My dear students, friends and colleagues,
Trains form my earliest memories, since I was a child of four in 1955. Our mother used to say she felt we were ‘born on railway trains or platforms’! Our father was a railway man, all his working life. So, I spontaneously think of Life itself as a train journey.
Now, I see myself standing at railway gate No.60. Can you see me, waving at you?
This “60” piece has five starting points:
1. My auto-biographical sketch: “Along the line, at railway gate No. 58” on this blog.
2. My catching-up piece, “This is me, Joe Pinto, since 1967”, written as I was preparing for the 11-1-11 re-union of my Class of 1967 school-mates from the St Mary’s (SSC) High School, Mazagaon, Mumbai. (Read this piece on my source-blog, “Journey Unbegun”.)
3. The memoir of my mother, “Lessons my mother learned me”, in five parts on this blog.
(Read all five parts as one piece on “Journey Unbegun”
4. Addressing various issues, raised from time to time, by my students, in posts like “Rules of the Road” and other pieces, on this blog.
5. A birthday gift to one of my sincerest students, Gunjan Chaurasia, “When I was 27”. (Read the original piece here on “Journey Unbegun”.)
*****
"A man's memory is his own private literature." – Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Looking back at my journey, how do I see myself, as I stand at railway gate No.60? This is how one of my caring gurus, Dr Devendra Agochiya, sums me up: “A journalist by profession, and a trainer by choice.” Also see my 5 Ws and 1 H, on the margins of this blog.
“Along the line, at railway gate No. 58” traces my efforts to reconcile myself with aging and retirement. Today at 60, maybe I will not stop working. But I no longer want to do, what I do not like to do. I am coming to terms with work, in a radically different way.
In my “58” piece, I recalled the seven main streams of influence in my life and paid tribute to my parents, teachers, students, friends and colleagues, who helped me to discover who I am.
Their single-most important contribution was to help me be myself:
- comfortable in my own skin;
- a one-eyed Joe, with my spectacles on my nose from the age of eight;
- with words as my friends and books as my lovers;
- walking ‘the road less travelled’ with a jhola on my shoulder; and
- placing people before profits and man (woman) before markets.
“To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance” – Oscar Wilde.
They learned me to love myself; love all the peoples of the world; make all the children of our world become my own children; love and care for my students passionately; be at peace with myself. They told me that I deserve to be myself; that I am the only beautiful person I fully own; so, I should not want or need to be someone else, no matter how desirable or successful.
*****
I can arrange my 60 years into nine periods:
1. 1951-61 My ‘lost childhood’: roaming like a gypsy, passing through railways
stations: Amla, Jabalpur, Nagpur, Solapur, Manmad.
2. 1961-71 In Mumbai: at school and college.
3. 1971-82 A break from my studies; living out of a jhola, a full-timer with
various NGOs in Village Maharashtra and Mumbai slums.
4. 1982-90 In Pune: married; working with Maharashtra Herald (MH);
start teaching in 1987 at University of Pune; in 1990 at SIMC.
5. 1990-93 Accompanying wife to Leeds, England, to take care of my 3 year-old daughter, while she did her PhD.
6. 1993-96 Working with a much-weakened MH; resign from MH.
7. 1996-2003 Setting up and working with the Corp Comm Dept at a private
company in Pune and editing ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara (MSMT)’.
8. 2003-04 Editor of Gomantak Times, Panaji, Goa.
9. 2004 >> In Pune: training at BJS since 2005; teaching at journalism courses.
Of my ‘lost childhood’ days (1951-61), my three years at the railway junction of Manmad (1958-61) were the most wonderful. What would I give for all the money in the world? A chance to meet my lost school-mates … when I was little in Manmad. I shall devote 10-15 posts to these three memorable years.
The first 10 years of my ‘lost childhood’ in the railway towns on the Central Railway and my 13 years, working at the Desk in Maharashtra Herald, Pune, have one word in common: ‘small’.
These two ‘small’ periods of my life have shaped my world-view: of the small as beautiful (but the big as ugly); the slow as steady (but the fast as fatal); the low as good (but the high as vulgar); the hot as Heaven (but the cold as Hell) and so on and so forth.
*****
I recall I left Manmad, for Mumbai, when they were building the bridge across the railway track; and just after Rexy, our beloved dog, had been mistakenly poisoned, despite having a legal dog collar.
Boarding school in St. Stanislaus, Bandra, during 1961-63 in standards VI-VII, was bleak. I have written about those lonely two years in the book, based on the five-part memoir of my mother on this blog.
The saving grace? For the first time, a teacher took over my life and longing and revealed to me the secret and magic world of words and books. This was Ms. Philomena D’Souza (nee Valladares), my English teacher. Where have all my great Goan gurus gone? Remind me to devote an entire future post to how I searched her out over 40 years and found her, and what she means to me -- today.
Boarding was also my initiation into football (as a right-outer) and hockey (as a left-outer, who could reverse-flick the ball to the top of the ‘D’) and to Don Camilo, the Catholic priest during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. (Later, I would add George Orwell, Christopher Caudwell and Martha Gellhorn to that red list.) The 1962 war with China appeared as “clippings” on the St Stanislaus notice-board.
Here in the boarding, in a big city school, a boy from ‘small’ places faced the big world of competition – marks and ranks – and came out right on top. (But this topper was not to last out long. By 1970, I had decided that the “rat race” was not for me.)
