 08, 2013.
Preference Dates for India 1st Current 2nd November 15, 2004 3rd September 01, 2003 Other September 01, 2003 Workers 4th Current Certain Current Religious Workers 5th Current Targeted Employment Areas The Department of State has a recorded message with visa availability information at (202)485-7699, which is updated in the middle of each month. Source: http://travel. state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy/ bulletin/2014/visa-bulletin-for-february-2014. html
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taxes
2013 Tax Saving Guidelines By Khorshed Alam
I
t is the time to get an early start for your 2013 tax return filing. The following steps will guide you through organizing your documents.
Good Recordkeeping
Maintaining good records can make filing tax returns easier and help keep track of taxable transactions made during the year, which can help reduce tax liability. Here are a few steps to ensure good recordkeeping. • Keep any and all documents that may have an impact on your tax returns, leading to more legitimate deductions and less tax liability • Keep your records in a safe place. You may like to organize them by year and type of income or expense, or keep all records related to a particular item in a designated envelope or folder. Keep all the documents in a folder and label it “2013-Tax Return Filing.” • Keeping organized records ensures you can answer questions if your return is selected for examination or prepare a response if you receive a notice from the taxing authorities.
Gather Tax Documents as You Get Them By Mail
Save all documents you receive in the mail as they contain information that you will need for tax return preparation. Review each document as it comes in so that your tax preparer can correct discrepancies well before he/she starts preparing your tax return. If there is a mistake, getting a corrected W-2 or 1099 form can take time, so don’t wait until the last minute. Typical forms you will receive may include: • W-2 forms from your employers • Unemployment compensation and state tax refunds: Form 1099-G • Miscellaneous income, including rent and royalties: Form 1099-MISC • 1099-INT (interest) and 1099-DIV (dividend) forms • 1099-B forms showing brokerage trades in stocks and bonds, along with statements showing when you bought and sold your investments • K-1 Income and deductions from partnership, S corporations, trusts and estates • 1099-SA form showing Social Security or railroad retirement benefits • 1099-R distributions from pensions,
28 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
annuities, retirement or profit-sharing plans, IRAs, insurance contracts, etc. • Proof of jury duty pay • Proof of alimony you received • Records of income and expenses for your rental property • Records of income and expenses for your self-employment • Scholarships and fellowships • Prizes and awards • Gambling and lottery winnings • IRS Publication 915
Income From Sources Outside the United States
List all income received from foreign banks/financial institutions to report interest income. You will have to complete the Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) (Form TDF 90.22.1) for individuals having a combined balance over $10,000 at anytime during the year. In addition, single taxpayers with financial assets of $50,000 and over in one year need to complete Form 8938 to be in compliance with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). For those that are Married Filing Jointly the requirement of financial assets is $100,000 and over in one year. Additionally, all other income sourced outside the United States (e.g. rental, dividends, interest, etc.) are required to be reported as world income. Taxing authorities have become very diligent in assuring that the taxpayer is in compliance with reporting of income from outside the United States and financial assets held overseas.
Itemize Deductions
To get all the possible legitimate deductions, go through your checkbooks, credit card statements and receipts for cash purchases. Itemize expenses into medical, union dues, mortgage interest, real estate taxes, charitable donations, unreimbursed work related expenses, personal property taxes (i.e. DMV license fee), and any other expense which might be applicable in your case. These documents may include: • Health care expenses (doctors, dentists, health insurance, eye care, medicine) • Real estate taxes • Motor vehicle registration (Vehicle License Fee—VLF)
• Mortgage interest paid (1098) • Home equity loan interest • Gifts to charities and churches (monetary and other) • Last year’s tax preparation fees • Unreimbursed job related expenses (union dues, job education, uniforms) • Loss of property due to casualty or theft • Gambling losses (to the extent of winnings) • Contributions to your traditional or SEP-IRA • Qualified moving expenses • College expenses (Student loan interest 1098-E) • Daycare, childcare, or adult daycare costs • Rental property expenses • Alimony paid • Adoption expenses • Job-hunting expenses • Investment expenses (e.g. margin interest, etc.) • Unreimbursed business or volunteer work expenses If you paid estimated taxes, keep a summary of your federal and state estimated payments and canceled checks. Other documents that may be helpful are: • HUD-1 Escrow statement for property you bought or sold • Summary of educational expenses (college tuition) • IRA contributions (traditional, SEP, or rollovers)
Schedule Your Tax Appointment Early
Schedule your tax appointment as soon as you get most of the documents in the mail. Afterwards, you may need to chase down missing records or resolve other problems before the April 15th filling deadline. n The above information is of a general nature and should be treated as such and should not be acted upon in your specific situation without professional assistance or advice. Khorshed Alam is a practicing CPA and business valuation analyst. He is the President and CEO of Alam Accountancy Corporation.Check out http://alamcpatax.com or call (408) 4451120.
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India Current
environment
Coastal Cleanup By Zenobia Khaleel
T
he drive on the Pacific Coast Highway in California towards Monterey Bay, framed on either side by jagged cliffs and emerald ocean, has been ranked as one of the top 10 scenic road trips of the world. But behind the scenes of this visual splendor is a dark and filthy secret; 8,659 pounds of trash that washes up in the Monterey shores every year. The joy of your picturesque journey might turn down a notch, when you realize that you are unwittingly part of the equation that generates this colossal problem. Over 80% of the plastic pollution that ends up in the ocean begins on land. Most of the litter on our streets floats to our storm drains, leading to the ocean or nearest body of water. Every Earth Day, the marine environmental organization, Save Our Shores (SOS) coordinates the largest cleanup efforts in Santa Cruz, San Lorenzo River and Del Monte Beach in Monterey. In 2013, a total of 523 volunteers from schools, girls scouts and boy scouts, religious, and business groups and individual drop–ins celebrate Earth Day bringing their own buckets, gloves, shovels and reusable bags; to help this stretch of the Californian coastline revert to an ecofriendly, no-waste reality.
30 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
Every year, volunteers pick up around 700 pounds of trash and recycling, the most common item collected being cigarette butts. Similar reports from the Southern California organizations, Heal the Bay and Save Our Beach point to a pervasive problem. In fact, the Washington, D.C. organization, Ocean Conservancy, reports that international coastal cleanup efforts have yielded 10 million pounds of trash in the year 2012. The most common items being “cigarettes, food packaging and plastic bottles.” These beach cleanups demonstrate the power of how each individual can bring about a monumental change. For 30 years, SOS has been coordinating over 200 beach cleanups every year. 27,080 pounds of pollution was prevented from entering the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in 2012 alone. In the last 27 years, Ocean Conservancy volunteers have found 9,806,905 plastic bags, “which required 1,176 barrels of oil to produce;” 57 million cigarette butts, “which, if stacked vertically, would be as tall as 3,867 Empire State Buildings;” and 1,017,444 diapers, “enough to put one on every child born in Japan last year.” The underlying theme of these nonprofits is education and awareness, connecting people to the ocean; showing them how their actions affect the marine environment, and offering choices to make a positive impact. When junior girl scout Rihanna Razack signed up for the beach cleanup as part of the leadership project requirement for the Girl Scout Bronze Award, Rihanna’s high point of the trip was a day at the beach with her friends. The field trip turned out to be an eye-opener for Rihanna, that inspired in her
a newfound respect for the fragile resource; the ocean. The first leg of the trip comprised of interactive educational presentations where students learned fundamental ocean concepts such as food webs, the impact of pollution on marine animals and ecosystems, American consumer habits and waste generation. Through rounds of play, students collected colored beads, representing their food source. In the later rounds, some students were told that they had become entangled in a piece of plastic and were now couldn’t use their right hand to gather food. This simulation enlightened students on how marine debris debilitates creatures of land and sea. The macabre sideshows of dead birds with assorted plastic junk in their guts drove the point home. The display of “plastic pollution fashion” caught the fancy of the whole troop. A whole line of jewelry was fashioned out of single use and throw-away items like bread clips, bottle caps, bar straws, broken seashells and seaglass. After four hours of combing the beach for assorted litter, the scouts were dismayed at the huge haul of garbage they collected. “Plenty of trash was dumped on the beach, whenever we took a step, we had to dodge one or two pieces of trash,” stated Razack. “My friends and I took a few plastic bags and started collecting as much trash as we could. We filled five large trash bags! A stray bottle cap is all it takes to choke a seagull! Each cap we collected, saved the life of a baby bird!” Razack’s act of goodwill earned her a Girl Scout Bronze Award, and more importantly, helped her recognize her potential in making a difference. People forget that the beach is not just a fun place but the home of many fish and birds too. It feels good to have helped save many lives is the message she took back home. n Zenobia Khaleel is a stay at home mom who dabbles in a lot of adventures (and misadventures), and is passionate about writing, traveling, acting, direction, girl scouts, and community volunteering. Some of her articles have been published in The Hindu and The Khaleej Times.
