Smells Like A Scam To Me

A perfume company that claims it makes unique perfumes out of people’s individual DNA now says it has created a fragrance from DNA extracted from Michael Jackson’s hair.

Really?

Not that I’m the slightest bit interested in smelling Michael or finding out what his signature scent could be like.

But I’m curious to know: Was that hair from somewhere other than Michael’s head?

Also: How did they get an authentic sample of Michael’s hair? Did a barber’s assistant secret away a fistful as she swept the curls scattered on the floor after a trim? Did a girlfriend or boyfriend snip a lock or maybe yank a hair out as Michael slept?

Now I also remember reading that a leaked copy of Michael’s autopsy report said he was completely bald, so this so-called hair from which this fragrance was concocted could be from a wig that most likely originated from hair shaved off the head of a pilgrim in Tirupati.

Turns out this company even has an official source for all the authentic hair it derives its celebrity fragrances from, including Elvis's. A man called John Reznikoff has the largest collection of genuine celebrity hair. I never was into collecting coins when I was little, and I collected stamps half-heartedly, perking up when I came across stamps issued by places that had nothing to write home about, like Lesotho and Papua-New Guinea. Why didn’t I think of amassing a collection of human hair? It’s portable and its DNA doesn’t degrade even after a person is dead.

I checked out the website of DNAfragrances.com to see if it was an actual company. They’ve got fancy pictures of mysterious-looking women draped in yards of billowing silk and velvet, and suitably flattering copy.

“As a woman this fragrance says I am. This is me. I no longer wear hand me downs. My genetic code is created from my heritage. I am connected to kings and queens. I dictate what is good for me. It is the history of my soul that announces who I am through My DNA Fragrance. I am exclusive.”

And then, instructions on how to send your DNA so you can have your own perfume: “You simply take a special sized Q-tip swab and rub it on the inside of your check” – yes, a true Freudian slip.

I’m jealous. How come I never thought of such a cool business idea. This sounds like a business I could run capably and collect some cool cash, all in the time it takes me to sing The Little Drummer Boy with every Ra-pa-pum-pum as I lick envelopes shut at the dining table. Just get people to Fedex a check for $99.99, to receive Brad Pitt’s DNA fragrance. Then, get a vial and fill it a little bit of cheap drug-store perfume, dilute it with tap water and send it on in a special box.

For those who are not into celebrities because they want to celebrate themselves, I’d have them Fedex a strand of their hair, an unwashed sock, a soiled tissue or some nail clippings – just about anything, even a half-sucked lozenge they’ve spat out, and send it with a cheque for $99.99 (limited special offer). Then, I’d get a vial and fill it with a little bit of cheap drug-store perfume (something with a desperate name, like Voluptuous -- which is cheap-perfume-code for Fat Loser), dilute it with tap water and send it on in a special box. Anyone who’s into this kind of self-worship is too dumb to smell a scam.

And I’ll actually be doing them a favor. They could be wiring their entire savings account to some Nigerian cheat who’s emailed them to inform them they’ve just inherited a few million dollars from a Liberian warlord and just need to quietly send their bank information to the widow.

Instead, I'll have given them a two-for-one deal in which they learn an essential lesson in financial prudence, and discover the god/goddess sleeping in their armpits.

Reason #8: You're Not Returning to Eden

Think you’re restoring your children to your Malgudi Days childhood? Think again.

If you’re relocating from overseas because you think you’re giving your children a chance to discover their true identity as Indians, think again.

I speak of Bangalore because I moved here, but this applies to all overseas Indians moving back to India.

Your children are American/British/whatever nationality they have been born into and raised in. Like it or not, accept it or not, that is their new identity. You pushed them into living in your time warp while you were abroad building your cushion of hard currency. But why push your children into duplicating your life and chasing your unachieved dreams?

Yet thus so many children of NRIs live, in a world of parent-approved schizophrenia, where they preserve two conflicting identities: one of compliant over-achievers yearning for the approval of their parents, and the other to be the sum of their hidden desires and find a place in the bigger world outside that they desperately want to belong to but their parents insist they should insulate themselves from.

So many returning Indians think they’ve left their families’ inner Indianness intact and unsullied by all the decay in the West they’ve fearfully cocooned themselves from. They keep their families protected in a cultural capsule, sparing no effort to carefully bring this precious little egg sac of their genes and all their savings back safer and richer to India.

Welcome home and find the same decay here. If you’re returning to a place like Bangalore that prides itself in being globalized, be prepared to run into some of the same problems you might be running from: families caught in the rat race and hard-pressed for time for each other; children getting obese on junk food; narcotic drugs (oh yes, available every where, unregulated and far more cheaper than they were abroad).

Bangalore has among the highest crime and suicide rates in India. With rapid, uncontrolled growth has come a breakdown of old ways across India, and more so in urban India. Bangalore is where old people gather at park benches and talk about all the places in the world their children and grandchildren are scattered.

You do get more time to spend with your family because you can afford to outsource domestic drudgery. But you also spend a lot of time keeping this house of cards from collapsing: supervising staff, picking up the slack when they don’t show up, and just doing many of these chores on your own because you don't want fo let your sense of independence lapse.

And yes, it is easier to prolong your children’s childhood in India, but you aren’t restoring them to the simple, bucolic era of your childhood. You cannot expel Kentucky Fried Chicken and Facebook from their lives. Drugs are cheaper than in New York, and easy to buy.Rapid urbanization has made city life more impersonal. Our elders kept up with their distant cousins despite a decrepit postal and phone system. Now, in the era of mobile phones and social networking, those elaborate family networks have shriveled because no one has time.

Bowing to Ignorance

I didn’t know there were so many people in America, men and women, who wore veils or oppressively enforced the wearing of veils.

I’m being facetious, but there’s a point I want to make.

As an American who lives in India and has traveled extensively across Asia and Africa, I can tell you there are millions of women who live covered by purdahs and burqas, whose families would feel dishonored and beat them if any of these covered womenfolk dared to make eye contact with or shake the hand of a man who wasn’t their husband, father or brother, even if all they intended to say was ‘hello’ or ‘thank you.’

Even if all these women wanted to do was say, “Thank you for the smokeless stove so I don’t have to breathe in the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes every time I cook a meal.” They dare not say they were just returning a friendly greeting in the manner their kind host. Dare not say it because it’s no defense against being lynched by the guardians of their honor. And these guardians know a lot about honor and how to keep it from getting smirched. What would come of the world if these women got their heads filled with new ideas and (God forbid!) started greeting people in any but the clan’s prescribed way?

The fundamentalists in this part of the world who insist women wear veils and shouldn’t read or write are no different from the fundamentalists in America who believe there is only one way – their way – of being polite, even when they’re in someone else’s country.

The grouse du jour in the United States is that their president greeted the Emperor of Japan, a man 28 years older than him, on Japanese soil, in the manner most polite people would in that country. He bowed to him.

Immediately, this simple gesture was loaded with political color and dissected across the country as further damning evidence of the president’s un-American predilections. How much better if he had had a shoe hurled at him amidst secret congratulation, or had thrown up at a banquet. American leaders don’t bow before anybody in deference to local custom. They genuflect before dictators and prostrate themselves so they can get oil for their country’s gas guzzlers.

And it’s not as though the Japanese crowed that aha, finally they were able to drag the butt of an economically weakened America before their emperor for payback for Hiroshima. Yet many Americans were steamed at the idea that their president belittled his office by bowing.

These people just don’t get it. Everyone bows low to the emperor. It’s just local custom, just as everyone bows or curtseys before Queen Elizabeth without harboring seditious thoughts or plotting the subversion of the U.S. Constitution. It’s just the etiquette the cultures of these countries follow. Had Obama bowed low before the Japanese prime minister, the chief executive of that country, and not been reciprocated -- that would have been an insult.

It would never occur to the same kvetchers that shaking hands or making physical contact with a stranger is culturally offensive in many parts of the world. And yet thousands of people who are culturally programmed to feel disgusted or affronted by a proffered hand generously put aside their reservations because they recognize that no offense is intended by this presumption of familiarity by an earnest if ignorant outsider.

The sad thing about Americans is that they have become such a tired and divided people. A great many of them are so filled with intolerance towards each other, suspicion of their own government, and mistrust of the rest of the world that they snap and bicker at the slightest provocation.

Had Obama had occasion to open the door for Emperor Akihito, a man frailer and considerably older than him, would that gesture reduce him to a doorman? Could he just open a door for a woman out of politeness, without precipitating a national crisis? Will there be a national discussion on the state of the president’s masculinity if we see pictures of him wearing a skirt in Scotland?

Obama’s bow didn’t diminish his status as president of the United States. But the laughable trail of outrage back home has diminished America.

Birds of the Indian City

Peacocks may be the national bird, but the signature bird of Indian cities has to be the crow.

Crows are everywhere, with their scruffy gray collars, rumpled feathers and glossy, Cherry-blossomed beaks, scouring neighborhoods so they do not miss any interesting leftovers, sights or prey. Throw out something, and they alight in a minute, cocking their heads and commenting loudly on their find.

Hawks are secretive about their catch. They will take it to a safe height and look regally pleased. Crows are not circumspect. They’ll be practically dancing, doing a little victory hop from side to side. “Ka. Ka. Ka,” boastful and insistent. One crow outside my window even did some secret political campaigning every day: “O-ba-ma, O-baa-ma.”

There is little pride or honor in the code of conduct of crows. They will hijack the catch of other birds. Although physically smaller, they tease the hawks and swipe at them until the hawks have to defend their dignity by tearing after their tormenters. The crows give chase, then quickly dip down below roofs. There, they flap and catch their breaths with mirthful taunts as the hawks are forced to suddenly brake their swooping arc and cursingly flap their wings to a safer height. Crows are the cheeky urchins who rule our rooftops.

In Singapore, the common Indian crow is deplored as an illegal immigrant. The government pays rifle owners who shoot down crows, and yet has not been able to thin down its crow population significantly.

When I read about these efforts during my family’s time there, I was moved to show my solidarity for the birds who had been my childhood neighbors in Kolkata. I would tear up slices of bread and strew them over the little picnic mat-sized yard attached to our Singapore condominium. It was my way of thumbing my nose at the rigid control the local government tried to impose on what their citizens did, saw, ate, thought and imagined.

