Because of our traditions, we've kept our balance for many, many years

Manahatta was one of the plays that we watched in Ashland this past June.  It was not in the top-tier of plays that I have enjoyed there over the years.  It certainly had an innovative storytelling by showing the past and the present in parallel.

One of the themes explored in that play was about language and traditions.  The smart daughter gets to a Wall Street firm while her family continues to struggle.  The struggle is not only financial, but also about the language and traditions and everything else that adds up to the identity of the Lenape people.

These struggles are not unique to the US, but are universal.  Canada's First Nations. The indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand. In South America. In... everywhere.

In many cases, the language and the traditions were even systematically wiped out by oppressors, who were almost always the invading whites.  Some, like Canadians, have sincerely apologized, and reconciled with the horrible past.

And then there is contemporary India.

Purnima, whose born name is Pukutti, comes from a hamlet deep in the forests of Niyamgiri, where her tribe has lived for centuries, rarely venturing beyond the market towns at the foot of the range. As a small child, she helped her mother sow the dongar, the shifting hillside plots from which the Dongria take their name. They grew millet, bananas, and beans, and at night the children watched for animals—wild dogs, bison, sloth bears, and sometimes tigers. For the Dongria people, “the mountain is God’s abode,” Purnima told me recently. “For many generations, we’ve worshipped these hills, streams, and trees.”

So far, all seems good, right?

There was no school near the family’s home, and Purnima, like many Dongria children, at first received no formal education. The year she turned seven, an official of the Dongria Kondh Development Agency arrived to enroll tribal children in an Ashram, a new government-run residential institution down in the plains. Purnima’s parents did not want her to leave, and they refused to let her go, until the official promised them rations of rice from the local council.

The parallels with Manahatta, and the Canadian First Nations immediately blips in the radar.  The sister, Kuni, who stayed in the forests, and who is illiterate, was one of the many tribal women who were in the forefront of the struggle against a a U.K.-based mining firm that wanted to mine bauxite from the hills and manufacture aluminum.

One night in early May last year, Kuni was asleep in the home of her new in-laws when members of India’s Central Reserve Police Force crept up to their village, Gorata, to arrest her. Kuni says she awoke to the sound of a girl crying, “The police are here!” Then armed men were in the house, hustling her family into the night. Kuni was seized by women constables, who forced her down the trail leading out of the village, to where a convoy of trucks and S.U.V.s were idling.

The authors reporting the tale of these two sisters write:

To close observers of the struggle, Kuni’s arrest is a signal that Vedanta, emboldened by the corporate-friendly national government of Narendra Modi, is setting up a new play for the bauxite in Niyamgiri. To Kuni herself, however, and to others in her tribe, the threat is not that they will be driven off their land but that they will be drawn off of it, like Purnima was, one child at a time.
“Our people are alert to the cause of our land. If the situation demands, we will rise up again,” Kuni told me, and later added, “Our fear is that so-called education will uproot our people. The companies know that ‘educated’ people want to leave. They want jobs elsewhere. That’s why they take our children so far away.”

And how is the residential school system that the other sister is in?

In September of last year, the anthropologist Felix Padel visited an Ashram school in Chatikona, south of Niyamgiri. What he found was, he said, “quite shocking: the girls aren’t allowed to wear their jewelry, and their hair is cut short on arrival, supposedly to get rid of lice.” Teachers seemed well-intentioned, he said, but spoke “in terms exactly reminiscent of colonial-era missionary schools, as if it’s a huge effort to pull these girls out of their traditional culture. Why should that be wished for?”

Is there a different approach that can be attempted?  Kuni suggests that there is:

“Dongria girls need an education, so they can fight for their rights and their land,” she said. “We do need schools, but over here, so they accommodate our knowledge system—what we learn from the Earth and from our community.” Absent that, the transplantation of children seems to her a harbinger of the eventual physical displacement of the Dongrias altogether. “When Vedanta leaves,” Kuni said, “then we will all go to school.”

It is a tragedy that the lands where indigenous people have lived for centuries are also the lands that are rich in resources that salivates the profit-seekers.  Another resource curse!

