Learning the ABC from Pinsky 30 August 2007
Posted by bornonacusp in Poetry.add a comment
Came across a clip of Robert Pinsky, American poet, reading his ‘ABC’. Pinsky is poetry editor of the fantastic online magazine, Slate, and he also teaches.
“ABC”
Any body can die, evidently. Few
Go happily, irradiating joy,
Knowledge, love. Most
Need oblivion, painkillers,
Quickest respite.
Sweet time unafflicted,
Various worlds:
X = your zenith.
White is beautiful, so they say 20 August 2007
Posted by bornonacusp in Dateline: Delhi.3 comments
Back in Manila, I used to detest all the aggressive push for skin whitening products, eternally wondering how my country has come to this, that beauty is so narrowly defined using the single criterion of possessing fair skin. I remember trips to supermarkets where you are assaulted with shelf after shelf of creams, soaps, and lotions that promise you not only white skin but the magical beginning of a life full of love and attention, an end to obscurity and plainness. And giving up on all the wondering, just accepting the sad fact that, allright, Filipinos do want to be white. I have no problem with caring about how you look, per se. It is a perfectly sensible concern. Especially if you have money to spare, then go ahead, mind your hair’s shine and your skin’s glow. And in the end, smart marketing or not, it is only up to the person herself to decide whether or not to actually buy it. But to peddle this superficiality, of being obsessed with changing the colour of your skin, because society defines that ‘look’ by a singular standard of complexion, perplexes me no end. Whatever happened to celebrating diversity? Are we out to merely become clones of one another? Now I am finding out that India has been stricken by the bug too. I’ve seen the ads — Indian versions of the ones that used to make me gag in Manila — and have exclaimed, “You guys too!” I’ve just learned the numbers. Apparently, in the past two years alone, no less than nine new fairness products and treatments were launched in this country. Aimed at both women and men, these creams and treatments – again – make promises of a glow that can only be found in white skin. All the media are replete with advertorials that encourage you to do something about your earthy skin. And people are biting. A study by the marketing research firm, AC Nielsen, found that in all of India’s skin care market, a huge 46 per cent is composed of skin-lightening products. The market for men is growing by 200 per cent. Of course, the marketing gurus have been quick to say that they are only after giving “a choice.” They can respond to any argument for political correctness by saying these are merely choices that the consumer can choose to take or not. Maybe true. But when you constantly drill the message to a woman that your boyfriend/husband/partner will only begin to notice you again – or for that matter, tell a man that he will only get the ‘take-me-now’ look from that elusive bombshell – if their skin has turned fairer, then what choice are you actually giving to the consumer? Beyond what slick advertising peddles, respect, attention, love and warmth, or success, do not come from having light skin. The world is a much better place than what these caricatures would have us believe.
Happy 60! 15 August 2007
Posted by bornonacusp in Dateline: Delhi.add a comment
Today India celebrates its 60th year of independence. Here in the capital, the Prime Minister is delivering a speech, beamed simultaneously across the world. Tiny flags are aflutter in homes, shops, cars, everywhere that can hold a pole and the tri-color. Families and friends are gathering for tea, or more, to mark the holiday. Television, newspaper, and other media organisations are in a race to pay the best fitting tribute to India, their mother country, what many are calling a giant who – though saddled with weaknesses not least of all is poverty – is on its way to becoming a world power broker, if not already.
Some of the best accolades are accorded to the Indian self. However difficult it is to define who an Indian is, there are peculiarities that define Indianness, character traits that they say cut across all cultural lines.
The Hindustan Times has one such homage. (In italics are excerpts from HT.)
Indian Stretchable Time
When we receive invitations to parties that have timings engraved on them in a large, bold font, we don’t even dream of getting there at the time we’re told to arrive. If, perhaps because we’re phoren [that’s Hindenglish for ‘foreign’, as in a visitor to India] we do commit that folly, when we ring our host and hostess’s doorbell, we find the food still in a state of preparation, the host in the shower and the hostess in her nightie and rubber chappals [slippers] wondering what to wear.
