Exit, voice, and loyalty ...

Much to this guy's displeasure, I have often remarked in this blog that life would have been better if India were not India but quite a few countries in the Subcontinent.  The Republic of Tamil Nadu.  The Republic of Nagaland. I would have traveled to the US on a Tamil Nadu passport.

Instead, the leaders who took over from the British went the other direction and even employed the military in order to force kingdoms and territories to join the union.  Of course, one of those forced integration projects continues on as a geopolitical problem that would not go away.

I am generally supportive of people who want their own identity and territory.  Which is a big reason why I cheered the Scottish referendum, which eventually failed.  I wrote there:

We are so much wrapped up with the idea of globalization that we forget we are humans and we like, we love, identities.  Identities especially when there is a long and rich history of the peoples.  Economics--being materially well off--does matter to us, yes.  But, we seem to overlook that we do not live on bread alone.  There is a lot more than mere material satisfaction that makes us human.  Identity--religious, ethnic, linguistic, ... and often these are also intertwined.

I think that makes a lot of sense even now.

I included in that post this: "There are more in the queue: Basque, Catalonia, Tibet, Xinjiang, Kashmir, Balochistan, ... it is a long list."

The people in Catalonia and Kurdistan will soon vote on their preferences.

On Sept. 25, Iraqi Kurdistan will vote on independence from Iraq. On Oct. 1, Catalonia will vote on independence from Spain.

Guess what?  I support the creation of an independent Kurdistan and an independent Catalonia.

Guess what?  The US opposes that spirit of independence.  Yep, a country that broke free from the United Kingdom does not want other people to break free from their overlords!  The country that made famous "give me liberty or give me death" typically opposes creation of new countries.  I still remember how the US did not even favor Bangladesh breaking away from Pakistan.

Our current period of cartographical stasis might turn out to be a brief anomaly. Rather than seeking to preserve the current map at all costs, American efforts might be better spent trying to ensure that these changes happen peacefully.

Exactly!  That's what I say!

When the shapes of new countries have been drawn by people who don’t live in them, it hasn’t usually worked out very well. There are very real reasons for skepticism about all of these independence movements. But that doesn’t mean that maintaining the world’s current arrangement of countries within their existing borders needs to be a guiding principle.

Yep, if the people within those borders feel that the arbitrary lines have not worked out well for them and, therefore, they want to decide whether or not they should break free, so be it.  It is about time that the Kurds, of all, got their own country.

If the trump era continues on, I would gladly vote to break away:

Source

ps: I have mis-appropriated the title from this awesome intellectual's work.

August 15th marks a personal tryst with destiny!

August 15th is India's Independence Day.

In marking the transition from the British rule to freedom, India's first prime minister referred to the moment as "tryst with destiny."  Salman Rushdie provided a magical realism treatment of this midnight hour with a literary gem that won the "Booker of Bookers."

I, too, have my own stories to tell of the 15th of August.

In Sanskrit, the word

dvi|ja, twice born, could mean a Brahmin, for he is born, and then born again when he is initiated into the rites of his caste; it could mean ‘a bird’, for it is born once when it is conceived and then again from an egg; but it could also mean ‘a tooth’, for teeth, it was plain to see, had two lives too.

It has been more two more rebirths for me, both on August 15th.

August 15th marks the anniversary of my own "tryst with destiny."  Make it two different anniversaries.

In 1987, the Singapore Airlines flight that I was on took off from Madras (as Chennai was known then) a little before the midnight that made made the transition from the 14th to the 15th--similar to India's birth at midnight.

As the US immigration stamp from that old passport shows, I landed in Los Angeles on August 15th, 1987 and since then have only been a tourist in the old country where I had my wonderful formative years.

Though it took me a decade-plus to formally become an American, there was no doubt in my mind that when I left India on the night of that August 14th, I was leaving to make myself a new home. I looked forward to the new identity that would result.

Coming to the US took a whole lot of planning--from thinking about what I wanted to study to where I wanted to study.  Los Angeles was, thus, no simple accidental happening.

But, of course, as much as we plan, well, life unfolds in its own cosmic way.  The unpredictability of life that makes it exciting and depressing, depending on the events.

