March 2014 by India Currents

Triumph of the One Percent by Sarita Sarvate

Say Shalom to Latkes by Praba Iyer

INDIA CURRENTS

march 2014 • vol. 27, no . 11 • www. indiacurrents.com

A new generation reclaims a revolutionary past By Anirvan Chatterjee

Freedom Subtracted 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 (408) 324-0488 x225 Managing Director: Vijay Rajvaidya md@indiacurrents.com Editor: Jaya Padmanabhan editor@indiacurrents.com (408) 324-0488 x226 Events Editor: Mona Shah events@indiacurrents.com (408) 324-0488 x224 Advertising Manager: Derek Nunes ads@indiacurrents.com Northern California: (408) 324-0488 x 222 Southern California: (714) 523-8788 x 222 Marketing Associate: Raj Singh marketing@indiacurrents.com (408) 324-0488 x221

“Freedom is indivisible,” said John F. Kennedy, “and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.” The politics of freedom has bedeviled statesmen and leaders from Nehru to Lincoln and Gandhi to MLK. Freedom, then, was to do with the enslavement of African Americans in America; of the attempted extinction of Jews in Europe; of the fragmentation of Indians in India; and of the secessionist struggles in many parts of the world. These days, freedom is about rights, protections and entitlements of citizens and legal immigrants. What about the rights and liberties of those “dreamers” who entered the country illegally? Should they have constitutional privileges? Should they be granted the freedoms that other residents enjoy despite their illegal status? Many Republican speeches center on the theme of encroachment when it comes to immigration. “Immigration. Enough is Enough.” is the title of The American Freedom Party article on the subject. Freedom, it seems, is the heritage of those who came earlier, those ahead and beyond the assimilation line. Hidden within the immigration rhetoric, is the grammar of freedom. It has always

been about value, price and advantage. Even when it was about the immorality of slavery, it was also about the economic advantage of free labor. When talking about immigration reform, it is important to consider rights that are due all individuals on the basis of humanity, despite their legal status or which country they came from. I believe that the immigrant spirit is one in chaos—putting on hold the familiar, redefining identity, employing a new language and absorbing a varied culture—and the undocumented immigrant spirit is one in crisis. While the 11.5 million undocumented immigrants (240,000 Indians in that number, as per 2011 Department of Homeland Security figures) do not take part in the electoral process, they must, on humanitarian grounds, be allowed freedom of access to health care and education. These are fundamental freedoms that promote physical, moral and intellectual progress. Freedom should not be a commodity that is easily subtracted from the equation when the economics don’t add up.

Jaya Padmanabhan

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INDIA CURRENTS march 2014 • vol 27 • no 11

PERSPECTIVES 1 | EDITORIAL Freedom Subtracted By Jaya Padmanabhan

Southern California Edition www.indiacurrents.com

Find us on

6 | FORUM Do We Relax Environmental Regulations During Drought? By Rameysh Ramdas, Mani Subramani

15 | OPINION Rain, Again By Dilnavaz Bamboat 16 | YOUTH Standing on the Bridge By Nimi Jayachandran 18 | VIEWPOINT Sorry, John Hancock By P. Mahadevan 30 | SCIENCE Eclipse Predictions in Ancient India By Krishnamachar Sreenivasan 31 | ON INGLISH A Raja’s Pearl By Kalpana Mohan

28 | FINANCE On Reserve By Rahul Varshneya

10 | Rebel Legacy A new generation connects to Ghadar history By Anirvan Chatterjee

34 | Films Gunday and Hasee toh Phasee By Aniruddh Chawda, Madhumita Gupta

64 | THE LAST WORD Chia Seeds, Psyllium Husk and a Blender By Sarita Sarvate 2 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

36 | Commentary Why Oscar Doesn’t Go To India By Monojit Lahiri

42 | CURRENT AFFAIRS Preet Bharara Nabs Another By Sandip Roy 60 | DESI VOICES The Fundamental Feminist By Ranjani Iyer Mohanty

20 | BOOKS A Review of Cowboys and East Indians, The Elephant’s Friend By Anita Felicelli, Tara Menon 23 | RELATIONSHIP DIVA Long Distance Doubts By Jasbina Ahluwalia

7 | A THOUSAND WORDS Closely Watched Things By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan 8 | ANALYSIS Phobia and Philia By Prabhakar Putheti

LIFESTYLE

63 | DEAR DOCTOR Spiraling into Negativity By Alzak Amlani

DEPARTMENTS 4 | Voices 5 | Popular Articles

56 | Recipes

26 | Ask a Lawyer 27 | Visa Dates

Say Shalom to Latkes

61 | Classifieds 62 | Viewfinder

By Praba Iyer

WHAT’S CURRENT 46 | Cultural Calendar 50 | Spiritual Calendar

Saturday, March 8, 2014, 8 PM The Toronto Brothers Ashwin Iyer and Rohin Iyer Karnatic vocal with Rajna Swaminathan - Mridangam Venue: Herrick Chapel Occidental College Los Angeles, CA 90041

Admission: $35 Gen., $25 Basic Members, FREE Sustaining Members, $5 Child., $5 Students w/ID Karnatic musicians Ashwin Iyer and Rohin Iyer, known as the Toronto Brothers, are senior disciples of veteran musician and musicologist S.R. Janakiraman. The brothers were initiated into classical music early on by their parents and formally introduced to Karnatic music in 1989 when they began taking lessons under Toronto-based teachers. They have also had advanced training under T. R. Subrahmanyam and T. K. Govinda Rao. Rajna Swaminathan is an accomplished mridangam artist. She is a disciple and protĂŠgĂŠ of mridangam maestro Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman. Rajna is one of only a handful of female mridangam artists in the world.

Saturday, April 5, 2014, 8 PM Kala Ramnath (Violin) & Abhijit Banerjee (Tabla)

Venue: Herrick Chapel - Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041 Admission: $35 Gen., $25 Basic Members, FREE Sustaining Members, $5 Child., $5 Students w/ID Kala Ramnath was born into a family of prodigious musical talent, which has given Indian music such violin legends as T.N. Krishnan and N. Rajam. Abhijit Banerjee studied tabla with Tushar Kanti Bose, Manik Pal and finally with Gyan Prakash Ghosh. March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 3

voices In the Context of Anger

The February cover story by Anita Felicelli (Mad, Mad World, India Currents, February 2014) is an interesting analysis of expressions of anger in two different contexts: in the public primarily twitter-based social context in the United States and in the private south asian immigrant context. These are two very different factors at work and different ways in which people in these contexts process anger. Perhaps the same person resorts to different strategies depending on the context? Who knows what psychic schism that leads to! There are probably different prescriptions, if there be such, for the two contexts,too. Thanks for a thoughtful examination of a prevalent phenomenon of the day. Vijay, online

On Khobragade

Sandip Roy’s article (Why the United States Emperor Has No Clothes, India Currents, February 2014) is typical of the Indian government, people and the media—It is all the fault of the United States of America. How strange that they forget there was another Indian citizen involved in this case who is totally forgotten probably because she is not a “dalit” and does not belong to any vote bank. Roy had the audacity to suggest that Khobragade deserves a pardon from the United States President! Both sides made fundamental flaws. The United States didn’t expect the huge Indian emotional backlash. The Indian government ignored numerous communications on the issue prior to the arrest assuming nothing was going to happen anyway. Khobragade was one more trophy for Preet Bharara and nothing more. I’m sure Bharara wouldn’t have arrested Khobragade if it had been the Consular Officer of Israel. The villain in this case is Uttam Khobragade, Devyani Khobragade’s father. He used his daughter’s plight to further his own political advantage in India. He wanted to be a Member of the Parliament (MP) and for that reason didn’t hesitate to tell the media that his daughter was subjected to a “cavity search” when in fact she had not been. I hope Devyani Khobragade’s husband and children can make the transition and live happily ever after in India. Uttam Khobragade has amassed such wealth that probably the next several generations need not work but as we all know, you can’t buy happiness. Subru Bhat, Union City, CA Regarding Sandip Roy’s article (Why the

4 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

United States Emperor Has No Clothes, India Currents, February 2014), in one sense Shiva Keshavan, the Indian Olympian, is right, a thief can not protest his conviction on the grounds that some other has gotten away with it. One troubling aspect with the Devayani episode is that you can take an Indian out of India, but you can’t take India out of her. Submitting false documents or outright lies in applications is at the fine arts level in India. Many Indians take that skill outside of India. It may fit in many parts of the world, but then again, it may not. This is a lesson for Indian diplomats. India has a serious national security problem. Almost all diplomats and service chiefs make the jump into the green card swamp as soon as they retire from their Indian posts. All of them wind up working in some form or the other and spill the beans from their past lives. The United States knows every minute detail of Indian diplomatic and domestic secrets. India is not alone in this mush. Most other third world countries are also in line. So, my question is how to not salute the Emperor whether he is dressed or not? Sam Channar, online Rameysh Ramdas, the forum columnist (Should India Have Backed Down in the Khobragade scandal? India Currents, February 2014) is right. We Indians still suffer from the colonial mentality—worship the Gora (Rich, Powerful) but screw the Desi (Poor, Weak). Also, neither illegal nor immoral acts can be justified just because bigger scoundrels walk free. This is not the first incident involving Indian diplomats. Mohammed Shoaib, Anaheim, CA

Cleaning Up

I was impressed by Zenobia Khaleel’s article (Coastal Cleanup, India Currents, February 2014), which reminds us about the importance of keeping our oceans free of pollution and the good work many volunteers like Rihanna Razack do.

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.

As a follower of the over 4,500 year old religion founded by His Holiness Prophet Zarathushtra (ancient Greek philosophers called him Zoroaster) I am duty-bound to keep all of our environment clean. Similar to Hinduism we have prayers of praise for all of God’s creations. In my own small way, when I go to the beach, I pick up plastic bottles and other things lying on the beach, and put them in garbage cans so recyclers can collect them. Once, a family that was leaving their site without picking up their garbage, observed my efforts and were induced to follow my example. The Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council organizes an annual event called Blessing of the Waves, attended by many surfers, local community leaders and general public at which representatives of different faiths share their belief in preserving the purity of our oceans. I recite a few verses from our prayer in praise of the waters. We can all do our bit to preserve the environment, and contribute to the education and support of our communities by setting an example. Maneck N. Bhujwala, Huntington Beach, CA

Online Notes of Appreciation

Sarita Sarvate (Of Gods and Faith, India Currents, December 2013) has this golden touch with simplicity where a complex emotional situation becomes untied for the reader. Mozzam Sheikh I always enjoy Jeanne Fredriksen’s book reviews. I especially like the questions that she asks the author. They are insightful and add so much to the article. B.J. Becker I loved the threads of family and history and future described by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (Mrinalini’s Mississippi, India Currents, February 2014). Beulah deserves her own piece! Dilnavaz Bamboat I have been reading Ragini’s column for years, but this one (Mrinalini’s Mississippi, India Currents, February 2014) I read and re-read. It was a treat for the soul. Matangi Rajamani What beautiful thoughts expressed by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (Mrinalini’s Mississippi, India Currents, February 2014). And I would love to hear more of the story of Beulah! Cortnay

India Currents is now available on the Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/IndiaCurrents/dp/B005LRAXNG Follow us at twitter.com/indiacurrents on facebook.com/IndiaCurrents Most Popular Articles Online February 2014 1)Mrinalini’s Mississippi Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan 2) A Flood of Memories Rajee Padmanabhan 3) Crushed by the Juggernaut Kalpana Mohan 4) Magic of Machu Picchu Riz Mithani 5) The One Percent American Girl Vibha Akkaraju

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7) Chia Seeds, Psyllium Husk and a Blender Sarita Sarvate 8) Why the United States Emperor Has No Clothes Sandip Roy 9) Should India Have Backed Down in the Khobragade Scandal? Rameysh Ramdas, Mani Subramani 10) Aziz Ansari: Comedy and Commentary Apurva Desai • Easy access to our current content and decade-old archives of diverse articles • Special web-only articles and videos • Digital issue of the magazine • Interactive event listings • Advertising access to a niche high-value segment of the community • Comments highlighted on home page • A full color experience • RSS feeds and newsletter subscriptions

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forum

Do We Relax Environmental Regulations During Drought?

Yes, a practical solution should be found

No, short term solutions are not the answer

By Rameysh Ramdas

By Mani Subramani

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

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

alifornia is reeling from the worst drought in modern history with an estimated economic loss of over $5B this year in agriculture, including milk production. California, the 12th largest economy in the world, is blessed with fertile soil and a climate that produces nearly half of our nation’s fruits, nuts, vegetables, and dairy, besides being the largest domestic source of wine. Agricultural exports, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, exceeded $18 Billion in 2012. While the lack of adequate rainfall the past three years and inadequate storage facilities are obvious reasons for the drought, overzealous and militant environmentalists in California have exacerbated the problem. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is the single largest source of water in our state but our farming communities have been denied much of this water. A three-inch fish, the delta smelt, has been at the center of the water debate, since the Obama administration invoked the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 2009 to require diversion of water for preservation of the smelt and less use of the pumps to distribute the water south. According to the Pacific Legal Foundation, more than 81B gallons of water have been wasted due to these regulations—enough to cultivate 85,000 acres ... more than 81B gal- of farmland. The irony is that evidence to justify the inlons of water have been clusion of the smelt in wasted due to [the Del- the ESA is debatable. In by Scott Learn ta smelt] regulations— ain piece The Oregonian, Garth enough to cultivate Griffin, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric 85,000 acres of farm- Administration (NOAA) researcher, concedes that land. “smelt populations are unpredictable” and questions the smelt’s classification as endangered. In a rare act of proposing sound policy, the House Republicans from California have unanimously introduced a bill H.R 3964 that would require the amount of water to be at the 800,000 acre-feet level required by the federal law. The Democrats are vehemently opposed to these proposals; including Governor Brown’s to build gigantic tunnels to facilitate the export of the delta’s water. No right thinking person would argue against preserving and protecting nature and its creatures, both big and small, besides the air we breathe. However, such measures cannot be at the cost of people’s livelihoods or food supply. We have got to extend the boundaries of science to achieve reasonable environmental protections while still ensuring sustainable economic growth and prosperity. It would also be prudent to relax onerous environmental regulations temporarily to deal with the drought now. Practical middle of the road solutions is what is needed to solve our water woes, not extremist and purist ideological rigidity. Sadly, the Democrats have refused to seize the middle road on this issue and surprisingly, the Republicans have. n

6 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

ater wars in California are at least a 100 years old. The Central Valley project was a Depression Era canal system built to bring water to irrigate and grow crops. There have been many environmental battles fought since then. One such is the Mono Lake (a lake in Mono County, CA) drainage caused by water diversion from the lake which caused severe habitat destruction. This was finally halted in the late 1970s by legal action. Since then the lake water has risen 13 feet and on the way to the legally mandated 20 feet. This slow process indicates the irreversibility of decisions made for short sighted gains with no thought to sustainability. The latest in these wars is the delta smelt. This once abundant species is declining “due to record-high water diversions, pollutants, and harmful non-native species that thrive in the degraded delta habitat.” In 2007 during surveys conducted in the delta, too few fish were found indicating that the species was near extinction. This is a warning that other native species is on the decline. According to the Los Angeles Times, “twenty-nine known species once called the delta home” and twelve of those are extinct. Protectionary efforts will only marginally affect Central Valley land that is reeling under drought. Due to the lack of pure water from rain, the Protectionary efforts state faces the huge issue of salination of the land would only marginally which renders it fallow affect central valley over a period of time. One primary cause for land that is reeling unsalinity is water pumped through canals and pipes der drought. from the rest of the state. Such water carries salt with it which remains permanently in the soil as the water molecules evaporate through transpiration or evaporation. While the benefits of the canals built in 1930 and since have been reaped by the farmers and the state’s economy, longer term issues like salination and depletion of aquifers etc. have been ignored. At the end of it all when the farms pass down from generation to generation they do so tax free, thanks to the estate tax laws that farmers, among others, have lobbied to enact. Such a cradle to grave subsidy system has perhaps trained the small group of about 64,000 farmers and families into politicizing their issues rather than trying to find sustainable solutions. An oasis in this desert of reason can be found in Panoche district, where a San Francisco based company is using the Sun’s energy to desalinate drainage water into pure water at half the cost of traditional desalination plants. By using salty water from fallow land the solar arrays separate the salts from pure water that can be used for irrigation and human consumption while ridding the soil of the salts. While the water generated is about 60% more expensive than the highly subsidized Central Valley projects water it comes with no salts attached. Perhaps it is time for the Central Valley to get on the path of sustainability and pull a Silicon Valley!n

a thousand words

Closely Watched Things By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

hen you were a child, when people still asked what you wanted to be when you grew up, what did you say? Did you want to be famous? And when you pictured fame, what did it look like? Was it the quality of being admired, talked about, and eulogized? Was fame attended by riches? Did it signify a worthy life? Most of us, I’d wager, want to be known for the work we do, to be recognized and maybe even celebrated for what we’ve achieved in our respective fields. But we also realize early on in life that we are not going to be Shah Rukh Khans and Arundhati Roys; we will not be fodder for New York Times’ headlines; we will not sit courtside with Jay-Z; we will not fly in Air Force One. We may have fifteen minutes of fame, but for the most part we will reside far away from the velvet-floored halls of celebrity. We hope that when we die we will be honored by our near and dear, our families and friends, our worlds, in other words, if not by the world at large. We make peace with that, and still we strive for excellence in the lives we are leading. Or at least, that’s how it used to be. Ordinary people were content to be ordinary. A full life could be lived outside of the spotlight. Nowadays, celebrity is common. It’s easy to become famous, almost harder not to be, and differently intolerable. Newspapers publish so much and so often that being featured or interviewed by one is less a distinction than a requisite of societal membership. Everyone is read, not just writers. Everyone is overexposed, not just movie stars. In the 2012 bestseller, How Should a Person Be?, Canadian author Sheila Heti offered this response to her titular question: “How should a person be? ... I can’t help answering like this: a celebrity … as famous as one can be, but without changing anything. Everyone would know in their hearts that I am the most famous person alive—but not talk about it too much. And for no one to be too interested in taking my picture … No one has to know what I think … and no one has to know the details of my life … It is the quality of fame one is after here, without any of its qualities.” Should a person be … a celebrity? Taken at her word, Heti’s seemingly flippant response to a rather serious question actually gets at something important about the complexity of fame. On the one hand, the famous person is in everyone’s “hearts.” She is recognized by the world, seen, legible; more to the point, she is the subject of care, attention, and love. When Princess Diana died, the world grieved. When Malala Yousafzai lived, the world rejoiced. On the other hand, the famous person is subjected to tremendous indignities in the form of paparazzi that “take her picture,” psychologizing journalists who seek to “know what she thinks,” and even the likes of the Wikipedia biography, hungering for “details.” A person should be regarded, Heti is saying, a person should be recognized by the world, but she should also be left alone. She should be appreciated, without being apprehended. We should each have “the quality of fame” of being larger than life, but without being daily reduced into objects of scrutiny. An impossible dream? Ironically, each of us now has all of the bad stuff that typically attends fame without any of the fundamental human regard that is probably the only worthwhile thing about being famous. We have the intrusions into our privacy, largely self-inflicted, as

