Can astrology predict when I will die?

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has recently been in the news a lot for many reasons.  For one, it was recognized with the "The best of the Booker" books.  A movie version, for which Rushdie contributed the screen-adaptation as well, will hit the US screens next week.

The midnight that is referred to in the title is the midnight that India became independent and marked the country's "tryst with destiny" as its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, put it.  India chose that midnight hour for independence, and for its Constituent Assembly to convene, because of the majority opinion of the Indian astrologers that the morning of the 15th was an inauspicious time.  Thus, the midnight, which then made possible the magical title for Rushdie's book--otherwise he would have had to title it "Morning's Children" and that would never have had that same magical appeal ;)

Astrology is a huge deal in India.  From side-walk squatting palm-readers to horoscope-reading specialists in luxurious settings, there are hundreds of thousands who make a living out of predicting others' futures.  As I noted in this post from three years ago:

a classmate from my engineering days is now a much sought after (which means highly paid as well) astrologer in India.  Yes, astrology!  The guy is proving in his own ways that there is a sucker born every minute :) 

Astrology is highly revered by many in India and rarely is anything out of the ordinary life ever scheduled without consulting with the astrologer.  From matching the horoscopes and determining the wedding date and time, to the time when a business venture might be inaugurated, to when one might want to set off on a long voyage, and, apparently, even when a Caesarean operation should be done so that the child will be delivered at the best of all times and not at the worst of all times!

The latest issue (March/April 2013) issue--not online yet--of the Skeptical Inquirer has an interesting piece on a scientific experiment that was conducted in India to test the accuracy of astrological predictions.  Surprise, surprise--they were no better than results that one would end up with by guessing or tossing a coin!

Jayant Narlikar, who is an astrphysicist, and his science colleagues set up an interesting experiment to test the  astrologers' claim that "they are able to tell intelligence from a person's horoscope."  So, they first collected from different schools names of "teenage children rated by their teachers as mentally bright.  They also collected names from special schools for the mentally handicapped."  A total of 100 bright and 100 mentally-challenged children.  Then they obtained the relevant information from the parents of these children and charted their respective horoscopes.

Narlikar and his associates invited astrologers to participate in the controlled experiment--"each participant would be given forty horoscopes drawn at random from our set of 200 and would have to judge whether their owners were mentally bright or handicapped."  Interested astrological organizations--not individuals--would be given all 200 horoscopes.

Long story short, the participants failed, failed miserably at that.  "None were able to tell bright children from mentally handicapped children better than chance.  Our results contradict the claims of Indian astrologers ... In summary, our results are firmly against Indian astrology being considered a science."

The pairing of astrology and science is especially important because it is one crazy country that even legitimizes offering astrology as an academic degree.  Yes, if you are interested, you can work on that degree  thanks to distance education opportunities like the one offered here!

It is a culture where determining auspicious times and seeking the divine assistance is so pervasive a practice, so much so that a few weeks ago:

Ahead of the launch of the Indo- French satellite 'SARAL' onboard ISRO's workhorse rocket PSLV from Sriharikota, ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan today offered worship at the hill shrine of Lord Venkateswara near Tirupati.

In case that didn't impress you enough, the same news item continues:

Since the last two decades, heads of the space agency have made it a practice to visit the the over 2000 year-old Tirumala hill temple to seek divine blessings before every satellite launch, the sources said.

Shouldn't surprise us in a country whose hour of independence was determined by astrologers!

A much younger me, with a whole lot of hair, amusing myself with Linda Goodman's astrology (1989)

The Satanic Verses became Salman's Rush(to)Die.

Sometime in the spring of 1989, I swung by Tridib Banerjee's office to chalk out my plans for the summer.  I was going to India, and was hoping to get a little bit of research done under his guidance.

As is always the case with such visits, the conversations were less about the scheduled agenda and more about everything else.  That particular meeting was all about Salman Rushdie and his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses.  Stroking his beard, as he often did, Tridib asked me whether I wanted to take with me a copy to India--he had one to spare because both he and his wife had purchased a copy.  "It is banned in India, you know."

I didn't take up Tridib's offer.  In fact, to this day, I haven't read The Satanic Verses.  Not because of any religious faith, and not because I am worried that a fanatic will kill me for having read it.  I just wasn't interested in it. Plain and simple.  After all, there are many, many things all around me in which I have no interest whatsoever, and this happens to be one.

During my undergraduate days, I read Rushdie's Midnight's Children and thoroughly enjoyed it.  A couple of years ago, Rushdie was on BookTV's "In Depth" program and I recall watching it practically from the beginning till the end.  The guy is brilliant.  Quite a few questions there were also about the Islamic fundamentalist response to his book.

It is quite an irony of a coincidence that his memoir about all those fatwa years is being released at the same time that radical fundamentalists have been creating quite some news with their violent response to a reportedly moronic and sophomoric video on Islam and its prophet.  Rushdie sure knows how to get himself into the middle of the action!

