Grandpoohbah's Blog

Moebius Transformations Revealed

2007-11-24T13:11:00.000+05:30

TSA Watch

2007-11-02T02:57:00.000+05:30

Ed Hasbrouck follows up with the TSA:

http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001065.html

Resisting

2007-06-21T06:43:00.000+05:30

Man tasered for riding bicycle mounts a blogosphere resistance -- read more about Minneapolis police officers Wingate and Bryant's brutality!

Totalitarian

2007-05-09T05:12:00.000+05:30

A friend sent in comments by Vir Sanghvi (first appeared in The Hindustan Times) on Nandigram. Excerpts:

It is now over a decade since I moved out of Calcutta. But watching the news last week, I felt I was back. As I saw those terrible shots of policemen beating up women in Nandigram, as I read about the massacre of innocent villagers, and as I noted the cold, commissar-like response of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to the killings, I remembered what it was like to live in West Bengal.

...

Like the rest of us, the people of West Bengal get the politicians they deserve. They get the thugs and murderers of the CPM and they get the hysterical, self-destructive opposition of Mamata Banerjee. Small wonder then that while Bengalis prosper all over the world (and in the rest of India), Bengal remains a backwater, always at least a decade behind the rest of the country.

When I first moved to Calcutta in 1986, Jyoti Basu was already India’s longest-serving chief minister and the subject of universal admiration among the middle class — outside of Calcutta. Within the state capital itself, many educated people took an entirely different view.

It wasn’t that they did not admire Basu’s stature — it was the rest of him that they disapproved of. The general view then was that while he was a well-educated bhadralok (unlike the north Indian politicians whom Bengalis love to despise), his reputation outside the state was based on hot air. His credentials as a man of the people were dented by his love of the good life, by the annual trip to London in the summer (always on some pretext; it was never described as a holiday), by his son’s dodgy reputation and by his complete intolerance of dissent.

A couple of years before I moved to Calcutta, Ananda Bazar Patrika, where I worked, had suffered a violent and disastrous strike. The violence had emanated not so much from disgruntled employees as from professional activists affiliated to the CPM. In those days, the group’s Bengali daily was anti-communist and the party had decided that ABP had to be punished. ABP employees were beaten up outside the office and the police determinedly looked the other way — they had orders from the government not to intervene.

But even Jyoti Basu was considered a pro-free speech liberal compared to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the classic humour-less, dour communist. When City of Joy was shot in Calcutta during my time there, Jyoti Basu was broadly supportive of the filming. It was Buddhadeb who opposed the decision. His view was not motivated by any sense of literary high-mindedness (I thought, at first, that he might have disapproved of the idiotically sentimental Dominique Lapierre book on which the film was based) but out of a conviction that evil Westerners had arrived to denigrate his city.

It is traditional now to regard the CPM as being the most honest party in India and, given the financial integrity of the current leadership, this is probably accurate. But when I lived in Calcutta, we joked that the M in CPI(M) stood for ‘Marwari’ because so many of the party’s leading lights were clearly in the pay of the city’s dominant business community.

But the corruption worried us less than the violent streak at the centre of the CPM. Like most successful communist parties, the CPM is cadre-based. And like communists everywhere, its cadres cling to the totalitarian view that individuals are less important than The Cause.

Anybody with some experience of rural West Bengal will tell you that the CPM has done an outstanding job in land reform since it came to power in 1977. But they will also admit that the price Bengal has paid for this is to allow the cadres to take over the villages.

In many rural areas, communist cadres dominate everyday life with the same ruthless efficiency demonstrated by the LTTE in northern Sri Lanka. More than the police or the local administration, it is the cadres who wield the real power. They routinely rig elections (though I reckon the CPM would win anyway though perhaps with smaller margins) and impose a reign of terror on the villagers, murdering anyone who dares defy their authority.

In Calcutta we saw the cadres in action when the party required a show of strength. On election day, they would prevent people who were likely to vote for the Opposition from reaching the polling booths. When bandhs were declared, they would ensure that Calcutta shut down.

It was generally accepted that the police would never intervene if CPM cadres were involved. And sometimes the cops would actually lend a hand. It was in the early 1990s (I think) that Mamata Banerjee learnt this the hard way. During a Calcutta bandh, she was publicly assaulted and so comprehensively thrashed by a police party that she had to spend months in hospital recovering. As journalists and editorialists, we were outraged. But the CPM didn’t give a damn to what the papers said.

Oddly enough, the rest of India — or, at least, educated urban India — never saw the CPM as a party based on violent, totalitarian cadres with a Stalinist intolerance of dissent and opposition. Nobody commented on the corruption. Or on the intrigues that ensured that control of the party remained in the hands of a small band of apparatchiks.

When these commissars — most of whom rarely stood for election — held forth on democracy and the will of the people, they were listened to with a baffling respect. When they complained about the fascist core at the heart of the Sangh Parivar, nobody pointed out that all totalitarian parties — including their own — had such a core. When they spoke about free speech, few people pointed to the CPM’s own mixed record in this regard.

When they treated the machinations and intrigues of Indian politics with lofty disdain, most of us failed to point out that their own party was as full of manipulation and petty feuds. And when they lectured us about the evils of capitalism, we rarely reminded them that Jyoti Basu had repackaged himself as the businessman’s best pal while sipping Scotch with the city’s richer Marwaris.