Children of the 21st century won’t wonder if they’re going to grow up to be famous. They’ll wonder how they can wrest back the stories of their lives from the clutches of the celebrity machine. we publicize our movements and doings on the latest social network. We have the burden of hearing our lives narrated while we’re living them, whether in the blogs we write or the comments and appraisals we solicit. And we tend to observe even our own actions from the remove of a photographic lens, whether literally through cell-phone camera or thanks to that anxiety-producing split subjectivity that seems to be our shared modern condition. It’s little wonder that the Oxford Dictionary chose “selfie” as the word of 2013. The new challenge of adulthood is not to quell our lingering, childhood dreams of fame while reconciling ourselves to our anonymous, human lives, but rather to stay out of the spotlight, to preserve our privacy, interiority, and silence at all costs. I think about this when I’m posting yet another picture of my daughter on her personal Tumblr, an excessive and exuberant photographic record of her life, one I keep entirely for the benefit of her doting grandparents, great-grandparents, and uncles, despite my significant reservations about the intrusive cataloging of her adventures in banana-eating and toe-sucking. At not-even ten months of age, she is already being seen, followed, shared, and commented on. I have plans to stop posting photos when she turns one, but will it be too late? Children of the 21st century won’t wonder if they’re going to grow up to be famous. They’ll wonder how they can wrest back the stories of their lives from the clutches of the celebrity machine. I once proposed in these pages that being questioned is like being tortured. I think the same is probably true about being famous. It’s not all backstage passes and glowing reviews; it’s more like the rack and the screw. Rather than gaining an exalted vantage on life, today’s celebrity must give herself up to the world to be taken apart, tweeted, followed, imitated, imaged, and ventriloquized. No matter her life’s work, she is easily shaken by the vagaries of public opinion. It’s no wonder that genuinely famous people all around us are imploding under the burdens of their too closely watched lives. In the words of poet Kay Ryan, “A too closely watched flower / blossoms the wrong color. / Excess attention to the jonquil / turns it gentian. Flowers / need it tranquil to get / their hues right. Some / only open at midnight.” n Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 7

analysis

Phobia and Philia The disfavor and infamy of the number thirteen By Prabhakar Putheti

n February 13, 2009, a close friend of mine got married. I had wondered why anybody would get married on the 13th. This infamous number is least preferred for auspicious occasions. History has shown us many examples. The thirteenth person in the Last Supper was a traitor, and so Jesus was caught and crucified; if 13 could lead to God’s own man’s death, how much risk do we carry? I had always stayed away from anything associated with the number 13. I didn’t know that I was suffering from a condition termed Triskaidekaphobia, or fear of number 13, until I came across this tongue-twister in the Oxford dictionary. My condition seems rather prevalent. While leaving my primary care physician’s office, I noticed that he was located on a floor identified as 12A; his hospital building doesn’t have a 13th floor! Upon Googling, I learnt that most of the buildings in the United States do not name a 13th floor. After the 12th floor, comes 14th, 12A, or M (the 13th alphabet). Many airlines do not carry seat number 13 or row number 13, and many airports do not have gate number 13. At least, I was relieved I wasn’t alone suffering from Triskaidekaphobia. I gathered much of the awareness of this phobia from an online group for Numberophobics—those that are scared of numbers. In this group, members do not keep track of how many emails they write or receive, and writing dates or times in the email is prohibited, as is calling on the phone as that involves dialing numbers. It was too complex and creepy for me; I decided that my situation was not that bad. My fears and suspicions of number 13 were many. I believed that if Apollo 13 had been numbered differently, the accident wouldn’t have occurred. The spacecraft came down after an oxygen tank exploded inside, and the astronauts experienced a near death situation, but finally landed safely. Until I visited The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C., I even 8 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

The cartoon shows a patient suffering from Triskaidekaphobia visiting the clinic. The front desk person is giving a slip and asking to pay the co-pay of $13, but as the patient is scared of number 13, she conveys it as $12A. The patient is confused.

thought that a calendar year was intentionally allotted 12 months so that people don’t fall into 13, 12A, M, or 14 kind of issues. A staff member at the museum clarified that 12 months represent 12 lunar cycles in a year. I even suspected my North-Indian friend once. He always said “tera” for number 13. “Tera” also means “yours” in Hindi. I was worried that he was directing the bad-luck towards me. Not knowing much of Hindi, I then cross-checked online about Hindi numbers in Devanagari and realized that the “tera” in fact genuinely stands for number 13. As Atul Gawande, a surgeon in Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, in his book Complication writes, there is a fear of Friday the 13th among doctors that work at Intensive Care Units. A study reported in the

British Medical Journal in 1993 showed that hospital admissions for traffic accidents in a community outside London on Friday the 13th is 52% more as compared to Friday the 6th. It seems doctors face overwhelming workloads on Friday the 13th. The authors of the paper recommended that people stay home on Friday the 13th in order to be safe. Over cautious driving from the fear of accidents on Friday the 13th can also lead to accidents. Lo et al. in their article titled “Answering the Myth: Use of Emergency Services on Friday the 13th” published in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine in 2012 reported that penetrating traumas, but not other traumas, were seen more often in emergency departments on Friday the 13th. By the way, fear of Friday the 13th is termed Paraskevidekatriaphobia. Based on

surveys it is estimated that 17 million to 21 million Americans suffer from Paraskevidekatriaphobia. They perform rituals before stepping out of their homes, call off to work, and postpone travel or important purchases, causing an estimated $750 million loss annually to businesses. Britain’s pride, the London Eye, has 32 capsules, numbered 1 to 33, leaving number 13 out. Superstitions are deeply rooted in our minds. If not this superstition we follow some other superstition. Scientists have identified a region of the human brain termed right middle/superior frontal gyrus to be involved in superstitious thinking. Burrhus Frederic Skinner did pioneering research in the field of superstition. In his article titled “Superstition in the Pigeon” published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1948, he reported his observation of superstition in pigeons. He placed pigeons in individual cages and provided food at regular intervals through an automatic delivery system. At the time of food delivery, each of the pigeons happened to be executing a response—turning counter-clockwise about the cage, thrusting the head into a corner of the cage, tossing action with the head, pendulum motion of head and body, or incomplete pecking movement—and the pigeon repeated the response. The pigeon behaved as if its behavior caused the food delivery, although, in fact, food delivery was pre-scheduled even if the pigeon did nothing. My wife, like any other woman, is good at remembering dates and numbers. She showed me in chronological order that I received a job offer, saw my son in a prenatal ultrasound image, received my green card, and most importantly got my parking ticket waived on the 13th day of the months in question. That boosted my spirits. I started to first cautiously and thereafter confidently do things that are important to me on the 13th. Now I am a changed man. I prefer to do things on 13th. This is my new superstition. In medical terms this would be termed Triskaidekaphilia, and I may be the only one with this condition. By the way, my friend that got married on the 13th has two lovely kids and leads a happy married life.n Prabhakar Putheti is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York. Dr. Putheti has a Ph.D. from Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. He did his postdoctoral research in Transplantation Immunology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. He has published 25 scientific articles in leading science journals and has written textbook chapters. Writing, photography, and making cartoons are his hobbies.

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Rebel Legacy Re-Imagining the Ghadar movement By Anirvan Chatterjee

Nisha Sembi and Amman Desai creating artwork for the “Our Name is Rebel” art show. Photo credit: Anirvan Chatterjee

As chapters of history are written, what relevance do individual events, like the Ghadar movement, have on shaping the values of newer generations? The past speaks in audible syllables, conveying the experiences and perceptions of those who came before in ways that can be transformative. The Ghadar movement is significant to the Indian American evolution. It is evidence of our struggle and proof of our survival.

rowing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s and 1990s, Partha Sircar, a family friend and one of the history buffs in my Bay Area Bengali community, would sometimes share stories of early Bengali revolutionaries in California, some of whom were involved with the anticolonial Indian-American Ghadar Party. I initially filed the stories away as trivia, not fully understanding the relevance until much later. My Partha-uncle wasn’t the only one sharing these stories. I later learned that the Punjabi community is full of elders trying to keep alive the legacy of Punjabi Ghadarites. “The youth don’t know our stories,” I heard a few lament at a recent Ghadar Party commemoration event. But a century after the Ghadar Party’s formation, a new wave of young South Asian American artist-activists have been finding new meaning in the Ghadar legacy.

10 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

History of the Ghadar Movement

The Ghadar Party, founded in 1913, was a West Coast movement of Indian immigrant laborers and students organizing to end British colonial rule in India. (Ghadar means “rebellion” or “mutiny” in Urdu and Punjabi.) The organization was headquartered in San Francisco, where it published secular anticolonial literature read in dozens of countries. Members organized internationally, as well as with a variety of American social movements, including labor, anarchists, and Irish-Americans. In the dawn of the 20th century, as Indians streamed into Canada and the United States in search of a better future and relief from British oppression they encountered discrimination and intolerance on the shores of their new home. With no support from the British-run India, these immigrants (mostly farmers from Punjab) banded together and formed the Ghadar Party. The

aim of the movement was to overthrow the British in India through the use of force and aggression. This was clearly stated in the first issue of the weekly newspaper Ghadar, dated November 1, 1913: “Today, there begins in foreign lands, but in our country’s language, a war against the British Raj … What is our name? Ghadar. What is our work? Ghadar. Where will Ghadar break out? India. The time will soon come when rifles and blood will take the place of pen and ink.” About a century ago, the Komagata Maru, a Japanese steamship, carrying 376 passengers from Punjab sailed to Canada, where all but 24 were sent back to India. This was due to Canada’s exclusion laws to restrict immigration from India. Upon arriving in India these hapless travelers encountered the British police who deemed them “self-confessed lawbreakers,” and fired shots. Many were killed and the rest arrested. This incident served to energize the Ghadar

Komagata Maru as it leaves Vancouver Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Ghosh and I wrote the monologue in a way that hints at contemporary immigrant rights and food justice campaigns, so audiences can walk away thinking of Ghadar in the context of living movements.

What Does a Younger Generation See in These Histories?

Joti Singh and Bongo Sidibe from the Duniya Dance Company Photo Credit: Paul K. Benjamin

movement. Inspired by the editorial rhetoric and nationalistic fervor, donations flowed in and men were exhorted to fight for freedom of the motherland from the British overlords. The first ship carrying Ghadar revolutionaries sailed from San Francisco in August 1914. The Ghadar movement which had its roots in Punjab, joined forces with Bengali revolutionaries for strategic effectiveness. According to G.S. Deol, author of The Role of the Ghadar Party in the National Movement, Ras Behari Bose was “a link between the Bengali anarchists and the Punjab conspirators.” The movement ultimately failed because of several reasons. The Ghadarites were ill-

prepared. They did not anticipate the lack of enthusiasm for revolt in India. They could not persuade Indian leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and B.G. Tilak to lend their support. The shipment of arms and ammunitions failed to arrive in India. And the most critical reason was a matter of misplaced trust. The British got wind of the revolt through Kirpal Singh, who infiltrated the Ghadar leadership and leaked critical and sensitive information to the British. While the planned revolution failed, the Ghadar Party continued to influence the global movement for Indian freedom, both through its own work, as well by inspiring other anti-colonial revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh.

Zuha Khan, a Pakistani-American UC Davis student and music journalist, traces her interest to her discovery of Ghadar revolutionary Kartar Singh Sarabha, who was a University of California student a century before her. Explains Khan, “the Ghadarite emphasis on inclusivity during the struggle amazes me because South Asians—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and others—were working together, developing camaraderie, and organizing toward a single goal. Learning about this makes me wish that camaraderie between different groups from South Asia was as common now, instead of our being split up along religious, ethnic, or national lines.” Simmy Makhijani, a San Francisco Bay Area youth organizer and Ghadar researcher, emphasizes the relevance of the Ghadar Party as a lens on 21st century America. “History is circular. The Ghadar Party was a product of forced labor migration met by virulent forms of racism. These conditions politicized and provoked our ancestors to take up the legacy of Ghadar and rebel. They were then met with militarized policing, surveillance, and ongoing racist discrimination, but continued to organize and resist.” For Makhijani, the Ghadar legacy offers critical lessons for our community in a post-9/11 context. Oakland environmentalist and artist Amman Desai recently participated in a Ghadar history reading group. What he learned made a deep impression on him. “What’s remarkable about the Ghadar Party,” he explains, “is the way they were able to rally around anti-imperialism without completely collapsing into nationalism. They weren’t just advocating for the independence of India—their politics were much bigger and more thoughtful, and they were simultaneously building relationships and solidarity with anarchists, nihilists, radicals, and other anti-imperialist struggles on a broad international scale. And the Ghadarites were doing all of this large-scale, effective, and involved March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 11

Amman Desai’s Linocut of Ghadarite Har Dayal

Ghadar Art Show Photo credit: Sharat Lin

Photo credit: Anirvan Chatterjee

Cover of 1914 Urdu edition of Ghadar Di Gunj, a compilation of Ghadar poetry, featuring a personification of Mother India

Photo credit: University of Toronto Robarts Library

organizing by pen, paper, memory, boat, and foot. At a time when people are so willing to give credit to Facebook and social media for the success of various social justice struggles, the Ghadar party is a reminder of the power of human agency, not technological capacity, in dismantling structures of power.” Young San Francisco Bay Area artists have been finding new ways of seeing old stories, celebrating 2013, the 100-year anniversary of the Ghadar Party, by developing responses to the history through dance, music, visual arts, and place-based performance.

Making the Art-History Connection Joti Singh, artistic director of the Duniya Dance Company, has a very special connection to Ghadar history as the great-granddaughter of Ghadar leader Bhagwan Singh Gyanee. In her recent work “Red, Saffron, and Green,” a moving two-hour bhangra, spoken word, and music performance, Singh explored Ghadar history through her family’s story, using biography as an entry point to a complex history. “Knowing this history,” she explains, “makes you realize and question where we are now, and where our struggle is.” Visual artists Nisha Sembi and Amman Desai just concluded “Our Name is Rebel,” their joint month-long show of artwork inspired by Bay Area’s South Asian American people’s movements. Sembi designed a striking wall-sized street art-inspired mural

12 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

honoring young Ghadar Party martyr Kartar Singh Sarabha, including text handwritten in English, Urdu, and Punjabi. (The mural is visible at Guerilla Cafe in Berkeley, California.) Another of her paintings brings to life the Ghadar Party’s printing press, the source of their revolutionary literature. An artist and organizer, Sembi says it’s an honor to be able to create work dedicated toward popularizing the Ghadar story. At the “Our Name is Rebel” show, Amman Desai unveiled a new linocut image of anarchist Ghadar philosopher Har Dayal, one of the co-founders of the party. He also showed off an intricate pen and ink image of Ghadar veteran Kartar Dhillon, who started her life in the Ghadar Party, but went on to work in a variety of California movements, participating in worker organizing campaigns, supporting the Black Panther Party, and even founding the San Franciscobased “Chaat” performance art collective in the 1990s (making her quite literally a foremother to the new wave of young artistactivists). Some Ghadar-inspired artists make very explicit connections between the issues of the 1910s and the 2010s. DJ Drrrty Poonjabi recorded his new track “Ghadar di Gunj” for Beats for Bangladesh, a fundraiser album supporting worker struggles in Bangladesh in the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster. “I wanted to connect musically,” he explains, “the Ghadar struggles and inspiring legacy with the oppression these Bangladeshi laborers are facing today, and also express solidarity with all colonized, racialized, dispossessed, and oppressed working people of color worldwide.” Across the country there have been many commemorative events organized. In Los Angeles on June 16, 2013, the event focused on discussions explaining the history of the Ghadar movement and how the threads of

these trailblazers are intertwined within our immigrant lives. A similar event was organized on June 29 in Atlanta and another in Washington, D.C on July 28. The event in DC was organized by Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO). The speakers talked about the Party’s organizational ability and its network of support within academic institutions like Berkeley and Stanford and its resemblance to the Irish push for independence, which was also characterized by turbulence, fervor and sacrifices. As for me, I’ve finally found my own path to the Ghadar legacy, many years after my Partha-uncle began sharing his stories with me. My partner, Barnali Ghosh, and I now curate the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, a monthly history experience that uses storytelling, street theater, and poetry to make the history of South Asian American organizing come alive. On the tour, I play the role of a Ghadarite; Ghosh and I wrote the monologue in a way that hints at contemporary immigrant rights and food justice campaigns, so audiences can walk away thinking of Ghadar in the context of living movements. Histories can be remembered in different ways. (The story of the Punjabi Mexicans, for example, is sometimes shared as a kind of multicultural trivia, without much relevance for the way we live today.) While they use different approaches, a new generation of South Asian American artist-activists is starting to converge on a shared reading of Ghadar history that very explicitly foregrounds its contemporary relevance. One hundred years on, the Ghadar Party continues to inspire the creation of revolutionary new histories. n Anirvan Chatterjee is a techie, entrepreneur, and climate activist from Berkeley, California. Find him online at www.chatterjee.net and @anirvan