Caption at the Source:

A woman in traditional Dongria dress.

Of course, the title is from this wonderful song.

Photo of the day: Bhubaneswar

More from the maidan, which is only a couple of minutes away from the hotel where I am staying.

A pleasant evening it was, with the temperature probably at about 20 C (68 F)

But, the air is getting awfully smoky.  It is a literal version of "Smoke gets in your eyes" ... am guessing that people, in homes and without, got those charcoal and wood stoves going to cook dinner and to keep warm.  It felt like a forest fire just a mile away.

An evening in Bhubaneswar

The city is very different from what I had in mind.  Perhaps it is because I am in the affluent part of the city?

Anyway, there are lights galore.  Particularly in the maidan close to the hotel where I am staying.  It is all because of the Fifth Toshali Arts Mela.  Will post a video when I get better/faster connection to the web.

Now, I will head out to have dinner at .... Domino's, maybe?

India's Naxalite group's ten year anniversary :(

In an opinion piece last week, I noted how the Maoists (Naxalites) are active in the poor, Third World, parts of India.  Well, apparently it is the ten-year anniversary of ...

When Naxalites announced the formation of the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) a decade ago, security agencies dismissed it as an attempt by the rebels to regroup their cadres and propaganda to boost their perceived military strength....

Now, the security forces are bracing themselves for intensified attacks in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal as the Maoists have announced month-long celebrations coinciding with the 10th anniversary of PLGA formation. All these years, the celebrations were only week-long. “This means bigger strikes can be expected in Maoist-affected States,” authorities concede.

Modeled after the People's Liberation Army, which is the military force in ... yes, China, which has ditched Mao.  The Red Army is the role model for this group, which is not good news at all ... It is awful that the poor are being left behind, and awful that their advocates are these guerillas.  And awful that the Indian government can't seem to recognize the underlying poverty and disenfranchisement as the issue, but responds with guns.

Since its inception, the PLGA has waged a relentless war against the security forces, and in the last decade, the rebels killed 2,000 security personnel, injured as many, and snatched nearly 2,500 weapons and one lakh rounds of ammunition, a Maoist document says.

A clear hierarchy has helped the Maoist military wing improve its strike capabilities. ...

On the organisational level, the PLGA has developed from a force of one or two platoons to having companies and a battalion now. ...

Another achievement of the PLGA has been transfer of technology. The technology for making and planting Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) has been successfully imparted to the large 30,000 base force. “The making and use of IEDs has now taken a mass form,” another Maoist document discloses.

IEDs!!! If that does not make it clear that this is a war inside India.  And then there is a war in another of India's fronts: Kashmir.

The ‘other’ India fails to get much attention from the West

During the last presidential primaries, Sen. John Edwards, who has since disappeared from the political radar, constantly referred to “two Americas” — one America that struggles to get by and lacks political clout, and another that has plenty of everything, including the ability to shape government policies. While this duality is subject to debate, such a schism is certainly visible all the way across the planet — the “First World” India of commerce, call centers and high technology, versus the poor and backward millions of “Third World” India.

After being ignored by successive American governments all through the Cold War, India now gets considerable attention. We have now had three successive, and successful, presidential visits by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama. Of course, the economic and geopolitical angles are what interest the United States, and it is this “First World” India that we are increasingly familiar with. It is also thanks to such a familiarity that NBC now features a sitcom, “Outsourced,” whose context is India and its call centers.

And when the media report about the world’s first billion-dollar house, which will be home to the family of India’s richest individual, Mukesh Ambani, we are certainly impressed — and perhaps made a little insecure, too, by rapidly growing prosperity in a country that for years did not rank that much higher above Ethiopia in our mental impressions of poverty on the planet.

However, poverty has not really gone away; it is, unfortunately, alive and well in “Third World” India.

While it is true that rapid economic growth has lifted quite a few million Indians from poverty, the poor are by no means an insignificant minority. A multidimensional poverty index used by the United Nations Development Program counted 421 million people living in acute poverty in eight Indian states, exceeding in sheer numbers the 410 million in the 26 poorest African countries combined.