I thought back to my years in Calcutta when I saw the TV footage of the Nandigram massacre. Anybody who has lived in Calcutta will understand at once what happened. The CPM had tolerated the defiance of the villagers for long enough. If they were unwilling to give up their land for the greater good then they had to be punished. And so, in the finest traditions of global communism, the cadres were despatched on a mission that would have done Joseph Stalin or Mao Tse-Tung proud. They beat up the villagers, murdered a few people and terrorised the area. The tame police force followed and shot the few innocents who continued to protest.

Was Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee responsible? I doubt it. My guess is that the cadres listen to the apparatchiks and not to the chief minister. It is no secret that large chunks of the Politburo would like to see Bhattacharjee go. And so, they don’t really care how much the massacre embarrasses him or whether his position has now become untenable. Elected politicians will come and go. But the grim-faced men who run the cadres will go on forever.

...

What is it about Bengal, I wonder, that ensures that not only does the CPM get away with murder but that all of the Opposition, from Mamata Banerjee to the pathetically inept Congress, always destroys itself?

Nobody I spoke to in all my years in Calcutta had an answer. Or was able to explain why the state voluntarily opted for a one-party system run by a totalitarian cadre.

I call it the Bengal paradox. And until we learn why Bengalis, who shine wherever they go, are so different when they are at home, we will never understand the hold an obsolete 19th-century totalitarian ideology has on a state full of some of India’s most talented and intelligent people.

Inner Life

2007-04-14T07:56:00.000+05:30

Leukocytes -- white blood cells -- normally flow around in blood unattached. An infection triggers signals that make the leukocytes move into tissue towards the foreign invader, in a process called extravasation. Extravasation needs specific interactions between the leukocytes and the endothilial cells lining the blood vessel. This process is visualized above. A longer version with biochemical commentary can be found here.

Exam Fever

2007-04-07T07:50:00.000+05:30

Looking at these (sent in by a colleague), I was reminded of an old Beau Peep cartoon:

Officer: Are you familiar with the phrase 'flying colours'?
Beau Peep (salivating): Yes? Yes? ...
Officer: You failed with flying colors.

Quota

2007-03-31T04:45:00.000+05:30

The Indian Supreme Court has suspended the implementation of the 27% quota for 'other backward classes' (OBC) students for the coming academic session. The Indian parliament had passed the law unanimously last December, upping the OBC quota from 22.5% to 27%, and seeking to extend these quotas into India’s most prized institutions: the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). (In addtion, there is a 15% quota for 'backward' scheduled castes , and a 7% quota for 'scheduled' Tribes. Previously, the Court had ruled that quotas could not be used to fill more than 50% of available seats. The 27+15+7% numbers were designed to fit under that limit.)

The court criticized the government for basing its quota system on a 1931 caste-based census data, saying what may have been valid data then could never be a determinative factor now to accord reservation. Some see the Court as a desperate rearguard of Brahminical privilege. Others more cynically see in the ruling an attempt by the Congress+Communist government of the day to get some leverage on the OBC electorate, who have been abandoning them for regional political parties; a convenient court ruling shows promise in making them come to Papa.

Since polls are coming up in several states, talk has now turned towards a constitutional amendment to get around judicial activism. The 'upper' castes are predicting the quality of India's education institutions will drop; those who can are in flight, not only the US but Australia, Canada, even China are witnessing a boom in Indian students. In Beijing I talked to two customary tired, over-sized-satchel-hauling 19-year-olds from Ludhiana enrolled in a Chinese language course in the hope they'd make it to a professional course of study later.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta of the Center For Policy Research had a more charitable take than most, some months ago in Yale Global:

India has become a net consumer of foreign education – spending to the tune of $3 billion a year to train students abroad ... However, the Indian education system is not able to mobilize funds from its students at home. By some accounts, Indian students, whose fees are paid by their parents, have become a net subsidizer of British higher education; the largest number of foreign students in the US come from India, some 80,000; and there are even an estimated 5,000 Indian medical students in China. Many of the best students go abroad ... Devesh Kapur of the University of Texas has calculated that for every patent held by an Indian, Indians abroad hold 28,000 patents ... Only three Indian institutions rank among the top 500 in the world, and significantly none of them are full-fledged universities. Beyond a small group of elite institutions, few Indian institutions are globally accredited or recognized. Thus, the competition for a handful of elite institutions is severe.

The cost to business is increased by the fact that firms must do much of their training in-house, since they cannot count on the supply of talent. The mismatch of education to the economy is also evidenced in this paradox: While there is a severe shortage of skilled manpower, a third of unemployed youth are science graduates... Ironically, India met some demands of the IT sector, because a large number of private institutions managed to dodge the regulatory system by offering diplomas rather than degrees – which can only be conferred by government-regulated institutions.

The Indian education system is one of the most tightly controlled in the world. The government regulates who you can teach, what you can teach them and what you can charge them. It also has huge regulatory bottlenecks. Over-regulation has produced the crisis of higher education that is the context of the current agitation. The shortage of quality institutions is a product of India’s regulatory structures. Increased public investment that the government has promised is absolutely necessary to increase access. But this investment will not yield much if India’s regulatory regime remains rigid. There was agitation over quotas not because the students oppose increased access or even affirmative action. Quotas became a symbol of the state’s power over Indian education: its propensity to hoist its own purposes upon academic institutions regardless of their impact on the quality of these institutions. Globalization requires two contradictory transformations in the state: On the one hand, successful globalization requires that the state invest heavily in increasing access to education. But in higher education, globalization also requires the state to respect the autonomy of institutions so that a diversity of experiments can find expression, so that institutions have the flexibility to do what it takes to retain talent in a globalized world and, above all, respond quickly to growing demand. Globalization demands a paradigm shift in the regulation of higher education. In India the debate has only just begun.

