Bal Thackeray - Valid & Pithy, mostly.

What I would say to Mr. Bal Thackeray anent his quoted remarks – “Who is this Rahul Gandhi? What is there in him? Tomorrow any school kid will rise and ask to be made the prime minister.” – TOI, October 21, 2011, pg. 16, if I could, and I wasn’t interrupted.

Mr. Thackeray, sir, as usual your reported questions and comments give me much to think about, They, your questions, are, and I must admit to a degree of surprise at this, valid and pithy. Your comments, however, quite often leave me puzzled and discombobulated. I find myself trying to parse those comments to get them to fit into the world in which I live. A world, I hasten to add, very removed from the one in which you do, which may of course explain my perplexity.

For instance – Your question on the ‘is-ness’ of young Mr. Gandhi. Valid and pithy. There is rightness to wanting to know about the reality of a potential prime minister; about the reality of anyone who aspires to leadership of the political kind, really. “Are you for real?” you, we, the people, can ask, with full justification. “Do you know how to separate the personal from the important?” you, we, can wonder, recognizing as we do, that a leader better know the difference. After all, we wouldn’t want to be led by someone who is, say, perpetually squabbling, in an unseemly manner, with a sibling.

Then there’s the question on Mr. R. Gandhi’s substance. “What is there in him?” you ask. Valid and pithy.. You, we, have every right to ask that of a leader. What are you made of? Is your substance corrodible? Is there enough mass to withstand the erosions of governance and political expediencies? Is your substance brittle, frangible? Prone to slight and sensitive (some might say hyper-sensitive) to slander? Is lashing out still part of your political armamentarium? “Mr. Gandhi”, we want to be able to say to him, “our leader needs to be a person who considers the destructive capabilities of his power in his leadership. Or are you prone to releasing your myrmidons and then regretting, but understanding, the collateral damage? ” We can justifiably, and honorably, ask of our waiting in the wings 2^nd level leaders whether they understand that a criterion for a democracy is the freedom of opinion; that there is no hierarchy to belief. We can suggest that things like banning the publishing of opinions on heritage, culture, or, for that matter, your opinion, is just not a sustainable component of substance.

See how my thoughts are informed by your pithy validity? See how you have me looking at all aspiring leaders, on all levels of governance with more educated eyes?

So then we come to the comment, and my discombobulation.

See, Mr. T, if any school kid cannot rise up and aspire to prime ministership, then what is the point of a democracy? Why bother paying lip service to a classless, casteless society with equality as a birth right? Why not just keep it in the family and leave governance to the ones born to... Oh, wait, I just realized you don’t like Rahul Gandhi’s family either, do you? All that foreign blood mucking up the purity. Unconscionable.

See, all I had to do is think about your comment, and it all became clear.

Thank you, sir.

Ian and Nagu discuss jogging

So, here I am. An interpreter. A conduit between, a cold, not to say Scandinavian (in spite of the truth of it), North urban First World sensibility, and, the hot, the sun baked hot, of a Central Andhra rural Emerging World sense.

The issue at hand – The amount of sense it makes, (or not), to be taking a constitutional jog at 2:00 pm of a sunny B’luru afternoon.

Simple translation is not going to do it. Entire fields of culture, seasons, Vitamin D (production of), and lengths of day versus night, have to be considered, summarized, collated, and then translated, if peace is to return.

Nagu – (in Telugu and oodles of body language) - “What sir, why do you want to run now? Wait. The sun will be setting in a little time. Then you go running. It will be better.”

Ian - (in exaggerated English and stiff mostly inefficient – the man is no actor – body language) – “But the sun is out. Nice and bright. Work up a sweat. Soak in some sun. Warm up these bones of mine.” (I was worried for a bit, but then he chose his ulna to illustrate his words.)

This is what each heard.

Ian – Rising pitch whine with strangely soothing undertones. Maternal persuasion. Calm reason. Resolution and closure.