This is a staggering number of poor people, a number that does not show up in our calculated economic and geopolitical interests in India. Even those skeptical about the accuracy of the UNDP estimates will not find it difficult to imagine that the number of poor in India will be in the hundreds of millions.

Over the years, this parallel existence of an India that is poor has also resulted in a growing radical and violent movement, whose members are referred to as Maoists. Yes, Mao — as in China’s Mao Zedong, who has been pushed aside ever since Deng Xiaoping opened the Chinese economy in 1979 and declared that “to be rich is glorious.”

It is no surprise that India’s Maoists are active in the same states that are home to the vast numbers of poor tallied in the UNDP study of poverty. Decades ago, in a much poorer India, Maoist “rebels” were present in other states, too.

During my childhood, the adults in the family often spoke in hushed tones about a much older cousin of mine who had suddenly dropped out of college and gone “underground.” As a kid who only knew the literal meaning of the word, I didn’t understand then that “underground” meant that he had joined the radical, and often violent, communist groups.

But now, such groups are almost nonexistent in the southern parts of India that I visit — these states boast of homegrown multinational computer and automobile corporations. Maoists have long exited these regions, which have experienced economic growth and prosperity, and where governments offer considerable support for the economically and socially disadvantaged.

It is also not a mere coincidence that this cousin later on completed his college education, had a successful banking career, and is now a retired grandfather.

It is time for my next trip to India, and it includes spending a couple of days at a conference that will be held in one of those eight states with high poverty — Orissa. The focus of this academic conference is on rural laborers who, without land, property and political weight, find themselves in precarious economic situations.

Through the conference papers and a little bit of traveling, I hope to understand this “other” India, even as I spend most of my time in the successful “First World” India and report as your correspondent.

For The Register-Guard

Published: Monday, Nov 29, 2010 05:01AM

The modern temple at Rourkela failed Orissa?

The fall term is coming to an end and the results of the learning are evident right in the questions in class.  Like the one in the introductory course, from Mike, who, with his usual loud voice, asked from all the way in the back row, “so, how do things get going then?  How does a poor African country also get rich?”

This is, after all, the question that the world has been grappling with, particularly since the end of World War II, when newly independent countries were born with immense challenges of economic development.  Mike’s genuinely interested, and yet puzzled, question is the latest along this global struggle to figure out a formula for development. 

Since its independence in 1947, India has been a living laboratory to test out various hypotheses with the hope that the best solution would be found.  One of those was a rather simple idea—if only the government could accelerate the process by systematically investing in modern economic activities.

That certainly was the case behind the planned industrial township of Rourkela, in the state of Orissa, which is one of the economic laggards in India—then and now.  I should note here that Orissa was not always poor.  Its history is rich—materially and culturally.  Perhaps an easily demonstrable example, as I wrote in a column a few months ago, is the word “juggernaut” in the English language, which owes its origin to the Jagannath Temple located on Orissa’s coast along the Bay of Bengal. 

It was in Rourkela, located more than a thousand miles away from his home town in southern India, that my father pretty much began his engineering career more than fifty years ago.  Soon after getting married, he joined a German firm, which was advising the Indian government in the construction of one of the largest industrial projects at that time—an iron and steel factory. 

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, referred to modern enterprises like the Rourkela steel project as “temples of modern India.”  It was more than rhetorical, in the sense that these new temples were expected to deliver tangible miracles to India’s millions.  In the academic and policy language, these were “growth poles” that would catalyze economic growth in resource-rich but economically backward regions.  Thanks to such initiatives, currently, Orissa accounts for, among others, about a tenth of all the steel produced in the country, and leads in the manufacturing of aluminum. 

After spending the first three-plus years of married life in Rourkela, dad took up a job in yet another “temple”—this time a thermal power plant complex in Neyveli, which also, incidentally, had German advisers.  The move brought my parents and my grandmother back to their “home” state of Tamil Nadu. 