The crows would show up the moment my food scraps hit the grass. They would hop over, bully away the mynahs and scoop up the goodies. They looked better fed and glossier than their cousins in India. Sometimes, I had an ethnic treat for them – day-old chapatis. There was no outpouring of sentimental gratitude from my guests. They ate with the cockiness of local thugs collecting hafta. Still, I invited them. My baby daughter sang with them. Tropical humidity, rain and crows immediately made me feel at home.

Sparrows seem to have disappeared from the city sky. I remember dozens would be perched on electric poles, fidgeting and cheeping anxiously. Now, the trees and electric poles are themselves vanishing. There are fewer places to perch. Buildings have airconditioners belching hot air and noise and floor upon floor of dusty, tinted glass.

Then there are mynahs, stepping quick and dainty in funky yellow lipstick, flying off in a latte-whipped flurry of cocoa and white. In my Bangalore suburb, I also see dozens of black and white tuxedoed magpies, shy olive sunbirds, chattering parrots, and the occasional kingfisher. There is even a crow pheasant, which looks like a crow on steroids with a brown, droopy tail and red eyes, and lives in a strand of ficus nearby. In a few years, most of these birds will probably disappear from my neighborhood as the city’s leafy canopy recedes and the march of concrete and glass-fronted towers invades us.

I have not seen many pigeons around where I live, but along with crows, they are the infantry of the Indian metro. People love to throw broken wheat and grains to feed pigeons. When crows close in on the periphery of a mass pigeon feed, they shoo them away these uninvited guests. The cheek of these dark, uncouth intruders! The crows retreat nearby, protesting their banishment. They take safe little hops to be in the midst of these goodies. Until they’re shooed off again. The crows don’t stick around. They’ll happily zero in on an easy feed any time, but they’re not going to fake the servility of a pigeon or the cute hop of a mynah to get food out of humans. They’ve got standards.

I don’t see the charm of pigeons. They feed constantly, rest their double chins on their pillowy chests, crap and shed flaky feathers everywhere. I could ship them all to Trafalgar Square and let the old ladies sitting in their woolen coats feed them as much as they want to.

I like the raucous frankness, the unpretentiousness, the disarming ordinariness of crows. They know when to back off, but never quit. They keep coming back till they get what they want. They are determined to get the most of any situation. No wonder crows look so comfortable in our midst. They epitomize the spirit of all the migrants who flock to any Indian city.

Reason #7: Neither Garden Nor City

This garden city doesn’t have many gardens and it’s not much of a city.

Bangalore does have more trees and parks than the average Indian metro. But an appallingly large number of these grand, elephantine trees have been sawn down.

And if you can actually cross the streets in an area to walk to the local park, these islands of green are usually filled with jittery lovebirds and evening-walking retirees glaring at them through their monkey caps. For children, there might be a steep concrete slide and some jagged edged play equipment that can cause serious head injuries and tetanus. Some parks have topiaries and lovely soft grass tended by gardeners who shout at people to stay off it.

What strikes you most about Bangalore is how unremittingly filthy and unswept it is. You can go through major streets and see piles of litter, smelly open drains, dug-up footpaths with slabs of concrete jutting unevenly, amputated trees with their remaining foliage brown with dust.

At night, vast stretches of street are routinely dark. Even the old Airport road along HAL, a major provider of military hardware and helicopters, is unlit. Roads outside swanky IT parks look like they were recently bombed.

Laid-back neighborhoods have their trees ripped out to accommodate vehicles and the Metro. And all these are overseen by a municipal corporation whose main function seems to be to preside over the planned degradation of the city.

Bangalore feels like a small town thrust and unwilling stuffed into the ill-fitting clothes of a large metro. You can sense the city’s discomfort and resentment towards this forced transformation everywhere. It is sad to see this sprightly small town reduced to such a resigned shuffle.

Reason #6: There's Nothing to See or Do

Despite all the wealth and intellect that reside in Bangalore, there are no impressive museums or performing arts centers where one can properly appreciate the immensity of art, music and dance that India produces.

There are pockets of good theatre and performing arts in Malleswaram and Jayanagar, and a few small auditoria here and there, but no grand performing arts center one would expect of a place that fancies itself as a metropolis. Chowdiah Hall, the premier venue for performances, is a concrete violin-shaped building tucked inside a tiny lane in a residential area, with unimpressive acoustics (and a casino-themed washroom with lurid red décor). Getting to these halls in evening traffic is a major expedition.

Museums such as the Vishveshvaraya science museum or the HAL air museum are rinky-dink little collections where half the exhibits are outdated and the rest are broken.

The city’s parks are vanishing. Biking is an activity to be recommended if suicide also figures high on your list of hobbies.

The city has a good sprinkling of book stores, but it is depressing to see so many young people draped along the aisle of self-help books reading Who Moved My Cheese?

The greatest preoccupation in Bangalore is making money. The second greatest preoccupation is spending it, usually shopping or eating out. Malls and restaurants are the cultural hotspots of Bangalore.

The Mommy Dictionary

Preity Zinta stroked her smooth, hairless limbs in the television ad.

“I want to get my hair removed, too,” announced one of my children.

I had a stock answer along the lines of: And so you shall. Some day, when you’re older.

Actually, I was grateful the depilatory cream caught her attention. There are dozens of explicit ads, some completely unfit for viewing at family time, that routinely get broadcast on Indian television.

Condoms. Contraceptives. Abortion pills. (“I didn't take any precautions last night ..." Magic product appears. "Now I have no chinta, only honey! Let’s bang away, tension-free!”)

Liquor and cigarettes ads are not permitted on TV, and for good reason. But if there’s anything concerning reproduction, body fluids and skin rashes that involve violent itching, hey, bring it on.

Now I’m up to discussing any of these subjects openly with my children. It’s just that I’d rather not be ambushed with them while we’re in the middle of watching Psych together, with dinner plates in front of us. That is not a time I want my family to be assaulted by graphic information on the consequences of not being protected from accidents and leaks involving the human body.

But I guess parents can never be prepared for the questions their kids choose to ask them, or when.

“What’s intercourse?” my younger child asked me, out of the blue, last week.

“Where did you come across that word?” I asked, trying to sound indifferent.

“These two teachers were talking and I was walking by and I heard one of them say “They had intercourse.”

Hmm, teachers! And it’s not like they were discussing the intercourse of art and science. They were clearly talking about people. I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t use the f- word on campus within earshot of children. But now there was something more Victorian and priestly to explain.

Intercourse, I explained, was the exchange or intermingling of things. Sometimes, people use it to mean having sex, I added. “Yuck,” she said, twisting her lips in disgust. And she was ready to talk about something else.

She could have looked up “intercourse” in the dictionary, too, except that the dictionary wouldn’t have interlaced hands like I did during my rambling, but mostly adequate explanation.

The dictionary was the default source of information for me when I was young and curious. My mother was prudish, and my father left discussions of all matters related to human plumbing to my mother, so the subject never came up. When it did, occasionally, it got shushed away.

I remember once overhearing my mother and her friend talking about a movie character who became a “pros,” which I gathered was a bad person even though I had never heard the word before. It’s not as if I eavesdropped. They were having a conversation right in my presence, but assumed that I was invisible or heard nothing. Later, I asked my mother what a “pros” was. She looked at me as though I had just told her I wanted to become one. Her cold, disapproving voice informed me that such words were for “adults” to know, and that I should never mention such a bad word ever again.

I took her lesson to heart. I never asked her about such words again. I just looked them up quietly in the dictionary ... and found the meanings of lots of forbidden “adult” words that were thrilling and disgusting.

The day I looked up “pros,” I also learned the meanings of “proscenium,” prosthesis, and “prostitute.” And after the way my mother had ticked me off, I was so expecting to be shocked by the definition of “prostitute,” but it didn’t even make my eyes pop.

My dictionary was a good confidant and companion. It offered up anything I wanted to know, without judging me. I learned the meanings of words I was looking for, and those I ran into because they were just hanging around the neighborhood. I could even open it up in full view of my mother and look up filth with scholarly diligence.

I would have loved to have my mom talk to me about the words I secretly looked up, but she was too prim. In her world, kids were too pristine to know about certain things. They just figured them out when they became “adult.” She had been raised in a devout household where they didn’t even know such blasphemous words existed. I can understand her awkwardness now, though I certainly think that as a rational, free adult, she could have made a choice to at least resist such ignorance, even a little bit, instead of raising her kids behind the same veil of silence. I pieced together the facts of life from whatever I gleaned from secret whispers, dirty jokes and high school anatomy lessons.

We have lots of dictionaries in our home. But I’m glad my kids don’t feel inhibited about throwing any question at me. I’m surprised they know about things I hadn’t even heard about at their age, but I’m glad to give them a straight answer.

Reason #5: The Nightlife is ... oh, there isn't any

Bangalore works as cybercoolie to most of the Western world. It is a city that doesn’t sleep because it is busy attending to the housekeeping problems of companies in London, New York and San Francisco.

When people do go out on their night off, there’s not much to party about. A Cinderella law ensures that no establishments serve alcohol after 11.30 p.m. – which is actually 30 minutes less than Cinderella had to party, but be grateful: it used to be 11 p.m. and was extended to 11.30.

Live music is not allowed because the government thinks that dancing to live music leads to prostitution. I’m opaque to this logic, but obviously, people with higher minds and the burden of public welfare on their shoulders have anticipated the dangerous possibility that women who oversee transactions worth thousands of dollars might have a change of heart about their professions as they dance to a live band, and instead consider the career option of hustling hair-oil reeking guys on the street, causing lakhs of rupees in tax losses to the state exchequer.

This regulation doesn’t just insult women. Men should feel insulted, too, because the government assumes they are too stupid or undersexed to be capable of such deviancy.

Bangalore is the city of pubs and of Kingfisher beer. Yes, you can go to any number of places and drink alcohol so you can forget that you're in a city being stubbed to death by its unexpected growth. If you’re a woman, even that simple trip to the pub can be downright dangerous because organizations like the Ram Sena will be sending thugs to beat you up, even if you’re having a beer and biryani with your girlfriends in the afternoon.

