Baroda visit

This was written in 2002

"We came out of the house one morning- the birds outside were crying frantically. A green snake had climbed up the tree, and was devouring eggs from the nest one by one. This was last week."

My aunt was telling about the frequent sighting of snakes in the area.I was sitting in my aunt's living room at the IPCL petrochemicals residential complex, in Baroda. I had arrived that morning at 4:30 AM by train, and my uncle and cousin had gone to pick me up. It was now mid morning.

I had taken the same train the previous afternoon that I had taken to visit Bombay. This time, my fellow passengers were two corpulent scrap metal traders,who were busy amusing themselves with their cell phones with an adolecent curiousity characterestic of many people here who are still amazed by this gadget.
Every time the train would pass through a new city, they would try calling each other up on their cell phones to see if their roaming plan was working. I did not talk with them, we had to sleep early because my destination would arrive so early in the morning.

"The snakes hide under the leaves and thick bushes. This is why we do not have much vegetation in our backyard. Yes, we grow some vegetables sometimes. And we have
closed off the lower windows with iron meshes, just in case...sometimes the snakes get in stay hehing your gas stove. As for the servants in their quarters-
they are used to this hard life. They can handle it."

The servants are attached to this house-they have been provided separate housing behind the bungalow. They get free accomodation, and in return they work for
you for a bare hundred rupees a month ($2). My aunt says that the servants can afford to eat just once a day. They fast frequently, citing religious reasons. But the truth is that they cannot afford food at times.
"Yes, there is poverty in Gujarat..even though there are affluent businessmen", says my aunt. But it may not be obvious to an uninformed visitor. A few years ago, three American exchange students came to live in the area. Looking around, they found a mostly middle class neighbourhood- IPCL engineers, scientists in theresearch lab (like my uncle), technicians, personnel managers living in a peaceful township secluded from
the crowded and filthy city life of Baroda. Free schools for IPCL employees. Wide open fields, lots of trees. "Where is the poverty?," they had asked my aunt.

"If you have to see poverty, you have to go to the villages nearby," my aunt says. The discussion now switches to the history of Baroda. A benevolent king had ruled in the last century, and helped establish a free education system, and a prominent university
(the MSU)in the city. He did not want a child walking to school in the sun- so he planted trees along all roads-hence the name of the city, from the type of tree that was planted.

The benevolent kings descendents still live in the palace in the city. Perhaps they overestimate their importance- photography is banned in front of the palace gates.
But I wonder who really cares about them now ? Parts of multiple palaces have been given off to the local authorities. Parts of it now seem to be a large playground, with ruins and run down buildings in varied states of neglect. This is all I could see of
Baroda- the university near the station, and the palace gates.

The next day, I went in to the surrounding villages. My cousin is a 17 year old high school student.He is amazingly mature compared to my other cousins. I had
not met him in years- though I had heard about the time when he locked up his father in a room upstairs and stuck upa sign out side the door: "Do not open. A
mad man lives here." My cousin had learnt to ride his fathers scooter on his own in secret. Today, he first gave me a lesson on how to ride a scooter (I had wanted to learn this for so many years), and then took me out to a place called Sindh road. "Sindh Road"
was a big place for him and his friends. Its a bridge over a river that finally drains itself in the Arabian sea.

If you go there early morning, the sunrise looks beautiful. We reached Sindh road quite late- we got lost, explored some nearby ravines on foot, then got directions from locals before reaching the place. It did not seem that awesome as he had portrayed. But
then our senses are relative. Growing up in a small town, perhaps this is a really cool alternative to sitting in a crowded fast food restaurant nearer to the city. This did appear to be a place to bring someone special to see the sunrise, and have grilled corn sold by the poor vendors on the bridge.
Yes,this place could be beautiful.... The place is peaceful and calm.

Baroda was hardly calm a few months ago, in Feb. An insane (or perhaps deliberate) act of burning a carriage full of Hindu activists had occured in a nearby district. The response was terrible- and instantaneous. "They put some people in the ovens in the bakery. Then there was this Muslim and Hindu couple. The man ran a tutorial agency. They attacked
the building where he taught. His wife managed to live. He jumped out of the second floor to save his life, breaking both legs in the process. He could not run away, and was stabbed..." I think of the green snake devouring the eggs from the nest one by one...

My return is uneventful. Dry fields as far as I can see, waiting for an abberant monsoon. Goats and cows tied to houses next to the railway track. As the train enters Delhi, I see a dead pig on the tracks, neatly sliced in half from the middle.