March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 13

14 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

opinion

Rain, Again By Dilnavaz Bamboat

hree and a half decades ago, on a late July night in Bombay, the rain came clattering down on the red-tiled roof of the Parsi General Hospital. Just a few hours earlier, my mother had delivered her firstborn, and I lay in a bassinet under ultra violet light, tiny and jaundice-ridden, strangely soothed by the rumble of thunder even as other babies wailed and started. In the years that followed, the only thing that made the start of the school year tolerable was the monsoon that accompanied it. Through the warm downpours and rising waters of my coastal city I would wade, delighted by the damp and the puddles and my red Bata gumboots. My first solo travel experience happened at 18. And as the train wound through the emerald northern Maharashtra countryside, my face mirrored my elation. It was August, a steady stream of raindrops splashed my tee-shirt in the doorway, the wind was in my face, life lay waiting for me, I was young, and thrilled, and free! Die-hard fans of summer can keep their king of fruit and the steaming, sultry weather that comes with it. Each year of my life, June was the Holy Grail, and the anticipation of rain was excruciating. Sometimes the clouds would gather, then flit away. Every pore of our bodies spewed humidity. Who could blame the brainfever bird in its nearhysterical state? I would fly between trees in agony if I could! Finally, at long painful last, the sky would darken, the drops would descend, falling faster and faster toward the eager earth, and all life would stop to watch the miracle unfold. Even as animals scuttled away to safety and dry spaces, human beings would emerge to partake of what was surely heaven’s blessing, laughing, splashing and exulting in the headiness of this grand new season. As the days turned into weeks, these same ribbons of water would cause damage to parts of the city, washing away homes and flooding the roads with their ferocity, but in that first moment, they were welcomed like god himself, all of his creatures rising to celebrate this magnificent arrival. Indian movies are frequently accused of filling our brains with associations of

rain and romance, but as a child I watched none. And yet, I cannot imagine anything more romantic than the end of summer and the lushness, virility and borderline-obscene greenness of this reckless season. Not for the monsoon is the polite chill of winter; not for the rains are the persistent claws of heat; this is a time for unbridled joy and a celebration of life and all that perpetuates its cycle. My personal definition of rain was a downpour, one in which we could barely see beyond the cascading sheets of water. Anything less was a mere drizzle, and the sheer number of words used in India to describe rain based on its volume never fail to amaze. There is varsaad for rain—audible but not blinding; there is jhoptu for a brief, forceful shower; there was chhip-chhip for a slight drizzle; and naago varsaad for that rare combination of simultaneous rain and sun. There are also dhor maar (pouring) and ghela ni kani (like a madman), my favorite kind of precipitation. And these are just the Gujarati words! Then there are the Marathi rhymes our maids taught us about their beloved, benevolent bestower of prosperity on the fields back home. The scent of wet earth is a cliché that’s been done to death—for a reason. Have you ever smelled anything that drove you to greater elation? That scooped you right up and plunged you straight into your childhood? That made you long for this unique and precious Indian phenomenon on this continent so far away? When the skies turn stormy in our home country, Indians across the length and breadth of the land quicken their steps. They emerge onto rooftops and terraces and into narrow gulleys, calling out to friends and neighbors, their eyes trained skyward, their fragile hopes clutched deep within their hearts. The first drops are intercepted before they can embrace the earth, a collective gasp encircles the air, and exultation and dancing are de rigueur. No matter what their age, religion, or station, the advent of the monsoon is the Great Indian Equalizer for my people. In the land of a thousand festivals, this is probably the most universally celebrated and uniformly welcomed. And when that first deluge is done, leaves drip leaky silver missiles onto freshly cleaned streets, and to

be sure, it has washed some of the dust off our souls. When I landed in San Francisco on Valentine’s Day three years ago, I was newlymarried and eager to join my spouse. It rained for six straight weeks after my arrival, and even as I laughed about being duped by “sunny” California, I could not have felt more accepted by my new patch of sky. Today, as the state battles the severest drought in its history, that gentle rain is but a memory that I hold on to with hope. A rainless existence affects me in ways deeper than just the physical. It strains the connection to my past, highlights the flaws in this Valley I am learning to befriend, and keeps me hankering for home. It may sound dramatic, but it’s true: a lack of stormy weather parches my soul. I become unreasonable, forgetting the potholes and waterlogged streets of Bombay, and unfavorably comparing my desert-surfaced skin to the dewy glow of a season run wild to the strains of Hariharan’s “Indian Rain” the aroma of ginger tea, and the crunch of freshly-fried pakodas. I swear up and down that I’ll visit Bombay this very monsoon, I rail at the maddeningly blue skies, and even as the rest of America faces extreme, dangerous weather, I can only wallow in my own drop-less fate as I watch the country of my birth drifting away on drain water. Maybe it will rain before the winter is over. Maybe it will compensate for the chronically cloudless air. Maybe it will pour down in sheets as penance, and drive the weather channels into a frenzy. If this indeed manifests, as thousands across this state will it to, then in the midst of it all, remember to watch for a lone Indian woman standing in a parking lot, soaking it all up and deliriously reclaiming her connection to her ancient skies. n Dilnavaz Bamboat manages communications and social media for a Silicon Valley non-profit, is a scriptwriter for iPad applications for children, a writer and editor at IDEX (idex.org), a section editor at Ultra Violet (ultraviolet.in), a feminist blogger at Women’s Web (womensweb. in) and a founder member of India Helps (indiahelps.blogspot.com). She lives in the SF Bay Area. March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 15

youth

Standing on the Bridge By Nimi Jayachandran

t’s a topic that’s been visited in countless movies and books, but the fact remains that growing up as a second generation Indian American in America is not easy. Especially, if you’re growing up in an orthodox household where your parents are trying to instill in you Indian values and culture by all means possible. I’ve attributed their doing so to a learned fear of losing their identities, and of losing their connection to their homeland. Regardless of the A Creative Commons Image reason, I am one amongst the countless second genchanged. I had been studying in India for eration Indian American a few years now and after all the initial adchildren, who feel lost growing up with an justment issues; I had actually grown quite amalgamation of two cultures so different comfortable being in Chennai. from one another. It made me wonder, “Had I been lookThere is a reason that the term “American ing at this whole situation glass half-empty?” Born Confused Desi” became so popular. I What if I didn’t belong in one place, because have always felt comfortable interacting with I belonged in both? Had my parents manmy non-Indian counterparts but there always aged to successfully ingrain in me our Indian seemed to be an invisible barrier; something roots to the point I felt comfortable enough that prevented me from entirely immersstudying here, so far away from home? Of ing myself in the immediate environment I course, home is still Fremont,California; I lived in. did grow up there after all. However, ChenAt school and with my friends, I was nai has also grown to be a second home of American, at home with my family and with sorts. family friends, I was Indian. Adjusting to life in Chennai was not Unconsciously, my identity became without its own set of biases. Just as there something of a reflection of my surroundare many prejudices about Indians from ings at any given time. I considered myself to India, there are equally as many prejudices be standing on a metaphorical bridge in beabout children of immigrants who have been tween my two cultures; never fully identifybrought up abroad. ing with either, nor completely unattached to Thanks to various scenes depicted in them at the same time. I was freely allowed popular movies and books, one of the folto wander to either side, but somewhere inlowing [limited] labels are immediately alside, I felt incomplete. What followed was a lotted to people like me: She either shows up lifelong inner struggle, and after a point, I reas an airheaded diva who is oblivious to the signed myself to remaining a member of this Indian culture around her until the local hero no-man’s land, learning to be content with shows her what she has been missing, or she being a wanderer between the two cultures, gets the tag where she is referred to as “bewhich have shaped me. ing Indian despite having been brought up It was a late November morning and I abroad.” It has been stamped into the minds was cleaning my hostel room in Chennai, of the masses that the hordes of Indian India when I realized that something had 16 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

American children growing up abroad can either be Indian or not; not many people seem to realize that many of us stand on this bridge in between. Early in my first year of college, I faced many of these prejudices as people asked with surprise, “How do you speak Tamil so fluently?” Or there came a shock with the realization that I was equally fluent in reading and writing it as well. (All those summers when my Mom made me practice writing Tamil alphabets and all the years of my Dad driving me to Tamil classes every Sunday morning really paid off!) When “Tamil Thai Vaazthu” (“Salutations to Mother Tamil”) played at the start of a college ceremony I could sing along whereas many of my local counterparts could not, it made me glad that my parents had not only forced me to learn about, but also live my Indian roots. I don’t know of too many other people who have Aruna Sairam and Lady Gaga in the same playlist, but it goes to show that many of us growing up abroad are exposed to varied cultures. I’ve come to view my upbringing as a blessing. I’ve been given a certain freedom and independence that comes with growing up in America, but I’ve also been given the comfort, warmth and security that comes with being a part of a traditional Indian family. My two cultures, though initially seemed to oppose each other, as I have now learned, make me who I am. All the initial confusion and frustration stemming from that diversity has now been replaced by a sense of pride and gratitude in being able to belong to these two places. My spot in the middle of that bridge feels more like home than ever before. n Nimi Jayachandran is an avid reader and passionate writer who is currently pursuing medicine in Chennai. She was born in India and brought up in the Bay Area.

March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 17

viewpoint

Sorry, John Hancock By P. Mahadevan

ohn Hancock (1737-1793) is an American icon; statesman, patriot, one-time governor of the state of Massachusetts, and signatory to the primal document, that established the United States as an independent political and geographic entity, the Declaration of Independence. But the one reason he continues to be remembered and often quoted is not any one of those qualifications but the way he signed his name on that imposing document, in deliberate, bold, linked together letters, as in cursive format. It is not uncommon these days, for instance, to be asked to put your Hancock on the dotted line and then we are all set to proceed with the process of filing a loan application or other document agreement. That is how impressive his signature on the famous document was. We are sorry, Mr. Hancock, the cursive format of writing in English is fast disappearing. The old “Hancock” may be replaced in a variety of ways such as printing, or even a fingerprint scan. We are told anecdotally that when asked why he took such meticulous care in signing the document, he answered: “George will see it.” The reference is to King George III of England who hated him so much for his anti-British position as to put a prize on his head.

Confusing Conundrums

The English alphabet has just twenty six letters. Each letter can be written in four different ways: upper and lower cases in print and cursive respectively. One has thus to learn to read and write one hundred and four letters without the benefit of that many letters in a phonetic tongue. Confusing conundrums in etymology are too many as a consequence. It is no surprise that a Common Core Curriculum Standard is soon to be adopted in all of the United States. Common Core focuses on computer and analytical skills rather than penmanship. The keyboard, obviously, is the evolved tool for all such endeavors and cursive writing is the favored skill to be painlessly dropped. It is pointed out that one of the major pitfalls of Common Core is that it boils down to one giant testing program.

18 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

The teach-to-the-test practice is aptly illustrated in the cattleman’s crude adage: “you cannot fatten a calf by simply weighing it.” We all know that this is not a change occurring overnight. This trend has been in place now all across the English speaking parts of the world including the mother country, England. For instance, I am now looking at two framed diplomas/certificates, on the wall, issued about fifty years ago to me from the University of London and the Institute of Physics, London respectively. In both, the ornate part of the text is printed while the specific part appears to be “cursive printed,” not calligraphed by hand at all. The “writing has been on the wall” for a while. Perhaps, we owe it to Hancock to establish a National Handwriting Day in his memory. Handwriting and signature analysis (Graphology) in the cursive writing format is an established procedure for evaluating the writer’s personality. The scientific value of the procedure is perhaps debatable. The point is, however, moot because that form of writing in English is fast disappearing. Printing in the upper or lower case is a more deliberate effort and the manuscript may not carry a personality trait. We see quite often the ceremony of signing a major piece of legislation by the U.S. President, for instance, using multiple pens, which are later distributed as souvenirs. This is different from signing a check or a document in everyday life. I can remember from yonder years how fascinated I was with dotting the i and crossing the t (the cursive “i and t”) and at conjugating long words such as impecuniocity or anti-dis-establishmen-

tarianism, with a generous spread of these two letters. Among the bygones of the last half century are the ink well and the dipping pen, the four line ruled practice pads for cursive writing, the type writer, correcting tape, the white out, the cyclostyle for copying and others. These were a few of my favorite things.

The Three Rs

Sorry, John Hancock, again. The three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic) are gone too. Arithmetic appears to be no longer needed. Its role has been taken over by the calculator. Has anyone engaged in a conversation about a billing discrepancy with a cashier at a check-out counter? The omniscient, ubiquitous keyboard, real or virtual, has just about taken over the pen. You may type in the English alphabet and get the read-out in another language, Tamil, perhaps,—a phonetic language. The e-reader tablet is probably the latest in the realm of gadgetry to arrive on the scene. An e-book can be read out to us in a grandmotherly monotone or a teacher’s pedagogic style. Change has arrived on the scene. Time waits for no man. n P. Mahadevan is a retired scientist with a Ph.D. in Atomic Physics from the University of London, England. His professional work includes basic and applied research and program management for the Dept. of Defense. He taught Physics at the Univ. of Kerala, at Thiruvananthapuram. He does very little now, very slowly.

March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 19

books

Rippling with Metaphors By Anita Felicelli

COWBOYS AND EAST INDIANS by Nina McConigley. Five Chapters Books. August 2013. $13.95. 196 pages.

he American West proves itself to be at least as surprising a place as India in Nina McConigley’s debut literary short story collection Cowboys and East Indians. Collectively, these realistic stories create a landscape in which every character, no matter his or her ethnic background, has an equal claim on the human condition and feelings of loneliness, alienation, and desire. Throughout the collection, the reader senses that the world inside the stories is much larger than what we are given on the page, a testament to the author’s skill at choosing the right details. Several of McConigley’s best stories depend for their narrative energy on the destabilization of fantasies, usually fantasies of belonging. Others present a unique consideration of what it feels like to be seen as an exotic outsider in both Chennai and Wyoming. One story in particular, “White Wedding,” seems to hint at one meaning of the collection in its entirety. The narrator Lakshmi (“Lucky” for short) is biracial, half Indian and half white and feels like she comes up short, unable to fit snugly into either world. Lucky reflects on her Indian mother’s death by cancer while attending her sister’s wedding and comes to this interesting epiphany about her exhaustion entertaining the wedding guests: “People are always so insanely happy to try something on. Especially when it is exotic. And since her guests were all from New York, and used to seeing Indians, I hadn’t counted on Wyoming being the more exotic of the two.” This theme, that the exotic is simply whatever is unfamiliar from one’s own perspective (for many people, the exotic could be the Wild West even though Hollywood has shown us this place time and again) is echoed in many of the stories. When writers choose to use very strong cadences or syntax for Indian characters, you never forget the character’s ethnicity and this can either add to the verisimilitude 20 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

or increase the potential for stereotyping, or both. In several stories from I Am An Executioner: Love Stories, for example, Rajesh Parameswaran chooses to give his Indian characters pronounced accents with varying effects. McConigley’s attention is focused on a different project of finding common ground in emotional truths. While McConigley’s dialogue includes some syntax and rhythms common among Indian immigrants of different backgrounds and she often elects to invest cultural objects (like saris or dolls) with meaning, more often she focuses on her character’s interior lives in relation to place. Their ethnic background is less essential than the place from which they come. In the first few stories, McConigley’s prose style ripples with metaphors, giving her fictional world a compelling strangeness. Where authors like Jhumpa Lahiri or Alice Munro strip sentences down to their barest elements, McConigley sometimes engages in a beautiful and lively showiness. The lan-

guage itself becomes a metaphor for seeing the world outside one’s own consciousness as necessarily surprising and alien. For example, in the title story, a young woman born in India and given up for adoption as a two-year-old to a white couple struggles with her identity in Wyoming as an “other” solely because of her skin color. She encounters a group of Indian students with “black heads like notes,” one of whom has hair “like origami, all lines” and teeth “like crumpled paper.” When the students help her put on a sari, they dress her “like a wound.” In “Pomp and Circumstance,” a newly immigrated Indian wife in Wyoming fits in better than her husband after she becomes complicit in a cross-dressing fantasy. Here, from the perspective of the Indian wife, Wyoming’s strangeness is revealed. This is a world in which “the snow fences look like abandoned snake skins in the grass” and lipsticks are “lined up like bullets” and a man possesses a touching desire to wear a sari. Later in the collection, however, McConigley’s voice becomes more objective in its descriptions, more confident in its storytelling, but also less interested in the potential weirdness of perception when you are an outsider. As the language becomes more transparent, some of the stories start to feel less intuitive and more logically constructed than “Cowboys and East Indians” and “White Wedding.” In “Reserve Champions,” an uptight white woman competes in a dress-a-doll contest while distracted by a gutted deer that her neighbors shot and hung outside her sewing room window. Although the woman is alienated from those around her as much or perhaps even more than Lucky from “White Wedding,” the language ensconces us in an interesting subculture of Wyoming, rather than looking in from the outside. When we learn of the main character’s distaste for deer meat, for example, we learn that she grew up eating deer that had feasted on sagebrush and therefore tried “to mask the taste of sage and the antelope’s adrenaline with tomatoes and kidney beans. But that taste of the prairie was in every bite.”

There is one story where the imagery and symbols don’t seem to arise quite as naturally. In “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” the symbols chosen move us towards a prefabricated meaning rather than building their resonance through a slow accretion of small events, hopes and fears as in the author’s best stories. The story revolves around an insecure white woman obsessed with her acneplagued skin. She visits India as a medical tourist and discovers that India’s preoccupation with fair and lovely skin can work to her benefit—she is suddenly desirable. Rather than write about an Indian girl in Wyoming obsessed with the difference of her skin, which might seem the more obvious choice, McConigley delves into skin as a universal metaphor. While this is an interesting decision and most of the story is rich, particularly with respect to the Indian characters and the depiction of the city, the Christian symbolism surrounding the skin feels a bit heavy-handed. One of the most successful pieces in the collection, “Curating Your Life,” concerns a young Indian American woman who returns to India for a job hoping to find her roots (placing herself both literally and figuratively), only to find she is even less embraced by Indians than her white coworkers are. The language in this last story, like the first few stories is lushly populated with metaphors. The author gives us a clearly observed portrait of working in Chennai, but more importantly there is a growing dread and angst and willingness to deviate from expectation in this piece that is remarkable. I felt as if the air was being released from all the lazy, binary literary tropes that characterize India as more colorful, exotic, and morally superior (or else more dirty and backwards) than the West. It takes flexibility and empathy to see the world from such different perspectives, to inhabit a mind as completely as all of the first person stories in this collection do. Nina McConigley, who is biracial and holds an MFA from the University of Houston, has a necessary kind of brilliance for our globalized world. She is interested in people as people, rather than explaining Eastern culture to white audiences or America’s West to Indians. We need more books like Cowboys and East Indians, which engage our collective humanity through humor and pathos, rather than exploit our most superficial cultural differences. During a time when issues of identity, race and ethnicity can be divisive, McConigley’s stories clear new paths into the human heart. 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.