On Inglish
Crushed By the Juggernaut By Kalpana Mohan
juggernaut—noun (juhg-er-nawt, -not)—any large, overpowering, destructive force or object, as war, a giant battleship, or a powerful football team; anything requiring blind devotion or cruel sacrifice; Also called Jagannath, an idol of Krishna, at Puri in Orissa, India, annually drawn on an enormous cart under whose wheels devotees are said to have thrown themselves to be crushed. Origin: 1630–40; < Hindi Jagannath < Sanskrit Jagannatha lord of the world (i.e., the god Vishnu or Krishna), equivalent to jagat world + natha lord
I
n the last few week of November 2013 and for a few weeks afterward, every Indian news channel I watched, and every newspaper I opened, chewed on the ignominy of what had happened in the world of Indian journalism. An organization called Tehelka, the lord and purveyor of investigative journalism in the country, was lambasted for suppressing the misdemeanors of the man at its helm, Tarun Tejpal. He had allegedly molested a young staff member during a leadership conference in Goa in early November. With the revised laws in India following the Delhi gang rape incident of December 2012, Tejpal was not just accused of sexual misconduct and harassment; his offence was now deemed to be rape. Furthermore the powers at the juggernaut called Tehelka were hauled up for suppression of information following the incident in Goa; under the Vishaka guidelines drawn up in 1997, it was “the duty of the employer or other responsible persons in work places or other institutions to prevent or deter the commission of acts of sexual harassment and to provide the procedures for the resolution, settlement or prosecution of acts, of sexual harassment by taking all steps required.” The word “juggernaut” comes from the Sanskrit term “Jagannatha” which means “Lord of the World.” It denotes the form of Krishna as he is worshipped in Puri, Orissa, where during the annual festival the image of this avatar of Lord Vishnu is carried through the streets on a lumbering chariot called a “rath.” During this time the three deities of Jagannatha, Balabhadra and Subhadra are taken out in a grand procession in specially crafted gigantic temple-like cars that are pulled by thousands of devotees. To imagine such a vehicle inspires awe. The chariot at the temple of Thiruvarur in South India, for instance, is one of the biggest in Asia. At 96 feet tall, it weighs more than 300 tons. This grand floating temple is finished with intricate wooden carvings and massive wheels. The chariot steering Thyagarajaswamy, another aspect of Shiva, is pulled by a minimum of ten thousand people to move the chariot through the four streets hugging the temple at festival time. When the British first watched the spectacle of the Rath Yatra in Orissa in the 18th century, they wrote up descriptions that then gave rise to the term juggernaut, meaning “destructive force.” The accidental deaths of some devotees under the chariot wheels caused by the crowd and commotion is still an occurrence at temple chariot processions around the country; children are often victims under the ominous turn of the wheel. The figurative sense of the English word later began to embrace the evil or the sense of “something that demands blind devotion or merciless sacrifice.” Thus, today, the word sometimes alludes to a large rumbling machine, or a grassroots organization, or a political movement in which people work as a unit to make it function. It’s easy to see why the term often has a negative connotation. My 90-year-old father once told me how, when he was young, he
was always haunted by the fear of dying under the majestic wheels of a village temple’s chariot. He was not a risk-taker and so he would never get close to the chariot. Other uncles of mine often talked about the magnificence of the yearly chariot festivals when they were growing up in the village of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. On the day the deity was herded around the village in a procession pressed by hundreds of people, the children of the village were cautioned about the dangers of a stampede. They could be crushed under the mighty carved wheels. No one would know until you had been chewed by the spokes on god’s whirring wheels. On some rare days when I’ve had little control over the course of my life, I have nursed the feeling that life itself is about doing a balancing act inside a large chariot, while keeping myself from toppling onto the road and being crushed by its enormous wooden wheels. Through the years I’ve got a sense of how my own family members, in turn, experience their course through life. “You’re trying to crush me with your idea of the person I should become,” my son said to me last month when he arrived in India for a series of concerts. In the eagerness to have him perform in Chennai during the December performing arts season, I had signed him up somewhat excessively, with scant regard to his enormous commitments during the semester at school. He enjoyed music greatly but he wished to have the freedom to chart his own course and draw up a different schedule, especially now that he also had to prove himself in college and in his chosen career. I imagined my son at that moment, a scrawny, slight young man in the last teen year of his life, screaming silently from under my enormous chugging engine, his torso buckling under my wooden stance. It wasn’t difficult then to imagine how nurture could warp into a scourge. In February 2013, Tejpal and his magazine had actively sought to talk about the issue of sexual violence in India, but by the end of the year, they were heaving under accusations of vehemence and hypocrisy. No one in the nation had missed the stark irony of what the news juggernaut had wrought. The arrows that Tarun Tejpal had once launched from his quiver were now hurtling back towards him. I sensed how hubris could, with one mighty grind or turn, make an oppressor of a visionary. n Kalpana Mohan writes from Saratoga. To read more about her, go to http://kalpanamohan.org and http://saritorial.com. February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 31
32 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 33
films
Love Among Thieves By Aniruddh Chawda
DEDH ISHQIYA. Director: Abhishek Chaubey. Players: Naseeruddin Shah, Madhuri Dixit, Arshad Warsi, Huma Qureshi, Vijay Raaz. Music: Vishal Bhardwaj. Hindi with Eng. Sub-tit. Theatrical release (Shemaroo).
T
he business of making sequels is still new for Hindi movies. While this worldwide filmmaking trend of late has mostly been used to cash in the builtin audience for previously successful megabudget action movies, it’s now producer Bhardwaj and director Chaubey’s turn with a smaller entry. Adding to the success of their quirky, myth-making and off-beat 2010 entry Ishqiya, the duo return with the equally off-beat Dedh Ishqiya, which amounts to an amoral, asymmetrical, myth-busting romantic comedy-thriller. Staged in a grownup playground where just about everyone—yes, everyone—is painted in shades of gray mischief, Begum Para (Dixit), a refined and rich widow with an egalitarian nawab-princely following, announces a poetry contest where she will marry the winner and immediately attracts the attention of Khalu-jaan (Shah), a ruffian with a dubious past. Posing as refined gentry, Khalu is soon joined by his bumbling sidekick Babban (Warsi). Before Khalu and Babban can even roll up their sleeves to defraud the beautiful widow, Khalu finds himself drawn to Begum Para and Babban is smitten with the Begum’s vivacious maid-attendant Munniya (Qureshi). At heart, Begum Para’s opulent marital sweepstakes is what the ancients called a “swayamvar,” a Hindu ritual that allowed a woman to choose a husband from multiple suitors, a thematic fodder for umpteen modern day TV reality shows in India. Retro-fitting an ancient ritual with modern sensibilities—or lack thereof—is a clever trick employed in Chaubey’s script here. In addition to diddling with an ancient marriage ritual with a lascivious edge, Dedh Ishqiya also wittingly or unwittingly emerges as championing gay rights. The refreshingly candid portrayal of a same-sex relationship as a pivotal element in the story is captured delicately and without judgmental innuendos. Regardless of when the gay angle was plotted into the movie, in the wake of a decision by 34 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
India’s highest court recently striking down legal protections for millions of LGBT folks in India, this gutsy move by Bhardwaj and Chaubey hits an even more profound sociopolitical note. When Bhardwaj, the maestro, teams up with lyricist Gulzar, the result has often been enchanting (Maachis, Omkara). The arc continues here with a breathtakingly beautiful score. There is Rahat Fateh Ali Khan’s “Dil Ka Mizaaj Ishqiya,” which strikes a chord for ageless longing. Rekha Bhardwaj’s “Hamari Atariya”—originally penned for the first Ishqiya—finds a hand-in-glove home here, especially when accompanied by Dixit’s still-able classical Indian kathak moves and a sumptuous, sensual chorus backdrop. In a light classical node, Rekha Bhardwaj and the dance master Birju Maharaj gradually increase the tempo for “Jagaaave Saari Raina” where the notes eventually fill every audible crevice. In an age of electronically manufactured pseudo-ballads and dance chart positioning, Dedh Ishqiya is an immensely satisfying boon to the ears. Dixit’s return to acting after taking a break to raise a family has been spotty up until now. The reason Dedh Ishqiya works
for Dixit is that, much like Sridevi in English Vinglish, Dixit finally embraces, no, she relishes, a woman of a certain age now only interested in the comforts life has to offer and settling down with a soul mate. Shah and Warsi hold themselves in check as twobit crooks the same roles they played in the first Ishqiya. An especially noteworthy role is Raaz as Khalu’s professional nemesis and personal competitor for Begum Para’s affections. Equally vile and just as much a poser, Raaz’s Jaan Mohammad provides the down and low cunning that Khalu must always contend with. Devising a bawdy comedy and holding it together with a patchwork of male bonding in the trenches of low-life hoodlums, a feast of poetry, pseudo-courtly love, gay love and criminal trespasses that criss-cross every which way would be a tall order for lesser film makers. In the hands of Bhardwaj and Chaubey, Dedh Ishqiya strikes its mark, not the least of which is the notion that women can just as equally be dirty rotten scoundrels as men. Score one for gender equality! n EQ: A
Furious & Fast: Chicago Drift DHOOM 3. Director: Vijay Krishna Acharya. Players: Aamir Khan, Abhishek Bachchan, Katrina Kaif, Uday Chopra, Kim DeJesus, Jackie Shroff. Music: Pritam. Hindi with Eng. Subtit. Theatrical release (Yashraj).
W
hen classroom texts on marketing Hindi movies are re-written, they will all without a doubt offer chapters on the global phenomena of Dhoom 3, now the biggest box office hit in India’s history. Underneath the record setting boxoffice hype, however, there is an action movie that keeps intact all the tell-tale signs of successful, albeit formulaic, Hindi filmmaking that happened to get all the stars, the stunts and cash-registers aligned just right. Set in Chicago, for Vegas-style stage show operator Sahir (Khan), the only thing that matters is settling a score against a bank that once turned down a crucial business loan for Sahir’s father (Shroff). When a rash of bank robberies break out in Chicago, local authorities reach out to Mumbai cop Jai Dixit (Bachchan) and his dim-witted assistant Ali (Chopra) for help in catching the motorcycle-riding perp. For Sahir, who moonlights as the masked motorcyclist, things get even more complicated when he hires the attractive Aaliya (Kaif) as his stage companion. What Dhoom 3 does well is the fran-
chise’s calling card—the numerous stunt scenes that capture edge-of-the-seat thrills. The many motorcycle chases on the many bridges that span the Chicago River, jet ski chases in the river, helicopter chases, a vavoom roller-coaster ride and camera work as it follows circus stunts are fun to watch while they last. When they end, there are the gaps we must address. Where Dhoom 3 is lacking, is the chemistry between the leads Khan and Kaif. It is unfortunate that anyone who steps in as leads in this franchise—and it would be foolish to think there will not be more Dhoom installments—will be held up to the sizzling Hrithik Roshan-Aishwarya Rai pairing from Dhoom 2 (2006). Also, if there is a crime in Chicago, why does the fuzz from Mumbai have to be called in? There must be a detective or two free to investigate bank heists in the Windy City. Finally, for all the maddening rushes to get the heavily-armed police commandos on the chase scenes there are surprisingly very, very few bullets actually fired—for an action movie that is sacrilege. Yashraj is amazing at marketing their movies. Dhoom 3 was released in over 4,400 theaters worldwide—just one of the many records the movie set. However, even with all of Yashraj’s marketing muscle, Dhoom 3 was picked up in only two—yes, two — IMAX screens in the United States: one each
in the secondary markets of Seattle and Tallahassee. As far back as 2001, when Yashraj floated Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham, it was screened on IMAX screens in several cities, including Chicago’s Navy Pier IMAX screen, where only one show sold out even with a premium ticket price of $25. Music director Pritam has a knack for grooves that have hooks that draw in the listener with guilty pleasure—we really should not be enjoying the umpteen avatar of the Bhangra-tinted Dhoom title track this much, should we? No, we should not, and yet here we are! Pritam reworks the “Dhoom Machale” refrain in one way or another into every song on the soundtrack. The standout tune is “Malang,” engulfing Siddharth Mahadevan and Shilpa Rao’s torchy pipes that rise above the circus stage where the song is staged. In addition to being one of the best songs of the year, it is also one of the finest stand-alone dance videos. The song alone is worth the price of admission. Lebanese singing sensation Naya’s version of “Dhoom Machale”—available only on Youtube—is a fun one-world testimonial to the global demographic reach of Hindi movies. This, no doubt, also added to the Dhoom 3 marketing mystique that had the movie break all previous box office records set for Hindi movie releases in India, the Middle East, Europe, North America, Australia/New Zealand and South East Asia. In line with Hollywood’s highly successful Fast & Furious franchise, Dhoom 3 could just as easily have been christened Furious & Fast: Chicago Drift. n EQ: B Globe trekker, aesthete, photographer, ski bum, film buff, and commentator, Aniruddh Chawda writes from Milwaukee.