*****
I joined St Mary’s (SSC), Mazagaon, during 1963-67 in Stds 8 to 11. Here my love for English was nurtured as well as my interest in science and mathematics was aroused. I passed out in 1967, winning the Esso Prize as the best all-rounder.
I got my first pair of long pants to wear at the prize distribution ceremony and Vullu Uncle, one of my father’s cousins, who worked at Riyadh in Saudi Arabia during the 1960s, gave me my first wrist-watch, a Swiss Sowar Prima, as a present.
I finished my B.Sc. with Chemistry from St Xavier's College in October 1971. In December, the war broke out with Pakistan, resulting in the formation of Bangladesh.
By the end of my second period – in Mumbai, at school and college – I had won a National Science Talent scholarship and was on my way to a ‘promising’ career. But I had decided, on ideological grounds, that the competitive “rat race” was NOT for me.
My mother, who had always urged me to compete with myself, died in 1969. Looking back, I feel I took her death seriously and in a sub-conscious way decided to implement what she had been exhorting me to do. I am still coming to terms with my grief at her sudden death.
I have not had a single reason or occasion to regret the decision to drop out of the rat race. On the contrary, seeing the destitution of the poor caused by liberalisation, privatisation and globalization (LPG), I have felt re-assured that I was correct.
Today, I prefer to compete only with myself. So cooperation, team-work and peace pervades my work and teaching. I appeal to my students, friends and colleagues to stand against this tide and shun the greed, which is being encouraged both by government sell-outs and corporate profligacy.
“The world is too much with us.
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.”
- William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
*****
Then, I took a break from my studies.
From 1973 to 1983, I worked as a full-time volunteer in Maharashtra with:
1. a rural development agency in some drought-prone villages (1973-77)
2. a science popularisation organisation (1978-83)
3. a trade union and a slum-dwellers organisation (1977-83).
This was the mass-activist period of my life, when many new things were revealed to me for the first time, bringing me close to the pain and sufferings of the common people, enabling me to look at life the way they did – sharing with compassion.
“Living is easy, with eyes closed.
Misunderstanding, everything you see.” – The Beatles.
During this period I learned the meaning of Gandhi’s talisman, one of the last notes left behind by him in 1948, expressing his deepest social thought:
"I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."
- Source: Mahatma Gandhi [Last Phase, Vol. II (1958), P. 65].
The remaining part of this “60” piece is in the present tense, like in a diary or a letter, written as if I am telling my story, till 1978, to one of my sincerest students: “When I was 27 – a report to Gunjan”. I know that writing thus, is an illusion. For, I have the advantage of hindsight. I was not a journalist then; I entered mainstream journalism in 1983.
“We give but little, when we give of our possessions.
It is when we give of ourselves, that we truly give.”
- Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)
*****************************
I am 27 today, 5 March 1978.
The mynahs and sparrows are chirping under my window. The sun tries to warm me, but my heart is still as cold as the body of my mother, who died nine years ago in 1969.
The Emergency that began in June 1975 ended last year, but even now terrible stories are surfacing of political prisoners, who were brutally tortured by terrorists like Sanjay Gandhi and his goons, under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). Some of them are my dear friends.
We too have suffered our share of miseries. The local leaders in Kasarpimpalgaon (taluka Pathardi, district Ahmednagar, Maharashtra), where we were doing drought relief work since 1973, got emboldened by the terror, unleashed during the Emergency. If it was not for a kind IAS officer, who tipped us off in time, we would have been also arrested.
So our adult literacy work is in a shambles, and abandoned. I can only console myself reading "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and "Cultural Action for Freedom" by Paolo Friere, whose 'conscientisation' methodology we used in our classes. "Liberation theology" is a new subject for me now.
*****
Let me tell you a little bit about Vistas, the group we formed in 1973, to work in the villages, after we had passed out of St Xavier's College. We were nine or ten young people in our early 20s. As for me, I used to wear flowers in my hair, which I grew to my shoulders, inspired by the protest song, "When you're in San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair."
I failed in explaining to my father and help him to understand why his brilliant son, a first ranker, and a National Science Talent Scholar, one of only 350 from India in 1969, had chosen to drop out after finishing his B.Sc, and did not continue further studies like his classmates, especially his best friend, Spenta Wadia.
The drought of 1970-71 was one of the severest in the history of Maharashtra. Having stayed in a village for four years, I would not hesitate to call it a 'famine'.
Initially, we started with drought relief work, with 'Food for Work' programs, with maize, wheat and milk powder being provided by international funding agencies like Caritas, Casa, Lutheran World Relief, etc. Then we started supplying seeds and fertilisers through Afarm and Afpro. Later we worked with Oxfam on adult literacy and organising youth.
I was mainly inspired by the writings of John Holt, Ivan Illich, Frantz Fanon, Jean Paul Sartre, Will & Ariel Durant, Paolo Friere, etc. I was already influenced by Vatican II and Pope John XXIII, who spoke about Christians standing up for justice and peace as well as the liberation of the poor and the oppressed.
Among the many books that I took with me to the villages was a copy of the Communist Manifesto. But I only remember reading it for its excellent English and vivid description of bourgeois life; the social and revolutionary content having little impact on me.