If this court judgement cannot deliver the OBCs of UP to the Congress+Communist alliance, the next stop is sure to be quotas for jobs in the private sector. A friend who heads up HR for an IT firm in Bangalore reports being quietly told to start lowering the hiring bars for 'locals' and OBCs. In urban Bihar, that state unfailingly at the forefront of social change, there is a great preponderence of 'quota-pass doctors', usually identified by their caste-based last names. No patient who has a choice likes to go to one; the 'upper' caste Dr. X, who presumably made it through his medical education on merit, has his chambers overflowing with patients of all castes, while 'quota-pass' Dr. Y sits twiddling his thumbs, gnashing his teeth, and no doubt dreaming up a constitutional amendment to guarantee him 27% of the ill.

Chal Khusrau Ghar Apna

2007-03-24T02:52:00.000+05:30

Young India had geared up for this Cricket World Cup as never before. From Joga-style splash-printed t-shirts to live feeds at all the conference rooms -- it had been an eat-cricket sleep-cricket kind of fortnight at work. Now as India crash out following first-round defeats to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, there is only silence. The players' cutouts are being taken down, headed no doubt for a bonfire in some parking lot. Some cubes away, a sweet-voiced office wag is singing:

Gori suwe sej par, mukh par darey kes,
Chal Khusrau ghar apna, saanjh bhau chahu des

The fair one sleeps on the couch, black tresses cover her face,
O Khusrau, let's go home now, it's twilight all over the world

(Lines written in the 1300s at the death of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia. Above: An aul inside the sanctuary of the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin in Delhi. Khusrau, and coincidentally Mirza Ghalib too, are buried close by.)

Amar Gram, Tomar Gram, Nandigram

2007-03-20T12:26:00.000+05:30

"Bands of CPM goons aided by platoons of Eastern Frontier Rifles and Commando forces were entering every village and paras [mahallas]. They brought the men out of home, they took no prisoners, no witnesses, they shot them, bayoneted them, ripped apart their stomachs and then laid them down the canal to the sea and confluence. They then brought out the young girls, gathered them in open space, raped them multiple times till the girls collapsed, they then tore their limbs, in some cases cut them to pieces and let them down the Haldi river and/or Talpati canal. They made sure that there were no witnesses. And even if there were some, they know that the young girls in traditional Medinipur would never come out to say what really happened and who will believe. Nobody will corroborate and those who will speak out will be killed and tortured again. CPM and police then wrapped the entire village with their red banners showing that the area was secured and their writ will run. Those who fled the villages were mostly apprehended on the outskirts or on the boundaries and no one knows what happened to those poor souls. We could hear these facts only from those who could crawl the whole way out through fields and forests. Even that is difficult now as the fields are all dried up and the crops have already been reaped. Anyone running is easily visible.

Even though innumerable, official count of rape could be obtained as six, because these are the ones who survived to tell their tales and they are around middle aged women who somehow were spared from being butchered and minced to pieces. The process followed in villages after villages and to our utter astonishment the process continued till next morning. All the correspondents were removed. Sukumar Mitra, a journalist from Dainik Statesman ran his way out amidst flurries of bullets. He was specifically hunted and somehow could manage to sneak out. The ferocity of this attack was so grizzly that the residents of that area was simply not believing anyone to open their gab. Fear is made a weapon for a social-censorship.

Haripur is a nearby subdivision. This area is earmarked for nuclear power plant. People of that region has also come up in protest. Most of them are fishermen. They have stopped going to the confluence and the sea. They feel that human bodies are everywhere in the confluence and the worst is that the crocodiles, gharials and sharks are now rushing towards that spot from far away Sunderbans. These animals rush for fresh blood. The fishes will be eaten away by these reptiles and there is a high possibility of these getting netted instead of fishes. The Haripur will be out of livelihood for at least a week or so, and this was premeditated by the CPM administration to teach Haripur a lesson. Haripur is the place which shooed out even Central teams and even bigger police forces. This was a lesson to teach both Nandigram and Haripur together. No sign of any dead bodies would ever be found, no proof of rape will be there. The real number of casualties can only be revealed at least three months after, and that too if peace comes into stay, and if the residents could come back and then count the missing. But after CPM has "secured" and "liberated" those areas, the evicted will not be allowed to come back and these properties will be given to the CPM goons from Keshpur and Garbeta and neighbouring places. The permanency of mopping up strategy is how CPM will ensure that Nandigram and Haripur will be secured for electoral battles in the future."

(From Calcuttaweb.)

West Bengal is often lauded for its land redistribution programmes of the 70s and 80s. In a society that has relentlessly added surplus labor since the 1800s, in the 3 decades since the last redistribution a new generation of landless cultivators has emerged, renting land from those who had received the original redistributed titles.

As part of a particularly opaque deal with the Indonesian Selim Group, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), in power in West Bengal, tried to acquire 14000 to 22000 acres -- about the size of Chandigarh -- in a Midnapore seaside village called Nandigram to build a Special Economic Zone. After many years in power, the CPI(M) has attracted many rapacious carpetbaggers; its appetites have grown and it must routinely create new avenues of loot and income for its leaders and cadres. Its philosophy now is brutally Chinese -- good old-fashioned Tienanmen Chinese, not the present namby-pamby property-rights-espousing Hu-istas -- flavored with a sullen Indian inefficiency.

