Picking Waste by Anita Felicelli
A Stroke of ... Luck? by Harshada Rajani
Seeking Kabir in Malwa by Jayaram Kalpathy
INDIA CURRENTS D.C.Edition
Celebrating 29 Years of Excellence
Black and Desi a Shared History
june 2015 • vol. 29 , no .3 • www. indiacurrents.com
African Americans and Indian Americans have been standing up for each other for over a century. Did you know? by Anirvan Chatterjee
Secrets R Us facebook.com/IndiaCurrents twitter.com/IndiaCurrents Now published in three separate editions HEAD OFFICE 1885 Lundy Ave Ste 220, San Jose, CA 95131 Phone: (408) 324-0488 Fax: (408) 324-0477 Email: info@indiacurrents.com www.indiacurrents.com Publisher: Vandana Kumar publisher@indiacurrents.com Managing Director: Vijay Rajvaidya md@indiacurrents.com Managing Editor: Geetika Pathania Jain mgeditor@indiacurrents.com (408) 324-0488 x226 Events Editor: Mona Shah events@indiacurrents.com (408) 324-0488 x224 Advertising Department ads@indiacurrents.com Northern California: (408) 324-0488 x 225 Southern California: (714) 523-8788 x 225 Sales Associate: Anu B anu@indiacurrents.com (408) 324-0488 x 222 Marketing Department Ritu Marwah ritu@indiacurrents.com Graphic Designer: Nghia Vuong
We all keep secrets. Apparently, the National Security Agency (NSA) had access to most of our secrets. We know about this surveillance, that NSA kept secret from us, because Ed Snowden told us NSA’s secret. Now Ed Snowden is in trouble for telling secrets. Perhaps it is the NSA that should be in trouble for keeping secrets. In May, a federal circuit court finally ruled NSA’s activities illegal, stating that Section 215 of the Patriot Act “cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program.” (“N.S.A. Collection of Bulk Call Data Is Ruled Illegal.” New York Times, May 7, 2015.) We hope that the secret collection of Americans’ phone records in bulk is on its way out. For this, we can thank Ed Snowden, currently in exile. Snowden has been reviled as a traitor by people like Dick Cheney, for jeopardising national security. Some think Snowden is a hero, for shining light on NSA’s shameful secret. Ed Snowden’s parents should be proud of him. In this month’s cover story, Anirvan
Chatterjee writes about how many young Indian Americans must keep their political activism a secret. They keep secrets because they want their parents to be proud of them. A few weeks ago, I listened to the poetry of Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian of the performance art duo BlackMatter. These two transgendered desi kids from Stanford talk of the pain of having had to keep their sexual orientation a secret. They kept secrets because they didn’t want their parents to be ashamed of them. It is time to stop shaming our children, regardless of their political leanings or their sexual orientation. It is time to be proud of our heroes. The real heroes. Not a surveillance agency that tramples on our civil liberties. So let’s stop worrying about what people say, and do the right thing. Let’s put the Patriot Act where it belongs. And let’s tell people like Cheney to put the Patriot Act where the sun don’t shine.
Geetika Pathania Jain, Ph.D. is Managing Editor of India Currrents magazine. She has been keeping her doctorate a secret so people wouldn’t expect her to say clever things.
WASHINGTON, D.C. BUREAU (Managed by IC New Ventures, LLC) 910 17th Street, NW, Ste# 215 Washington, D.C. 20006 Phone: (202) 709-7010 Fax: (240) 407-4470 Associate Publisher: Asif Ismail publisher-dc@indiacurrents.com (202) 709-7010 Cover Design: Nghia Vuong Cover Photo Credit: DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) INDIA CURRENTS® (ISSN 0896-095X) is published monthly (except Dec/Jan, which is a combined issue) for $19.95 per year by India Currents, 1885 Lundy Ave., Ste 220, San Jose, CA 95131. Periodicals postage paid at San Jose, CA, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to INDIA CURRENTS, 1885 LUNDY AVE, STE. 220, SAN JOSE, CA 95131 Information provided is accurate as of the date of going to press; India Currents is not responsible for errors or omissions. Opinions expressed are those of individual authors. Advertising copy, logos, and artwork are the sole responsibility of individual advertisers, not of India Currents. Copyright © 2015 by India Currents All rights reserved. Fully indexed by Ethnic Newswatch
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 1
INDIA CURRENTS June 2015 • vol 29 • no 3
PERSPECTIVES 1 | EDITORIAL Secrets R Us By Geetika Pathania Jain
Southern California Edition www.indiacurrents.com
Find us on
LIFESTYLE 8 | POLITICS Image Management 101 By Sandip Roy
6 | A THOUSAND WORDS Fault Lines By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
22 | TAX TALK Are Your Childcare Expenses Deductible? By Rita Bhayani
14 | PERSPECTIVE Are you desi enough? By Vibeka Sen
34 | TRAVEL Ten Days to Tirumala By K.P. Naidu 38 | MUSIC Seeking Kabir in Malwa By Jayaram Kalpathy
18 | FEATURE The Little Independent Bookstores That Could By Lakshmi Warrier 23 | BUSINESS Sammy the Stockpicker By Prabhy Palani
10 | Black and Desi A Shared History By Anirvan Chatterjee
26 | ON INGLISH The Call of the Koel By Kalpana Mohan 31 | DESI VOICE My Stroke of ... Luck? Harshanda Rajani 45 | VIEWPOINT My Tailor Nazi By Raji Venkatesan 54 | EDUCATION Minimizing Stress During the College Process By Purvi Mody 56 | THE LAST WORD An Ode to Wives Who Rule By Sarita Sarvate
24 | Not For Profit Picking Waste By Anita Felicelli
28 | Films Reviews of Bombay Velvet and Piku By Aniruddh Chawda, Jyoti Khera
32 | Books Reviews of The Lives of Others, by Neel Mukherjee and Land Where I Flee by Prajwal Parajuly By Jeanne Fredriksen, Vidya Pradhan
2 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
42 | RECIPES Kesar Badam Kulfi By Jagruti Vedamati 50 | HEALTHY LIFE When Should Kids Start Yoga? By Arundhati Baitmangalkar 52 | DEAR DOCTOR Flustered During Difficult Discussions? By Alzak Amlani
DEPARTMENTS 4 | Letters to the Editor 17 | Popular Articles 20 | Ask a Lawyer 21 | Visa Dates
WHAT’S CURRENT 46 | Cultural Calendar 48 | Spiritual Calendar
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 3
letters to the editor Saving Mother
I would like to make some comments on Geetika Jain’s editorial.(“Saving Mother,” India Currents, May 2015) In Maharashtra, cow and bullock poojas are important festivals. I am a Hindu Dalit and we do not eat beef. This misinformation must not be perpetrated. People in Mumbai can eat fish, chicken, goat meat and also pigs and water buffalos. India is predominantly Hindu nation. so minorities have to respect Hindu feelings. Only convent educated pseudosecularist don’t understand this. Because they are numbed by convent education towards Hindus and Hindu religion. I live in USA and eat beef, as I don’t consider US cow as my Go-mata. But when I go to India, I don’t eat it. Cows are used for milk and buffalos are used by farmers for ploughing their fields. So both are important animals to society. Prakash Deshmukh, San Jose, email
What is Hindu Dharma?
The article “What is Hindu Dharma?” (India Currents, May 2015) by Dr. Rita D. Sherma starts with the common refrain of, “... this ancient word (Hindu) coined by the Persians from the name of the river Sindhu ...” May I suggest that the author read the research paper at http://www.b-i-f.com/hindu. pdf regarding the source of the word Hindu and respond to that. It is annoying when Indians propagate the Western agenda by quoting their claims as the gospel truth without researching things for themselves. We expect more from teachers at all levels, as they shape the thinking of the younger generation. Ramesh Kalra, online
Empathy or the Lack Thereof
Manikya Veena’s article on “Empathy or the Lack Thereof ” (India Currents, April 2015) unwittingly reveals an alarming lack of empathy and naivety about the state of relations between African Americans and the police. She seems to think that recording attacks by police on non-whites, is something people do as a source of amusement and for the purposes of circulation on social media, and this demonstrates an inherent lack of feeling. What Ms. Veena needs to be aware of is that if bystanders hadn’t recorded the attacks by police on Oscar Grant, Walter Lamer Scott, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Levar Jones and Rodney King, these cases
4 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
would not even have reached court because of the tendency of authorities to believe the police version of events unless video evidence exists to contradict it. (Needless to say the list of those killed in brutal attacks that weren’t filmed is even longer.) While photographic or video evidence may not be conclusive or provide overwhelming evidence of proof, it does supply evidence that challenges the version of events given by police officers, and this footage is often taken at great person risk. Indeed, the importance of a documentary film record is considered so significant that there have been calls for police officers to wear body cams, which simultaneously provide evidence which could challenge an officer’s version of events, and indeed, might even trigger less aggressive and brutal police behavior. Tim Charles, Fremont, CA
What is Hindu Dharma?
Rita Sherma is right on in “What is Hindu Dharma? Why Study It?” (India Currents, May 2015). A deep study of Hindu Dharma’s spiritual texts will add much needed meaning to the many desi cultural things we already do: dance, music, festivals, mandirs and yes, Bollywood too. GTU and its Hindu Studies Initiative fill a valuable niche in the Bay Area. Moreover, Indic dharma traditions are based not on monotheism, belief and dogma. They are based on experienceable reality that is anyone’s birthright. And a worldview that aims at cosmotheism. As Sherma points out, dharma study allows us to sacralize, reenchant everyday life. Textual study, seminaries and ritual life have generally been co-located in India. Just drop by Varanasi, Melkote or Sringeri! Both the desi diaspora and the larger community will surely benefit from this theological sadhana. Mala Setty, Long Beach, CA
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.
Cheating Relationships
With regard to the article “Cheating Relationships” (India Currents, May 2015), what does Jasbina Ahluwalia mean by cheating? Which era are you living in? Didn’t you see the recent My Choice video? Please check it out and enlighten yourself. Rahul Pandey, Facebook comment
Yoga: Indian or American
Hindu hotheads who want yoga practitioners to pay tribute to its Hindu origins should ask themselves whether the kids who practice Taekwan Do need to salute Korea or those who play cricket at school in India should acknowledge each time its British origins. Yoga was always a spiritual practice indulged in by those on the fringe of society. Greek historians have recorded how Alexander interacted with yogis during his retreat along the Indus, now in Pakistan. During the colonial era yogis and fakirs were treated with disdain. It is only since the sixties when schools such as Kaivalyadham in Lonavla, and by the efforts of Swami Shivananda and a few other teachers that yoga gained acceptance by the intelligentsia. When I came first to the US in the eighties and offered to teach a weekly class for the city’s recreation department, it was met with consternation by the religious right. Now there are yoga studios in every town in this country. It is a tribute to the genius of Americans that they are able to translate an esoteric practice from another country into mainstream culture in their own. In whatever way it is practiced, physical or spiritual, it is bound to do good and for that alone we should all be thankful. Srinivas Chari, email
Not Just Another Jute Bag
Kalpana Mohan’s article (“Not Just Another Jute Bag,” India Currents, May 2015) was wonderfully-researched and heart-touchingly concluded. It also brings out the tragedy of those who toil versus the middle-men who make all the profits. Melanie P. Kumar, online
What is Hindu Dharma?
A very good article indeed. Continuous destruction of Hindu way of life is carried out here by way of education, forced conversions, ethnic cleansing and systematic attacks in various way. As the article rightly points out, when the source dies, the dependent systems elsewhere will have high chances of natural fading out Sudarshanarao Duttaluri, facebook
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 5
a thousand words
Fault Lines By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
I
yard. I, age three, rode my blue and cream tricycle onto the portion n mid-March, the U.S. Geological Survey reported that there is a of the sidewalk that touched the neighbor’s lawn, ten feet from our 7% chance of an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or greater hitting mailbox. California in the next thirty years. The report talked of “multi-fault The second house had a square-eyed garage door, squares so ruptures” and “individual faults,” which would in turn rupture others. large and black that if you looked at the house straight on it was Compared to the ongoing drought, which has led Governor like a pale jack-o-lantern, crowned with bougainvillea. There were Brown to impose water restrictions statewide, the threat of the earthswings in the backyard, and a narrow, yellow slide that bent and then quake conventionally known as “The Big One” looms vaguely in the broke as my brother and I grew. It was only when my family moved unknown future. It could be decades from now, when most of us livfrom the second house to the third that I missed the bougainvillea, ing are long dead, or, as the tragedy of the Nepal earthquake makes the rubber-bottomed swings in our backyard. When I picture that clear, it could be tomorrow. But what difference does it make, really? house on Pinot Gris Way, I picture a light blue sky, snails in the grass, If it doesn’t claim us, it will claim our children, or their children, or the neighbor’s child riding past on his bicycle, shouting the names theirs. of the Ninja Turtles. Reading the USGS survey and then about the devastation in The next year, we moved. I remember driving past rows of Kathmandu and surrounding areas, I’ve been reminded of the biggest cloned trees, as similar to one another as the houses lined and facquake I’ve personally experienced, which doesn’t seem quite so big ing them on the opposing road. I can see the anymore. That earthquake, known as trees, but not the fruit they bore. Peaches? “Loma Prieta,” hit the Bay Area on OcWe sped by too fast, windows rolled up to tober 17, 1989. News anchors called it When an earthquake hits, you preserve the air-conditioning, and I never the Great Quake. Over sixty people died. can find faults but you can’t smelled the flesh of the fruit rot or ripen on Loma Prieta was a magnitude 7.1 the stem. earthquake that caused power outages, find fault. Later, when new houses were erected to fires, even a four-foot tsunami wave in replace the trees, we smelled paint and faced the Monterey Bay. The city of San Franroutine construction. The new houses were spongy blocks, echoes cisco incurred nearly three billion dollars worth of damages. Highways of the old houses, inhabited by the families of young computer exploded; sewage crept into war memorials. Paul Newman donated engineers. New mothers lifted car seats from the backs of Hondas 10,000 pounds of spaghetti sauce to the thousands injured and left as older siblings roller-bladed around the cul-de-sac. Eventually, all homeless by the earthquake. the orchards were displaced. The nearby duck pond where a spiteful My family lost little by comparison: three goblets of opaque red gander once bit off a souvenir portion of my father’s thumb was not Murano glass, with gold plated stems and a pattern of gold leaves spiso nearby after the construction. The houses multiplied. raling up the sides of the cup. My mother’s painting of Kerala temple These were no UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Still, they were elephants dropped to the floor with a canvas thud. Books on artificial our homes. intelligence and Victorian poetry became dominoes as shelves bent Our third house sat atop the ravaged, former terrain of longand spilled their contents onto the floor. A Sesame Street VHS caseared jackrabbits, overlooking a golf course, a gated neighborhood, sette turned itself on amidst the confusion. Wine bottles anticipated a grocery store with an Italian name, and palm trees imported from dinner; red, white, and rosé mingled and bled into the grout of our somewhere far away. From my bedroom window, some 15 miles kitchen tiles. west of the Calaveras Fault, I could see the neighbor’s unused, I was four years old, coloring and listening to my mother’s telechemically balanced swimming pool and his exuberant attempt at a phone conversation with someone who, as I recall, was on his way to homegrown vineyard. All night, the sprinklers stayed on. visit us via the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, a section of which * would collapse in the quake. My brother, one and a half, was asleep on When an earthquake hits, you can find faults but you can’t find the sofa in the family room. fault. It’s impossible to rationalize the brutality and contingency of As soon as my mother put the phone back in its cradle, the house moving tectonic plates that shift the earth 10 feet in 30 seconds. So began to rock. The china cabinet gave way to the walls. My brother if there’s a lesson for drought-stricken, quake-wary Californians to rolled from his perch atop the sofa onto the floor below, the power take from Nepal maybe it’s this: To be fully present; to see with open went out, and we both burst into tears. After the final aftershock, my eyes while we can; to be stewards of the world we’ve gained, in the eyes fixed on the phone. I was convinced that my mother had caused hope that some of it, somehow, will remain. Do what we can now. the earthquake. For months I believed this, with the fire of a young (Turn off the tap.) n child’s conviction. Somehow, her hanging up that call had started it, the end of the world I’d known as steady California. * Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is a doctoral candidate in What was that world? Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. By the time I was twenty, we had lived in three houses in the same city, San Jose. Each was larger and closer to the country club than its predecessor. We had roses—red, pink, and white—in our first front 6 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 7
politics
Image Management 101: Decoding Narendra Modi’s Time Interview
A
s Narendra Modi rolls up to his first anniversary, it’s not all coming up roses. The disquiet has less to do with the Vipassana-enhanced Rahul Gandhi than some signs of daring dissent within the BJP’s own ranks. On one hand, there was Arun Shourie’s scathing interview and then the BJP’s parliamentary party meeting was stunned, reports Scroll when Bharat Singh, an MP from Uttar Pradesh, complained that the government had failed to “do anything on the ground” leaving MPs like him to face the music. More stunning than what he said was the fact he said it in front of Modi himself. None of this implies there is a groundswell of discontent grumbling through the party ranks. But it also shows that while Modi’s grip over the party is iron-clad, it does not mean there are no chinks in the armor. Meanwhile abroad, Modi has had to deal with more stories about perceptions of attacks on Christians and church vandalisation than about India Shining. Whether the perceptions are fact-based or not is moot. For a while the narrative was India is no country for women. Now it looked like it was changing to India is no country for Christians. Shashi Tharoor claimed that when a church in an outer suburb of Delhi is vandalized and it makes it to the front page of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, a German investor wrote to him to ask “Is this the kind of India in which you want us to invest?” It’s all a perception game. And Modi understands he needs to quickly step in and fix the perception. In short, it’s good time for Time. He gave its editors two hours. And he gave the portrait photographer a full hour. The photographer Peter Hapak himself said it was “very unusual because most of the time I only have 10 minutes for a portrait session.” Perhaps Modi enjoys having his portrait done. But more likely he understands the opportunity the Time interview presents to correct a picture. How well does he correct it? Reading the full-length interview on Time’s website you can see that Modi has learned a few things in the past year.