Nagu – Flat expostulations given unnecessarily loudly, accompanied by some Kathakalli styled dance movements which look silly when done by an old white guy.

This is what each meant to say.

Nagu – “Are you crazy? It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. That sun is going to kill you. Act your age. Who is going to look after you if you fall sick. Go running in this sun and you are going to get ill. Yes you are. Wait and see. Then who is going to have to look after you? Me. That’s who. As if I don’t have enough to do. I have three other houses to clean. And those houses – appah, you don’t even want to know about them. Dirty? Sometimes I feel like taking a bath when I’m done. But who has time for that? I have enough to do. No. The sun will be lower in a little while. Won’t be as strong. Go then. Maybe that way the only thing that will happen is that you’ll fall and it won’t be so bad. I’ve seen you run. You aren’t moving that fast.”

Ian – “But the sun is out. Nice and bright. Work up a sweat. Soak in some sun. Warm up these bones of mine.

See what I mean?

Sounds like a job for Intermediary Man.

Excuse me, I have to find a phone booth.

Angela, the FRRO and then there's me.

Hey Ange, read your piece on the FRRO [http://angelacarson.wordpress.com/]. 

Glad everything worked out for you. 

You may want to thank your parents for making you the babe-o-licious person that you are. I think that babe-o-liciousness helped ease your way through the process of being a legal foreigner in B’luru. Well, that and the fact that you are, judging by your columns, a friendly, sunny, all-around-good-guy, type person, A SoCal Gal.

I, on the other hand, am not. Any of those things. Except for the legal foreigner part. That I am. With a twist. (Hey, this is South India. Everything comes with a twist.) But, what I definitely am not is any degree of babe-o-licious. (I use the term generically.) Quite, in fact, the contrary. My attempts at using my inner babe-ness, (during my callow youth), inevitably led to threats of arrest and detention for violating the local anti-pollution ordinances. The FRRO bureaucrats care not for ‘cute’ when it comes from a used to be Indian who escaped the rigors of India’s recent political past. My attempts to register myself as a foreigner... Well, let’s just say, as a starter, didn’t go so well.

My, now mercifully in abeyance, registration process took, not 2 visits on subsequent days, but rather 2 years of multiple visits, multiples of thousands of rupees, (man, that’s a lot of coffee those guys drink), bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label, (which might help explain the need for coffee), multiple public dressing downs by bloated bureaucrats (BB), (that would have to be upper case, now wouldn’t it?), all of whom might as well have had ‘payback’ tattooed on to their furrowed brows.

I should add – that payback thing? When I first started to get the impression that I was being picked on because I was an American of Indian birth, I disciplined myself into giving the BBs’ the benefit of the doubt. Then I got to talking with another miserable looking specimen who seemed to be spending as much time as I was leaning his elbows on his knees, his head bowed in submission, his mien that of a soul coming to grips with the concept of Karma. He, poor bastard, was trying to legalize the continued stay of his Vietnam born, naturalized US citizen wife, and their US born children. He had made his choice of US citizenship as an adult who had escaped the Robber Baron Era of Indian politics. His education and subsequent well paid employment in the US having been facilitated by the fact that he had been born into established wealth and comfort. He now had to explain himself to his peers – to BBs of less fortunate birth and the opportunities therefore denied to them. His mistake, he told me, was in being truthful when asked for his reason for moving back to India. He, poor sad soul, had thought that his desire to give back to India what his foreign sojourn had taught him, enriched him, would be met with enthusiasm and cooperation. Wrong. He had been told, when he tried to argue some deficiencies of service (I know, hard to believe, at the FRRO, but I’m just reporting), that he had some nerve, just because he was “foreign returned”, to expect things to run according to his schedule. That They, the ones who were left here, his peers, had had to claw, scratch and bribe their way to the heights and that they were going to make sure that... He started to sob at that point, and I had to get him out of there and buy him a drink. He had been waiting the outcome of his written appeal for a waiver on the fines imposed on him for having missed his deadline because his hearing for the extension was three weeks (IBT – Indian Bureaucracy Time) down the calendar. He was still there, in the same position when I returned three weeks later to pick up the papers I needed, having the previous evening visited, at his behest, the home of a Baron in the Police Force where I had inadvertently left a package containing two bottles of aged scotch, one box of imported ‘duty free’ chocolate, and a not-so-slim envelope of high denomination rupee notes. He, the poor bastard (pb) (n.b. lower case), had with him, his family, each of them learning the truth of Karma in their lives. In discussing our mutual miseries we were joined by others. Eventually we formed a club; our bonding based on our experiences with the FRRO. We still keep in touch, the pb and I. It seems his wife has divorced him, taking the alimony and herself to Vietnam, and his children decided to return to the land of their birth and he has a monthly tab at the place I took him for his drink.