My DIY Diwali

Diwali is such an easy holiday to celebrate these days. One rangoli (solid cut-out, ready to assemble), a few dozen diyas (store bought), cards (from a store), a stack of gift boxes ordered from confectionery shops, and I’m ready for the festival. Back in the retail-challenged past, Diwali was mostly a do-it-yourself affair that kept us busy for weeks.

Houses got cleaned. Special foods got cooked. Metres of silk had to be shopped and dropped off to be stitched by the tailor, followed by days of begging and threatening so that new outfits could be picked up just before the festival. Platters of goodies draped over with a festive cloth had to be hand-delivered to the homes of friends and neighbors. People dropped by with their platters of goodies and sat and chatted over cups of tea. My sister, brother and I made Diwali cards, laboriously drawing diyas and paisleys and writing a personalized greeting from our family -- none of those e-cards and smses sent off with the click of a digit. We did all this even though we just got one day off from school for Diwali.

The annual cleaning did not just mean uncluttering the house. Cupboards and drawers were turned out and stacked neatly. Cobwebs that had been tolerated with a frown for months were finally demolished. Every corner of the apartment: the walls, the floors, and every door and window, were washed with soapy water and scrubbed.

During this annual ritual, a brown river crowned with suds would trickle down the stairs of our building. That was one of the tests of good neighborliness. Some families had their runaway tributaries mopped up. The bad neighbors just pushed their dirty water out.

At the risk of sounding ancient, I will share that in those days aluminium ladders weren’t available. Paranoid about the makeshift stools most households used, my father had a carpenter build a tall, topple-free four-legged stool with a platform wide enough for a bucket and a pair of legs to stand on. It was a great stool. Neighbors asked to borrow it for their house cleanings, and sent it back with a platter of homemade sweets.

The ultra-clean floor had another use. My siblings and I loved walnuts but the betelnut cracker at home would not open wide enough for a walnut. We designated the corner of our living room door-jamb our nutcracker. We’d wipe out the corner, stick a whole walnut in and close the door till we heard a crunch. We’d take the broken fragments and separate out the kernels.

Once the house was cleaned, the Diwali goodies were prepared. Each day, one or two items would be made. My nose got a smell telegram as soon as I got off the rickshaw with my schoolbag and entered our building. Sev. Murkha. Gaja. Nimki. Fafda. Or if it was that cloying smell of simmering ghee and sugar, I knew it would be Ghughra, Mohanthal, Adadiya. Our little kitchen became a sanctuary for deep-frying as kilos of hydrogenated fat and tins of ghee and oil were emptied.

Sometimes my aunts were all clustered outside the kitchen, sitting under the fan even though it did nothing to prevent the sweat circles around their armpits from getting bigger. They rolled scores of rounds of dough, chatting and moving their elbows in brisk little jerks. We helped a little and tasted a lot. But when sweets were made, a smiling Brahmin cook called Devji Maharaj took over the kitchen for a few afternoons.

Devji Maharaj was brown and round as a gulab jamun. He had large tufts of white ear, thick as a shaving brush, and the hairiest, bulging forearms that would smack, twist and flatten kilos of dough. He brought his own industrial size pots and woks, and utensils with handles as long as fishing rods. He was no wimp who needed to be near a churning fan. He leaned over the kitchen fires, deep-frying and stirring and kneading for hours until the vapors rising from the pots made him look wavy like a genie in a mirage.

The tins of sweets and savories would be depleted over the next week. Most were sent off in platters to the homes of friends and relatives. The snacks we reached for over-eagerly lost their novelty in a few days. We groaned every time mother set them out on a plate or packed them for school snack. The festival started early and lingered in our blood streams. Years later, when I suffered my first hangover, I recognized a hint of that feeling of absolute overload.

My mother's DIY Diwalis have imprinted smells and memories that haven't faded. I won’t be scrubbing any walls, but I have cooked some snacks and sweets whose smells prompt little hands to go on clandestine missions to the kitchen. My family will do our own little Lakshmi puja and hand-deliver chocolate boxes to our friends' homes. We'll arrange diyas on our porch and light our modest stash of fireworks. Then we'll shut all the windows, cuddle up and watch the skies explode with the muffled pop of all the fireworks in our neighborhood.

Reason #4: The Worst of Both Worlds

You think you’re going to get the best of both worlds for your family, but could end up with the worst of both.

You’re familiar with this math: If I’m earning in dollars and spending in rupees, I couldn’t get any closer to winning a lottery. With servants to do my work, and saving pots of money because everything is dirt cheap, I’m going to live royally.

Isn’t that the ultimate heaven for a middle class Indian, or for anyone on an expat pay package?

It’s a better life than one could imagine when immigrating to London, New York or Sydney. But remember, too, that getting through your average day will sap every ounce of energy and patience you have and cost you dearly. You can’t always count on the government for power supply or water, so be prepared to arrange for your own power back-up, and patronize a water tanker that can drain the city’s depleted borewells even drier.

Getting someone to cook and clean for you and drive you around is wonderful. You could also end up with higher levels of stress because you’ve suddenly become parent, psychiatrist, moneylender and health care provider for your household help. Altering your life to this degree to just get someone to cook meals and dust your house for you? Suddenly this doesn’t seem very attractive.

Also consider that you will spend a great part of your day working with people who don’t deliver on what they’ve promised to, and chasing people who routinely don’t show up when they’re supposed to.

If you’re at a point in your life where you’ve achieved independence, self-sufficiency and equanimity, do you really want to sacrifice these?

Reason #3: The Schools Are Disappointing

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because major international companies have their offices in Bangalore, because vast numbers of college-educated specialists live in Bangalore, then its schools must also be great.

With a handful of exceptions, Bangalore schools range in quality from average to abysmal.

And the general quality of school teachers is among the worst I’ve seen or heard of. Not surprising, actually. Anyone who can walk upright and speak English can get a very well-paying job answering a telephone. With tea-boys at BPOs making as much as teachers and a high cost of living that does not make idealism economically viable, teaching is not the career choice of most smart people.

So the boom in Bangalore has ironically created a situation where there are so many better paying career options that there is actually a shortage of talented teachers at a time when the number of students has gone up due to massive migration and repatriation to the city.

There are 3 main types of schools available in Bangalore: the traditional schools, the international schools, and the new schools.

The Traditional Schools: These are the branded schools whose name everyone recognizes.

Indians moving back to India think: “I went to a no-frills traditional school, and they drilled me and helped me get those exam results I needed to study medicine/engineering/management. I managed to go to the U.S. and kick butt in college. Now I want my U.S.-citizen kids to go through the drill I couldn’t escape because, hey, it wasn’t too bad for me after all.

So what if there are 50-60 kids in a classroom? It’ll teach them to toughen up and appreciate the odds I had to overcome in life. They’ve become pampered softies abroad, thinking they can get hugs from teachers and ask them all the questions they want. Why, it’s good, old-fashioned cramming, mindless bowing to authority and leaping from exam to exam that got me where I am, and no better place to deliver that than a good, old-fashioned reputable school with a good track record.”

It is allegedly impossible to get admission to these schools because they have gargantuan waiting lists that parents signed with their blood before they even conceived their kids. However, offer a generous “donation”, drop a few names, and seats will miraculously become available.

The International Schools: For parents who don’t want to subject themselves and their children to the humiliation of seeking admission to a traditional school, and who have deep pockets, the so-called international schools are a lifesaver.

An international school should offer an international student body, an international teaching staff, an international curriculum and international-quality facilities. The existing international schools sometimes meet maybe one or two, and most often, none of these criteria. They do charge their parents astronomical dollar-equivalent fees comparable to elite private schools overseas, while paying their mostly Indian teachers slightly more than the local schools.

In terms of value, these schools are the ultimate rip-off. My advice: Save the money for college.

Gullible streams of NRIs and expatriates looking for continuity, and a more easygoing and familiar school environment for their children fall for the rolling campuses and soft-sell from these schools. What these parents don’t know, but find out gradually, is that the teachers who staff these schools have had most of their education and training in the traditional Indian system. A few weeks of token “training” or a week abroad does not change a mindset trained to impart knowledge through rote learning, exams and an authoritarian teaching style that is suited to a classroom where children are expected to be seen and not heard. These teachers are affronted when kids ask them questions ("How can I finish the syllabus if kids keep putting up their hands and interrupting me?").

The New Schools: These offer elements of both the international and the traditional schools. In general, they are less finicky about admissions than the traditional schools and have smaller class sizes. They tend to be located on the fringes of the city. Their fees tend to be higher than those of traditional schools, but much lower than those of international schools. They offer a range of sports and extra-curricular activities. They usually offer the traditional ICSE/CBSE curriculum, but without the numbing rigor. Some of these schools offer the Cambridge IGCSE as an option in high school.

mybangaloredlife: I Want My Rahul Refund!

mybangaloredlife: I Want My Rahul Refund!

I Want My Rahul Refund!

After having accomplished not much in life except overdose on drugs, have a failed marriage and show up on reality TV with equally untalented attention-seekers, Rahul Mahajan thinks he can hit the marriage jackpot and get wooed by a line-up of brides.

Rakhi Sawant, whose pseudo-swayamvar Rahul is trying to replicate, can at least dance. She has a spunky coarseness that’s real underneath all her network nakhras. She would make a lousy wife and mother, but she’s at least a wannabe with some talent, even though it’s had some help from a plastic surgeon.

What has Rahul got? He’s no arm candy. And even women with extremely poor judgement – the kind that would have them line up for someone like Rahul M -- would admit that in a moment of crisis, an airline vomit bag would be a more dependable source of comfort than him.

He’s out of shape and dissipated. With that soft chin, the shifty eyes and hands that haven’t done much work other than leave bruises on his former wife, he’s a sorry specimen to parade in the marriage market. Would anyone buy a used car from him, let alone marry him?

And yet there he is, the next candidate for an on-air pseudo-shaadi. Couldn’t he at least work on his abs or get a tummy tuck before bothering to be photographed in his groom’s sherwani looking like schlub who’s just ended a first trimester of boozing?