We read the feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer. (Note: none of them burnt bras, a myth of the demonic media machine)
The songs of protest by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, moved us.
The names of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were on our trembling lips. With the Beatles, we believed in: "Can't Buy Me Love." We took the slogan "Make Love, Not War" to our hearts and minds.
I was learning to speak Marathi from the illiterate natives, even as I taught them to read and write their mother-tongue.
When we formed Vistas in 1973, I was 22. The world was young and, for me, anything was possible. Still is, Gunjan. I was not afraid to stop my studies and go to the villages, where the poor lived. By now, I had decided, on ideological grounds, to get out of the rat race. A topper for years, I discarded competition and its connotation of war, welcoming cooperation among humans as the foundation of peace.
*****
The proclamation of the Emergency in June 1975 by Sonia Gandhi's mother-in-law, the dreadful Indira Gandhi, came as a shock to me. (In 1968, my first year of college, I had been thrilled by her nationalisation of banks and challenge to decaying Congress values.)
I remember we had taken the morning train from Bombay to Pune. When we reached Pune and saw the newspapers, some of them had blank patches on the front pages. The courageous editors left the columns blank, when the government censors objected. The name of Jayprakash Narayan was like a magic mantra.
Today in 1978, I am 27 and disillusioned. I went hopeful to the villages in 1973. Our raw idealism collapsed in the face of the brutal assault by Sanjay Gandhi. We realised we were soft boys and girls, pampered and spoiled in the cities. Within 20 months, the Emergency (June 1975 – January 1977) made us men and women.
Now my first taste of direct resistance and protest on the streets is in the form of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR). I am working to set up a Centre for Education and Documentation (CED), which will set up a library of clippings for use by activists and journalists.
Three friends become journalists: Ivan Fera, Ayesha Kagal and Chaitanya Kalbag.
Yes, I am disillusioned, Gunjan. But I have not given up and succumbed to the temptations of a comfortable job. I am brave. I struggle and learn.
********************************
“We are all in the gutter.
But some of us are looking
… at the stars.”
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).
This first part of my “60” piece brings my story up to 1978, when I am 27. Let me outline the rest of my story, in brief, to be taken up in detail, as and when time permits.
After 1978, I joined trade union work and organising slum dwellers in Bhandup, Mumbai. Then, we formed the Lok Vidnyan Sanghatana for taking science to the people in 1980.
I got married to a Pune girl, Kalpana Joshi, on 26 January 1982. In the ardour of passion, I promised her, not the moon, but that I would stop smoking the day after we got married. She reminded me of my promise, and I stopped smoking. So this, inadvertently, became a wedding present to my wife.
Our only child and lovely daughter of our life, Pallavi, was born on 23 October 1987. Till her arrival, my late mother came first in my life, and my wife came second. Today, my daughter is at No. 1 position.
The mothers of my friends pass away, carrying away my long-lost mother into the history-books she loved so much.
*****
Meanwhile, full-time journalism had started in 1983. I started teaching journalism at the University of Pune in 1987, and at the Symbiosis Institute of Journalism and Communication (SIJC), now SIMC, in 1990.
Since 1983 to 1996, I worked with Maharashtra Herald, the one and only local English daily in Pune. I have begun a 20-part series on “the old MH” as a tribute to that most valiant of Indian local papers, sustained by the blood, sweat, toil and tears of working journalists.
During 1990-93, we were in Leeds, England, where my wife did her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. I took three years leave without pay, to take care of our daughter, who was three years old then.
After 13 years in Maharashtra Herald, Pune, I left in 1996 and joined to set up the Corporate Communication Dept at Deepak Fertilisers. So, though I disliked it, I did internal PR for seven years. No choice: just a job. My only joyful consolation during those years is “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara (MSMT)”, a unique internal newsletter.
The date 2 September 2006, when I suffered a heart attack, I recall as the day I got a second chance.
Since 2005, I have been also doing some unusual work – designing, developing and delivering training programs – at Bharatiya Jain Sanghatana, founded by the pioneering Shantilal Muttha.
I continue to teach print journalism. But I am winding up my lectures and concentrating on writing: a memoir on my mother; a text-book on editing; survivor drafts of my cold & wet days in Leeds; and other scraps.
*****
When I went off my blog "to restore myself" I thought I would be back in three months. But it has taken me 19 months to come back. Not because it took me 19 months to restore myself, but because only the way, I developed other ways of keeping in touch with my sincerest students.
But the blog kept beckoning. And its charms, like a personal dairy, can only be appreciated by those who have roamed the adventures that Life offers the precious, the gentle and the brave.
I have inserted five appendices, to explain the sources and starting points for this piece. This is only for those who wish to go "inside the mind" of a writer and see how a piece takes shape.
*****
I have hundreds of journalism students since I started to teach in 1987; they are scattered across the world. A few of them (and I tell them so), I cherish as “my sincere and serious students”.
But as I said at railway gate No. 58, I still “await the student, who may exceed me, who may dare to go beyond imagination, against the tide; to whom I may entrust the torch given to me by my ancestors and teachers.”
Dare I say, during the last two years, I may have had fleeting glimpses of some such adventurous students? A hundred others are striving to be my students, just as I struggle, even today, to deserve to be the student of my teachers, some long gone to dream with Hemingway’s lions.
Your support is my strength.
Peace and love,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Wednesday, 19 May 2011.
