Tamil at the border ... and yet at the center

Tirunelveli with its own dialect is where my people are from.  Well, one branch is from close to Tirunelveli, and the other is at Sengottai, which is at the foothills of the Western Ghats.  Sengottai used to be a part of the old Travancore kingdom, and then Kerala.  After the disastrous creation of language-based states, Sengottai became a part of Tamil Nadu and Tirunelveli district.

Tenkasi is the big town near Sengottai.  I have never explored that town, other than waiting at the bus stand there, or passing through.

David Shulman makes me feel that I have missed out on something important at Tenkasi.  This town that is seemingly insignificant was not really insignificant:

A line of rulers claiming to be descendants of the medieval Pandya kings consolidated a small-scale state in this far southern corner of the Tamil country in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  By the decade of the 1440s this Pandya state had attained a solid economic base, at least partly sustained by the lucrative trade passing over the Ghats, that enabled the rulers, among other projects, to build the great Visvanatha-Siva temple still standing in the city

One of the rulers was Ativirarama Pantiyan.  Tamil literature "beginning ca. 1564, witnessed a burst of activity unparalleled elsewhere in Tamil Nadu."

From Tenkasi!

How unparalleled at that time?

the king himself was a powerful poet, the author of the complex work known as Naitatam ... Once considered the basis of an education in Tamil, this work is, sadly, little read today, as are Ativiraraman's other monumental narrative poems

Again, in Tenkasi!

Contributing to poetry itself is significant.  But there is more.  Tenkasi poets produced "major works of what we could call poetry-as-prose."

In Tamil, believe it or not, one could draw a line leading from late-sixteenth century Tenkasi poetic narratives to twentieth-century prose artists such as Putumaippittan, with a big but necessary detour around late-nineteenth-century novelists such as Vedanayakam Pillai and Rajam Iyer.

Maybe I should have picked up the Putumaippittan collection.

A guy who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and an Israeli after immigrating, teaches me about Tamil and Tenkasi and Tirunelveli.  Serendipity at the bookstore!

Keeping time with history

When young and keen on understanding the USSR, I had to deal with two different usages: the October Revolution, and the big celebrations on November 7th.  It always puzzled me that the October event was being celebrated in November.

Now, in the old days, there was no Google.  No internet.  And, of course, nobody to bug about this question either.

As years passed, I forgot about that issue altogether.  Who cared anymore when the USSR itself became history, right?

Well, except that I am now reading Secondhand Time.  It is not any old  novel like Tolstoy's or Turgenev's.  Secondhand Time is about the last of the Soviets, in which people refer to all things Russian, which are self-evident to Russians but not to aliens like me.  Which is why when Margarita Pogrebitskaya says "my favorite holiday was always November 7 ..." there is a footnote.  And that footnote both reminded me of my old annoying question that I had forgotten about, and answered it.

The Bolshevik uprising, which turned into the October Revolution, took place the night of October 24-25, 1917.

The rest of the footnote gets to the exciting part--those dates were "according to the Julian calendar, which is November 6-7 according to the Gregorian calendar that was subsequently adopted in the USSR."  I guess it is the academic in me that I read the footnotes even in the summer readings ;)

Wikipedia notes that Russia was the penultimate country to switch from the old Julian calendar to the Gregorian.  It happened in 1918--1 February became 14 February.  Just like that!  I suppose it was one of the first revolutionary moves ;)  The things I learn every single day!

If you are like me, then you are perhaps thinking: How about the US?  When did we change to Gregorian calendar?  Unlike the old days, I now have Wikipedia at my fingertips:

 In the British Empire (including the American colonies), Wednesday 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday 14 September 1752.

In the old country, my grandmothers' generation kept time with a "Kollavarsham" because of their roots in the old Travancore Kingdom.  The curious fellow that I am, I recall bugging my grandmother about when the home was built and she said that the original structure had the year noted on the external wall.  I went out, and was puzzled at the number that I saw.  When I reported it, she laughed and said it was not in the "English" calendar but in kollavarsham.  

Thankfully, the year the addition was completed is in the "English" calendar--the Gregorian calendar, to be precise.

A view from the terrace on grandmother's home--you can see the nearby temple "gopuram"
This was during my trip to Sengottai in ... ahem, you see the date stamp? ;)

I suppose we are all Gregorians now.

Oh boy, the world is going bananas!

Decades ago, my rather cantankerous great-uncle decided that he had a great plan to earn quite some money from the fertile lands that had been passed down the generations--he would plant bananas in place of rice.

The family lore is that it looked like like he would really strike it rich.  The plantation was coming along great.  But, disaster struck in the form of sustained high winds and rains.  The field of dreams was wiped out only days before harvest time.  Those were the bad old times before crop insurance, and the man who bet his farm on bananas lost it all.

Trouble lies ahead for banana farmers.  It is of a different kind.  Literally a different kind--a fungus.

Crop pathologists call Fusarium oxysporum, a tiny, asexual soil fungus, the “silent assassin.” It enters plants through their roots and travels through their vascular tissue; by the time it is ready to sporulate, the plant is doomed. The fungus has adapted to human agriculture by differentiating: F. oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici causes tomato wilt; F. oxysporum f. sp. asparagi causes asparagus wilt; and F. oxysporum f. sp. cubense is slowly but surely wiping out the world’s banana supply.

No, "wiping out the world's banana supply" is not an exaggeration.

Specifically, the researchers warn that the strain, which first began wreaking havoc in Southeast Asia some 50 years ago and has more recently spread to other parts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia, will eventually make its way to Latin America, where the vast majority of the world's banana exports are still grown. At this point, they say, it's not a question of whether Tropical Race 4 will infiltrate the mothership of global banana production; it's a matter of when.

Apparently this pathogen is an awful killing machine:

Tropical Race 4 is capable of killing at least 80%—though possibly as much as 85%—of the 145 million tonnes (160 million tons) of bananas and plantains produced each year

As with everything else, with this TR4 too the impacts on the poor will be worse:

The developed world prizes bananas as a food of convenience—it’s cheap, portable and reasonably healthy. In poor countries, however, bananas are often a basic source of nourishment for at least 400 million people. The average person in Uganda, Gabon, Ghana and Rwanda relies on bananas and plantains for more than 300 calories each day—around 16% of the UN’s nourishment threshold (and bear in mind that around 20% of the 74 million people living in those four countries are undernourished). Roughly 70% of all bananas consumed locally are vulnerable to Tropical Race 4.

The damn thing has even spread down under, by which I mean Australia:

The discovery of TR4 on the Cassowary Coast – that bountiful stretch of lush green valleys and rainforested ranges south of Cairns – cast a pall over a place that produces eight in every 10 bananas eaten in Australia.