I can understand Rahul’s desperation. He may not get luckier than this in his search for a mate. What I can’t understand is that there might actually be a queue of women so lacking in self-esteem that they are willing to concede to the public shame of actually declaring they want to marry this loser.

Surely they would rather be at home plucking their nose hair, sorting their socks or getting an honestly detoxing enema, than kissing Rahul’s ass for all the world to see?

Here I am, a happily married woman, getting bent out of shape on behalf of all these debased single women whose 15 minutes of fame are likely to prove longer than the length of time the unluckiest of them is likely to be married (or engaged) to this schmuck. (Aah, have been wanting to use this word in print forever and finally got the chance. A schmuck is Yiddish slang for the discarded foreskin of a circumcised penis. Another first for me: using 2 Yiddish words in the same piece of writing.)

The women on that show should demand a Rahul refund. “We want Rahul Gandhi,” they should shout to the network. Okay, that Rahul’s hard to get, but he’s got the looks and the substance that would easily make him part of any smart woman’s fantasies. If not him, how about a Rahul Gandhi look-alike? Or just any achha-sa, reasonably intelligent guy who might be trolling through the trenches of shaadi.com, without the luck to be as well-connected as Rahul M?

There’s no justice on TV. Network new programs, those purveyors of truth and balance, routinely feature ugly, old male anchors with powder-caked receding hairlines paired with bright, chirpy young women. Because according to their wisdom, women always have to look pretty, while bald, ugly men exude a natural air of irresistible competence.

This is an ass-umption made by bald, ugly, male network executives … the same sort who also fancy Rahul Mahajan would be God’s gift to women. And not inappropriately, this network’s name happens to be NDTV Imagine.

A Shakedown on Gandhi's Birthday

On the Mahatma's birthday, the children had an important lesson on how our system of law and order functions. They saw Mom and Dad give in to a bully.

We were headed to Koshy's for lunch and took a left turn at a light just two blocks away from Gandhiji’s statue on Mahatma Gandhi Road. Our car was flagged down by a couple of policemen.

There were the usual hapless motorcyclists begging and bargaining for release. We pulled over and rolled down our windows. One of the cops sauntered to our car.

“You took a free left turn on the junction,” he said. “There is no free turn.”

We were certain the light had been green. In any case, there had been cars in front of us that had turned left on to the empty road, and so had we. We had done nothing as wrongful as blowing through a red light, which Bangaloreans routinely do whether the streets are empty or not.

All the cars in front of us and behind us were gone on the empty road. We were the only foolish ones to stop for a person in uniform.

We insisted we had not turned left on a red light. The cop demanded to see my husband’s licence. He looked disappointed that it was all legitimate. He looked at us: a family out for Saturday lunch. He looked at our kids, who had stopped reading their books and looked worried.

“You turned on red light,” the cop said. “If you go back, you will see.”

The shakedown was so pathetic and obvious. I would have laughed were I not seething. “But the lights have changed already, have they not …?” my husband said, incredulous and polite.

The cop looked deliberately at the licence again. He was reluctant to return it. “You have to pay something,” he insisted. Now he was getting to business. “Hundred rupees,” he said sticking his hand out. "For violation."

There was no question who was being violated, but we paid up. It was his word against ours so there was no winning this fight. And like any skilled extortionist, he gauged the amount was small enough for us to write off as an irritant not worth disrupting our day for.

He took the money and waved us on generously. There was no receipt for the “fine.”

"But we did nothing wrong ...!" the children protested. We told them this was an abuse of power that we could challenge successfully in a place where the government functions in a fair and transparent manner. Not in India.

On the Mahatma's birthday, my children witnessed for the first time something that happens every day millions of times across India. Currency notes embossed with Gandhi’s face and proclaiming "The truth always wins" are wrongfully extracted from the pockets of citizens by a breed of common bully called a government servant.

Lalbagh

Lalbagh is the Central Park of Bangalore. It is an island of more than 200 acres of trees and parks, surrounded by some of the city’s most congested neighborhoods.

Many people go to Lalbagh to see its absolutely unspectacular flower clock, or the glass house that hosts a kitschy flower show a few times a year. During the flower shows, tens of thousands of people line up to look at potted plants and carved vegetables, and leave kilograms of litter in their wake.

The flower show is something to do once, just to experience the flutter a city can go into over a bunch of flower pots, even as glorious, storied trees with pachyderm trunks tower quietly just yards away.

Lalbagh is best enjoyed when you think of it as a remnant of Bangalore’s vanishing past. The few benches in the park are taken by lovebirds turning their stiff, guilty backs to people strolling by and vendors selling roasted peanuts, puffed rice and sliced cucumbers. Climb the rock hill, said to be 3-billion years old, and catch a view of Bangalore’s skyline. Then take the path that does the outermost circuit of the park.

We passed a lake carpeted with lotus pads but boasting more plastic bottles than blossoms. We saw only three lotus flowers, and even these were a beautiful consolation. A delicate pink flower standing shyly on a greenish-blue stiletto of a stalk, still water and moving clouds in the sky. My husband points out the pearly sheen of the rain clouds gathering in the distance. Walking about amidst nature has us prospecting for beautiful things and spouting poetry unrehearsed.

The best part of Lalbagh is a chance to get close to its trees. Frowning guards materialize when you get close to the roses (which give the garden its name, "red garden") or look like you might be enjoying the grass. I don’t care for the pampered grass. The flowers have enough adorers to flirt with. I scout for the garden’s step-children: its marvellous, brooding trees.

My favorite are the Bombax trees, whose massive, rippling girths rise up into infinity. Like so many of India’s historical monuments, some of these old trees are carved with the initials of vandals. The names have grown bigger along with the diameters of these limbs. You can read these ugly tattoos meters away.

There is something menacing yet gentle about these Bombax trees. My children swore they were enchanted like the Whomping Willow encountered by Harry Potter. They patted the tentacled roots with wary delight, as though petting an animal.

It is easy to believe there is something mysterious about these powerful trees. Maybe they are petrified rakshasas clawing out into the air in a futile effort to escape. I tried to play a fast-motion movie in my head where a seed churns out a stalk that dances up to the sky for more than a hundred years, getting thicker as it flings its branches out in magnificent mudras up towards God.

Or maybe it’s like witnessing Sita’s fire ordeal. “Have I not endured enough?” the trees beseech the skies. “Take me away from this wretched city that rapes me and lusts for metal and concrete.”

Reason #2: The Traffic is Mind-Numbing

What happens when you get small amounts of road space, exploding numbers of new cars, imbecile two-wheelers, maniacal truck and bus drivers all jostling for space, cutting each other off and breaking every rule of driving and road courtesy? Stand by any intersection and observe the mayhem.

There are an estimated 30 lakh vehicles jostling for 7,000 km of road space in Bangalore. And 200 new cars are registered every day (along with hundreds of other vehicles), adding to this mess.

No one observes the rules of driving. Lane markers and traffic lights are wishful reminders of decorum that few drivers care to observe. In reality, everyone drives where they please, stops wherever they want to at any time, and turns anywhere. Drivers on the far left of a road can swipe to take a right turn. Drivers who face an obstruction think nothing of suddenly flowing into your space.

Car horns and brakes are the most frequently used parts of a car, followed by the steering wheel. Turn signals are rarely used. Mirrors are protruding nuisances that are folded in.

What you may have learned in driving school is seldom needed or used on the road. The city’s drivers have devised their own set of signals. A couple of squeezes on the highbeams indicates, “I’m headed at you and am taking your space, so give way.” A wrist stuck out and wobbling in the air indicates, “You can squeeze past my side.” Elbows and foreams may be used to turn a steering wheel so hands can be freed for more critical functions such as talking on the cellphone and checking that the family jewels are intact.

Bangalore has awful roads. Sidewalks are often dug up so pedestrians share the road with vehicles. The majestic trees that form a canopied arch on many roads are daily ripped out to widen roads. The city has tried to add dozens of flyovers and ready-made underpasses (called "magic boxes") to ease traffic. These are so narrow that they actually cause traffic to freeze instead of moving it along.

The most traversed roads are either dug up to retro-fit an antediluvian Metro rail system, or are dumped with re-routed traffic. The city's roads are among the worst I've ever seen. I've seen better roads in Liberia -- and they've had a long-running civil war where grade schoolers with guns run the show. Whenever CNN airs a report on a bombing in Baghdad, I shout: "They have better roads!"

The IT industry works because it is able to wire most of its output to every end of the world. Of course, no one knows that these paragons of efficiency who answer, “Hello, this is Sam. How may I help you?” risk life and limb to get to work, and put their personal health and sanity on the line every day so they can fix customer gripes continents away.

Think of how many hours of your and your school-children’s week are spent going to work and school. Then be sobered by what fraction of your primary school-aged child’s life is spent breathing toxic gases and witnessing human incompetence on a grand scale every day, to and from school.

MTR: The Emperor's New Dosas

The Mavalli Tiffin Room, reverently known as MTR, is one of those legendary Bangalore institutions that anyone who loves the city or wants to learn to love it is urged to go on gastronomic pilgrimages to.

Queues start forming shortly after the eatery opens in the morning, and crowds throng outside at lunch time. Bangalore is a city that does not have very many sights to see, and so MTR figured high on our list of places to go to.

We made it for family breakfast one morning.

Flooded drains formed a moat around the seedy building that houses the restaurant. We wobbled like tightrope walkers over a makeshift bridge of broken bricks and entered the temple of high cuisine. Many of the most awesome eateries in India look forbiddingly dreary or ordinary. The grimy interior did not deter us. These people have been too busy cooking up heavenly meals for decades to think of lowly details like sweeping and dusting.

People wait for a table, eat quickly and leave. There are no plaster of paris curly ornaments on the ceiling or anything as pretentious as a cummerbund on a waiter or a folded napkin on the sticky tables. The waiters wear lungis folded up and tied around their hips, and they don’t offer you a menu. They are too busy zipping from table to table, and usually neither receive nor expect tips. You choose from the dozen items the kitchen has on offer at the time you order.