February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 35
profile
Aziz Ansari: Comedy and Commentary
I
was walking in downtown San Francisco, one evening, when I overheard two men talking: “I hate technology. I forwarded the email to her, and she posted it on ...” It seemed to be a discussion about singles, dating, and technology and the first person that came to mind was, of course, Aziz Ansari! On September 7, 2013, I attended a comedy show of Parks and Recreation star Aziz Ansari at the Victoria Theater in Dayton, Ohio. The evening started out with Ansari allowing the audience to take a picture of him on stage, a practice that had just previously been announced as prohibited. Ansari wondered why fans were so eager for a picture that would inevitably be blurry. Ansari then began his act dedicated to dating and relationships in today’s climate of smartphones and texting. Ansari emphasized the awkwardness and difficulty of dating in modern life, drawing upon some of his own experiences, those of his friends and even reading an audience member’s texts on her phone. I thoroughly enjoyed the humor laced social commentary on how texting changes the ebb and flow of relationships, changes the power dynamic, and creates new uncertainties and anxiety in the dating process. Appearing on the Conan O’Brien show in November 2013, Aziz elicited several rounds of laughter with his comments. “[Dating in today’s texting era] is pretty much now like you’re a secretary for this really shoddy organization scheduling the dumbest shit with the flakiest people ever.” “I see people my age getting married to people they don’t know that well, sometimes to people they’ve known for a year and a half. A year and a half! Is that enough time to get to know someone to spend the rest of your life with someone? A year and a half? I’ve had sweaters for a year and a half and I’m like what the f*** am I doing with this sweater?” “Imagine if marriage didn’t exist and you’re a guy and you’re asking a woman to get married. Imagine what that conversation would be. You’d be like ‘hey, so, you know how we’ve been spending a lot of time together, doing a lot of stuff together, hanging out like everything?’ ‘oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.’ ‘I want to keep doing that till you’re dead!’” Talking about his fascination with today’s world of romance, Ansari explained, “I’m 36 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
By Apurva Desai
super-fascinated by how texting and modern technology have made the early stages of our romantic interactions frustrating—that roller coaster of emotions you go through when you text some girl you are into, asking about dinner. You don’t hear back for hours, and you are going crazy. Then you look on Instagram, and she’s, like, posting a photo of her dog and you’re like, What the f*#!? Why are you Instagramming photos of your puppy, you rude piece of s*#!? Respond to my text! I started talking about stuff like that and was stunned by how much it seemed to resonate—such a specific, modern conundrum that has become almost universal. In a few hours of no texting, you can go from elation at meeting someone to total horror and anger.” Ansari was given an advance of $3.5M from Penguin Press to write a book on this topic. Here’s how the publisher describes the untitled book, which is expected to be published in September 2015. “[The book] will provide an investigation into what Ansari argues is an entirely new era for singles, in which the basic issues facing a single person—whom we meet, how we meet them, and what happens next—have been radically altered by new technologies.” At first glance, it feels quite surprising that a comedian like Ansari would be able to credibly write about dating. But when you peel back the onion, it isn’t that surprising. As a comedian, Ansari is constantly observing and finding humor in the the human condition. And being single in New York, he’s likely to have experienced the trials and
tribulations of the dating game in perhaps the most competitive and challenging place in the country. As Scott Moyers from Penguin Press says, “So much of Aziz Ansari’s brilliant humor comes from grasping the hidden forces that govern our everyday lives. I’m delighted but not surprised that he is the one who is going to make sense of the strange new world that singles have to navigate today.” What I really find surprising about this book and the willingness of both the public and publisher to have Ansari serve as an expert on dating in this decade is not that he is a comedian, but that he is an Indian American comedian. Ansari was born in 1983 in Columbia, South Carolina to immigrant professional parents from Tamil Nadu, India. South Carolina is not thought of as a hotbed for Indian Americans, evidenced by the 2010 Census which shows that in Columbia there were 878 Indians, or 0.7% of the total city population. Undoubtedly, during his teenage years, the Indian population would have been even lower. Admittedly, I haven’t come across any mention of Ansari’s dating life in South Carolina, but given that level of diversity, it’s unlikely that any Indian American, even a funny, handsome one, would have been in dating demand. Indian Americans have made notable contributions in fields such as medicine, academia, science, mathematics, and business, but sustained notoriety in public facing fields such as media and entertainment feels like a newer phenomenon. While some would debate whether Ansari’s dating expertise is one of the desired areas of assimilation, the fact that it could happen is a clear example of diversity in career and lifestyle choices. While there is certainly a long way to go, as evidenced by the backlash from a few misguided vocal critics on Twitter against the recent Indian-American Miss America winner Nina Davulur not being American enough to hold such a crown, Ansari’s example is a comforting sign of progress. n Apurva Desai lives in the Silicon Valley where he has worked for leading Internet and Mobile companies ranging from large giants to emerging startups for the last decade. You can find him on Twitter @apurvadesai and at his personal site apurvadesai.com .
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music
T
February Favorites By Vidya Sridhar
he new year brings with it a bunch of new releases and promises for lots of great albums. I am personally looking
Movie Jai Ho; Music: Sajid-Wajid Lyrics: Sameer Anjaan Singers: Shaan, Shreya Ghoshal, Shabab Sabri Salman’s first movie after almost a year, so, needless to say, it must be good. Sallu Bhai has a thing for “naina.” “Tere Naina” will remind you of “Tere Mast Mast do Nain” and “Dagabaaz Re.” Totally beautiful. The refreshing use of tabla instead of the dhol is welcome. n
forward to Highway by A.R.Rahman. Lots of fun music and big banner releases to look forward to this year. n
Vidya Sridhar works at NASA and is a mom of two elementary school children. She lives and breathes all things filmi.
Movie: Dhoom 3; Music Pritam Chakraborty Lyrics: Sameer Anjaan Singers: Siddharth Mahadevan, Shilpa Rao
Movie: Highway; Music: A.R. Rahman Lyrics: Irshad Kamil Singers: Jyoti Nooran, Sultana Nooran
This is an awesome composition that has a superb fusion of sufi and rock, camouflaged in an Arabic, Western and Hindustani background. The “Dhoom” signature tune has been incorporated within the “Malang” track perfectly. n
Movie: Hasee Toh Phasee; Music: Vishal-Shekhar Singers: Sunidhi Chauhan, Benny Dayal The latest from the Dharma banner by Vishal-Shekhar. I love this song and you will too. It’s one of those you won’t be able to get out of your head. Upbeat and rhythm heavy with a strong Punjabi flavor, this will definitely be replayed at Indian weddings across the globe. n 38 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
Finally A.R.Rahman and a song that is really refreshing and different. This song grows on you. It sounds both modern as well as rustic. The mood is masterfully manipulated by Rahman. n
Movie: Dedh Ishqiya; Music: Vishal Bhardwaj Lyrics: Gulzar Singer: Rahat Fateh Ali Khan This ballad is just exquisite. It is one of those haunting songs with beautiful music and unforgettable lyrics by Gulzar. Rahat Fateh Ali Khan's soulful voice reaches hidden places and floods with warmth. n
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in memoriam
Consummate Artist: Lakshmi Shankar By Kanniks Kannikeswaran
I
t was the morning of the 30th of December 2013 in the thick of the music season when I had a brief conversation regarding veteran musician Lakshmi Shankar and her sister Kamala Sastri at the canteen of the Music Academy with Sruti Editor Ramnarayan; it seems surreal to hear that she passed away on the very same day in Simi Valley, California. Lakshmi Shankar is known to the world as an established Hindustani music singer of the Patiala gharana and a member of the Ravi Shankar family. She is the sister-in-law of Pandit Ravi Shankar. She is known, in particular, for her sweet voice and her expressive rendition of bhajans, khyals, thumris and compositions in several languages. I still remember the manner in which she held the attention of the audience with the purity of notes, sweetness of voice and richness of expression even at the age of 78 when she sang in Cincinnati. The world knows her through her voice that rang crystal clear with her rendition of “Vaishnava Janato” and “Raghupati Raghava” in the Oscar winning film Gandhi in 1989. I have had the honor of collaborating with her, when she sang the lead parts in my oratorio “Shanti–A Journey of Peace”— which she described in 2004 as a breathtaking experience. Lakshmi Shankar was born in Madras in 1926 to Pudukkottai R. Viswanatha Sastri and Visalakshi, Lakshmi Sastri. Few musicians have straddled South and North Indian classical traditions with the same grace and ease as Lakshmi Shankar. Her contribution to the arts is immense. The recognition that she received was primarily from other musicians and her fans; yet, Lakshmi Shankar had no regrets about the lack of institutional awards. She taught and shared music even until the very last years and she sang with fidelity to the sruti of G-sharp, even in her 80s. It is not known to many that her foray into the world of art started with bharatanatyam. Lakshmi had her bharatanatyam arangetram at the age of 11 attired in “blue satin salwar and kurta”– a total contrast from the costumes that outdo each other today. The late S. Rajam, actor, painter and Karnatik musician, recalled her prowess and grace as a dancer—in a conversation with me in July 2009. 42 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
Soon after her arangetram, she left for Almora to join Uday Shankar’s (Ravi Shankar’s brother) Almora Cultural Center where her horizons widened considerably thanks to Uday Shankar’s global approach to dance and his integration of various traditional elements into his formulation of a “modern dance paradigm.” Lakshmi Viswanatha Sastri married Uday’s brother Rajendra Shankar and became Lakshmi Shankar. Lakshmi Shankar recalled with nostalgia the creative outpouring of energy while discussing the script for Discovery of India with the Shankar brothers. She has the highest regard for Ravi Shankar. “Is there any sphere of music that Ravi ji has not touched?’ she remarked often, as she talked of the instrumental ensembles that Ravi Shankar conceived of and directed. Each performance of The Discovery of India was intense. Her musical involvement with Ravi Shankar was a lifelong one and she expressed loneliness after the maestro’s passing about a year back. It was after her last performance in Discovery of India as a dancer in multiple roles, that Lakshmi fell severely ill and had to give up dancing. For a person of South Indian origin grounded in the arts, branching off into Karnatik music was a natural choice; however, it was due to the advice of Ravi Shankar and noted film composer Madan Mohan that she took to Hindustani music. Lakshmi Shankar trained under Ustad
Abdul Rehman Khan and then later under Pandit Deodhar. Her dulcet voice lent itself freely to the evolution of a unique style that was at once expressive and exceedingly sweet. Lakshmi was fluent in Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, Gujrati and Bengali and her renditions endeared her to audiences everywhere. Lakshmi Shankar’s musical personality was further shaped by her full spirited participation in the Festival of India an ensemble performance directed by Ravi Shankar. She participated in Festival of India’s world tour in 1974 and later recorded an album by the same name. Lakshmi Shankar’s life has been associated with a galaxy of historic personalities from the 1900s including Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, musician T.L. Venkatarama Iyer and filmmaker S. Balachander. Lakshmi Shankar stands apart as a consummate artist. She spoke both the North Indian and the South Indian idioms. She could translate music to movement and expression. She was a polyglot. She acted in and sang for movies. Lakshmi Shankar’s home is full of relics and images from her work. She treasures the old program notes from Discovery of India, a group photograph from Festival of India which looks like a collection of the Who’s Who of Indian music. Lakshmi Shankar used to visit India each December and was frequently seen attending concerts in sabhas in Chennai. Her last performance was when she performed with Gayatri Venkatraghavan in the United States in 2013. During my last conversation with her in early December 2013, she made oblique references to her health and even remarked that “I don’t know how much long I will be around.” I didn’t realize that the end would be upon her so soon after our conversation. Lakshmi Shankar as a mortal is no more; yet her voice lives on and continues to move countless admirers around the globe. n Kanniks Kannikeswaran is an internationally renowned musician, composer and music educator, whose award winning research on the Indo-colonial music of Dikshitar is beginning to influence Indian music pedagogy. Kanniks is a pioneer of the Indian American choral movement. He teaches Indian classical music at the University of Cincinnati. www.kanniks.com.
