You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion

Carefully look at the person in this photograph:

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Is he:
a. Saudi?
b. Iraqi?
c. Indian?
d. Persian?
e. Afghan?
f. Italian?

Could be any one of those, right?

Now, consider the following photo of the same person without the beard:

Source

Is he:
a. Saudi?
b. Iraqi?
c. Indian?
d. Persian?
e. Afghan?
f. Italian?

Not sure, eh!

Look at the two photos again.  Doesn't the one with the beard seem more like a Muslim and the clean-shaven one more like a non-Muslim?

Doesn't the guy portrayed in the photo below look like a Muslim?

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Yep, that is the point.

The first two photos are of the same person--Amit Majmudar.  I have blogged about him before.

So, why do I blog about Majmudar and his photos with and without a beard?

Here's why:

Especially as a guy with a #beard, and being from the Subcontinent, I loved Amit #Majmudar's poem in @NewYorkerhttps://t.co/qt3TYnsg0G

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) July 4, 2017

Read that poem at the source that I have linked to.  Better yet, listen to Majmudar read that poem.

Oh, in case you are waiting for the correct answer to the multiple-choice question, yes, Majmudar is an American.  Ok, yes, an Indian-American.

In my previous post, I wrote:

Amit Majmudar is yet another Indian-American who makes me feel like I am nothing but a blabbering idiot who does nothing. Majmudar is a radiologist, novelist, poet, and writes commentaries. And, yes, he is a family man. Seriously, isn't that supposed to be four different people? And, oh, he is yet to turn forty! I hate such people who make a good-for-nothing out of me!!! ;)

Majmudar has more to say about his dual career life:

 Majmudar, whose poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2007 and periodicals like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, won the 2011 Donald Justice Prize. Majmudar was amused when asked to explain why many Indian-American doctors are also writers, prominent examples being Abraham Verghese, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Atul Gawande. “I don’t know why that is,” he said, “except if you look at the Indians who came over in the sixties and seventies many were doctors like my parents. Medicine is the Majmudar family profession. My sister and I are also doctors. Going forward, I don’t think we will see this split. If someone is interested in writing, he will go into writing, and that will be the end of it.”

May a million writers--bearded or not--bloom!

ps: the title of this post is a G.K. Chesterton quote.

An Arab in the plane is the new Black on the sidewalk

In three years, in 2019, we will mark a very dark anniversary--four hundred years since the first Africans were sold as slaves in Virginia.  Between the old country's caste system and its untouchables, and slavery and African-Americans here in the adopted home country, I feel like I always carry an unbearable burden of the sins of the past.

I have no idea how a young black man makes peace with how his life has been screwed up forever thanks to this history.  It is beyond my wildest imagination.  Which is all the more why I am blown away by Martin Luther King's commitment to non-violence in the struggle for civil rights.

It took me a few years of living in this country to understand the deep effects that slavery and white supremacy have had on everyday life.  I am continuing to understand my own deep-seated biases as well, and am trying my best to rid myself of those.  The earliest learning experience was in graduate school when the friends from Nigeria and Ghana laughingly observed how people switched to the other side of the road in order to avoid walking up to them on the sidewalk.  Kayode and Seth laughed about it because they had a great sense of humor.  But, I suppose other than laughing about it what else could they have done anyway!

Now, we have added one more category to such awful behavior: An Arab, or anybody who even looks Arabic while on a plane is now viewed with suspicion.  But, unlike the sidewalks where people crossed the street, racists cannot get down and climb into a different plane.  Which is why things like this happen:

A college student who came to the United States as an Iraqi refugee was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight in California earlier this month after another passenger became alarmed when she heard him speaking Arabic.

That was a month ago.

The student, Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, was taken off a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to Oakland on April 6 after he called an uncle in Baghdad to tell him about an event he attended that included a speech by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
“I was very excited about the event so I called my uncle to tell him about it,” he said.

It turns out that one does not even have to speak Arabic.  One does not even have to wear a jubba for a fellow passenger to get all worked up.  You are a danger if you even look like this:

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Who is he?

Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

So, if he was not speaking Arabic, or wearing a jubba , then what happened for him to be forced off the plane?  His seatmate, who was "a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag" "had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something":

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

And what exactly was Menzio scribbling?  Math!  "A differential equation, to be exact."

After reading the news report, I tweeted:

Rising #xenophobia in the US, thanks to #Trump :(#Economist ethnically profiled on American Airlines flighthttps://t.co/wAzfYAlXW1 #Menzio

— sriram khe (@congoboy) May 7, 2016

The trolls showed up right away.  Such is life in these United States, which will only get more awful if the fascist gets elected in November!  I shudder thinking that it could be President Donald Trump addressing the nation in 2019, marking the tragic anniversary!

When a man sees a woman ...