MTR is like the Soup Nazi in The Seinfeld Show. You show up, and you wait humbly and politely eat what they give you, in the manner they choose to serve it, because they know their food best and you’d better be grateful to be getting some of it. You don’t ask for sambar if they care not to serve it. There was none at 10 a.m. “No sambar,” the waiter said disapprovingly when some was requested.

The dosas we ordered were tepid and already wilting. They looked practically burned. I glanced at other people’s dosas. All dark brown. The rava idlis, supposedly invented here, were cold and bouncy. The kharabhath was over-seasoned, but the only item colorfully garnished with a tomato slice. The gulab jamuns were warm dough pellets with a metallic aftertaste. I wonder how this restaurant got its name as a food purist.

We had asked for coffee to be brought along with our meal and offered several reminders to our waiter, who put his hand up every time he walked by, nodding as though he were quelling an annoying child. The coffee was brought at the end of the meal, when it is customarily drunk. We sipped it gratefully. After all that below-average, pulpy food, the coffee tasted honest and robust.

This was my second sampling of food at MTR, and I rate its food as unremarkable to downright awful. I can forgive a bad meal at a restaurant. But two unrelentingly awful meals at a shrine where I had to grovel to get a seat? I felt scammed at having to endure a long wait and indifferent service for food even an okay cook like me would scorn to produce. What I can’t understand is that thousands of people line up to shove this food in and still praise the lord for blessing Bangalore with MTR. I just don’t get it.

I know lots of people who say in praise of MTR: “I’ve been eating there for 20 years and the food always tastes the same.” After two equally wretched meals there, I can believe that there’s no variation in the quality of the food and don’t plan to go back unless struck by desperation or dementia.

MTR has sold its venerable brand name to a Norwegian food company that now mass markets its high quality masalas and ready to eat mixes globally. Maybe the restaurant should switch to using these in its own kitchen.

You might wonder if I have something against South Indian udupi food. I love idlis and dosas. The steam curling off fluffy idlis on a plate, the crisp, golden dosa that opens to reveal its lacy, bubbled inside (sounds like Victorian underwear, but never mind!) can get me all excited about tucking into a meal. The mustard and chilis in the sambar set off a loud but pleasingly familiar argument with your tongue, while the coconut chutney calms it down. A steel tumbler of filter coffee is good down to the chicory-flecked sediment. It is a flavorful meal.

Having said that, I must confess a politically incorrect puzzlement I’ve long harbored about South Indian food. How can people who eat idlis and dosas and rasam practically every day, sometimes all through the day, step out of their homes and purposely seek out restaurants where they can find more idlis and dosas to order, meal after meal, day after day, month after month, and disturbingly, hop with ecstasy when they do find that dosa joint (gasp!) at the end of the block? I don’t get it. The food they get all poetic about is practically identical to what they eat at home all the time.

It’s comfort food, and I can understand the tears that may run down a deprived cheek when months of separation from idli and dosa ends with a chance encounter with a perfect hing-laced sambar bubbling in a styrofoam bowl on an icy Chicago morning. You think of the plump squeeze of your mother’s hand telling you to have one more dosa, you can hear your father sucking drumsticks noisily with his teeth. After days of boring cornflakes and waxy bagels and bony toast, you want to dig into idli and dosa and feel your sinuses sting gratefully. Moisture courses down your eyes and your nose and you don't give a damn how you look because your body has all its senses engaged in making some heavenly food disappear. You don't say through pursed lips, "Pass the apricot jelly, Nigel." You're busy making indelicate, slurping history of your idli-dosa combo. I get that.

But to crave a dosa, that same dosa, because the last one you had was in the morning ...?

Can comfort food be so comforting that it can anesthetize you into such a state of zombie gratitude that you can’t snap out of it for decades? I had to physically fight the urge to stand up on a chair at MTR that morning and shout, “It’s okay, people. It’s okay to say it. This food is pretty bad.”

Maybe people just keep going back again and again, more than 20 years, to see if they can finally get a good meal at the place. I’m not going to be one of them.

Reason #1: The Housing is Ridiculously Overpriced

I’m not comparing Bangalore to Mumbai or Shanghai or New York here. I’m comparing Bangalore to Bangalore.

Single family homes are rentable in multiples of 1 lakh a month unless you live out in the middle of nowhere, have lousy road access, arrange to pump your own borewell water and generate your own electric power. A 3-bedroom apartment in a compound with recreational facilities should cost you a third to half of that.

The rent bubble has burst, and one can now rent a small villa in Palm Meadows, an upscale gated community, for Rs. 40,000 a month, instead of a lakh a year ago. Homeowners whose rent expectations zoomed from Rs. 20,000 to 2-3 lakhs are now cooling their heels as there is an oversupply of housing.

Gated communities at least offer on-site recreational facilities that compensate for the utter lack of cleanliness or facilities outside their walls. But a dekko will bring the shocking realization that many of the so-called luxury housing options available are little better than low income housing projects in the United States or Europe.

Typically, what you pay for is just a roof over your head because the city does not have much to offer in terms of civic amenities or quality of life.

That homeowners and agents demand extortionate rates isn’t any tribute to the superior quality of the housing on offer or the attractiveness of Bangalore as a city. For rents that are higher than in Palo Alto, Calif., where the original Silicon Valley is, Bangalore offers dug up footpaths, unswept streets, open drains, and daily chaos, making it a destination for people who have to be here because their jobs are located here. Not only does the housing exclude any white goods, it does not include good (and free!) schools, rolling parks and ribbon-smooth highways. It does include horrendous traffic jams and a high probability that your principal source of water will be tanker trucks bringing pesticide-laced ground water from the city’s dwindling borewells to your building. All in all, a laughable price tag for the only good thing on offer: the weather.

Bangalore’s topsy-turvy housing prices are all about supply and demand. There was a huge demand for high-end housing from 2004 for NRIs and expats moving to Bangalore. Whitefield became an attractive location because villas with on-site club facilities were available within a 30 to 45 minute drive to two popular international schools (TISB and Indus), and close to ITPL and its vicinity, where the offices of IT majors are located, as well as to the old HAL airport.

With the housing bust already here, thousands of apartments built to lure property speculators now lie vacant in Whitefield. Villas are quietly put on sale. Gone is the bidding frenzy of prospective renters and the queues of buyers willing to shell out several crores for villas they built for Rs. 20 to 40 lakhs.

The rental market has cooled too. Landlords who salivated at the prospect of luring a gullible expatriate to pay them 2-5 lakh a month in Palm Meadows, with a 15-month, interest-free deposit now have villas lying vacant for months. Gone are the days when they coldly evicted tenants in the middle of leases because some agent promised a company lease that would pay them double.

The new airport is in the city’s north, as are some of the newer international schools. Although still very much an expat ghetto, Palm Meadows is no longer the only option for new expatriate families. More housing is available in every neighborhood of Bangalore. And traffic jams have doubled the peak hour commute from Whitefield to M.G. Road from 45 minutes four years ago to an hour and a half on a good day. Electronics City to the airport is a good 2 hours. A windfall doesn’t last forever.

Apartment prices are also a third to half of what they used to be a few years ago. But these are a bargain only if you think your dream home should come with: No zoning regulations, so you can have a shop or restaurant open practically anywhere in a residential area. Traffic noise that lasts into the wee hours of the morning. Walking on streets that have choked gutters, no sidewalks and no safe junctions to cross at.

The gloriously spreading trees along the sides of roads that the Garden City got its name from are quickly being cut down, and there is rubble and trash everywhere. Metal barricades and knee-high medians stretch for kilometers, with no consideration for pedestrians and school children. Motorcycle riders think footpaths are an extra lane for them to drive on. Streets get flooded after a few centimetres of rain. People fall into overflowing drains and drown every monsoon and yet nothing changes.

All these make Bangalore an ugly, decaying and unsafe city.

Top Ten Reasons Not to Move to Bangalore

Packing up your family and moving to Bangalore because this is Silicon Valley with the same salubrious weather and a lower cost of living? Whatever your company’s HR propagandist or your relocation agent tells you, brace yourself for unpleasant surprises.

This city has a king-size ego, and not much to offer in terms of work, family life or lifestyle. So think twice about altering your life plans to accommodate this city.

The enduring lesson I’ve learnt: You’ll have to sacrifice a lot to accommodate this city, but it won’t do much to accommodate you – not because it doesn’t want to, but because it is itself in tatters.

Here’s my honest and opinionated assessment of Bangalore that will help you factor in all the real pros and cons of moving to this city.

Next post:
Reason #1: The Housing is Ridiculously Overpriced.

CBSE, ICSE: Pick Your Poison

Copyrighted. Reprints only with full attribution and the author's permission.


What is CBSE? What is ICSE? Is one better than the other?

For parents, it is akin to being asked to choose which poison to administer to their child. Both these exam boards cram a huge amount of knowledge into our children while chipping away at their individuality so that by the time they finish school they are are no square pegs left to squeeze into round holes.

CBSE schools are affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education, based in Delhi, which is why some schools will say they are attached to the “Delhi Board,” as opposed to the regional “state board.”

The CBSE board conducts two examinations, one at the end of Class 10 (which it is now considering making optional), and another at the end of Class 12 (the results of which help determine which college a student might be able to enroll in).

Government and military employees face frequent transfers around the country. The CBSE board has a uniform curriculum tailor-made for this constituency.

The CBSE curriculum is largely rote-based, and therefore ideal for government and military schools as it is fairly easy to ensure the same textbooks and parroting teachers are available anywhere in the country. The exams test memory rather than intelligence.

The CBSE board is perceived as strong in mathematics and the sciences, and easy in English and social sciences. The same board also conducts entrance examinations for engineering and pre-medical courses, and the curriculum and questions of these coincide with its school syllabi.

This accounts for the widely held assumption that CBSE students perform better in these tests because they are already familiar with the subject matter tested.

Many private schools also offer the CBSE curriculum: It is an easy product to deliver even with barely adequate teachers. Customers don’t have to be sold on it as they are predisposed to think it gives their children an edge in the college market.