Showing posts with label resistance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label resistance. Show all posts
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Monday, November 2, 2009
Away for three months, to restore myself
My dear family, students, friends and colleagues,
You who follow my blog may have noticed that I have not been posting every Sunday, as I promised. For example, my last post was on 4 October, that is, four weeks ago.
A few of you have called or emailed to find out if I have been unwell. Thank you for your concern. I have not been posting regularly, because I have been pre-occupied with a personal assignment that takes a lot of my thinking time and energy.
Writing is strenuous. Moreover, since I expect that my own work be an example of what I preach and teach in class -– writing with nouns and verbs, NOT with adjectives and adverbs –- writing drains me.
But life in the blogosphere is even more tiring. When I started blogging on 2 October 2008, I found the Blogger software convenient. The template was easy to learn and use. And so I enjoyed myself. I still do.
But gradually, I got sucked into mediocre junk, the way children get seduced by fast food.
*****
In his 1959 revision of William Strunk’s Elements of Style, E.B. White added a Chapter V, “An Approach to Style” (with a list of 21 reminders). Reminder 9 says, “Do not affect a breezy manner.” Here, White refers to a poem, “Spontaneous me”, and argues that “in his innocence”, Walt Whitman, “let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers” with their “uninhibited prose”.
When I read newspapers today, there is so much of breeze, wind and hot air, printed on their pages! No need to comment about the fluff and hype on TV.
For me, writing and reading as well as speaking and listening are two sides of the same coin: thinking. So blogging is not only about writing “Against the Tide”, but also about reading other blogs. And that seems to have taken a severe toll of my senses.
In my early exuberance, I read all the blogs as I strolled along, the way a child grabs at any toy within its ken. But I have realised I was straying into mediocre junk.
Sadder but wiser over the last year, I have decided to halt by the wayside. And slow down for the next three months. While I restore myself – with a personal assignment.
I shall, however, respond to ALL emails and messages on facebook. And like a street rag-picker, I shall scrounge through a few of your careful blogs, searching for …??? And when the urge takes hold of me, I shall post – but rarely.
Keep in touch. Resist the tide. Take care.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, India, Monday, 2 November 2009.
You who follow my blog may have noticed that I have not been posting every Sunday, as I promised. For example, my last post was on 4 October, that is, four weeks ago.
A few of you have called or emailed to find out if I have been unwell. Thank you for your concern. I have not been posting regularly, because I have been pre-occupied with a personal assignment that takes a lot of my thinking time and energy.
Writing is strenuous. Moreover, since I expect that my own work be an example of what I preach and teach in class -– writing with nouns and verbs, NOT with adjectives and adverbs –- writing drains me.
But life in the blogosphere is even more tiring. When I started blogging on 2 October 2008, I found the Blogger software convenient. The template was easy to learn and use. And so I enjoyed myself. I still do.
But gradually, I got sucked into mediocre junk, the way children get seduced by fast food.
*****
In his 1959 revision of William Strunk’s Elements of Style, E.B. White added a Chapter V, “An Approach to Style” (with a list of 21 reminders). Reminder 9 says, “Do not affect a breezy manner.” Here, White refers to a poem, “Spontaneous me”, and argues that “in his innocence”, Walt Whitman, “let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers” with their “uninhibited prose”.
When I read newspapers today, there is so much of breeze, wind and hot air, printed on their pages! No need to comment about the fluff and hype on TV.
For me, writing and reading as well as speaking and listening are two sides of the same coin: thinking. So blogging is not only about writing “Against the Tide”, but also about reading other blogs. And that seems to have taken a severe toll of my senses.
In my early exuberance, I read all the blogs as I strolled along, the way a child grabs at any toy within its ken. But I have realised I was straying into mediocre junk.
Sadder but wiser over the last year, I have decided to halt by the wayside. And slow down for the next three months. While I restore myself – with a personal assignment.
I shall, however, respond to ALL emails and messages on facebook. And like a street rag-picker, I shall scrounge through a few of your careful blogs, searching for …??? And when the urge takes hold of me, I shall post – but rarely.
Keep in touch. Resist the tide. Take care.
Your support is my strength.
- Joe.
Pune, India, Monday, 2 November 2009.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Journey of life: rules of the road
My dear family, students, friends and colleagues,
Describing life as a journey and asserting, “The journey is its own reward” are two common ways of seeing life.
For me these two ways are true, because travelling had been an integral part of my life till the age of 31, when I got married in 1982 and, for the first time, thought of settling down – in Pune. Moving from station to station with our father, a railwayman in the Signals & Telecom Department of the Central Railway, I had become a wanderer, a gypsy.
What are the rules of the road in the journey of life? The first and foremost is: the strong and the mighty shall protect the weak and defenceless.
While at Maharashtra Herald (MH) in Pune, I had the opportunity to interview ordinary as well as extra-ordinary persons, irrespective of their standing. But one extra-ordinary man whom I recall as ordinary and common is “S.M.”. These initials belong to one of Maharashtra’s greatest political leaders of the twentieth century, the late S.M. Joshi and the initials “S.M.” stand for: “Simple Man”.
For an MH photo-feature, with pictures by one of India’s finest photo-journalists D. Sanjay, we had interviewed “S.M.” during an entire day, travelling across the city to the places that were significant in his life.