As a result of the SEZ, the landless tenants of Nandigram face displacement without compensation, which is only to be paid to the formal owners of the land. In a district with 960 people per sq km, all the surrounding areas are so chockful with landless peasants, if your land's 'owner' sells out to the government you have nowhere to go.

As the SEZ talk gained currency, Medha Patkar and other social activists visited Nandigram in December. Trouble in Nandigram began in earnest on Jan. 7, after the leak of government plans to build a petrochemical plant and shipyard on the newly acquired land. A hastily-formed Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh -- Land Acquisition Resistance -- Committee organized protests that quickly blockaded the villages. Police effectively abandoned Nandigram to the farmers, who turned their villages into bristling garrisons — digging trenches across roads and erecting barricades to keep outsiders out.

After 2 months of impasse, an increasingly incensed CPI(M) leadership finally sent in the cavalry last week. On Wednesday night the police stormed the village. CPI(M) cadres who have bought up all the land adjoining the SEZ in anticipation of making, well, a killing, fired from behind police lines at the Resistance committee, and also prevented any of the injured from getting out. By morning Nandigram gutters were running red. Independent media reports suggest a hundred 'shot while poor'.

The Business Standard (upset at the failure to acquire land for 'reasonable developmental objectives') writes in an opinion:

West Bengal has been at the centre of a persistent storm over the acquisition of land for supposedly reasonable developmental objectives. The confrontation between the police and residents of Nandigram, who have resisted the acquisition of their land, has brought sharply into focus the extreme sensitivity of land-related issues, on the one hand, and the heavy-handedness that the state has tended to bring to bear on them, on the other. But attention must focus also on the broader implications of the episode in West Bengal. In terms of the metrics currently in vogue, faster growth with greater inclusiveness, these may well be ominous.

Three critical links in the political and administrative chain appear to have broken down in precipitating last week’s confrontation. First, the CPI(M)’s internal intelligence system failed in bringing the depth of the anti-acquisition sentiment in Nandigram to the notice of its leaders. This is, after all, the most essential function of a political party in a democratic framework. Indian parties are often, and justifiably, criticised for having abandoned this function and allowed their grassroots to rot even as parties have become more leader-oriented and less bottom-up in their approach, but the Communists have generally been seen as the significant exception. Their well-organised cadres were seen as a reliable means of two-way communication between the people and the politburo, a key reason for their stranglehold on political office in West Bengal. But, as Nandigram demonstrates, this is not always the case. The priority that the chief minister put on the project was enough to energise the party cadres into pushing it forward, regardless of the resistance. They did not think it necessary to keep him informed of the growing significance of that resistance, which would have at least opened up the possibility of a mutually acceptable course correction.

Second, the working arrangement between the party and the government seems to have degenerated to a situation of total capture of the latter by the former. Even if the party cadres were painting a false picture of the situation on the ground in pursuit of their own interests, it was clearly the responsibility of the district administration to warn the state government about the precariousness of the stand-off. Whether they chose not to, or did and were ignored will come out in an objective process of inquiry, which is clearly warranted. It is extraordinary that the administration and police should have been prevented from entering Nandigram for two months, with no way of enforcing the civil administration’s writ over the area. Either way—tainted or ineffectual—the structure comes across as inadequate.

Liberal opinion in Calcutta is revulsed. The poet Shankha Ghosh writes (apparently targeting Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the CPI(M) boss and Chief Minister):

But I have kept my pledge
Letter by letter
Those who resist -- their lives
I have made hell
Our party will rampage
No one else will speak
In an iron-fisted governance
That is but natural.
The time for bullets is night
and all day, too
In an iron-fisted state
that's Law and Order.
Who dies, dies; or lives out his life
in bereavement
Today I have won, I have made
All their lives Hell.

Another perspective can be found in the history of surplus labour and deficit land -- see Netaji's grandnephew Sugata Bose's Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital -- Rural Bengal Since 1770, part of the New Cambridge History of India. Recommended.

Sheng Qi's Finger

2007-03-16T01:06:00.000+05:30

The Great Chinese Firewall (see last year's post) is alive and well, still blocking grandpoohbah.net. What a bunch of maroons, as Bugs Bunny would say. Informal discussions with an acquaintance who is apparently related to The Firewall Mandarin -- China's current Director of Internet Security -- reveals That-Whose-Name-Must-Not-Be-Taken is not only a bunch of servers and routers, but also 500-odd schmucks who sit in a windowless concrete building and watch internet traffic all day. If chat-room gossip-du-jour is found to turn to the politburo-member's daughter overdosing during her decadent birthday party, then the schmucks have to try to put a lid on things by adding 'birthday party' to the list of harmony-disturbing terms. In consequence, you might to your surprise be blocked when looking up the latest goings-on of the Party, or indeed Deng's birthday; for while the sickles are not very sharp, their hammer is indeed heavy.

To see if a site is blocked in China, see here.

Interestingly, sometimes harmony-disturbing-content does get through, perhaps during a schmuck's bio-break. I managed to get to f2gallery.com, a progressive Chinese art site hosted out of Canada, without problem a couple of times; and then it got blocked (and remains so at the time of this post.) The picture above, which I saved from inside China, is by one Sheng Qi, whose gallery blurb reads:

"Sheng Qi came to public attention in 1985 as a key member of China's "New Art Movement." This circle of artists organized a series of collective performance events under the title Concept 21. In 1989, after the Tian'anmen Square Incident, Sheng Qi left Beijing for Rome. Before leaving, he cut off the little finger from his left hand and buried it in a flowerpot.