 So, what can possibly be the way to save the Cavendish banana?  Scientists are working on two ideas:

(1) inserting a TR4-resistant gene from a different wild banana species from Malaysia and Indonesia, musa acuminata malaccensis, into the Cavendish to create a fungus-resistant version of the popular variety and (2) turning off a gene in the Cavendish that follows directions from the fungus to kill its own cells. 

Ahem, GMO banana?  That'll go well, won't it? ;)

Dale's introduction of a different GM experiment in 2014, a vitamin-A-fortified banana meant to help deliver nutrients to impoverished Africans, was met with harsh criticism from the likes of Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva, Friends of the Earth Africa, and Food and Water Watch. "There is no consensus that GM crops are safe for human consumption," they wrote in a letter to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Or, we could switch to the gazillion other varieties of bananas, instead of this one:

We could stop relying on Cavendish bananas. If you've ever tasted one of the dozens of small, sweet bananas that grow in regions like Central America and Southeast Asia, you probably aren't terribly impressed with the United States' doughy supermarket varieties. Belgium's Bioversity International estimates that there are at least 500, but possibly twice as many, banana cultivars in the world, and about 75 wild species.

Yes, like one of my favorites--the "malai vazha pazham", which translates to "hill bananas" because that variety is grown in the hilly terrains near Pazhani and Kodaikanal in the old country.  Ah, for some tasty old country bananas!

Keeping time as people leave

If she were alive, she would be 102.

She died 35 years ago.  

"I cannot believe it has been 35 years already" mother said.  "Time goes by really fast" mother added.

"As has been the practice for many years now, I gave money to the temple" father chipped in.  "I spend a few minutes in the morning remembering her, and say a few prayers."

In our own ways, the three of us recalled her; she was:  

My grandmother;

My father's mother;

My mother's mother-in-law.  

The cosmos handed her an extremely raw deal.  Misfortunes upon misfortunes.  The eldest child in the typically large family of those days, she was the beloved sister to her siblings and practically the mother for the two youngest sisters.  A pretty girl she was when she was married.  A girl--not a young woman--as was the custom for centuries until recently.  She was only fifteen when she had her first child, and barely seventeen when the second--my father--was born.

So, there she was all of seventeen, a mother of two boys of whom one was only forty days old, when her husband died.  He died far away from her village, in the big city of Madras where he had gone to participate in political meetings and make his contribution to India's independence movement that was gaining strength.  She never even got to see her husband's dead body.

She was now a seventeen-year old widow, with a two-year old son and a forty-day old infant.

The unexpected death of the son was traumatic to the husband's parents.  Within a year, the mother died.  And then the father also died.  

She was now about twenty, with two young boys, without the father-in-law and the mother-in-law.  A couple of years later, her mother also died and her father became senile.

Meanwhile, society compelled her to shave her hair, and wear the plain beige saris that marked women as widows.  That is the how even my father remembers her.  Father has no idea how his mother looked as a woman with hair and wearing regular saris and clad in jewels as young women would typically look.

And there were more mishaps, big and small.  As I recall grandmother and her life, I am all the more impressed that she was, by and large, an optimistic and fun-loving woman--despite all these setbacks.  Maybe that's what we literally saw in her--an enlarged heart.  Yes, a heart that was enlarged.  It started slowing down.  Nearly forty years ago, India didn't have any treatment for her enlarged heart.

One day, she seemed to be more than a tad short of breath and even the oxygen at home was not helping her.  Mother and I rushed her to the hospital.  I was in the front with the driver and mother was in the back with grandmother.  We were not even halfway to the hospital when my mother said that grandmother had died.

That was in 1980.  Thirty-five years ago.

The street in Pattamadai, where our ancestral home (sold a few years ago) is located

Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation

Every visit to India, I worry that most interactions amongst people are defined by the "in group" and "others" criteria.  In the non-work social space, there appears to be a great deal of conscious and subconscious decision-making on whom to associate with based on various "in group" attributes, especially religion, and caste and sub-caste.

It worries me even more than that this gets spatially reflected: neighborhoods with dominant "in group" demographics.  Worry is an understatement--it freaks me out.

Such a geographic separation of "in group" and "others" was not uncommon here in the US, too.  After all, for instance, the history of "white flight" as a response to racial integration is not easily forgettable.  Fair housing laws and a lot more inter-racial and inter-cultural mixing, along with education and understanding, has decreased a great deal of geographic exclusion of the "others."  Thankfully!

Sometimes, I think of the geographic exclusion in India as non-violent and passive-aggressive "ethnic cleansing" of neighborhoods.  It freaks me out even more.

India, with its long history of the awful caste system, has a terrible history of geographic separation of people.  My grandmothers' villages were classic examples of these.  In the small village of Pattamadai, the brahmins, for instance, lived in "agraharams" while Muslims lived in a different part of town, and the non-brahmins in yet another part of town.

In my other grandmother's place, in Sengottai, it was no different.

 In the map on the right, which is of the eastern half of Sengottai, the brahmin neighborhoods were clustered about the center.  (Click on the figure for a clearer image.)  As is typical of the "agraharams," temples were the focus of the neighborhoods. 

The Muslim part of town was across on the west side.  In between are the traditional non-brahmin neighborhoods, including the one where the my high school friend's grandfather's home is located.

During my childhood, I have spent many summer breaks in Sengottai and Pattamadai.  But, never had I even remotely wandered into the Muslim areas.  It was much later that I walked around and got a sense of the layout of the town.  Graduate schooling, which helped me better understand these issues, furthered my intellectual and personal curiosities. 

The good news is that even these villages and small towns are beginning to change.  A few years ago, during Christmas time, I was pleasantly surprised to see a lit up decorative star hanging outside one home in a agraharam.  A Christian family had moved in to the neighborhood, I was told, when I casually asked my uncle.  Of course, it was at the end of the street, far away from the temple.  To me, it was progress.  A huge progress.  Over the years, many non-brahmins have also moved into those agraharams.

I never saw a Muslim household though.

Now, it could be that I had not taken any systematic census, and could have overlooked a Muslim-occupied home or two.  But, my sense is that Muslims hadn't moved in.

If that was the case in the villages, changes in cities are also very slow, compared to the phenomenal changes in the economy.

Given that open notices about sale or lease are rare in India, and with space availability information transmitted more by word of mouth, well, the words are transmitted only to the in-group in the first place. And when the word is out, they employ euphemisms and proxies--urbanites being more literate and worldly-wise know that outright discrimination is not correct. .  For instance, "I don't want to rent out my house to those who cook beef"--excludes Muslims and Christians right away. Or, "I don't like the smell of cooking with mustard oil" is a way to keep away the population from Bengal and the Northeast parts of India.  Imagine if in the contemporary US, an apartment manager denies an Indian immigrant family an apartment because of the curry smells from the kitchen!

