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.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, August 17, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, August 10, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Groundhog Day
Being in India often makes me feel like I’m stuck in my own version of Groundhog Day.
This is one of my favorite movies. Bill Murray is a self-centred and snide television weatherman who is smitten by Andi McDowell, a producer who detests him for the arrogant jerk that he is but is stuck as his partner during their news coverage of the cute annual ritual of Groundhog Day in a small town. Every year, the town officially hails the end of winter after a celebrated rodent and town mascot named Punxatawney Phil ends its hibernation by emerging from its hole in the ground and approving the weather by looking as though he is interested in remaining outdoors.
The same sequence of events in a single day repeat themselves, over and over again, giving Murray a shot at re-capturing lost opportunities and re-doing everything he did unthinkingly or clumsily again and again, with increasing purpose and elegance.
Again and again, he gets the same chance over to be kinder to the people whose toes he treaded on. He learns to open himself to the beauty of moments he missed in his usual snarkiness. And with each new effort, he gradually re-invents himself as a sensitive, happy person who celebrates each moment of his day till he makes it perfect, for himself and everyone he meets. As he finally perfects this single, all-important day in his life, he enriches the people he encounters and finds his own hidden talents. He learns to be kind and gentle, to play piano like a virtuoso, to find joy in little things. And by editing and retooling himself, he crafts his own happiness.
The lesson is that we are the creators of our own happiness. Every day can be the most meaningful day of our lives, and we have the power, within our own selves, to make little moments and gestures reverberate with beauty. We are the artists who can paint and re-paint each still frame until it imparts the beauty we imagined it should glow with and becomes perfect as a work of art.
Every time I’ve come back to India, it feels like I am stuck again in the same set of events and given another opportunity to do things over in order to make them come out better.
The props change a little over the years. There are more cars, grander buildings. People have more money, wear nicer clothes and still cut into queues and attack buffet tables.
But the situations are the same. I interact with the same prototypes of relatives, neighbors, people I meet for work, or at a dinner party.
Each time, I have the same conversations and go through the same motions, over and over.
Each time, I have an opportunity to feel utterly stuck and utterly blessed with something new.
Each time, I have an opportunity to do better and to get things right as I become aware of the renewed opportunity to understand the people whose lives intersect with mine better, to offer better of myself and to come away enriched with simple gladnesses I was blind to in previous times.
Moving to India has felt like enacting my own Groundhog Day. I feel stuck in a maddening yet serene cycle of karmic repetition. When things happen, they are new, yet infuriatingly similar. It is a second chance disguised as déjà vu. I’m still stuck, still trying to get it right.
The country I have a love-hate relationship keeps throwing me fresh chances to know it, and myself better; to forgive me, and to be forgiven, to disown me and to embrace me in its fragrant shoulders.
This is one of my favorite movies. Bill Murray is a self-centred and snide television weatherman who is smitten by Andi McDowell, a producer who detests him for the arrogant jerk that he is but is stuck as his partner during their news coverage of the cute annual ritual of Groundhog Day in a small town. Every year, the town officially hails the end of winter after a celebrated rodent and town mascot named Punxatawney Phil ends its hibernation by emerging from its hole in the ground and approving the weather by looking as though he is interested in remaining outdoors.
The same sequence of events in a single day repeat themselves, over and over again, giving Murray a shot at re-capturing lost opportunities and re-doing everything he did unthinkingly or clumsily again and again, with increasing purpose and elegance.
Again and again, he gets the same chance over to be kinder to the people whose toes he treaded on. He learns to open himself to the beauty of moments he missed in his usual snarkiness. And with each new effort, he gradually re-invents himself as a sensitive, happy person who celebrates each moment of his day till he makes it perfect, for himself and everyone he meets. As he finally perfects this single, all-important day in his life, he enriches the people he encounters and finds his own hidden talents. He learns to be kind and gentle, to play piano like a virtuoso, to find joy in little things. And by editing and retooling himself, he crafts his own happiness.
The lesson is that we are the creators of our own happiness. Every day can be the most meaningful day of our lives, and we have the power, within our own selves, to make little moments and gestures reverberate with beauty. We are the artists who can paint and re-paint each still frame until it imparts the beauty we imagined it should glow with and becomes perfect as a work of art.
Every time I’ve come back to India, it feels like I am stuck again in the same set of events and given another opportunity to do things over in order to make them come out better.
The props change a little over the years. There are more cars, grander buildings. People have more money, wear nicer clothes and still cut into queues and attack buffet tables.