From 1993 to 1998, Sheng Qi studied at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London for a Master's degree. During his stay in the West, he participated in exhibitions in Europe, Mexico and the United States, including the much-hyped (1998) Inside-Out exhibition in New York that showcased contemporary Chinese art. During his exile he gained invaluable cross-cultural experiences enriching his work.

Sheng Qi says he is not sensing a cultural equality in the 21st century, and aspires to find a "Third Space" outside the hybrid of nationalism and globalization.In his recent paintings, Sheng Qi mainly displays China’s political history. He indirectly touches some of China’s sensitive issues, by painting for example an Army Parade at Tian'anmen Square, without further referring to its political meaning. The painting becomes a silent witness only in the mind of the viewer."

Rangapanchami

2007-03-13T09:18:00.000+05:30

I have never found that moment
when the mind was halved by a horizon --
for the goldsmith from Benares,
the stone-cutter from Canton,
as a fishline sinks, the horizon
sinks in the memory.

- Derek Walcott, Names.

From top:

Rangapanchami marks the end of the Holi festival period ...

... but the hopeful trader, his hair still bearing witness to recent festivity, displays the remaining stock.

Tribal mask, Brahmaputra valley.

The house-painter's mid-morning tea.

Cat Theory

2007-03-08T12:21:00.000+05:30

In 1962, when discussing a contract responsibility system for agricultural production, Deng Xiaoping at a meeting of the Chinese Central Committee Secretariat presented some homespun wisdom from his native Sichuan province -- "Not matter whether it is a yellow cat or a black cat, whatever method works ... we should use that method." Over the years, the yellow cat became a white one, and the canonical wording of Deng's Cat Theory became "It doesn't matter if it is a white cat or a black cat, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat." Later, it was often connected to another oft-quoted Dengism: "To get rich is glorious" to provide an ideological basis for China's jettisoning of economic isolationism for market capitalism.

Today, Chinese 'lawmakers' (the 2835 deputies of the National People's Congress) introduced a bill to protect private property. Ill-defined property rights have allowed local Communist Party goons to seize small businesses, houses and farmland for lucrative real-estate and commercial deals, and anger has spread among ordinary Chinese, alarming the top leadership who have less and less control over the depredations of their rank-and-file. Introducing the bill to the rubberstamp national legislature, Wang Zhaoguo, a Politburo member said: "As the reform and opening up of the economy develop, people's living standards have improved in general and they urgently require effective protection of their own lawful property accumulated through hard work."

From top:

'Wall Street English' language coaching center in a Beijing mall.

Tots learn to ice skate at the China World Shopping Center rink, at RMB 50 (USD 7, Rs 300) per hour per child.

Interchange in NW Beijing.

Fireworks celebrating the 15th day of the New Year don't quite manage to clear the highrises anymore.

Conference room name, offices of a tech company.

Pan Jia Yuan

2007-03-07T20:14:00.000+05:30

If there is an antiqued trinket - howsoever tacky - to be found anywhere in China, rest assured you will also find it at the oft-demolished Panjiayuan 'dirt' market off the 3rd ring road in SE Beijing. From posters of the 'So Called Cultural Revolution' to Shang dynasty bronzes from 1700 BCE, from Yinxing teapots to military-surplus binoculars, Panjiayuan has everything; I saw several paintings by Tintoretto and Modigliani, Tibetan trunks, Ming pottery, Mikimoto pearls, bronze door knobs, papier-mache puppets, even Victorian claw-feet bathtubs.

Facebook Beijing

2007-03-06T07:25:00.001+05:30

Winter, Beijing

2007-03-05T13:02:00.000+05:30

A bitter wind is blowing in from Mongolia. It is -8 centrigrades in Beijing (less with wind chill) and falling. I wake up to gusts of snow, by mid-morning even the matrix cranes -- that were working round-the-clock to beat the end-of-year construction moratorium for the Olympics -- are stilled. Beijing is looking like a Russian city, except for new year lanterns swinging from the trees.

Kuskokwim

2007-03-04T06:15:00.000+05:30

Flying over Alaska on route to Asia, the Kuskokwim river appears far below.

The Kuskokwim is about 750-miles long, and drains into the Kuskokwim Bay at about 59°30'N 162°30'W. Kuskokwim is derived from the Yupi'ik word Kusquvak, whose compound means 'big slow moving thing'. The Kuskokwim forms Alaska's second largest drainage system after the mighty Yukon.

Go Daddy

2007-03-03T05:31:00.000+05:30

Being an immigrant is "a perpetual wait, a constant burden ... a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding." -- Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake.

Mississippi Masala, the earlier movie by Mira Nair which charts the inheritance of loss (or is it a loss of inheritance?), benefits from a piece of autobiographical detail -- her husband Mahmoud Mamdani is a third-generation Ugandan of Indian 'extraction', deracinated by Idi Amin and thereafter a foreigner in America writing analyses of identity. Mamdani is a decade older than Nair, and that may have made it easier for her to project the expatriation experience onto the father's character (played delicately by Roshan Seth) in Mississippi Masala.