In the excerpts published in the New Yorker, Rushdie writes about the confluence of various events that led to his writing this controversial fiction, including this event:

In 1982, the actor Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest star of the Bombay cinema, had suffered a near-fatal injury to his spleen while doing his own movie stunts in Bangalore. In the months that followed, his hospitalization was daily front-page news. As he lay close to death, the nation held its breath; when he rose again, the effect was almost Christlike. There were actors in southern India who had attained almost godlike status by portraying the gods in movies called mythologicals. Bachchan had become semi-divine even without such a career. But what if a god-actor, afflicted with a terrible injury, had called out to his god in his hour of need and heard no reply? What if, as a result of that appalling divine silence, such a man were to begin to question, or even to lose, the faith that had sustained him? Might he, in such a crisis of the soul, begin to lose his mind as well? And might he in his dementia flee halfway around the world, forgetting that when you run away you can’t leave yourself behind? What would such a falling star be called? The name came to him at once, as if it had been waiting for him to capture it. Gibreel. The Angel Gabriel, Gibreel Farishta. Gibreel and Chamcha: two lost souls in the roofless continuum of the unhoused. They would be his protagonists.

Most of us followed the news about Amitabh and went on with our lives. Rushdie finds an inspiration for a novel!

Can one imagine something like The Satanic Verses being published in the contemporary world?  Even Rushdie thinks not:

The writer said the banning of his book in many countries and the subsequent threats on his life had created a "long-term chilling effect".
"A book which was critical of Islam would be difficult to be published now," he told the BBC's Will Gompertz.
He said the only way to solve the issue was for publishers to "be braver".
"The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff," he said.

One of the powerful ayatollahs in Iran is confident that the film that sparked the current violence would never have been made if only Rushdie had been killed back then!

Ayatollah Hassan Sanei, head of a powerful state foundation providing relief to the poor, said the film would never have been made if the order to execute Rushdie, issued by the late Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had been carried out.

Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa sentencing the author to death in 1989 after declaring his novel, The Satanic Verses, "blasphemous", but Iranian officials later indicated it would not be implemented.

"It [the film] won't be the last insulting act as long as Imam Khomeini's historic order on executing the blasphemous Salman Rushdie is not carried out," he said in a statement.

"If the imam's order was carried out, the further insults in the form of caricatures, articles and films would not have taken place. The impertinence of the grudge-filled enemies of Islam, which is occurring under the flag of the Great Satan, America and the racist Zionists, can only be blocked by the absolute administration of this Islamic order."

 The same news item also reports on a renewed bounty for Rushdie's life.  The guy's misfortunes continue. 

Is India secular in the public sphere? Does it have a "religious" government?

Recently, I traveled in Tamil Nadu government buses.  These are buses funded and operated by the government. Yet, on one bus I saw a decal of a Shiva Lingam. Another bus had a cross.  A third one had a figure representing another Hindu god, Muruga.

We are not talking about the bus driver wearing any religious symbols--that pertains to the individual, and we generally do not worry about what a single person says.  Of course, if the driver were to discriminate against passengers of other faiths, for instance, then we worry. 

The decals were on taxpayer property!

Such acts in the public sphere are all too common in India. 

I was flummoxed to read in the newspaper that the Madhya Pradesh government was going ahead with its mass "surya namaskar" while conveniently pretending that there are no religious undertones, despite protests from minorities.  An editorial in the paper that dad subscribes to had this to say:

The ostensible purpose of these camps, which saw heavy participation by schools, colleges, and other organisations — many of them privately run and obviously feeling compelled to go along — was to get into the record books. Yet questions do arise when the entire State Cabinet led by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan makes a fetish of performing a particular asana that is known to cause unease among Muslims, including secular sections otherwise supportive of yoga. The surya namaskar carries with it a suggestion of sun worship, which is anathema to orthodox Muslims. ... Ahead of the surya namaskar mobilisation this year, the government secured presidential assent for a draconian law against cow slaughter, which was followed by reports of attacks on Muslims. Clearly, a stint in power and more than a decade of coalitional leadership have not changed the BJP, whose single preoccupation is Hindu sectarian politics. Matters have been made worse by the Congress' emulation of the BJP's communal politics — in reverse.

The editorial concluded that politics was making it increasingly difficult for India to shed its communal baggage.

Even as that was unfolding, there was another controversy--about Salman Rushdie's visit to India, in order to attend the Jaipur Literary Festival. 

A few--by no means any majority--Muslim leaders, who continue to be upset with Rushdie for this Satanic Verses, wanted the government to prevent him from entering India.  But, the federal law minister pointed out that  Rushdie, who apparently went through the process that I chose not to, has the paperwork that recognizes him as a "person of Indian origin" and, therefore, doesn't need a visa to visit India.  Rushdie can, legally, come and go as it pleases him.