A few years into my citizenship, I made a trip to India. In the summer, which surprised people there, given my inability anymore to deal with the heat and humidity. I planned the trip, yes, but it was to announce yet another re-birth: to begin the transition to the divorced life.

It was a brutal summer.  Brutal heat.  And brutal on the heart.

A few days prior to my departure from Chennai, I got an email from the airlines in which I was booked to fly back home. Home in the US of A.  Because of scheduling issues, I had been automatically re-booked with a new departure date of, yes, August 15th!

When we watch such coincidences unfold in the movies, we dismiss them as melodrama that could have been avoided.  But, I suppose there is no better fiction and melodrama than real life!

So, there I was, re-enacting the whole August 15th rebirth.  Once again leaving India for the United States. To lead a life that would be very different all over again.  It has been one hell of a tryst with destiny!

A note to the cosmos: enough with the melodrama already! :)

In the US, I met my enemies. And we became friends

As India and Pakistan mark their respective Independence Days, it occurred to me, yet again, that one of the many wonderful experiences in the US has been meeting people from India’s “enemies”—Pakistan and China—and becoming their friends.

As a kid, I was convinced by news reports that Pakistan and China were sworn enemies.  After all, by then India had fought a total of four wars with them.  One of the wars, in 1971 when I was barely seven years old, resulted in Bangladesh becoming an independent country, instead of its previous status as East Pakistan.  During this war, there were nights when we were required to shut off all lights and maintain darkness—even though our small town was hundreds of miles from the battlefront itself. 

Thus, it was no surprise that in schoolyard war games during the breaks between classes, many of us boys delighted in pretending that we were in the Indian army fighting the good fight against the Pakistanis and Chinese.

As the wars wore down the countries, Pakistan and India decided to embark on “cricket diplomacy” which made possible for the teams from both the countries to play against each other.  It also coincided with the slow spread of television in India. 

I had just about stepped into the teenage years when for the first time I watched on live television one of those cricket matches while on a visit to the big city of Madras.  

The Pakistani players were nothing like what I had imagined and, in complete contrast, looked and behaved pretty much like the Indian players.  I could not figure out how they could be so much like most of the Indians and yet be the enemy.  And, yes, they played a wonderful game, too, which made it all the more difficult not to applaud them!

That cricket match on live television alone completely demolished the simplistic formula that Pakistan equaled enemy. 

A few years later, a Pakistani was one of the first students I met as a new graduate student in Los Angeles.  Like me, Siddiqui was also a first year graduate student, but in engineering.  As we started talking, I realized that he was no different from me in many ways.  There was no doubt that my elementary school buddies and I had seriously erred when we caricatured Pakistanis, and fired imaginary bullets in Siddiqui’s direction.

It was a similar story with students from China.  Rongsheng routinely brought me Chinese snacks that either he had picked up from the stores or his wife had made.  Tibet and the Dalai Lama were the only real issues over which we could not agree.  But, friends we remained, even as we progressed from being students to fellow interns at a planning agency in Los Angeles. 

India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, used a rhetorical phrase of “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” that means Indians and Chinese are brothers.  However, it took coming half way around the planet for me to quite easily realize that idealism of brotherhood among neighbors. 

Over the years since, I have lost contact with the Siddiquis and Rongshengs from graduate school.  There is a good chance that I would never have met such “neighbors” had I not emigrated from India.  And what a terrible loss that would have been!

Of course, territorial disputes among between these countries persist.  All is not well in the land of call centers that we imagine India to be.  The simmering discontent in the disputed Kashmir flares up periodically, which is the current state of affairs up there in the Himalayas.  On India’s eastern front, which neighbors China, most of the area is off-limits to foreigners because of geopolitical tensions, some of which are internal and others are related to China.  It is quite an irony that I would need a special clearance from the Indian government if I decide to visit those scenic areas—because of the American passport that I carry. 

As we mark the 65th birthdays of India and Pakstan, here is to hoping kids in these countries will not grow up thinking of their neighbors as enemies, and that the younger versions of Srirams and Siddiquis and Rongshengs will become very good friends.

