The kite runner 26 September 2007
Posted by bornonacusp in Dateline: Delhi.add a comment
This is an aerial view of Jama Masjid, Delhi’s largest mosque built in the mid-17th century, taken by French photographer Nicolas Chorier.
Chorier specialises in “kite photography”: he uses a 40-sq-foot kite he himself makes from siliconised nylon and carbon or fibreglass rods, where his camera sits in a cradle on a line beneath the kite. His image of the Jama Masjid is part of a new book on India, Kite’s Eye View: India Between Earth and Sky.
Chorier says of his work across India: “I have shot thousands of pictures above India. I love India, its sounds, smells, colours, people. Shooting India is so rewarding to my senses.”
See more of Chorier’s photography here.
Anarchy? Call it India’s dharma. 24 September 2007
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Read a short fine piece in the Times of India about India’s so-called anarchic ways, or how every one does things their own way. The writer says, that indeed, Indians as a people do not adhere to regulations and norms in most everything in their lives. Yet that doesn’t mean things don’t work; they always do. I myself am forever amazed at the gut-driven churning of life here. (An earlier blog about India’s order in chaos here.)
And this is Jug Suraiya’s essay:
Anarchy is our dharma
Jug Suraiya , Times News Network
It’s often said that India is a functioning anarchy. That seeming contradiction in terms is, in fact, not a contradiction at all. On the contrary, it is a confirmation of the truth about India and Indians: India, we, can only function because we’re anarchic.
The dictionary defines anarchy as a state of disorder without government or control, a condition where no hard and fast rules apply. This is certainly true of India, at almost all levels. Wherever you look, there is not the slightest vestige of what more ordered societies call discipline, an adherence to regulations, norms and codes of behaviour.
Indians, all Indians, literally do their own thing. Take traffic. India’s road traffic (where there is the luxury of a road) is among the most chaotic in the world. It has to be in order to function. At any given time, a typical urban thoroughfare can simultaneously have on it some 17 very different types of transportation, from buses to bullock-carts, limousines to elephants. If all these various modes of transport, moving at different velocities and in different directions, were to follow some abstract, codified rules of the road instead of their own basic instincts, no one would ever get anywhere.
Out of apparent chaos emerges progress: in the end, they all – BMWs and bullock-carts, elephants and autorickshaws – get to their respective destinations with, generally speaking, the minimum of mishap, considering the sheer volume and diversity of the numbers involved.
Democracy and the art of negotiating traffic find a perfect parallel in India. Both involve extempore adjustments in order to traverse a common space (be it a road or the larger community of the nation) where often conflicting interests – BMWs-bullocks, SEZs-farmers – must negotiate with each other without colliding head-on. One step forward and three steps sideways? Perhaps. But it’s better than terminal gridlock. Or fatal collision.
Our identities as Indians are similarly ad hoc: we are a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. A little bit Punjabi, or Bengali, or Tamil, and a little bit Indian; a little bit Brahmin, or OBC, or Dalit, and a little bit ‘caste no bar’; a little bit capitalist, and a little bit socialist; a little bit religious and a little bit secular. We are all these things, and more.
What we are not is sliced white bread. Or uniformed fascists on parade (though there are some who want to make us exactly that, but our innate gift for anarchy has so far foiled them, thank God). We are not regimented; we are not disciplined.
Other societies go by the inflexible exactitude of rules. We, all of us, write our own rule books as we go along. As TOI columnist Santosh Desai has said, we function by that uniquely Indian concept called ‘andaz’, approximation. Other cooks use exact recipes; we use inexact, and creative, andaz. A pinch of this, and a dash of that. How much precisely? Arre, use your andaz, bhai. Other musicians use written score sheets; our music is based on constant improvisation on basic ragas, on andaz and all that jazz.
So are we forever doomed (or redeemed, take your pick) to be a thoroughly undisciplined lot? Certainly not. We do follow discipline; you follow your discipline, and let me follow mine. Except we mightn’t call it discipline. We might prefer to call it dharma.
The world’s many tongues: going, going, gone. 20 September 2007
Posted by bornonacusp in Muni-Muni.add a comment
How many languages are spoken by the world’s six billion people? At least 7,000.
Of these languages, how many are likely to disappear within this century, according to a new linguistics research? Half of them.
Every two weeks, one language somewhere in the world dies. Never to be spoken again, lost either instantly upon the death of its last surviving speaker, or slowly as it gets overwhelmed by another more dominant language.
Scary, right?
The researchers say the world may be losing a diverse range of languages at extinction rates that are higher than those of plants and animals. Some regions are losing their languages at an ever faster rate: northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal area, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. Indigenous communities in these regions are falling in numbers; as these populations die out, they take with them their mother tongue, for most of them leaving behind no text or record.
One of the researchers, Prof. K. David Harrison, says losing languages translates to nothing less than losing knowledge. “When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday.”
Just note the divide: 83 languages with “global” influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world’s population.
So will those 83 soon become the only ones among the current 7,000 languages that will survive? What a sad, sad prospect.