Of course, change is difficult for those whom the status quo has served well.  But, that status quo is simply unfair.  The more people are resistant to change, the more the unfairness continues, like in this news item about a young woman in Mumbai who "was denied a flat in the city just because she is a Muslim":

After a hard search, Ms. Quadri found a tidy 3-BHK apartment at Sanghvi Heights in Wadala. Her new flatmates — two working women, in their early twenties and Hindu — found her on Facebook.
However, a day before Ms. Quadri was to shift, the apartment’s broker warned that the housing society did not accept Muslim tenants.

Long story short, after signing "a “no-objection certificate” and ready for any harassment from her neighbours because of her religion," she was forced to leave the place.  And this:

Incidentally, the other women had to pay a price for sheltering a Muslim; they have vacated the house unwillingly.

The big world city of Mumbai is no different from the very small town of Sengottai!  Or perhaps the big city is even worse!

ps: the title of this post is from Khalil Gibran's poem, Pity the Nation

The times they are a-changin'

Once, during the annual summer vacations, from Sengottai we went to Trivandrum, where the highlight for this young kid of then, was the visit to the aerodrome, as it was called.  I am sure I had no idea then that I would one day step into a jumbo jet for the first time, and that from then on flying would become a part of life.

In place of the annual summer vacations of a life past to visit the grandparents, I seem to have developed an annual winter vacation routine visiting the folks in the old country.  I am now older than my parents' age when I went to the aerodrome, and my parents are older than my grandmothers were.

Years and decades have gone by, as if in a nanosecond.

The old country is less and less like the country that I once knew.  Understandable.  If I could have changed from a kid who was impressed by the aerodrome to a grey and balding old man, so can the peoples and the natural and built environment in India.

I saw five women walking along the crowded Usman Road.  All of them wearing niqabs.  Only their eyes were visible.  I had never seen women in niqabs when I was a kid.

A woman was ironing clothes on a cart by the roadside.  In the past, it was a man's job.  Now, it is a woman.  Even more interesting was that she was not clad in a sari, but was wearing the churidar combo.  As a kid, I would not have imagined a Tamil woman wearing a churidar ironing clothes on a cart by the roadside.

I am always impressed with the rows of Hindi-speaking guys waiting for customers--always women--to offer the henna services.  As a kid, all I knew was the simple applying the home-ground henna on fingers and the palms, without any intricate patterns--and that too by Hindi-speaking guys from somewhere.

Seemingly everybody is eating and drinking on the sidewalks, in the tea-stalls, in the cafes, in the "hotels" (as restaurants are referred to here.)  As a kid, it was always a special deal to get even a candy from the store--for which we had to beg and annoy the parents.

The three places--Neyveli, Sengottai, Pattamadai--that provided the backdrop for my childhood were all small enough that it seemed like I could not go anywhere without people knowing me.  The places were all quiet and peaceful.  The kid from those days would never have imagined the noisy, noisy, noisy, life in anonymity in this city that has been home to the folks now for more than the years that I have been away in my adopted land.

The niqab-wearing women, the ironing woman, the henna-workers, all of them would have reasons to be happy and would have their own reasons to be unhappy.  I wish them all happiness as this annual vacation comes to an end and as I prepare to leave on a jet plane from an airport.

Happy new year, dear reader!

Into the swing of things ...

My childhood home was surrounded by trees. Five huge tamarind trees, seven or eight mango trees, a cashewnut tree, two bearing lemons, and a bunch of trees that did not produce any edible fruits.

In one corner of this compound was a lovely swing.  A swing with a plank on which two kids could sit or stand.  My brother and I have had countless competitions on that swing--two of our favorites were how high one could swing, and how much farther one could jump off that swing.  And, of course, many of these ended up in fistfights too!

While the swing at home was an outdoor one, grandmother's home had an indoor swing. A swing that was long and broad enough to serve as a bed.  It was in the inner courtyard, which served us kids well because we did not have to deal with the midday sun.  We cousins who gathered at grandmother's home during our annual school vacations have played, eaten, and also slept on that swing.  And, yes, lots of crying at the swing.

Thus, old as I might be, even now I am always drawn to a swing when I see one.

I was swinging away at the local park when a self-appointed righteous citizen, clad in a dhoti, chastised me for my merriment.  "The swing is for children, and you should not be swinging" he scolded me in Tamil as he contorted his facial muscles to produce a contemptuous expression.

Over the past few days, a couple of minutes at the swing has been a part of my early morning routine.  It is my reward for the hour-plus of walking in the insanely hot and humid morning.  After those couple of minutes, I slowly walk back home.

That local guy, who was perhaps no older than I am, perhaps has never had the pleasure of swinging away life's problems.  He perhaps has never experienced the priceless joys of swinging.
There is a pleasure in gentle swinging.
There is a different pleasure in the wild arcs.
Another pleasure with company.
Thrills are different in the morning hours versus in the evenings.
Indoor versus outdoor.
What a joyless world that guy must be in if he has never known such simple pleasures of life!

"It is all ok" is all I replied in Tamil.

That response did not go well with him.

Consistent with the culture of self-appointed righteous citizens, he immediately shared his concerns with two other middle-aged men, who then turned around to look at me swinging.  I wanted to wave a hi to them, but I did not.  The citizen kept gesticulating at my direction as he continued to talk with them and they too regularly turned their heads towards me.  I continued to swing.

I slowly walked back home thinking about the cold, fresh, mango juice in the fridge. I wish I could drink the mango juice while seated on that swing, just like in the old days.

Were my grandmothers racists?

A friend emailed me this video clip, in which Aziz Ansari--the Indian-American comedian/actor--observes that racism is very much on the decline here in the US and that the old racists are, well, dead or are dying from old age.  As with any public policy or comedy line, Ansari then works on the old grandmother angle and even asks the audience to make noise if their racist grandmothers died recently.

I agree with him.  Race is not that much an issue anymore, nowhere near what it was even during the time of the Rodney King and OJ Simpson dramas two decades ago.  But, it is there.

Anyway, Ansari's comment got me thinking.  Were my grandmothers racists?

There was no doubt that the grandmothers were steeped in the traditions.  They observed a great number of orthodox practices.  The interesting aspect is that the orthodoxy discriminated against all kinds of humans, depending on the contexts.  In the mornings, we kids were not allowed to touch grandmothers if we had not had our showers by then.  Menstruating females were condemned to a corner of the ancestral home, and even the sight of those females meant that grandmother had to cleanse herself all over again!  And, yes, the treatment of the lower castes. ... the list is endless.  It seemed like equal-opportunity discrimination ;)

But, would I think of my grandmothers as having been racist?

When they were presented with a world that was different from the traditional one that was the only world they had ever known, well, their practices changed, and changed dramatically.

I can relate many examples in this context.  For instance, one grandma lived with us for the last seven years of her life.  Her life was no longer back in the village.  In the new setting, too, she could have continued on with many of the old practices.  Yet, she ditched some, and moderated quite a lot.