Arranged Marriage

No two words fill me with so much anguish as these two. It is the ultimate denial of the self, a surrender to a collective consiousness that refuses to acknowledge a persons individuality.Anyway- to begin at the beginning, this post was prompted following a conversation with a friendwho is currently visiting India from the US. At 34, after dating two or three women off and on, he finally consented to his mother finding somebody for him. Its too hard to meet someone interestingin the small town where I live, he said. I could understand it-aging parents, and his own age touching 35 soon, could have prompted this decision. I guess if you have experienced the magic of falling in love (and the subsequent falling out of it, for his case), an arranged marriage does not mean that you have not lived your life fully. But what if you never met someone special, never had a chance to know such a feeling ?I think then an arranged marriage is the end of all such dreams, its like giving up believing that you too deserve to experience life to the fullest.
Unlike my friend, my case is the latter. Till my late twenties, I was too shy to approach women for a dance. A significant part of it of course, was my Indian upbringing, those days having a girlfriend was not that common. Then I moved so much in different cities in the US- that it was hard finding friends.But I have never stopped trying. My sense of identity will always be at war with this Indian tradition. But India is changing- I feel so good to see the young couples from schools and colleges hanging out. I too hope I never have to go in for such a thing.

Pujas in Delhi

"'The indians are the Italians of Asia....They are both people of the Madonna - they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner."
-Shantaram

The pujas in Delhi are a grand affair, getting bigger every year. The roads to the area where my parents live was closed to traffic, so I got out at the main road and started walking with my luggage. The mood in the streets was festive. Even though it was midnight, there were people everywhere, dressed in their best. Makeshift cafes had come up on every street corner. The sidewalks were full of hawkers selling anything from straw hats,jewellery to cheap toys for kids. Near a playground that featured on of the prominent pujas in the area, I passed a large live sony display relaying the events inside. A guy with an electric guitar was jumping around on stage. It could have been any other music video on MTV. In the ten years since I had been gone,things had changed so much, asI discovered over the next few days.

Everything now had a multicultural- even perhaps international influence. Contemporary Hindi music had replaced the worn out Bengali songs that I remember from the early nineties. Some of the musical events were in both languages, as a large part of the audience were now hindi speaking. The large TV displays, wireless handset wielding show organizers, SMS voting for the best artwork, women dressed not just in traditional attire but in Britney Spears inspired creations-made the whole experience more contemporary. Even the "prasad" served in the day had become more health friendly- consisting mainly of whole fruits and missing out the sweets. It made me happy. Cultures that are inward looking are heading towards decay. But what I find in India (well Delhi at least) is a promising mix, cultural and language boundaries are disappearing, and people are more aware of the rest of the world.

The domestic help, shopkeepers in the area- the lower income groups who ten years ago
would have been easily identifiable by what they wore- were no longer distinguishable from the affluent upper upper. They all looked clean and presentable, educated- and seemed to convey an attitude of hope rather than one resigned to fate. If this can happen in Delhi, perhaps it can be done for the rest of India.

I went out next evening with some old friend who still live there. The hawkers on the street were selling horns made of a rubber baloon and cardboard and we bought some, joining the other horn blowers in the crowd filled streets that connected the centers of festivities. It was the Night of the Horns. Soon the night was filled with the sound of these horns,one responding to the other, going on in a continueous moan long after the cultural events had ended.

Shantaram review

This is the story of a 'Gangster Gandhi'. Nonjudgemental, compassionate, yet making no attempt to hide the dysfunctional thought process of the protagonist, it tells about an escaped convict on the run. Lin arrives on a fake passport to Mumbai and falls in love with the place. When he runs out of money he moves to the slum, adjusting to the harsh life with a positive spirit that reminds you of Francie in A Tree grows in Brooklyn. Ten years of his life flood the 900 plus pages with a cast of characters that include village dacoits, pimps, passport forgers, palestinian fighters,Iranian army desserters, brothel madams with a KBG past. There is Prabhakar whose smile will stay with you after your book is done, Didier, the aging gay man who could have inspired Eliot to write The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the loveless Karla with a neglected childhood, the Palestinian who burns with hate, and countless other underworld characters who indulge in philosophy as an intellectual defense for their dark deeds.

This book falls short of a classic, partly because at times it spends too much time glorifying the underworld. Lin's life in crime really begins in Bombay, after his supposed spiritual rebirth working in a slum as a medic, something thats not well understood. For a fleeting moment you may wonder- has Lin has really reformed, or is this book a con job of a different kind, with a pen ? But things fall into place in the end. Unlike Captain Corelli's Mandolin, this is not a feel good book with sweet pure characters either (Prabhakar being the exception). At times you hate the protagonist himself for his actions, his gradual entry into crime. Yet its all out there, in the face. This is a story of survivors in a tough city, and Lin baba is the ultimate survivor of all.
Four 1/2 stars.