A Pictorial Spread By Tara Menon THE ELEPHANT’S FRIEND AND OTHER TALES FROM ANCIENT INDIA by Marcia Williams. Candlewick. August 2012. Hardcover $12.31. 40 pages. Children’s book.

arcia Williams has delivered a sumptuous feast with a pictorial spread of retold fables, The Elephant’s Friend and Other Tales from Ancient India. The sources of the eight stories are the Hitopadesha Tales, the Jataka Tales, and the Panchatantra Tales. The tales may seem familiar, but packaged in comic strip format they possess vitality and can be savored again and again. Among Williams’s other cartoon books are Ancient Egypt: Tales of Gods and Pharaohs and Greek Myths for Young Children. In The Elephant’s Friend and Other Tales from Ancient India, the author’s humorous take on the stories, especially in the speech bubbles, the striking colors and lovingly portrayed animals give instant appeal. My favorite, “The Elephant’s Friend,” is sure to enchant. The elephant in Williams’s story enjoys a privileged existence as the king’s pet. He strikes up an unlikely friendship with a scrawny dog who lives off his food. When the animals get acquainted, they bow to each other in absurd fashion—both creatures bend down, raising their rear ends. “Pleasure to meet you, Dog,” the elephant says while in the ridiculous position. The canine, rear held aloft, says, “Likewise!” The scrawny dog’s appearance improves, thanks to his new environment and meaningful friendship, so much so that he attracts the attention of a rich merchant who buys him. The lesson of the fable delivered by the king, as the elephant and the dog hold their bottoms aloft again, adds to the hilarity: “Never come between an elephant and his dog.” The story has its poignant moments as when the elephant, missing his friend, lies prone and a tear slides out of his eye. The writer says of the character and the other animals, “their passions, disappointments, triumphs, and foibles could have been my own … or maybe yours!” “The Tale of the Three Large Fish,” concerns the destiny of three fish—one wise, one clever, and one ruled by a belief in fate. One day, they overhear two fisherman talking, one of whom tells the other that they should return the next day and cast their nets in the lake. The wise fish fails to convince his friends to leave the lake with him. The clever fish has too much confidence in himself

and the fish who believes in fate has a que sera sera mentality, mumbling, “What will be … will be.” I wish Williams had ended this charming story with an illustration of the wise fish swimming in the company of new companions (we don’t see him after he leaves). “The Wise Little Pebet” like “The Tale of the Three Large Fish” is another story celebrating intelligence paired with the right attitude. A mother bird’s wit saves the lives of her seven chicks. The villain here is a cat who pretends to be a vegetarian and is susceptible to flattery. Williams comes across as a stronger illustrator than a storyteller. Her pictures invite leisurely scrutiny. The book occasionally relies on cliches. “In the middle of a forest, there lived an extremely greedy lion named King Bhasuraka. King Bhasuraka ate at least six forest creatures a day! He grew fatter and fatter, but the forest creatures grew fewer and fewer …” However, Williams’s old-fashioned narrative and charming contemporary dialogue marry well. Though the publisher targets children from the age group of eight to twelve, I think The Elephant’s Friend and Other Tales from India suits a younger group ranging from four (read with an adult) to eight. The attractive comic strips and the time tested traditional stories make the book an excellent companion to relax with. n Tara Menon is a freelance writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her fiction, poetry, and book reviews have been published in many magazines. March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 21

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relationship diva

Long Distance Doubts By Jasbina Ahluwalia

I met my boyfriend when I was working at my first job after graduating from college. Since then, we’ve enjoyed spending a good deal of time together getting to know one another. We’ve developed a great relationship, and have now been together for almost 1.5 years. I just found out that he’s seriously considering pursuing a drastic career change. The career change would involve his going back to grad school. He’s expressed interest in attending a school which is about two hours away, and I just don’t know whether or not I could make the move for him. I’m worried that if he decides to go away for grad school, that may tear us apart. Any suggestions?

Facing a life-changing decision can be nerve-wracking, and feeling powerless in the decision might cause you to reconsider your commitment and question your desire to continue on with the relationship. Before you decide to act in one way or

another, ask yourself these five questions: i) Do you agree with his desire to change careers? Do you understand and support his decision? ii) Is he definitely planning to move? Rather than wondering and worrying, find out by gently asking him to clarify his intentions. iii) Could you work through a long distance relationship? While long distance may not be ideal, two hours may not be very far to travel for weekend and holiday visits. With social media, video chat, email, texting and cell phones, staying in touch despite distance is possible. Your mutual levels of trust and commitment to each other should be key factors in this decision. iv) What are your real concerns? Be patient, but also be honest about where you stand. Hidden resentment (on either side) will certainly tear you apart over time. v) Can you support this change? Rela-

tionships require compromise. Any relationship worth keeping is worth working for. Consider what you are willing to give up and work through, as well as what you are asking him to give up and work through. Above all, don’t be pushy and aggressive. Though your concern quite understandably might make you want answers sooner, rather than later, he may need some time to consider these questions himself. Men generally take time to deeply think through decisions, silently and in their own time. So, allow him plenty of time to think things through; applying pressure will likely push him away. n Jasbina is the founder and president of Intersections Match, the only personalized matchmaking and dating coaching firm serving singles of South Asian descent in the United States. She is also the host of Intersections Talk Radio. Jasbina@intersectionsmatch.com.

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24 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

28th Annual India Heritage

Scholarship Awards

For students graduating in year 2014 from High/Middle school in Southern California, with one or both parents of Asian Indian origin

Gala Lunch event for award winners

Sunday, April 20, 2014 • 11:00 AM Long Beach Hilton, Long Beach

Academic Excellence Awards High School Graduates – Nine Awards $750 - $2000 First Place Winner will also receive “Profiles in Excellence” Revolving Trophy Middle School (8th grade) Graduates – Five Awards $200 - $600 First Place Winner will also receive “IAHF Founders” Revolving Trophy

Outstanding Achievement Awards High School Graduates: $600 and a revolving trophy 1- Sports; 2 - Math, Science & Technology; 3 - Visual & Performing Arts; 4-Community Service Special Awards: $200/each for Perfect score in Quiz/SAT Middle/Jr. High School Graduates: Visual & Performing Arts Two ($250 and $150), India Heritage Plaque

Eligibility Criteria: GPA of C or higher for Outstanding Achievement Awards and B or higher for Academic Excellence Awards Last date for receipt of completed applications: Monday, April 7, 2014 For application forms, guidelines for applicants, or more information, send email to: awards.middlehigh@gmail.com, or call: 818-708-3885

Sponsored by: Indian American Heritage Foundation in association with: GOPIO LA Chapter March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 25

ask a lawyer

H-1B Visas, Caps and Scams By Indu Liladhar-Hathi

I recently returned to the United States on an H-1B visa but I was not issued an arrival-departure record (I-94 card). Do I need to worry about this?

As of April 30, 2013, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) has transitioned to an automated, electronic system and they no longer issue a paper I-94 card. Therefore, you should make a point to visit http://CBP.gov/I94 to access your admission record information, preferably within 48 hours of entry into the United States. You should ensure that your admission record states that you arrived on “H-1B” status. You should also carefully note how long your admission record states you may remain in the United States, it should be consistent with your most recent H-1B expiration, unless your passport has an earlier expiration date.

How does one deal with the upcoming

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H-1B cap season?

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will start accepting H-1B petitions for the fiscal year 2015 beginning April 1, 2014. As readers may be aware, there are 65,000 regular H-1B cap numbers with an additional 20,000 for individuals who have obtained master’s degrees from the United States. Only new H-1B petitions are counted against the H-1B cap. Individuals who are currently in H-1B status or held H-1B in the past with a cap subject employer will not be subject to the cap. These individuals can apply for H-1B extensions or a change of status at any time. If the USCIS receives enough (or more) cases to fill the cap within the first five business days, it will stop accepting new cases. If the USCIS receives more cases than the numbers allowed, a lottery is conducted. Although it is difficult to say if the cap will be

exhausted early this year, it is estimated that the H-1B cap may be used up within the first few days in April.

USCIS SCAM ALERT Various USCIS applicants and petitioners have recently reported being targets of a new phone scam. The scammers display a misleading phone number on a recipient’s Caller ID and pose as USCIS officials, asking for personal information and payment to correct supposed issues with their records, often threatening deportation. USCIS will NEVER ask for any form of payment or personal information over the phone. If you receive such a call, hang up immediately and report it to the Federal Trade Commission at https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/ or to an appropriate state authority at www.uscis. gov/avoidscams. 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 BLS International Services. Call (415) 609-4965 or visit http://www.visa. blsindia-usa.com/ for more information.

March 2014

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 March 2014. In the tables below, the listing of a date for any class indicates that the class is oversubscribed. “Current” means that numbers are available for all qualified applicants. “Unavailable” means no numbers are available.

FAMILY PREFERENCE VISA DATES Preference Dates for India 1st Feb 01, 2007 2A Sep 08, 2013 2B Sep 01, 2006 3rd Jun 15, 2003 4th Nov 08, 2001 NOTE: F2A numbers subject to percountry limit are available to applicants with priority dates beginning Apr 15, 2012 and earlier than Sept 08, 2013.

EMPLOYMENT-BASED VISA DATES Preference Dates for India 1st Current 2nd November 15, 2004 3rd September 15, 2003 Other September 15, 2003 Workers 4th Current Certain Current Religious Workers 5th Current Targeted Employment Areas The Department of State has a recorded message with visa availability information at (202)485-7699, which is updated in the middle of each month. Source: http://travel. state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy/ bulletin/2014/visa-bulletin-for-march-2014. html

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finance

On Reserve What to watch for with Janet Yellen as the new Fed Chair

or some people 1929 was just another year in history, others recognize it as the beginning of the Great Depres-

sion. Many economic control mechanisms like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and securities law were enacted to avoid having another Great Depression. Yet, despite all our sophistication and professed understanding of markets, in 2007 the United States was hit with the Credit Crisis. Now, in 2014, we look back at the last eight years of monetary policy and are grateful that Ben Bernanke was able to draw on his knowledge of 1929-1933 to bring America out of one of the worst economic crises of all time. Now with Bernanke retiring, he has passed the torch onto Janet Yellen who will face an equally challenging tenure as the Chair of the Federal Reserve.

The Hawk and the Dove

Prior to her time as the Vice President of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of California from 2004 to 2010. Before the financial crisis hit in 2007, Yellen became well known in finance circles as an outspoken critic of increasing house prices calling it a bubble. Although vocal in her opinions, she did not take action against easy lending policies and instead looked to Washington for change, which never came. In 2010, Janet Yellen succeeded Donald Kohn as Vice President of the Federal Reserve. During her time as the Vice President, she often aligned with the opinion of Benjamin Bernanke when discussing monetary policy decisions. She, like Bernanke, is described as a “dove” when it comes to policy leaning towards cautious rather than aggressive. As we were coming out of the recession in 2013 growth was sluggish, economic outlook was mixed, and the post of Federal Reserve chair was open with the retirement of Bernanke imminent. On one end was Janet Yellen—dovish, unassuming, cautious and chaired President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. On the other end was Larry Summers—hawkish, aggressive and polarizing, the former Secretary of the Treasury and economic advisor to two presidents. Although initial support rallied around Larry Summers, the opinion that the market

28 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

By Rahul Varshneya needs cautious and gentle guidance versus a more risky, shorter tapering period and potential volatility which Summers preferredbecame the guiding factor which led Yellen to be tapped for the position.

Monetary Policy—An Inflated Issue

We all know that the Federal Reserve has a severely inflated balance sheet due to an expansionary monetary policy for the last 6 years. Monetary policy, at the start of the recession, consisted mainly of short term bond purchases to drive down short term interest rates but transitioned to a blend of short and long term bonds in response to the severity of the financial crisis. Until December 2013 the Federal Reserve was making asset purchases of $85B per month. There was a lot of debate among experts, about when the tapering (reducing the amount of the bond buying) would begin. The Federal Reserve had previously stated that they would use a 6.5% target unemployment rate and multiple quarters of strong economic growth before even considering the possibility of tapering. By definition, the unemployment rate measures the number of people without jobs in the total labor force, which is the number of people actively seeking jobs. As people gave up on looking for a job, the labor force pool shrank —leading to a reduction in the unemployment rate, making it a less reliable indicator of the health of the economy.

Tapering

In December 2013, the Federal Reserve made its first taper ever, from $85B to $75B and then again in January to $65B per month. Although tapering has begun, it is not yet a cause for celebration. A $4.1 trillion cash position is not an easy one to unwind. One cannot just go from pumping $85B per month into the economy to nothing; it would cause chaos. Furthermore, tapering in and of itself is not the issue—it is what follows that the Fed must be careful with. The implication of tapering is that at some point in the future Yellen must make a decision on interest rates. During the recession there was a flight to safety, money poured into fixed income investments. Fund managers and analysts with

exposure to fixed income flourished when interest rates dropped to the near zero levels, which led to increased bonds values. Now that circumstances are less dire, these same individuals have been looking to Fed policy to predict when tapering would occur so that they could safely exit their positions. This is the reason why Bernanke held monthly meetings and quarterly public interviews: the more the public is aware about future policy decisions, the less volatile capital flows, and by extension, our stock market will be. With the economy growing at an annualized 3.2% in Q413 it became clear that we are finally on the road to recovery. Many believed that the tapering was coming much sooner than initial late 2014 estimates, so they started slowly unwinding their fixed income positions and will continue to do so in a controlled way.

On the World Stage

The last few years have been very difficult for the economy. Janet Yellen, like her predecessor, has inherited the Federal Reserve at a challenging time. Even a simple economic behavior like a dropping unemployment rate has become a more contentious debate because of its cause. A 6.5% unemployment rate was once considered a true measure of a recovering economy, now the Fed has said it will be re-evaluating its use in monetary policy. Janet Yellen’s actions also have an impact on the world stage. While times were tough in the United States, capital was flowing to other countries with more attractive interest rates like Argentina, Turkey, and India. Now these countries with poor trade deficits are experiencing capital outflows exposing their weaknesses, which was masked in the past by the capital inflows. The country has been through major surgery, Janet Yellen needs to be very careful in how quickly she takes the patient off painkillers. n Rahul Varshneya graduated from the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University with a degree in finance and is working in the technology industry as a financial analyst. He is currently enrolled in the chartered financial analyst (CFA) program.

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India Current

science

Eclipse Predictions In Ancient India By Krishnamachar Sreenivasan

ince time immemorial farmers relied on astrologers and astronomers to tell them when to plant to take advantage of the monsoons. Depending on their culture, astronomers and astrologers were rewarded when their predictions were successful and punished when wrong, sometimes rather severely.

Patrons of Arts

Ancient Rome, India and France are examples where rulers, many benevolent, patronized philosophers, thinkers and artists living in their kingdom, and paid them handsomely to think, paint, predict and write. Alexander the Great tried in vain to learn geometry from Euclid. Louis XIV had De Moivre, Lagrange, Laplace and many other luminaries in his court. King George III tried to learn mathematics from Leibniz. Jayachamachandra Wodiyar in Mysore, and King Verma in Travancore and Cochin patronized Asthana Vidwans (royal scholars) and mathematicians; Tippu Sultan who fought Jayachamarajendra’s grandfather, Krishnarajendra III (who allied with the British when they were getting their foot inside the rich Indian door) read Euclid at night. So did Lincoln: Abe studied Euclid by lantern light at night which explains, in part, his precise syntax and persuasive arguments to sway even his opponents.

Calculations of Motion

In determining and predicting eclipses, it is important to determine the true instantaneous motion of the planets or stars at any given moment. Tat-Kalika-Gati, or instantaneous calculation of motion, was probably first mentioned and used by Aryabhatta II, Brahmagupta II and Manjula around 1100 CE Bhaskara (1114 to 1185 CE) figured out formulas involving differentials, using the Chakravala method, which is defined as a cyclic method used to solve indeterminate quadratic equations. This knowledge is still a useful tool in today’s calculus theory. Ghazni destroyed all the parchments of Brahmagupta when he gutted the town where Brahmagupta lived. Only recently, archeologists carefully unearthed parchment fragments of Brahmagupta’s writings which 30 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

are now housed in the Oxford University Library. It would have been a great loss for mankind, but for India’s rich oral tradition of memorizing and chanting to help remember information handed down through generations. Can you imagine Jakanachari, the chief architect of Belur temples in Karnataka communicating the intricacies of design sculpted in stone (full of axi-symmetric tall columns— axi-symmetry is what you get from a potter’s wheel; rotation of the wheel helps the potter design symmetric pots) without using blue prints, emails, SMS, laser beams or even pencil and paper.