Why did I tell this tale?

Oh, yes, to make the contrast between what happens when a non-blonde applies for permission to remain in India. Quite different from yours, Ange. 11 dimensions, string theory, alternate universe, different.

Which reminds me, sadly, my own permission to remain here, in B’luru, is coming up for recertification.

Let’s see now, yellow pages, agents...

But first a word from my vices, my soul fortifying vices.

.

India yelling

Angela Carson’s blog –(Why are Indians heating up and getting pissed off? (http://angelacarson.wordpress.com/) -  has an insight into the reason that is, frankly, pleasantly surprising coming from a SoCal Gal, an area whose USP is not other consciousness. So, well done Angela. She posits that the reason Indians get so pissed off in public is that it works; the job gets done. I hesitate to suggest that, insightful as the observation is, it falls short of a full explanation. But, I’m going to anyway. Suggest, that is.

It’s like this, Ange.

It’s a class thing; a social hierarchy marker. A feudal holdover. Your Airtel lady was letting everyone know that she was a person of means. A person who didn’t have to punch a clock to ensure her daily, uh, (I was going to say non-veg meal but then I realized that doesn’t hold true for all the more-than-enough-to-eat aristocracy so...) her daily sustenance. The servitor, on the other hand, needed to be reminded that ‘We are inconvenienced’. And further, had the Good Lord meant for Us to be inconvenienced He would have ensured Our birth into the lower orders.

What you’ve got to understand is that India is new to this equality business. (Oh all right, you don’t have to understand but it might help.)

India, as a Republic, is only, let’s see subtract 1949 from 2011, carry the 1, oh, 60 something years old, you do that math. To further complicate matters, that step from feudalism to democracy had to pass through the mezzanine landing of socialism with its hierarchical methodologies. Which, since those methods eschew overt symbols of status, make do with yelling as a way of establishing precedence. Which in turn is a holdover from the way kings, queens, and their administrative coterie, dealt with the shortcomings of their subordinates. Implicit in that yelling is the threat of the serious, neck stretching consequences of non-compliance. (Had the Airtel employee not, skillfully, allowed the lady to vent her spleen before suggesting a remedy, the lady’s next step would have been to call for the hang... manager, who, She had no doubt, would then summarily execute the offending peasant.)

Should you care to, you’ll find evidence of this in everyday governance. For instance, Gandhi Jayanti mandates, by way of a Governing Fiat, a meat free day for all of Karnataka. Gujarat is dry state because it is the Mahatma’s birth place and He was a teetotaler. Mind you, as far as I can tell those prohibitions do not come by plebiscite. The Governance of Karnataka and Gujarat have decreed that state of affairs. B’luru’s early closing hours are a police order. (That administrative coterie? Unh-hunh.) You can lay the blame for the strictures against alcohol and music in the same place at the same time squarely at the door of some Big Cheese who decided that the so called common man (n.b. lower case) needs to be protected from the combination of music and alcohol, and the bodily celebrations it can lead to. There are documented cases of Administrative Big Cheeses physically attacking the common man for having had the temerity to overtake, (pass) their convoys. On any given day you will see ranked Police Officers berating some common driver for some traffic failing or the other. That peroration, that traffic blocking castigation, will not be taken to the side of the road and common traffic cleared because the Officer will be sending that same message to those waiting commoners on their interrupted way to their commoner destinations. (The same does not obtain if Big Cheese convoys are in the offing.) And the message is this. “I am superior to you. You are inferior to me. Whatever it is you have to do, is not as important as what I’m yelling at you. And, this is for your own good.” Repeated and re-repeated.