Post-retirement, the city of Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, has been home to my parents for almost thirty years now, and the city’s sobriquet, “Detroit of India,” is an easy clue about one of its major, and fast growing, economic industries.

In contrast to states like Tamil Nadu that have surged ahead, others like Orissa always seem to be playing catch up forever, despite their tremendous natural resources.  The heavy industrial progress has not been matched by comparable advancements in the rural areas, which is where nearly 85 percent of the population lives.  Estimates are that of the nearly 37 million people in Orissa, about 46 percent live below the poverty line.  In some parts of the state, incidence of poverty exceeds 70 percent!

It is almost as if most of the Oriyas, as the people of Orissa are referred to, are still waiting for the payoff from the massive investment in places like Rourkela.  As a recent report from the United Nations’ World Food Program pointed out, “there is a major concern with the failure of that growth to translate into a somewhat proportionate reduction in poverty and malnutrition.”

Though I am disappointed that a field trip to Rourkela won’t be possible, given the more than 200 miles distance from the conference venue in Orissa’s capital city—Bhubaneshwar—at the end of it all, I hope to be able to offer a lot more to students like Mike. 

Swine flu and global public health

The worldwide attention paid to swine flu is great, from a public health perspective.  If only we could equally effectively rally our country and the rest of the world about the many infectious diseases that ail millions of poor everyday.

In early September, in a few villages in Orissa, which is a state in India, about 40 people died and more than 200 were admitted to hospitals.  It was not because of the swine flu, which has so far claimed about 300 lives in that country.  The deaths in Orissa were because of diarrhea.

Diarrhea is a gastrointestinal infection that typically spreads through contaminated water or food.  A bad infection results in severe loss of fluids and even death, which was what happened in Orissa.  According to the World Health Organization, the deaths of nearly two million children every year in the less developed countries has one single culprit—diarrhea.   

The fact that many of the severe diarrheal deaths can be traced back to contaminated water should not come as a surprise given that more than 2 billion people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, lack access to clean water and sanitation facilities.  Not having such facilities means a slew of other waterborne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and hepatitis.   

The irony is that in such contexts, it is practically impossible to implement the typical swine flu prevention advice—to frequently wash hands.

When I was in India this past summer, as reports of swine flu came to dominate the news and conversations, I sincerely suggested to my parents that they should frequently wash their hands, and time it by humming the “happy birthday” song. 

As the words slipped out of my mouth, I knew it was a stupid and incongruous advice because of the water shortage in the city.  Apartment complexes were paying hefty amounts to private operators who supplied water by transporting them in special water-tankers.  When that was the condition for middle-class households, I cannot imagine the less affluent spending their precious money to wash hands in order to battle an invisible enemy.    Clean water is a super-luxury for the poor. 

I do not mean to minimize the risks of a global pandemic, particularly if the swine flu virus were to mutate into a highly virulent form.  But, I do want to point out that the global focus on the swine flu, which we have rightfully managed to accomplish, should remind us that being a good citizen of the world also means that we ought to pay attention to the priorities of the rest of the world—in particular, the sufferings of the poor, who are almost always voiceless in the international arena.

Unfortunately, our track record has not been one that we can proudly hold up when it comes to supporting public health programs for the world’s poor.  Even a couple of years ago, Congress and the White House bickered over allocating $25 billion for public health programs in Africa.  Soon after that, in what comes across as quite a surreal contrast, the same people quickly committed all of us taxpayers to a couple of trillions of dollars—that  we do not have—in order to bailout various economic institutions here in the US.  Well, the $25 billion for Africa that we fought over sure does seem like chump change these days! 

As the economist Jeffrey Sachs has pointed out “we’ve just been making choices to ignore the poor rather than calculations based on real resources available. We made a choice to let millions of people die and not honor our commitments.”

Changes in our attitude towards war and peace will certainly win over a few hearts and minds around the world.  But, we can easily and dramatically increase that number if only we spent even a fraction of our military expenditures on public health programs around the world that will immediately improve the everyday lives of millions of poor.  Here lies an opportunity for the “soft power” that Secretary Hillary Clinton often talks about.  Above all, it is the right thing to do.