Checking the Gujarat Reflex 8 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
By Sandip Roy
When Modi was on the campaign trail and in the few interviews he has done as Prime Minister, he had the habit of falling back on Gujarat every time he needed to cite an example to make a point. It was his comfort zone, his area of expertise. He’s realized he has to stop sounding like the Chief Minister of Gujarat anymore. In the entire Time interview he only brings up Gujarat twice. Tellingly neither made it into the print edition. There’s another word missing on all sides that should warm Indian hearts. Nobody says Pakistan ever in the whole interview. India is well and truly out of that bracket in international eyes.
Forget the Cheesy Acronyms
Nobody loves an acronym as much as Modi and it seemed every other speech introduced a new Modi acronym. P2G2. 3Ds. 5Ts. Perhaps someone told him it’s starting to sound like he is running a government of Star Wars robots but he’s understood that the acronyms do not add to his Prime Ministerial gravitas and while they might excite a graduating MBA class, Time’s editors would probably be nonplussed. Acronyms have been junked for now.
Reassure, Reassure, Reassure
Modi was clearly determined to reassure any nervous India-watchers that the country was in safe hands. No sudden jhatka moves were in the works. The PM sounds perfectly zen about everything. India-China tensions? He talks about a “framework of peace and tranquility.” Does the power of dictatorship
seem alluring? Don’t worry, democracy is in India’s DNA. US-Russian tensions putting India in a spot? Not at all. “Whatever is agreed within the framework of United Nations, the international community should follow it.” What about those party members saying “unkind things” about minorities? Instead of bristling defensively, he smoothly insists “wherever an individual view might have been expressed with regard to a particular minority religion, we have immediately negated that.” “Immediately” sometimes has taken weeks, if at all, but Time did not press Modi on that. Interestingly, in the excerpted interview it also chose to omit his quote about there being no place for “imaginary apprehensions with regards to the rights of minorities in India.”
Sab Ka Saath, Sab Ka Vikaas.
The framing of the interview, at least according to the cover, is “the world needs India to step up as a global power” and whether Narendra Modi can deliver. But few of the questions actually probed Modi on what India might do as a global power. And Modi made everything sound like peace, love and friendship for all. It’s not about US or India but about “what India and the US can together do for the world.” While hardliners in his party commonly say every Muslim is not a terrorist but every terrorist is a Muslim, Modi talks reassuringly about the need to “delink terrorism from religion.” And unlike the US Axis of Evil, he presents the idea of an Axis of Good where all countries that
believe in human values come together and fight this evil force. Very Star Wars. Let’s all sign the United Nations Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, let’s all be partners in cleaning the Ganga. The interview should be music to Ban-ki Moon’s ears. It’s as if Modi has taken his domestic mantra of “sab ka saath, sab ka vikaas” and globalized it. “All should be happy, all should be healthy, all should live life to the fullest.”
There’s No Yes-No Question.
Does India support international sanctions against Russia? Will India specify a cap on its emissions. Modi has learned yes-no questions don’t need yes-no answers. He refuses adroitly to be pinned down on anything. And he’s also figured out that when in doubt, tell a story. Ask him about climate change and he’s happy to tell stories about how Indians call the moon Chandamama. This close bonding with Nature, as he describes it, does not mean his government has not slashed the budget of the environment ministry but Modi has perfected the politician’s art of serving everything sunnyside up.
India Über Alles
The PM loses no opportunity to gently remind the world that India did it first. Asked about climate change he said the India in
particular has historically pursued economic growth in co-existence with Nature and Mother Earth. Asked about worries about freedom of speech he pointed out that while the West imprisoned Galileo, Charvaka was accommodated and equated to a sage despite his theory of “extreme hedonism.” That of course did not prevent Indian politicians from passing or defending 66A but the larger message Modi is getting out, with a smile, is that he’s not going to take any finger-wagging morality from the West.
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
If anyone was worried about pace of reforms and change, Modi was there to reassure them that the “world is excited and enthusiastic about India,” that he’d put the I back in BRIC, lifted Moody’s mood and that he not only had in his mind “a very clear outline of the framework of what we are going to do in the next five years” but the last year had gone “precisely as per that plan” from GST to FDI. Sure, getting used to the Federal government structure was a bit of a challenge, but not to worry, because “within a very short time” he had “bridged the gap through very focused and concentrated actions” and created “a smooth, seamless working mechanism within the Federal structure.” That might be Modi-speak for
bypassing ministers and empowering the bureaucrats to directly work with the Cabinet Secretariat and the PMO. Yet for all his suaveness and panache, Modi still betrays some areas where he just cannot go. When asked about minorities he reaches deep into his bag and offers up the Parsees as a micro-minority that has thrived in India. It’s wonderful that there’s been a Parsi chief of army staff and a Parsi Chief Justice but the only time anyone mentions the Muslim word in the interview, it’s the Time editors. For all his reassurance, Modi talks about minorities and ignores the elephant in the room just like he once ignored that skull cap. But in general he should be happy with the interview. His slew of foreign trips might have made him fodder for snide jokes about a visiting prime minister in India but it’s certainly helped him establish his profile abroad. If prior to the election, he had a bit of a Darth Vader image in the world, now he is presenting a far more wise Yoda the Jedi master persona. And if the Time interview had any objective it was to reassure the world that the force was very much with him. n Sandip Roy is the Culture Editor for Firstpost. com. A version of this story appeared on Firstpost.com.
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cover
Black and Desi: A Shared History By Anirvan Chatterjee
Photo credits: Sandhya Jha, #Asians4BlackLives
In January 28, 1900, Swami Vivekananda looked out at the white audience at the Universalist Church in Pasadena, California, and spoke out against anti-Black racism. “As soon as a man becomes a Mohammedan, the whole of Islam receives him as a brother with open arms, without making any distinction, which no other religion does … In this country, I have never yet seen a church where the white man and the negro can kneel side by side to pray.
H
alf a century later, a young Black man sat down inside the British Embassy in Washington, DC, and refused to move. African American pacifist Bayard Rustin became director of the Free India Committee in 1945, working to end British rule in India. But it wasn’t enough to just talk, so Rustin began leading sit-in protests at the British Embassy, repeatedly getting arrested as he worked to help free India, two decades before he went on to organize the 1963 March on Washington, site of Martin Luther 10 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
King, Jr’s “I have a dream” speech. Why would a Hindu monk speak out against anti-Black racism? Why would a gay African American civil rights leader repeatedly face arrest fighting for India’s independence? South Asians and African Americans have been standing up for each other for over a century. Our histories are deeply intertwined, even if our communities don’t always know it. I don’t know if Vivekananda was scared to condemn American anti-Black racism. But I heard fear, or at least a great discomfort, when I talked to a young Desi
activist speaking out against anti-Black racism. She wasn’t scared of engaging in civil disobedience, but the thought of talking to her parents left her speechless. “When I act in solidarity with Black people in this movement, I want to call my parents in to the struggle,” she explained. “After an action, when Ma calls and asks if I’ve eaten and if my health is well and how is school, I want to tell her everything … Instead, I say, ‘My health is good, Ma.’ And it breaks my heart.” South Asians and African Americans have been standing up for each other for over a century. If we knew our shared history,
would it make the conversations easier?
The Black Bengalis of Harlem: 1880s-1940s
Growing up in California, many of my South Asian friends were instructed by their parents that they weren’t allowed to marry someone African American—racism cloaked as “tradition.” But over the last several years, historian Vivek Bald has uncovered a history we were never told: when we were new to the United States, we were welcomed by African American communities, to intermarry, and built rich mixed lives together. Between the 1880s and 1940s, two waves of South Asian men came to the United States, marrying and building new lives in African American, Creole, and Puerto Rican communities. Bald traced the story of these men and their lives in a strange new country in his groundbreaking book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. The first wave of these immigrants came to the United States from the Hooghly district of Bengal between the 1880s and 1910s. They worked as peddlers across the East Coast and the South, selling embroidered silks and “Oriental” goods from Bengal. These dark-skinned Muslim immigrants found homes in communities of color, with many settling in New Orleans. Bald found records of about two dozen South Asian men in New Orleans who married African American and Creole women. Moksad and Elizabeth Ali married in 1895, and had six sons and a daughter. In 1900, they were living in a joint family in New Orleans’ Third Ward: Moksad, Elizabeth, their children, Elizabeth’s sister and brother-in-law, and her 80-year-old grandmother, a freed slave from Virginia. The Alis later moved to Mississippi, and by the 1920s, the next generation of Alis had moved to New York’s Harlem neighborhood, where a new Black Bengali community was about to form. From World War I to the 1940s, a second wave of working class Bengali ex-seamen was finding their way to New York, often settling in Harlem, the heart of African American New York. Vivek Bald, an intrepid history detective, scoured New York City marriage records to uncover the stories of Harlem Bengalis marrying African American and Puerto Rican women. The community eventually spread outside Harlem, but the Bengali men, their wives, and their mixed race
Why would a Hindu monk speak out against antiBlack racism? Why would a gay African American civil rights leader repeatedly face arrest fighting for India’s independence? families would continue to come together to celebrate Eid-al-fitr, and host an annual summer celebration bringing together hundreds of members of the scattered community.
Dreaming of Freedom, Standing Up for Civil Rights: 1920s-1947
From the 1920s onward, Indian and African American freedom fighters started recognizing the links between their struggles against colonial rule and racist oppression. Gerald Horne, Sudarshan Kapur, and others have written extensively about this history, often focusing on African American scholar and civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois, who corresponded with Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Lala Lajpat Rai, and others. By 1942, Horace Cayton, Jr. would write “it may seem odd to hear India discussed in pool rooms in South State Street in Chicago, but India and the possibility of the Indians obtaining their freedom from England by any means has captured the imagination of the American Negro.” The NAACP, the prominent African American civil rights group, passed a resolution supporting Indian autonomy that same year, with accompanying statements from major African American artist-activists like Paul Robeson, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. African American poet Langston
Hughes, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote eloquently about the shared struggle of Indians and African Americans. “It just does not make sense,” he wrote, “for the Allied leaders of the Western world to make beautiful speeches about freedom and liberty and democracy with India still in chains and Negroes still jim-crowed.” One of Langston Hughes’ several poems about Indian liberation, “How About It, Dixie” connected Indian political prisoners and African American victims of racist police brutality. It reads, in part: “Show me that you mean / Democracy please— / Cause from Bombay to Georgia / I’m beat to my knees / You can’t lock up Nehru / Club Roland Hayes / Then make fine speeches / About Freedom’s way.” Jawaharlal Nehru was devoted to solidarity with African America, connecting both with friends like Paul Robeson, and through intermediaries like Cedric Grover. After India gained independence, solidarity was complicated by the need to maintain good relations with a white-led American government. However, in a secret memo to the first Indian ambassadors to the U.S. and China, Nehru remained clear about India’s position: “our sympathies are entirely with the Negroes.”
How African Americans Created South Asian America: 19501960s
We are in the United States today because African American activists organized, bled, and died to overturn the racist laws keeping us out. American laws long restricted immigration from South Asia. While several thousand South Asians had journeyed to the United States by the early 20th century, the Immigration Act of 1917 explicitly barred our immigration. Three decades later, the 1946 Luce-Cellar Act loosened the restrictions—but allowed in only one hundred Indian immigrants per year. From the 1950s onward, new waves of African American activists took on the policies upholding American racism. Civil rights activists organized in the face of social pressure, mob violence, police brutality, and domestic terror. In Mississippi, NAACP activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed in his home. In Alabama, four little girls were killed when their church
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 11
was firebombed. In South Carolina, three students were shot and killed by Highway Patrol officers on a college campus. In Tennessee, Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as he stood in support of local African American union workers. The list goes on. Some early South Asian immigrants participated in the civil rights movement. For example, in his book Colored Cosmopolitanism, historian Nico Slate describes how in the mid-1960s, two professors in Jackson, Mississippi stood with their African American students to help desegregate the city in the mid-1960s. Hamid Kizilbash (from Pakistan) and Savithri Chattopadhyay (from India), both faculty members at Tougaloo College, challenged racial segregation and terror, taking advantage of their ambiguous racial status. (In one instance, a white mob stopped attacking a bloody Kizilbash after a priest yelled “he’s not Negro, he is Indian.”) The civil rights movement won one of its biggest victories with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, which created South Asian America as we know it today. This law ended the racist restrictive immigration quotas, allowing us to become one of the fastest-growing populations in the United States, with over 3.5 million South Asians in the United States today. While the burden of the civil rights movement was carried largely by African Americans, perhaps no group has benefited as much from African American activism as Indian (and particularly upper caste Hindu) Americans. Fifty years after the civil rights movement, the median Indian American household income is over two and a half times higher than that of African Americans, in part because of immigration policies favoring the selective import of skilled foreign workers like my father. I grew up in the United States, and never questioned my right to be here. But my wife Barnali Ghosh came to the United States as a graduate student; and stayed on as an H-1B worker. Learning the history made a deep impression on her. “I realized that my presence in this country, and the existence of our Desi community, was possible only because African American activists helped overturn anti-Indian immigration laws. How do we repay the deep debt that we owe?”
South Asians for Black Lives: 2014-
Seventy years ago, Bayard Rustin, a gay African American civil rights activist, repeatedly engaged in civil disobedience to support Indian independence. Across the country, South Asians are starting to repay the debt,
12 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
at a time when African American activists are asking other communities for their support as they organize against racism and police brutality. In Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown was fatally shot, South Asians whose businesses were impacted by protests stood with their African American neighbors and often saw their neighbors stand up for them. Ferguson resident Anil Gopal, president of the St. Louis Asian Indian Business Association, described to India Abroad how “Black people came to help the (Indian) community … Some of them even kept vigil outside the store as long as they could, to protect the stores.” In New York City, the DRUM (Desis Rising Up And Moving) South Asian Organizing Center brought together over a hundred community members to discuss race and policing in light of the killings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, before starting a march against racism and for immigrant rights. In the San Francisco Bay Area, South Asians organizing with #Asians4BlackLives have been engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience against institutions responsible for killing African Americans. Across the country, South Asian Americans are divided about how we understand our relationship to African Americans; many community members have never given much thought to the topic. The Queer South Asian National Network developed a free curriculum on confronting anti-Blackness in South Asian communities, which is being used for 1–2 hour workshops in New York City, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and beyond. Little
by little, some community members are choosing to repay the debt, continuing the century-long tradition of solidarity. Growing up, I learned a version of our community’s history where we desis worked hard, pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, never connecting with other communities of color. But for over a century, South Asians and African Americans have lived entangled lives—Black-Bengali marriages, Vivekananda speaking out against anti-Black racism, satyagraha in the civil rights movement, Indian Muslims offering Black Muslims a more global perspective, Dalit activists learning about Black Power, long histories of individual friendships, and African American activists who first fought for our independence, and then helped end the barriers to our immigration. Knowing our history leaves us with a choice. Behind closed doors, I’ve heard some of us openly express anti-Black racism; perhaps this is linked to casteism or colorism, or maybe we’re mimicking what we see and hear around us. Will we ignore our history and give in to some of our worst instincts? Many community members are choosing a different path, celebrating our shared histories, and helping add a new chapter to one of our best and oldest traditions. n Anirvan Chatterjee is a community historian. He’s one of the curators of the award-winning Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour (BerkeleySouthAsian.org), and the author of the Secret History of South Asian and African American Solidarity (BlackDesiSecretHistory. org). Find him online at www.chatterjee.net and @anirvan.