As I look back at my angst-filled teenage years from the comfortable distance of my middle age, I can see that sex was one of the greatest sources of angst.  Sex seemed to be everywhere, and yet there were structures in place to make sure that there would be no outlet for those basic instincts.  I would think that even in contemporary India a typical young male (I can only speak for my heterosexual kind) can relate to all that, and even to this essay on "The Sexual Misery of the Arab World":

Today sex is a great paradox in many countries of the Arab world: One acts as though it doesn’t exist, and yet it determines everything that’s unspoken. Denied, it weighs on the mind by its very concealment.

That paradox generates a great deal of tensions, within the body and out in society.  The following that the writer has to say about the Arab World could easily describe India too:

Desire has no outlet, no outcome; the couple is no longer a space of intimacy, but a concern of the whole group. The sexual misery that results can descend into absurdity and hysteria. Here, too, one hopes to experience love, but the mechanisms of love — encounters, seduction, flirting — are prevented

A few years ago, when visiting Chennai, I was shocked to read news reports about the police arresting young people holding hands and attempting to kiss at one of the public parks.  Seriously, the cops had nothing better to do?

A white woman friend and her white husband (I am intentionally stressing on the "white") from this town are big time Indophiles and, over the years, have visited India seven or eight times, spending three to four months during each visit.  The woman is more than a decade older than me.  She once joked that in India, the young men hit on her too.  Well, there is a reason.

In trying to understand the reason, consider what happened in Cologne, Germany on New Year's Eve:

That night, gangs of young men, mainly asylum-seekers, formed rings around women outside Cologne station and then robbed and sexually assaulted them. More than 600 women reported to the police that they had been victimised.

Young men, from the Arab world.

Migrants are no more likely to commit crimes than natives. But it would be otherworldly to pretend that there is no tension between the attitudes of some and their hosts. European women cherish their rights to wear what they like, go where they like and have sex or not have sex with whom they please. No one should be allowed to infringe these freedoms.

Cologne did not simply happen, nor was the local white woman friend accidentally hit on.  How do we begin to explain that?

with the latest influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe.

A pathological relationship with the female kind!

I have a difficult time in a class on diversity that I teach every year--I have to make sure that students think about issues from multiple perspectives without giving away my own opinions on such matters.  Thus, of course, in the class my task is only to force them to think about how they would begin to understand the differences across the culture--even when I know well that I believe it is not kosher to treat women as property, which is the case in the traditional societies be they Islamic or Hindu.  Unless that pathological issue is addressed,"The path to orgasm runs through death, not love."

Let them eat cakes!

It appears that Kim Davis has exhausted her fifteen Andy Warhol minutes.  She might be gone from our news radars, but the struggle between faith-based personal values versus the larger collective, social policies will continue on for a very long time.

Here in the US, we might struggle through the issues, yes.  As that cigar-chomping English racist remarked, Americans will always do the right thing, only after we have tried everything else.  Makes me wonder why we always have to take the long, long, long road to do the right thing.

But, at least here we end up doing the right thing.  I increasingly worry that the trend in the old country is one of doing the wrong things.  Today's exhibit:  vegetarianism.

Of course, this is not the first time that I am blogging about the vegetarian existence.  But, here is an important distinction to keep in mind: I don't make an "ism" out of a preferred way of life.  The moment an "ism" is framed, it immediately leads to an us-versus-them, which is what is rapidly unfolding in India.

The problem is that when vegetarianism—and what you eat in general—is associated with morality, it serves to strengthen distinctions, marking class, education and other indicators of status.

Any holier-than-thou approach, especially in the political space, is bound to be disastrous.

In a national landscape moving towards a narrow definition of what it means to be Indian—specifically, Hindu and high caste, and specifically not Muslim—such distinctions have potentially serious consequences.

Ah, yes, the caste issue comes up again.  The religion issue comes up again.  And you thought food is an easy topic, eh!

We can already see its effects in cities such as Mumbai, where the discourse of purity and pollution around what you eat is so powerful that certain groups are denied access to the housing market on account of their dietary choices. If you belong to the “non-vegetarian” groups—including anyone from Muslims to Christians to Maharashtrians to Dalits—it can be difficult to purchase or rent an apartment. Potential buyers are turned away, presumably, because smells from their kitchen might pollute a neighbour’s flat. With vegetarianism used as a distinguisher between “us” and “them”, Mumbai is becoming an increasingly hostile place for religious minorities.

The struggle will not be resolved anytime soon in the old country.  Nor here in the US.  When individuals claim that their "faith" prevents them from supporting a commercial transaction, societies will have quite a struggle trying to resolve the incompatibility between a secular political democracy with those faith-based practices.  Here in the US, chances are high that the food fight will end up in the Supreme Court.  Remember the bakery here in Oregon that refused service to a same-sex couple?  The baker in Colorado?