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events
California’s Best Guide to Indian Events Edited by: Mona Shah List your event for FREE! MARCH issue deadline: Thursday, February 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 Sarasvati Puja Vasanta Panchami
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Feb. 28
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March 5
CULTURAL CALENDER
February
8 Saturday
Valentine In Paris—Gala Dinner and Dance. Featuring live vocals by DJ Fusion Nauzad Sadry and Bhavna Chawla. Dinner, Paris theme portraits, raffles, and spot prizes. Organized by Hindu Temple and Heritage Foundation (HTHF). 7-11:45 p.m. Arcadia Community Center, 365 Campus Drive, Arcadia. $60. (626) 991-4789, (626) 664-962. imu8@yahoo.com. www.facebook.com/ events/1378166812440513.
44 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
Valentine In Paris - Gala Dinner and Dance, Feb 8
February
15 Saturday
Shradanjali and Pushpanjali. Shradan-
jali for Lakshmi Shankar and first anniversary memorial for the founders of Music Circle, Ravi Shankar and Harihar Rao. Tributes by Tarun Bhattacharya on santoor and Aishu Venkataraman on violin. Organized by The Music Circle. 6 p.m. Herrick Chapel, Occidental College, 1600 Campus Road., Los
Angeles. Free. (626) 449-6987. www.musiccircle.org.
Valentine’s Party. Featuring the Heart
N Soul band with Madhumita Chatterjee ( vocals), with Sufi star Shams Rahman. Accompanied by Samir Chatterjee (guitar), Rishi Thakar (drums) and Faheem Hayat (keyboard). The show will present the best Indian and Pakistani live songs from 1960s to 2010s. Organized by Pakistani and Indian
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S
ince 2011 the organizers of I Just Wanna Dance (IJWD) have met in Los Angeles to ready themselves for their crowd pleasing, annual show performed by post-graduates who hope to entice, thrill and share their pure passion for the steps and sounds of Indian dance and music with the public.. The motivation behind this event is to help post-graduate, working professionals who share a passion for their culture and “love to perform, regardless of talent level” to put on a show for the community say IJWD founders Raman Gulati and Shailee Mehta. The duo also added that the show is not a judged competition. The three-hour cultural show will feature a panorama of creatively choreographed dance styles such as Hindi film, bhangra, classical, and hip hop, as well as live music and comedy, along with Indian food from local eateries. Gulati recalled memorable acts which represented the essence of the show such as San Francisco based HipNatyam which fused Hip Hop and Bharatanatyam. “Two groups individually performed Hip Hop and Bharatanatyam which culminated in an unforgettable battle between the two styles.” In their second show, Bhangraholics, a bhangra group emerged from dancers from various rival colleges who had once competed against one another. For our show said Gulati, “they put aside their differences and put their energy together to create one of the most exciting bhangra acts I’ve ever seen.” Yet another Indian group (Critical Conditionam) according to Gulati, earned a reputation for being the most accessible through their “bonding and the openness to allow everyone a chance to perform.” The troupe allowed people to join past their signup deadline, and swelled to over twenty dancers who rotated in for different dance acts. IJWD will also donate a portion of their proceeds to local charities such as Pratham Los Angeles chapter and Artesia based Sahara. Pratham provides education to povertystricken regions of India, while Sahara is a
South Asian Helpline and Referral Agency for victims of domestic violence. The show is quite “unique” according to Gulati, an engineer by day who drew inspiration from the hundreds of colleges nationwide as well as his own alma mater University of California Berkeley where youth groups partake in similar shows to learn about one’s culture and make lifelong friendships. Once students graduate, Gulati noted, “there is no way to experience the affiliation and fun without being part of some professional performing organization.” Gulati’s vision to extend the collegiate like extra-curricular event was shared by Mehta an accountant by day, who spent much, of her youth participating in various dance groups inclusive of choreography work. Such extracurricular involvement is a key tool in personal development, added Mehta who admits “many choreographers have had such ideas but just need a venue to express
their creativity.” The founders also acknowledged their growing pains with their non-profit. Mehta recalled her elation and bewilderment of the show’s popularity as she watched the ticket sales counter rise from zero to eight hundred in their formative years. The unexpected throngs of audiences gathered mainly from social media marketing and word of mouth caused various delays in their initial show which forced the organizing committee to re-evaluate their event goals by incorporating timely starts of their growing acts to make the show more polished. IJWD is about people coming together because they all have one thing in common—their passion for dance and performing. n Saturday February 15, Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, 1935 Manhattan Beach Blvd., Redondo Beach. 6:30 p.m. $10 - $20. http://www.ijwdshow.com. February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 45
events
California’s Best Guide to Indian Events original choreography by Rachana Upadhyay founder and director of Kathak Kala Academy. Organized by the Kathak Kala Academy and IPAC. 6 p.m. Madrid Theater, 21622 Sherman Way, Canoga Park. $20, VIP $25. (818) 272-1912, (818) 882-3368. rachanau@yahoo.com. www.mykathak.com.
March
9 Sunday
Rajan and Sajan Mishra and Suman Laha Concert. Accompanied by Ash-
100 years of Kathak Dance in Indian Cinema, a concert on Feb. 22
Community of Southern California and Faheem Hayat. 6:30-11 p.m. Yorba Linda Community Center, 4501 Casa Loma Ave., Yorba Linda . $39, $33, $28 tickets. (949) 433-3077, (909) 720-2435. hayat_faheem@yahoo.com.
February
Payal Baaje and more. Join us in recognizing Kathak in the movies with innovative
ish Sengupta (tabla), and Vyasmurti Katti (harmonium). Followed by instrumental music by Suman Laha with Abhijit Banerjee on the tabla. Organized by Satsang Foundation (dba Cerritos Music Circle). 2 p.m. William and Jane Bristol Auditorium, 16600 Civic Center Drive, Bellflower. $100, $50, $30. (310) 530-5992, (562) 704-2720. nibeditalaw@yahoo.com.
20 Thursday
A Nice Indian Boy—A Play. As gay
marriage is being debated by the Supreme Court, this play is timely in continuing the discussion. Naveen Gavaskar meets Keshav Kurundkar, and they share all things Indian, from speaking Hindi to the difficulty of being gay in Indian culture. They agree to meet in person to find that one is South Asian and the other (Keshav) is a Caucasian, adopted by Indian parents and speaks fluent Hindi. Ends March 23. Organized by East West Players. The David Henry Hwang Theater at The Union Center for the Arts, 120 Judge John Aiso, Los Angeles . $60. (213) 6257000. www.eastwestplayers.org.
February
22 Saturday
100 Years of Kathak Dance in Indian Cinema from 1913 to 2013. A concert
that pays tribute to some of the historic dancers and choreographers of the silver screen. Performers of all ages will present classical pieces from every decade of Indian cinema, from 1950s Satyajit Ray film Jalsaghar to 2013’s Vishwaroopam, including nods to classic films like Devdas, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Meera, Jhanak Jhanak
46 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
Shradhanjali for Lakshmi Shankar , Feb 15
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February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 47
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2 Sunday
Habits: Your Master or Your Slave.
Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 661-8006. Glendale Temple, 2146 East Chevy Chase Drive, Glendale. (818) 543-0800. Fullerton Temple, 142 East Chapman Ave., Fullerton. (714) 525-1291. Encinitas Temple, 939 Second Street, Encinitas. (760) 436-7220. San Diego Temple, 3072 First Avenue, San Diego. (619) 295-0170. Call temples for times. Organized by Self Realization Fellowship. www.yoganandasrf.org.
Yoga for Inner Fitness with Yogi Ramesh. Ends Feb. 11. 6-9 p.m. Downey
Senior Center, 7810 Quill Drive, Downey . Adults $55, seniors $45 (per month). (562) 716-9367. yogiramesh@att.net. Http://www. laughingyogi.org.
Sunday Services at the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Rotating
lectures, please visit websites for updated informartion. Hollywood Vedanta Temple, 1946 Vedanta Place, Hollywood. (323) 4657114. hollywood@vedanta.org. Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple, 927 Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara. (805) 969-2903. santabarbara@ vedanta.org. South Pasadena Vivekananda House, 309 Monterey Road, South Pasadena. (323) 254-1546, pasadena@vedanta.org. Trabuco Canyon Ramakrishna Monastery, 19961 Live Oak Canyon Rd., Trabuco Canyon. (949) 858-0342. rkmtrabuco@vedanta.org. San Diego Ramakrishna Monastery, 1440 Upas Street, San Diego. (619) 291-9377. sandiego@ vedanta.org.
February
9 Sunday
Experiencing the Love of God. Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 661-8006. Glendale Temple, 2146 East Chevy Chase Drive, Glendale. (818) 543-0800. Fullerton Temple, 142 East Chapman Ave., Fullerton. (714) 5251291. Encinitas Temple, 939 Second Street, Encinitas. (760) 436-7220. San Diego Temple, 3072 First Avenue, San Diego. (619) 2950170. Call temples for times. Organized by Self Realization Fellowship. www.yogananda-srf.org.
ety of Southern California. Rotating lectures, please visit websites for updated informartion. Hollywood Vedanta Temple, 1946 Vedanta Place, Hollywood. (323) 465-7114. hollywood@vedanta.org. Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple, 927 Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara. (805) 969-2903. santabarbara@vedanta.org. South Pasadena Vivekananda House, 309 Monterey Road, South Pasadena. (323) 254-1546, pasadena@vedanta.org. Trabuco Canyon Ramakrishna Monastery, 19961 Live Oak Canyon Rd., Trabuco Canyon. (949) 858-0342. rkmtrabuco@vedanta.org. San Diego Ramakrishna Monastery, 1440 Upas Street, San Diego. (619) 291-9377. sandiego@vedanta.org.
February
16 Sunday
The Liberating Power of Affirmation. Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 661-8006. Glendale Temple, 2146 East Chevy Chase Drive, Glendale. (818) 543-0800. Fullerton Temple, 142 East Chapman Ave., Fullerton. (714) 525-1291. Encinitas Temple, 939 Second Street, Encinitas. (760) 436-7220. San Diego Temple, 3072 First Avenue, San Diego. (619) 2950170. Call temples for times. Organized by Self Realization Fellowship. www.yogananda-srf.org
Sunday Services at the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Rotating
lectures, please visit websites for updated informartion. Hollywood Vedanta Temple, 1946 Vedanta Place, Hollywood. (323) 465-7114. hollywood@vedanta.org. Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple, 927 Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara. (805) 969-2903. santabarbara@vedanta.org. South Pasadena Vivekananda House, 309 Monterey Road, South Pasadena. (323) 254-1546, pasadena@vedanta.org. Trabuco Canyon Ramakrishna Monastery, 19961 Live Oak Canyon Rd., Trabuco Canyon. (949) 858-0342. rkmtrabuco@vedanta.org. San Diego Ramakrishna Monastery, 1440 Upas Street, San Diego. (619) 291-9377. sandiego@vedanta.org.