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 13
perspective
Are You Desi Enough . . . ... straddling the culture divide
I
f you walk around our house and peek into our closets, you will find that five out of the six closets are filled with my clothes. It’s not because I am a shopaholic. Or because I hoard clothes ... 20 years of cohabitating with a “serial purger” wears out the strongest of pack rats. It’s because I use the closets to straddle the culture divide between where I came from, and where I am now. One of the closets is dedicated to my sarees, one to my churidar kameezes, two closets are for my “American” clothes, and one is a mishmash of everything else. Do I feel guilty about taking up so much space? Maybe ... but given that I am the most fashion forward member of the family, I don’t see another option. It’s more than clothes or closet space, though. It’s about the quest to strike the perfect culture balance as an immigrant in America. I can only speak for the community I know best, Desi Americans, or Indian Americans. On one side we have our chicken tikka masala, Bollywood, and Spelling Bee and Math Olympiad championships. On the other, we have fourth of July barbecues, Abercrombie & Fitch, proms, and the Sacramento Kings. Just like Indian heroines, we sashay in and out of these worlds in an attempt to embody the good Desi American persona. Or maybe that’s just me ... As the post hi-tech boom generation comes of age, I can’t help but wonder what being an Indian American really means to the children who were born and raised here. Avni and Sayan may sometimes humor me by dressing up and participating in Indian festivities, but in their hearts and minds they are Americans. Does that make Sanjeev
By Vibeka Sen and me bad Desi parents? Should we have tried harder to indoctrinate them with our culture and values? Should we have taught them to speak Hindi at home? Should we eat more roti-subzi and less pasta and tacos? Should we have taken them to India more often when they were younger to spend summers with their cousins? Should we push them academically so they are in contention for those handful of Ivy League berths? Fortunately for us, living in the heart of Silicon Valley means that our children live in a community that naturally embraces and assimilates every imaginable race, ethnicity and creed—without needing to be choreographed. Add to that the reality that Sanjeev and I may be the last generation which feels the tug of the motherland because of our ties to our parents and extended families. As far as this generation is concerned, everything and everyone that matters is right here. It boils down to this. As immigrants, is
Desi Americans 2.0 14 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
the goal to raise the next generation of (insert country) Americans whose connection, in this case to India, is at most tenuous with the infrequent Skype call, a handful of visits to and from the native land, and a few dressup festivals? Or, is it it OK to be content with raising well-rounded, compassionate individuals and just let the culture chips fall where they may? (Of course, they would still need to spell really well and love math.) I don’t know the right answer. I do know that it’s time for me to go through my closets and clean out the guilt and expectations taking up so much space, and just hold on to the things that reflect who I am, today. n Vibeka is a well-intentioned and constantly guilt-ridden mother, daughter and wife of Indian origin. She is also a writer, editor, blogger and singer, and, a highly opinionated and spiritually evolving human.
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What should you do?
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16 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
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feature
The Little Independent Bookstores That Could Creative Solutions in the Age of Amazon
“W
hen Borders closed three years ago, independent bookstores were the only remaining option for buying books. For the past 5-6 years, these stores have been at the forefront of the ‘shop local’ movement,” says Hut Landon, the executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers (NCIB). Bookstores today face stiff competition and pressures from multiple fronts—online retailers, specifically Amazon, eBooks, rising rents and other business expenses, and so on. Yet, some of the smaller corner bookstores have managed to adapt and thrive. “Localism encourages local businesses and ensures that the majority of tax dollars stay within the community. Landon adds, “Bookstore owners are smarter now than before, and are more technology savvy.” Many former presidents of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), who met at the Winter Institute in February 2015, mirrored this opinion. They also welcomed young entrepreneurs who brought fresh ideas and business knowledge, calling them the future of the business. Measured by the number of new members to the ABA, there has been over 5% growth nationally in 2014. The Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) lists over 150 member bookstores in the Bay Area, and their sales revenue is up by 7% in 2012, following the closure of Borders stores. Since then, the market has held steady at about 2-3% increase in sales every year. But is this trend truly an indication of change or a blip in the market? Landon is optimistic. “Ten years ago, when a bookstore closed, it stayed closed,” says Landon. “Now we see more stores selling to new owners” instead of dying out, which to him is a sure sign of a healthy industry. New owners bring in fresh business ideas as well. Praveen Madan, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, had befriended Clark Kepler, owner of Kepler’s Books in Palo Alto, over their shared passion for books. When Kepler decided to close the iconic Kepler’s Books for the second time in six years in late 2011 (it had been saved once through community funding in 2005), Madan stepped in. He initiated the Kepler’s 2020 Project, and invited a cross-section of 80 interested parties from the literary community, including other booksellers, publishers, authors, journalists, and members of the 18 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
By Lakshmi Warrier
Praveen Madan is Kepler’s Chief Engagement Officer (CEO). Photo Credit: Christin Evans
community, to brainstorm ways to reinvent the store. The result was the creation of a nonprofit entity, Peninsula Arts and Lectures (PAL), which funds and hosts community events at the for-profit bookstore.
So What Has Changed? Creative Solutions
Bookselling is a business, and stores must bring in revenue to stay in business. To help stores compete, the ABA and the nine regional associations including the NCIBA provide extensive resources and support to booksellers through educational workshops on business skills and best practices, and networking opportunities. Careful curation that reflects local tastes is also key in bringing customers in. Landon adds that knowledgeable staff let you “have a conversation with an individual—not an algorithm.” Bookstores are finding creative ways of adapting to changes in the economy and customer expectations. The New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA) is encouraging staff at member stores to visit other bookstores in the area in an effort to learn best business practices from each other’s experiences. Bookstores are also
increasing their online presence. CityLights, Diesel Books, Moe’s Books, Kepler’s Books, and others utilize their website and social media presence extensively to promote authors, sell books, and publicize literary events. Community support for meaningful businesses has also never been stronger. Borderlands in San Francisco announced its sponsorship program with special member benefits in February as a last ditch effort to stay afloat, and raised the required amount in 48 hours. Granada Books in Santa Barbara launched a crowd funding campaign in midMarch to raise $50k to help keep its doors open, and raised over $10,000 in three days. But these are only temporary fixes. Not all communities may have the commitment or financial resources to support a bookstore. The key is in finding other ways to bring in customers and revenue. For instance, some bookstores rent their space to book clubs or special events for additional revenue. Location is key. Landon calls it the “Main Street versus Chain Street” mentality. Independent bookstores tend to be in areas with high foot traffic, encouraging customers to stroll in, talk to the friendly staff, get personalized reading recommendations, catch up with neighbors, and entertain themselves with a free event or two. Community events hosted at the store are invaluable to give customers a reason to come in. Providing a literary gathering place for the community is one of the most important goals of the bookstore. Praveen Madan explains, “The days of only selling books through brick-and-mortar stores is over. Only if there is community engagement is there a future for the store. Otherwise it will go the way of record and video stores.”
Praveen Madan explains, “The days of only selling books through brickand-mortar stores is over. Only if there is community engagement is there a future for the store.”
With their limited budget, many stores struggle to provide free events. This is where the nonprofit model instituted by Madan at Kepler’s Books makes sense. Peninsula Arts and Letters (PAL) organizes free and ticketed literary events and fundraisers that are hosted in a large dedicated space within Kepler’s Books. The nonprofit generates funds to support its staff and the numerous literary events, and indirectly increases book sales. With the help of this innovative non-profit model, Kepler’s has successfully raised the starting wage from $9 per hour to $13 per hour and is hoping to become the first bookstore in the country to reach $15 per hour within the next year. Emphasizing its social commitment, PAL also organizes literary events at local schools. Praveen explains, “Fifty percent of American adults do not read a book after high school,” mostly because they never understood their own preferences, and are now overwhelmed by the choices. Madan believes that bookstores, like libraries, can meaningfully contribute to the social mission of engaging children early to become lifelong readers. Madan shared his future plans for Kepler’s Books. He hopes to either create a single nonprofit entity merging the bookstore and PAL, or to initiate community ownership of the store by selling stock directly to customers, once the Jobs Act of 2011 is implemented. Madan is also working on a gifting program with GiftLit.com that allows customers to choose a selection of books to be delivered over a year, much like wine or fruit baskets. The true renaissance is in how independent bookstores are learning to adapt to changing times while staying true to their literary commitment, and in how the community is responding to them. In addition to revenue generation, successful bookstores enable increased readership and meaningfully engage the reading and writing communities. Increasing community support is evident: the Bike Coalition of San Francisco is organizing a bike tour of independent bookstores to commemorate the day this year. Another event to watch out for is the inaugural Bay Area Book Festival on June 6-7, featuring 300 authors, 150 exhibitors including various Bay Area bookstores, and Project Lacuna, a unique volunteer-led participatory art installation made from over fifty thousand donated books. n Lakshmi Warrier is a writer and editor completing her Post Graduate Certificate in Writing with UC Berkeley Extension. With a background in science and genetics, she also undertakes projects that further health and wellness, education, and nonprofit endeavors. June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 19
ask a lawyer
Legal Updates for Immigrants By Indu Liladhar-Hathi
Q
I am currently out of status and reside in California. I obtained a driver’s license from the DMV under AB 60. I wanted to know if I can use AB 60 to board an airplane?
A
AB 60 became effective in January 2015 and directs the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to issue a driver’s license to any California resident who is eligible (possessing proof of insurance and passing written, actual, and vision tests). According to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center’s Report, it is not recommended to use AB 60 license to board an airplane because: a) The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) might not accept it as the TSA has been inconsistent in their approach, and b) TSA officials could use the license as a basis to stop and question someone and refer them to federal agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Thus, you should use other identity documents, such as your unexpired passport. Be aware that TSA
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is also engaged in immigration enforcement.
Q
I note that effective May 26, 2015, certain H-4 dependents will be able to apply for Employment Authorization Document (EAD), provided the principal spouse (H1B spouse) has an approved I-140, Immigrant Petition, or the H-1B spouse is currently working in the U.S. beyond a six-year limit on the H-1B status. I wanted to know: a) Do I need to go through my employer to file the application for EAD for my H-4 spouse? b) If this EAD allows my spouse to work in any job at any location?
A
You do not need your employer to file the application for EAD for your spouse. The EAD allows your spouse to work for anyone, anywhere.
Q
I work for a consulting company on an H-1B status. Recently my employer transferred me from a client site in San Jose, CA to New York. I understand that my
employer need not file an H-1B amendment on my behalf.
A
A recent decision from the Administration Appeals Office (AAO) has established that if there is a change in the worksite location (i.e. a worksite that is neither within normal commuting distance nor within the same metropolitan statistical area indicated on the existing Labor Condition Application (LCA), an H-1B amendment must be filed with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Therefore, H-1B employers need to take careful note of this decision by the AAO. Consulting companies who move their H-1B workers from one job location to the next will need to review their current practices and ensure that they adopt measures that will help them to remain in compliance. n Immigration and business attorney Indu Liladhar-Hathi has an office in San Jose.(408) 453-5335
legal visa dates Important Note: U.S. travelers seeking visas to India will now need to obtain them through Cox & Kings Global Services Pvt. Ltd. Call 1-866-978-0055, email enquiriesusa@ckgs.com or visit www.in.ckgs.us for more information.
June 2015
T
his column carries priority dates and other transitional information as taken from the U.S. State Department’s Visa Bulletin. The information below is from the Visa Bulletin for June 2015. In the tables below, the listing of a date for any class indicates that the class is oversubscribed. “Current” means that numbers are available for all qualified applicants. “Unavailable” means no numbers are available.
FAMILY PREFERENCE VISA DATES Preference Dates for India 1st Sept 01, 2007 2A Oct 01, 2013 2B Sept 15, 2008 3rd Feb 22, 2004 4th Sept 08, 2002 NOTE: F2A numbers subject to percountry limit are available to applicants with priority dates beginning Aug 08, 2013 and earlier than October 01, 2013.
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tax talk
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By Rita Bhayani
A
ccording to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it will cost an average couple $245,340 to raise a child born in 2013 to the age of 18. Luckily, there is a tax credit available for child and dependent care expenses to help parents recoup some of these costs. The credit can be up to 35 percent of your qualifying expenses, depending upon your adjusted gross income. To be eligible, the person receiving the care must be a qualifying person— either your dependent child under the age of 13 or certain other individuals who are physically or mentally incapable of self-care. If you are divorced or separated, only the custodial parent can claim this credit. The care must have been provided while you (and your spouse) were either working or looking for work. If you are married, you must file a joint return in order to qualify for the credit. In order to claim the credit, you (and your spouse) must have earned income from wages, salaries, tips or net earnings from self-employment. One spouse can be exempt from having earned income if he or she was a full-time student or was physically or mentally incapable of self-care. Additionally, expenses must be paid to a qualified caregiver. Spouses, dependents and children under the age of 19 are not qualified caregivers. At the end of the year, caregivers should provide you with a statement that includes their federal employer identification number (EIN) or social security number (SSN), full name, address and amount paid. All of this information is necessary to prepare your tax return. If you do not receive a statement with this information at the end of the year, you should request it prior to your tax appointment. If your employer provides a dependent care benefit, the amount of dependent care expense claimed must be reduced by the benefit you receive. If you pay someone to come to your home and provide care, you may be considered a household employer. At
A Creative Commons Image by US Army the end of the year, plan on providing your accountant with the information listed above to claim this credit.
Tax Reminders
• Second uarter individual estimated tax payments are due June 15. • Individuals with interests in signature or other authority over one or more bank, securities or other financial accounts in a foreign country may need to file an FBAR (Foreign Bank Account Report) by June 30.
Did You Know?
On July 1, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln and Congress created the position of commissioner of Internal Revenue and enacted an income tax to pay Civil War expenses.
Quote Corner
“Teach your children about tax—eat 30% of their ice cream.” ~Anonymous n Rita Bhayani is a Certified Public Accountant and a Certified Management Accountant practicing at Pleasanton, CA and she protects the clients from the IRS. She provides tax planning, accounting, payroll and outsourced CFO services too. For more information log on to www. ritacpa.net. Reprinted with permission from the National Association of Tax Professionals.
business
Sammy the Stockpicker Perils of trying to beat the market
M
any of our Silicon Valley readers have top quartile looks, smarts, and success. They are often exceptional at what they do. Unfortunately, many of us equate these qualities to our prowess in picking stocks. Let me introduce you to my friend whom we shall simply call Sammy Stockpicker. Sammy and I meet regularly over a cup of coffee at Peet’s. Sammy is a very accomplished individual. An engineer by training, Sammy holds a Ph.D. from a top school and is a successful Silicon Valley executive. Knowing my background, Sammy insists on talking about his success in stock picking. He just can’t help it. With a gleam in his eye, he often reminds me about his forecasts on a wide range of tech stocks. If a market surge had just preceded our meeting, Sammy would become quite the market strategist, extending his expertise to all manner of investments from commodities, to real estate, to Bitcoin. Being the good friend that I am, I rarely remind Sammy about his spectacular failures—like the time he called for a short on stock x or stock y, which then promptly proceeded to double or triple in value. I just humor Sammy. Now let us admit it, there is a bit of Sammy in all of us. Who can resist the urge to buy a “hot” stock? The desire to make a quick buck is all too human. But before we bet the house on our favorite stocks, let us consider this. The majority of the best trained, most accomplished professional money managers often make mistakes in their stock picks. Numerous studies have shown that an overwhelming percentage of mutual fund managers fail to beat their benchmarks after accounting for fees and transactions costs. A splendid paper by Bill Sharpe, Emeritus Professor at Stanford and the 1990 Nobel Prize winner in Economics titled, “The Arithmetic of Active Management” (Financial Analysts Journal, January/February 1991), explains why. What is the market? The market is nothing but the sum of all its participants. In other words, it is the collective securities held by mutual funds, institutions, endowments, and individual investors like us. If the sum of all our holdings equals the market, on average what is our return?
By Prabhu Palani
A Creative Commons Image by tradingacademy.com
The desire to make a quick buck is all too human. But before we bet the house on our favorite stocks, let us consider this. The majority of the best trained, most accomplished professional money managers often make mistakes in their stock picks. Zero. In fact, if you consider the brokerage fees and commission of buying or selling a stock, or the fees charged by a professional money manager, what you are left with is, on average, the market return minus these costs. This does not mean that there isn’t a reliable way to outperform the market but does illustrate powerfully what a difficult game beating the market is. On a truly long-term basis, few investors can claim to have consistently outperformed the market. Equally difficult is the ability to correctly pick managers who will beat the market going forward. Past outperformance, as they say, is no guarantee of future outperformance. Analyzing the returns of pension plans, Brinson, Hood, and Beebower (Financial Analysts Journal, January/February 1995) demonstrated that over 90% of return variation in a portfolio is determined by asset allocation decisions. In other words, which
asset class you are invested in is more important than which stock or fund you picked. Even if you are an excellent stock picker in a declining stock market, you are still going to lose money. And on average, stock picking does not contribute significantly to your portfolio’s performance. Benjamin Graham wrote in The Intelligent Investor (Harper Row, 4th ed. 1973), “There is intelligent speculation as there is intelligent investing. But there may be ways in which speculation may be unintelligent. Of these, the foremost are: (1) speculating when you think you are investing; (2) speculating seriously instead of as a pastime, when you lack proper knowledge and skill for it; and (3) risking more money in speculation than you can afford to lose.” Luckily my friend Sammy is all talk. He is quite sensible about money and he rarely picks individual stocks or bonds. He has paid off his mortgage, put aside money for his children’s education, and lets the pros invest for him. He even makes sure that I pay for my own coffee. You should do the same. n Prabhu Palani, CFA, was formerly a managing director and the head equity strategist at Mellon Capital Management in San Francisco, CA. Previously he was senior vice president and portfolio manager at Franklin Templeton Investments and Principal, Portfolio Manager at Barclays Global Investors. Prabhu holds graduate degrees from Stanford University and the University of Delaware and is a member of the CFA Institute and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India.