As I think back about those years, I can see how she appreciated and supported the very different ways in which we kids were behaving in an environment where traditions died.  At school, we mingled with students of all castes and religions.  It did not bother her at all.  In fact, we even used to joke about this!  She was always happy to meet and chat with my sister's classmates when they came over.  (I was not a social being even then!)

Grandmother had an enlarged heart condition that required hospitalization at one point.  The attending physician, an MD those days when it was rare, was from a low tier of the atrocious caste system.  He treated her well, and she was happy about him as the physician.  (While I struggle to recall his name, I do remember that a year or so after the hospital interactions, the physician was elected as our representative to the Parliament and we felt great that for once we actually knew our MP!)

So, were my grandmothers racists?  They gave up the bad old traditions when presented with better ways to think about the world.  They modified their behavior not out of compulsion.  Not out of fear that otherwise life will be miserable for them.

Racism is merely one of the many prejudices around.  We walk around with baggage of prejudices that we might have picked up from our childhood days, from religious leaders, from peers, ... whatever.  If people point out that what we carry in the bag is not healthy and even after that if we do not get rid of that baggage, then we are bigots.

My grandmothers offloaded plenty of baggage, and in a hurry.

Give a man free fish ... soon he will be bored and will choose to pay for them!

With the exception of people like my super-wealthy gazillionaire friend (haha!) or people like me who, according to my neighbor, never works for a living, most dread the weekdays and look forward to weekends and holidays.

We are a strange species.  We bring all the trouble of work on ourselves and then dream about not having to work.  We chain ourselves, put a lock on it and throw the key away, and then dream of being free at least every two days of the week.

Some of the most free people that I have met in my life were in the villages like Pattamadai and Sengottai.  Seemingly in sync with the hot temperature conditions, where even a brisk walk can tire a person, there was a whole lot of doing nothing.  We folks from urban and industrial areas, having been used to working in order to earn the privilege of sitting around twice a week, found that kind of a rustic life to be dull and boring and even labeled them as lazy for not doing anything.

The older I get, the less clear I am on who is really free.

We dream of a future, made possible by science and technology, when we won't have to work at all.  Robots that clean the homes. Ready-to-consume nutritious food in full and plenty (even if it will be in unrecognizable forms to us in the present.)  A future in which even firefighters won't have any work because nothing synthetic will ever crash or burn thanks to advancements in science and technology.   In that future, we will have all the free time in the world.  Or, at least, more weekends than weekdays.

When students complain about income inequality and unemployment--about which I have been worried for a long time, evidenced by the number of blog posts on those issues--sometimes I have thrown at them a different scenario to think about.  What if those profiting from automation and outsourcing agreed to guarantee every American an income that will be at higher-than-poverty level, and they can work and earn more if they chose to?  The possibility of a permanent vacation. Every day will be a weekend. A Sengottai/Pattamadai life of minimal work.

Almost always, students do not like that idea.  Sitting around, or even standing around in a museum, doing nothing can become a bore.  Fishing is fun when you do it once in a while, but not day in day out.  Or, given the Puritanical streak, some see the virtue in working as a means of not merely earning a livelihood but about feeling good about oneself and the path to god and heaven.

Of course, that guaranteed minimum income is only a thought experiment.  But, I am not the only one who has been thinking like that--I am merely an insignificant person to think about it ;)

A simple idea for eliminating poverty is garnering greater attention in recent weeks: automatically have the government give every adult a basic income.
The Atlantic's Matt Bruenig and Elizabeth Stoker brought up the idea a few weeks ago when they contemplated cutting poverty in half, and Annie Lowrey revisited it in today's issue of the New York Times Magazine.

See, there are quite a few of us loons out there!

Why are we even constructing such thought experiments?  Because it makes things simpler at one level:

a minimum income would also allow us to eliminate every government benefit as well. Get rid of SNAP, TANF, housing vouchers, the Earned Income tax credit and many others. Get rid of them all. A 2012 Congressional Research Service report found that the federal government spends approximately $750 billion each year on benefits for low-income Americans and that rises to a clean trillion when you factor in state programs. Eliminate all of those and the net figure comes out to $1.2 trillion needed to pay for a universal basic income, still a hefty sum.

Interesting, right?  I tell ya, this thinking business is a whole lot of entertainment that no amount of sports and movies can equal ;)

Of course, with a Congress that can't even figure out what color toilet paper to use, such radical approaches will forever remain only as thought experiments.  It does not mean that there are no attempts--they are not here in the US though!

Switzerland’s citizens will soon vote on a referendum to give each working-age adult in Switzerland a basic income of $2,800 (2,500 francs) per month.

We are living in some interesting times.

A couple of miles outside Sengottai

TELEGRAM ERA ENDS STOP

"Did you know that the last telegram was sent in India yesterday?" asked my father when I called up my parents.  That gave us something more to talk about.

The earliest memory I have of using the telegram is from way back when I was a kid.  I might have been just about seven or so years old.  It was the rainy northeast monsoon time.  Perhaps November.  One after another, we all fell sick.  A flu bug, of the worst variety.  Raging fever and loss of appetite.  And, for some, the body rejecting food every possible way.  Was the worst of times.

Mother was the last one to get the bug.  When she did, she was hit hard, perhaps because her energy was already spent on taking care of the three kids and the husband.  One moment she was sitting and the next she fainted.

Father managed to get across a telegram to my grandmother.  It was an SOS of sorts.

Almost two days later, my great-aunt and her uncle--Puliyarai chithappa, as we called him--reached our place, in the middle of some pouring rain.  That awesome woman took wonderful care of us, nourished us back to health, spent a few additional days with us, before returning to Sengottai.

Turns out I don't have photos of the post office at Sengottai,
which is a perhaps a couple of hundred feet beyond the building at the right edge of this photo

The post and telegraph office, as it was called, at Sengottai was literally behind grandmother's home.  In fact, the property belonged to her mother-in-law and the government bought a piece of it to construct the building.  The proximity of the telegraph office created some interesting moments when listening to the old valve-radio at grandmother's home.

"Do you remember  Puliyarai chithappa  deciphering the Morse Code from the telegraph office that interfered with the radio stations?" I asked my father as we chatted.

The road from Sengottai to Puliyarai

Father was surprised I remembered that.  I wonder why he is surprised every time I recall any of those old stories.  When I toss out details on the years, he is even more impressed.  Like when I asked him today, "if grandmother were alive, wouldn't it be her hundredth birthday this year?"

"I was thinking about the same thing yesterday.  I am surprised you remember that" he said.

Anyway, father commented that Puliyarai Chithappa worked as a station master in the railways, and station masters needed to know Morse Code.  Now, that was a piece of information that was new to me.