The other rival education brand, the ICSE, also has a cookie-cutter approach to education. But it has a far massive syllabus and essay type questions, which are a truer test of intelligence and expressiveness, and therefore harder to get perfect scores on.

A large portion of CBSE exam questions are multiple choice, making it easy for candidates to get perfect scores for correct answers even if they have poor language skills -- and therefore high overall scores. The board has recently modernized the curriculum, requiring more essays and reflective answers. It also plans to switch to a system of letter grades from 2010.

Parents opting for the CBSE system say they do so their children can get higher scores, giving them an edge in college applications (Most Indian colleges specify the minimum cutoff percentage of marks they want in applicants. If you got less, don’t even bother to apply.) However, many of the premier colleges in India administer entrance exams of their own precisely because they do not want just rote learners to crash their rolls and they want to pick their own candidates. So, scoring high in school board exams are no longer a shoo-in for admission to India’s top colleges.

The CBSE system is the default choice for many who want their children to study engineering or medicine because popular myth has it that this board’s candidates are more likely to succeed in entrance exams. This is only a perception. The reality is that the majority of candidates who succeed in entrance exams for institutes such as IIT prepare themselves with additional private tutorials and coaching classes that teach test taking techniques that enable them to score high. In fact, actual surveys of students who made it to the Indian Institute of Technology, the holy grail of engineering studies in India, have revealed that a greater number of them hailed from ICSE rather than CBSE schools.

The national education minister Kapil Sibal recently shook the massive ants’ nest that the country’s education system is by suggesting that his government is likely to abolish the 10th grade examination, starting with the CBSE’s own exam, from 2011.

Under the new system, students will be assessed by their own schools, and over a longer period so that a single exam does not have the power make or break their lives. Letter grades will be awarded rather than marks so students have benchmarks for their performances, without having their worth measured in percentages and decimals derived from one exam. These are all sensible changes.

These are all necessary and welcome changes. Indian students generally perform well on tests that require cramming and offering predictable answers. They are unable to think out of the box because our education system does not nurture or reward this skill.

The 10th grade exam is often a dress rehearsal for the 12th grade exam, which supposedly prepares you for college exams, and ad nauseam. If an exam exists solely to prepare children for another bigger exam, then it has no intrinsic value of its own. Our 9th and 10th graders devote two years to cram for a week of sit-down exams. Imagine, if that time was spent in experiencing the joy of learning for the sake of learning before they are spat out of the system and into the cynical world where skills are worthwhile only if they are marketable or capable of generating money.

The Parents' Guide to India's Education System

Copyrighted. Reprints only with attribution and the author’s permission


This blog offers the Only guide to education in India that is comprehensive, honest and useful. Most so-called guides are larded with PR bullshit. Take it from a parent and a former newspaper reporter who has scoured every option and is happy to share her findings with thousands of others who are likely to walk in the same shoes.

Families moving to India find themselves staring at an alphabet soup of educational systems: CBSE, ICSE, SSC, SSLC, NCERT, IGCSE, ISC .... The nightmare doesn’t end, and parents have to make the right choice in a snap.

Time is short. The education system is completely different from what your children are used to. The school year is different. The Indian school calendar runs from June to March so you agonize about whether it’s better to let your children finish their school year abroad so they experience closure before you all move, or better for them to cut short their school year, forgo their summer holidays and plunge into a fresh start in India. School admission can be a humiliating ordeal for parents and children. Schools typically have long waiting lists and grueling admission tests that can batter a child’s self-confidence. Your children are likely to be saddled with heavier school bags, loaded with homework, parrot their textbooks and constantly prepare for tests.

You stare at all these unappetizing options and have to take the perfect decision quickly ... because your child’s future depends on the oracle of a school principal and your ability to find the right school and curriculum.

Unscrambling the acronyms is easy. The challenge lies in finding the right school that can give your child an enriched and balanced learning experience that you want for them and would make your relocation worthwhile.

Those relocating for a brief period want to leapfrog into a compatible educational ecosystem. Those moving to India for good want to make that perfect, unerring decision that could make or break their family's adjustment to India.

Parents want to choose a school and an education system that together are most likely to make their kids happy, successful and well-prepared for admission to the most competitive colleges in India and abroad.

Read my succeeding posts for answers to the most asked questions about the Indian school system.

The next installment will answer:
What is CBSE?
What is ICSE?
Which is better: CBSE or ICSE?

Hyderabad 2: Charminar

The Charminar is to Hyderabad what the Arc de Triomphe is to Paris.

The Charminar was etched in my mind long ago as a child, even though no one in my family smoked. I was raised in a tee-totalling world in which only movie stars and the local layabouts smoked cigarettes, while servants and laborers dragged on bidis. I remember the sketched logo of the orange Charminar cigarette packs in paan shops and on billboard advertisements that urged everyone to Relax, Have a Charminar.

I saw the actual monument finally, and it is practically as tiny as its likeness on the cigarette packs.

You’re driving down the main drag of the old city quarter of Hyderabad, and there the Charminar suddenly stands before you, dingy and chipped, with that aged yellowness of old dentures.

The ticket office charged me Rs. 5. The staff insisted my husband should pay Rs. 150 even though he has proof of residence in India. “Naagrikta honi chahiye,” a ticket guy said, turning down all government-issued proofs showing he lives in India and is not a tourist. “He has to be a citizen.”

Our family goes through this annoying and humiliating exercise of Indian double standards all the time. When we go travel anywhere in the United States, my husband and I pay the same to see any national monuments. I don’t pay more because I look darker than him, or because the ticket guy thinks I look foreign or because the American government thinks I should pay more because I must be richer since I come from the land of maharajas.

At the Charminar, no documents were asked of me; the color of my skin was enough. My husband paid 30 times more than me. I wonder how the Indian government calculates the exponents by which tourists or anyone not perceived to look Indian should be robbed officially. What a grubby beggar it reduces a government to to dip into the pockets of its guests so shamelessly and for no apparent reason other than it can get away with such extortion.

My husband got the same view of the graffitied minarets, but the ticket he got was printed on nicer paper while mine looked like a bus ticket. The guards let him through with a jaunty flourish.

The Charminar might have been a towering structure in 1591. What you get after climbing up a narrow, glute-challenging spiral staircase is get a pigeon’s eye view of the lanes of fruit vendors, yellow arcs of auto-rickshaw queues, billboards and crowded bazaars. The carvings on the minarets are clearly visible from the balcony.

A grubby jute rope is strung across the balcony to deter people from falling over. Suicidal leaps from the minarets have made the upper levels of the Charminar out of bounds for all visitors except for Very Important Persons. There are taller buildings in the city whose heights can guarantee greater success in creating a bloody pulp of oneself than the stubby Charminar. But maybe there is something romantic about leaping out of stone arches that have an established pedigree in assisting suicides.

The Charminar's walls are gouged with graffiti. “All from before 2006, before they posted us here, Madam,” a guard said defensively. Who are the scribblers, typically? “Students,” he said. “Illiterate people are not our problem because they can’t write their names. It’s these educated people who want to write their names everywhere.”

Hyderabad 1: Fire at the High Court

I went to Hyderabad for the first time ever. The High Court was on fire the morning I landed. The morning after I left, the Chief Minister died in a helicopter crash.

Monday was one of the rainiest days there. The rain started before dawn and had retreated to a drizzle by late morning, when my husband and I drove from the airport to the old city to catch some sight seeing.

My husband’s cellphone rang. “Are you near a television?” a friend demanded. “The High Court is on fire.”

Eerily, we were on the same street, just a block away. We turned our heads right, and there was the fire: the brown onion domes of the stately 93-year-old High Court with black curls of smoke puffing out. There weren’t any fire engines around or police cordons, no signs of sleepy government officials poked into moving with any speed. It just seemed like a normal morning, with cars streaming by on the street outside, while parts of the city’s highest court were into their sixth hour of burning.

The High Court, a magnificent building of pink granite and red sandstone (that now look a drab brown), cost Rs. 2-million when it was built in 1916. Its architect was Vincent Esch, who also supervised the construction of the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta.

The next morning’s paper reported that the fire, started by an electrical short circuit, was detected at 4 a.m. by a guard. There were no fire alarms or extinguishers in the building.

Apparently, the fire department had for years been sending reminders to the Court that it needed to comply with fire safety guidelines. The state's highest Court thumbed its nose at them; its business was to dispense law, not follow it.

How I Grew Up With And Grew Apart From Jainism

Copyrighted by Reena Shah

It is Paryushan, a time of prayer, penitence and abstention that all Jains, and almost everyone in my family and my childhood community observes with a reverence I no longer share.

For years, I have been an outsider looking in on rituals that far from evoking devotion, don’t stir a shred of religious feeling in me. For many Gujarati Jains, among whom I was raised, their religious practice boils down to conforming to a series of dietary abstentions and fasts that earn them a pious sheen. Even fallen Jains opt for a quick spiritual makeover during Paryushan to demonstrate they still belong to the flock. I rebelled against this cosmetic compliance long ago.

And yet I’ve never slammed the door officially shut or converted to another religion that wowed me as being the perfect package of salvation.

The fundamental problem I have with Jainism is its unrelenting pessimism. Jainism 101: Man’s very existence is sinful because to fulfill his needs, he has to cause suffering to other creatures. Our animalistic nature spurs us to indulge in cruelty to others and blinds us from realizing our inherent divinity. So break out of this cycle of causing suffering to others. Be ascetic, righteous and non-violent to achieve self-knowledge. So what if you suffer or starve? The body is but a temporal distraction. Your soul will be freed of its bodily shackles to attain nirvana.

Buddhism and Jainism both figured this out. The Buddha was the Enlightened One. The Jinas (the root of the word “Jain”) were the Conquerors of human frailty.

Gautama Buddha’s answer was to steer away from extremes and follow the Middle Path between indulgence and self-mortification. He also encouraged his followers to spread the word. Jainism venerates 24 tirthankars or men who realized their latent divinity, the last being Vardhaman Mahavir, an older contemporary of the Buddha.

Jainism’s path of self-abnegation did not find as many preachers or takers. Jainism had a headstart, but its competitor, Buddhism, benefited from better marketing and charismatic salesmanship of a more user-friendly product and won a significantly larger, international following. Today, there are thought to be 350-million Buddhists. There are 8-million Jains, mostly in India.