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not for profit
B
engaluru is known as the Silicon Valley of India, but the increase in information technology (IT) jobs has come with an increase in waste and garbage. All over India, waste picking has been the unacknowledged labor of Dalits and lower caste people. Due to the economic realities in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, and the increased need for waste picking in Bengaluru, migrants have moved to Bengaluru slums and the outskirts of the city to collect garbage. Around the world, statistics on waste pickers are often unreliable because waste pickers are mobile, and often avoid official counts for fear of harassment from officials. Often it’s a family business; sometimes, children of waste pickers can’t go to school because they are working to help feed their families. In 2007, when Nalini Shekar moved to Bengaluru from the San Francisco Bay Area to retire, most waste pickers made only $4-5 per day, though if they worked 13-14 hours a day, they could make the equivalent of $8 a day. A waste picker’s average day involved walking 8-19 miles, and bending around 1,000 times to pick up other people’s garbage. This work gave waste pickers a lot of skill and knowledge about how to recycle waste and the cost of different items of waste. In spite of this tremendous labor, however, housing remained out of reach for many waste pickers. In the Bay Area, Shekar had worked on human trafficking and domestic violence issues and translated for the government during the infamous Lakireddy Bala case. Upon arriving in Bengaluru, she noticed significant discussion about waste management among middle class activists. Many of the middle class policy makers in Bengaluru believed the waste pickers were beggars. There was zero social recognition of the work done by waste pickers, and municipal workers harassed them. The activists were pushing for decentralization of waste without considering the impact on the waste-picking community. When Shekar attended their meetings, she wondered what would happen to the 35,000 waste pickers working in the streets, if a form of activism that ignored the waste pickers were successful. Shekar believed that since there were already 35,000 people who knew how to 24 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
Picking Waste By Anita Felicelli
Photo credit: Hasirudala
pick waste, this was an untapped pool of skill. Putting waste pickers to work formally would be easier than teaching someone with no familiarity with waste management to segregate different types of waste and recyclables. This was not Shekar’s first foray into helping waste pickers. Before moving to the United States, she had worked in education in Pune. In 1997, she and her colleagues had observed that the children of waste-pickers were the most vulnerable population of children as far as education was concerned. They asked the waste pickers whether they
would send their children to school if they had better job conditions. She and her colleagues started working with them in the outskirts of the slums. During that time, Shekar learned the hierarchy of garbage disposal. At the bottom were waste pickers, usually Dalits. Shekar explained that, “The bottom contributes the most, but earns the least.” The itinerant buyers who bought scrap material that fetched more money in the market were a step up from waste pickers. Next were scrap dealers, who bought paper, plastic and metal junk. Higher up were wholesalers and stockists,
who typically managed one kind of waste, which went to recycling units. Shekar explained, “The higher up you go, the more profit and the fewer people. But if the waste picker walked away from the pyramid, the whole thing would fall down.” She noted that the recycling offices had a corporate grandeur that belied where the money was coming from. Hasirudala, or “green force” was born. Although Shekar started Hasirudala in the 2010-2011 time frame, it was only formally registered in 2014. In the beginning, the organization did lots of policy work, but over the last year, most of the work has consisted of making sure people get jobs and keeping the operation running. The balance is 90% is grassroots work and 10% policy work. Today, there are 36 people on payroll including four in management. Hasirudala works mainly with waste pickers, but also with itinerant buyers and some scrap dealers. Corruption has been the biggest obstacle for the organization in working with the contract system—the contract for garbage and the nexus between elected representatives and local contractors. The organization has received death threats. Its vehicle got hijacked at one point because corrupt individuals didn’t believe it was big enough to fight back. Hasirudala went to court and obtained a judicial order specifically saying that it had to be protected—or else Karnataka would need to fold down the Bengaluru government. A secondary obstacle has been the process of gaining the trust of the urban poor who have been cheated by so many. Shekar and her colleagues kept returning to the slums until one woman, noticing how often they visited, encouraged the others to try it out. The waste pickers were astonished that Shekar made good on her plans, and that they eventually received ID cards.
Photo credit: Hasirudala
As part of Hasirudala’s policy work, Shekar conducted a study that showed waste pickers managed to recycle 1,050 tonnes per day. If the city managed that on its own, it would spend $8.4 million per year. She started by negotiating with the city government, showing it how much waste was being recycled. She explained that if the waste pickers could do the same work for a living, they would be mitigating climate change by saving virgin material, and also saving money for the city. Another early project involved working with Bengaluru’s Urban Development Department to integrate waste pickers in the solid waste management system of the city. Shekar argued, “If they’re bending 1,000 times per day, they are not beggars.” She told the city government that it should give them official identity cards. The government finally agreed. The card that Shekar pushed for is identical to the card that the mayor gets, with a logo of the local government and a signature of the commissioner. Shekar wanted integration to occur in a way that was consistent with the policies of the city. Since mid-2011, more than 7.000 waste pickers have been given identity cards. The works with about 3,000-4,000 waste pickers closely, but is in touch with about 10,000 waste pickers. Now that they have identity cards, and the police don’t harass them, their status in the city has started to change. Hasirudala also worked to move waste pickers from scavenging on the street to uniformed waste manager positions. The organization found that working in private spaces was a further opportunity for waste pickers to get integrated. The bulk generators pay the organization, which in turn pays the waste pickers. 11,000 households are covered. Moreover, the organization pushed for segregation of waste into different categories such as wet waste, dry waste, sanitary waste and medical waste. Shekar explained to me that collecting different types of waste separately led to better processing and less harm to the environment. For example, sanitary waste that is placed in organic waste is not processed properly because it has plastic in it. Shekar explained that Bengaluru is currently the only city that collects medical waste separately. When the organization started working,
Hasirudala
Nirmala Shekar came out of retirement to found Hasirudala
the amount of waste was almost 310 grams per day to landfill. But today, the average is 125 grams per day. Some apartments have taken the rules so seriously they have reduced the waste that goes to landfills to 75 grams per day. The environmental benefit of composting, bio-methanization and processing is enormous. Remarkably, Hasirudala has pushed all of these significant reforms with limited financial investment thus far. Financial investors included Grass Root Communities, an NGO in Washington D.C. (previously Community Housing Foundation) and Indians for Collective Action. Jain University gave the group space to work. WEIGO, a UK organization that Shekar knew through her work in Pune, provided the group with office furniture. Shekar even invested her own money into it. Hasirudala also has an IT partner, MindTree Limited, which developed a platform that helped Hasirudala scale up operations. Waste pickers get a handheld phone into which they input the weight of the waste collected and that goes to a program developed MindTree. What does the future hold for an organization that has already accomplished so much? Shekar seems to have no intent to slow down. The organization aims to create 1,000 jobs this year. Shekar also hopes that Hasirudala will be able to acquire vehicles for waste pickers to use to pick up waste. Waste pickers would own this capital investment themselves. Shekar noted that she took what she learned, and the risk-taking, innovation mindset she developed as a Bay Area activist, and applied it to the work she does at Hasirudala. n 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.
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 25
On Inglish
The Call Of The Koel By Kalpana Mohan
ko·el, noun. An Asian and Australasian cuckoo with a call that resembles its name, the male typically having all-black plumage.
“T
he Asian koel, you mean?” I asked Lingesh. We were debating the origin of its name. Lingesh Kalingarayar, a naturalist who accompanied tourists on nature trips through Pollachi’s biodiverse countryside, believed that it had entered the lexicon from the Tamil “kuyil.” I found out later, however, that the name had descended, from the Hindi koël hinting that the origin was most likely kokila, a Sanskrit term. On the morning of our drive into the Anamalai Tiger Reserve Sanctuary, the sun hadn’t yet yawned into the Western Ghats. The only sounds were the rustle of coconut palms and the calls of birds. The creature Lingesh and I were discussing was the omniscient Asian cuckoo whose call supposedly mimicked the sound of its name. In South India, the koel is as common as the cockroach and therefore it didn’t intrigue me, not when we were deep in a forest that teemed with over 250 species of birds and over 2,000 species of plants. As he drove us through coconut orchards bordered by cocoa plants, Lingesh slowed down whenever something caught his fancy. But where he saw wings, I saw twigs. And where he saw a nest, I saw a coconut. He talked sparingly. It was a warning to the humans—especially to Vinayagam, my late father’s chauffeur, who was sitting in the back and being driven for a change—that we were to please keep quiet so that the birds would swoop down from nowhere and give us the pleasure of their plumage. By the end of our drive, I’d seen at least thirty-five species, including the red-vented bulbul, the southern coucal with its rust-orange wings, a blue-faced malkoha, the common hoopoe with its stylish crown, the yellow-browed bulbul and several black-hooded orioles. Still, I knew that I wouldn’t ever be able to tell the coo of a koel from the metal clang of a racquet-tailed drongo—not even under the threat of being assailed by elephant droppings the size of Mauritius. During those four hours together, Lingesh was mostly tuned to the creatures of the forest. Once a bird seemed to peep from the car’s dashboard. “That’s my cell phone,” our guide said. The phone mimicked the alarm call of a spotted deer alerting its ilk about the presence of a predator. Every few minutes, Lingesh would propel the car forward just a little. Then he’d wait. At some stops, he’d point and shoot his camera. Its snout was a mahjong of lenses locking into one another. Then he would show me the picture he had just taken so that I could see how the bird looked up close. Then he’d extend the binoculars so I could get a better look. Whenever I tried to do just that, the human in the back crowed about how he had seen, with just his naked eye, what Lingesh pointed at. “I see it, Saar!” Vinayagam said to the man. “Isn’t the chest orangebrown?” Unfortunately, according to the binoculars, all the birds had green chests. All I saw were the margins of leaves or the striations on bark. Finally, when my lenses alighted on what seemed like the tail end of suspicious plumage, it was always too late. “Ayyo, amma, it just flew away,” Vinayagam would declare as if I were at fault. Vinayagam found many other reasons to cheep from the back. “Amma, do you know that cell phone companies get their ideas from the calls of these birds?” I hadn’t thought of that. Lingesh nodded.
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“Oh yes, they’re all inspired by birdsong.” He told us that all that pompous plumage inspired fashion designers. The nuance and contrast of colors in nature was a huge canvas for artists. Soon we began seeing warning signs that we were entering tiger country and that visitors could not get out of vehicles under any circumstances. I noticed how Lingesh wasn’t worried enough to roll up our windows. I shared my deepest fear with my guide. “What if a tiger paws me now?” I wanted to live to write about my adventure. Lingesh laughed. He was a 32-year-old forest lover who preferred to live with the wild things in their habitat. A few years ago, he had built himself a place and had lived in the deep forest for six months, subsisting on local produce, bathing in the waterfalls and attending to calls of nature in the wild open. The experience had convinced him that his life would always revolve around the hills of Pollachi. He lamented that he still hadn’t seen a tiger in the wild. “Ma’am, no other animal is as majestic,” he said. I assured him, once again, that I was not keen on meeting a tiger that morning. Even when our bird-lover was laughing at my cowardice, he was always on the prowl. “Look there, those are the footprints of sloth bears.” He pointed to small markings on the mud to the side of the road. He could tell the claw marks of many animals. Later, when we were minutes from Topslip, which was located at 800 feet above sea level, he pointed to a clearing where an animal had mauled tall bamboo clusters and trampled over the undergrowth. “That there is the work of an elephant.” He showed us how the animal had cracked bamboo to cross over to the other side of the road as it went foraging for water and food. By the time Lingesh dropped us off at the Aliyar Ashram where we had stayed the night, I’d learned a lot about a passionate young man who wanted to be a farmer, just like his father. Like Lingesh, many youngsters now worried about the depletion of forests and habitat. They wanted to sensitize locals and visitors to ecological conservation by offering intelligent tourism. Vinayagam realized that he had received an education about forest preservation while discovering the beauty of his land. I too had learned to spot birds, to associate a call with the name of a bird. The birdsong is the primordial sound of existence. It preempts the first rays of the morning sun. It echoes the notes of the beginning of time, although in my life, the birdcall also signifies an end. The call of the koel will always remind me of the collapse of a nest. It sang outside my father’s balcony last June on Father’s Day. A swan song, perhaps, from a father to his daughters. n Kalpana Mohan writes from Saratoga. To read more about her, go to http://kalpanamohan.org and http://saritorial.com.
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 27
films
Walking the Walk By Aniruddh Chawda BOMBAY VELVET. Director: Anurag Kashyap. Players: Ranbir Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, Karan Johar, Kaykay Menon, Manish Chaudhary, Satyadeep Misra). Music: Amit Trivedi. Hindi with Eng. sub-titles. Theatrical release (Fox Star)
T
he thinking had to go something like this. Bring together Anurag Kashyap, perhaps the most important mainstream Hindi language filmmaker working today (Gangs of Wasseypur, The Girl in Yellow Boots, Black Friday), happening A-list actors Ranbir Kapoor (Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, Barfi, Wake Up Sid) and Anushka Sharma (NH 10, PK), throw in the buzz-worthy acting debut of Karan Johar, incidentally also the directorial force behind some of the biggest hits in recent memory (Student of the Year, Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham, Kuch Kuch Hota hai) on top of a retrograde story and, viola, there would be magic. Not so fast. Bombay Velvet, the resulting expensive and definite retro-feel collaboration, feels weighted down by self-importance. Tracing a loose and, at times, disjointed arc from 1949 to 1969, Kashyap’s story, cowritten with Gyan Prakash, Vasant Bala and Thani, appears to have too many hands on the script from the get go. Small time pickpocket and moonlighting kickboxer Johnny Balraj (Kapoor) has ambitions far exceeding his station in the hard knock life of brothels and street brawls of what was then Bombay. Johnny’s ambitions and brawny stature attract the attention of the two powerful newspaper publishers, Kaizad (Johar) and Jimmy Mistry (Chaudhary), both of whom want to use their politically-skewed respective flagship presses to influence the massive post-Independence public spending works about to get underway to transform Bombay from a large brackish swamp into a modern and thriving sub-continental hub. There are other elements, the most important of which is that Kaizad has capitalist leanings while Mistry champions communism and that Kaizad uses Johnny to take blackmail-worthy compromising photos of a prominent politician—the same photos that Mistry sends his mistress Rosie (Sharma) to get. This tug of war, sometimes carried out in the open at Bombay Velvet, Kaizad’s 28 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
high-end nightclub that he ropes in Johnny to manage, soon overshadows all goings on and will eventually affect the lives of everyone involved. There are too many sub-plots and detours to track. That is too bad because Kashyap’s execution of technical details is simply flawless. The cabaret song sequences take an already sultry Trivedi score to tap into a workable late-night blues and AshaBhosle-with-one-mic soundtrack framework for amazing visual polish. The same eyecatching attention is paid to some jaw-dropping costumes and strategically cropped pseudo-vintage camera work that captures a distinctly less-crowded city on the brink of major figurative urban revolution. What also gets lost in all the plot traffic are some credible performance by a talented cast. As if finally coming of age, Kapoor’s Johnny wonderfully channels not only gangster-era Hollywood but even more so his legendary great-uncle Shammi Kapoor’s turns from that Kapoor’s classic films like China Town, Bluffmaster and Singapore. As Johnny pines for Rosie in an increasingly dangerous game, his pain comes across as real. Sharma’s Rosie is a steady subdued siren forced to be a feather boa for one sugardaddy too many. Johar and Chaudhary both deliver surprisingly astute media barons and Menon is spot-on as a determined cop perennially on the cusp of exposing the mysterious cross-fire murders that may ensnare both sides.
What trumps style over substance, alas, is just how much Kashyap makes us care for whether Johnny and Rosie end up together and how little he inadvertently has us care for what happens to the larger currents that will pull the city’s path into the future. While we know that communism failed to make deep inroads into India—Hinduism and collectivism are fundamentally at odds—one would not necessarily surmise that from this movie. Period pieces are especially tricky to reenact given that they require recreating a bygone era while resonating with modern ethos to truly grip the audience. If the retrofeel can successfully subjugate another time period while ringing true for any age, the resulting work becomes noteworthy (Parineeta, The Dirty Picture, Detective Byomkesh Bakshi). On the other hand, if the end product achieves only a retro-feel (Hawaiizada, Once Upon a Time in Mumbai Dobaraa) with no compelling modern sentiment, the movie feels only half baked. Squarely in the latter camp, Bombay Velvet walks the walk but does not talk the talk. n EQ: C+ Globe trekker, aesthete, photographer, ski bum, film buff, and commentator, Aniruddh Chawda writes from Milwaukee.