Plotting Planets

Historians may disagree on the origin of methods to predict eclipses. But related fields of arithmetic, geometry, metallurgy, and calculus were known to Indians at least 600 years before Europeans started even thinking about them. A lunar eclipse occurs when Earth prevents Sun’s rays from reaching the Moon. Solar eclipse, on the other hand, happens when Moon prevents some parts of the Earth from getting total view of the Sun. Total eclipses

occur when the three objects are in the same exact plane. If the objects do not line up exactly partial eclipses result. Indians plotted the planet locations in a clever way. They used two stones of different heights whose top ends defined a direction pointing toward a planet, the angle determined by the distance between the stones. They divided the planets into two types—interior, Mercury and Venus; and exterior, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars. Uranus and Neptune are recent discoveries. Poor Pluto; it is in and out and out right now. Only sometime in 2025 will it come very near Earth as Pluto takes 265 years to go around the Sun once in a bizarre way. In a town in North Kerala, near the Karnataka border, stones seemingly planted randomly, actually turned out to be pairs of stones plotting the planet locations as seen from Earth. A Kerala astronomer, Parameswara, in the 15th century methodically recorded eclipses and planet locations for 55 years. The details of his observations are in his work Siddhantadipika. The calculations involved multiplying the distance of the Sun from the Earth by the diameter of the Earth and then dividing the product by the difference between the diameters of the Sun and the Earth. The result is the length of the shadow of the Earth (i.e, the distance of the vertex).

t is true every culture, in every part of the world, had very intelligent people who devised clever ways of making daily lives useful. Bolivians, before the Spanish arrived, knew and built sound elliptic cones, long before Euclid gave the world the concept of ellipses. n I gratefully acknowledge all the eminent scholars for their presentations at the IIT, Gandhinagar conference, who inspired me to write this article.

Earth centric view of the planets—not to scale

Krishnamachar Sreenivasan teaches a freshman course at IIT, Ropar, in the Dept. of History and Social Science, that includes material in this article. n

On Inglish

A Raja’s Pearl By Kalpana Mohan

raja—noun (rah-juh)—Hindi and Urdu raja, from Sanskrit raja—king First Known Use: 1555 1 : an Indian or Malay prince or chief 2 : the bearer of a title of nobility among the Hindus

he land of my father’s youth, Palakkad, is about as common and generic as the rest of India. If you were to alight at “Palakkad Junction” in the suburb of Olavakot, you’ll drive through auto-rickshaw stands, taxi stands, produce markets, seafood stalls, mom-and-pop stops selling fried foods and betel leaf mouth fresheners, dilapidated historic buildings and seedy lodges. You’ll zip past familiar rows of vendors peddling fritters, fruits, flowers, shirts, sandals, cell-phone chargers, handkerchiefs, green coconuts, underpants and belts. But if, instead, you hop into an auto and drive to the town’s old Hanuman temple to see the deity’s form carved into the face of a rock, in just about ten minutes, you’ll enter another Palakkad that dates back to Paleolithic times. Here, you’ll hear the whispers of kings. You’ll behold Palakkad Fort, the brooding, sand brown edifice built in 1766 by Hyder Ali, the ruler of the Deccan. Ten feet wide in some parts, its massive stone walls soar into the sky. Mini red hibiscus blossoms preen against the old wall. A breeze blows in from the mountains. Tiny waves stipple the green waters of the moat. This Palakkad evokes a time of scabbards and treaties and kings of every stripe and every time. For centuries the Palakkad region has remained a jewel in the crown of many a raja who ruled India. Derived from the Sanskrit term rajan, meaning “king,” the word raja was also used as a mark of respect for humbler dignitaries, petty chiefs and large landholders. Today, the title raja inspires images of palaces, forts, cavalries and conquests. The life of the raja was rife in intrigue and conflict in strategic passages like Palakkad. Everyone wanted control of this prime property. Called the Palakkad Gap, this tract of land through the mountains was the main conduit for goods and people from the lands around South India into the kingdoms of Malabar, Cochin and Travancore and also onto international waters. Traders and soldiers approaching the Ghats were often ambushed by archers hiding by the edge of the dense forest. I could see the area’s vitality even in the present day as our family trundled into Kerala from Tamil Nadu, past miles of somnolent goods trucks inching, bumper-to-bumper, towards the state border. On my trip, I discovered how India’s tumultuous history affected my father’s village of Lakshminarayanapuram in the middle of the 18th century when Raja Hyder Ali wanted to wrest control of the eastern ports then controlled by the French, Dutch and English trading companies. Later, his son Tipu Sultan continued the invasion of Kerala until his death in 1799 in Srirangapatnam at the hands of the British army. During Tipu’s invasion, Hindus in the Brahmin villages of Palakkad feared for their safety and for the sanctity of idols in the temples dotting the villages. The residents of the villages hid the idols of their temples in the well of one of the homes. When Tipu Sultan withdrew his forces, the idols were retrieved for reinstallation in the temples of the villages. The elders of the villages of Lakshminarayanapuram and Sekharipuram agreed that the idol first retrieved from the well would be installed and

consecrated for worship at Lakshminarayanapuram temple and the second at Sekharipuram. The first to be pulled out, strangely enough, was the idol of Lord Gopalakrishna. It was installed at the Lakshminarayanapuram temple. The second, an idol of Lakshminarayana, was taken to the Sekharipuram temple. Tales like this circumambulate every temple in Palakkad. The 600-year-old Kasi Viswanathaswamy temple at the village of Kalpathy houses a shiva lingam idol from Varanasi. Behind it, the Nila river flows gently, adding to a dramatic landscape of mountain, river, field and home. People wash and bathe daily in the river’s waters; it’s a living and breathing entity meandering through people’s lives, just like the Ganges. An ancient stone inscription in front of this temple narrates the specifics of a gift—in gold, silver and copper coins and utensils—for the upkeep of the precincts by Prince Ilttikombi Achan in the presence of several witnesses. On the last day of my stay in Palakkad, I discovered another story—an event not involving royalty but one far more significant to my life—when I happened upon two sheets of paper in my second cousin Babu’s home. A few minutes after I turned up at his home, he fished out two yellowing postcards from a drawer. He believed they would be of interest to me because of my curiosity about the village and my heritage. One was a letter typed up in 1928 by my grandfather to his brother. Another was a letter written by my father’s father to his brother in 1932. In my grandfather’s letter he discussed the cost of two cartloads of rice that he sold (Rupees 60) and the rent he was offered (a rupee and eight annas, that is, a rupee and a half) for one of his properties. My father was just five years old at the time. Both the letters threw light on specific information I had been looking for related to a writing project. Each postcard was a revelation about mutual respect, responsibility and consideration between siblings and the extent of economic hardship at the time. These letters gave me an insight into the great value placed then on penmanship, simplicity and clarity. Between the spaces of an old date, a dull seal and a fading address, I’d chanced upon the extraordinary daily battles and victories of commoners like my great grandfather, my grandfather and my own father. In two ordinary postcards, I had found a treasure far more precious than a Raja’s pearl. n Kalpana Mohan writes from Saratoga. To read more about her, go to http://kalpanamohan.org and http://saritorial.com. March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 31

32 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 33

films

The Coal Miner’s Song By Aniruddh Chawda

GUNDAY. Director: Ali Abbas Zafar. Players: Ranveer Singh, Arjun Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Irfan Khan, Saurabh Shukla. Music: Sohail Sen. Hindi with Eng. Sub-tit. Theatrical release (Yashraj).

fter the mega success of Dhoom 3, Yashraj hangs around on the action thriller circuit with Gunday. However, it is one thing to have Dhoom 3’s adventure saga turn into a Box Office earthquake and quite another to have the follow up offering Gunday achieve meaningful resonance. Thrills? Check. Adventure? Check. Romance? Check. Originality? Not so much in that as fun as Gunday is in parts, the lasting impression is that there is little here that was not already seen on Sholay or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. An epic trajectory is appropriately ignited when two orphaned refugee teenage boys, victimized by the cross-border atrocities of the India-Pakistan war of 1971, find themselves in the slums of what was then Calcutta. Hardened by brutalities of war and incessant penury, the boys grow up to become Bikram (Singh) and Bala (Kapoor) and, against overwhelming odds, rise to stake a claim on the web of the local coal-running mob. For Bikram and Bala, the strangest turn is not their violently sordid climb up the criminal food chain but the fact that both of them are smitten by the come-hither cabaret dancer Nandita (Chopra) all the while both of them are being chased by shrewd anti-mafia cop Inspector Satya (Khan). When the going is good, director Zafar (Mere Brother Ki Dulhan) and action-choreographer Sham Kaushal (Dhoom 3, Krrish 3, Ram Leela) stage some truly terrific action sequences many of which prominently feature trains as the mode of transport used in shipping the afore-mentioned coal. The non-action narrative that should effortlessly coalesce around the edge-of-the-seat thrills, however, lacks urgency in solidifying what should be a well-rounded story. Ceasar-Bosco’s dance numbers are also ferociously energetic and effortlessly draw on Chopra’s dance skills. Nandita’s cabaret numbers, modeled after the Moulin Rouge motif, are polished and here in line with Yashraj’s rep for opulence in musical delivery. 34 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

Sohail Sen’s soundtrack has got it going on, especially with the lovers lament “Saiyaan,” piped by Shahid Mallya. Once again, however, what is happening in the foreground does not jive with what is happening in the background. What is happening in the background is this. There is too much here that is indeed reminiscent of Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay (1975). A bromance between two men who are inseparable, sometimes use a coin toss to arrive at decisions, have many fights on moving trains, value their friendship above all else, share the same bed, urinate together and, perhaps other than the ambiguously heterosexual posturing of falling for the same woman, repeatedly remind one of Bachchan and Dharmendra from Sholay. This subtle homoeroticism alone is no reason to complain. In the story overall, however, it is distracting. Singh is coming back after the rocking success of Ram Leela while Kapoor delivered the hit Ishaqzaade. Their Bikram and Bala are carefree mafia kingpins unafraid to get into bare-knuckle brawls with everyone from mean bosses to competing mafia dons. As counterweight to their aloofness, there is Khan’s Inspector Satya who is a portrait of a Machiavellian company man that can often outguess his enemy. In the rush to exploit the

jealousies that set in when Bikram and Bala get closer to Nandita, while Chopra gets her dues as the object of desire, the script misses out on getting more use out of the underutilized Khan. Relative newcomers Singh and Kapoor as well as director Zafar (Mere Brother Ki Dulhan) are Yashraj faves. Because Yashraj provided both Singh and Kapoor their respective career starts, what the studio gets is return is relatively modestly priced talent compared to, say, Hrithik Roshan or Ajay Devgan. That, combined with expected future DVD sales and lucrative international satellite broadcasting rights, even a better than average Box Office of a movie like Gunday can end up as a money making proposition for the studio. Just as the studio has been marketing Parineeti Chopra in smartly-made smaller movies, we can likely expect Singh and Kapoor in more Yashraj offerings. n EQ: B Globe trekker, aesthete, photographer, ski bum, film buff, and commentator, Aniruddh Chawda writes from Milwaukee.

Sizzle and Fizzle By Madhumita Gupta HASEE TOH PHASEE. Director: Vinil Mathew. Players: Parineeti Chopra, Sidharth Malhotra, Manoj Joshi, Sharat Saxena, Neena Kulkarni, Adah Sharma. Music: Vishal-Shekhar. Hindi with Eng. Sub-tit. Theatrical release Dharma Productions and Phantom Productions (Reliance).

When two big production houses like Dharma and Phantom, with people like Karan Johar and Anurag Kashyap come together for a film with a fun title like Hasee Toh Phasee, you expect sparks to fly. Especially since one of last year’s biggest block-busters was the romcom Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani. Here, too, the lead pair is promising, the ensemble cast pillar-like, the music catchy— how wrong could a film go with so many things working for it? Not much, one would suppose but one would be quite, quite wrong. There is only so much all these things can do because the crucial thing to hold them together is a strong or even credible storyline, which is conspicuous by its absence. The film starts with two kids, in two different cities, with similar skills in getting out of locked doors … that’s a connection, ok? They’re meant to be soul-mates. They grow up into a dishy Nikhil (Malhotra) and the nerdy Meeta (Chopra) who meet fleetingly just to separate. Nikhil goes and falls for and gets engaged to the sizzling-turned-tantrummy Karishma (Sharma). Our sympathies are with the boy when we learn that Karishma loves breaking-up at the drop of a hat. Reenter Meeta, who now appears almost crazy and we learn that she is Karishma’s sister whom the family has ostracized for some reason. The film plods on featuring scenes preparing for the great Gujju-wedding. Nikhil runs around at the nth hour trying to prove himself to his finicky would-be as we wait for the explanation of Meeta’s ostracism and craziness. In the meanwhile, we discover that Meeta is super-intelligent, when she is not crazy, and Nikhil, despite being engaged to her sister, starts falling for her. Why? Search me! In a highly convoluted plot Nikhil cures Meeta of her craziness and a song or two later she convinces him that they make a better couple. The last ten to fifteen minutes

races to the finale, where Nikhil makes up his mind which sister he really wants to marry. And that’s that. The film is shot beautifully, the production values are great, the actors look lovely in soft-focus and act as well as the script or the lack thereof lets them. One feels sorry for the talented Parineeti, whose supposedly drug-addict version becomes a caricature with its blinking, tongue-sticking and staring and her, again, supposed IIT-level brilliance turns to spouting bookish knowledge about how to charge a dead car-battery from a laptop charger to the effects of certain drugs to how to remain calm—surely we needed a much sorted out person to invent that gamechanger ball she has invented? Malhotra turns in a more credible Nikhil, a loser trying to find his way to success and win his lady-love’s respect. Among the supporting actors, Manoj Joshi deserves a special mention as the girls’ father—his interaction with his estranged daughter is one of the most touching moments of the film. Vishal–Shekhar’s music is excellent specially the melodious “Zahenaseeb” and the foot-tapping “Shake it like Shammi” and “Punjabi wedding song.” One just wishes that the writers and the debutant director Vinil Mathew had given a little more thought to the storyline and remembered that assorted great scenes do not make a great film! Or was it the case of too many cooks which cooked this could-have-

been-wonderful film’s goose? Hasee toh Phasee has all the right ingredients but lacks the recipe to give it lasting flavor. Watch it for some good sequences, dances and music! n EQ: B Madhumita Gupta is a freelance writer and a teacher.

L ATA’S

FLICK PICKS

 Besharam Boss hqiya Dedh Is 3 om ho D Phasee h to Hasee o H  Jai Krrish 3 irus Mickey V la Ram Lee the Great ab Sa h ng Si Desi Romance Shuddh

March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 35

commentary

Why Oscar Doesn’t Go To India How can India crack the Oscar movie formula?

36 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

A Creative Commons Image

t really has become an annual joke or as a local wit quipped “I laugh so that I may not weep!” Ever since the Best Foreign Film category was introduced in 1947, India has dutifully sent entries. Till date, only three films (Mother India, Salaam Bombay and Lagaan) made the cut, while almost all others have been slung out with ceremony! Yet, every year India continues to make a big production generating high drama involving the selection process—which invariably turns controversial due to the bizarre set of films picked. How dumb, delusional and demented can India get? Now comes a proposal from a respected filmdom official that instead of one, can we please send five entries? Let’s get some basics right and home in on some ground realities. The fact that India is the largest movie-producing country on earth, doesn’t mean a fig because in global competitions where quality—not quantity— is the key, India is often found wanting. Bollywood junkies, blinded by glitz, glamor, and the demons of megalomania insist that Bollywood doesn’t really need the Oscars because it is a global force anyway! In support of this argument they point towards its zooming box office collections from the international arena. What can the Oscars—an American/Hollywood award—give Bollywood that they don’t already have? For that matter, all big-ticket (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto) global events are ONLY great for an exchange of ideas, networking with luminaries, marketing movies, collaborations and socializing ... International awards mean nothing, beyond some media coverage and congratulations, forgotten within a week. The saner lot (after clearing their throats in embarrassment) however are fully cognizant of the huge and unquestionable status, respect and global recognition that comes with an Oscar, something that all the awards at home can never ever hope to match. The problem is: How should India crack it? Veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal believes that “narratives on human relationship with a strong socio-political context that celebrates the ambience of local roots ignited by universal appeal—A Separation, Amour, In a Better World, Lives of Others, The Secret of their Eyes—is required, something that

By Monojit Lahiri

we just can’t seem to come up with.” He believes that, unfortunately, we are blinded by our version of so-called great films [Tare Zameen Par, Barfi] which bewilders them. “We must realize that our version of their need just doesn’t work!” he reminds all those keen to hear. Adds Victor Banerjee, the star of David Lean’s classic Passage to India three decades ago and an Oscar nominee himself without any fuss or frippery, “We are plain not good enough for global standards! Stuff like Barfi and Black are nothing when you see Charlie, Rain Man, Miracle Worker and a host of other gems from Hollywood and other places. In our arrogance and self-congratulatory mode, we believe that we have been wronged and racism, favoritism or politics has played its devious part. Rubbish! Our 100 years of cinema or tons of trash that we roll out every year means nothing to them. Its not that we lack talent but our cockeyed presumptuousness and habit of reading the writing on the wall wrong, along with our self-righteousness continues to prompt this early exit. Sad but true.” The other international star Kabir Bedi (of Sandokan, Octopussy, Bold and Beautiful fame) also joins the party with his POV (point of view). “I agree with both Shyam and Victor and would like to add one more reason. According to me, much more attention needs to be paid to the psychographics and demographics of the jury members and decision makers. What is their leaning and liking in terms of form and content? Historically there has also been a huge greenlighting

of films from the West, with Italy ruling. Asia, comparatively, has been pretty much out in the cold with a very meager presence. Can we do anything about that? Quite honestly, I have no answers.” All three make valid points, but can India learn? Will India learn? After packing off the truly brilliant Lunchbox, India’s Oscar Selection Committee’s choice The Good Road was shown the highway in record time! Instead, the list of nine films that will feature for the BFF (Best Foreign Film) slot have been announced: Belgium’s The Broken Circle Breakdown, Bosnia’s An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, Cambodia’s The Missing Picture, Denmark’s The Hunt, Germany’s Two Lives, Hongkong’s The Grandmaster, Hungary’s The Notebook, Italy’s Great Beauty, Palestine’s Omar. Belgium? Bosnia? Cambodia? Hungary? Palestine? Places which are miniscule in size and population compared to India with no celebrated hundred year tradition or moviecrazy audiences. Can they be expected to produce films of world class standard? Yes … and it is out of these films that five have been shortlisted (The Broken Circle Breakdown, The Great Beauty, The Hunt, The Missing Picture and Omar) and from which one will win the Oscar. Perhaps, the next Oscars will be a new beginning. n Monojit Lahiri is a journalist who has been writing on Advertising, Cinema and popular culture and has been published in every mainstream Indian magazine for over three decades.