Towards the end of our interview, I asked him, “Which was the one virtue he felt he lacked in himself but admired most in others?” The simple man replied, “Karuna”, using the Marathi word for “compassion”.
Compassion, above all, is the one human quality that is, for me, at the root of the first rule of the road in the journey of life: “The strong and the mighty shall protect the weak and defenceless”.
Glorifying greed; mocking the poor
Nowadays, this rule of the road must be underlined because the global free-marketeers, like the gamblers and smugglers and thieves of yore, inspired by the politics of Thatcher and Reagan, have glorified greed and mocked the poor, in the name of freedom for the individual and the market.
And though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh speaks of “inclusive” growth, I believe that is mere lip service to win votes, while his colleague Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, executes the brutal agenda of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation; what I call LPG, the poisonous gas which will most surely destroy the weak and poor in India.
Some shocking indicators are the unacceptable number of infants who die every year and severe malnourishment among children in India. Among adults, look at the suicides among farmers and starvation deaths in villages, due to agrarian distress. You must find out the horror of the figures for yourselves.
On the road, this rule translates simply: the first priority should be for the pedestrian, the citizen who walks on two feet. But look at our cities. The pavements are being cut and the roads are being taken over by cars and two-wheelers.
In education, this rule means: priority for primary education in the villages. In health: save the girl child, ban female infanticide.
For the environment: embrace trees to the death, like Shahid Amritadevi and 362 other Bishnoi martyrs at Khejarli village, near Jodhpur in 1730.
In journalism, save and cherish the reporter of facts, the most endangered species in journalism, from the rampage of the advertorial-writers, the deception of the PR agencies, the target-mad circulation and marketing departments –- the whole gang of space marketeers, in the pay of corporate profiteering.
Add to this list. In general, resist the bullying and persecution of the minorities by the brute majority in any sphere of Life and Nature.
*****
I have kept this post brief, down to 600 words, because I want my readers to participate – my family, my students, my friends and my colleagues. Do you agree with my first rule of the road on the journey called Life? Do you have some other rule that you would place at No. 1? What are some of the other rules along the road to Life?
I thank all those who sent me their best wishes on completing three years of my second innings. I hope I can live up to your expectations and make our coming years worth our while.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 6th September 2009.
Describing life as a journey and asserting, “The journey is its own reward” are two common ways of seeing life.
For me these two ways are true, because travelling had been an integral part of my life till the age of 31, when I got married in 1982 and, for the first time, thought of settling down – in Pune. Moving from station to station with our father, a railwayman in the Signals & Telecom Department of the Central Railway, I had become a wanderer, a gypsy.
What are the rules of the road in the journey of life? The first and foremost is: the strong and the mighty shall protect the weak and defenceless.
While at Maharashtra Herald (MH) in Pune, I had the opportunity to interview ordinary as well as extra-ordinary persons, irrespective of their standing. But one extra-ordinary man whom I recall as ordinary and common is “S.M.”. These initials belong to one of Maharashtra’s greatest political leaders of the twentieth century, the late S.M. Joshi and the initials “S.M.” stand for: “Simple Man”.
For an MH photo-feature, with pictures by one of India’s finest photo-journalists D. Sanjay, we had interviewed “S.M.” during an entire day, travelling across the city to the places that were significant in his life.
Towards the end of our interview, I asked him, “Which was the one virtue he felt he lacked in himself but admired most in others?” The simple man replied, “Karuna”, using the Marathi word for “compassion”.
Compassion, above all, is the one human quality that is, for me, at the root of the first rule of the road in the journey of life: “The strong and the mighty shall protect the weak and defenceless”.
Glorifying greed; mocking the poor
Nowadays, this rule of the road must be underlined because the global free-marketeers, like the gamblers and smugglers and thieves of yore, inspired by the politics of Thatcher and Reagan, have glorified greed and mocked the poor, in the name of freedom for the individual and the market.
And though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh speaks of “inclusive” growth, I believe that is mere lip service to win votes, while his colleague Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, executes the brutal agenda of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation; what I call LPG, the poisonous gas which will most surely destroy the weak and poor in India.
Some shocking indicators are the unacceptable number of infants who die every year and severe malnourishment among children in India. Among adults, look at the suicides among farmers and starvation deaths in villages, due to agrarian distress. You must find out the horror of the figures for yourselves.
On the road, this rule translates simply: the first priority should be for the pedestrian, the citizen who walks on two feet. But look at our cities. The pavements are being cut and the roads are being taken over by cars and two-wheelers.
In education, this rule means: priority for primary education in the villages. In health: save the girl child, ban female infanticide.
For the environment: embrace trees to the death, like Shahid Amritadevi and 362 other Bishnoi martyrs at Khejarli village, near Jodhpur in 1730.
In journalism, save and cherish the reporter of facts, the most endangered species in journalism, from the rampage of the advertorial-writers, the deception of the PR agencies, the target-mad circulation and marketing departments –- the whole gang of space marketeers, in the pay of corporate profiteering.
Add to this list. In general, resist the bullying and persecution of the minorities by the brute majority in any sphere of Life and Nature.
*****
I have kept this post brief, down to 600 words, because I want my readers to participate – my family, my students, my friends and my colleagues. Do you agree with my first rule of the road on the journey called Life? Do you have some other rule that you would place at No. 1? What are some of the other rules along the road to Life?