I did not remind my father about my memory of the last time we used telegrams.  When grandmother--his mother--died.  In August 1980.

Wait, wait. Is it Orosi or Sengottai?

Sengottai is full of ups and downs.  Sometimes even the street names say that: Upper Street (மேட தெரு) and Lower Street (கீழ தெரு.)  Sometimes it is a gently sloping alley that links these different levels and at other times one has to climb the steps.

Unless things have changed now, the streets had open drainage channels as well--primarily for the rain water.    While not anywhere as clean as I would like the town to be--like many parts of India, open defecation is not out of the ordinary--I still liked to walk around and understand the place and its peoples.  And take photos, of course.

Once when I showed this photo of a part of Sengottai to some, they were pleasantly surprised that the town looked this good.  I suppose it is not unusual for an outsider to show how good things are.

Sengottai, India

I was reminded of Sengottai's streetscape when I saw this in Orosi, on the other side of the planet:

Orosi

Here is Sengottai's main road:

In fact, there is more to the streets too--like how the tree trunks get painted to serve as alerts.  In Sengottai:

And in Orosi:

It is not merely the streets, of course.  The lush green vegetation all around.  The mango trees and the banana trees.  The railing outside people's homes.  The hills.

From an upstairs window at grandma's home, back in the day before new buildings came up, we could see lights at the distant hill.  With very little artificial light after sundown, it didn't take much brightness to reach the window.

In Orosi, from my balcony, I could see the lights at the distant hill.  Those lights moved--the headlights of vehicles coming down the mountain.  Sometimes they played hide-and-seek with me when their lights were blocked by vegetation or because of the curves the vehicles had to follow.

My father wonders why I go all by myself to places where I don't know anybody.  But, he is getting used to it by now, I think.  "Collect a lot of information" is what he said when I called him from the airport before shutting down my phone.

I think I should explain to him that, strangely enough, the more I travel, the more the places seem familiar.  Not the same, but oddly familiar.  Even when I don't know anybody to talk with. And even when I don't have anybody to talk with.

A few minutes outside of Orosi

Rain, rain, don't go away

It is interesting that the monsoon sets in India just as the long wet months of rain end in this part of the world. In my imaginations, the clouds consider their work done here in Oregon and move on to the other side of the planet where the billion-plus in the Subcontinent eagerly await the downpours after having survived yet another summer of heat and dust.

As kids, when we visited grandmas' villages every summer, I found it fascinating that people always talked about the rain.  Conversations between men typically involved openers like மேக்க மழை உண்டோ? (any rain in the west?)  It seemed like that was how they even said hello to each other.  And then the next few minutes were spent talking only about the rains.

There was a good reason why the rain talk featured so much--it is the source of the vital water for life and farming.  No snow banks in those near-equatorial conditions.

The rain-fed Tamarabarani at sundown, Srivaikuntam 2012

Many, many movies that I watched during those childhood years explored rural stories that also portrayed life when the monsoon failed.  Stories of hardship, deprivation, and heroism.  "Thanneer thanneer" (water, water) was one of the movies that made quite an impression on the young adult that I was; as I blogged earlier, using the context of water scarcity,:

Adapted from a play, the movie was one sarcastic tragic-comedy on the plight of the poor, the bureaucracy, and the self-promoting and self-aggrandizing politicians.  It was brilliant.

Perhaps conditioned by all the experiences of growing up in the rural settings, and interacting with folks from there throughout the adult life, even now my father, who lives anything but a rural life, worries about the rains.  Even before I had read the news about the meteorologists statement on the monsoon, father talked about it when I called him up a couple of days ago.

Listening to father's comments, I, too, then visualized in my mind the breeze in Sengottai that typically was the monsoon's calling card.  The rains that then made the waterfalls at Courtallam a wonderful sight for the eyes, and a pleasure for the body when getting massaged by those waters.

Here is to hoping that the rain clouds from Oregon have reached their destinations in India.  A "meghaduta" of a different kind.

I know I will see them here again in October.  I shall wait for you, my friend.  And welcome you with open arms.

Life is not about the grammar issues

Before you get any incorrect ideas and leap to conclusions, let me make it clear: spellings matter; watch out for the comma, which can kill a person; and, yes, make the writing look sophisticated by using semicolons!

However, let us not get carried away.  There is more to life than grammar. A lot more.  Way more.

When I was a kid, one relative who never failed to impress me was my father's uncle.  In conversations we always referred to him as RM.  Like all of us, he was also a mixed bag of the good, the bad, and the ugly.  RM was sharp. Quick witted. And well read.  He didn't keep up with the modern science and literature, yes.  But, he knew what he had studied during his younger days.

A rather argumentative and cantankerous man he was.  (Now you know there might be a biological reason, too, for my fascination for The Argumentative Indian!)  Mostly irreligious, and definitely irreverent too.  The religious rarely dared to pick an argument with him not merely because he was good at arguing but, and more importantly, because he would recite from memory verses from any number of religious texts and proceed on to interpreting them.

One that made an early impression on me was the way he presented to the young me how Bhjaja Govindam came about.  Now, thanks to the information technology, I am able to simply link to that Wikipedia entry.  The Wikipedia note says the same that RM told me a long time ago.  That devotional, philosophical, and poetic work, the story goes, was Sankara's reaction when he came across a Sanskrit professor teaching the finer points of grammar to his students.  Sankara observed:

Bhajagovindam bhajagovindam
Govindam bhaja muudhamate
Sampraapte sannihite kaale
Nahi nahi rakshati dukrijnkarane.          Translation:
Worship Govinda, Worship Govinda,
Worship Govinda. Oh fool!
Rules of Grammar will not save you
At the time of your death.

RM was often annoyed that those reciting this didn't even pause to understand what it meant and, thus, I have often heard him talk about dukrijnkarane. The audience would get nervous, while I sat there enjoying the show.

We draw our own lessons from what we experience in life.  In my case, I fell in love with the idea that there is a lot more to life than the small stuff that we are so fascinated with.  That there are much larger issues that we needed to understand.  I didn't care for the religious "Govindam" bottom line that Sankara preached, but I appreciated that dukrijnkarane as a metaphor for the ultimately trivial stuff that don't matter at all.

Graduate school and the research activities that professors and students engaged in often reminded me of this dukrijnkarane approach.  Instead of grammar, it was about some minutiae.  I didn't refer to such research as dukrijnkarane; after all, I was an in alien culture.  So, I made fun of research in the field of economic development as nothing but a fixation on "the productivity of left-handed female labor in the cotton textile mills of who-cares-where."

I felt convinced that modern day academic research was nothing but a variation of that Sanskrit professor being monomaniacal about dukrijnkarane.

Whether in intellectual pursuits, or in life, I understand that there is a lot more to it than the fine details we worry about.  Yes, those details matter, like how the comma does.  But, it is not about the comma, right?  And that we forget.