Jainism’s self-mortification has its own logic, but not one that made sense to me. Why would God create a world, populate it with highly intelligent creatures and then rig it all by insisting they should not delight in its beauty because they were inherently sinful? Even if one believes there is no single, all-powerful Creator, the idea of life as a pleasureless journey during which one chooses suffering and self-denial to gradually stamp oneself out is negative and unappealing.

The central principle of Jainism is non-violence. Observant Jains are not just vegetarian. They do not eat foods that are dug from under the ground, such as potatoes and carrots, because the act of digging is thought to hurt soil organisms. They shun leather and silk, and anything derived from causing injury to other living things. They meditate and fast in varying degrees of severity. A milestone of piety is to fast on alternate days for an entire year, a feat even children sometimes achieve. Monks wear cotton masks over their mouths so they do not swallow tiny insects accidentally. They travel everywhere on bare feet and periodically swish a soft brush around themselves so no tiny insects will get trodden by them. When they get ordained, these monks do not shave their heads, but pull their hair out by the roots to demonstrate they are oblivious to bodily pain.

Growing up Jain, I naturally had questions about all the prohibitions we had to practice in order to be considered virtuous. Why did I have to utter prayers and say the rosary in a language I could not understand, seated for a whole hour on a little mat? Why were potatoes pariahs in our kitchens? Why were onions odious and eggplant evil? These were questions the adults who enforced these practices couldn’t quite explain other than to say that was just how people wiser than us had made these rules, rules that generations of people had managed to follow without asking pesky questions. Everything one did had degrees of sin attached to it, and the Jain way was apparently the correct way to get through life with the best score.

That did not stop the questions. Would people who enjoyed onions but did lots of good deeds be barred from heaven? Jains drink boiled water but wasn’t the act of boiling water sinful because we kill germs? Were hydroponically grown potatoes acceptable, or was there something irredeemably evil about tubers? Was eating a sprouted bean really less sinful than eating an unfertilized egg that would never hatch into a chicken?

Some of the prohibitions didn’t make any sense. Roots and underground tubers were considered sinful to eat because digging them was thought to harm to insects and soil organisms. But ginger and turmeric were okay.

Eating greens was forbidden during Paryushan, the annual ritual of temperance and fasting (“See how advanced science was in those days! Our ancestors wanted to prevent people from eating foods that were likely to be infested with worms during the rainy season.”) But when dehydrated peas, and then frozen ones, started being available, people weren’t sure which side of the rules these were on. How about the beneficial properties of garlic? Was swallowing garlic capsules from medicine bottles permitted?

Honey was forbidden because it was apparently teeming with unseen little organisms, but yogurt was fine. Why couldn’t someone just admit this was what was accepted in scientific belief back in olden times, and yes, maybe Jainism did perhaps have the scoop on microbiology when it declared way back in B.C., long before microscopes came along, that invisible organisms exist everywhere. But couldn’t there be some way that new scientific theories could be acknowledged and integrated into our beliefs?

My mother took me to a Jain monk so he could better answer my questions. After listening to me, he turned to her and said, “Your daughter doubts too much.” To me, he said: “To be religious, one needs faith. You doubt too much.” A lot of my faith died right then.

I had the feeling that people who didn’t know much about science or care to know about it had been arbitrarily turning their blind beliefs and personal fetishes into rules for everyone else to follow. I went through the motions of observing certain rituals to please my elders. Gujaratis are an unabashedly acquisitive people who turn to finicky dietary rules and penances to earn their “Get Out of Jail” cards periodically. The complicated rituals of deprivation they follow give them the comfort of virtual asceticism without having to make any real sacrifices of wealth and comfort. I felt repelled by what I saw around me, but then was my dishonesty any better than the token compliance that bothered me? I stopped pretending.

The entrepreneurial Jains have spread across India and more recently, migrated overseas, carving out a reputation for being hard-working and prosperous. But their outdated religious practices have not been as market-responsive or customer-savvy as the trades they ply with such seat-of-the-pants acumen.

Ironically, Jainism started as a progressive backlash against the ritualism and idolatry of Hinduism and then fell into comfortable trap all organized religions do when they prefer not to get off their cushions of dogma. What a fiery revolutionary Mahavira must have been to defy the Brahminical establishment with his nakedness and declare he would follow his inner compass to seek his own truth! He made his teachings available in Prakrit, the language of the common people, during a time when the Brahmins purposely confined Hindu rituals to the aristocratic Sanskrit language. But Prakrit is a dead language now and many old Jain teachings remain largely untranslated and unavailable to modern practitioners.

If Jainism was such a rebellious and scientifically inclined religion in its early days, why has it been reluctant to integrate modern physical and environmental sciences into its current body of belief? Its principles of respect for life, non-violence and limiting consumption of resources would make it the world’s first green religion. Its do-it-yourself approach to salvation would be so appealing to our generation. How relevant it would be, especially to the young, if this combination of environmental awareness and personal responsibility evolved beyond villainizing vegetables to issuing prohibitions such as limiting the use of fossil fuels and plastic that imperil our planet.

Yet Jainism’s practice largely consists of following ossified rituals conducted in the dead languages, rather than examining the spiritual lode underlying its texts. If its narrow-minded asceticism has been so liberating, where are all the great philantropists, reformers, artists, musicians and poets who should have emerged out of this superior ideology?

So I have long stopped being a formal follower of Jainism. I have rejected its illogical dietary restrictions, its obsession with purification, its glorification of self-inflicted pain, and its guilty and muddled embrace of technology.

I refuse to let go of the belief that humans are highly intelligent, even if flawed, creatures who are capable of creating and experiencing great beauty and should have the freedom to do so without being encumbered by guilt and shame. I still hold that a faith that prescribes non-injury to all creatures must honor its believers and not advocate the self-inflicted violence that can deaden one’s enjoyment of life’s beauty and replace it righteous blindness.

I refuse to regard my body as a disgusting appendage to be dragged through my lifetime and tended to grudgingly until I am rewarded with release into bliss. To be born human is a gift to be celebrated by achieving one’s fullest potential and engaging in public service to make our world better. How wasteful, to finally earn the privilege of being incarnated human after several failed lifecycles, and then squandering that precious opportunity by retreating into the morbid execution of a community-sponsored death-wish!

Jainism’s innate goodness lingers in the corners of my mind in ways that never leaped out of its books or rituals. It is in my memories of the selfless austerity my maternal grandmother practised all her life, without ever being exhibitionistic or preachy. It is in the acceptance and sacrifice I see my parents practice constantly. It is in the remembrance I carry, like a pebble still clutched in a child’s hand, that personal responsibility, awareness and compassion must guide our thoughts and actions.

Although I have shunned Jainism’s myriad rules, I have kept parts of it that make sense to me and help me become a good person. I practice little austerities quietly, but think the world of garlic and occasionally wear silk. I try to consume less and be a caring world citizen. I do not abstain from my normal diet during Paryushan or pray more, but I observe its concluding ritual, which encourages the faithful to seek each other’s forgiveness for any slights or suffering they might have inflicted, knowingly or unintentionally.

I still say the Navkar mantra every day, a reflex lingering from my childhood programming that I find comforting. It is an umbilical cord that links me to the fountainhead of a faith that has not yet spoken to me.

Swine Flu

The school calendar for this time of year is loaded enough with holidays:
Varamahalakshmi (I never got that day off when I was a kid).
Independence Day (polish shoes and badges extra shiny, show up at school for flag raising, lots of extra homework... how did I ever consider this a holiday?)
Janmashtami and Ganesh Chaturthi (didn’t get both these either).

Deduct a few days of attendance because of the coughs and colds kids pass to each other in the rainy season.

Then, faster than you could say gesundheit, dozens of city schools shut down indefinitely. Even pre-schoolers can tell you the name of the new long school holiday: Swine Flu.

The newspapers are splashed with photos of scared-looking people wearing surgical masks doing yagyas, with smaller, buried headlines (that’s how they attempt to show balanced coverage) stating there is no cause for panic.

My children’s school has sensibly remained open despite the city-wide scare. Why shut down? There was no directive from the government’s education or health departments recommending a shut down for schools. Our school let parents know that children with any cold symptoms should be kept at home.

My ever-prepared daughter packed a bottle of hand sanitizer in her book bag. What fun to open a bottle of cold, nice-smelling, squishy stuff in class and have other kids ask if they could please, please, get a little drop too. It’s a girl thing. I remember the little sachets of wet tissues from airlines I would hoard in my sanitizer-less childhood. On extra hot days, I would unfold one cold square with slow drama, and pass around the cologne-scented icons of luxury travel to my circle of cousins. I was the only one who had ever flown on a plane once, briefly, as an infant. Of course, I had no recall of that heavenly experience and only knew about it because my parents told me. Still, that made me special; I had been closest to where angels and fairies might live. Girls are programmed to take ordinary little objects and use them in elaborate and sometimes twisted rituals of belonging.

Boys are more direct. My son already regards soap as an invention as pointless as homework but submits to it from time to time. Hand sanitizer in his school backpack … now, that’s pushing it. Even fear of the swine flu virus hasn’t pierced his sunny, invincible disposition into buckling to something as effeminate as hand sanitizer. He squirted a bit on his palm last week and was quick to underline it wasn’t due to any namby pamby germ fear. “Umm, alcohol,” he said, with slow, taunting relish, to show me he already has a manly recognition of a distant relative of beer and other forbidden liquids. His friend’s eyes popped with awe.

He usually gets a rise out of me, but this time I didn’t react. I can handle swine flu. The virus cannot resist high temperatures. I’m the mother of a teenager. I can.

Celebrating 62 Years of Grovelling to VIPs

A lot of people in India are mad at America these days.

First, its former president Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was frisked by Continental Airlines staff, in accordance with U.S. transportation department rules, before they allowed him to board a flight. Those arrogant American officials were ignorant that India's government exempts VIPs and their families from being subjected to any searches, even though India suffers one of the world’s highest rates of terrorist attacks.