February
23 Sunday
The Cosmic Motion Picture. Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 661-8006. Glendale Temple, 2146 East Chevy Chase Drive, Glendale. (818) 543-0800. Fullerton Temple, 142
East Chapman Ave., Fullerton. (714) 5251291. Encinitas Temple, 939 Second Street, Encinitas. (760) 436-7220. San Diego Temple, 3072 First Avenue, San Diego. (619) 2950170. Call temples for times. Organized by Self Realization Fellowship. www.yogananda-srf.org.
Sunday Services at the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Rotating
lectures, please visit websites for updated informartion. Hollywood Vedanta Temple, 1946 Vedanta Place, Hollywood. (323) 4657114. hollywood@vedanta.org. Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple, 927 Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara. (805) 969-2903. santabarbara@ vedanta.org. South Pasadena Vivekananda House, 309 Monterey Road, South Pasadena. (323) 254-1546, pasadena@vedanta.org. Trabuco Canyon Ramakrishna Monastery, 19961 Live Oak Canyon Rd., Trabuco Canyon. (949) 858-0342. rkmtrabuco@vedanta.org. San Diego Ramakrishna Monastery, 1440 Upas Street, San Diego. (619) 291-9377. sandiego@ vedanta.org.
February
28 Friday
Maha Shivratri Celebration. Mandir, 1732 Reynolds Ave., Irvine. (949) 222-2283. mandir@mandir.ws. www.mandir.ws.
March
2 Sunday
Harnessing the Power of the Mind.
Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 661-8006. Glendale Temple, 2146 East Chevy Chase Drive, Glendale. (818) 543-0800. Fullerton Temple, 142 East Chapman Ave., Fullerton. (714) 525-1291. Encinitas Temple, 939 Second Street, Encinitas. (760) 436-7220. San Diego Temple, 3072 First Avenue, San Diego. (619) 295-0170. Call temples for times. Organized by Self Realization Fellowship. www.yoganandasrf.org.
Place your event for freewww.indiacurrents.com/ submit-event Š Copyright 2014 India Currents. All rights reserved. Reproduction for commercial use strictly prohibited.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 49
reflections
Ministering the Monk
The unlikely story of how a Christian minister married a Hindu monk By Bob Allen
O
rdained Baptist minister J. Dana Trent got more than she bargained for when she tried to broaden the field on a dating website application by checking boxes for other religions along with Christian and “spiritual but not religious”—a Hindu husband she says has brought her closer to Jesus. “As Christians, we may think we’ve cornered the market on God,” Trent writes in her book Saffron Cross: The Unlikely Story of How a Christian Minister Married a Hindu Monk. “We cling to our religious traditions as the only true way to spiritual enlightenment or eternal life.” Dana Trent said the first seed for the book was planted in 2008, when she got engaged to Fred Eaker, an American-born Hindu convert who spent five years as a monk at a Gaudiya Vaishnava monastery in California. As “self-described theology nerds,” she said, the couple sought out a manual for interfaith marriage. Finding volumes on Jewish-Christian and Muslim-Christian marriages but nothing close to the Baptist-Hindu variety, they joked, “Well, we’ll just wright the book. How hard can it be?” The idea became cemented when they honeymooned for two weeks in December 2010 in Vrindavan, India, described in vivid detail in the book’s opening chapter. That’s where sharing their story, and in turn fostering interfaith conversations, took on a new priority. Returning home, Trent made plans to leave her full-time job in development at Duke University to pursue a career in freelance writing and teaching. She proposed Saffron Cross to Upper Room Books in November 2011. They accepted, and she wrote and revised the manuscript in one year. Trent says in the book that the human tendency is to “place God in a little box with sharp edges and straight lines.” “Our biggest fear is that when we open ourselves to others’ understanding of God, we will jeopardize our own
50 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
Dana Trent and husband Fred Eaker
path,” she writes. “And yet, the opposite is true. The Holy Spirit breaks free from our human-made constraints and moves fluidly among us, crossing our unnecessary lines drawn in the sand.” Fifty years ago, a mixed-faith marriage might have referred in the Bible belt to a Baptist wedding a Methodist, Presbyterian or even a Catholic. That’s a far cry from today, when young adults are surrounded by friends from many cultures and backgrounds, including those who practice other faiths. Trent said she and her husband are hearing from a lot of Baptists and other evangelicals who identify with their story. “On their college campuses, millennials are surrounded by fellow students of different religions, faith traditions, and cultures,
and many of them are choosing to date one another,” she said. “We’ve found that self-identifying Baptist/evangelical women particularly struggle with this.” Several have come forward during booksigning events to discuss their non-Christian boyfriends. They often ask what to do with verses like 2 Corinthians 6:14, which says Christians should not be “unequally yoked” with unbelievers, as well as John 14:6, where Jesus says: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” “They have difficulty reconciling such verses with the deep faith traditions they see exhibited in their boyfriends,” Trent said. “I always encourage them to read and exegete thoughtfully, considering the cultural and
history contexts of the scripture, as well as the early formation of the church’s theology.” Trent said Christians “begin to stumble in interfaith conversation when we proof text.” She finds it more helpful to approach the situation from the viewpoint that “Christianity is absolutely the path for some, but not for everyone.” “It’s difficult for me to deny the validity of the global traditions, given their rich history, scripture and most importantly their results,” she said. “The essential discernment is: does the faith path deepen the individual’s experience and relationship with God and their fellow humans? For me, that is the ultimate truth of religion.” Trent admits she didn’t come to that conclusion overnight. Her own initial reaction to why her husband’s childhood profession of faith in Christ didn’t last was because his pastor didn’t follow up by insisting upon his baptism. One thing Trent said struck her early on about her husband’s devotional life was Hinduism’s focus on “what can I do for God?” rather than the individualistic evangelical concern of “what can God do for me?” Trent grew up in Binkley Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, N.C., a progressive congregation known as a safe haven for folks who didn’t belong anywhere else. Her spiritual nurture also included a Southern Baptist church that ordained her to the gospel ministry despite the Southern Baptist Convention’s official stance that the role of senior pastor “is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” She enrolled at Duke Divinity School, finding her place as a Baptist among United Methodists at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship-affiliated Baptist House of Studies led by Baptist theology professor Curtis Freeman. Trent acknowledged that a lot of Christians are uncomfortable talking about things like sexual orientation and interfaith dialogue. “At some point, it is my fear that Christianity will lose an entire generation of practitioners,” she said. While young people “are waiting for the church to sort out its views on gender, sexuality and interfaith unions, their reality is that their friends are from many cultures and backgrounds, some are LGBT, and some practice other faiths.” “They know and love their friends, so it’s impossible for them to understand and reconcile why the church doesn’t accept them, too.” n
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healthy life
Crucial Workout Meals By Malar Gandhi
Y
our total daily calorie and nutrient intake, along with getting those nutrients from mostly higher quality sources, is always the most important part of every single diet plan regardless of what your goal is. Once you ensure you’re getting all of your totals right for the day, the meals directly surrounding your workouts are next in line in terms of the amount of impact and influence it has on the results you get. Fueling your body before and after a strenuous exercise is important for minimizing soreness and fatigue, playing a key role in energizing your muscles. After a long high-intensity cardio your body’s stored energy is depleted and your muscles need to replenish lost glycogen as soon as possible. Choosing the right combination of protein and carbohydrate is crucial. In order to maximize energy and calorie burning potential in a workout session, it is always recommended to eat something prior to physical activity. Skipping meals altogether is a big mistake. Many think that to burn calories or lose tummy fat they should workout with an empty stomach, but blood glucose drops when you are fasting, so the body uses its reserve fat as fuel, but this does not mean you are actually burning fat. Burning fat is more about overall calorie expenditure and not just about the type of energy your body is using up for a physical activity. The undermining issue is that one cannot perform well at the gym for a reasonably long period. Therefore, one will end up burning fewer calories than planned for. Eating before a workout has its own benefits, besides boosting recovery and strength. It will help you sustain for long hours and for an intense workout. If you had a light snack before any physical activity, the blood glucose level won’t hit bottom and make you dizzy. At the same time, if you have eaten a relatively big meal, make sure to give enough time for digestion before you hit the gym. The larger the portion of the meal, the more the time you will need before the workout.