But the situations are the same. I interact with the same prototypes of relatives, neighbors, people I meet for work, or at a dinner party.
Each time, I have the same conversations and go through the same motions, over and over.
Each time, I have an opportunity to feel utterly stuck and utterly blessed with something new.
Each time, I have an opportunity to do better and to get things right as I become aware of the renewed opportunity to understand the people whose lives intersect with mine better, to offer better of myself and to come away enriched with simple gladnesses I was blind to in previous times.
Moving to India has felt like enacting my own Groundhog Day. I feel stuck in a maddening yet serene cycle of karmic repetition. When things happen, they are new, yet infuriatingly similar. It is a second chance disguised as déjà vu. I’m still stuck, still trying to get it right.
The country I have a love-hate relationship keeps throwing me fresh chances to know it, and myself better; to forgive me, and to be forgiven, to disown me and to embrace me in its fragrant shoulders.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Kicking A Fuss
I thought saas-bahu TV soaps with all the intrigues pitting brides and mothers-in-law against each other were so over the top.
All those loud, resounding slaps that echo through the corridors of havelis, making every aunty and cousin in each room come skittering out batting their false eyelashes and biting their lips in spiteful smirks. All that pushing of sobbing brides/heartbroken mothers out of the carved teak doors of the house as the gonad-lacking husband/son stands by silently. All the suffering mothers crying their hearts out because they can no longer diaper their grown sons (okay, some mild exaggeration here). All the thunderclap sound effects (there’s just one canned sound repeated in every soap, again and again) reverberating da-dan… da-dan… da-dan…that are supposed to signal, in case you still didn’t get it, that a great outrage to family, society and civilization has just been perpetrated, for the fifth time in seven minutes.
But living in India, I’m often reminded that the most outrageous and unbelievable things aren’t what you see enacted on TV shows. They happen in real life.
The Supreme Court of India has just ruled that a woman who was kicked by her mother-in-law and other members of her husband’s family cannot charge her husband’s family with cruelty.
The mother-in-law allegedly called the bride's mother a liar, threatened to break up her son's marriage, gave the bride old clothes to wear and poisoned her son's mind against his wife. The court said all these were offences that could be classified under some other category, but not cruelty.
Cruelty to a wife, covered by Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code, can punish a husband or his relatives with up to three years in prison and a fine.
The case was filed by Monica Sharma, who married Vikas Sharma, an Indian businessman residing in South Africa. Apparently, this is Mr. Sharma’s second marriage. The first also ended on the grounds of cruelty and breach of trust. Monica alleged that her husband’s family did not disclose this crucial information from her before their wedding.
The court did concede, though, that appropriating the couple’s wedding gifts constituted breach of trust and that a case against the mother-in-law could proceed on those grounds.
Ab tera kya hoga, saas-ji?
All those loud, resounding slaps that echo through the corridors of havelis, making every aunty and cousin in each room come skittering out batting their false eyelashes and biting their lips in spiteful smirks. All that pushing of sobbing brides/heartbroken mothers out of the carved teak doors of the house as the gonad-lacking husband/son stands by silently. All the suffering mothers crying their hearts out because they can no longer diaper their grown sons (okay, some mild exaggeration here). All the thunderclap sound effects (there’s just one canned sound repeated in every soap, again and again) reverberating da-dan… da-dan… da-dan…that are supposed to signal, in case you still didn’t get it, that a great outrage to family, society and civilization has just been perpetrated, for the fifth time in seven minutes.
But living in India, I’m often reminded that the most outrageous and unbelievable things aren’t what you see enacted on TV shows. They happen in real life.
The Supreme Court of India has just ruled that a woman who was kicked by her mother-in-law and other members of her husband’s family cannot charge her husband’s family with cruelty.
The mother-in-law allegedly called the bride's mother a liar, threatened to break up her son's marriage, gave the bride old clothes to wear and poisoned her son's mind against his wife. The court said all these were offences that could be classified under some other category, but not cruelty.
Cruelty to a wife, covered by Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code, can punish a husband or his relatives with up to three years in prison and a fine.
The case was filed by Monica Sharma, who married Vikas Sharma, an Indian businessman residing in South Africa. Apparently, this is Mr. Sharma’s second marriage. The first also ended on the grounds of cruelty and breach of trust. Monica alleged that her husband’s family did not disclose this crucial information from her before their wedding.
The court did concede, though, that appropriating the couple’s wedding gifts constituted breach of trust and that a case against the mother-in-law could proceed on those grounds.
Ab tera kya hoga, saas-ji?
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