I thank all those who sent me their best wishes on completing three years of my second innings. I hope I can live up to your expectations and make our coming years worth our while.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 6th September 2009.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Second innings: 3 years of living and loving
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
The second of September 2006 is the first day of my second innings. I am grateful to have got a second chance. So on Wednesday, 2 September this year, I complete Year 3; though on the wall calendar I have crossed 58 years on Mother Earth.
My colleagues at the Bharatiya Jain Sanghatana, Pune, tell me how I showed up at the office near Chaturshringi on Friday, 1 September. But then for the next three months, I missed my three-days-a-week at this NGO, founded by the social reformer, educationist and servant of India, Shantilal Muttha.
My students of the 2007 and 2008 batches still remember how I took lectures during the week ending Saturday, 2 September. But I did not turn up for classes from Monday, 4 September, because I was admitted to the Deenanath Hospital in Pune.
I had suffered a heart attack. Now that I survived and have been living and loving for the last three years, allow me to thank all the people who saw me through those days.
My wife Kalpana and daughter Pallavi were with me at home that evening. My brother-in-law Dr. Rajeev Joshi, was also in Pune and at home. Our neighbours at Swanand, Aapli Society, were also indoors. So when the heart attack came, the cardiac ambulance of the Pune Heart Brigade (phone 1050 from anywhere in Pune) could be summoned and rushed me within "the golden hour" to the hospital. My brother-in-law’s classmate Dr Shireesh Sathe, who operated on me, was also in town that weekend. I am lucky to have had all these people in their places that Saturday.
The Emergency Medical Services (EMS) run by the Pune Heart Brigade had saved 17,500 lives, including mine, till end 2007. Even today, whenever I visit a patient at Deenanath Hospital, I drop into the Casualty ward and thank the staff on ambulance duty, without whose prompt help I could not have been writing these words today.
*****
Flat on my back at home, with the unbearable pain crushing my rib-cage, I can still recall visualising my photo with a black border in the "Obituary" section of the papers next morning. I used to work night shifts at the sub desk and accept the obituary notices for the Maharashtra Herald in Pune, during 1983-90. So I mumbled to myself through the engulfing darkness, "This is it now for you, Joe!" Luckily, that was not to be.
I flatter myself to think that my family, friends, colleagues and students loved me too much to let me go –- so soon. Maybe I have some unfinished work to complete, before my turn comes. So, I got my second chance.
In the first few days of white, I cannot recall who came to visit me. But slowly the faces began to register. I remember each one of them with deep gratitude, for they put me back in touch with the blues and greens of the world outside.
As I left the hospital and was returning home in the ambulance, I could see the clouds breaking through, as the sun set. In the cloud-pictures, I like to think I saw my mother’s smiling face, welcoming me back into our world that she had left so abruptly in 1969.
Since the mid-1970s, I have not been a believer in life after death or supernatural powers. But I like to believe that the mother who gave me birth and, in that sense, lives within me as I breathe, wanted to complete her life cruelly cut short. She could not live it out fully herself.
Now I like to believe she was giving me, her son, a chance to live out his life -- and her life -- again. She lives in my memoir. Click on the links, alongside this post, to read the five parts.
*****
When I came back home, everything about my lifestyle would change completely: food and diet, regular exercise; yoga for stress management.
For opening my eyes to these neglected facts of life, I have to thank Dr. Dean Ornish’s "Program for Reversing Heart Disease: The Only System Scientifically Proven to Reverse Heart Disease Without Drugs or Surgery ". The book explains the kinds of food to eat and what to avoid, as well as the need for regular exercise and stress management through yoga.
Thank you, Ashok Gopal, for giving me the book. And D. for caring.
Dean Ornish, M.D., is the founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, USA.
The first edition of Dean Ornish's Reversing Heart Disease, was published by Random House in 1990 and is available as a Ballantine paperback in India for Rs 250-300, depending on the discount. The 640-page book is priced 8 US dollars.
*****
First, food and diet.
When I look back at what I used to eat, especially the fried stuff (samosas, batata-wadas, bhaji, namkeen or farsan) and the bakery products, loaded with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils(butter, cakes, pattice, nankatai biscuits), I know now how I was inviting trouble.
Today, I resist these dangerously tasty items as pictures on menu-cards. I can identify them as the junk that clogs my arteries. And I turn my mouth away -- resolutely towards fruits and green leafy vegetables.
Second, regular exercise.
Having travelled like a gypsy (during my railway childhood and full-timer youth), I had reached the still stage, when I would return home tired and unwilling to travel -- from the living-room, to the bed-room, to the kitchen!!!
You can imagine how this shocking lack of exercise, combined with the “exertion” of lectures and the sedentary office was harming my body.
Third, yoga for stress management.
Dean Ornish opened my eyes to our India viraasat -- yoga and deep breathing, something I knew well, but was not doing. Yoga helps me to manage stress.
Even today, a five-minute stint of pranayam is sufficient to help me withstand the “chhote shaitans” (little devils) on Pune roads, darting about on their two-wheelers.
By February 2007, my weight had dropped from 87 kg to 65 kg. I managed to lose 22 kg during the first six months of my illness. My shirts and trousers hung around me like I was wearing a bedsheet, and I had to stitch new sets of clothes. This was the result of a strict fat-free diet, a regular brisk walk and yoga.