It was always easy to get RM going on such issues.  He loved them.  He seemed to draw energy from making life miserable for others by bringing up such topics.

He was also the first one I really knew who grew a beard.  Well, sometimes he grew one, and at other times he was clean-shaven.  Once, in his bearded phase, while assisting somebody else at a food charity event of sorts, he was asked to be in-charge when the other person left.  RM being RM, he decided to play a practical joke; he sat there like a holy man--he had the beard, the looks, and the erudition after all.  When people came, he made the appropriate comments and soon had collected donations from the passers by by offering his profound words of wisdom!

Now, I am at an age that probably RM was when I began to interact with him as a kid.  My beard, unlike his, is always well-trimmed.  I suspect that my beard is why people pay attention to me even the little bit they do.  Ask yourself: if you were a student in my classes, or a newspaper reader scanning through my op-ed, would you think I had any gravitas if I looked like this?:

yes, me, in summer 2012.
http://sriramkhe.blogspot.com/2012/07/so-why-havent-bald-men-gone-extinct.html

With all the pontification that I do, I can easily imagine that I, too, can sit at a place, make appropriate comments and, in the process, earn more money than I currently do now.  I am not that far away from the place where something like that actually happened, after all.

There is a demand for a false prophet like RM, even if only for those few minutes, or a lot more such RMs because innately we humans are always driven to understanding the mystery that life is.  We intuitively feel that there is a lot more to life than whatever dukrijnkarane we pursue.  We want to make sense of that larger issues.  We then seek people who, we think and believe, might have the answer.  Or, at least, show us the path towards that.

But, the search for that master is futile.  Nobody knows.  It is up to us individually to understand that life is not about the fine points of grammar.  In a way, that is what I tell students, without going into all this philosophy talk.  When I tell them that a course they take with me is not really about the course alone, and that education is not merely about the letter-grade and diploma alone, I know that I am implicitly hoping that they would engage in a self-driven inquiry into what they understand the big picture to be.

Perhaps it was six years ago that I went to Sengottai to say hi to RM.  It was our last interaction.  He was anything but that person he was when younger when he made a serious impression on me. RM spoke so softly that I had to strain to catch his words.  In my Americanized way, I tried telling RM how much I appreciated him.  I held his bony arms with the skin that was dry and wrinkled.  I am not sure whether my expressions crossed across the cultures.

I like to imagine that as RM neared his last few breaths, he knew really, really well that life is not about dukrijnkarane.

A few months ago, when my mother saw a recent photo of mine, she couldn't stop commenting on how much I look like RM.  Am not sure whether it is a case of we see what we want to see, or whether there is more of a resemblance.  The beard helps, for sure :)

Darwin, Lincoln, and my grandmothers

From the industrial complex-based modern town where we lived, my siblings and I used to head every summer to spend time with our grandmothers, who lived in kind of "advanced villages" that were about 50 miles apart--Pattamadai and Sengottai.

Sengottai had a regular structure for a cinema, and Pattamadai had nothing but a tent, a bunch of benches, and a crude projector.  It was in one of these movie places--I think it was in Sengottai--that I was introduced to the idea of evolution, way back when I was a kid, and way before the academic idea popped up in the biology class.  Yes, thanks to a film, in a run down cinema hall, in a very small town.

It was some old black and white movie that had Sivaji Ganesan, I think.  Am guessing it was from the 1950s.  As practically all Indian movies do, this one too had songs, one of which starts with "kurangil irundhu pirandhavan manithan"--translates to "from monkeys humans were born".

It was news to me that humans descended from monkeys.  I mean, I was then a kid less than ten years old.  I was more than shocked to know that humans were born from monkeys.  The world has never been the same to me since then.

It was much later in high school when we learned about natural selection, evolution, and Charles Darwin.  Today is Darwin's 200th birthday.  (and, Honest Abe's too).

In Darwin's honor, and relating to my first ever intro to evolution, here is a link to the famous "The Monkey Trial"--State v. John Scopes.  

Am proud to have descended from apes.  And, yes, mighty glad to be in the country that Lincoln helped build.  My beard, however, is nothing compared to Darwin's and Lincoln's :)

source

A photo evidence of my great-grandmother's ghost?

Into his adulthood, grandfather had three siblings--two sisters and a brother.

One sister got married to a local attorney in Sengottai.  Not too long after that, she was diagnosed with one of the most dreaded diseases of those days: tuberculosis. 

This was way back early in the 1940s and true to its other name of "consumption" the disease killed her.

The brother, who was in his early twenties, also fell ill.  Yes, the same dreaded tuberculosis.  Soon, he was also gone.

Grandfather was now left with only one sister.

Great-grandmother, Parvathy, was heartbroken from experiencing two consecutive deaths of her adult children.

She lost interest in living, and asked her husband to take her to Kashi (Varanasi,) while making it clear to the family that she was not coming back.  It was goodbye forever.

The year was 1947.  It took quite a few days of travel by train from Sengottai to Kashi.

They reached the holy city and rented a small place for themselves.  Great-grandfather was an orthodox brahmin schooled in the traditional texts and easily adapted to the Vedic activities there.

One day in 1948, grandfather received a telegram from Kashi.  His mother was sick, and was rapidly deteriorating.   Somehow grandfather managed to reach Kashi.

Within a few days, great-grandmother Parvathy died.

It occurred to grandfather that the couple of hours before cremation were all he had to take a photograph of his mother for future generations to know about her.  So, father and son draped a sari around her as best as they could, and hired a photographer before rigor set in.

That is how the family home in Sengottai always had this rather eerie photo of great-grandmother Parvathy, which always scared the heck out of us kids whenever we visited Sengottai.

Notice her mouth?  Her hands look strange as well, right?

And a halo effect behind her?

Apparently, grandfather was behind the chair, holding his mother--after all, she wasn't alive to sit up.  So, after the photo was taken, the print was airbrushed in order to hide the person behind!

After the cremation and other rites, grandfather returned home with his father.  Together they updated grandfather's grandmother--yes, the matriarch, Meenakshi, my great-grandmother's mother, was alive.

Family stories are that Meenakshi cried every single day lamenting the loss of her only daughter, and the grandson and the granddaughter who died from TB.  Tears ran down every single day for seven years until her very end. 

If great-great-grandmother Meenakshi had lived for two additional years, she would have witnessed the regeneration of life in the form of her great-granddaughter's (my mother's) wedding in 1957.

The women who made my life so sweet!

It is Deepavali time in India, which brings back lots of memories of the phenomenal sweets that mother made for the occasion.  My favorites were the cashew sweet and the gulab-jamuns that she made.  I often swung by the kitchen and the pantry areas whenever mother was not around and gobbled up sweets that were off-limits.