Before coming here to settle, I have always been familiar with what back in Manila, we pejoratively called ‘Filipino time.’ Which meant that if a meeting was set at 10 am, then it will actually start half an hour later, if you’re lucky. And no one ends up too bothered; it’s just how it is, and everything else will then proceed smoothly. But Indians take it to a whole new level altogether. First of all, they will not set a rendezvous at a specific time, say, one o’clock. Instead they will say, ‘one-ish.’ Now, to me, that must still be about 1.10, 1.15. But what I have learned is that with IST, if you are told ‘one-ish,’ then coming at 1.30 is just on time. And, similarly, no one must end up agitated. It’s all natural, it’s how things work.
The closer, the better (That’s speaking literally)
Space is not a problem in India. We’re not particularly fond of it. We like being in crowds. Four generations of families live in a single flat; when we buy a scooter, a whole nuclear family – mummy-papa, two kids, baby and dog – ride off into the sunset on it; and as for the Maruti 800, no one ever dies of loneliness in it: it can fit 36 people. This is why no one ever walks on footpaths in this country. We walk in the middle of the road where all the other people are.
Crowds are simply humongous here. I’ve always thought that Manila and Delhi are so much alike, except that everything here is magnified a million times for sheer population size. So is street life. People, auto rickshaws, cars, buses, street food stalls, cows – all jostling for space though ‘jostling’ may not actually be the correct word, because hardly anyone, it seems to me, is shoving or pushing. The traffic (vehicular, pedestrian, cattle) just flows. (See this blog with a YouTube video on one such snapshot.) If you are the sort who values her or his space, that the ruffle of a big toe right next to your small toe makes you feel violated, then you might not like it. Space, as is time, is relative; and for Indians, it is relatively cosy.
Love for weddings
When a member of our family gets married … we’re happy to include the whole country in the celebrations. We want everyone to please enjoy. Because weddings are about celebrations – and not much else. Certainly not about the two people, known as ‘the girl’ and ‘the boy.’
Weddings, for Indians, are not only about celebrations; they’re about grand celebrations. Traditionally, when a member of the family gets married, gatherings and rituals stretch for four days – from bathing the betrothed in turmeric, to the wedding itself, and the numerous receptions, to the welcoming of the new bride to the husband’s home. The hangover from a wedding ripples so long and far, that if you’re the bride, you are still referred to as ‘the new bride’ more than half a year after the deed is sealed and done.
We are family
The family is the most important thing in our lives … We inhabit a large and frightening world and when even our sister-in-law’s mother’s second cousin’s third child’s nephew’s niece is not there to hold our hand, we instantly adopt all passing strangers into our family.
This is not something that is astoundingly peculiar for me, sure, because Filipino families are generally close-knit as well. (When someone leaves for overseas, it would be a sin to let the person go to the airport on her/his own, in a cab. The whole family has to be there, all crammed in one car, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandmother in tow.) It is the same here. Families are, on the whole, valued like nothing else. And the more people are taken into the fold, the merrier it will certainly be.
India’s rural journalism gets a boost 2 August 2007
Posted by bornonacusp in Dateline: Delhi.6 comments
For a journalist in India, Palagummi Sainath is an oddity. While the ordinary journalist is reporting about the boom in the Indian stock market, or perhaps a glitzy fashion show organised by a huge cosmetics company in some posh hotel, or maybe even the country’s IT advances, P Sainath writes about why farmers are killing themselves in desperation during a long drought in Maharashtra.
Every other journalist, by default it seems, writes about the good and the beautiful; P Sainath, 50 years old with 27 years of journalism tucked in his belt, of those left in the margins of India’s rush for growth.
Is the man simply a grumpy party-pooper?
The Ramon Magsaysay Award – often referred to as “the Asian Nobel” – does not think so. Or even if he was, then rightfully so; P Sainath, says the Magsaysay, is a champion of excellent journalism and is being recognised as such. He had just been named the Magsaysay Awardee for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts and will receive the award in Manila at the end of this month.
The citation says Sainath is being recognised for “his passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s consciousness.”
Sainath spent years investigating poverty in the country’s ten poorest districts. His articles were later compiled in a book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, a bestseller on its 18th reprint. But lest anyone think all he writes about from the rural dateline are glum stories, far from it: Sainath likes to write about what he calls “the energy of the countryside.” He writes about stories of hope and resilience, of, for instance, women breaking taboos to learn to ride a bicycle.
Last night, in a television interview, Sainath – hair almost completely white at his relatively young age, his movements bespeaking of a renowned journalist not full of himself – raised questions about the state of journalism in India today.