The protesters won--Rushdie stayed away from the literary event.

A few writers, upset at the manner in which Rushdie was treated, decided to read a little bit from, yes, Satanic Verses, which is banned in India.  A book, authored by a person who was born in India and recognized around the world as a talented writer, is banned in India, which proclaims itself as a democracy. 

Anyway, does reading from the book mean it is an illegal activity?  Can those people be hauled off to jail?

Q.What then does this mean for Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru and the other writers who read passages from “The Satanic Verses”?

A.I would say that as a writer you must have not any fear of cases and other things. We must not have any fear.

Q.Could festival organizers be held liable for their readings?

A.When a case is filed, it’s in the investigation it would be known whether they were responsible or not. As far as I am concerned, as a civil liberties person, no law has been broken. As far as I am concerned, nobody has committed an offense. As far as the organizers being worried, I do think that they do have a right to be worried. I don’t think there is any reason for them to worry.

Crazy, isn't it?

An op-ed author writes:

Salman Rushdie's censoring-out from the ongoing literary festival in Jaipur will be remembered as a milestone that marked the slow motion disintegration of India's secular state. Islamist clerics first pressured the state to stop Mr. Rushdie from entering India; on realising he could not stop, he was scared off with a dubious assassination threat. Fear is an effective censor. ...

The betrayal of secular India in Jaipur, though, is just part of a far wider treason: one that doesn't have to do with Muslim clerics alone, but a state that has turned god into a public-sector undertaking.

I liked the argument that the op-ed author makes, and the evidence he provides for how the state has made god a big time government activity, with large budgetary allocations too.  And "god" as in budgets for every flavor of god:

Few Indians understand the extent to which the state underwrites the practice of their faith. The case of the Maha Kumbh Mela, held every 12 years at Haridwar, Allahabad, Ujjain and Nashik, is a case in point. The 2001 Mela in Allahabad, activist John Dayal has noted in a stinging essay, involved state spending of over Rs.1.2 billion ...

There are no publicly available figures on precisely how much the government will spend on other infrastructure — but it is instructive to note that an encephalitis epidemic that has claimed over 500 children's lives this winter drew a Central aid of just Rs.0.28 billion.

The State's subsidies to the Kumbh Mela, sadly, aren't an exception. Muslims wishing to make the Haj pilgrimage receive state support; so, too, do Sikhs travelling to Gurdwaras of historic importance in Pakistan. Hindus receive identical kinds of largesse, in larger amounts. The state helps underwrite dozens of pilgrimages, from Amarnath to Kailash Mansarovar. Early in the last decade, higher education funds were committed to teaching pseudo-sciences like astrology; in 2001, the Gujarat government even began paying salaries to temple priests.

In 2006, the Delhi government provided a rare official acknowledgment that public funds are routinely spent on promoting god.

I am pretty sure that his concluding sentences will not draw accolades from those who have a political fortune to make:

Dr. Nanda ably demonstrated the real costs of India's failure to secularise: among them, the perpetuation of caste and gender inequities, the stunting of reason and critical facilities needed for economic and social progress; the corrosive growth of religious nationalism.

India cannot undo this harm until god and god's will are ejected from our public life.

Will India ever be able to secularize its public sphere?

Pakistan is not salvageable

I am always worried about Pakistan. And it is not because I was born in India, but because of the immense geopoloitical fallout from the Pakistan disaster.
It, therefore, feels good to know that I am in good company; here is Christopher Hitchens in an interview with The Walrus Magazine:

On a bit of a different subject, I’ve been reading your more recent columns, and in your opinion, what do the next few years hold for Pakistan?

Well, the column I’d like you to read is called “On The Frontier Of Apocalypse,” and I wrote it in late 2001 after I went out to the Afghan, Pakistan and Kashmir after 9/11, for Vanity Fair. It’s in my collection, called Love, Poetry and War. And in there I say the problem is not Afghanistan, the problem is Pakistan. And I give quite a lot of reasons why that is. If I can say it without being facetious, in the last year or so I’ve been sort of almost hysterically proven right, with people crowding around me to say “Goddamn.” I’ve had more vindication than anyone should have. The original mistake in that region was the creation of separate states. The amputation of India instead of independence; the worst thing the British empire ever did was to give way to religious sectarianism, and not promise that we were there to unify India, not divide it. A terrible betrayal, and it got worse every decade. And this decade is no exception. We will never stop paying for the mistakes of 1947-1948. It’s one of the reasons why Salman’s novel Midnight’s Children is almost better than The Satanic Verses, because it’s prescient in just the right way. So I think the endgame in Pakistan... it’s conceivable that the state has enough resources left to battle those who care more about the Muslim bit than the state bit. Pakistan’s institutions are fighting the people who take the idea of Pakistan seriously, the idea of a Muslims-only state. Boy, we are gonna pay for this. Obama has no idea.