As a kid, I ate sweets all the time. From morning until night. Sweets any time.  It continued on even into my young adult phase.  As an undergraduate student, I once had 22 gulab-jamuns in one sitting.

As an adult, it was always an additional pleasure to listen to my grandmothers recall stories about my fascination for sweets.  An incident that she recalled often, which always made me feel special, related to the milk-sweet, which was her specialty.  To make this "thirattipal,", my grandmothers patiently stirred, and stirred, and stirred milk for hours until it boiled down to the sweetest delight ever. I was about five years old and was in Sengottai when she decided to make this milk sweet for her grandson.  The process started late in the evening.  I was apparently sitting right by her side and started falling asleep, which is when I made my grandmother promise to wake me up after she was done making it because I wanted to eat that sweet as fresh as I could get them.

The extra kick in the story was when she described how she woke me up and I ate it half-asleep. And then woke up in the morning and ate that sweet before eating or drinking anything else.

It was well into adulthood, after a few years of life in the US, did I realize I hadn't ever thanked them for all the kinds of grandmotherly acts they did so meticulously.  I had never thanked them for making all those heavenly sweets.  My great-aunt was the only one alive by then.  Every time I met with her, I recalled all these stories and asked her once how she had the patience to make all those sweets and other snacks.  Which is when I found out that she often felt nauseated after that constant exposure to the smells.  Sometimes, the nausea was so intense that it led to, yep ... I felt awful.  But, it didn't matter to her.  That was her life and she enjoyed doing what she had to do.

A couple of days ago, I was talking with my mother recalling some of these old stories of my fascination for sweets and about her awesome cashew sweets.  Mother didn't' make any sweets this time around because tradition bars any celebration for a year whenever there is a death in the family.  

The grandmothers, and my great-aunt too, were, however, diabetic, which is why all these memories are even sweeter.

A few years ago, my mother tested positive for diabetes.

Diabetes runs in the extended family. It seems like very few aunts and uncles don't have diabetes.  I wonder if it is only a matter of time before that switch gets flicked in my system.

This news item on Deepavali and diabetes notes that Wednesday is World Diabetes Day.  I hadn't known that.

Here is to hoping that we will all eat and live smartly enough to avoid the diabetic curse as much as we can.

After all this, will it be a surprise if I noted that I made a sweet?  Yes, I really did!

I made a carrot-payasam over the weekend.  It was wonderful.  But, nothing like the sweets that my mother and grandmothers and great-aunt made.

My thanks to all those women who literally sweetened up my life.

Spontaneous aggregation of the like-minded and exclusion of "others"

Every visit to India, I worry that most interactions amongst people are defined by the "in group" and "others" criteria.  In the non-work social space, there appears to be a great deal of conscious and subconscious decision-making based on various "in group" attributes, especially religion, language, and caste and sub-caste.

It worries me even more than that this gets spatially reflected: neighborhoods with dominant "in group" demographics.  Worry is an understatement, though--it freaks me out quite a bit.

Such a geographic separation of "in group" and "others" was not uncommon here in the US, too.  After all, even the history of "white flight" as a response to racial integration is not easily forgettable.  Fair housing laws and a lot more inter-racial and inter-cultural mixing, along with education and understanding, has decreased a great deal of geographic exclusion of the "others."  Thankfully!

Sometimes, I think of the geographic exclusion in India as non-violent and passive-aggressive "ethnic cleansing" of neighborhoods.  It freaks me out even more.

India, with its long history of the awful caste system, has a terrible history of geographic separation of people.  My grandmothers' villages were classic examples of these.  In the small village of Pattamadai, the brahmins, for instance, lived in "agraharams" while Muslims lived in a different part of town, and the non-brahmins in yet another part of town.

In my other grandmother's place, in Sengottai, it was no different.

 In the map on the right, which is of the eastern half of Sengottai, the brahmin neighborhoods were clustered about the center.  (Click on the figure for a clearer image.)  As is typical of the "agraharams," temples were the focus of the neighborhoods. 

The Muslim part of town was across on the west side.  In between are the traditional non-brahmin neighborhoods, including the one where the my high school friend's grandfather's home is located.

During my childhood, I have spent many summer vacations in Sengottai and Pattamadai.  But, never had I even remotely wandered into the Muslim areas.  It was much later, did I walk around these places and get a sense of the lay of the land.  Graduate schooling, which helped me better understand these issues, furthered my intellectual and personal curiosities. 

The good news is that even these small towns are beginning to change.  A few years ago, during Christmas time, I was pleasantly surprised to see a lit up decorative star hanging outside one home in a agraharam.  A Christian family had moved in to the neighborhood, I was told, when I casually asked my uncle.  Of course, it was at the end of the street, far away from the temple.  To me, it was progress.  A huge progress.  Over the years, I see that many non-brahmins have also moved into those agraharams.

I never saw a Muslim household though.

Now, it could be that I had not taken any systematic census, and could have overlooked a Muslim-occupied home or two.  But, my sense is that Muslims hadn't moved in.

I thought about all these even as I started reading this report about Muslims in the city of Hyderabad:

Ghettoisation of Muslims in a city boasting a long 700-year-old history of ‘their’ rule? Quite ironic but it does exist, mainly owing to periodic bouts of communal riots and a media-created image of the city as ‘terrorist hub’, though not as virulent a form as seen in Mumbai and Delhi.

It generally fits into the patterns I have seen in India.  For Hindus, there is a lot more uneasiness when it comes to Muslims than with any other religious group. This was the case even before 9/11, since when dirty politics often employs Muslims and terrorists as synonyms.  Since 9/11, and since the attacks in Delhi and Mumbai by Pakistan-based outfits, and the horrific events in Gujarat, I would think that the geographic exclusion of Muslims might have increased in many parts of India.

[There] are apartments where some fastidious Hindu residents would not allow Muslims to stay “especially for their cultural practices like sacrificing sheep on Bakrid.” It’s not just Muslims but lower caste Hindus too who face this problem when they encounter “vegetarian only” boards, a euphemism to bar those from “other castes” in places like Himayatnagar, Nallakunta and Chikkadpally in the new city. Fortunately such instances are very few in Hyderabad.

 In a related story, the same paper reports:

Finding a home to rent in India's national capital is an arduous task for anyone - but, an investigation by The Hindu has found, almost impossible for citizens who happen to be Muslim. Homeowners and property dealers contacted by reporters often firmed up deals, only to be disqualified as soon as they revealed their religion.

Housing apartheid was at its worst in New Delhi’s most affluent and educated neighbourhoods: New Friends Colony, Vasant Kunj, Jangpura and Rohini. By contrast, in areas such as Mukherjee Nagar, Karol Bagh, Janakpuri and Ashok Vihar the responses were mixed.

In one case, a property agent representing a homeowner in New Friends Colony flatly told The Hindu's reporters, “The landlords want only Indians, not Muslims.” 