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music

March Madness By Vidya Sridhar

ith the recent crop of releases, there appear to be a surfeit of Punjabi rhythms. Rahman is back holding the microphone in “Maahi Ve” and orchestral

Harry is not a Brahmachari

Movie: Shaadi ke Side Effects; Music: Pritam Lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya Singers: Jazzy B, Divya Kumar, Ishq Bector This is the first song from the new Farhan Akhtar and Vidya Balan release. It sounds fresh and fun. It adds a techno beat to a peppy Punjabi flavor. Definitely changes it up with some rap elements and some classical elements. n

details abound in background scores. It's not just about composing melodies, but telling a story through song and exploring situations in tracks. n

Movie: Gunday; Music: Sohail Sen Lyrics: Irshad Kamil Singers: Arijit Singh, et. al.

Movie: Highway; Music: A.R. Rahman Lyrics: Irshad Kamil Singers: A.R. Rahman

This is such a beautiful song—takes you on a romantic journey. It does grow on you, so be patient. Arjit Singh’s voice is both soothing and melodious. The background score is impressive and reminds me of Rahman. n

Movie: Yariyaan; Music: Pritam (Guest Composer), Mithoon, Yo Yo Honey Singh, Arko Pravo Mukerjee Singers: Yo Yo Honey Singh, Neha Kakkar This is such an upbeat song, rendered pitch perfect by Yo Yo Honey Singh and Neha Kakkar. It is a totallly fun dance number that you can’t stop listening to over and over again. n 38 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

Maahi Ve

Jiya

Sunny Sunny

Vidya Sridhar works at NASA and is a mom of two elementary school children. She lives and breathes all things filmi.

Brilliant song sung soulfully by music maestro A.R. Rahman. This is a romantic number and brings out the heart of the storyline. Rahman has melted together the sounds of Punjab and Haryana into a beautiful melody. n

Zehnaseeb

Movie: Hasee toh Phassee; Music: Shekhar Ravjiani, Vishal Dadlani Lyrics: Amitabh Bhattacharya Singer: Chinmayi Sripada, Shekhar Ravjiani “One of my favorite love songs” tweeted Karan Johar and he’s right on the mark. It is lyrical and has a haunting quality, bringing out the pathos of love. n

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40 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 41

current affairs

ll American cowboy Preet has added another Indian (origin) scalp to his belt. Even as the Devyani Khobragade affair recedes from the front pages, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has gone after another prominent Indian American. This time it’s the outspoken conservative darling Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza is accused of breaking United States laws about campaign funding limits. Bharara alleges that D’Souza got others to donate money to a U.S. Senate campaign in their names and then reimbursed them because he would have broken the law if he had donated all the money in his own name. Reuters identifies the candidate as Wendy Long who tried to unseat Kirsten Gillibrand in New York in 2012. D’Souza, if convicted, could face up to seven years in prison. D’Souza’s lawyer has said there was no “corrupt or criminal intent” and no “quid pro quo.” “He and the candidate have been friends since their college days, and at worst, this was an act of misguided friendship by D’Souza,” he said. Basic translation: Rich guy felt the law was getting in his way. So he found his way around it. It’s his money anyway. Bharara, on the other hand, wants to project himself as “Mr Zero Tolerance” who will not let D’Souza’s fame or Devyani’s status deter him. A law is a law whether it’s about an employment contract for a nanny or a campaign finance limit. But in these matters timing is everything. And Bharara will find it hard to duck charges that his zeal for righteousness is turning into a full-blown case of the MATA syndrome— as in More American Than American. That’s not because Dinesh D’Souza is dearly beloved in the Indian community. His pop psychology analysis of “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” was a hit among Obama-haters. His documentary Obama’s America is “the highest grossing explicitly right wing film ever.” Will Leith on Deadspin described its plot in a nutshell: Best I can tell, his argument is that Obama got his entire political worldview from his late father, who D’Souza claims was an anti-colonialist, anti-American, racist terrorist drunken black guy from some crazy black-guy country. Hence, Obama hates America and is part of some secret

42 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

Wikipedia Commons Image

By Sandip Roy

plot launched by his father to take down the country from inside the very belly of the beast. It fired up Obama’s many bitter foes, but did little to swiftboat his electoral campaign. And it certainly won’t win D’Souza new friends in the overwhelmingly Democratic Indian-American community. So while they will shed few tears for the impending downfall of Dinesh D’Souza, they will also be looking rather nervously at hamara Preet, who is showing little preet for his community. As journalist Siddharth Mitter quips on Twitter, “It’s getting harder to argue that Preet Bharara isn’t on an ill one-man mission to purge Desi America of rogues and miscreants.” Clearly, Bharara would say he is just doing his job in the most color-blind way possible. And one would have to tot up the entire record of everyone his office has gone after to see if there’s a disproportionate number of South Asians in the mix. Ultimately of course, it’s the conviction rate that will make Bharara’s reputation or ruin it, not the color of the defendants’ skin. It’s easy to speculate that Indian Americans must go further to prove their loyalty to America but hard to prove it. As Aseem Shukla, a member of the board of directors of the Hindu American Foundation writes in India Abroad: Bharara is celebrated because of his 77 of 77 conviction rate for insider trading cases, and not because his convictions happen to include a Raj Rajaratnam or a Rajat Gupta, whose guilt was proven in court. And if Khobragade curses his name, she shares her woes with leagues

of Wall Street titans. There are exceptions no doubt, but the progeny of India do not submit to a litmus test of loyalty in the United States, as much as it needs no certificate from India or being Indian enough or MATA. This is really the Indian community’s problem with its Indian American children rather than Preet Bharara’s desi problem. Ami Bera, a newly minted Congressman from California told India Abroad that 2013 was a “coming of age of the community.” “It clearly shows that the Indian-American community with its second and third generation are now completely ingrained in the mainstream of America,” he said. He was talking about the record number of Indian American Obama appointees as well as judges. But when Bera said “ingrained in the mainstream of America” he also quietly removed the fence-straddling hyphen from their identities, at least in their professional lives. While Indians celebrate those appointments as a kind of community achievement, the sheer number of those appointees also frees them from the pressure of being any kind of representatives for India’s honor. Bharara might not repudiate his heritage the way a Bobby Jindal has. But a Preet Bharara can show up at his rubber chicken and wine Indian American of the Year reception in a Manhattan ballroom and feel no more sense of special indebtedness to the community feting him than a Bobby Jindal or Nikki Haley does. In his statement after the Khobragade affair became a political hot potato, Bharara said “this Office’s sole motivation in this case, as in all cases, is to uphold the rule of law, protect victims, and hold accountable anyone who breaks the law—no matter what their societal status and no matter how powerful, rich or connected they are.” He did not mention race or ethnicity. But it is perhaps a twisted reflection of the Indian community’s success in the United States that his pursuit of law breakers among the “powerful, rich or connected” is netting so many desis. n Sandip Roy is the Culture Editor for Firstpost. com. He is on leave as editor with New America Media. His weekly dispatches from India can be heard on KALW.org. This article was first published on FirstPost.com.

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healthcare

The Promise of Coverage

One woman takes Obamacare’s promise to Bangladeshi immigrants Akiko Fujita • New America Media

ina Sharmin has set up shop in a restaurant in Los Angeles’ Little Bangladesh neighborhood on most recent Wednesdays. Deshi Food and Groceries is a favorite stop among South Asian immigrants who live in this part of the city. They come to feast on Bengali food, while news from their native country streams across a grainy TV screen. But Sharmin isn’t here to eat. The health advocate is here to become a familiar face, so she can talk to people about healthcare. She knows the Bangladeshi community is one of California’s fastest-growing immigrant groups. More than 6,000 people from Bangladesh live in Los Angeles, a sharp rise in recent years, according to a report by Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Many of the immigrants in this community fall into low-income brackets. Nearly a quarter here are uninsured. Yet the community is often unaware or ill-informed when it comes to the new federal health insurance program. Many, says Sharmin, have never even heard the term “Obamacare.” “So, what will it be?” Sharmin asks. “They’ll go without health insurance?” Sharmin and outreach workers with the South Asian Network, a non-profit group, are trying to change that. They canvass people in restaurants, shops, and homes, going door-to-door to explain the Affordable Care Act. They’re part of a wider force of nearly two dozen groups reaching out to California’s vast Asian immigrant community to talk healthcare. Often, Sharmin drops in unannounced at apartments in Little Bangladesh, handing out healthcare pamphlets in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati and Bangla. Cold calls like this are possible, Sharmin says, because the South Asian Network has built up trust in the community over its 20-plus year history here. Manju Kulkarni, the executive director of the South Asian Network, says South Asian immigrants are often skeptical of government programs because of the high level of corrup44 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

Nina Sharmin handing out healthcare pamphlets

tion back home. “We tell them that things are different here,” Kulkarni says. “They can trust the government and they don’t have to pay anybody off to get things done. This is not a scam. We’re able to provide evidence of what kind of benefits they’ll get.” As Sharmin moves through the neighborhood, an older man pulls her aside. He says he and his wife are insured through Medi-Cal, but his daughters aren’t covered. He asks about Obama’s new plan. Sharmin pulls out a pamphlet and explains who is eligible under the Affordable Care Act. She offers to meet him again, to help fill out the application. It’s 32 pages long. Outreach workers like Sharmin are required to go through three days of training to understand every page of the rigorous application process. They must also take an exam and score at least 80 percent in order to enroll people. Kulkarni says many of her clients want healthcare, but don’t have the language proficiency to understand the complexities of it. “Getting access to a doctor for the first time, being able to take their kids to the dentist, these are really important things for them, and part of what they see as the American dream,” she says. It’s a stark contrast to conditions back home. Kulkarni says most South Asian countries don’t offer comprehensive healthcare coverage, and systems are known for being corrupt. Still, getting healthcare in the US is hardly straightforward. Kulkarni says many immigrants aren’t aware of the high premiums or exclusions. As she tours Little Bangladesh, Sharmin comes across a group of women who insist they’re not eligible for healthcare. After a series of questions, she learns the women

qualify for Medi-Cal. Sharmin remembers the hurdles she faced, when she first arrived here from Bangladesh 15 years ago. Her son was 3 and had kidney problems. Insurance for the entire family cost $500 a month. She ran out of cash in six months. “Think about people who are just coming to this country, people who cannot even speak English,” Sharmin says. “What will they do?” As Sharmin approaches a bus stop near a busy intersection, she sees a woman wearing a headscarf and rattles off the usual questions: “Do you know about the new healthcare plan? Are you insured?” The woman, Parul Katun, tells Sharmin she is from Bangladesh and that she moved here with her family two years ago. They have no idea about healthcare, but are interested. Recently, Katun says, her daughter fractured her knee, forcing Katun and her husband to pay $40 out of pocket each month. It may not seem like much, but the woman tells Sharmin she and her husband don’t speak English and can’t find work. Katun’s 21-year-old son works at a gas station to support the family. Sharmin points to her pamphlet and says, “Affordable healthcare. Affordable healthcare.” She offers to walk Katun through the new program. She also shares her own story. “When I came to this country, I was in the same situation. But today, I’m OK,” Sharmin says. “I can speak, I can work, my children are going to school.” Katun smiles after learning Sharmin’s son is now studying to become an accountant and her daughter is a software engineer. Sharmin reassures her and says, “One step at a time.” n Akiko Fujita has taken her passion for storytelling all over the world. A veteran journalist with more than a decade of experience, she has reported on some of the biggest stories across Asia and the U.S. Her work has been featured on ESPN, the BBC, Public Radio International, The Wall Street Journal, and NHK.

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events MARCH

Californiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Best Guide to Indian Events Edited by: Mona Shah List your event for FREE! APRIL issue deadline: Thursday, March 20 To list your event in the Calendar, go to www.indiacurrents.com and fill out the Web form

Check us out on

special dates Ash Wednesday

March 5

Holi

March 17

Now Roz

March 22

Ugadi

March 31

Gudi Padva

March 31

Ramnavmi

April 8

Baisakhi

April 13

Mahavir Jayanti

April 13

Tamil New Year

April 14

Hanuman Jayanti

April 15

CULTURAL CALENDER

March

1 Sunday

A Nice Indian Boyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;A Play. As gay

marriage is being debated by the Supreme Court, this play is timely in continuing the discussion. Naveen Gavaskar meets Keshav Kurundkar, and they share all things Indian, from speaking Hindi to the difficulty of being gay in Indian culture. They agree to

46 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

7isai Geetham, music show highlighting several music directors, including Maestro Ilayaraja, March 1

meet in person to find that one is South Asian and the other (Keshav) is a Caucasian, adopted by Indian parents and speaks fluent Hindi. Ends March 23. Organized by East West Players. The David Henry Hwang Theater at The Union Center for the Arts, 120 Judge John Aiso, Los Angeles . $60. (213) 6257000. www.eastwestplayers.org.

Family Gita Class. A class for kids, youth and parents. Organized by Radha Madhav Dham. 7-8:30 p.m. Pasadena Hindu Temple, 676 S. Rosemead Blvd., Pasadena. Free. (626) 755-8686. vishalkapoor82@gmail.com. www. radhamadhavdham.org. Music Meets Bells. Music and dance fusion with Tarun Bhattacharya (santoor), N. Ravikiran (chitravina) and odissi dance by Sanchita Bhattacharya. Organized by Indian

Fine Arts Academy of San Diego and Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation. 4-6 p.m. Jacobs Center, 310 Euclid Ave., San Diego. Free. www.indianfinearts.org.

7isai Geetham. A light music show highlighting several music directors along the horizon of tamil cinema with a special hint on maestro Ilayaraja. Organized by Southern California Tamil Manram. 4:30-8 p.m. Hoover Middle School, 3501, Country Club Drive, Lakewood. $12, kids (13 - 18) $5, VIP section per family $100. (562) 653-6120. socaltm@gmail.com. goo.gl/Ss5kn3.

March

3 Monday

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recommends

Festival of Colors Shyamal Randeria-Leonard

egardless of the numerous legends and traditions of celebrating Holi, the upcoming spring festival is sure to be observed with fanfare as Indians unify regardless of age, caste or creed to spray, douse and smear one another with a panorama of colors during one of the largest Hindu festivals. Holi celebrations traditionally begin the day after the full moon of the lunar month Phalguna which falls in either late February or March. Prayers and bonfires are customary the night before Holi. This year, Holi’s eve falls on Sunday, March 16 followed by the day of Holi on Monday, March 17. The word Holi is derived from the word ‘hola’ which means offering, especially to God for a good harvest. The annual jubilee is also called Phagwah in many parts of India. Popular with children and adults, the festivities are marked with the smattering of bright gulal (colored powder) to anyone standing nearby. Bystanders may also use pichkari (water jets) or buckets of water filled with bright red, green, yellow and blue colors to drench one another from head to toe. Indoors the observance include reverence of one’s elders as well as feasts with sweet treats such as gujia, puran poli and refreshments such as thandai and the hemp based bhang. Aside from its significance for ushering in the spring, the ancient Vedic festival has its roots in various legends from many parts of India. Holika Dahan one of the most well known stories is about the demon king Hiranyakashipu’s failed pursuit to punish his son Prahlad for worshipping Lord Narayana. After repeated warnings to his son, the demon king approached his sister Holika for help. Holika had a boon to never burn in a fire, and took Prahlad in her lap and entered a pyre to destroy him. Due to her villainous act of betrayal of Prahlad, Holika burned to death leaving Prahlad unharmed. The age old lesson on moral values and the victory of good over evil are still played out throughout India where Holika is figuratively burned in effigy. In the cities of Mathura, Vrindavan, Gokul, Nandgaon,

Freinds celebrating holi. Photo credit: Porus Chaudry

Phalen and Barsana ‘Braj Holi’ is popularized by the reenactments of love legends associated with the eternal consorts Radha and Krishna. The sixteen day festival is filled with folk music, dance and the worship of Agni or holy fire. The second day or Dhuleti is reminiscent of the common spray of colors throughout the cities. An interesting portion of the merrymaking is the piñata style hanging of a buttermilk pot high in a street. A human pyramid-type formation is created so that a person can climb up to break the pot, mimicking Lord Krishna’s similar childhood venture. Holi is also a celebration of wives in the state of Haryana which welcomes ‘Dulandi Holi.’ Other variations of the boisterous festival are known as Dolyatra and Basanta Utsav in West Bengal. Here in the United States, Holi is either celebrated via pageants and parades, local parties or large scale community gatherings which mingle food, music and fun. n Upcoming local Holi festivities this year in Southern California span from Los Angeles to San Diego:

Holi Festival of Colors 2014. Saturday, March 8, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.Excelsior High School Grounds 15711 Pioneer Blvd., Norwalk. Adults $5, Kids 12 and under free. http://www.festivalofcolorsusa.com/festival-ofcolors/festival-of-colors-in-los-angeles-ca.

Association for India’s Development LA-OC’s Holi on the Beach 2014.

Saturday, March 15, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Will Rogers State Beach (Between Towers 5&6), 14800 Pacific Coast Hwy., Pacific Palisades. $12 advance, $15 at door, $10 students, kids under 8 free. http://la-oc.aidindia.org/holionthebeach.

CRY San Diego Holi (Children’s Rights and Youth). March 15, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Ocean Air Rec Center 4770 Fairport Way, San Diego. Adults $10 advance, $12 at the door, Kids (6-12) $5. https://www.facebook. com/events/683367498373599.

Chinmaya Mission Los Angele Holi Picnic. March 16. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Mile

Square Regional Park, Fountain Valley. Dry Holi only. $5 entry fee for park, $10 adults and children over 4. Food and Color provided at park. https://www.chinmayala.org/civicrm/ event/info?reset=1&id=166. March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 47

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ter, 330 N Brea Blvd., Brea . $15. richajfit@ gmail.com.