52 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
The timing of your post-workout meal is critical for proper recovery. In a 2001 study conducted by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, researchers found that ingesting protein and carbohydrates an hour after workout was superior for protein synthesis, or the muscle growth process within cells, and muscle recovery rather than consuming carbohydrates three hours later. Pre and Post Workout Meal Plan Each genre of workout may demand a different approach of meal before and afterward to help maintain energy and to maximize the results. Pre-workout meal means grabbing a snack about 30-60 minutes prior to exercise, whereas, post-workout meal is an hour after. Yoga and Stretching. Though yoga and
stretching could be stressful for some of us, it is still considered low impact exercise. Choose fibrous foods like apple, pears, pineapple, berries before your activity. While your body is still burning calories, afterward, replenish with water and plan for healthy meal like whole wheat chappathi wrapped with paneer or black eye beans. Cardio Workout. Before you hit the studio, you need energy, but not too heavy a meal. Start with an Indian trail mix, dry fruits and nuts (bananas slices, peaches, coconut pieces, dates, raisins, candied sugar, walnuts, almonds and pumpkin seeds). Following your exercise, opt for palak paneer or grilled fish. Maintain a low fat diet for high metabolism. Strength Training. Prior to strength training, eat a protein-carbohydrate rich diet. After training, choose complex carbohy-
drates like brown rice with vegetable subzi (stir-fried vegetables), or whole wheat phulka with dal tadka and avoid simple starches like potatoes and white rice. Vegetarian’s Choice. Pre and post workout snacks usually compromise on vegetarian ingredients. This leaves vegetarians with fewer options to boost performance. Some of the best vegetarian snack ideas include banana-walnut smoothie, toasted brown bread with fresh cream, Punjabi lassi (with palm sugar), South Indian sundal (tempered legumes), sprouted mung bean salad, paneer tikka (grilled), whole wheat roti with dal are all some of the power packed, smart choices to have soon after a hard day at the gym. Stay Hydrated. Exercise often causes dehydration, which hinders muscle recovery. According to research reported in the 1996 issue of “Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise,” athletes should drink about 17 oz of fluid every two hours during and after exercise until they are adequately hydrated. Prepare your own liquid electrolytes, like honey based lemonade, ginger-mint juice, water melon juice, salted buttermilk, tender coconut water and whey. The next time you make home-made paneer (Indian cottage cheese), do not throw away the whey. It is rich in liquid milk serum, lots of albumin and globulin proteins are still present in it. In fact milk serum or whey is often sold as a nutritional supplement in many health care industries. It’s quite popular among body builders. It’s one of best post-workout drink, helps the aching muscles to relax and tone. Liquid Diet Lovers. In order to nourish yourself after an intense workout, your meal itself can be something with lot of fluids, like finger millet gruel (ragi koozh), mixed beans pottage (Indian chili), cracked wheat porridge, lentils and spinach soup, barley and chicken broth, red rice kanji, health mix kheer, ragi malt, greens broth and mixed vegetables juice. n Malar Gandhi is a freelance writer, who specializes in Culinary Anthropology and Gourmet Indian Cooking. She blogs about Indian food at www.kitchentantras.com and can be reached at malargandhi@kitchentantras.com
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current affairs
The Devyani Khobragade row By Sandip Roy
54 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
Image Courtesy: Facebook
I
f America was a bully in the china shop when it came to its handling of Devyani Khobragade, India has decided its revenge for its humiliation will be death to America by a thousand cuts. The United States embassy has been told to close down all commercial activities it permits through the American Community Support Association by January 16. That means non-U.S. diplomats or private American citizens and their families can no longer enjoy the restaurant/bar, bowling alley or beauty parlor. India says these commercial activities in a duty-free facility violate the norm. Before that we heard about a directive to the American Center to stop screening films. A “tersely-worded communication” sent to the American Centre has said screening fims without a license is a “transgression.” Of course, stopping film screenings is going to annoy Indians who went to watch the films more than it annoys the Americans. But that’s just a niggling detail when it comes to the Great Game of score-settling. It’s reached a point where the editorial board of the Washington Post has decided to weigh in. “The Indian government has compounded tensions with high-decibel rhetoric and a vindictive campaign against U.S. diplomats in New Delhi. Its bullying measures have ranged from the petty—withdrawing the U.S. Embassy’s permit to import alcohol—to the irresponsible—removing security barricades from the street in front of the facility.” This the Post implies with a tone of tuttut reproof is very disappointing especially because over the past decade, senior United States officials have portrayed India as an “emerging strategic partner” as well as a “democracy that respects the rule of law and shares U.S. values.” The Post’s lofty tone of aggrieved letdown boils down to this: We thought India was a grown-up who we could invite to dinner. But alas, it’s still a spoiled brat having a tantrum. No wonder when that piece was tweeted out, Shashi Tharoor, the Indian Minister of State for Human Resource Development, a
Member of Parliament, an author and columnist, tweeted back calling it “high-handed & presumptuous” wondering if the Indian Embassy would be allowed to block a street unilaterally. Tharoor tweeted that the Embassy had blocked the road on its own and the Indian government “let it pass in a spirit of friendship.” Where once India turned a blind eye to these things, now it’s more like an eye for an eye and a tit for a tat. I believe that the issue of the treatment of Devyani Khobragade by the United States authorities and the issue of visa fraud in her employment contract are separate from each other. One does not excuse the other. However when it comes to these matters of equality before the law, the United States is very much the emperor who has no clothes. It really has little ground to adopt its tone of high moral dudgeon. And one needs only one name to make that point: Raymond Allen Davis. That’s the American CIA contractor who shot two Pakistanis in Lahore and then ran over another person in his rush to get away. President Obama invoked diplomatic immunity to break him from a Pakistani jail. As Mukul Kesavan points out in The Telegraph the Pakistani government made exactly the same arguments that American state and its proxies are making in the Khobragade
case. But to no avail. And Khobragade, unlike Davis, is not accused of killing anyone. “Does American wrongdoing in Lahore justify Indian wrongdoing in New York?” wonders Kesavan. “In normal circumstances, the answer would be no, it doesn’t. A thief can’t protest his conviction on the grounds that some other thief was let off on account of a miscarriage of law.” But as Kesavan points out the problem at the heart of all this is that we are judging these events by normal citizen standards of fair play and even playing fields. This ain’t cricket. “There’s nothing ‘normal’ about diplomatic immunity,” writes Kesavan. That’s why both sides are in such an impasse. The Vienna Convention is more of an “extraordinary privilege” that all nations subscribe to because ultimately they all benefit from it in ways big and small—from evading murder charges to foreign wine and cheese. America demonstrated during the Davis affair that it could do whatever it wanted in the name of the Vienna Convention because hey, it just could. But in doing so it seems to have failed to realize that where the United States leads, others can follow. Of course, turning off the Embassy liquor spigot and shutting down its DVD player is not going to do much to put hair on India’s chest though it is thumping it with such vigor. “Indians do shrill petulance better than they do manly truculence,” quips Kesavan. We can put that down to the surfeit of saas-bahu serials that afflict our culture. Now the foreign policy magazine The American Interest is asking Obama to intervene because he has the power to pardon. If he does decide to do that, here’s a line he could use: There’s a broader principle at stake that I think we have to uphold. It should come easily to him. He used it once before. For Raymond Allen Davis. n Sandip Roy is the Culture Editor for Firstpost. com. He is on leave as editor with New America Media. His weekly dispatches from India can be heard on KALW.org. This article was first published on FirstPost.com.
commentary
Charm of the Farmers’ Market By Archana Asthana
I
’ve never been on a farm and I don’t live near one, yet the ubiquitous lure of the farmers’ market brings me to our local milieu most Sundays. The freshness of the locally produced fruits, vegetables, flowers, honey (even beehives), breads, marinated olives, garlic, ravioli, varied nuts are all fair game; the local musician enthusiastically cranking out tunes and livening up the ambience. It was a glorious 70 degree day, last Sunday, and the refrigerator resembled Mother Hubbard’s bare cupboard, so we trekked out to the market toting our reusable cloth bags (like all good Indian Americans, who were green even before being green became fashionable). The scene was awash in bright sunshine. The local guitarist was strumming musical numbers that we knew all the words to (read Beatles, ABBA, Eagles). The smell of fresh flora, and the delectable taste of fresh fruit set out for tasting by vendors combined to create a really heady feeling. I felt transported to another time and place. The busy street junction’s usual hustle and bustle was replaced by people on foot, strolling along with babies and dogs in tow, pausing to examine the wares, testing them for ripeness, sniffing, scratching, staring intently and then haggling with the vendors for a more affordable price. These days the haggling has all but disappeared, as the savvy farmers have realized that their wares, once considered a cheaper alternative, are now considered “super foods” and command a higher price, suitable to their “organic” status. All in all, I was feeling good, socializing with known faces and sharing recipes with strangers while tasting an unknown variety of fruits and vegetables. I watched the world pass by in slow motion as the sights and sounds were filed away for later retrieval. These moments represented tranquility in my busy life, a few stolen moments of respite amidst the clamor of attention from all that touched me. What was most endearing was the ability to select the amount of food and have the farmer measure its weight ... much like the old times, or, like when I lived in India. The “bhaiya” or “dada” factor is some-
A Creative Commons Image what restricted, but we are getting close to calling them “amigo” or “buddy” whenever appropriate, which makes the simple act of buying food somewhat more personal. A few years ago, I recall stopping by a farmers’ market and catching a glimpse of fresh crabs as they were being unloaded. Deciding to be adventurous, I had bought some. Back at home cookbooks had been rifled through, in our maiden attempt to cook this delicacy, and finally hubby dear had decided he was confident enough to try to recreate the black pepper crab we had so enjoyed in Singapore. I had been warned of the lingering smell from cooking crab at home, so, the stove on the outdoor barbecue grill was used and a big pot of water was soon bubbling with boiling water, into which the crabs were dropped. This act should have evoked other thoughts, rather than the one of imminent food, however by this time in the afternoon, we were all too hungry to be sentimental about the last rites for the crab. The dish was topped with black pepper liberally sprinkled on melted butter. Then began the crab fest ... a sight to behold, and about an hour and four large mounds of shells later, we were satiated campers. I realized then that our family tended to bond
over food. More recently, it has been whole walnuts from the farmers’ market that have prompted similar moments. I miss my hinged doors to crack the walnut shell with, and contend with the nutcrackers. I also miss the kids cracking their own walnuts, instead of waiting for me to finish cracking theirs! Fresh flowers are my husband’s indulgence. There is always a reason to buy flowers in my household (special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, makeup after fights), or for no reason. Honey is another interesting item to pick up at these local stalls, especially when you can see it being made as you watch the buzzing hive in action. What is missing is live cows, and then we’ll be all set with fresh milk! Until then, we enjoy our Sunday mornings spent outdoors, buying food in a way that brings us closer to the source, and more importantly re-establishing the human connection. n Archana Asthana is a biologist by training, and currently a high school science teacher in Fremont. An adventurer by avocation, she is always on the lookout for something interesting to read, talk, or write about. February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 55
recipes
Cuttacki Street Fare By Jagruti Vedamati
T
he name itself conjures up thousands of memories and for anyone who’s ever been to Cuttack or hails from the city, needs no introduction to this legendary street food—known as “Dahi Bara Aloo Dum” or “Dahi Bara.” For the uninitiated, this street food is the combination of Dahi Vada topped with Aloo Dum and Guguni (yellow peas curry), served generously garnished with cut onions, coriander leaves and sev. The savory tartness of the Dahi Vada perfectly complements the spicy Aloo Dum and Guguni and all of it wonderfully comes together with the crunchiness of the onions and the sev. It’s truly a wonder how all three distinct dishes can meld together in this unique, indescribable way. Despite its iconic status within the state, it’s a pity that outside Orissa hardly many people know about it. Every nook and corner of Cuttack beams with a Dahi Bara vendor these days and despite the growing fervor for “westernized” fast food, I can very gladly say
56 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
that little has changed as far as its popularity goes. Quite aptly put, it’s the “Vada Pav” of Cuttack in the nature of which it has wormed its way into people’s hearts and stomachs. I have known people eating this street food for all three meals for several days together. But unlike the Pav Bhaji or the Vada Pav, it really hasn’t received the recognition it deserves. I am sure, absolutely sure, that all that is required is a little bit of promotion and this street fare can exceed many iconic Indian foods in the lovability quotient. Having grown up in Cuttack, my love for this street delicacy represents festivity and all such happy times when as kids we would savor every bite of the street food we were occasionally allowed to eat. It conjures up cheerful childhood memories of springing towards the gate as soon as the vendor rang his cycle bell and drummed the container to attract attention. It was difficult to contain the excitement of holding the “thola” (the container made leaves) in our hands. Yes,
sometimes managing the thola in our tiny hands did get difficult, but that never discouraged us from gulping it all down and not to forget the last desperate plea for some more dahi paani (“tike dahi debe bhaina”) or some crunchy sev. Just like every other delicacy we have loved, my Ma has tried her hand many a time at making this dish and well, after a few failures, did get it right. Now, with my Ma around, I had the privilege and the luxury of learning how to make this iconic, street food. We had a total blast making this and, yes, a memorable time eating it too. I am sure this is going to be made on many such occasions when I feel the need to go back to Cuttack. My own quick timetravel, you see. 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.
Dahi Bara
Dahi Bara (Dahi Vada)
Savory and tangy fried lentil donuts soaked in a thin yogurt base forms the heart of this street food. Light and fluffy, it forms the perfect neutral base to complement the spicy additions. Ingredients (Makes ~12 medium sized vadas) 1 cup urad dal ¾ cup rice flour 1 tsp baking soda Oil for frying ½ cup yogurt (dahi) ¼ cup water Salt to taste Black salt to taste Cumin and red chilli powder (optional) 1 tbsp oil ½ tsp mustard seeds 2 whole dry red chillies
Method: i) Soak the whole urad dal overnight in luke warm water (6-8 hrs). ii) After the dal is perfectly soaked (it will feel light and puffed up), grind to a smooth batter. Keep it aside for ~4-5 hrs for fermentation in a dark, warm place. iii) The batter rises up and the surface has many small bubbles. Now slowly mix in the rice flour and baking soda. Keep it aside overnight. iv) For the dahi: In a small vessel, thin out the dahi with some water. Add salt to taste, black salt and cumin powder. v) Heat up the oil. Wet your palms and make a donut shaped batter. Slowly slide the donut shaped batter into the oil. Fry till golden brown. vi) In another bowl, add some salt to iced water and keep aside. vii) Soak the fried vadas in the salted water till soft and fully soaked. viii) After the vada becomes soft, gently squeeze out the water and place it in the dahi. ix) For the garnish: Add oil to a pan, splutter some mustard seeds, curry leaves and dry red chillies. Then, pour the tadka on the dahi vada.