And now, horror of horrors, movie star Shahrukh Khan was subjected to questions about his travel documents by customs and immigration officials in Newark. He was sent to a room for secondary questioning and had to wait in line for his turn, just like everyone else there. He was asked some more questions, and then he was out of there in a little over an hour.

Put yourself in the shoes of the U.S. immigration and customs officials that day in Newark. They are among the billions of people in the world who have been spared viewing Om Shanti Om and do not recognize Shahrukh Khan, much less intend disrespect to him.

The person standing before them has a surname that matches that of many on their terrorism watch lists. He bears a passport from a country where a disproportionately large number of travelers obtain visas through fraudulent documents and immigrate illegally to the United States. And quite possibly, this passenger does not have two little bags like most travelers. You don’t want to hold up the impatient passengers who are lined up behind Mr. Khan, so you ask him to go to another room where he can be questioned more privately.

Sounds like they were simply doing their job politely. Does this warrant burning effigies of U.S. President Barack Obama? Or having Ambika Soni, the national information minister, publicly recommend retaliation in the form of harassment for
American travelers? The information minister is ignorant. American travelers already find Indian airports nightmarish. They haven’t complained loudly because they don’t feel singled out for bad service; Indian officials treat all their customers equally poorly, regardless of nationality.

Racial profiling occurs in America. It occurs more frequently in India, and those who suffer it rarely have legal recourse to correct it. Ambika Soni only has to accompany Shahrukh Khan as he hunts for an apartment in Mumbai.

India is a democracy where some people are more equal than others. It is a place where legislators pass laws that subject ordinary citizens to inconveniences and indignities that the legislators and their powerful friends are exempted from.

India’s rich and powerful are so used to having everyone in government and society bowing and scraping before them and bending rules for them, that when they travel abroad, they are shocked when they are treated just like everybody else.

“Do you know WHO I am?” is a threat that works all the time in India, putting the fear of God in officials who are afraid the displeasure of a powerful person might cause them to lose their jobs or get demoted.

On the anniversary of 62 years of independence from colonial rule, Indian news headlines were squealing in protest because one of their darling VIPs was being treated just like anyone else.

Not an apt way to trumpet one’s achievements as a democracy. But certainly, lots of free publicity for Shahrukh Khan ahead of the release of his forthcoming film, My Name is Khan.

Of Gods and Parents

Janmashtami is around the corner and the gaudy Ganesh statues arrayed on pavements signal that Ganesh Chaturthi is not far away.

Ganesh is hands down my favorite deity. The elephant-headed god thinks on his feet, loves sweets, has lots of body confidence despite his girth, and merely thinking of him is supposed to be good for procrastinators like me.

He’s cute and chubby and a kid at heart. But when I tell the story of Ganesh to my younger child, her forehead sets in a frown. “I don’t like that,” she declares when I come to the part about Shiva lopping off Ganesh’s head in fury. She’s a funny one. She’ll protest, “Don’t change the channel, I want to SEE that!” when I pound the TV remote as soon as a close-up of a dead body or a gushing wound unexpectedly appears on screen. She stares at the screen with an unblinking interest that disturbs me. But she is troubled by the story of how Ganesh lost his head and ended up with an elephant’s.

I can why this story would be unsettling. What parent – and especially a god, for god’s sake – would do this to a child?

It’s hard enough for a mortal like me to explain this story to my children. However Ganesh’s mother Parvati manage to explain this to him? “Daddy got so angry one day, he cut your head off. But he was very, very sorry and said he would replace it first thing in the morning…. Yes honey, it is an elephant’s head but I want you to know you’re very special, and we love you very, very much.”

I enjoy reading and telling mythological stories to my children. They’re colorful as stories and resonate with layers upon layers of symbolic meaning.

And I find them reassuring and empowering as a parent. I’ve been known to lose my temper and am glad I don’t have a third eye because I would have caused some serious, regrettable damage with it. But compared to Shiva, I’m not doing too badly in the parenting department.

What a wonderful luxury! Our legends provide provide us with the delicious paradox of being able to venerate our gods and goddesses and still being able to notch higher behavior points than some of them. Look at all those gods and goddesses and heroes and the messes they got themselves in and out of. Most of them had such dysfunctional families and complicated lives, yet they all turned out happy and fine and interesting and mostly put together. And people in India have had the scoop on their shenanigans for thousands of years and still worship them.

Look at Krishna. How dissipated and lost he might be in today’s world, although he did just fine in his time. You can imagine a therapist giving him a dressing down: “I know you’re struggling to overcome the trauma of being a foster child. You are addicted to dairy products. Eating so much butter since childhood places you in a high-risk category for heart attacks. You have a history of stalking women. The court order obtained by the gopis states that you must maintain a minimum distance of 50 yards between yourself and them, yet you consistently violate it. And your neighbors complain you play the flute loudly at all odd hours. How can you expect people to continue worshipping you if you exhibit such poor self-control and continue to flout the law?”

A culture that is not afraid to vest its gods with frailties and can see beyond their imperfections and worship them despite their flaws century after century has to be both blind and andar-se strong.

Our gods stuff themselves with laddoos till they burst, chase women, bend rules when they want to. They are extensions of ourselves, but with divine powers. They are our superheroes.

America has Superman and Batman and Captain America and hosts of superheroes dashing about in capes. We have our gods and goddesses. That is why a copycat modern superhero like the flabby Shaktiman in his wrinkled nylon bodysuit is a dud who will never capture our imaginations in the same way.

Our flawed, carbo-loading, multi-armed, third-eye incinerating superheroes rule our imaginations. That is why we haven’t tired of hearing and re-telling their stories for 5,000 years, and my children will pass them on to theirs.

Hari 2: More Tales of Our Garden

The sparse monsoon is beginning to show on the brown grass. The rain has been absent and so has Hari the gardener.

I can see weeds propagating in comfortable patches, like they don’t expect to be disturbed. The leaves on the roses are chewed through. There are aphids on the guava tree. The leaves on the jasmine and hibiscus are curling unhappily from some invasion.

I’ve long suspected that Hari has no real hands-on knowledge of plants. His horticultural skills are limited to sweeping fallen leaves and tonsuring the grass when it becomes overgrown. He claims he grew up on a farm but I find it hard to believe he is a son of the soil.

I have to show him how to prune bushes and transplant saplings. I have to pull off aphids and squeeze them to show him that it isn't a gust of "bad air" that has my jasmine leaves shriveling. He cannot identify common weeds or secretly collaborates with them. “Oh, you don’t want these flowers?’’ he’ll say. I tell him the plant in question is a non-flowering weed that has now grown to over a foot high and is multiplying itself. “Na-ah,” he’ll say mysteriously. “Wait some more. It’s not a weed. It’ll give flowers.”

Hari colludes with weeds until they overrun the garden. Then he announces the garden will die without herbicides. I deliver an ultimatum and no herbicides. Then one day Hari recruits his wife, cousins and neighbors to squat in little circles and stab the grass with weed-pullers that look like big flat-pin screwdrivers. Piles of weeds, enough to stock a morbid florist for weeks, are displayed as trophies of his unappreciated devotion to our garden.

We go through this dramatic routine at the end of every month. Then Hari goes on his weed-pulling frenzy so that he can avoid being ticked off and threatened with unemployment when he shows up to collect his pay.

I’ve felt tempted to get another gardener. But I feel responsible for Hari. He has four children to raise in the city and a mother in his village home he sends money to because none of his brothers help her out. He shows up regularly and is honest and good-natured. If I replace him, the new guy could be a jerk and Hari’s kids might have to drop out of school because he certainly won’t be able to pay their tuition fees.

He is clueless about his work, but at least earnest. So it would be fair to say my compassion for our gardener has come at the expense of my compassion for our ailing garden.

Hari has a single, undeviating diagnosis for everything that ails our garden at any time of the year: Kida (bugs, worms).

Kida hiding under the ground are eating the roots of the grass. Kida are eating the leaves that are punctured with holes. Kida are sabotaging his work.

Hari also has one same magical prescription for banning all these ills: "Yirya complice" and "por-eight".

The first time he made this request, I asked him again and again what these were. He couldn't spell them or write them in a language I understood. "Medicine, madam," he would repeat as I shook my head uncomprehendingly. "Medicine for plants. Haven't you used it ever?"

Finally, I decided to drive to a seed and fertilizer shop nearby with him so he could show me what these were.

The shop was divided in two. The glass-fronted half stocked mobile phones. The open half sold farm supplies.

The shop reeked of death and disfigurement. My eyes stung and I could feel minutes peeling off my life span as I scanned the stock.

There were bags and sacks of chemicals with skull and bones symbols and serious health warnings. It was a mini-mart peddling poisons in pellets, powders and bottles. The contents all cautioned they are to be mixed in very small concentrations and handled with protective clothing and masks. Yet laborers who apply these lethal chemicals are often barefoot and have obviously not been supplied basic protective gear by their employers.

That is how easily you can shop death in India. It's practically as easy as buying handguns in America.

In a farm store, you don't show any IDs and you can buy anything toxic that takes your fancy: Malathion, DDT, any of the polysyllabically named poisons that are banned in the United States and Europe, are all available cheaply.

Hari picked out what he wanted: Urea complex and Phorate.

I read the labels and had the store clerk put them back. Instead, I bought a bag of compost.

Hari was downcast. I had chosen kida over him. “All your neighbors are using medicines,” he pleaded as we loaded the compost in the trunk of my car.

“These are not medicines,” I interrupted righteously. “They are poisons.”

“How can that be madam? Can the government allow the selling of poison?” I marvelled at his such faith in India's government and let him know we were done shopping.

Back home, I Googled Hari’s wish list of chemicals. Phorate is a relative of nerve gas. Urea compounds are used to fertilize soils but high concentrations can irritate the skin, eyes and respiratory tract.

There are many important reasons not to buy them. Hari’s health. My children playing ball with their friends. The birds that visit my garden.

Hari has come around to accept my irrational dislike for his "medicines" and I've grown to accept his inability to tell desirable vegetation apart from weeds.

Brown is the color of my garden’s good health this year. I’ll pretend the subdued looking grass is a sign of the fall colors I miss.