In a brief introduction to the screening I attended, Mira Nair talked about first reading Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake on a plane just after the funeral of her parent. She said she planned the movie "in a fever", dropping various other projects already committed to. While the autobiographical intensity of Roshan and Sharmila's lives in Mississippi Masala was due in great part to it being Mahmoud and Mira's story too, in the case of The Namesake the visiting of the director's own life on the movie has not been as beneficial. Mira's mourning for her parent threatens to overwhelm the other threads of the story, and move the fulcrum of the narrative away from Gogol Ganguli towards his dad and mom, Ashoke and Ashima (played by Irfan Khan and the gorgeous Tabu.) Since most of the melodrama is to be extracted from Ashok's demise, the first third of the movie jerkily presents vignettes from his past life while we wait for him to hurry up and die. Once he has become a photo on the wall and there is not a dry eye in the house, we only have 20 minutes left for Gogol's own story.

Indian audiences used to seeing Irfan Khan as a wag in Hutch ads selling airtime will expect him to spring out of his morgue cooler with the latest model of cellphone -- Be-fiqar reh puttar, socha main aise-hi khallas? No, no, no, no, darrling, abhi to main zinda hoon. (Didn't Gogol's Akakii Akayievich come back to haunt the officials after he died of exposure from losing his overcoat? ) Between cringes at Irfan and Tabu's atrocious accents, Bengali audiences will be suprised to realize Gogol is Feluda's grandson. Calcutta audiences will no doubt be flattered by Nair's contention that it is really a sibling of New York, with brighter colors but a similar bridge. Music lovers will admire Nair's cleverness in strategically positioning soulfully yodeling Baul singers on boats everytime someone's ashes have to be scattered in Ma Ganga. The broad-minded will admire the syncretism of Tabu sporting Rajasthani tribal foot-decorations and a matching heaving choli (to say nothing of Zuleikha's Bengali fishnet legs), wondering where these two were when Mirabai was casting Kama Sutra? Calligraphers will admire the Bangla kana in the credits, as well as the Engo-Bongo titles designed to bring out cultural fusion.

Oh, it has its moments; every expartiate will recognize the aspect of being in that obtuse place where no one can pronounce your name, where you find your past is considered threadbare and your present depends on how you kit yourself out with a new overcoat of belonging, where your descendants have no use for their inheritance.

At last poor Akakii Akakievich breathed his last. They sealed up neither his room nor his effects, because, in the first place, there were no heirs, and, in the second, there was very little inheritance; namely, a bunch of goose-quills, a quire of white official paper, three pairs of socks, two or three buttons which had burst off his trousers, and the “mantle” already known to the reader. To whom all this fell, God knows. I confess that the person who told this tale took no interest in the matter. They carried Akakii Akakievich out, and buried him. And Petersburg was left without Akakii Akakievich, as though he had never lived there. -- Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat.

Uricon

2007-02-25T02:45:00.000+05:30

"Today the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon."

From top:

Ariston Men Hudor: Water is the chief of elements, i.e., as in being the origin of all things. (In classical mythology, Oceanus and Tethys were regarded as the parents of all the deities who preside over Nature.) Of Greek origin, a Georgian addition over the Roman Baths.

A tombstone to a fallen Roman soldier (an armourer?) raised by subscription by his fellows.

Braided bun, high fashion c. 100.

Lost Roman ring-stones from Bath drains. What heartache each loss must have caused the wearer.

Bas-relief (of supplicant?) from temple.

Original Roman era lead piping under the stones of Bath. The heavy seam seal shows water must have flowed under high pressure through this 'plumbing.' Plumbum is Latin for lead, it along with the Greek μολυβδος [molybdos] is borrowed from the same older language, from which the Georgian prpeni, brpeni = lead, tin, and the Baskian berán (beruna) might also be derived. The linguist van Windekens proposes that Pelasgian, a prehellenic Aegean language, was the donor language and unclosed the root *b(o)lub. Other see a proto-Iberian language as the donor of both words, since the Iberian peninsula is rich in lead. Some have also tried to locate the Latin plumbum with the help of Indogermanic languages in the suffix -bho-, often used for the names of animals and colours; thus to trace plumbum back to pl-on-bho and to include it in the family of the Greek πελιος [pelios] = bluish-black. Others see both these names derived from the Sanskrit bahu mala = very dirty. Unlike the Romans, the Indians may have suspected it to be toxic.

Roman temple courtyard statue, Bath.

More statues. This area had a vaulted ceiling in Roman times, brightly painted in gold, blue and red, lit by torches.

King's Bath -- in medieval times, monks would bring down the sick to the arched cubicles in this inner courtyard and administer to them the waters.

Today's streets around the old Bath structure.

Somerset

2007-02-22T05:20:00.000+05:30

Somerset, with Hampshire, is Jane Austen country. Jane lived in Bath for several years in the late 1790s while her family moved from lodging to lodging in reduced circumstances. One visualizes her visiting a socially superior friend at the manor, gossiping tartly on a bench in the lawns about the gala last weekend. Sense and Sensibility is apparently to be remade. The last one won Emma Thompson an Oscar as well as Golden Globes for screenplay. Here's her report of the ceremony, pace Jane:

Four a.m., having just returned from an evening at the Golden Spheres, which despite the inconveniences of heat, noise and overcrowding was not without its pleasures. Thankfully, there were no dogs and no children. The gowns were middling. There was a good deal of shouting and behavior verging on the profligate, however, people were very free with their compliments and I made several new acquaintences. There was Lindsay Doran of Mirage, wherever that might be, who's largely responsible for my presence here, an enchanting companion about whom too much good cannot be said. Mr. Ang Lee, of foreign extraction, who most unexpectedly appeared to understand me better than I understand myself. Mr. James Shamis, a most copiously erudite person and Miss Kate Winslet, beautiful in both countenance and spirit. Mr. Pat Doyle, a composer and Scot, who displayed the kind of wild behavior one has learned to expect from that race. Mr. Mark Kenton, an energetic person with a ready smile who, as I understand it, owes me a great deal of money. Miss Lisa Hanson of Columbia, a lovely girl and Mr. Garrett Wiggin, a lovely boy. I attempted to converse with Mr. Sydney Pollack, but his charms and wisdom are so generally pleasing, that it proved impossible to get within ten feet of him. The room was full of interesting activity until 11 p.m. when it emptied rather suddenly. The lateness of the hour is due, therefore, not to the dance, but to waiting in a long line for a horseless carriage of unconscionable size. The modern world has clearly done nothing for transport.

Above: Bailbrook House, NE Somerset. Below: Bath Abbey.

Edgar, first King of all England, was crowned by Dunstan Archbishop of Canterbury in the Saxon Abbey on this site on Whitsunday A.D. 973.

AQVAE SVLIS

2007-02-18T01:09:00.001+05:30

The Roman city of Bath was known throughout the ancient world, by virtue of it being endowed with an impressive complex of baths, built around the prodigious natural hot springs (the only natural geothermal ones in Britain.)

The baths were dedicated to the goddess Minerva Sulis, and the most sought-after R&R place in Roman Britain -- surrounded by country villas as well as temples of healing and worship. The waters from its spring were believed to be a cure for many ancient and medieval afflictions. As late as the 1770s, we find personages like 'Baron' Clive 'of Plassey' going to Bath to take the hot water cures.

Bath was a major focus in the Roman road system and was also served by the sea-port of Abona (Sea Mills) i.e. the mouth of the River Avon.

In the early second century Ptolemy's Geography attributed three towns to the Belgae tribes of Avon and Hampshire, one of which was named Aquae Calidae Sulis or The Hot waters of (Minerva) Sulis -- which in Britain can be nowt else but Bath. Ptolemy also mentions the capital Venta (Winchester) and the hitherto unknown town of Iscalis.

Bath and its temple-spa were sacked by the Saxons once the Romans withdrew in the 400s.

The bust is that of Minerva, found in the 1700s by workmen digging near the Roman ruins; the stone carving of Gorgon was at the pediment of the temple to Sulis; the spring source can also be seen 4th from top.

Britain

2007-02-17T02:25:00.000+05:30

London Docklands & Excel Center, Edinburgh Skyline from Customs House, Orchids at Kew (SMB), River Avon, Bath.

Jockey's Whips

2007-02-14T02:04:00.000+05:30

Hint: Cockney rhyming slang.

Vidyapati

2007-02-10T13:18:00.000+05:30

सखि हे हमर दुखक नहिं ओर
ई भर बादर माह भादर
सून्य मंदिर मोर।

Friend, I have no other sorrow
These torrential rains, this month of Bhadra
My empty temple.

Vidyapati Thakur -- the Maithili kokil (cuckoo) -- was born around 1350 in the village of Bispi in Madhubani, on the eastern side the Bengal - Bihar border. Claimed by both Bengali and Maithili speakers, Vidyapati wrote in Abahatta (a precursor to both languages), as well as Brajbuli, Prakrit and Desaj dialects.

In the tradition of medieval Indian poetry, Vidyapati's love-poems re-create and reveal the world of Radha and Krishna, the major erotic figures of Indian mythology and literature, conveying the ecstasy of Krishna's worshippers through the metaphor of human erotic love. While his precursor Jayadeva's poems celebrate Krishna's love and pays comparatively little attention to Radha the woman, Vidyapati is primarily concerned with the intensity of Radha's passion. At once sensuous and dramatic, Vidyapati's most popular songs find their place in the heart of a very human lover.

While Jayadeva wrote in Sanskrit, Vidyapati shunned the formal language and wrote in vernacular dialects; his position as a poet and creator of modern languages is akin to that of Dante and Chaucer. He did not disdain folk-speech, legends and thoughts for even the most complex of his work. Dante was blamed by the Latinate scholars of Italy, so was Vidyapati at odds with the Sanskrit pundits over the direct lasciviousness of his use of the vernacular.

जखन लेल हरि कंचुअ अचोरि
कत परि जुगुति कयलि अंग मोहि।।
तखनुक कहिनी कहल न जाय
लाजे सुमुखि धनि रसलि लजाय।।
कर न मिझाय दूर दीप
लाजे न मरय नारी कठजीव।।
अंकम कठिन सहय के पार
कोमल हृदय उखड़ि गेल हार।।
भनइ विद्यापति तखनुक झन
कओन कहय सखि होयत बिहन।।

When Hari stole my blouse away, what contortions did I not do to hide my body? What happened thereafter cannot be told -- in my shame I found what was to the front of me aroused me to even more shame. My palms couldn't extinguish the lamp, which was too far to reach. I just died of shame -- it was as though woman had petrified to wood. Beyond bearing was that harsh piercing embrace -- the necklace bruised my tender heart. Says Vidyapati what happened then -- Who could tell, sakhi, when dawn next came?