Clockwise from the left) Guguni, Dahi Bara, Aloo Dum, Plate of chopped onions, cilantro and sev and the final “Dahi Bara Aloo Dum” plate.
Aloo dum
Spiced potatoes in a thick tomato gravy provides the necessary spice for this dish. It can also be eaten by itself with poori or with rotis. Ingredients ½ lb small or regular sized potatoes 2 tbsp oil ¼ tsp turmeric powder ½ cup onion and ginger garlic paste ½ cup tomato puree ¼ tsp red chilli powder 1 tsp curry powder ¼ tsp garam masala powder ¼ tsp sugar 1 cup water Salt to taste Chopped cilantro leaves to garnish Method: i) Boil whole potatoes. Peel and keep aside. ii) In a separate pan over medium heat, lightly sauté the boiled potatoes with salt and turmeric powder. Take it out of the pan and keep aside. iii) In the same pan, add the onion, ginger and garlic paste to oil. Add in salt, red chilli powder and turmeric powder. iv) Then, add in tomato puree little at a time and sauté the masala till the oil separates. v) Now add in curry powder, sugar, garam masala powder and the potatoes. Add water and bring it to a boil. When oil floats at the top, it is done. vi) Sprinkle chopped coriander and keep aside.
Guguni
This spiced yellow peas curry can be eaten just by itself or along with rotis or pooris. Ingredients ¼ lb yellow peas 2 tbsp oil ¼ tsp turmeric powder ½ cup onion and ginger garlic paste
Guguni (Left) and Aloo Dum (Right)
½ cup tomato puree ¼ tsp red chilli powder 1 tsp sambar powder ¼ tsp garam masala powder ¼ tsp sugar 2 cup water Salt to taste Method: i) Soak the yellow peas overnight in lukewarm water. ii) Boil the soaked peas in a pressure cooker with a pinch of salt and turmeric powder. Take it off the stove after a whistle from the pressure cooker or after 20 minutes of cooking. iii) In a separate pan over medium heat, add onion, ginger and garlic paste to the heated oil. Mix in salt, red chilli powder and turmeric powder. iv) Then add tomato puree a little at a time and sauté the masala till the oil separates. v) Now add in sambhar powder, sugar, garam masala powder and the boiled yellow peas. Add water and bring it to a boil. When oil floats to the top, it is done.
Assembling the Dahi Bara Aloo Dum and Guguni Ingredients for the garnish 1 cup chopped onions 1 cup chopped cilantro 1 cup chopped mint (Optional) Sev Method: In a bowl, place 2-3 dahi vadas and a little bit of dahi. Then scoop in some aloo dum and guguni. Then add in some more dahi and sprinkle some black salt and cumin red chilli powder. Garnish the dish with cut onions, coriander leaves and sev. Now dig into it and savor every bite! Like they say, there’s nothing more effective than food and music to conjure up happy memories of time well spent. Have fun preparing this and sharing with your loved ones. n February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 57
travel
Magic of Machu Picchu By Riz Mithani Machu Picchu
D
uring the usual spiel about oxygen masks descending under conditions of reduced air pressure on a Colombian owned airline originating in Guayaquil, Ecuador, with its non-stop destination to Lima, Peru, we are informed that there is no oxygen mask in the lavatory. We are further informed that under those aforementioned circumstances of low pressure and in the event that we happen to be in the lavatory sans any mask containing oxygen, we must make a dash back to either our own assigned seats or any other seats that happen to be empty. Whilst you ponder the implications of the above in a situation that may catch you with your pants down and out of breath, we are here to talk about our journey to the land of the Incas, who ruled during the period from the 13th to the 16th century and who assuredly did not have the toilet sensitivities that we do today. The Inca empire not only encompassed what is modern day Peru, but stretched into large parts of modern day Ecuador and Bolivia as well as significant portions of what is today Chile, Argentina and Colombia. On our way to Machu Picchu, Lima, the modern capital of Peru, simply happens to be an overnight destination where the airport hotel holds a monopoly with over-the-top nightly rates. From Lima we headed to the imperial city of Cusco in Peru, the original capital of the Incas. Despite the fact that Cusco is situated at an altitude of 11,200 feet above sea level, the altitude does not get you as soon as you disembark from your plane. You will continue to have your wits about you if you wish to haggle your taxi ride into town from the asking rate of 30 soles ($10.7) to 20 ($7.13) or 25 ($8.91), which I personally found a moot point, as it is just a couple of dollars or so different, particularly since having forked over a grand and a half of those dollars per person for the multi-city airplane fare to the Colombian airline alluded to earlier in this treatise. The Hotel La Casa De Selenque, con-
58 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
ens. It was inhabited by women from all veniently located behind a Starbucks on over the empire who were renowned for the second floor in a calle (street) just off their beauty and noble lineage. Once they the main Plaza de Armas square, did have entered the compound, they lived as nuns a supply of “hot cocoa tea” and “raw cocoa till the day they died. In 1650 the monastery leaves,” which everyone assured us was not was destroyed by an earthquake, and rebuilt narcotic in nature, and merely prevents the to what it is today, a simple structure with onset of altitude sickness and cures the ones a single nave along the northeastern side of already suffering from it. This ensured that the building. we did not really need the supply of sugar Early the next morning it was time to laced ginger candies or the gingko root, catch the Perurail Vistadome train that chugs which possess similar curative powers, both along the breathtakingly scenic Urubamba of which we had diligently packed in our River. As the man of the house, regardless suitcase. of the strides made towards equality by During our four hours walking The city of Cusco A Creative Commons Image through the town of Cusco, we visited the impressive Monasterio de Santa Catalina (Monastery of Saint Catherine). During Inca times this monastery was the site for a building called Aqllawasi, or the House of the Chosen Maid-
the feminine sex, I am usually the one who has to rub my eyes open when the iPhone alarm buzzes. I stumble my way to the bathroom where I am met with the sight of the letters C and F in the shower instead of the familiar C and H. I surmise that the word for Hot in Espanol possibly has its roots in Fahrenheit, and promptly turn up the F, barely managing to suppress a scream as the freezing water strikes my skin. I take a step back, curse the mechanic who screwed on the shower taps incorrectly and turn up the one marked C settling into a blissful hot shower. I only realized my gaffe when the Vistadome rolled into its final destination of Aguas “Calientes,” the name the town derives from its “Hot” Springs. Aguas Calientes is the only gateway to Machu Picchu for average people and their grandma, who cannot undertake the 4 day 3 night arduous trek along the Inca trail, and it is a tourist trap if you have ever seen one. Hotels with bare minimum facilities charge upwards of a 100 U.S. dollars a night, while bananas may cost a dollar a piece. Nevertheless, we found a great vegetarian option in Govinda’s which besides serving the staple Italian cuisine extracts fresh fruit juices that are to die for. The highlight is the huge seven-dollar Indian style vegetarian samosas (one can fill you up) made from scratch and are worth the half-hour wait. Pachacutec, the main alley through the town of Aguas Calientes, slopes at an angle of close to 45 degrees providing good exercise in preparation for the trek ahead. Walking down Pachacutec towards the Central Plaza, we spot a sign indicating that tickets to Machu Picchu must be purchased in
Urubamba River
this town, there being none sold at its gate. So far so good, but the real adventure of the evening begins when the lady at the counter of the only ticket office in town informs us that they only accept cash for the 128 soles (about 50 dollars) per person, and it must be in soles. You remain undaunted that they do not accept credit cards as all you have to do is walk up the 45 degree sloping Pachacutec to your hotel room and retrieve the 100 dollar bills that you have stashed away in the seams of your luggage for emergencies. Next morning, it’s not even 5 a.m. and we already have a couple of hundred people in line waiting for the first buses that leave at 5.30 a.m. to the gates of the magnificent ruins of Machu Picchu city. Each bus holds about 35 people and it is highly recommended that you purchase the bus tickets the previous evening, as by 5.30 a.m. there are over a 1000 people in line. Over 5000 people visit Machu Picchu every day which includes the permitted 500 brave souls enduring the Inca trail who enter the site through the Sun Gate (the first vantage point from which the
Interlocking Stones at Machu Picchu
Grand City of Machu Picchu is visible). The Inca architecture is fascinating. We are talking about stones weighing from under a ton to over 50 tons that have been polished to rectangular angles (some with as many as 32 angles to them) that interlock with each other without the use of anything similar to mortar or cement; these behemoths just sit on top of each other and are able to withstand earthquakes because of the stability afforded to the structures by being tilted to an 85 degree angle to form trapezoids. The contrast between the original surviving structures from over five to eight centuries ago and the ones that have been restored by archeologists in the last few decades is striking; the latter has already started to show wear and cracks, while the former remains pristine such that you cannot even slide a wafer thin knife between two adjacent stones. Upon inquiry regarding how the Incas managed to get such huge boulders up to the Old Peak (this is what the name Machu Picchu means), our tour guide with all seriousness told us that they used the Mick Jagger principle—Rolling Stones! Jovial as these tour guides are, always attempting comedy for your benefit, one thing common amongst all of them is that they hate the Spaniards for destroying their cultural heritage and imposing their language. Hey, my birth country, India, was under British colonial rule just over 65 years ago but I have not run into many compatriots possessing similar hatred towards the Brits. Peru has been independent from Spanish rule for almost 200 years when most current Peruvian’s great great grandparents were not even born. One tour guide told us the story of how the destruction of the Inca Empire began very animatedly in the Qorikancha (Sun Temple in Cusco). A Dominican friar accompanying the Spanish conqueror Pizarro offered a Bible to the Inca king Atahualpa, the latter promptly put it to his ear and declared that he could not hear the word of God and apparently threw the holy book to the ground, following which blasphemous act, a bloody battle ensued in which the primitive weapons of the Inca natives were no match for the cannons of the Spaniards. Interestingly there is also a little bit of height envy as it was repeatedly pointed out that the Inca royals were only 160 cms tall on average (5.2 feet). The guide books crown Hiram Bingham as the discoverer of Machu Picchu, which is not the opinion of our tour guide. Machu Picchu, the seat of high priests, royal astronomers and star engineers, was abandoned in the 1500s when the Spanish invaded Peru and was apparently forgotten resulting in February 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 59
forest cover growing over it for more than three centuries. The real story apparently is that the locals discovered the site a couple of decades before Hiram Bingham staked his claim, and he simply piggy bagged off this local knowledge backed by the muscle of National Geographic and the prestige of Yale University. The more relevant act of deceit though may be regarding the whereabouts of the Inca Gold at Machu Picchu. The 147 crates of artifacts carted away did not contain a single piece made of gold. The probability that there was no gold on the Old Peak is close to zero, given its stature and importance at that time. One story says that Bingham shipped the gilded precious material off to Europe but on its way the ship was intercepted by pirates following which the golden treasure is now at the bottom of the Atlantic; this would make a good movie plot, or the basis for a Steve Berry novel. Our tour guide mentioned that 147 (a recurrent number!) sarcophagi mummies were found at Machu Picchu. These were not blood sacrifices like those of the Mayas or the Aztecs. These sacrifices were voluntary ones achieved by the intake of hallucinogenic flowers, the fact apparently deduced from the way the mummies were positioned. Although initially thought that all 147 were male, it was latter concluded that roughly