Why is it, he asked, that newspapers do not have a single correspondent to cover labor issues, nor anyone reporting about agriculture? “What it means is that 70 per cent of our people do not make news.”
“Good journalism,” he said, “will be judged according to how it relates to the great processes of this time.” And what are those great processes? “The astonishing growth in inequality in the last 15 years not seen since the colonial times.”
Sainath’s call may be a tough one. It becomes quite easily tempting to write about the good news. After all, it is an unprecedented economic growth that this country is witnessing. The middle-class is indeed growing, and increasing numbers of people are accumulating purchasing power that allows them to participate in economic activities in a way they were never used to. This is news.
But Sainath’s point is straightforward: Do not forget about the rest. Surely, he said last night in that interview, newspapers are not expected to devote all of their pages to poverty. He does not deny the presence of market forces, those concerns that baffle newspaper owners about where to get the next million to fund the paper with. But news organisations must go out of their way to accord more space to stories that talk about the issues that affect the lives of the majority.
Yet the best thing about Sainath is beyond everything that is being said about him right now – how he spends 300 days of a year deep in Indian countryside, how his articles were used in a national hearing on anti-dalit (untouchable) discrimination, how he trains young journalists to do rural journalism. The best thing about Sainath is his attitude.
Asked last night by an eager and obviously smitten host about his forays into rural India – “the endless days you spend in those areas, the miles you walk …” – the man simply but quickly replied, “I’m not suffering. I do it because I like it.”
It is not only honest, it hits the spot: Journalists, no matter the lengths they must go to in order to get a story, must never make it sound as if it’s a supreme sacrifice, that they do it for public service and nothing else. That is truly sad, but an attitude that is so commonplace. None of that, however, seems to be in Palagummi Sainath, and he’s getting the Magsaysay.
Away and home; home and away 1 August 2007
Posted by bornonacusp in Dateline: Delhi, Muni-Muni.add a comment
A recent poll has found that more than one-third of migrants to Britain of South Asian origin “do not feel British.” Conducted by the British Broadcasting Corp. — to coincide with the network’s India and Pakistan ‘07 season of programmes marking the 60th anniversary of the 1947 partition of India — the survey asked 500 South Asian residents aged 16-34.
The report has generated a lively online exchange. A guy from Aberdeen exclaims in a comment to BBC: “I may not be Asian but I also don’t feel British. I’m Scottish. What is the problem with not feeling ‘British’? Many UK residents don’t feel that way either.”
He’s absolutely right. What’s the big deal about whether or not immigrants to the UK “feel British”?
If someone asks me, for instance, if I “feel Indian,” I would undoubtedly be saying no – even when I can convincingly say, nahi. And I don’t think it’s because I’ve only been here for three months. I am guessing that even if you give me another three months, and then again you ask me the same question, I will still reply in the negative.
It’s not just that I cry every single time I sink my teeth into a dish with more chillies than a slight pinch. Or that, unless completely urgent, I’d rather SMS than make voice calls with my mobile. Or that I do not begin my morning with ‘bed tea.’ Or, for that matter, that I drink more coffee than tea, period.
It is much, much more than that. It is many things combined. Culture, after all, runs deep down through your guts. It’s what you’re made of.
And those South Asians not “feeling British” or me not “feeling Indian” is not inflexibility. It is not anthrocentricity that you are convinced there is no other way other than your own, nor simple stubbornness, to hold on to your own ways. Most especially, it isn’t blind patriotism, that I’d wish to thump my chest and say, “I am Filipino!” — absolutely not, as I am quite a believer in John Lennon’s plea that the world will be an infinitely better place if the lines for nations, races, religions, are blurred. So it’s not that either. It’s just really that, no matter how hard I may try, I will never really “feel Indian.”
My consolation is, I have heard it very often said around here that, among Indians themselves, there is no way to define what is “Indian.” So if BBC makes the same attempt to run a similar survey in this country, they will probably get a lot of blank stares in return. What is, indeed, Indianness?
One adapts, of course. As what millions of migrants across the globe do as they start to live in their host countries. Migration, after all, has increasingly become a fact of human life. All over the world, people move, seeking new lives. And inevitably, they take on new ways of doing things, new perspectives on life.
But the old stuff remains. They sneak in like a recurring dream to remind you of your complexity. Because identity is never simple and that’s how it must be.