I have no problem with, say, the English language (surely one of those 83 that will endure). Being one-half of an inter-racial marriage, how can I not appreciate the language that the two of us use to bridge our Hindi-Filipino speaking/writing gap? (At this time, at least, when his Filipino and my Hindi are laughable.)
And I do understand that there’s a variety of cultural and anthropological processes involved in the manner of how a specific language may be slowly overwhelmed by a dominant one. People move around, interact with other cultures, and can lose out on their indigenous traits along the way.
But won’t it be a far less interesting world, to have just a paltry diversity of languages to read and hear?
And that’s why there are these groups that are working double-time to “revitalize” endangered languages. They find elderly indigenous speakers, make recordings of their speech, translate those into written text, and do many other things in the hope of giving these dying languages a fighting chance.
See these links:
A map of the language hotspots
Enduring Voices project of the National Geographic, also the organisation that initiated this recent research.
Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages
Word association: ‘India’ 17 September 2007
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When asked by the news organisation BBC what they think of when they think of India, respondents in a global survey listed the following:
Gandhi
Taj Mahal
Bollywood
Cricket
Outsourcing industry
Poverty
The survey is part of BBC’s special coverage of India’s 60th year of independence from Britain. 12,670 people were surveyed by BBC across 20 countries in Europe, North and South America, Asia Pacific, and Australia.
If I were asked to play word association with ‘India’, this used to be my list before I came down here (top six, to parallel the BBC survey):
Yoga
Spices
Holy cattle
Gandhi
Kama sutra
Cricket
Now I don’t know what my list looks like. It’s hard to play the word association game with a place that is now more familiar (yet still odd), which makes you feel you’re home (yet often feels strange.)
Saving the children 17 September 2007
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Good news from Unicef: Fewer children under the age of five are dying because of improvements in health services. Across the globe, according to Unicef, more aggressive immunisation drives, increased breastfeeding, and anti-malaria programs are bringing down child mortality rates.
For the first time, the number of young children who died in 2006 dropped below 10 million worldwide, the United Nations agency said. (That figure was 13 million in 1990.)
Still, most of those deaths recorded in 2006 could have been prevented, which only means that much more needs to be done. Statistics from fifty countries were compiled for the Unicef report.
Here in India, under-five mortality rates dropped to 73 per 1,000 live births in 2006, from 94 per 1,000 in 1990. Unicef calls the decline “extremely good news,” though, it hastens to add, such proportion still translates to a huge 1.9 million deaths. What makes the Indian situation even more worrisome is that India being such a large country — and with progress across the regions in such stark contrast — some states are advancing much faster than others.
But good news is good news, and Unicef credits India’s success in pulling down child mortality rates to higher health budgets, investments in the health sector, facilities, and health workers.
Sting, stung 14 September 2007
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I think it was two weeks back. I tuned in to the evening news only to get a shock from the sight of a woman being mobbed here in Delhi, her sari top misplaced, revealing a shoulder, hair disheveled, face contorted with what clearly was fear. Policemen surrounded her, attempting to cover her from being lynched, whisking her away to safety.
The woman was a maths teacher and the mob was a group of (obviously angry) parents. What triggered the violent attack?
A ‘sting’ operation of a news channel showing the teacher — through footage and conversations taken with a hidden camera — purportedly offering her students for prostitution.
Based solely on that television report, the irate parents went after her and hurt her; she was sacked from her school; and she was charged with a criminal offense.
Then followed revelation after revelation, both from the police and media organisations (not the one that conducted the ‘sting’, of course) — saying, basically, that the sting was a fake. The reporter — out to get a big name for himself — colluded with a few other people to entrap the teacher, pretending to be someone he’s not, and editing the footage to fit his story.
This story gives me the goose bumps from start to finish.
Seeing that footage of this woman being mobbed, it bothered me no end that right then and there she could have died in the hands of those people, driven as they were to blind rage by a television report without having knowledge of all the facts. I am all for fighting for what is right. But to judge what is wrong based on two minutes of video clips, without ascertaining the whole story, is totally a different matter. It is scary.
And this reporter? Having been a professional journalist in my previous incarnation, it makes me grit my teeth in anger that this man did what he did, knowing how important genuine undercover journalism is to a democracy.
Indeed, coming from the Philippines — where certain genres of journalism similarly employ ‘sting’ tactics to get to the truth — I am worried about the implications of this episode to how Indian authorities will now move in response. Already, there is a proposal to legislate a Broadcast Code that will — according to most intelligent sections of Indian media — act as Big Brother to television. This fake sting incident will surely give authorities more reason to enforce regulations, which will not necessarily benefit the development of a truly free and responsible media.
Undercover journalism, if conducted with the supreme public interest in mind — and after all other means have been exhausted — can ferret out the truth and help this world become a better place. In the Philippines as well as here in India, undercover journalism has created a huge impact on many areas of public life. When public officials refuse to open themselves to scrutiny, journalists are often compelled to use other means to get the facts and make sense of them.