Big B in “Motion” By Jyoti Khera PIKU. Director: Shoojit Sircar. Written by: Juhi Chaturvedi. Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Deepika Padukone, Irrfan Khan. Music: Anupam Roy. Hindi with Eng. Sub-tit. Theatrical release (Yash Raj Films)
max—abrupt and simplistic even if apt. Still, nothing prevents you from relating to and laughing at the craziness going on the screen. Piku is a worthy sequel to Vicky Donor — the first laugh-riot from this director-writer pair, even if less potent. That they could make a Bollywood film with a 70 year old and his constipation as the main theme, and make it so engaging, is a testament to our times, the adroitness of the director, and the performances. But go watch Piku just to laugh at the Indian moments you will so easily recognize. If you walk away with an added awareness of and being sensitive to and patient with our elders, that would be a bonus. n
I
f you were not inclined to watch Piku after seeing the trailers filled with potty humor, you were not the only one. Yet that would be a mistake you would be making akin to judging a book by its covers. For nothing short of two hours of delight awaits you in Piku. So I discovered as I went, lured by the preview praise and the company of friends, and ended my Mother’s Day on a sweet Piku note. The director-writer duo of Shoojit Sircar and Juhi Chaturvedi, and the talented trio—the Big Mr. Bachchan, Deepika and Irrfan pack a funny punch in this slice of life film on Bengalis, eccentric old-age replete with homeopathy bottles, toilet trouble, and the not-so-funny issue of geriatric care. I saw glimpses of my attention-seeking, selfproclaimed homeopathy expert father in the elderly character and I am sure all of us will recognize some older relatives in our lives. Piku is the unmarried daughter of the old widowed Bengali gentleman Bhaskor Banerjee, whose biggest problem in life is “motion” —the term used in India by doctors and at home referring to the daily bowel movement ritual. He is a hypochondriac and preoccupation with his health governs his and Piku’s life. It is clear that Piku does not have a life. Barely managing to run her architecture firm with her partner Syed, she is perpetually responding to her father’s every whim and eccentricity. She agrees to his wish of going to Kolkata by road from Delhi and so they set off, complete with the master’s obedient man-servant Budhan, and the allimportant chair-commode in full-view. Juhi Chaturvedi is somewhat of an expert in etching out endearing characters and the often hilarious realism of their interactions. So the paternal and maternal aunts quibble. Moushumi Chatterjee as the loud mouth, much-married mashi and the paternal aunt with a complex about her wedding, are adorable characters. Irrfan is the über cool taxi driver—an
EQ: A effortless actor as always, he also looks absolutely dashing and years younger, and is just a pleasure to watch. Deepika is good but the surprise package is AB’s performance. I am perhaps one of the few who doesn’t buy into demigods. I love the intense angry young man of Zanjeer or the brooding lover of Kabhi Kabhi but lately have been put off by the histrionics. But Amitabh as Bhaskar Bannerjee is a delight to watch. He doesn’t overdo it, even with the fake Bengali accent, and brings the character to life with such warmth and heart, making it easier to love the annoying and eccentric old man. Both Piku the character, and Piku the film have flaws. Piku has a huge chip-on-theshoulder and the world-is-my-slave attitude and, inexplicably, gets away with it. Whether it is her partner Syed, or the hapless taxi drivers, they all acquiesce to her, no matter how unreasonable she is. Also suspect was the depiction of the taxi drivers in Delhi as polite and meek lambs who endure the temper of the fiery Bong beauty without so much as a whimper. It must be mentioned that the suave RayBan-sporting, English-speaking Rana is nothing like the old sardarjis who happen to be the owners of most private Delhi taxi stands. His patience as he not only calmly observes and handles the idiosyncrasies of the family during the trip, but also goes out of his way to help them, is too good to be true. The biggest flaw if any is the cli-
Thinker, dreamer, a left-brainer trying to evolve as a right-brainer, Jyoti is a freelance writer based in San Jose, California. She writes on food, films, politics and anything Indian!
L ATA’S FLICK PICKS ali Girl Friend Dilli W Dirty
Politics
Mr. X Gabbar Piku
eli Leela Ek Pah
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 29
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desi voice
My Stroke of ... Luck? By Harshada Rajani
I
n a second, I fell, from heaven to hell, from peace to utter chaos, from perfection to obliteration. In a second, I lost it all, my past, my present, and most tragically, my future. In a second, I simply faded away ... a part of me died. A huge part of me. I’m not just saying that as a dramatic metaphor; I mean it quite literally. Three years ago, when I was 23, during my 2nd year of medical school, I suffered a massive, spontaneous, bilateral brainstem stroke that left me completely paralyzed from head to toe. Unable to talk, unable to eat, unable to move anything (even my eyes), I just silently and begrudgingly stared up at the ceiling for days, weeks, even months, while the machines keeping me alive buzzed and beeped their way into every cell in my body. I had a condition called “locked-in syndrome” (which is as horrifying and inescapable as the name implies) that left me trapped inside my mind, alone with the things that became my only friends—my nightmares, my tears, and Harry Potter’s scar-shaped crack on the ceiling. My life was locked away, left to be forgotten, while I was silently screaming to get out, to be heard, to be free. People kept trying to console me by saying, “everything happens for a reason.” To that phrase I say, “bullshit.” I’ve learned (quite slowly and painfully) that unfortunately, in life, things just happen and it can suck. A lot. Unfair, irrational, unpredictable things happen in our lives that make us question fate, karma, destiny, and everything that we once believed to be true in this world. This didn’t happen to me because of any deeper meaning or higher purpose, and I adamantly refuse to accept this sorry excuse for a life as my fate. Before all of this, my life was so completely and utterly full—full of friends and family, full of Bhangra and boyfriends, full of summa cum laudes and summa-time cocktails, full of potential and so full of pure, infectious happiness. So, as you can imagine, life as a cripple in a wheelchair feels uncontrollably and incessantly empty. Reality is
In a second, I fell, from heaven to hell, from peace to utter chaos, from perfection to obliteration.
supposed to offer a brief reflection of your dreams, and a brief respite from your nightmares. But my heavenly reality before all this was as magical as even my most perfect of dreams, while my hellish reality now is a million times worse than even my most haunting of nightmares. So, I live for those few stolen moments when this cruel world just lets me dream ... I dream about running wild through Duke’s campus, singing Beyonce at the top of my lungs, devouring a slice of good ol’ NY style pizza, or falling madly and shamelessly in love with a boy. I desperately want my life back; to not only live, but to live well. I want my reality to reflect my dreams again, not my nightmares. I want to fight, to believe, to hope for something better. Now, through my borderline insane fighting every freaking second of every freaking day for the last three years, my dreams are slowly coming true. Well, they’re partially coming true. I’m not yet running
but I can take a few steps, not yet singing but I can speak (though not too clearly), not yet devouring but I can eat anything and everything, and I can even type this article myself with my right hand. But things are immensely far from perfect, I have a long way to go—I’m still in a wheelchair and still pretty powerless. And love? Well that’s a dream that will have to wait; I have things to do. But I promise you, I will continue to fight, until I have a life I can be proud of, until I can be free. n Harshada Rajani is a 27-year-old North Carolina native. She graduated from Duke University in 2007 and began medical school at her alma mater immediately thereafter. On November 29, 2008, Harshada suffered a vertebral artery dissection leading to a bilateral brainstem (pontine) stroke.This post was first published on Divanee.
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books
Family Stories By Jeanne E. Fredriksen
THE LIVES OF OTHERS by Neel Mukherjee. W. W. Norton & Company: New York. 2014. 528 pages. $26.95 wwnorton.com. Available as hard cover book, paperback digital book, or audio CD.
N
eel Mukherjee’s 2014 Booker Prize nominated novel, The Lives of Others, is a wholly-absorbing work that is both ambitious and exhausting. The novel opens with a raw, heart-wrenching prologue set in 1966. A farmer, at the edge of desperation and starvation, kills his family and then himself. We are then tossed into 1967 and the daily goings-on in the Ghosh family household with prose that soothes and seduces, whisking the reader away from extreme tragedy and into the world of those who inhabit this great house. Paper manufacturing had long provided wealth, status, and comfort for the Ghosh family, leaving them to want for nothing. However, times are changing, workers are organizing, and society as a whole is challenging the system. Hard times and bad management have contributed to the erosion of Charu Paper & Sons (Pvt. Ltd.), leaving not just the faded exterior but the crumbling foundation of their lives and relationships. Trapped within the walls of the Ghosh mansion, three generations struggle to keep or gain a foothold not only in business but also between themselves, as family members play one against another. The elders reside on the top floor as do the oldest and favorite son and his family. Two other sons and their families plus one unmarriageable daughter live there as well. So it goes in all the way down to a storage room on the ground floor where the youngest son’s widow and her two children are relegated as castoffs, the widow treated like an unpaid servant without any kindnesses. With three generations of Ghoshes living under one roof and rarely needing to venture outside, tempers rise and cool. Dreams inflate and collapse. Communication is as unnerving and sporadic as electrical outages. Mukherjee’s far-reaching narrative is filled with the dissonance of life and hyperbole of existence that is the Ghosh family. This is in stark contrast to the life that lies restively with one character, Supratik. The oldest grandson, Supratik is a college student activist who disappears with Marxist friends to indoctrinate 32 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
Mukherjee’s far-reaching narrative is filled with the dissonance of life and hyperbole of existence that is the Ghosh family. the poorest farmers of Bengal. Chapters and scenes focused on the inhabitants of the Ghosh mansion are offset by Supratik’s detailed, unsentimental letters that describe the work in which he is engaged alongside the poorest of farmer workers and their living conditions that are tragically accepted only because there is nothing more for them. Early in the book and before disappearing into the rice paddies of Bengal, Supratik asks his mother, Sandhya, if she likes the life she is living. Sandhya anxiously points out that these are bad times for the family: they had to sell two cars and some of her mother-in-law’s jewelry to pay a bank loan, and the business is about to go bust. In Supratik’s mind, it would be nothing more than what is referred to today as “a first world problem.” Supratik is more concerned with equality and about the plight of the worker whose choice between hopelessness and backbreaking work far
outweighs materialistic and selfish desires for new saris, having servants, and enjoying the latest fads and trends. Later in the conversation, Supratik challenges his mother, slapping their family squarely on the debate table: “Are you happy with the inequalities of our family? Of the power-on-top-rulingpeople-below kind of hierarchy? Do you think it’s right? Has the thought ever crossed your mind that the family is the primary unit of exploitation?” This conversation sets the tone for both worlds the author presents in tandem—the Ghosh family as a unit, and Indian society as a whole at that time. Mukherjee’s scope is so vast yet compact while being caste-andclass conscious in a time of social, political, and economic upheaval that Downton Abbey aficionados will see a surplus of similarities despite the difference in the setting. Mukherjee depicts the effects of changes across the spectrum from utter and complete despair and desperation to sharp jealousies and anger over petty things in such vivid detail that at times it becomes pleasantly uncomfortable. In this targeted look at Calcutta and India in the late 1960s, Mukherjee’s attention to one family and all of its members becomes an intimate and representative microcosm. By leveling a microscope on each character, he exposes everything, including horrific actions committed to the most innocent of souls. Supratik’s letters also bring a needed critical realism to the glaze of disappointed contentment. The Lives of Others is many things. It is a portrait of a family of 1960s Calcutta, an historical rendering, and a treatise on how varying world views and personal actions affect or disaffect those around us. In creating this epic tale of survival and activism, Mukherjee has taken us to a place where we see more than a family on the brink of ruin and workers on the brink of hopelessness; we see a world that for all the change that has happened, very little has truly changed, even today. 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.
Dysfunction Knows No Geography By Vidya Pradhan LAND WHERE I FLEE. Prajwal Parajuly. Quercus, 2015. 318 pages. Hardcover.
H
alf Nepalese, half Indian, Prajwal Parajuly came to the attention of literary critics with his debut novel The Gurkha’s Daughter, a collection of short stories about the Nepalese diaspora. In his second book, Land Where I Flee, Parajuly takes the various skeins he created in The Gurkha’s Daughter and weaves them into a single story about a dysfunctional Nepalese Indian family based in Sikkim. While many Nepalese moving to India have comfortably assimilated into mainstream Indian society, there are a few categories of immigrants settled in the north-eastern Indian states who maintain close kinship with their homeland and consider themselves Nepalese first. The Neupaney family belongs to an upper caste immigrant class called the Baahuns, or Vedic Brahmins, who, despite making their home outside Nepal for several generations, cling to Nepalese social structures, religious observances, cultural mores, and casteist boundaries in a way that sometimes only the diasporic can. At the head of this family is the irascible Chitralekha, the matriarch whose 84th birthday, an auspicious Hindu celebration, pulls her grandchildren back into her somewhat erratic orbit. Guardian of her grandchildren ever since their parents died in an accident, Chitralekha has been accustomed to ruling her brood with an iron fist and they, in turn, have acquiesced to or rebelled against her dictates in ways that have marked their lives forever. The scars they bear set the stage for a fiery reunion at the family house. Adding to the fireworks is the clash of politics between the diasporic Neupaneys and the assimilated Gorkhas, erstwhile Nepalis looking for a separate state for themselves in India. Parajuly does a wonderful job of creating unique voices for this disparate cast of characters. Apart from the indomitable, scheming, bidi-puffing Chitralekha, there is the closeted and literally buttoned-up Agastaya, whose lover Nicky shows up unexpectedly at the family reunion. There is Bhagwati, whose marriage to a lower cast Damaai has
Despite its musings on identity, Land Where I Flee is, at its heart, a tale of dysfunction, of what happens when we let the obsession with our past cast shadows over our future.
not been forgiven, and Manasa, the dutiful child resentful at being trapped into a burdensome marriage. The siblings’ tentative approach towards rapprochement with each other and their difficult grandmother is threatened by the verbal and emotional bombs launched by their youngest brother
Ruthwa, a failed writer trading off of the family secrets to make a name for himself. The complex identities forged by the various family members who have landed in various geographic and economic situations are expressed beautifully by Parajuly, who writes, “… citizen of the world? Not quite. Nepali-speaking Indian. Indo-Nepalese. Indian of Nepalese origin. Gurkhali or Gurkha or Gorkha—terms gaining rapid popularity to describe the Nepali in India, words embraced to chisel out our identity, to distance ourselves from Nepal. Old words with new meanings. Words not meant to confuse our ethnicity with our nationality. Hoping the association that comes from sharing our new names with those valiant soldiers doesn’t spawn a different kind of identity conundrum.” That search for and understanding of identity is perfectly encapsulated in the most colorful character of the book, Prasanti the eunuch who is both Chitralekha’s servant and dearest confidant. Her flamboyant acceptance of her fractured identity masks the same insecurity plaguing all the other characters, and it is she, ironically enough, who achieves the redemption that is denied the others as the book wraps up. Despite its musings on identity, Land Where I Flee is, at its heart, a tale of dysfunction, of what happens when we let the obsession with our past cast shadows over our future. Parajuly’s novel is therefore a deeply resonant work to even those who are unfamiliar with the history of Nepalese struggle. To Indian Americans in particular, each sharply etched character is likely to evoke a congruent memory of a family member. Parajuly’s characters are not particularly nice people, but they are profoundly human in their desires and sorrows and striving. We could imagine having exasperated conversations with each of them, and what more can a writer aspire to? n Vidya Pradhan is a freelance writer and a published author of children’s books. She was the editor of India Currents from June 2009 to February 2012. She hosts the popular Safari Quiz Show every Saturday on 1550 AM in the San Francisco Bay Area.