*****
Like all heart patients, I am struggling daily to keep to the strict regimen, suggested by Dean Ornish. Fortunately, I had had built up strong will-power, having given up smoking in 1982, after 11 years of being a chain-smoker.
I can resist the oily fried foods and crisp crunchy bakery products that I used to relish. For this, I have to thank my wife and daughter for supporting me to say, "NO!!!". My father had taught me yoga, which I always enjoyed. But I did not fully appreciate its deep and intimate connection with stress management.
What I find most difficult is to take a brisk 40-minute walk –- six days a week -- the cardiac exercise that my heart needs most.
So, I try to close my eyes and think of the Yeshwantrao Chavan municipal garden that forms one corner of the Shiv Darshan chowk (junction), near our Aapli cooperative housing society.
I first became friends with the mud and stones; trees, plants, dried fallen leaves and blooming flowers; crows and cats, in this small garden when I used to walk in it every day from the first week of December 2006. But I am sorry that I do not meet my natural friends as often as I must and I promise myself that I shall not let my body down.
With a lot of help from my family, friends, colleagues and students, I have humbly resisted the temptations that seduced me in the bad old days and unlearned some of the harmful habits that dragged me down.
Started on 2 October 2008, my blog has also helped me to swim "Against the Tide". As a part of the healing therapy that I have devised for myself, my blog has rebuilt and sustained a lifestyle that is healthy for me.
Thank you all. Your good wishes and messages carry me on. I look forward eagerly to your love and caring, as I enter my Year 4.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 30 August 2009.
The second of September 2006 is the first day of my second innings. I am grateful to have got a second chance. So on Wednesday, 2 September this year, I complete Year 3; though on the wall calendar I have crossed 58 years on Mother Earth.
My colleagues at the Bharatiya Jain Sanghatana, Pune, tell me how I showed up at the office near Chaturshringi on Friday, 1 September. But then for the next three months, I missed my three-days-a-week at this NGO, founded by the social reformer, educationist and servant of India, Shantilal Muttha.
My students of the 2007 and 2008 batches still remember how I took lectures during the week ending Saturday, 2 September. But I did not turn up for classes from Monday, 4 September, because I was admitted to the Deenanath Hospital in Pune.
I had suffered a heart attack. Now that I survived and have been living and loving for the last three years, allow me to thank all the people who saw me through those days.
My wife Kalpana and daughter Pallavi were with me at home that evening. My brother-in-law Dr. Rajeev Joshi, was also in Pune and at home. Our neighbours at Swanand, Aapli Society, were also indoors. So when the heart attack came, the cardiac ambulance of the Pune Heart Brigade (phone 1050 from anywhere in Pune) could be summoned and rushed me within "the golden hour" to the hospital. My brother-in-law’s classmate Dr Shireesh Sathe, who operated on me, was also in town that weekend. I am lucky to have had all these people in their places that Saturday.
The Emergency Medical Services (EMS) run by the Pune Heart Brigade had saved 17,500 lives, including mine, till end 2007. Even today, whenever I visit a patient at Deenanath Hospital, I drop into the Casualty ward and thank the staff on ambulance duty, without whose prompt help I could not have been writing these words today.
*****
Flat on my back at home, with the unbearable pain crushing my rib-cage, I can still recall visualising my photo with a black border in the "Obituary" section of the papers next morning. I used to work night shifts at the sub desk and accept the obituary notices for the Maharashtra Herald in Pune, during 1983-90. So I mumbled to myself through the engulfing darkness, "This is it now for you, Joe!" Luckily, that was not to be.
I flatter myself to think that my family, friends, colleagues and students loved me too much to let me go –- so soon. Maybe I have some unfinished work to complete, before my turn comes. So, I got my second chance.
In the first few days of white, I cannot recall who came to visit me. But slowly the faces began to register. I remember each one of them with deep gratitude, for they put me back in touch with the blues and greens of the world outside.
As I left the hospital and was returning home in the ambulance, I could see the clouds breaking through, as the sun set. In the cloud-pictures, I like to think I saw my mother’s smiling face, welcoming me back into our world that she had left so abruptly in 1969.
Since the mid-1970s, I have not been a believer in life after death or supernatural powers. But I like to believe that the mother who gave me birth and, in that sense, lives within me as I breathe, wanted to complete her life cruelly cut short. She could not live it out fully herself.
Now I like to believe she was giving me, her son, a chance to live out his life -- and her life -- again. She lives in my memoir. Click on the links, alongside this post, to read the five parts.
*****
When I came back home, everything about my lifestyle would change completely: food and diet, regular exercise; yoga for stress management.
For opening my eyes to these neglected facts of life, I have to thank Dr. Dean Ornish’s "Program for Reversing Heart Disease: The Only System Scientifically Proven to Reverse Heart Disease Without Drugs or Surgery ". The book explains the kinds of food to eat and what to avoid, as well as the need for regular exercise and stress management through yoga.
Thank you, Ashok Gopal, for giving me the book. And D. for caring.
Dean Ornish, M.D., is the founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, USA.
The first edition of Dean Ornish's Reversing Heart Disease, was published by Random House in 1990 and is available as a Ballantine paperback in India for Rs 250-300, depending on the discount. The 640-page book is priced 8 US dollars.
*****
First, food and diet.