The success that Gandhi had in India

The real magic of the Mahatma was not a trick of popular charisma, but in fact a deft ability to recruit, manage, and inspire a team of talented individuals who worked tirelessly in his service. Gandhi himself was one of the few people to recognize how this phenomenon worked. “With each day I realize more and more that my mahatmaship, which is a mere adornment, depends on others. I have shone with the glory borrowed from my innumerable co-workers,” he wrote in 1928 in Navajivan.
Recognizing this fact does not diminish the rare and valuable qualities Gandhi himself possessed. Rather, it acknowledges that great work is the product of collaborative processes, and that many hands working together toward a common purpose can achieve monumental results. In Gandhi’s case, it was the relationship between a visionary leader and the team supporting him—and their collective use of the right resources, such as the books in Mahadev Desai’s library—that paved the way for extraordinary and lasting accomplishments.

An excerpt from a wonderful essay, after reading which I am all the more blown away with how effortlessly Gandhi was able to get so many talented, eager, and committed people to sign on to his ideas.  One heck of a personality he must have had.  Gandhi died barely 60 years ago, but the events of his life time now seem quite a few centuries old.  At the speeds at which we seem to move now, it is all the more real when I think about Einstein's comment that future generations will find it impossible to believe that such a real life person in flesh and blood actually existed on this planet.

Music video of the day

To mark India's Independence Day :)

Yes, a bizarre sense of humor!
Note that the way the Jai Ho song starts is very much like how the following one (Itna Na Mujhse Tu Pyar Badha) begins:

Well, this song itself, as you the talented reader already figured out, owes a lot to Mozart Symphony 40

Poem for Independence Day:

By the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (ht)


God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o'er
When from their galling chains set free,
The oppress'd shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom's reign,
To man his plundered fights again
Restore.

God speed the day when human blood
Shall cease to flow!
In every clime be understood,
The claims of human brotherhood,
And each return for evil, good,
Not blow for blow;
That day will come all feuds to end.
And change into a faithful friend
Each foe.

God speed the hour, the glorious hour,
When none on earth
Shall exercise a lordly power,
Nor in a tyrant's presence cower;
But all to manhood's stature tower,
By equal birth!
THAT HOUR WILL, COME, to each, to all,
And from his prison-house, the thrall
Go forth.

Until that year, day, hour, arrive,
With head, and heart, and hand I'll strive,
To break the rod, and rend the gyve,
The spoiler of his prey deprive--
So witness Heaven!
And never from my chosen post,
Whate'er the peril or the cost,
Be driven.

On the anniversary of Gandhi's assassination

Einstein summed it up best when he noted that  "Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."

January 30th 1948 was when Gandhi was felled by Godse's bullet.  62 years later, some of his ashes were scattered in the waters off South Africa, where Gandhi had spent a few years before returning to India. "Gandhi's ashes were brought to South Africa after his death in 1948 but only some of them were immersed in the ocean while the rest were given to a family friend who kept them for decades."

It is simply incredible that Gandhi was able to convince everybody on the merits of a non-violent movement for independence.  I have always felt that India's democratic politics (except for the brief period when Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution) is a result of the non-violent methods that were used to gain freedom.

Sir Richard Attenborough deserves a special meritorious place for making a movie about Gandhi.  One of my favorite scenes from the movie is also the one that troubles me the most--even more than the scene when Gandhi is shot.  The scene that I have embedded here depicts the "salt satyagraha."  The British imposed a salt tax, which was unfair and unjust.  Gandhi was arrested days before the planned non-violent protests at one of the salt works.
This scene gets my emotions every time I watch it; yes, even now as I type this.  Unlike a James Bond beating the crap out of a villainous character, this is a depiction of real happenings.  It is just awful how volunteers line up to get beaten up by the police--who are also Indians--and then the women volunteers bandage them up and they re-join the protest line.  The reporter--played by Martin Sheen--displays the emotions I suppose most of would feel if we were to witness such a horrible spectacle.

We owe Gandhi a whole lot.

China @ 60

I am glad I don't live in China. I mean, when I have a tough time even dealing with oppressive faculty colleagues who have successfully killed my freedom of speech, I bet I would not have literally lived under the Communist regime.  But, hey, thanks to the all-controlling government, they put on quite a show to celebrate turning 60.  Here is a video summary of the parade--the entire parade packed into four minutes: (HT)

China's 60th Anniversary national day - timelapse and slow motion - 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

Happy birthday, America

Right from when I was a kid—a long time ago in India—I was familiar with the importance of the Fourth of July in the United States because of a family connection: the standing joke at home was that my parents lost their freedom when they got married on the very day that Americans celebrate their independence. So, yes, anniversary greetings to my parents.