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 33
travel
Ten Days To Tirumala By K.P. Naidu
“
V
enkateswara, Yedu Kondala Wada, Govinda! ... Venkateswara, Lord of the Seven Hills, Govinda!” These are the only words I’ve allowed myself to utter as I climb the hills on the path from Tirupati to Tirumala. I’m finally fulfilling a promise I made thirty years ago. I promised to walk up the 9 kms (which includes 3,350 stairway steps) thirty times. About seven years ago I managed to complete ten of those walks. Now it was time to complete the remaining twenty. “Venkateswara ... ” I start from Alipiri, at the base of the first hill and the start of the a seemingly endless series of steps—2,083 of them—to the Namala Gopuram or Galli Gopuram as it is commonly known. This is where your resolve is tested. It is said that when you climb this first section of steps, the effort drives your sins out of you. My sins must have been many, because the first few days were certainly hard going. First, I must tell you about the ground rules I had set for myself. I had only tendays of vacation to spare, so I would climb the path twice a day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. I would walk barefoot and while I could stop for a sip of water and catch my breath, I would not sit down. I had to be on my feet from the start of the climb until I reached Tirumala. My daily routine, with minor variations, went as follows. I’d have breakfast and then
34 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
Gopuram of Tirumala temple
Approaching the temple
head to Alipiri to start the day’s first climb around 8.30 a.m. It usually took me around 2.5 hours to get to Tirumala. Once there, I would head to the temple for a short prayer from near the Coconut Hundi and then be driven back down the hill in a hired car. Once down in Tirupati I’d grab a quick shower, some lunch and take a short nap before heading out around 2.30 p.m. for the second
climb of the day. The staff at the Hotel Regalia at Ramanujam Circle in Tirupati made my stay very comfortable and looked after me like I was family. The staff was ever attentive and their care and attention helped me focus on the purpose of my visit. The food was fresh and very well prepared and the service was excellent. I had hired a car for the duration and Seenu, the driver, knew my routine. He had driven me around seven years ago when I did my first lot of ten climbs and I was fortunate that he was available to help me this time. Twice a day, he would drive me to Alipiri so I could start my climb and then head up the hills to wait for me at the end of the climb. He would then drive me to the temple so I could say my prayers and then drive me back down to the hotel where I was staying. The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) authorities mandate a minimum time of 40 minutes for cars to drive down the hill on the ghat road, which boasts 60 hairpin bends. Originally inaugurated in 1944 by the then Governor of Madras, Sir Arthur Hope, and used for traffic in both directions, the road is now used only for traffic coming down from Tirumala to Tirupati. A more recent, and less twisty road laid in 1974 caters to traffic going up. The steps and the path up the hills are made up of large, wide gray stone slabs anchored
with cement. They are slightly pitted, smoothed over the years by countless devout feet. They are not uncomfortable to my unshod feet, unaccustomed though they are to walking without shoes. The rises on the steps are covered with daubs of sandal and vermillion paste applied by devotees as they climb. For most of its length, the path has a metal railing dividing the path in two. There are little burnt patches in the middle of each step where the faithful have lit camphor tablets. The steps are covered with cement roofs for almost the entire length, except one section, just before the last 1,000 steps, where the path runs along the downhill ghat road for a short distance. There are worshipers who have made different vows going up and down the stairs. There are those, like me, who have made a promise to walk up to Tirumala. Some have made a promise to not only walk up, but also walk down on their return. While some people use footwear, most of the devotees walk barefoot. Some promise to daub every step with sandal and vermillion on their way up while others promise to light a camphor tablet on every step. There was a devotee I encountered on several mornings whose devotion made me feel very humble. I always saw him coming down the steps on hands and knees! I wondered how many times he had promised to do that. I am surrounded by a multitude of sounds along the way. There are the staff picking up rubbish and sweeping the stairs. The back and forth swishes of their brooms provides a beat to my steps and the rhythmic jingle of anklets of passing women provides a melodic counterpoint. Frequently some passing devotee will raise a chant— “Venkateswara, GOVINDA!” and most of the others within earshot will take up the chant. The TTD has fixed loudspeakers all along the route and there is a constant stream
of devotional songs, chants, and anxious messages for lost relatives or friends and announcements about darshan queue wait times. On one occasion, the wait time in the queue was 36 hours! Thankfully, I was spared that long a wait. My fellow path climbers are a diverse lot. There are college students, families, newlyweds and young couples, older couples and groups of friends or colleagues. There are also the pilgrims who have visited other temples or holy sites and have included Tirumala in their itinerary. The most noticeable are the pilgrims who have visited the Krishna Temple at Guruvayoor. Dressed all in black and barefoot, they stand out from the others. The conversations I pass through are in varied tongues—Telegu and Kannada and Tamil are most prominent, but there are liberal sprinklings of Hindi, Marathi, Bhojpuri and Bengali, and of course English. Various aromas and odors waft over as I pass. From the numerous shops perched alongside the steps, the smell of fresh idlis, dosas, sambhar and coffee drift down the stairs. There are vendors selling bananas, watermelon wedges and mango slices. Bhel puri vendors are sprinkled along the way, their baskets laden with puffed rice, tomatoes, onions, and other mysterious ingredients in jars and bottles. There are a dozen eateries just beyond the Gali Gopuram serving various tiffins. They provide a welcome respite for pilgrims who have climbed over 2,000 steps to get there. After the Gali Gopuram, the path becomes relatively easy. The first few days were hard, but after the fifth day, I was able to keep a quick, steady pace. During the afternoon, there are relatively fewer people on the stairs. Many monkeys live close to the path. They feed off the detritus left by passing pilgrims and have no fear of humans. Some of them can be quite aggressive and may at-
Tirumala footpath starting point
tack an unsuspecting pilgrim. The little ones chatter and play in the afternoon sun. Their screeches add to the general background noise. The steps have their own scam artists. I came across two different types of scams. The first goes something like this: a family, usually a couple and their two children, sit on the side of the steps. They accost me asking if I speak Telegu. I pause to catch my breath. I do not answer, but glance in their direction. One of them, usually the woman, immediately launches into her spiel. “We are pilgrims,” she says. “We lost our purse in the bus stand and now do not have money to return home.” She looks sad and briefly casts her eyes down and then swiftly raises them to cast a sly look at me. “Can you please give us some money so we can buy tickets to go home?” There is a calm calculating tone to her voice. I wipe my brow, murmur “Govinda,” and move on. Over the course of my trip, I encountered the same family on six separate climbs. Each time the spiel was the same. On the sixth occasion, the woman realized that I had heard the story before. Halfway into her “We lost our purse” plea her voice trailed off and she turned away. The second scam preys on people’s religious sentiment. A couple, dressed in white, their foreheads and arms daubed with sandal paste and vermillion would come up to walk alongside. One of them would carry a steel pot wrapped in a yellow cloth daubed with vermillion. “We are collecting money to put into the Hundi. Would you like to add your contribution?” Some of the passing pilgrims would reach into their bags or purses and pull out some notes and stuff them into the pot. Sinu, my driver told me that the police caught one couple. They admitted that they earned over 6,000 rupees (about $100) on
Tirumala: steps along the way June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 35
most days. On “slow” days, when there were fewer pilgrims on the stairs, they still managed about Rs. 3,000 (about $50) a day. Ten days and twenty treks later, I was ready to go into the temple to report to Lord Venkateswara that I had fulfilled the promise made all those years ago. The queue for the Rs. 300 ticket also allows NRIs (Non Resident Indians) like me to show their passports and enter the queue complex. I was assured that from this point, it would take only about an hour before I was in the inner sanctum. I bought my ticket and joined the queue. The crush of people was unbelievable. With my palms pressed together in front of me, I moved forward, almost carried by the pressing bodies around me. At times, I almost lose my footing, but the grip of the crowd around me kept me upright. There was eagerness, a sense of anticipation, at the prospect of shortly being able to catch a glimpse of the Lord. We were herded through a metal detector, similar to the ones used at airports, before being squeezed into a narrower passage. Govinda! A sense of calm descended over me. In the midst of a jostling, heaving crowd, it’s as if my churning mind had been soothed by a gentle touch. It’s as if I was moving forward in a soundproof cocoon. I fleetingly saw people around me, talking, chanting, shouting even, but I was oblivious to them
Statue of Hanuman, Tirupati
as I passed them. I climbed the last few steps into the golden enclosure, steps away from the inner sanctum. There were temple staff and volunteers on both side of the flow of pilgrims. Their only role was to pull pilgrims along and push them forward. Otherwise, the flow of the queue would come to a complete stop as devotees stood to pray to the Lord. I could see the image of the Lord. I took a
deep breath and stopped. The volunteer who was pulling and pushing people until then suddenly dropped his arms in fatigue. The entire queue stopped for about ten seconds. Everything went still for a moment, but it seemed like an eternity. I said my prayers. Just as I raised my head and opened my eyes the volunteer in front of me gently pointed and asked me to move forward. I thanked him and took a few steps. Suddenly, I was out of the sanctum and it was as if the crush had melted. There was no more pushing and pulling. Everyone was more relaxed. The sense of peace stayed with me. Almost in a daze, I walked out of the temple, through the queue to collect the prasadam and on to the adjacent building to collect my allotment of two laddus. I made my way slowly out of the temple complex back to Seenu and the car. With each step, it was as if a load had been lifted from my shoulders. I had not realized how much the unfulfilled promise had been weighing on my mind. I felt light. n K.P. Naidu is Director of IT Operations at Santa Clara County. Technology veteran living in the Bay Area for almost 20 years. I have traveled to 70 cities in 20 countries. I love baking and cooking for family and friends and riding my Can-Am Spyder motorcycle. I’m on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpnaidu.
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Seeking Kabir in Malwa By Jayaram Kalpathy
I
t was close to midnight as we made our way from Bhaklay village to the town of Maheshwar on the banks of the Narmada. We were at the Malwa Kabir Yatra—a week long annual event organized by Prahlad Singh Tipanya, a folk musician from Madhya Pradesh. There is a busload of folk musicians from Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, several young urban musicians and several diehard fans from around the world. All of us have been touched by Kabir’s songs and Prahladji’s music, and we travel around Madhya Pradesh, stop at a different village each night and celebrate by singing songs of Kabir all night long. We had come from all over the world, all inexplicably pulled to this place, to share a journey and to discover a little more about ourselves. The road to Maheshwar was little more than a narrow track. The bus, usually pounding with the beat of the dholak and a full chorus of voices, had gone quiet as we wound our way in the dark through the hills. Suddenly the bus stopped. Ahead was a small bridge, still under construction, with a bypass thick with mud from a heavy downpour earlier that evening. There was no question of going down the bypass, and trying to turn around would just as likely get the bus stuck in the mud. We were in the middle of a forest and the locals declared that there were enough wild creatures around to make walking a bad option. After much debate, everyone got out, gathered rocks and levelled the gap between the bridge and the road. I held my breath, wondering if the sharp rocks would result in a flat tire, but it didn’t seem to worry the driver. He stepped on the gas and the bus made it across unharmed. The next morning, we sat on the banks of the Narmada at Maheshwar, fresh from a dip in the sacred river, drinking in the cool morning air. Behind us rose the majestic Rani Ahilyabai fort and temple, changed little from the eighteenth century when Maheshwar was the capital of the Holkar empire. The Sahasrarjuna temple glowed with its eleven lamps. Legend has it that they have been burning since the time King Sahasrarjuna defeated Ravana, pinned him to the ground and placed 10 lamps on his heads and one on his hand. Mooralala Marwada, our fellow yatri and folk singer from Kutch, gave thanks for all of us with a soulful song, “Hamare satsang mein, hamare satsang mein,
38 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
With every word, abir opens your eyes and fills you with immense gratitude for everything you have in life. And then he grabs you by the shoulders, wakes you up and asks what you are going to do with this brief moment that is your life here on earth.
aavo Sri Bhagwan ki, hamare satsang mein” (In our gathering, grace us with your presence, O lord.) Later that evening, Mooralala-ji would keep a young crowd on their feet, dancing the evening away in Indore to a footstomping, heart pounding, rock concert like rhythm, “Vaari jaaon re, balihari jaaon re, mhara satguru aangan aaya, mein vaari jaaon re” (My true lord has come into my home—I am dancing with joy and surrender everything I have to him.) The crowd kept calling for more and he obliged and the concert didn’t end until well past midnight. I had first heard Prahlad Singh Tipanya in 2003, when Linda Hess, a Kabir scholar at Stanford, had brought Tipanya’s group on a tour of the United States. The music drew me in and then words pierced me to the core. “Shabd ki chot lag gayi” a friend remarked when I told her I couldn’t stop listening to his music. That’s Kabir for you. One of my favorite songs speaks to the presence of the universal spirit in everything on this earth. “Choron ke sang chori karta, badmashon me
bhedon tu, chori kar ke tu bhag jaave, pakadne vale tu ka tu” (You are a thief among thieves, a troublemaker among troublemakers, you steal and run away and the one who catches you is you too.”) Apart from the local Malwa musicians, the group included varied participants. There was Mooralala Marwada and Shankar, the percussionist, who had journeyed two and a half days from Kutch, near the Pakistan border, as well as a young English college girl, volunteering at Manzil, an NGO educating underprivileged kids in New Delhi. There was a group from Anhad Pravah, an NGO focused on building leadership skills among youth, Samarjeet, a young Sufi singer from Mumbai, accompanied by Durgaprasad, a versatile young tabla and flute player. Durgaprasad was a student of Hariprasad Chaurasia, who had run away from home to Mumbai to study music. Luniyakhedi village, Prahlad-ji’s home, was a special place for me ever since I heard him sing. Prahlad-ji welcomed me with a sandalwood tilak on my forehead. There was
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a big tent set up and by 7 p.m., several thousand people from the surrounding villages had started to gather. There was food for everyone—we sat cross-legged on colorful dhurries laid out in the open and were served a traditional meal. A simple dal was served with baati (baked wheat flour rolls soaked in a pot of ghee) and a fiery aloo sabzi, packed with red peppers freshly picked from the fields that you could see drying all over in colorful mounds. Outside the tent, a couple of vendors served a sweet cardamom tea in tiny cups under a hurricane lantern all night long. Moths buzzed around, drawn to the light, wanting to be one with it. One group after another sang late into the night. When I couldn’t stay up after 3 a.m., I turned to Devnarayan-ji and asked him how long it would go. “Until just after the sun comes up,” he said, “you see, people come here as the sun goes down and they don’t have a way to make it back home in the dark. So we keep them engaged by singing until dawn.” The next day found us at Sewadham Ashram near Ujjain and we were welcomed by Sudhirbhai Goyal, a bear of a man with a heart as large, who has taken in more than 300 destitute women, children and elderly and given them love, respect and a place to call home. As we helped give polio vaccines to the kids and fed chapatis and jaggery to the cows, Sudhir showed us his expansion plans for the ashram. “How do you fund it all?” I asked. “I just make the plans,” came the answer, “the lord makes it happen.” One morning, as we lazed around, Shankar, the percussionist, showed off his skills with a ghada-ghamela or earthen pot and an everyday aluminium basin, which looked like it had been used not too long ago to shovel dirt from the fields ... In his hands, they came alive and out poured a rhythm that had people on their feet. Samarjeet started teaching him a Sufi song and soon we had a ghada, flute and vocals jamming away. The audience got pulled into clapping hands to keep the beat and joining the chorus. These informal jam sessions were what the Kabir Yatra was all about—we’d crowd in a little room, under a tree or any place at all and the music would start—the rural and the urban all coming together, bound by the music, tossing aside any boundaries that existed earlier that may have kept us apart. That’s what the Anhad Pravah group was doing too—bringing college kids into spaces that force them to step outside their comfort zone and challenge them to break all the boundaries that shackle their thinking. They went from being spectators to participants, and taking the lead in whatever needed to be done. For many of the city youth, it was their first
taste of rural life—drawing water from a communal well for a bath out in the fields (you keep some clothes on), taking turns to serve food when you weren’t eating, and sleeping in communal quarters where you could whisper to your neighbor on either side. On the first night, I was feeling a little lost since the few people I know were the organizers and rather busy. But by the second day, after a few jam sessions and lots of singing on the bus, it felt like we had known each other for a long time. Oh yes, the bus! Each time we’d embark for the next destination, we’d get no more than a couple of minutes of quiet before the music started and wouldn’t stop until the bus did. The hours seemed to be gone in minutes and nobody was in a rush for the bus to reach its destination. The dholak would emerge and Kishen, son of Bhanwari Devi (who always sang with a veil over her face) would stand up and get everyone clapping to the beat. Samarjeet led from the front with a rip-roaring “Damadum mast kalandar” and Pritam and Mohanlal of the Mohan Barodia village bhajan mandli kept us true to the songs of Kabir with a “Sahib ne bhang pilaye re, akhiyon mein lalan chhayi”(I am drunk with the thought of my lord, my eyes see love everywhere.”) The aisle would be packed with people dancing and even Julia, the gray-haired horticulturist from Auroville, would be on her feet. I couldn’t help but sing along and soon was welcomed as an honorary member of the Mohan Barodia bhajan mandli. “Peekar pyala hua deevana, ghoom raha
hese are no gentle bhajans—they shout off the rooftops of the intimate, e plosive, soul-drenching love-fest with the universal spirit.
40 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
jaise matwala, Janam janam ka tala khul gaya, mere jyot lagi ghat mahi” (I drank from the cup till I was out of my mind, I wander about like a crazed one! The lock of many lifetimes has sprung open, a spark ignites, a light fills my body.) As we got off the bus at a village in Khargone district, we were mobbed by several thousand people who had come for the night’s program on a desert plateau under the stars. As friends of Prahlad-ji, we were greeted with the utmost love. You could feel it in the tilak placed on your forehead. In the cities, Prahlad-ji had touched many souls. In the village, he is god. I asked a local if he Prahlad-ji visited Khargone often. “Maybe once a year” he said, “but that’s fine. I have his bhajans on my mobile phone. When I wake up, I listen to them and before I go to bed, I listen to them again. He is with us all the time.” When I got off the bus for the last time, covered in dust and grime from all the travelling, I felt more cleansed than after my bath in the Narmada—cleansed from a week of sharing so much with fellow human beings who all accepted each other as their own. As I took leave of Ajay Tipanya, Prahlad-ji’s son, he summed up the spirit of the Kabir Yatra with this: “Yeh to bidaai nahin hain—ab ham sab to jud gaye hain” (This is not goodbye, now we are all one.) n Jayaram Kalpathy is a technologist from San Jose, CA. While he is not chasing bugs, he can be found searching for himself in his garden, on hikes in the woods, in music and on bumpy footpaths in India.