You don’t think?

He made a glib decision, the same mistake John Kerry made, that you can’t lead an anti-war, pacifist, isolationist party into an election, that you could in essence say there’s a great war in Afghanistan and a bad one in Iraq. One is good and just and legal and winnable, and the other is none of the above. And it’s exactly to the contrary. Well, not exactly to the contrary, because of course Afghanistan is a just war and a legal one. But it’s not winnable, though, and it’s not the important battle. But because [Obama] thought this was such a clever idea, and because it worked so well with his Democratic constituents, and because it confused the Republicans, he promised a demonstration of a very private stand. I put it down in several columns before the election. His supporters have no idea how much war the president is promising. Endless, endless. So if there’s anything keeps him awake, it should be that. Because he’s either got to go through with it, and see a lot go straight down a rat-hole, or he’s got to do a scuttle that will be more humiliating than any American president has ever had to face. It’s much, much worse than the risk Bush took in Iraq. And hey, the wonderful thing is that there isn’t a single liberal in North America who understands this. Or is willing to admit it. That makes me laugh. I do not want to give up Afghanistan or Pakistan, but I do not think the state of Pakistan is salvageable.

It is a stark choice for the president.

The best thing Bush did as president, apart from removing Saddam Hussein and removing the Taliban, was to make friends with India, and shift American foreign policy away from Pakistan. I think that was a long and vastly overdue move. And he gets so little credit for it. And I think Obama should build on that. I’m not sure we can save Pakistan; I’m pretty sure we can save Iraq and defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, and Iraq is important to us, strategically, economically. We don’t need to control Afghanistan. We need to have a say, and make sure it isn’t controlled by our deadly enemies — or that if it is, they live in constant fear. But anyway.

If Pakistan falls, then Afghanistan falls too?

Well, the British partition lines, I’m an expert — well, I’m not an expert, but I know more than most people do — but the British drew the lines of partition in Kashmir, which is where Pakistan once raised fight with India; they drew the Durand line, which is what separates Afghanistan and Pakistan; it runs through Pashtunistan, as you know; they drew the other line separating India from Bangladesh, which used to be East Pakistan. I thought all of those lines were lines in the sand, they were very well positioned. Fighting to keep them going any longer is very problematic. There are large bits of Pakistan that wouldn’t submit, I think ever, to Taliban rule, and of Afghanistan too. They’ve come up against some really tough opposition from people who’ve never put up with them.

But not the region they’ve just been handed.

What, the Swat valley? No. No one fought the war on that. Swat is like giving the Christian Coalition Northern California. There’s a difference between fundamentalist rule in an area like this, and having a launching pad for jihad. They just took it as their due, most of the inhabitants ran away, and then they used it to try and attack the capital city. And they’re twenty miles from where the [nuclear] reactor is.

Booker Prize Shortlist: No Salman Rushdie

The Booker Prize longlist has been narrowed down to six books, whose authors will now compete for the prize that will be announced on October 14th. The shortlist?

• Aravind Adiga The White Tiger
• Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture
• Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies
• Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
• Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency
• Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole

The Indian in me notes the presence of Amitav Ghosh and Aravind Adiga. The Guardian reports that

Adiga, who is Times magazine's Asia correspondent, exposes the underbelly of
India's new Tiger economy. The story is told through the letters of Balram who
escapes the poverty of rural India to become a rich businessman in Delhi, but
has committed a murder to reach his place in the "new" India

This reminds me of a big-time businessman in India, Ramnath Goenka. I recall reading an interview with him--perhaps during my high school years. In the interview, Goenka said something like "the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak" when asked whether he had killed anybody. Now, I am not sure if that interview question, and the answer too, was probing something that was real. Truth can be a lot stranger than fiction.

Booker Prize: Long list announced

The list of thirteen, which will be trimmed down to six on September 9th, has, as The Hindu puts it, "a heavy India-Pakistan flavour". Well, it is not without reasons, as you will see from the titles and authors. The Hindu notes that, Two first-time novelists from the subcontinent — Aravind Adiga, an Indian journalist, and Mohammed Hanif, a London-based Pakistani broadcaster — will compete with Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh for this year’s Man Booker Prize

Not that I have read all the Booker Prize winners over the years. But, really, nothing to beat Rushdie's Midnight's Children for the grand prize? I remember reading Midnight's Children when I was an undergrad, back in India. I liked it a lot. But, I still remember thinking that it could not measure up to Crime and Punishment and David Copperfield, which also I read at about the same time. Of course, these are all different genres, and written in different time periods. But, Midnight's Children did not have that intellectual and emotional depth into understanding humanity that the other two had. After all, isn't literature to help us understand humanity?