कि कहब हे सखि आजुक रंग।
सपनहिं सूतल कुपुरुष संग।।
बड़ सुपुक्ख बलि आयल धाइ।
सूति रहल मोर आँचर झँपाइ।।
काँचुलि खोलि आलिंगल देल।
मोहि जगाय आपु निंद गेल।
हे बिहि हे बिहि बड़ दुख देल।।
से दुख हे सखि अबहुँ न गेल।।
भनई विद्यापति एस रस इंद।
भेक कि जान कुसुम मकरंद।।

What can I report, O friend, for today's colourful gossip? An insensitive man dreamt away next to me all night. He came running to me all fine at the outset. But then he wrapped himself with the fringe of my sari and went to sleep. He had taken my blouse off and embraced me. So he roused me but then himself slumbered. O Fates, O Fates! what a tormented time I had -- that sorrow, Friend, hasn't gone away yet. Says Vidyapati this is just the hint of honey, what does a frog know of flower and pollen?

Chaitanya, it is said, would faint in ecstasy singing Vidyapati:

सखि, कि पुछसि अनुभब मोये ?
सोइ पिरिति अनुराग बखानिये
अनुखन नौतन होये
जनम जनम हम रूप नेहरलु
नयन न तिरपित भेला
लाख लाख युग हिये हिया राखलु
ह्र्दय जुड़न नँहि गेला।।

Friend, how can I answer how I feel? That Love defies description, is a new feeling every instant. Life after life I have seen His beauty, my eyes are still not sated. Millions of eons I have placed body on body, I could never cool my heart.

सैसव जीवन दुँहु सिलि गेल।
श्रवनक पथ दुँहु लोचन लेल।।
वचनक चातुरि नहुनहु हास।
धरनिये चान कयल परकास।।
मुकुर हाथ लय करम सिंगार।
सखइ पूछय कइसे सूरत-विहार।।
निरंजन अपन पयेचर हेरि।।
पहिले बदरि सम पुन नवरंग।
दिन-दिन अनंग अगोरल अंग।।
माधव पेखल अपरुप बाला।
सैसव जौवन दुँहु एक भेला।।
विद्यापति कह तुँहु अगेआनि।
दुँहु एक जोग इह के कह सयानि।।

Sri Aurobindo translated Vidyapati, published as 'Songs of Myrtilla':

Childhood and youth each other are nearing
Her two eyes their office yield to the hearing.
Her speech has learned sweet maiden craft
And low not as of old she laughed.
Her laughter murmurs. A moon on earth
Is dawning into perfect birth.
Mirror in hand she apparelsher now
And asks of her sweet girl-comrades to show
What love is and what love does
And all shamed delight that sweet love owes.
And often she sits by herself and sees
Smiling with bliss her breast's increase,
Her own milk-breasts that,plums at first,
Now into golden oranges burst.
Day by day Love's vernal dreams
Expand her lovely blossoming limbs.
Madhav I saw a marvellous flower
Of girls; childhood and youth one power,
One presence grown in one body fair.
Foolish maiden, not thus declare
The oneness of these contraries
Rather the two were yoked, say the wise.

जब गोधुलि-समय बेलि
तब मन्दिर-बाहिर भेलि
नबजलाधारे बिजुरी-रेहा
द्वन्द बधैय गेलि

से जे अल्प-बयसि बाला
जोनु गँथनि पुष्पमाला
थोड़ि दरशने आश न पुरलो
बढ़ल मदनज्वाला

When the time became dusk
I emerged from the temple
Zig-zag lightning in fresh puddle
Served only to increase doubt.

For she's only a young girl
That strings garlands of flowers;
A quick glimpse didn't satisfy
Burning desire grew.

Later in life, Vidyapati seems to have had a change of heart, away from all the wenching:

जनम अवधि नहि तुँय पद सेवल
जुबती रति रंग मेलि
अमिअ तेजि हालाएल पीउल
सम्पद आपदहि मेलि।

Never in my life did I serve at Your feet
I was too busy pleasuring girls
Forsook nectar, sipped poison
Got only troubles for my pains.

And:

ताताल सैकते बारि बिन्दु सम
सुत मित रमणि समाजे
तोँहे विसँरि मन ताँहे समर्पल
अब मँझु हब कोन काजि?

Like offering a drop of water unto the burning hot sands of the beach, I have offered my mind unto the society of women, children, and friends, abandoning You; now what use am I?

माधव! हम परिणाम निरास
तुँहु जग तारण
दीन दया मय
अतय तोँहरि विसोआस ।
Madhav! In consequence I am despondent. You are the savior of the universe, and are merciful to the helpless. Therefore I place my belief only in You.

आध जनम हम निंदे गँवालुन
जरा सिसु कत दिन गेला
मधुबने रमणि रस रंगे मातल
तोँहे भजब कोन बेला?

Half my life I spent in sleep; so many days passed in childhood and now old age. I played and pleasured with women in honey forests -- when did I ever get a chance to worship You?

कत चतुरानन मरि मरि जावत
न तुँय आदि अवसान
तोँहे जनमि पुन तोँहे समावत
सागर लहरि समान ।

So many gods have died and died, You remain without beginning or end. All takes birth from You, and is again absorbed endlessly as in ocean waves.

भनये विद्यापति सेस समन भय
तुँय बिन गति नँहि आर
आदि अनादिक नाथ कहयसि
भव तारण भार तोँहर ।

Vidyapati confesses that at the end of his life he is fearful. There is no recourse other than You. You will always be called both the beginning and the beginningless. Now the responsibility for his deliverance from the material world is entirely Yours.