But this television ’sting’ is such a shame. I am delighted that, last I read, the information and broadcasting industry has issued the TV channel a showcause notice, asking it to explain why it showed a programme “that was based on half-truths, slandered an individual and provoked violence.”
So who’s stung now?
The pigeon has come home to roost 13 September 2007
Posted by bornonacusp in Delhi life, Domesticity.comments closed
No, not a figure of speech. The pigeon has come home to roost. Our home. And not only is she perched; she’s having babies!
We’ve always had a slight “pigeon situation” at home. Pigeons come to our window sill either to rest before another flight, sleep, fight, or just chill. Apparently, the third-floor view is perfect.
In the beginning, FrenchBeard and I were concerned. He would even device “barriers” in the hope of keeping the birds away. (Not those commercially available spikes, which is what people in North America normally use, according to what we’ve read on the Net.)
But whoever coined the pejorative term ‘bird-brained’ has never met our pigeons. Our pigeons are clever. To every one of FrenchBeard’s smart moves, they had their own, even smarter, counter-moves. And in the end — endeared to them too because of their resilience — we said, alright, you can stay. FrenchBeard even started a nest himself, gathering a few twigs and placing them on the window sill.
True enough, eventually, a hen chose our home for her nest. So she sits there, her feathers no longer the least ruffled by our noises and voices. In two weeks, she’ll have her squeakers (we didn’t see how many eggs there are exactly). That should be a riot.
Mother Teresa’s crisis of faith 12 September 2007
Posted by bornonacusp in Dateline: Delhi, Muni-Muni.comments closed
Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.
— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979
In time for the tenth anniversary of her death this month, a book has been released compiling correspondence between Mother Teresa and her confessors. Spanning 66 years, the letters provide what commentators now say is a seemingly contradictory view of a life that the world came to know mostly through what it overtly saw. The letters tell a tale that for the last nearly half-century of her life, Mother Teresa — the ‘Saint of the Gutters’ — felt no presence of God whatsoever. Or, as Come Be My Light’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart nor in the eucharist.”
A slew of observations followed the book’s release. After all, they said, only three months after writing this September letter above, for instance, Mother Teresa would come to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. There, she would take the opportunity to celebrate God. In her lecture, she would say: “It is not enough for us to say, ‘I love God, but I do not love my neighbour,’ since in dying on the Cross, God had “[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one.” Jesus’ hunger, she said, is what “you and I must find” and alleviate. She said the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world “that radiating joy is real” because Christ is everywhere — “Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor that we meet, Christ in the smile that we give and the smile that we receive.”
I have been reading these commentaries with acute interest. Indeed, growing up, ‘Mother Teresa’ for my generation was synonymous with faultless goodness. In Manila, if someone was behaving in a way that looks even a little too good to be true, the person will be told, ‘Sino ka, si Mother Teresa (Are you Mother Teresa)?’
Too, it was Mother Teresa who gave me my first glimpse of this place called ‘India’, seeing pictures of her tending to the poorest of the poor in the slums of the city called ‘Calcutta’, a malnourished boy straddled in her arms or a beggar reaching for her touch.
Of course, the view of Calcutta she gave me eventually turned out to be highly disproportionate to what the place really was — as I would eventually discover over time, through history lessons in school, and moreso later, when finally I myself stood on Calcutta soil. True, poverty and misery is present. But Calcutta is infinitely more than orphans and beggars and swarming flies. Something that, of course, the press would have naturally failed to show the world as it followed the deeds of a white woman leaving everything behind and coming down to aid the poor.
But why do I not automatically see the so-called ‘contradiction’ — the ‘disconnect’ — that others are harping about? Why do I not find it at great odds that the same Mother Teresa who had done all of that and said all of that, was the same Mother Teresa who, in her most private moments where there was only herself to confront, found her spirituality to be barren?
Maybe because I’d like to look at it another way. That, despite her so-called ‘crisis of faith’, Mother Teresa still did what she did.
No, I do not think that she was a saint. Nor do I share the anti-view that Mother Teresa was a fraud who was perennially hungry for media coverage while providing only the littlest care to Calcutta’s poor.
I recognise the work that she did for the poor. But, from what I now know, many other people in Calcutta have done as much good work — if not more — than Mother Teresa and her order, the Missionaries of Charity. I tend to believe Calcuttan observers when they say that the reason why Mother Teresa’s charity work gained more accolade is perhaps because the woman “was white,” fitting “Western” stereotypes. (Though my own recollection from childhood is not of her being white but of her being such a tiny wisp of an old woman, in her blue-lined sari.)
If anything, the book only shows that Mother Teresa’s faith is more complex than what she herself mouthed when she was still alive. And maybe, it makes us take another look at how we define kindness. For, in the end, doing great work for others — no, forget great, just work — is not necessarily rooted in one’s faith. If someone sees a fellow in need, then help may be extended, and such help is not triggered by whether the person finds in her heart God or Allah or Shiva, but simply by human compassion.
