No Exit

It was a good spring day to drive with the windows down.  Cloudy, no bright sunlight, and with a Goldilocks temperature that was just right.

It was only a short drive to the grocery store but the perfect conditions made me want to keep on driving.  A younger me would have done that, I am sure.  Now, the older I get the more boring I am becoming as if that were even possible.

Turning left into the grocery store parking lot, I was welcomed with a "hello" by four who were on the sidewalk.  A man was standing with a sign board, and by him a woman and two children were seated on portable chairs.  I assumed they were a family.

I nodded my head as I drove on to a parking spot.

The news reports are very clear that the economy is humming along, which itself is reason for inflation, and unemployment is remarkably low.  Yet, here was a family that was hoping that shoppers would help them out with a few dollars.

I walked around the aisles and collected everything that was on my list.  I chuckled when I saw a pile of fresh spinach because I was reminded of this New Yorker cartoon:

At the checkout counter, as I started placing the groceries on the belt, I heard the cashier--a young woman--tell the older woman who was ahead of me, "I love your hummingbird earring."

I don't understand why some cashiers think it is a responsibility to comment something like that or say something other than a "hi" to each and every customer.  I steeled myself for whatever she might say in order to engage me in a meaningless small talk.

"How's your day going so far?" she asked me when it was my turn.

Phew!

"Can't complain."

I actually meant it.  In the grand scheme of things, there is not much for me to complain about.  I just passed a family of four peddling for dollars!

"Yeah, I know what you mean.  Often it is just wasted breath."

"And nothing is going to change anyway."

"True that."

When did this expression "true that" become mainstream?  I hear it everywhere, and from people across the age spectrum.  What is wrong with saying "so true" or "exactly"?

She rang up the total. I paid. I was glad to move along before she said something else.

I decided that I would take a different exit in order to avoid the sidewalk family.  It is my problem, not theirs.  It has been a lifelong struggle of being unable to reconcile my privilege with the visibly under-privileged.  As a kid, when we traveled, I couldn't even enjoy a candy if a beggar-child was right across from me.  Nor could I turn away and have my candy.  It seemed a sin to drive past them with all the groceries that I bought and with the money in the bank.

I took the other exit out to the street.

It was yet another lesson in life that denial would not work.  A young woman was in a wheelchair on the sidewalk by that exit.  It seemed like the lower part of one leg was an artificial one.  She too had a small hand-made sign.

Thankfully, there was no traffic and I didn't have to stop right by her.

As an individual, I cannot do anything to address such problems.  I pay taxes and donate to charitable organizations with the hope that government agencies and social institutions will address our collective problems.  But, we have a federal government that is keen on cutting taxes for the rich and spending a good chunk of the tax revenue on the military.  Who then takes care of my brothers and sisters on the streets?

I can complain about these, and I have been doing so for years.  Nothing has changed.  Wait, things have changed--for the worse!

Saare Jahan Se Achcha

In the civics portion of the curriculum, back when I was in grade VIII or IX (I think we used that number system, much like how the Super Bowl years are numbered) or sometime then, the textbook presented a wonderful portrait of a secular India.  A secular and peaceful country despite the gazillion religions and the tensions between them.  I felt good about my country.  Saare Jahan Se Achcha, I too mouthed whenever I heard the song even though I knew very little Hindi.  (It translates to: Best among the entire world.)

It was a convenient narrative that overlooked one important detail: It was not the reality.

Yes, it was a land of a gazillion religions.  While they were all equal, one was more equal than the rest put together.  And for a while I was proud to be part of the dominant group.  I write that off as the kind of mistakes that we make when we are young.  What is youth for if we cannot make mistakes and learn from them?

Decades have gone by since the civics class that was taught by Mr. Venkatesan, whose approach to teaching the social sciences completely washed away my intellectual curiosity about those topics, which I then came back to on my own after the undergraduate engineering program.

Every visit to India, I worry that most interactions among 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 along religious lines too.  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. 

It boggles my mind that all through my life in India I had never been inside a Muslim home.  How could that be possible unless society was such that one could live a life in a bubble without ever socially interacting with the other.

The secular facade was shattered when the country elected to power a Hindu nationalist party.  Over the recent decade, every day I have been witnessing from the other side of the planet the old country becoming overtly Hindu majoritarian that bullies the minority religions.  In the latest installment (and with no end in sight, I fear), the governing party's national spokesperson participated in a television news program and dissed Prophet Muhammad.  This was a shot that was heard all around the Islamic world. 