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 41
recipes
Creamy Happiness—Kesar Badam Kulfi By Jagruti Vedamati
I
t’s almost that time of the year, when the relentless sun and soaring temperatures make me reach out to an age-old, close to heart recipe. Long before we were spoilt by the plethora of ice cream choices in our freezer, a lot of us can remember looking forward to hearing the kulfiwallah (kulfi seller on a rolling street cart) screech out in the scorching summer afternoons. My earliest memories of this frozen milky delicacy date back to our luxurious summer vacations at my grandma’s place. Our cousins from all over the country would converge as soon as school let out. Fun, lots of food and unending frolic would ensue. Amidst giddying rounds of childhood games such as hop scotch, hide and seek, the hollering of the kulfiwallah on the streets would make us run to our parents begging for some (in fact any!) money. Moved by our incessant requests, our uncle would then invite the kulfiwallah to roll the cart into our courtyard as we literally drooled. Be it the fragrant,
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matki (earthen pot) filled with a mixture of ice and salt or the leaf that doubled up as the serving plate, all of it was so unique that I still remain captivated by it. This toothsome, luxurious frozen dessert holds a very special place in my heart. To this date, I could gladly give up all other ice creams as long as I could have kulfi. Such is my loyalty! For the uninitiated: kulfi stands apart from its numerous counterparts for its absolute velvety richness. I would say that it’s more like a gelato than an ice cream just for its sheer luxuriance. I have tried my hand at making kulfi many-a-times, but I have always wondered about the chewy texture of the store-bought ones. Mine never quite turned out like the one from the matki until I got this teeny-weeny secret. The last time I tried my hand at it, it was the same quick simple recipe but only with the slight glitch of being icy at the same time. The kulfi of my memories was supposed to feel very creamy as it melted in the
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Jagruti Vedamati is a post-doctoral student at Stanford University.
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mouth. So, ice was definitely NOT welcome. Hoping to achieve the perfect consistency, I started experimenting with some sort of a thickener into the milk base. Then, came the idea of adding some rice powder, a little at a time. When I was almost done with my saffron and almond kulfi, I thought “Why not add in almond powder too to intensify the flavor along with thickening the mixture?” Finally at the nth trial of the recipe with a several pounds heavier me, I had nailed it! It was creamy and smooth as well as toothsome. I couldn’t be any happier to have finally found the kulfi recipe for keeps. Here’s the no fuss-creamy-perfectly chewy and yes a winner-of-a-recipe for my beloved kulfi. No need to watch over the milk or fret over the consistency. Get it, mix it, cool it and let the magic begin! n
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e ar a a
Kesar Badam Kulfi
C
reamy and perfectly chewy with meltin-the-mouth texture, this typical Indian summer dessert is heightened with the richness of saffron, crunchiness of almonds and the earthiness of cardamom powder. A quick, easy and sure-fire way to earn brownie points from loved ones. Most importantly, guaranteed intense creaminess and no more icy crystals!
4. Whisk the milk mixture properly to ensure a smooth consistency. Heat it over mediumlow flame for 7-8 minutes until it thickens to the consistency of heavy cream. At this point, taste the mixture and adjust to desired sweetness. If you like the consistency, then take it off the stove and let it cool. 5. Pour the mixture into popsicle molds/ containers and put it in the freezer till frozen.
Ingredients (Servings: 10) 12 oz (1 can) evaporated milk 2 cups whipping cream 1 cup condensed milk ¼ teaspoon cardamom powder (optional) ½ cup slivered almonds ¼ cup warm milk ¼ cup milk at room temperature ½ teaspoon saffron strands 2 tablespoons rice flour 2 tablespoons almond powder sliced almonds and saffron for garnish
Helpful Hints:
Method 1. Soak the saffron strands in ¼ cup warm milk and keep aside. 2. Heat the evaporated milk in a pan (preferably non-stick) over medium heat until it comes to a soft boil and add the cream, condensed milk, saffron soaked in milk and cardamom powder. 3. In a separate bowl, whisk in ground rice and almond powder with ¼ cup milk at room temperature to make a smooth paste and add it to the heated milk mixture.
• raditional recipe If you plan to go the usual route, instead of heavy cream and evaporated milk, use 4 cups of whole milk and reduce it to 2 cups over low flame and consistent stirring. Then proceed with the rest of the recipe as stated. • or almond and rice powder mix in two tablespoons each of slivered almonds and basmati rice into a spice grinder to get a fine powder. If using whole almonds, soak the almonds to remove skin and make a paste. • I used one can of condensed mil since it seemed just right and anything more would take away from the richness. But if you like your kulfi sweeter, don’t shy away from adding more condensed milk. • Ice prevention tip wrap the edges of the kulfi mold tightly with plastic wrap to seal it completely. This helps prevent any ice formation during freezing. • I wish I had earthern pots for kulfi. They just add a different level of earthiness to this delicacy, which is absolutely beyond
compare.
Variations
Some of the other variations that can easily be substituted for saffron and almonds are 1. Spices: green or white cardamom (ground or pods for infusing the milk and removed before freezing), saffron, vanilla 2. Lavender flowers: for infusing the hot milk 3. Rose water: a few drops added before freezing, or for sprinkling on as a garnish before serving 4. Nuts: pistachios (chopped or ground), cashews (chopped or ground). All nuts that are used are usually unsalted, untoasted, or blanched. 5. Fruits: mango, lychee, banana, pineapple, apricots. Fruits are often pureed and stirred in before freezing or dried and chopped fine and stirred in before freezing, depending on the texture wanted. 6. Coconut: coconut milk is used, and also desiccated coconut 7. Lemon: use the lemon zest and add along with the pureed fruits. Well-equipped with this comforting recipe, I now have the confidence and the desire to take on the scorching heat. Here’s to sincerely hoping the sun to be a little gentler with us and yes, while licking that kulfi bar, make sure to avoid any distraction as it has a magical way of dripping past the elbow!
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 43
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My Tailor Nazi
A
by Raji Venkatesan
A Creative Commons Image by Tony Mitra
ny Indian woman who wears saris knows of the quest of this special relationship. For some, this quest is fulfilled very early in life. For some others, this is an eternal search. And yet others flirt around. This is the quest for the person who will become intimately familiar with the topography of your upper body. Not only do they begin to know every gradient at play, but have an intimate understanding of how your curvature vectors are evolving with time. The quest is to find a good “blouse tailor.” I have been fortunate to find one at the age of 16. I recall going into his shop as a giddy, excited high-schooler to get my first blouse sewed for my cousin’s wedding. My grandmother had decided that I was old enough to wear my first sari. It was an elegant gold Kancheevaram silk with maroon border. The “blouse-piece” was 70 cm of “two by two” coarse maroon fabric. Silk-cotton and silk blouses were rare or probably even non-existent then. “Nobles,” as we called him, took precise measurements in a little side room amidst piles of fabric under the watchful eyes of my mother. He made me two blouses for the wedding; the maroon round neck and a green high back one. “Nobles” has a reputation for not liking to be rushed. Hence in subsequent years after coming to the United States, I tried getting blouses made by other tailors on quick trips back home, but nothing seemed to feel right. So I found myself returning to the familiar Noble Tailors shop on 10th Cross, Malleswaram to pick up on our relationship. Mr. Gangadhar was delighted to see an old customer, and his eyes twinkled when I reminded him that he made my first blouse. He now has his older son helping in the business, but he continues to cut the fabric. Anyone who knows anything about sewing knows that it’s all in the “cut.” Each time, the father and son duo would try to
The eternal quest for a good “blouse masterji.”
convince me to get more adventurous with the necksline and designs of my blouse but I resisted. On this one visit, when his son was pressuring me to try some adventurous styles I looked pleadingly at the father for rescue and said, “You need the personality to wear those kind of blouses, don’t you?” I was not being self-deprecatory, but merely stating that “bling” is not me. He said back very kindly to me “Amma, what do you lack in personality?” They relented to my wish to make my regular round neck. Over the years, I would be surprised with an occasional square neck tucked in the middle of the stack of blouses that I would pick back from him. When I recently gave him a piece of Kalamkari patterned fabric and asked him to make a high back with a low front blouse, he laughed and asked “I will do it, but will you wear it?” As my daughter wears half-saris now, I am happy to be able to provide him an outlet for his creative ideas. He has found in her a willing recipient for the lattices, tassels, rhinestones and “what-have-you” that he always believed I should have tried, but has given up pushing on me. I also learned that he is “The Tailor Nazi.” When you enter his shop, you dare
not disturb him if he is in the middle of cutting or discussing a pattern with his assistant. You dare not take inferior material to him, as he will unhesitantly pick it with the tip of his fingers and put it aside saying “no need for this, amma.” When I receive compliments from my sari snob friends, I feel elated. But the ultimate is the stamp of approval from my dear old “Nobles” himself. At the end of each shopping spree, I land with bags and bags of saris at his shop. His son will open up each sari to cut out the fabric for the blouse. Mr. Gangadhar will pick up an occasional sari and look at me and say, “Amma, this sari is very good.” A thrill goes through me when I see his genuine appreciation. It has now been 34 years since I first stepped in to Noble Tailors. On my most recent visit, I left him with all of my blouse-pieces and told him to make them a tad looser than the “measurement blouse.” I went back after a few days with a different measurement blouse thinking this may have been a better one to give him. He told me that he had already cut my blouses, but asked what was different about this one. I said it was a bit looser and he replied that he had already accommodated it as per my original instruction. He then said, “Amma, you should not over-think. It will be fine.” And we then exchanged thoughts of how this is true for anything, not just tailoring. As I am well into my mid-life, I ruminate frequently on things that I wish for my daughters’ future. And amidst these wishes is my fond hope that my daughters, too, will form a special relationship with their tailor. A relationship based on good-natured comaraderie, emphazing high standards of quality and service, and one that will goad them ever so gently to take risks, and do so with kindness appropriate for a garment that is so close to their heart! n Software engineer, arts enthusiast and peopleobserver, Raji lives in Audubon, PA with her husband and two daughters.
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 45
events JUNE
California’s Best Guide to Indian Events Edited by: Mona Shah List your event for FREE! JULY issue deadline: Friday, June 19 To list your event in the Calendar, go to www.indiacurrents.com and click on List Your Event
Check us out on
special dates Memorial Day
June 21
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June 15
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June 18
Ratha Yatra
July 17
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July 4
CULTURAL CALENDER
June
6 Saturday
Hindustani Classical Music Concert.
Satish Vyas on santoor and Aditya Kalyanpur on tabla. Organized by The Music Circle. 6-9 p.m. Herrick Chapel at Occidental College, 1600 Campus Road, Los Angeles. $35 General; $5 students with ID. (626) 4496987. MusicCircle@aol.com. www.musiccircle. org.
June
7 Sunday
Jago Hindustani—A Program of Memorable Patriotic Songs. Organized
by The Shah Foundation. 6:30 p.m. Servite
46 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
Amjad Ali Khan in Concert, June 28
High School Auditorium, 1952 W. La Palma Ave., Anaheim . (562) 860-1135, (310) 7538990. krushmi@aol.com.
June
20 Saturday
Bharatanatyam Arangetram of
recommends Check out India
Enduring Traditions Currents online at
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T
athi Iyengar and Murali Mohan Kalvakalva Bharatanatyam dance by the Alliance for (India). A special performance Sadir, Past California Traditional Artists. “To celebrate Forward, is persented by guest artist and Ful25 years of producing and performing, we bright Nehru Fellow, Swarnamalya Ganesh. are presenting classics, guest performances Sadir is the name of the dance practiced and and exciting and compelling new choreoperformed by the hereditary dance practitiographic works and music,” Iyengar says. ners. In the medieval historical eras the sadir Swarnamalya Ganesh is a senior disciple dance was steeped both in temple, ritualistic of Guru Kalaimamani K. J. Sarasa and later © Copyright Indiasalon Currents. All rights trained under the ThiruvazaputhurKalyani tradition as well 2015 as social, traditions. reserved. commercial use Ganesh carriesReproduction forward notfor only their stories, granddaughters. From The Attic, is her strictly but also theprohibited. art of bharatanatyam as sadir. platform where she promotes performance, A garba performance choreographed by research and reconstructions of lost dance kathak exponent and long time Rangoli colforms. She aligns her own process as an laborator, Murali Mohan Kalvakalva, will be artiste and scholar to Sadir, the precursor featured. to Bharatanatyam. Her core areas of work The dances are performed to professionalare dance history—reconstruction and ethly recorded music by Rangoli dancers includnographic study. Apart from being a front ing Sheila Aula, Shivani Aysola, Vyshnavi ranking performer for many years, she has Aysola, Sanam Chalan, Lakshmi Iyengar, been working with the hereditary women Hema Iyer, Ritika Iyer, Deeksha Marla, Amiartistes, the Devadasis who were the custoya Prasad, Anya Prasad, and Akshaya Sekhar dians of the performing arts until mid 20th Malathi Iyengar is a Los Angeles based century. n choreographer, dancer, teacher, writer, and visual artist. Iyengar is a recipient of numerJune 27, 7 p.m. Electric Lodge, 1416 Electric ous awards for her choreographic works Avenue, Venice. $25, Donor & reserved $50. and is recognized as a Master Artist of rangolidancecompany@gmail.com. http:// Malathi Iyengar, Artistic Director of Rangoli www.rangoli.org. (818) 788-6860. o mark their 30th anniversary Rangoli Dance Company (RDC) will premiere acclaimed works from their repertory including Sacred Geometry. Guest artists join Rangoli dancers as they perform bharatanatyam classics and folk dances featuring new and traditional choreographic works by Artistic Director Mal-
Dance Company
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 47
events
California’s Best Guide to Indian Events
Katha: The Untold Stories of Kathak
T
Bharatanatyam Arangetram of Shrinithi Kalai, June 20
Shrinithi Kalai. Student of Malini Krish-
namurthi, Director of Natyanjali School of Dance. 4:30 p.m. Sophia B. Clarke Theater at Mt. San Antonio College, 1100 North Grand Ave., Walnut. Attendance by invitation only. kalai75@gmail.com.
June
27 Saturday
Enduring Traditions. Bharatanatyam
classics and folk dances by Rangoli Dancers featuring new and traditional choreographic works by Artistic Director Malathi Iyengar and Murali Mohan Kalvakalva. Organized by Rangoli Dance Company. 7 p.m. Electric Lodge, 1416 Electric Ave., Venice. $25, $50 donor and reserved. Rangoli.org.
June
28 Sunday
Sahara Community Walk. Yoga, Bolly-
wood zumba, lunch games, raffle draw and lots of other activities. 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Lakeside Shelter 5, Cerritos Regional Community Park, 19800 Bloomfield Ave., Cerritos. saharaorg.org.
Bharatanatyam Arangetram of of Bavani Sridhar. Student of Malini Krish-
namurthi, Artistic Director of Natyanjali School of Dance. 4:00 p.m. Sophia B. Clarke
48 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
his year, the Nrityodaya Academy presents “Katha: The Untold Stories of Kathak.” The production has four chapters: Raas, Harvest Festival, Around the World, and Qawwali. Each chapter encompasses a unique and creative flair to the centuries-old art of Kathak. The chapters of Harvest Festival and Around the World are performed as dance dramas, re-enacting their respective stories in a narrative form that use the rhythm, grace, and fluidity of Kathak as powerful storytelling means. Established in 1989 by Founder and Artistic Director Bhairavi Kumar, the Nrityodaya Kathak Academy, of Los Angeles is a sanctuary of the arts devoted to preserving the culture of Kathak dance and classical Indian art. Kumar began her formal training in the Institution of Pt. Nikhil Gosh under the guidance of Shivani Pandya, a Ghanda Bhandan shagrid of Pt. Lacchu Maharaji of the Lucknow gharana. Her training continued under Uma Dogra, disciple of Pt. Durgalalji of the Jaipur gharana. n
Bhairavi Kumar, Artistic Director of Nrityodaya Kathak Academy.
3891 West Temple Ave., Pomona. $25, $30, $35. (909) 630-8558. www.kathaksocal.com.
Theater at Mt. San Antonio College, 1100 North Grand Ave., Walnut. Attendance by invitation only. bavani628@gmail.com.
Katha, the Untold Stories of Kathak.
Directed by Bhairavi Kumar, Artistic Director of Nrityodaya Kathak Academy. The concert will feature four chapters: raas, harvest festival, around the world and qawwali. 5 p.m. University Theater at Cal Poly Pomona, 3891 West Temple Ave., Pomona. $25, $30, $35. (909) 630-8558. www.kathaksocal.com.
Amjad Ali Khan in Concert. Ac-
companied by Amaan Ali Khan and Ayaan Ali Khan on sarod, and Abhijit Banerjee and Vineet Vyas on tabla. Organized by bengali Association of Southern California. 7 p.m. Taylor Performing Arts Center, 845 W. Colorado Blvd., Monrovia. $35-$100. (626) 232-9778. sunetea_sen@hotmail.com. http;// home.bascweb.org.