March

8 Saturday

International Women’s Day— Celebrating Lives and Accomplishments of South Asian Women. With

distinguished guests, dinner, dancing, and performances. Sindhi panelists and honorary guests include Rosie Kar (Professor in Women Studies), Sobhya Agha (Former UN Worker and TV Anchor), Pirbhu Lal (Human Rights Humphrey Fellow from Karachi), Geet Chanani (Founder of Life Bridges, Sindh Flood Relief), Ambreen Joyo (Engineer and entrepreneur ), Sara Sadhwani (Community advocate), Meena Makhijani (South Asian Network). Performances by members from the local community. Organized by International Sindhi Women Organization. 4-9 p.m. Woodlands Indian Cuisine, 11833 Artesia Blvd., Artesia . General $30, kids (4 to 12 yrs) $15, student $20, seniors $25. (619) 787- 4483, (404) 694-4985. benazir.shkh@gmail.com, psamina@yahoo.com. sindhiwomen.weebly.com/events.html.

Holi Festival of Colors 2014. 11 a.m.-

6 p.m.Excelsior High School Grounds 15711 Pioneer Blvd., Norwalk. Adults $5, Kids 12 and under free. http://www.festivalofcolorsusa. com/festival-of-colors/festival-of-colors-in-losangeles-ca.

March

9 Sunday

Rajan and Sajan Mishra and Suman Laha Concert. Accompanied by Ash-

ish Sengupta (tabla), and Vyasmurti Katti (harmonium). Followed by instrumental music by Suman Laha with Abhijit Banerjee on the tabla. Organized by Satsang Foundation (dba Cerritos Music Circle). 2 p.m. William and Jane Bristol Auditorium, 16600 Civic Center Drive, Bellflower. $100, $50, $30. (310) 530-5992, (562) 704-2720. nibeditalaw@yahoo.com.

March

15 Saturday

CRY San Diego Holi (Children’s Rights and Youth). 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Ocean Air Rec Center 4770 Fairport Way, San Diego. Adults $10 advance, $12 at the door, Kids (6-12) $5. https://www.facebook.com/

Rajan and Sajan Mishra in concert, March 9

5 Saturday

events/683367498373599/

April

March

nRuthya Vasantham—Celebrate Spring. “Vasantha” meaning spring is

16 Sunday

Chinmaya Mission Los Angele Holi Picnic. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Mile Square Regional Park, Fountain Valley. Dry Holi only. $5 entry fee for park, $10 adults and children over 4. Food and Color provided at park. https://www.chinmayala.org/civicrm/event/ info?reset=1&id=166.

March

22 Saturday

the season of bloom, color and rejuvenation is celebrated by the dancers of Soorya Performing Arts. Organized by Soorya Performing Arts. 4:30-6:30 p.m. New Jewish Community High School, 22622, Vanowen St., West Hills . Free. (818) 730-0371. sushmakasthuri@hotmail.com. www.sushmamohan.com, www.sooryadance.com.

Holi on the Beach. Live music and food. Organized by AID LA-OC. 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Will Rogers State Beach, 14800 Pacific Coast Hwy, Pacific Palisades. $12. aidlachapter@ gmail.com. la-oc.aidindia.org/holionthebeach.

March

29 Saturday

Cruise with Bollywood—Dance Show 2014. A recital by students of

NDM dance. 6 p.m. Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, 1935 Manhattan Beach Blvd., Redondo Beach. $25, $35, $45. (562) 402-7761. ndmdance.com/cruise-bollywoodbollywood-dance-show-2014/.

Cruise with Bollywood, a dance show, March 29

SPIRITUALITY & HEALTH

March

2 Sunday

Harnessing the Power of the Mind. Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple

and Retreat, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. (310) 454-4114. Hollywood Temple, 4860 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 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.

Sunday Services at the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Rotating

lectures, please visit websites for updated information. Hollywood Vedanta Temple, 1946 Vedanta Place, Hollywood. (323) 4657114. hollywood@vedanta.org. Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple, 927 Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara. (805) 969-2903. santabarbara@ vedanta.org. South Pasadena Vivekananda House, 309 Monterey Road, South Pasadena. (323) 254-1546, pasadena@vedanta.org. Trabuco Canyon Ramakrishna Monastery, 19961 Live Oak Canyon Rd., Trabuco Canyon. (949) 858-0342. rkmtrabuco@vedanta.org. San Diego Ramakrishna Monastery, 1440 Upas Street, San Diego. (619) 291-9377. sandiego@ vedanta.org.

March

9 Sunday

The Speaking Voice of a Silent God. Sunday Service. Lake Shrine Temple

March

16 Sunday

Why Waste Time? God is the Joy

50 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

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.

March

23 Sunday

How to be a Friend to All. 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.

March

30 Sunday

The Way to lasting Peace and Hapiness. Sunday Service. Lake Shrine

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SHARE IT WITH THE READERS OF INDIA CURRENTS. Have you had an intense religious awakening? SHARE IT WITH US. Do you observe a meditation practice that works well? SHARE IT WITH US. Were you spurred onto a spiritual quest by a memorable incident? SHARE IT WITH US. INDIA CURRENTS is looking for thoughtful, personal essays written by readers; press releases from spiritual organizations will not be accepted for publication. If there are individuals within the organization who write about their individual spiritual practices, we will consider those submissions.

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reflections

Undesired Desires By Monica Bhide

“I

f you get what your heart desires, it is good. If you don’t, it is better.” I posted a note about this philosophy on my blog and got a lot of comments. What a losing attitude, most said. I grew up with the belief that I could design my life, and I rebelled against letting go. I wanted to be on the debate team, so I practiced until I was accepted. I wanted to act in school plays, so I pursued the director until he gave me a shot. How could not getting what I wanted be good for me? Although I’d grown up in Bahrain, a tiny island in the Middle East, I loved India, where I was born. I went there to study engineering in college and wanted to stay forever. It was Dad’s dream that I go to graduate school in the United States. My father had blessed me with abundance but, keenly aware of his humble beginnings, instilled in me the importance of a good education. While some traditional Indian fathers focus on the man their girls will marry— a rich doctor with a richer father—mine wanted me to have a “real” education, a “real” job. Other parents chided him: “Look at the money you are spending on her—and now sending her to America. She is a daughter—she will go away to another house. She is not your son.” My father laughed it off. He insisted I go to America. I wanted to stay in India. The day in 1990 when we landed in America, the Gulf War was starting to affect Bahrain. We were in a cramped hotel room in Lynchburg, Virginia. My father’s hands trembled as he spoke on the phone. He worried about friends and coworkers—what would happen to them? He had to go back. After Dad left, I moved onto campus at Lynchburg College, where I had enrolled for a master’s in industrial management. I missed him and my mom terribly. I wanted to leave this unfamiliar country where I knew no one. I stayed in my

52 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

Monica with her dad and kids

room watching TV, crying myself to sleep. Then, slowly, I started talking to people. Classmates invited me over for Thanksgiving—a holiday I had never heard of—bachelorette parties, weddings. I learned about kimchee from a Korean roommate, about the Shinto religion from a Japanese friend, about Starbucks from an American teacher. I began to fall in love with the United States. There was a willingness to try anything: I read about a lawyer who became a radio producer, a policeman who went to business school, a Wall Street hotshot who became a chef. I’d always done what I was supposed to do. Had I stayed in India, I would have had a good life—worked as an engineer, made a decent salary. I didn’t know then how many opportunities life would afford me if I let it. Two decades after coming here, I have the blessing to travel back to India whenever

I like. My adopted American home has allowed me to let go of an engineering career I disliked and become what I really longed to be—a food writer. In Lynchburg, I met the love of my life. We live in Washington and have two boys with independent spirits; a circle of caring, international friends who expose us to new cultures and ways of thinking; and, more than anything, a sea of yet-undesired desires. n Monica Bhide is a food writer and cookbook author. Her work has appeared in Food and Wine, Bon Appetit, Eating Well, The Washington Post, and many other national and international publications. You can find her at: www.monicabhide.com. This article first appeared in the Washingtonian earlier in 2010.

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healthy life

My Yoga Journey I built the house before the foundation By Mimm Patterson

’m like that kid in The Sixth Sense. Except instead of seeing dead people, I smell cigarette smoke. Now and again, even when the nearest smoldering cancer stick is miles away, I’ll feel the tease of a phantom, acrid odor. When I mentioned this to my doctor during a routine wellness exam at the beginning of the month he paused, looked up from his computer screen and said, “Really?” And that’s how I ended up in the neurologist’s office on Wednesday. Next week I’ll have an MRI of my brain. The following week it will be an EEG. Seven days later I’ll return to the neurologist’s office and by the time you read these words I will know if I am dealing with a brain tumor, epilepsy, chronic sinusitis or a rampant imagination. The odds are on my overactive imagination. My guess—as a graduate of Princeton Plainsboro under the tutelage of Dr. Gregory House with eight years of further study at Seattle Grace—is that my odd symptoms are nothing more than my body’s way of responding to stress and the hormonal fluctuations of menopause. But I could be wrong. And there’s nothing like a slight brush with mortality to jar you from a rut and encourage a yogi to take a good, close look at her practice. When was the last time you stepped back for a moment to examine your yoga journey? I sat in sukhasana for the first time in 1975. I was a 16-year-old junior at Northwestern Lehigh High School in rural Pennsylvania and my gym teacher Mrs. Carey was introducing the class to some weird alternative stuff from California she called yoga. My only goal in life at that time was to find my way to the edge of the Pacific Ocean so while most of the other girls in class sat slumped and bored, giggly and gossiping, I sat in sukhasana. I knew, at that moment, that I had found my first real thing. A thing I loved. Yet it would be ten years before I sat in sukhasana again. I found my way to California in 1980 54 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

Author’s self portrait

and my very first yoga class in 1984. Still, it feels disingenuous to call the path I’ve walked the past three decades a “yoga journey.” If I’m going to be honest with myself it has been an ‘asana journey.’ Asana. Asana. Asana. I ignored layers of tradition in order to collect asanas the way some people collect stamps. And why not? It was fun, my body was hungry for it and for ten years I turned a blind eye to the beauty and gossamer depth

of a rich yoga practice. Listen, I knew I was taking the scenic route but when I at last began to crave more I was so entrenched in the asana practice my lineage offered that I simply didn’t know how to deprogram myself. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t trying. I had all the right books.The Gita and the Upanishads, the Sutras and the Pradipika. They sat right next to Light on Yoga, a book that for years I carried with me as though it

were the Holy Grail. I was earnest and eager but on reflection it’s clear. I wasn’t ready for the truth yoga teaches. I wasn’t ready for the wisdom. Over the past five years, however, my intentions and thus my practice have changed. I work harder to open my heart than I do to open my hips. My asana practice is still strong but my living practice—how I walk in the world—is stronger. I am no longer a student of asana. I am a student of yoga. A student of life. So. Am I worried? There’s a certain anxiety in not knowing my immediate fate (we all know our ultimate fate) and an enjoyable paradox in knowing I am typing the words you’ll be reading when I’ve learned the answer. But I practice yoga. I know how to breathe, to remain present. I know how to still my mind and how to move away from the storied chatter. I’m grateful that over the past five years I have moved toward a more authentic practice. I’m grateful that it has built a wonderful foundation for me to rest on over these next few weeks. Postscript...All’s well. I have a fully functioning brain. While my doctor isn’t prepared to blame my rampant imagination the good news is that it doesn’t appear to be anything serious. I live to smell another day. n Mimm has been a yoga teacher, massage therapist, reflexologist and writer. When she’s not balancing in Ardha Chandrasana or wrestling with a sentence, Mimm’s either playing her guitar or doing homework. She is working towards a master’s degree in transpersonal psychology.

Share your stories on health with India Currents readers! We are accepting original submissions that focus on health and wellness. Send your 500-850 word essay on disease prevention, exercise, ayurvedic cooking, or any other health-related topic to Mona Shah at events@indiacurrents.com.

March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 55

recipes

Say Shalom to Latkes By Praba Iyer

56 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

A Creative Commons Image

y friend Darryl introduced me to Jewish food. We met at the Culinary Academy in San Francisco in the 90s. He swept me off my feet with his Namastes and infectious smile. Darryl’s kitchen was large and airy. He had many gadgets. My favorite was his ice cream machine. As we made crazy ice cream combinations, we talked about our lives and families. We blended cayenne and nigella seeds, or ginger into a black pepper and vanilla ice cream that became a big hit. I vividly remember one foggy afternoon when Darryl made me his grandfather’s special knaidlach (matzo ball) soup. We talked about his Jewish heritage and how his grandfather raised him. I’ve been fascinated by Jewish culture and cuisine right from those days. The Jewish diaspora is spread all over the globe from Cleveland to Cochin and this has helped create a rich and diverse cuisine among its people. The thread of exile and massacre connected this community throughout history, and as their people fled from country to country they took with them their culture and cuisine and enhanced it with the cuisines of the adopted countries. The two large subcultures of Judaism are the Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews. The Sephardic Jews are from Spain, North Africa and Middle East, while the Ashkenazic Jews are from France, Germany and Eastern Europe. Jewish culture has strict rituals and dietary laws when it comes to food. Observant Jews follow the laws of Kashrut. The Kashrut is a detailed and elaborate set of dietary laws, which dictate everything from the meat, poultry, bird, fish that can be eaten, (no pork), how they should be slaughtered and how they can be cooked. Foods that conform to these dietary standards are called kosher foods. According to Kashrut meat and dairy cannot be cooked together. Certain foods like cheese and gelatin are not considered kosher as they contain animal rennet and animal byproducts respectively. Foods like vegetables, grains, nuts, fruits are called “pareve” as they are neither dairy nor meat and so on. No Jewish meal is complete without its grains, beans, legumes and lentils. Couscous is the staple for North African Jews, while kasha (buckwheat) is the favorite for Russian

and Polish Jews. Mamaliga (cornmeal/polenta) is widely eaten by the Romanian Jews. Breads, noodles, pasta and dumplings are the pride of Jewish kitchens. Knaidlach comes from the German word knodel (dumplings) made with matzo meal and eggs. The Sephardic Jews made dumplings known as kibbeh (North African) or kobeba (Middle Eastern) made with bulgur wheat or rice. A meal is not complete without bread. Ashkenazic breads are rye, challah, pumpernickel, bagels, while Sepharadic breads are flat, like pita and lahoh breads. Matzo bread is the unleavened bread used during Passover. Dairy and eggs have great meaning in Jewish life. Israel is called the land of milk and honey and eggs represent the mysteries of life and death. Vegetables have a significant place in Jewish religious festivals. The golden pumpkin signifies prosperity at Rosh Hashanah. The harshness of slavery is represented by the bitter herb Maror at Passover. Unprocessed fruits and vegetables are considered kosher. The methods of cooking depend greatly on locale. Due to their years of taxation,

slavery and poverty, the Ashkenazics pickled most of the vegetables. Whereas the Sephardics were exposed to many fresh vegetables and fruits, and they embraced it as a big part of their meals. Flavorings are robust and piquant in Ashkenazic meals. Sephardic Jews included rich aromatic spice mixes in their cuisine like harissa, berbere and chermoula. The Shehecheyanu is a prayer of thanks recited at every religious ritual and festival before the meals are served. Both Indian and Jewish cultures are quite similar with their rituals, and the importance they place on foods during festivals and events. The next time you come across a Jewish deli in Chicago, or in San Francisco, remember that it is a small landmark of a community that has triumphed over some very dark periods in history. Here are two simple yet delicious recipes. B’Teavon! n Praba Iyer teaches custom cooking classes around the SF Bay Area. She also blogs about cooking at rocketbites.com.

Tomato Soup with Israeli Couscous Ingredients 1 tbsp olive oil 4 cloves of garlic chopped fine 1 medium red onion chopped fine 2 carrots, peeled and cubed 1½ cups crushed/pureed tomatoes 1 tsp cumin powder 1 tsp coriander powder 1 cup Israeli couscous 5 cups vegetable stock or water 1 tbsp of fresh mint ¼ cup of fresh cilantro chopped salt, cayenne and black pepper to taste 1 lime (optional) Method Heat one tablespoon of olive oil in a sauce pan and add the onions, half the garlic and sautee. Once the onions are slightly soft add the carrots and mix until the carrots are soft (about 5 minutes). Add the cumin, coriander, cayenne and black pepper. Now add the pureed tomatoes, vegetable stock and Israeli couscous. Stir occasionally and bring the soup to a boil. Add the rest of the garlic and reduce the heat and cook until the couscous is tender ( about 8—10 minutes). Keep stirring. Add salt, check seasonings

4 tbsps all purpose flour Salt and pepper to taste 3 chive stems chopped Oil for shallow frying

and garnish with mint and cilantro and serve with a squeeze of lime.

Sweet Potato Latkes

Latkes are my sons’ favorite snack. This year I decided to make sweet potato latkes instead of the traditional potato latkes for Thanksgiving/Hanukkah celebrations. You can make batches of latkes and keep it in a warmer or a warm oven and serve it later. Ingredients 1 lb sweet potatoes peeled and grated 1 small red onion peeled and grated 1 egg beaten

Method Place the grated sweet potatoes and onions in a bowl and mix. Add the beaten egg, seasonings, all purpose flour, chives and mix. Heat a skillet with a little oil and scoop out small mounds of the grated mixture. Using the back of a spoon flatten the mounds to small discs. Now fry over medium heat for 2 -3 minutes and carefully flip to the other side and fry. Add oil if necessary. Once they are golden and crisp remove and drain on paper towels. Serve hot with a dollop of sour cream and chive dip.

Sour Cream Chive Dip Ingredients 1 cup sour cream 5 chive stems chopped cayenne and salt to taste Method Mix the sour cream, chives, cayenne and salt to taste and keep it refrigerated for an hour before serving as a dip for latkes. n

March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 57

travel

The Pleasures of Arcachon By Kalpana Sunder

Philippe Starck designed La Corniche

aust, Toledo, Mona Lisa, Amadeus ... I am in Arcachon, just an hour’s drive from the wine city of Bordeaux. Many of the streets and homes here take their name from famous characters of operas, men and plays. It’s hard to believe that long ago this was just an anonymous, desolate stretch of flat marshy land. In the year 1852 the two enterprising Pereire brothers, wellknown financiers in Paris at the time, arranged to have the railway lines laid connecting the town of Arcachon to Bordeaux. To make it profitable they laid the foundations of the Winter Town, and built a Moorish casino modeled on the Alhambra in Granada and a luxury hotel. Mature pines were planted to drain the marshes. Wealthy aristocrats came to Arcachon to breathe in the elixir of fresh seaside air and inhale the fragrance of pines and it became the perfect “sanatorium village” for Europe’s sick elite.