The ACLU (yes, I am a card-carrying member) argues:

There’s a growing body of court decisions saying that while religion is central to what makes America America, religion can’t be used as an excuse to discriminate

The other side argues:

Government has a duty to protect people’s freedom to follow their beliefs personally and professionally rather than force them to adopt the government’s views

Here it is cakes.  There it is meat.  All I know is this: we Americans will always do the right thing, only after we have tried everything else.  I can't say that about the old country, however.

"What's in a name?" Try Denali and Aurangazeb!

"What's in a name?" wrote the Bard.  If he were around now, perhaps he will sue me for abusing it in this post about controversies over names--one in the old country and another here at home.

As always, the Indian story is complex.  Is anything ever simple back there? ;)  Therefore, the local story first:

President Obama will announce Monday that his administration is officially redesignating Alaska's Mt. McKinley as Denali, the original name for the 20,237-foot-high mountain given by the area's Alaskan native population.

As always, the feds are the last one to the party though.

The state of Alaska changed the mountain’s name to Denali, the native Koyukon Athabascan word for “The Great One” or “The High One,” in 1975. But the federal government retained McKinley’s moniker.

The mountain is in Alaska, and Alaskans had changed the name to Denali forty years ago.  So, did the word get to DC by Pony Express only yesterday?

Ohio's congressional delegation, among others, has opposed removing the name of McKinley, who had been an Ohio governor.

Excuse me, oh master storyteller, you ready to change your "what's in a name?" line? ;)

Giving a name for geographic feature, or renaming it, is always a political act.  Remember the controversy about the Persian Gulf/Arabian Gulf?  In this case, McKinley was the President from Ohio, which is why Ohioans protest the change:

Ohio Rep. Bob Gibbs, a fellow Republican who has introduced a House bill aimed at retaining McKinley’s name on the peak, could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday.
Gibbs’ measure would prevent the U.S. Board on Geographic Names from considering Alaska's attempts to change the mountain's name under a policy that says no landmark titles can be considered if related legislation is pending before Congress.
Ohio representatives file such a bill every two years to essentially stymie Alaska's efforts.

That is a simple story, compared to the one from India, where Aurangazeb Road in Delhi has been renamed after a former president, Abdul Kalam.

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That is one heck of a political complication.  Why?  Was Aurangazeb any beloved guy?

Aurangzeb was a despot.

Can we have some examples, please?

He not only imprisoned his ailing father, the Fifth Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, but had all three of his brothers—the heir-apparent Dara Shukoh, Shah Shuja and Murad, murdered. ‘Murdered’ is to put it mildly.
Both confident and insecure, Aurangzeb then went on to ensure his hegemony as the Sixth Emperor by having Dara’s son Sulaiman, imprisoned and poisoned in a slow and tortuous procedure that made the future Crown Prince mad before death claimed him.
He also set an example to all dissenters by having the free-thinking mystic Sarmad beheaded at the Jama Masjid, Delhi, for blasphemy, the Sikh Guru Teg Bahadur executed for objecting to conversions and the leader of the Maratha Confederacy, Sambhaji, caught and killed for just being what he was.

By now, I have perhaps lost the couple of American readers who were struggling through the names! ;)

So, if he was a despot, then changing the road name to that of the beloved former president is a good thing, right?

Re-naming roads is about the most immature and least convincing sign of authority. It is invariably the accoutrement of new power.

Denali was the original name that is now being restored. Was Aurangazeb Road, similarly, the original name?  Of course not; it was from the time when the British Raj opted for Delhi as its capital and designed buildings and roads that would be imperial enough.  Does it mean that the political act is to erase that British Raj's evil designs?  Nope. It is a political act by the ever scheming Hindu nationalist party that figured out a way to delete Aurangazeb, put Muslims in a corner by naming it after the popular former president, and make the Hindu fanatics happy.  A political trifecta:

The Muslims cannot object. How can they ? If they do they would be both un-faithful and un-patriotic. The Hindus will never object. And after a while all will be using A P J Abdul Kalam Marg as if the road has always been named after that honest son of Rameshwaram. How utterly clever!

One final question: what is the urgency to delete Aurangazeb anyway?  It goes back to the populist one-thousand-year slavery rhetoric that Modi and his Hindu nationalist party spew.  Perhaps you are shocked about 1,000 years as a slave nation, right?

The conventional view is that it lasted 200 years—those of British raj. So where did the remaining 1,000 years come from? Clearly, Modi was propounding what Mridula Mukherjee, former professor of modern Indian history at JNU, described as the “standard Hindu communal view of history”, which regards the period of Muslim rule also as a period of slavery.

 So, we will kick the ball back to Shakespeare.  "What's in a name?"  ;)

Aurangazeb's tomb
I was there more than three years ago