Ouch! Muslims become non-Indians?  How awful :(

Property dealers seemed to operate an informal network of religious segregation, often pointing The Hindu's reporters to supposedly Muslim-appropriate neighbourhoods. More often that not, they were told to look for houses in the fringes of posh colonies. Property dealers in Rohini suggested Rithala, one in Jangpura proposed Bhogal, famous for its Kashmiri population and Afghanistani refugees, a broker in New Friends Colony suggested Sukhdeo Vihar and Jasola both of which are close to another Muslim ‘ghetto’ Jamia Nagar, and one in Vasant Kunj suggested Munirka and Kishangadh.

Neighbourhoods like these appear to be emerging as enclaves for the growing Muslim middle class in Delhi, which despite its education and economic achievements is denied access to neighbourhoods preferred by Hindus from similar backgrounds.

On the travails of finding a house, Prof. Rizwan Qaisar, an academician at Jamia Millia Islamia, said while looking for a house in Saket and Munirka DDA Flats he came across instances where his name mattered a lot. “Every thing was fine till I revealed my name. After facing ‘no’ from several property dealers, I had to finally shift to Noor Nagar in Jamia Nagar.” “Several social groups face discrimination in housing but for Muslims the edge is sharper,” Mr. Qaisar said.

It is terrible.  

"He is from America, and wanted a photo of my dog"

Somehow, it feels like it was my last hurrah at Sengottai. 

I am so convinced about it that mentally I said goodbye to the town as I walked around earlier this morning.  It was, therefore, quite fitting that I even swung by what was once home where "V's" grandparents lived.

Though "V" and I were not best friends at school in Neyveli, we were more than casual classmates because we also knew well our Sengottai origins.  Our parents interacted as well because of those same geographic affinities and also because the generation even older to them were great pals in the town.

So much so that as a kid visiting grandma for the summer holidays, I have been to V's grandfather's home whenever dad or my great-uncle asked me to accompany them.

This time around, when it was about the time last evening for me to step out for a walk, dad came along.  As we crossed the street, dad said, "shall we go to MS Moopanar's home?"

I was, of course, delighted with the idea, though the old man himself is no more.  I have clear memories of a narrow alley and a passageway, which then opens up into a courtyard and a huge house.

V's uncle was home and recognized us without us introducing ourselves.  "There is nothing like the old friendships" he commented and added, "that kind of love and affection for people doesn't seem to come by anymore.  Times have changed."  They have, indeed.

After tea and a few minutes of chat, we continued our walk.  As is customary in this part of the world, women and girls were cleaning up the homes and the street in front of their respective homes.  Two women were chatting and cleaning and behind one, sitting on the front steps, was a dog.

Well groomed and happy, he looked.

I was blown away, with a second successive sighting of a pet dog in such traditional settings.  And both in two different towns.

I told dad that I wanted to take a photo of the dog, but first wanted to ask for the owner's permission.

Dad being all excited, jumped ahead of me in asking that question and prefaced it with an introduction of sorts about our Sengottai origins, walking from MS Moopanar's home, and that I am from America.  I am not sure which of these three segments of the introduction excited him the most :)

After all that, he asked her, "my son wants to take a photo of your dog.  Will it be ok?"

She seemed to be confused.  Understandable. Strangers we were.  On top of that, there I am with my shorts and camera, looking Indian and yet not looking Indian. And wanting to take a photo of the dog.

She was ok with it, and clarified it was her dog. 

After thanking her, I took a couple of photos of the canine who was enjoying it all, and thanked her again as we started walking.

I heard her in the background telling the other couple of women, "he is from America, and wanted a photo of my dog."

Not only dog ownership in such a traditional setting, but also a pride in that pooch being hers.  I tell ya, India has changed a lot.

I told dad that it was not the photo of the dog itself that I was interested in, as much as it being yet another symbol of changes in social norms in India.

Later in the evening, I heard dad narrate the entire incident to the aunt and uncle, and underscored how this was a symbol of social changes.

I suppose he agreed with my interpretation then.

The day the music died. Grandmother's music.

Grandma (Paatti, பாட்டி) died on July 6th, in 1993.

Because she was the Paatti from Sengottai, we sometimes referred to her in conversations as SP, so that we didn't get confused with the Paatti from Pattamadai.

During my early childhood years, I suppose I was like all the grandkids--we were a tad afraid of SP.  She was strict. We dared not to go anywhere near the storeroom and grab the delightful snacks from there.  Not that she ever yelled; come to think of, I don't remember even once SP yelling at any of us.  But, she knew how to control the running-around-crazies that we were when on our school vacations. 

As we both grew older, I was able to talk with grandmother in my semi-adult status.  It was during those years that I understood how much she was alive with the memories of her husband--my grandfather--who died when I was barely four years old.  To grandmother, there was no better gent that ever walked on this planet than this man to whom she got married when she was about fourteen. 

Grandfather, who was about five years older, died when he was 51, which left grandmother living a much less enjoyable life of a brahiminical widow for the rest of her 25 years.

My breaks during the college days, and then when I was loafing around after completing my undergraduate studies, were then all about chatting up old stories with Paatti, and my great-aunt.  (More on her later.)  While playing "thaaya-kattam" and eating murukku, it was a pleasure to listen to these two women tell stories from their pasts. 

I left for the US in 1987. 

Grandmother's health conditions forced her to come live with my parents. The years that I went to India, I could see the rapidity of the decline.

I was in the US when she passed away. 

I suppose we could say her death was romantic. 

She had been ill for a while, and was not quite able to take care of herself--mom attended to her daily needs during the last few months of grandma's life.

It was grandfather's death anniversary, for which the traditional rituals were performed.  That day, apparently grandmother was full of life.  She was up on her bed. Chatting. And even suddenly regained her appetite.  And asked for more of her favorite foods.  A couple of hours later, she was convinced that her husband was calling her to join him. 

And she died.

That is how it happened--grandmother, who was absolutely devoted to her husband, died on the anniversary of her beloved husband's death. 

Happy Anniversary. And, 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 gaining American citizenship, the Fourth of July is, of course, way too special for me. 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 emotion 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. The 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 at, or close to, the places where they were born and raised. Now, we move from state to state in this country, and with relatively little effort we 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 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.

It was not because the job did not pay enough--the offer was apparently a phenomenal one. But, his mother, who was deeply rooted in traditions, threatened to commit suicide if he went too far away from her!

Ah, mothers, without whom psychiatrists will be jobless :)

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, I travelled half way around the world, in order to be here in the US.

In my case, my mother cheered me on.

In an interesting irony, I left India on its independence day--August 15th.  So, I now have an addition to the family joke: I gained my independence the very day in 1987 when Indians were celebrating the anniversary of self-rule and the end of the British Raj :)

And America has been home since the day I landed in Los Angeles.


Happy Birthday, America!