© Copyright 2015 India Currents. All rights reserved. Reproduction for commercial use strictly prohibited.
Bharatanatyam Arangetram of Bavani Sridhar, June 28
SPIRITUALITY & HEALTH
June
7 Sunday
The Universe: God’s Cosmic Dream.
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.yogananda-srf. org.
June
14 Sunday
Meet Mata Amritanandamayi. Ends June 18. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Hilton Los Angeles Airport, 5711 West Century Blvd., Los Angeles. Free. amma.org/news/ammas-north-americansummer-tour-2015. Attuning Your Life to God’s Abundance. Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple
and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 6618006. 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. yogananda-srf.org.
June
16 Tuesday
Meditation Retreat with Mata Amritanandamayi. Ends June 18. www.amma.
org.
June
18 Thursday
Devi Bhava with Mata Amritanandamayi. Limited tickets distributed. 7 p.m.
Hilton Los Angeles Airport, 5711 West Century Blvd., Los Angeles. (3100 372-4000. www. amma.org/macla.
June
recommends
21 Sunday
Swami Tejomayananda’s Satsangs
T
he warmth and wisdom that the worldwide head of Chinmaya Mission Swami Tejomayananda bring to his satsangs needs no recounting. Now, Californians have an opportunity to experience it in person, when he conducts a week long gyan yagna on the subject titled Foster Your Freedom and drawn from chapter 4 of the Bhagavad Gita. “Guruji,” says Swami Ishwarananda, the head Acharya of CM Los Angeles, “brings to his talks the wisdom hidden in the words of Lord Krishna with his lucid style coupled with anecdotes, humor and over 40 years of experience in practicing spirituality. His devotion to God is so heart-warming and his bhajan stir every soul. His friendly demeanor makes everyone feel at ease whether he speaks in person or giving a discourse. We are fortunate to have him visit Southern California after a gap of over 5 years!” Other special events during the week will be the celebration of Swami Tejomayananda’s 65th birthday. Also, in memory and in celebration of the centenary year of the founder of the mission, Gurudev Swami Chinmayananda, a special Guru Paduka Puja will be held. Swami Tejomayananda has often stated, that as the head of the Mission, he has not stepped in his
The Father Aspect of God. Sunday Ser-
vice. 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.yogananda-srf.org.
June
28 Sunday
Spiritual Talks by Swami Tejomayananda. Talk on gyan yagna, Foster
Your Freedom, will be based on Bhagavad Gita Chapter 4. Cultural Presentation each evening, prior to the talk, featuring a cultural presentation. Ends July 4. Organized by
Swami Tejomayananda
Guru’s shoes but is in fact only at His feet. CMLA members can witness that humility as he leads the puja as well as participates in it. n Daily from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Chinmaya Rameswaram, 14451 Franklin Avenue, Tustin. www.chinmayala.org. Chinmaya Mission Los Angeles. 7-8:30 p.m. Chinmaya Rameshwaram, 14451 Franklin Ave., Tustin. Free. (714) 832-7669. gurujiyagna2015@gmail.com. www.chinmayala.org.
How You Can Talk With 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.
© Copyright 2015 India Currents. All rights reserved. Reproduction for commercial use strictly prohibited.
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 49
healthy life
When Should Kids Start Yoga? By Arundhati Baitmangalkar
I
t is common knowledge that yoga is great for adults. And millions around the world pursue this practice regularly. But is the practice only for adults? No! Yoga should ideally begin at an early age in one’s childhood so one can grow into a well-rounded individual and not come to yoga to fix issues with our body and mind later in life. I often wonder why we wait for so long to begin. Yoga is a gift that should be started early in life so one can reap the lifelong benefits of this ancient practice. There are some very important advantages to why yoga should begin when kids are young. The magical number is the age of 8. Adults combat stress in various forms in everyday life. Today’s generation of youth is as stressed as adults. They have to keep up with growing competition in schools and colleges, deal with peer pressure and the difficult stage of puberty, and not to forget stay involved in extracurricular activities, and meeting expectations of the family and teachers. For a kid or an adolescent this is a lot to handle. The benefit of yoga for children is something we should all learn about. The practice of yoga has a huge effect on the physical body and the systems that support it, like the nervous, respiratory, digestive system, etc. It greatly influences the emotional and behavioral aspect of children and adolescents. It has a positive effect on the mental state and aids creativity. Just like you prep the soil before you sow the seeds, one needs to prepare the mind. The mind assumes many stages. While it is generally felt that adolescents can be very difficult to influence, some are actually very receptive. Yoga can help transform the “quality of consciousness.” The quality of consciousness is good when one is aware and receptive and not so good if you find yourself lost in your own thoughts, unable to focus, absorb or retain information, poor memory etc.
The Role of the Pineal Gland
The pineal gland is located at the top of the spinal cord, and is very important 50 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015
to us. Millions of years ago, this gland played an active role in the development of the human brain. No wonder people before us had greater spiritual and psychic qualities and better control over their emotions than we do today. But with the passage of time, the pineal gland has started to degenerate. Today it is little more than a vestigial gland and we need to take adequate measures to protect it so that it does not disappear over the next generations. In yoga, the pineal gland correlates to what is called the ajna chakra, often referred to as the third eye or the super mind. This gland is very active in children, but by the time they turn 8 or 10 it starts to calcify and doesn’t really play a role in adult life. This is unfortunate, as in it is understood by yoga, to be the organ that controls and monitors the brain. When the pineal gland starts to degenerate, the pituitary gland comes in and emotions start acting up. This is the reason
why so many children become emotionally unbalanced and disturbed during their pre-adolescent and adolescent years. The balancing quality of the pineal gland keeps the whole brain receptive. Also the adrenal glands tend to be overactive in some children. The adrenal gland plays a very important role in a child’s moral behavior. Usually those with criminal tendencies have an overactive adrenal gland and yoga can regulate and bring balance.
The Three Channels of Energy
Ida, pingala and sushumna are three Sanskrit terms that are relevant here. Ida lies to the left of the spine and is your active breath while pingala is cooling and lies on the right of the spine. Sushumna runs through the spinal column. Having any blockages in these is what causes imbalance in the development of a child. The brain begins to suffer. When a child is classified as dull, it does not mean
that it’s a physical defect in the brain but the dullness is caused due to a deficiency of quantum energy to the brain. This is where pranayama can help. Circulation of prana is not important only for physical activities but also the activities of the brain.
At What Age Should Yoga Practice Begin?
In India, children traditionally have their thread ceremony (upanayanam), their initiation into religions practices, at the age of 8. At this age, children were introduced to sun salutations, nadi shodhana pranayama and the gayatri mantra. This age represents the end of childhood. This has now become apparent even to modern scientists who recognize that this is a crucial milestone for physiological and psychological development of children making a transition into adult life. Some of the facts that these scientists discovered are: • he number of air sacs stabilize at the age of 8. Until then they keep increasing. After the age of 8 they only grow in size and not in number. This is considered to be the ideal time to introduce pranayama into the daily routine for kids. This will help the cardiovascular and respiratory systems to maintain high levels of resistance and endurance throughout different stages of life.
• he health of the immunity system is established by the age of 8. The sun salutations and nadi shodhana pranayama ensure continual development of the immune responses throughout life. The pineal gland is responsible for maintenance of the child’s expanded state of
Usually those with criminal tendencies have an overactive adrenal gland and yoga can regulate and bring balance. awareness, devoid of sexual consciousness and role. Children who practice yoga in their eigth year experience a delay in their pubescence, thereby being a child for a little longer. This delay will help the child to be ready to cope with the physiological, psychological and emotional onslaught of puberty. Children who hit puberty a little later are
also found to be more intuitive, sensitive and intelligent adults than those who hit puberty quickly. Psychologists believe that kids’ ability to understand concepts and ideas which form the basis of ongoing technical and moral education begins at eight. Before this, fantasy and play are dominant in the child’s life. Spiritual development begins at this age. This is a great time to initiate children into karma yoga—where they begin to help in small household tasks, given some responsibility, taught morals and held accountable. This will help them develop their own spiritual journey. Children can grow and flourish with yoga. Swami Satyananda Saraswati has said “The destiny of the whole world depends on little children. If you want to see the silver lining on the horizon it is not you and me, but children who have to be spiritualized.” n Arundhati Baitmangalkar is an international yoga teacher, author and studio owner. She teaches classical hatha and vinyasa styles and runs her own yoga studio in Seattle. Her teaching style is simple with emphasis on alignment, breath coordination and awareness. She can be found at www.ahamyoga.com.
June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 51
dear doctor
Flustered During Difficult Discussions? By Alzak Amlani
Q
Recently, I had a difficult discussion with a relative about our views on family, politics and culture. We are both very interested in these topics and issues and there are areas we agree on and others we feel very differently about. I have a mixed reaction to engaging in these discussions. They are very interesting and help me get to know other people’s views and values, but I find them frustrating, scary and confusing. When a person is very good at reasoning, logic and communicating his arguments, I get flustered. Logically articulating my thoughts has never been my strong point, however, I am quite opinionated. I start to get intimidated and lose my confidence when confronted about my viewpoints. It’s like I lose my facts and feel that I got punched in the stomach. I don’t know why it affects me in such an emotional way and wish I could be a bit lighter about it.
A
Sounds like you are quite passionate about these topics and value direct
Ayurveda
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and honest engagement. This is a two-sided venture: 1) it’s engaging, stimulating and rich; 2) it’s risky, vulnerable, exposing what we think and emotionally taxing. Any good endeavor has a price to pay and requires a kind of risk. What’s so bad about that? It speaks to your aliveness and humanness. When we care about things and bring them into relationships and the world, we are bound to have a range of reactions from others. Taking their challenges and feelings less personally helps to not get so affected by them. It also sounds like you feel threatened and a bit beat up. Have you had difficult encounters earlier in your life with people through arguments? Are you exceptionally sensitive to criticism given the things that were said to you as a child or in school? Painful encounters as children where we felt overpowered by adults leave an imprint of shakiness and fear in us. Some people are organized more in-
tuitively and can access their emotional intelligence more than their rational-thinking mind. This is a harder way to be in a culture that values thinking more than feeling. However, intuitive knowing and having connection to our feelings is a great guide to more understanding. The key is trusting yourself more and finding the inner ground to stay connected to your voice, even if isn’t rationally thought through. Breathing, sensing your body and reminding yourself of your inherent value will help you ground. Finding your seat of comfort and knowing is the first step, then the other functions of thinking and reasoning will be easier. 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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All Services Are Free And Confidential Email: helpline@narika.org June 2015 | Washington D.C. | www.indiacurrents.com | 53
education
Minimizing Stress During the College Process
E
very year, as the admissions process starts, I meet with parents and high school seniors with the same anxieties, stresses and hopes as families from the years before. Undoubtedly, the admission process can be stressful. Applying to college has become irrationally complex and complicated. But there are some simple ways to minimize the stress.
1. Get on the same page.
The biggest mistake that I see families make is that each person thinks about this process in a vacuum, and with the belief that everyone else has the same goals, leading to confusion later. Parents and children should sit down and talk about the colleges that make sense, what major or program is ideal and realistic, cost and financial aid, and any fears and concerns. It might be a hard conversation to have, but it is better to do it before diving into the admissions game.
2. What is the goal?
It is so easy to get wrapped up in the
By Purvi Mody craziness of the process, to focus on just the brand name of a college and to want to collect admissions offers. But take a step back to remember that the singular purpose of admissions is to find a college for your almost-adult where he will thrive, prepare for a career and life, succeed, be challenged, and be fulfilled. Focus on the child, not the college.
3. Keep expectations realistic yet ambitious.
This is a fundamental tenet in our office. We should always encourage our youth to stretch beyond what is possible, to push themselves, and to deal with and learn from failure. With this mind, students should apply to their dream colleges, but not just their dream colleges. They should apply to the best schools for them that span the spectrum of difficulty of admissions.
summer is the perfect time to research and visit colleges, draft essays, and secure recommendations. A few well-spent hours every week will go a long way.
5. Roll with the punches.
The admissions process is relatively straightforward. You must plan for errors, learn to deal with different personalities, get comfortable managing others, and know that overcoming obstacles is a must. You will survive the admissions process minimally scathed and incredibly empowered. You will learn about your own goals and dreams. You will be able to better articulate what is most important to you. You will find this process is as enriching as it is rewarding. But in preparation of this very important step, a large dose of focus and planning will make all the difference. n
4. Get organized early.
Purvi Mody, the founding partner of Insight Education, has more than 17 years of experience as an educational and college admissions counselor.
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Happy Father’s Day from
INDIA CURRENTS India Currents is a monthly publication which explores the heritage and culture of India as it exists in the U.S. The magazine covers a wide range of subjects—politics, arts, literature, travel, even recipes. The magazine is published in three print editions as well as online, reaching over 172,000 readers every month.
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the last word
An Ode to Wives Who Rule The Yoko Ono mystique By Sarita Sarvate
N
him for the trappings of a traditional image. ow that the election season is here again, I cannot help Yoko Ono is a different entity altogether. I am intrigued by her thinking of Hillary Clinton and what it means to be a because she is an Asian woman who managed to carve out a radiwoman, a wife, a mother. I start thinking of the powercally unconventional life for herself, both professionally and perful women I know of. There is Arundhati Roy, who famously sonally. What is even more refreshing is that she did not seem to declared that she did not need a man to take her out to dinner; give a hoot about what people thought. She did not cater to public she had made her own millions from her book. There is Vandana opinion; nor did she become defensive when attacked. Even toShiva, the environmental activist, who is not afraid to challenge day, it is really touching to see videos of John Lennon jumping to American agribusiness. There is Rachel Carson, who brought Yoko’s defense while she sat there, saying little. about the birth of the American environmental movement. But Yet there is something bewildering about Yoko. You can call it these women I admire and worship mainly because of their conthe witch factor. “What did John Lennon see in her?” is a questributions to humanity. I do not dwell on their personal lives. tion that forever refuses to die. There is a magical quality Then there are women I am curious about, mainly beabout Yoko. Her assets and attractions are hidden cause of their associations with famous men. Such women “What underneath the surface. I sense that she is a deeply include Hillary Clinton, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the psychological person; she knew how to read a bewildering yet enigmatic Yoko Ono. For the life did John Lenman and how to keep him. of me, I cannot figure out what makes these women non see in her?” is Now, decades after John Lennon’s death, tick. Yoko is having her own show of conceptual art I can imagine feminists protesting just about a question that forat the New York Met. But Yoko is more than the now that these women are or could have been sum of her parts. She is unknowable; unfathomsuccessful in their own rights. That may very well ever refuses to die. able. She is the ultimately mysterious, alluring, be true. The trouble is, we will never know what There is a magical unreachable woman. Which is perhaps why John their lives would have been like had they not been fell in love with her. Men love a woman they married to their husbands. Their legends consist quality about Yoko. cannot possess. And Yoko is unpossessable. mainly of their famous marriages. I want to interview Yoko; ask her what her Of these three, it is easiest to forgive and adHer assets and atsecret is. I am jealous of her because she doesn’t mire Eleanor Roosevelt for her life choices. After tractions are hidcare what you think; she follows her own heart all, she came of age at a time when women did not and head. have careers. Nor did First Ladies pursue causes, den underneath The difference between Hillary and Yoko is proselytize the masses, or get a divorce. Eleanor that Hillary had the courage to stick with Bill, but the surface. faced difficult challenges like her husband’s infidelity, not to let him go. Yoko had the guts to do both. yet carved out a leadership role for herself with courage Feeling stifled by John, she let him go to Los Angeles and creativity. with another woman in 1973. Eighteen months later, he Hillary, on the other hand, grew up at a time when returned. But even if he had not, it is clear that Yoko would women were beginning to enjoy academic and professional have been just fine. She was unconventional enough and strong opportunities. A commencement speaker at her Wellesley graduenough to not worry about how it looked. ation, she may well have been successful in her own right, had she It is this characteristic that makes Yoko Ono a powerful not met Bill Clinton at Yale Law School. woman. She is able to let go; she is able to dig deep into her own What is maddening about Hillary is that she exudes an aura of inner strength. She is able to give her all to a relationship without unhappiness. She is a woman who has everything and yet nothbecoming dependent on it. ing. It is this paradox that intrigues people, makes them want to We women need to emulate these qualities if we are to have peek inside her soul. But any effort to do so is always met with peaceful, fulfilling lives. If we are to rule the world. n resistance. She has built up so many layers of defenses that her instinctive response when questioned is to attack. When a reporter recently asked her about contributions to the Clinton FoundaSarita Sarvate (www.saritasarvate.com) has pubtion, for example, instead of giving a straightforward answer, she lished commentaries for New America Media, blamed the whole thing on the Republicans. KQED FM, San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland I sense that Hillary is conflicted about her life; that the femiTribune, and many nationwide publitions. nist part of her wishes that she had not tolerated the humiliations Bill has put her through while the politician in her clings on to
56 | INDIA CURRENTS | Washington D.C. | June 2015