Lunch with a view of the dunes at the La Corniche

with the fishing port, marina and low, red tiled roofed houses, with brightly painted shutters. The lavish Winter Town was transformed into a sanatorium town and even

Stately Mansion in Winter Town

The Four Seasons

Arcachon has four seasons, which have nothing to do with the weather! The different parts of the town were named after the seasons—a Spring Town with a thermal spring, a Summer Town where chalets were built along the seafront, an Autumn Town

58 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

Villa Toledo in Winter town

today is full of sprawling villas in an architectural mosaic of genres and styles ranging from eccentric to quirky with Swiss chalets and Tudor mansions and Neo Gothic structures to English cottages. Faded splendor ... that’s the word that springs to my mind as I walk through the wide streets of Ville D’hiver or Winter Town lined with stately trees. Legend has it that in 1520 a Franciscan monk saw two ships off the coast of Arcachon, that was going to sink in a violent storm. He prayed hard and calmed the seas. Soon afterwards he saw an alabaster statue of the Virgin on the beach. Today this statue is enshrined in the L’Eglise Notre Dame, the town’s main church. Walking around Winter Town, I am entranced by Art Nouveau half moon windows, stained glass and intricate brickwork. I am impressed by the Moorish looking Villa Toledo built in 1862, with wooden balustrades cut with intricate designs into turrets and gables. There are large balconies and terraces located at the four cardinal points in many of the villas, which our guide says were meant to allow tuberculosis patients a place to sit and breathe in the

plankton and water salinity. The healthy sea air. way to eat Arcachon oysters she The ghosts of the past haunt says is “au naturel,” that is fresh me—Napoleon III who stayed in from the waters with just a dash the town on two occasions and of lime. We learn that the oysters high flying literati, royalty and take over three years to mature artists from Alexander Dumas to and that it is Arcachon’s delicate Monet, who enjoyed the restoreco-system with two tides a day, ative air and also found inspiration which provide plankton for the here. larva to grow until spring makes We visit the impressive Marthe world’s best oysters. guerite Villa where the musical Besides the oysters Arcachon maestro Debussy lived in the sumhas other claims to fame: it may mer of 1880 when he was just have been the inspiration for the eighteen years of age, and gave Eiffel Tower! Yes, we see the piano lessons to the children of View of the town from the Parc Mauresque towering structure in the Ville aristocrats. The villa built like a D’Hiver quarter of the town Swiss chalet with latticed wood called Observatoire Sainte-Cécile, painted a powder blue, and three the main frame of which is made levels, has a curving staircase. The out of train rails. It was designed present owners proudly show us by Paul Regnauld, an employee pictures of how the villa looked in of the railways and his young yesteryears and its transformation assistant was none other than over time. young Gustave Eiffel. I take a break at Parc MauOur attempt to visit the resque with unusual plants and oyster farms is foiled by nature. trees, linked to the lower town by Strong winds ripple the waters as an Art Deco style public elevator. we head to the sea—the flat oysMothers with babies in prams, ter boats called pinasses (because locals on their way to work, all they are made of pine wood) walk through this green lungs of lie precariously on the churning the town. waters and the lagoon glistens a We have our first glimpse silvery grey. of Arcachon’s show stopper, the To console ourselves we eat Dune of Pilat, Europe’s tallest a leisurely lunch at the terrace of sand dune, formed by the relentThe present owner showing us how Marguerite Villa looked long ago La Corniche, designed by famed less buffeting of the ocean and the interior designer Philippe Starck, winds. This bizarre chunk of sand fronting the Atlantic and the looks like a steep ski jump next to Dune Pilat with spectacular views the ocean—as if it was uprooted of the dune and an infinity pool from the Arabian Desert. Over our spilling over the beach. Like most heads paragliders twirl and pirouof the local restaurants, this one ette in the azure skies. features seafood platters arranged The steep ridge of the Dune is a on beds of crushed ice accomgreat launch pad for local paraglidpanied by the delicious wines of ers and sand boarders. The most the Aquitaine region. There’s just amazing thing about the dunes is the drone of the bees, the tang of that they are still growing at three the sea in the air, with the skies meters (9.8 feet) a year as domithe tone of crumpled parchment nant westerly winds pile on the paper with wispy white clouds. sand! For the not-so-adventurous, I watch the dune splotched with there is a wooden staircase with colourful gorse, with climbers 190 steps to the top from where, that look like tiny ants. For a moat sunset, you can often see schools The streets of Winter Town ment in time there’s just nature and me—the of dolphin and porpoise frolic in the waters. silver sheet of water like a mirror, the play of light on the towering sand dune with their The Flavor of Oysters deep indentations under the vast blue skies larvae on tiles and then moving them to calm Arcachon’s real claim to fame is its oyster ... n nurseries in wired bags in the center of the farms—it is the oyster capital of France. The sea. Farmers rent land from the government Bassin D’Arcachon is a geological curiosKalpana Sunder is a travel writer and blogger and live on site in log cabins on stilts. Our ity—an inland sea with mud flats and sandbased in Chennai, India who blogs at http:// guide tells us that each oyster has its own inbanks with tidal sea water and the colors of a kalpanasunder.com/blog dividual flavor fashioned by tidal conditions, lagoon. Oysters are still farmed by trapping March 2014 | www.indiacurrents.com | 59

desi voice

The Fundamental Feminist Gloria Steinem on stage By Ranjani Iyer Mohanty

t’s not often that feminism and India are mentioned in the same breath but Gloria Steinem’s visit to Delhi to launch her latest book “The Essential Gloria Steinem Reader” has put the two subjects together in the spotlight. That evening at the India International Centre, three inspiring Indian women deeply involved with feminist activism in India were present on stage. They were Ruchira Gupta, Devaki Jain and Ela Bhatt. Ruchira Gupta is an anti-trafficking activist and founder of the NGO Apne Aap Women Worldwide. Gupta has addressed the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on trafficking, produced an Emmy-winning documentary titled The Selling of Innocents, and teaches at New York University. She has worked with Gloria Steinem and has collected and edited Steinem’s writings as a tribute to the woman she calls her guru. Devaki Jain is a noted feminist economist, studying economic issues in ways that overcome patriarchal biases. She has served on several UN advisory committees on gender and poverty. Steinem considers Jain her oldest friend in India. They often shared ideas during their younger days and gained inspiration from each other for their separate but parallel works. Ela Bhatt is a lawyer, Gandhian, and founder of the very successful trade union, SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association of India). You could say that with SEWA, Bhatt has put Jain’s academic concerns into practice. The fourth woman on stage was, of course, Gloria Steinem.

Steinem knows India well. She spent two years here as a young woman, traveled extensively in the country, and had a very Gandhian experience. Nearing 80 years of age, part of the lasting power of this woman is her intelligence, charm, and good humor. The subtitle of the book reflects this—As If Women Matter is both serious and a touch ironic. It is also complex and inspiring: “Because we don’t know what we do will matter, behave as if everything we do matters.” But Steinem knows how to make the complex simple. At the heart, feminism is about very fundamental feelings. She laughingly used the example of how young children often say, “It’s not fair!” or “You’re not the boss of me!” The quest for equality is natural and present from an early age. “We are linked, not ranked.” And things could work out for the better if women were a bit more like men (standing up for their needs and desires) and men were a bit more like women (putting other people first). The evening’s audience was telling. Of the people on stage, Steinem, Jain, and Bhatt were near 80; Gupta was the youngster at 50. Most of the audience was middle-aged. The young were conspicuous by being few in number. When three high school students stood up to ask for advice, Steinem encouraged them to be in the company of others who shared their beliefs, so they didn’t feel alone or get disheartened. This related to something Jain also mentioned: You have the family you’re born into, but you can also have another family of your own choosing—the family of supportive women around the world. On the recent criminalization of homosexuality in India, Steinem mentioned how all movements are intertwined and made two incisive observations; the right wing seems to be “against any intercourse that can’t end in procreation;” and “our sexuality is a form of expression as well as a form of reproduction.” From left to right, Ruchira Gupta, Devaki Jain, Gloria Steinem, On women’s supEla Bhatt Photo credit: Kalpana Iyer Mohanty

60 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

Photo Credit: Apne Aap Women Worldwide port of the right-wing movement in both India and the United States, Steinem said she understood how some women would make the trade-off to accept a subservient or dependent position in exchange for acceptance, support, and protection. But to counter that, she said, “We need to increase safety together with adulthood.” A young man stood up, said he came from a family of strong women. Steinem said, “Be thankful.” The audience broke up laughing. In a revealing aside one young woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties, said, “My mother was right. All this is nice talk, but if you want a family and don’t want to end up alone in your old age, you have to compromise these ideals of gender equality.” It is a legitimate concern for many young desi women. Living in an old and deeply ingrained patriarchal tradition with religious sanction of son-worship, it’s often difficult to imagine that a more equitable way forward is really possible. Had Steinem heard this young woman’s comment, she would no doubt have talked about the dire need to democratize the family: family members need not agree—they just need to respect each other’s views. There are many battles ahead on the feminism front. The biggest and most difficult are likely to be against ourselves and our families—those nearest and dearest to us. Then maybe one day to say “I’m a feminist” will be as noncontroversial, as unthreatening, as obvious, and as acceptable as saying “I’m a humanist” or “I’m anti-racist” or simply “I believe in equality.” But that day is a ways ahead. n Ranjani Iyer Mohanty is a writer and editor, based in New Delhi.

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Embracing Technology By Kalpesh Shah

r winne

he picture was taken in 2008 of my grandfather J.M. Parikh (age 90) embracing technology in his quest for greater knowledge. He is my inspiration and, at age 95, continues to live the message that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s never too late to learn. We are extremely proud of his life achievements and the lessons he has taught us. n

Kalpesh Shah is Sales Manager of a global life support related products manufacturer based in Southern California. He is a graduate of San Diego State University and blessed with an amazing family; Sejal, Simran, and Sharmil. He enjoys creative writing, photography, gardening, and world travel. Kalpesh can be reached at kshah2261@yahoo.com.

India Currents invites readers to submit to this column. Send us a picture with caption and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll pick the best entry every month. There will be a cash prize awarded to the lucky entrant. Entries will be judged on the originality and creativity of the visual and the clarity and storytelling of the caption. So pick up that camera and click away. Send the picture as a jpeg image to editor@indiacurrents.com with Subject: A Picture That Tells a Story. Deadline for entries: 10th of every month. 62 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

dear doctor

Spiraling into Negativity By Alzak Amlani

I have a fair amount of psychological knowledge and have had some therapy to deal with issues in my relationships and bad moods. I have a general optimistic view of life, however, I also tend to spiral into negativity, fear and resentment quite easily, especially when I encounter a conflict or get bad news. Talking about it helps a bit, but when I am alone, I find myself returning to the negative feelings. I am wondering if there is anything I can do to build a more positive base to my character?

I am not sure how serious your bad moods are and whether your negativity has a proclivity towards depression? This is worth looking into since that would require some deeper therapy and lifestyle changes that help support a happier state. The tendency to drop into negativity and fear is often related to a lack of support in dealing with challenging feelings or life circumstances. Especially as children, if we didn’t have supportive, positive and helpful guidance and reassurance, then it becomes hard to actually build a solid base to encounter new challenges and grow into a confident and trusting person. Fear and a shaky sense

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of self can take hold more easily then. Some kids get very motivated to fight their obstacles and inhibiting self-images, however, in mid-life, these compensatory attitudes and efforts can break down, exposing the more vulnerable, fearful and moody layers beneath the survival tactics. Given the current economic, environmental and relational challenges that many people are facing, it’s easy to focus on what we don’t have, how things are going wrong, or what we might lose in the near future. Our brain and nervous system get wired in these negative patterns and can keep us stuck and bound in limited thoughts and disappointing feelings. The neuropsychologist, Dr. Rick Hanson says that, “neurons that fire together, wire together,” and presents his four-step process: i) Think of a positive feeling such as gratitude. What are you grateful for that gives you feelings of satisfaction, trust, joy and relaxation? Name the situation or quality and begin to feel gratitude. ii) Let the feelings expand into your body and allow them to become a precious and special state of mind that you care about

and want to protect iii) Steep into these feelings, allowing their intensity to increase and get absorbed into your psyche and nervous system more deeply. You want to let these “neurons fire” for 10—20 seconds. iv) Go a step further and link these positive feelings with a disappointment or challenge. While staying with the feelings of gratitude, let the negative experience find a space in the periphery of your mind. This begins to infuse that negative state with positive energy. Some people include their connection and experiences in nature to drop further into a healing experience. Visualizing yourself sitting under a tree, on a mountain, at a beach or walking through a forest adds strengthening and nourishing qualities to your inner state. n Alzak Amlani, Ph.D., is a counseling psychologist of Indian descent in the Bay Area. 650-325-8393. Visit www. wholenesstherapy.com

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the last word

Downton Abbey: Triumph of the One Percent By Sarita Sarvate

udging by the anglophilia that America is currently in the grips of, it is hard to imagine that we are well into the twenty-first century and Britain’s finest hour has long passed. Take the recent celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles’ debut on the Ed Sullivan show, for example, which ironically coincided with the new season of Downton Abbey, well underway on PBS. What is even more ironic is that Downton Abbey contains absolutely no irony. Here is a show which packages the British aristocrats as benevolent, sensitive, and touchy-feely creatures who care about their servants, who in turn iron their masters’ clothes and polish their shoes late into the night, not caring a hoot about whether they have any personal lives or not. Not only do they never ponder what it would be like to have their own families, their own homes, or their own children, they immerse themselves in vicariously rejoicing their overlords’ lives. One almost wonders if Fox News or Rupert Murdoch is behind this production. For, never has the proverbial one percent been more worshipped by the ninety-nine percent than on Downton Abbey. Ironically, the viewers of the show are none other than the very people who, in theory at least, deride the ... co-opting of political power, wealth, and opportunity by that same one percent. contrary Do these PBS viewers ever pause to wonder if they are being maniputo what Amerilated and brainwashed? Or do cans like to believe they feel they are off the hook because they are watching a drama about their demothat is set across the pond and cratic and egalitarian in another era? Do they really think that less than a hundred views, at heart they years ago, servants were so ignorant that they preferred are suckers for serving others to having their authority. own lives? As an art form, the show leaves much to be desired as well. The heroine Mary looks so bland, one wonders why male after male falls madly in love with her. And it is not just her looks that are bland, but also her personality, so much so that creator/writer Julian Fellowes has to tell us over and over again how much Mathew Crawley loves her; somehow the action and the picture never convinces us of this though. But then again, they are both pasty-faced, insipid, and conventional people, so perhaps they deserve one another. The one female who was a firebrand, who actually questioned the hierarchy of class and status and power, namely, the youngest daughter Sybil, conveniently died. What is even more exasperating is that never once is the British Empire even mentioned. Downton Abbey’s current season is entering the era, when, in response to India’s contribution to the British victory in World War I, the British parliament passed the Rowlett Act, whereby colonial officials could pretty much imprison anyone for anything. It was during this period that the infamous General Dyer perpetrated the Jaillanwallah Bagh massacre. Notwithstanding all this background, the characters on Downton Abbey continue to grapple with monumental questions like what to say to the opera singer who comes to entertain them, she being the only one among them with any talent, but who nevertheless must rank below heredity when it comes to status. 64 | INDIA CURRENTS | March 2014

Downton Abbey has been compared to Upstairs Downstairs, a British show from the ‘70s. But when I watched the latter on Netflix, I was pleasantly surprised. For, unlike Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs begins with a young woman arriving to work as a maid in the house of an aristocrat/politician. But a maid is not what the woman, Sarah, aspires to be. Quite the contrary. She is an actress with a fake resume who soon begins a relationship with the son of the house. I was so thrilled with this story, written by none other than Fay Weldon, a renowned author and creator of the She Devil, who, as a young girl, lived “downstairs” in London where her mother worked as a maid. Alas, in a recent interview, Weldon confessed that John Hawkesworth, the creator of the show, got rid of her because she was too much of a bolshie. Once the feisty Sarah, a creation of Weldon’s, played by the spunky Pauline Collins, was gone, the show fell into an insipid formula. I started watching Downton Abbey because of the fine acting by the servant characters. I kept hoping that some real drama would develop; that the status-quo would somehow be upset; that one of the servants would mention Mahatma Gandhi or orchestrate a revolt. But we are now into the fourth season and so far I have been thoroughly disappointed. Fellowes has stuck to his uninspired soap opera format, with the result that absolutely nothing of any consequence has taken place in the current season. It is a fictional show after all; I wonder why he cannot take more risks with the plot and the characters. Could it be that he himself belongs to the privileged class and cannot imagine the balance of power being shifted? I was surprised to recently discover that Fellowes wrote the screenplay for the film Gosford Park, a heart-wrenching upstairsdownstairs story much closer to the reality of the British class system. I only have to believe that it was Robert Altman, the director, who was responsible for that poignant film. Or perhaps, before creating Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes prepared a business plan to develop the most successful TV production with the least number of new props. For, let us face it, there are probably thousands of costumes and vintage cars sitting around in the back lots of Granada and Ealing studios, waiting to be dusted and used in the next period drama. I only bemoan the lost opportunities; I wonder what could have been accomplished with those same props and a riskier script. Or perhaps Julian Fellowes has his finger on the nerve of America. He knows that, contrary to what Americans like to believe about their democratic and egalitarian views, at heart they are suckers for authority. Why else would Jackie Kennedy’s Camelot capture the imagination of this nation? Why else would the Gores and the Bushes and the Clintons still be running the country? Why else would we be appointing the same people who brought down Wall Street to guard it? Maybe, as I write these words, Julian Fellowes is having the last laugh. n Sarita Sarvate (www.saritasarvate.com) has published commentaries for New America Media, KQED FM, San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune, and many nationwide publications.

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