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half of them were female, making one wonder if this was not some ancient equivalent of a rave party where they had overdosed on hallucinogens. The reason to arrive early in the morning is to be able to see the sun rise behind the mountains around 8 a.m. As its rays make their way to the sun temple, the sight is spectacular even though we had missed the winter solstice by a couple of weeks. The winter solstice in the southern hemisphere occurs during the summer solstice in the North. When you visit the southern hemisphere, be sure to look up at the night sky to spot the Southern Cross Constellation, the smallest of the 88 modern ones, which cannot be seen from the northern hemisphere. Learning such tidbits is inevitable when roaming Machu Picchu whose major raison d’être is Astronomy. To the Incas, the East was the most important cardinal direction; they worshipped the Sun not unlike most ancient religions which were termed pagan after the rise of Christianity and Islam. The North is the most important cardinal direction to modern cultures for the more mundane needs of navigation. The Incas also had a special relationship with the Milky Way which they considered the celestial river, where they saw images of the Condor, the Puma and the Snake, the Inca symbols of power in the heavens,
the earth and the nether respectively; not surprisingly they were also able to visualize the llama. Inside the Inca Sacristy on Machu Picchu, the tour guide makes one of our tour members put their ear inside a niche in the ancient wall and another one of us inside a different niche of the same wall. He asks the first member to make sounds like “O,” “Aaa,” and “Eee,” which then travels through the stone wall to the other fella who has his ear peeled. This exercise proves that the acoustics here were great and hence music must have been played here in the Inca times. The last note on our travels has to be about drinking Chicha, which we are assured is not alcoholic, but you can be floored regardless after consuming five or six glasses. This is all the better because if one more tour guide tells me about how perfect the Inca construction is without the use of mortar, I am going to snap; tell me something that I don’t already know! n Riz Mithani is a graduate of IIT Bombay and ekes out a living in the Bay Area by peddling simple business and technology solutions to highly complex problems that provide a real return on investment. When he is not dancing or traveling, he blogs occasionally at rizmit.wordpress. com
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viewfinder
Legendary Hill By Dhruv Joshi
r winne
O
n our way to the famous Lingyin Temple in the beautiful city of Hangzhou, China, we passed by a hill with many Buddhist statues. With a twinkle in her eyes, my guide, Shau Jung, asked if the hill looked familiar. Confused, I shook my head. She laughed and said, “It should look familiar to you. After all, it is called Fei Lai Feng, The Hill That Flew From Afar. A legend says it flew from India.” I looked at the hill and saw the inscription
Om Mani Padma Hum and realized that the legend was true. The inscription was made during the lifetime of a renowned Indian Buddhist monk who lived in the Lingyin Temple about 1,200 years ago. n Dhruv Joshi teaches chemistry at Chabot College, in Hayward, California. Teaching, meditation, and writing are his main interests. He can be reached at djoshi@comcast.net.
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. 62 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
dear doctor
Divesting Dependencies By Alzak Amlani
Q
My wife and I have two daughters who are now in their late twenties. We put a fair amount of energy into raising them and giving them lots of opportunities. They went to good schools, we helped them with their homework, enrolled them in extra curricular activities and we traveled to interesting places as a family. When my wife and I were younger we had to struggle much more to assure ourselves of a good education and career. We had to work during high school and college, since our parents couldn’t afford to pay for everything. I enjoyed working hard and knowing I could create the future I wanted for myself. One of my girls is quite independent. The other one seems unmotivated and tends to rely on us for financial support regularly. I don’t see her looking for work with any seriousness or wanting to get a degree so she can have a graduate education. Saying no to her requests makes me feel guilty. I don’t know how to help her grow in this area?
A
You want to first understand what might be going on for her. What are her world views, ideas about work and
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independence? Does she have interests that can get her excited to work or go to school? Have you had such a conversation with her? Does she feel disappointed about the lack of opportunities? Does she feel lost? Some young folks express depression by withdrawing, becoming more dependent, afraid and disinterested in their futures. Present these topics and I’m sure you will learn a lot more about her. Some children become more dependent when their parents hand them opportunities and pay for services without having to work for them. They take it for granted and don’t see the effort you’ve put in to helping them grow. Thus, they don’t really learn the real life lessons of earning, budgeting, planning and taking responsibility for themselves. Your financial support needs to be conditioned upon some agreements and follow through with time limits. She needs to give you a plan of moving towards financial independence or getting the training or degree she needs to get there in the near future. There are also students loans and many people do kickstarter campaigns to launch
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a career or start a business. You are not the only financial source for her. Lastly, some parents unconsciously hold on to one of their children so as to not face the loss of an “empty nest.” Are you sure you want her to be on her own? She may move further away or have a serious relationship. Not having any children in the home after many years can feel strange and could put a strain on your marriage. Partners wonder what they will have in common and how they are going to deal with each other, since the distraction of raising a child is gone. Some couples have to rebuild their relationship to stay together and grow. Finding individual and shared activities and interests can rekindle your partnership at this point. Letting your child go is essential for her freedom and maturity. It will also initiate you into the next phase of your life. n Alzak Amlani, Ph.D., is a counseling psychologist of Indian descent in the Bay Area. 650-325-8393. Visit www. wholenesstherapy.com
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the last word
Chia Seeds, Psyllium Husk and a Blender By Sarita Sarvate
G
o to any new-age retreat in California, and you will find young people preparing their breakfasts, not with spatulas and skillets, but with blenders. If you are eating your meal instead of drinking it, you are in danger of dating yourself. If you are eating bread or any other wheat products, you are at risk of being ostracized. Why is it better to blend your meal rather than use your teeth to break it down? Because, when you have a blender in front of you, you can put anything into it, like kale, frozen blueberries, sweet potatoes, tomatoes and carrots, just to name a few items. Never mind what the resulting concoction might taste like. The advantage of a liquid diet is that it goes directly from a straw into your throat, bypassing your tongue altogether, which is just as well because you wouldn’t want to taste something that combines kale with blueberries and sweet potatoes, even if they are all “super-foods.” Let’s face it, kale has no taste and possesses the texture of sawdust, even though it is the latest fad. If you go to a potluck, chances are you will run into a kale dish or two, steamed and garnished with olive oil, feta cheese, pine nuts, and spices. What wouldn’t taste good with these ingredients? Then there is the list of no-nos, which has gotten longer and longer over the years. Take eggs, rice, potatoes, butThe ter, sugar, and meat, for example. Even olive oil is now bad for us because it popular turns out that if you heat it at high misconception is temperature like I do (to prepare Indian food), it oxidizes. that just because To some extent, I understand the taboos. I myself have marcertain products are ginal blood sugar levels and can made from natural no longer eat too much of white rice or potatoes and have to avoid ingredients, they are most desserts. But what gets to me is the “gluten free” label. Admitted, good for some people have intolerance, not allergy, to gluten. But statistics indicate that you. such intolerance occurs only in the developed world, and only among less than one percent of the population. Why then is everyone gluten-free? I suppose it is because gluten has suddenly become a bad food. Unfortunately, what most people don’t realize is that gluten is in that part of wheat that also contains proteins. So when you eliminate gluten, you are eliminating all the nutrition out of the grain, leaving only fiber and starch. Imagine an Indian laborer living off bhakri—hand-rolled bread—and mirchi (chili), his only source of protein, without gluten in it. For me, the last straw came when my favorite Indian restaurant suddenly began to carry a banner declaring “gluten free.” I tried to imagine “gluten free” naan and chapattis but then decided not to even think about it. When you research the facts about gluten you realize that the gluten content of dough is enhanced or reduced depending on the variety of wheat used, as well as the method of preparation. I suspect that it is not gluten itself that is at fault but corporate food production in America which increases the gluten content of bread with the use of yeast and industrial baking methods. When you hold a loaf of hardy French bread in your hand, you do not find it soft and mushy, unlike American sliced bread, which is elastic and crumbly, indicating high gluten content. American consumers, I am afraid, have come to associate that elastic, rubbery sensation with bread that I myself detest so. No gluten, no transfats, no carbs, no GMOs , no butter, no eggs,
64 | INDIA CURRENTS | February 2014
no bread and no vegetables (with pesticides), that is today’s mantra. In fact, so many things are bad for you that it is hard to find a food that is good for you. The only things left to consume, I suppose, are Chia seeds, Psyllium husk and Stevia. And I am not kidding. I recently stayed in the house of a woman who daily prepared a milkshake of frozen blueberries, chia seeds, psyllium husk and stevia, declaring that the angels had told her to eat this meal after her recent bout with lupus! I was not surprised that she had lupus, only that she was still alive! For some people with weight problems, psyllium, the main ingredient in Metamucil, might be helpful, but one should never forget that psyllium is pure fiber, with no nutritional value whatsoever, unlike vegetables like celery or carrots, which contain minerals and vitamins. The popular misconception is that just because certain products are made from natural ingredients, they are good for you. Take green tea for example. A man nearly died of liver failure recently from consuming green tea extract. MSG too is natural but causes severe allergies and headaches in many people, including myself. Stevia is made from a plant but it is not clear that consuming it daily is good for you. When I see people preparing delicate shakes and salads at a California spa, I wonder if they go home, and in the privacy of their own television, pig out on burgers and fries. And I am tempted to ask, “Why don’t you just eat normal, balanced food for a change?” When my sons were babies, I asked their doctor about giving them daily vitamins. I had never taken any vitamins or supplements myself and wondered if they were necessary for people who ate healthy foods. The doctor encouraged me to give them supplements regardless. Luckily or unluckily, neither one of them got the hang of popping pills, with the result that the bottles simply sat on kitchen counters. Now, a quarter century later, researchers have finally concluded that vitamin supplements provide no health benefits whatsoever and are simply a waste of money. I told you so! The new focus on chia seeds and probiotic pills—the latter, for many, have replaced a daily intake of plain yogurt, which my Maharashtrian diet at home always included, and which aided digestion —might indicate a new health-consciousness. On the other hand, it might also signal a move away from actually cooking food. A family meal is becoming a rarer and rarer phenomenon in America, perhaps occurring only on Christmas and Thanksgiving. For me, the substitution of a blender for a saucepan suggests something tragic about modern life, namely, the death of the culinary experience as a sensory, aromatic, and visual delight. My father, though not religious, often recited a Marathi prayer before meals. It contained the following words: Anna he purnabrahma; udar-bharan nohe janije yadnya-karma. Food was Brahma himself, the verse said, and eating amounted, not to filling your stomach, but to conducting a yagna, a holy fire. In today’s hip culture, we have sadly lost the sacred ritual that used to be eating. 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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