After my wife and I gained our citizenship, the Fourth of July is, of course, way too special. To quote from the musical, West Side Story, “I like to be in America, okay by me in America.” Perhaps it is a typical immigrant story after all when I think that my love for this country is out of the ordinary because I consciously weighed the alternatives and worked to come to America. Hey, American citizenship was not my "birthright."

Immigrating to America or any other country has never been as easy as it is now—unlike a few generations ago when most of the world’s population stayed in, or close to, the places where they were born and raised. Now, we move from state to state in this country, and we relatively effortlessly migrate across international borders, and make ourselves new homes in strange places.

In our family, my grandfather was offered a job in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) because of his valued metallurgy qualifications from a reputed Indian university. If my grandfather had sailed on that ship, for sure my family’s history would have taken a different turn. However, he was compelled to reject that offer and stay back in India, and it was not because the job did not pay enough. His mother, who was deeply rooted in traditions, threatened to commit suicide if he crossed the sea—considered as grounds for excommunication only eighty years ago!

The distance between my grandfather's hometown and Ceylon’s capital city, Colombo, was nothing—a mere 250 miles. In contrast to that, a few decades later, my wife and I travelled half way around the world—independently—in order to be here in the US. And America has been home since the day we landed in Los Angeles.

Rudyard Kipling remarked that we are not able to call the entire world our home “since man's heart is small”.Kipling, too, was a product of globalization—he was born in India to British parents, and spent his early childhood in Bombay (now Mumbai), which he described as “mother of cities to me.” And of all the places he had been to, Kipling felt that one place was special. He wrote about that in a poem entitled “Sussex”:

Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!

As much as Kipling treasured his corner in England, I too rejoice in the fact that America is our home.

Happy Birthday, America!

(yes, this the same content from last year.)

The last emperor .... of India ...

From the BBC:

Madhu is the illiterate great-great-granddaughter of emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar and has been employed to run errands in Coal India's offices.

A letter of employment will be formally handed over to her by the coal minister at a function in Calcutta next month.

She and her mother currently run a tea stall in the slums of Calcutta.

Rehabilitation

"It will great to have Madhu working for us. Actually, it will be a great tribute to the last Mughal emperor who played a key role during the first war of independence in 1857," Coal India Chairman Partha Bhattacharyya said.

Independence Day in India and Pakistan

61 years ago, these two countries became independent, carved out of the colonial Raj. Here are two different perspectives on this anniversary:

From the Economic Times of India:
[It] is becoming clear that the much-maligned neo-liberal policies have contributed more to the alleviation of distress than the tax-and-spend socialistic policies of the past. The latest figures show that there has been a fall in the number of people below the poverty line to 24 percent compared to 36 percent in 1993 and 51 percent in 1977-78.
If India does become a major economic power over the next two decades, as is predicted, historians will look to the present period to assess the individuals who were responsible for the magical transformation from the land of tigers and snake charmers to one of Information Technology and nine percent growth. And among those who will be remembered are Rajiv Gandhi, who inaugurated the age of computers in the mid-1980s, and Manmohan Singh, who launched the economic reforms under the tutelage of then prime minister P V Narasimha Rao in 1991, and carried on the process after becoming prime minister himself in 2004. There is little doubt, therefore, that the positive aspects of the present times score over the negative features.

And from the Daily Times of Pakistan:
Everybody thinks President Pervez Musharraf has no way to go but resign from office. Some think he is going to announce his decision to bow out on Thursday (today). Newspapers are reporting on the advice being offered to him: most of it is in favour of resigning.
The ecstasy produced by the ritual of immolating President Musharraf is going to wear off pretty quickly in the post-Musharraf era. At this juncture, we should pause to ask whether we are not all becoming a collection of angry posses with single-item agendas. It is dangerous that, at the end of our “struggle”, there is the lone figure of Pervez Musharraf tied to a stake. Tunnel vision is no vision.