I think the pattern got established most firmly during the British rule of India; the centuries long British Rule of the sub-continent. I know from personal experience that English speaking folks seem to think that repeating what was not understood the first time around, in louder more aggressive tones is the way to go. India’s democratically elected, (Hah. That’s a wholly different, um, rant.), and appointed kings, queens, and satraps think that’s the way to get things done. Yell louder, make references to parentage, threaten, and maybe the message gets through that the peasant’s job is to do, not think. The concept that commonality is not a question of birth right, or rather, birth condition, has not taken root. Yet.

The thing is, back home, we went from feudalistic subservience to a ‘Sez who?’ way of doing things right from the get go. That attitude was subsequently reinforced by the various people’s movements that regularly yell ‘Sez who’ and ‘Hell no, we won’t go’ at irrational and unjustifiable constraints on a person’s right to be. In spite of that, it has taken us pretty close to 250 years to get it right. (That said, I must add that the recent antics of the Tea-baggers and fellow travelers have given me pause for thought.)

India, for a large part, for a substantive large part, seems to be doing it in less than a quarter of that time.

So take heart. The times, they are, indeed, a-changing, as Mr. Zimmerman would have it. I have much hope for, and faith in, India Youngistan and their understanding of Democracy and its affect on social behavior.

Cowabunga.

klaxons and couth

No, seriously now, about those horns and their use. C'mon folks, do you really need to blow your horn, sound your klaxon, shatter the stillness of a quiet suburban evening, just to let your household subservient know that you are on your way, from three streets away, and that the gate had better be open, because if it isn't you are going to... BLAAAAT anyway? Couldn't you like text them or something? Or here's an idea, why not just get out of the car and open the damn gate yourself? Or, if that's like beneath you, or something, maybe you could get one of those electronic gate opener thingies. That way you can play with the buttons as you are driving up, quietly. I mean think of the fun you'll have trying to time the gate opening so that you don't even have to slow down as you swoop into your portico, applying your brakes at the last second, sounding that oh-so-soul-satisfying chirps, quiet, localized chirps, of a well executed 007 bit of driving. Tres chic. You'll be the talk of the neighborhood, attracting admiring glances from flora and possibly even a fauna or two.

And, as long as the subject has come up, and because I was reminded of it last night, again, by the gentleman who works some very long hours, returning late at night from his labors, one presumes, who carefully, and quite unnecessarily, blows his (again, presumption) horn at every intersecting corner, as he pac-man's his way through the blocks of our housing colony, uncaring that the concrete towers of said colony form canyon worthy echo and amplification chambers. Yes, I’m talking about you, and this will probably come as news to you, the horn is not a safety feature of your vehicle. It serves no function in your well intention-ed attempts to prevent a cross-road collision. Actually opening your eyes and paying attention to your surroundings - and see there, isn't that silence blissful? - makes you a far better, safer, and perhaps most importantly, thoughtful driver. Besides, you and I both know that if there was another vehicle coming around the blind corner, chances are that he is talking on his cell phone and wouldn't have heard your klaxon anyway.

So what do you say? Give us enjoying-the-oh-so-brief-silences-of Urban India codgers a break, can you please? The god of Peace and Quiet, (a small humble god who finds his/her/its existence lost in the cacophony of ... well, you know) will bless you. Not much of a blessing, I grant you. Perhaps no more than a gentle moment in your hectic life, but still...