Writing about this unfolding crisis, Rana Ayub, an Indian journalist who has made plenty of enemies by critiquing the Hindu majoritarian politics, notes the deafening silence from India's Prime Minister even as the country rapidly descends into hate.  Ayub writes:

The world has long viewed India as a nation that has been the melting pot of cultures, religions and customs; a leading light in fighting tyranny and oppression; and a leader on discourse around secular and plural values. India under Modi, however, is coming across as a petty, vindictive nation that seeks pleasure in humiliating the oppressed and the less privileged. 

The land of Mahatma Gandhi, Abul Kalam Azad and Rabindranath Tagore is being reduced to a caricature of hate on the global stage.

I worry that the idea of "India as a nation that has been the melting pot of cultures, religions and customs" was always false and what we are witnessing now is the real India.  Saare Jahan Se Achcha it is not.

The beauty in assimilation

I took a long break from reading full-length fiction.  Well, other than the summer time reading, that is.  Factual reportage and analysis triumphed over my interests in fiction in the world of teaching and learning in which I was fully involved.  Now, when I have returned to reading fiction, I am blown away with the tremendous transformation in the authors who tell fascinating stories about the human condition.

(At this point, regular readers need no reminders about Orhan Pamuk's observation. Should they or the occasional wanderer to this blog be reminded about what Pamuk said, click here.)

Sanjena Sathian's Gold Diggers is the latest addition to my list.  Yet another female writer.  Yet another non-white.  Yet another story about brown people.  Yet another book that delves deep into race in America.

I suppose this was bound to happen.  Soon after passing the historic voting rights legislation, the US Congress voted in 1965 to reform the country's immigration law.  Brown people were no longer excluded and were now allowed to immigrate.  Though, at the time the legislation was passed, neither President Johnson nor the law's architects imagined that people would line up to come to America from far away countries in Asia and Africa.  But, come we did by the millions.

The parents--the immigrants--worked hard so that their children and grandchildren could do what makes them happy in life.  If writing books is what made the later generations happy, instead of becoming doctors and scientists as their immigrant parents were, then so be it.  This is not a new American concept.  John Adams wrote about this in 1780 in one of his letters to his wife, Abigail:

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History and Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. 

John Adams wished that his grandchildren ought to be able to pursue painting and poetry if that is what they wanted to do.  The American dream is less about owning a home with white picket fences, and more about providing opportunities for the next generation for them to be whatever they want to be--a writer, a poet, a scientist, a programmer, whatever!

The children of the early immigrants since 1965 are grown up.  Some of them have ventured into politics too--some have done that by changing their names and identities under a false notion that coming across as white is better than being an Indian-American.  Some have become comedians and comedic actors.  Some have gotten into the world of writing.  It is no surprise that brown Americans of various backgrounds are telling remarkable stories of brown people in America.

The stories of brown people in America are invariably statements on how we have moved from the fringes towards the center.  From being invisible to becoming visible to becoming like anybody else.  While Gold Diggers and Last Night at the Telegraph Club are about different kinds of non-white Americans, set in different geographies, with the stories unfolding in different time periods, I was struck by this: Beauty pageants feature in both.  Miss Chinatown.  Miss India USA.  The contestants are not merely presenting themselves as beautiful girls and women, but--and this is key--they make statements on what it means to be Chinese and American, what it means to be Indian and American.

The academic in me hasn't died despite having been forced off the campus.  I wanted to know more about these ethnic pageants.  The internet delivers through this Washington Post report from 2005:

The contests, which are growing in popularity even as traditional beauty contests are losing their allure, are patterned after the Miss America pageant, yet include colorful twists that recall tradition. Young, often brainy contestants wear an Ethiopian Absha Kamise or similar culture-specific outfits that their mothers and great-grandmothers would have worn.

At immigrant pageants, beauty has a browner, more worldly tinge. Noses are wider and eyes are a gooey chocolate brown, framed in various almond-like contours. Hips sway more in talent segments, such as an adaptation of a Bollywood performance at Miss India or a belly dance at Miss Liberia.

And this:

But the pageants also bring intense debates within these ethnic communities -- discussions that reflect the age-old split among immigrants over assimilation and retaining cultural mores.

How much and how well do we assimilate?  What from the old country do, should, we retain? 

Every immigrant family, every immigrant group has lived through these challenging questions of identity.  While I didn't contest in beauty pageants--you're welcome--these questions have always nagged me.  Straddling two completely different worlds is not an easy task.  I know that these questions will not go away either.  As challenging as it is, I don't think it is a problem.  It is a wonderful opportunity that I have to create an identity for myself as opposed to living a life that was dictated by the accident of birth to a couple in one part of the world.  There is beauty in such a life.

"Miss India Florida".  Source