When I look back at what I used to eat, especially the fried stuff (samosas, batata-wadas, bhaji, namkeen or farsan) and the bakery products, loaded with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils(butter, cakes, pattice, nankatai biscuits), I know now how I was inviting trouble.
Today, I resist these dangerously tasty items as pictures on menu-cards. I can identify them as the junk that clogs my arteries. And I turn my mouth away -- resolutely towards fruits and green leafy vegetables.
Second, regular exercise.
Having travelled like a gypsy (during my railway childhood and full-timer youth), I had reached the still stage, when I would return home tired and unwilling to travel -- from the living-room, to the bed-room, to the kitchen!!!
You can imagine how this shocking lack of exercise, combined with the “exertion” of lectures and the sedentary office was harming my body.
Third, yoga for stress management.
Dean Ornish opened my eyes to our India viraasat -- yoga and deep breathing, something I knew well, but was not doing. Yoga helps me to manage stress.
Even today, a five-minute stint of pranayam is sufficient to help me withstand the “chhote shaitans” (little devils) on Pune roads, darting about on their two-wheelers.
By February 2007, my weight had dropped from 87 kg to 65 kg. I managed to lose 22 kg during the first six months of my illness. My shirts and trousers hung around me like I was wearing a bedsheet, and I had to stitch new sets of clothes. This was the result of a strict fat-free diet, a regular brisk walk and yoga.
*****
Like all heart patients, I am struggling daily to keep to the strict regimen, suggested by Dean Ornish. Fortunately, I had had built up strong will-power, having given up smoking in 1982, after 11 years of being a chain-smoker.
I can resist the oily fried foods and crisp crunchy bakery products that I used to relish. For this, I have to thank my wife and daughter for supporting me to say, "NO!!!". My father had taught me yoga, which I always enjoyed. But I did not fully appreciate its deep and intimate connection with stress management.
What I find most difficult is to take a brisk 40-minute walk –- six days a week -- the cardiac exercise that my heart needs most.
So, I try to close my eyes and think of the Yeshwantrao Chavan municipal garden that forms one corner of the Shiv Darshan chowk (junction), near our Aapli cooperative housing society.
I first became friends with the mud and stones; trees, plants, dried fallen leaves and blooming flowers; crows and cats, in this small garden when I used to walk in it every day from the first week of December 2006. But I am sorry that I do not meet my natural friends as often as I must and I promise myself that I shall not let my body down.
With a lot of help from my family, friends, colleagues and students, I have humbly resisted the temptations that seduced me in the bad old days and unlearned some of the harmful habits that dragged me down.
Started on 2 October 2008, my blog has also helped me to swim "Against the Tide". As a part of the healing therapy that I have devised for myself, my blog has rebuilt and sustained a lifestyle that is healthy for me.
Thank you all. Your good wishes and messages carry me on. I look forward eagerly to your love and caring, as I enter my Year 4.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 30 August 2009.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Dubai seen in the words of a philosopher
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
A philosopher, whose words are among the most derided today, wrote in 1848, “A spectre is haunting Europe.” More than 160 years later, no such spectre may haunt the world. But for me, he made common sense when I visited Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently.
The visit was strictly personal. I came back refreshed and replenished. But I cannot conceal that it was also political. I recalled a phrase, hanging from the threads of the flower children from the 1960s and 1970s, resisting the Vietnam War: “the personal is the political”, a slogan that was also central to the feminist movement.
The waiter wiped the table with tissue paper
A close relative took me to a family restaurant for breakfast. Outside, it was Dubai in June: hot and humid; cars and concrete. Inside, it could have been any Indian city, any time of the year: dosas and filter coffee; spicy conversation dripping from Indian tongues.
Except, the waiter wiped the table with tissue paper.
I glanced at him. His face reminded me of the waiters who served us at Raj Mahal, an Udipi hotel in Dhobi Talao, Mumbai, when I was studying at St Xavier’s College. I have not seen this happen, anywhere in India. We had our fill of sheera and dosas with chutneys. But as we left by car, our personal meal became my first political insight.
My feelings grew firmer as I rambled for ten days. During a lunch, a student described how she was afraid that Dubai had exploded from a fishing community for a thousand years (dates, pearls) into one of the most modern cities of the world – since the first shipment of oil in 1969, and, more so, within her own memory of barely two decades!
So when I returned to Pune, I dug out and re-read my famous philosopher. This is how I propose to write this post: a sentence or paragraph (in bold italics) from the little book by the famous philosopher; then my observations and reflections. I will try and see Dubai in the words of the philosopher, who dared to change the world.
“The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape (of Good Hope), opened up fresh ground … The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies … gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby … a rapid development. … Modern industry has established the world-market …”
Everywhere in Dubai, you can ‘see’ money shining; and ‘feel’ the naked power of finance capital with “C” in capitals of concrete and steel: in the flashy cars, on the smooth roads, in the magic malls, the Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone; and on people (present on the rich, absent on the poor).
And at the seven-star Atlantis The Palm Hotel, during a fashion show, someone mocked with envy, “Can you see the recession anywhere here, eh?” Merely the air-conditioning had already frozen the marrow of my bones into ice.
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie … has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals ... ”
Tens of huge cool towers lined up the big, main road like two rows of pillars holding up the hot sky. There is sand where I stand. I pinch myself awe-struck at the lawns in the desert. That Dubai is being erected in the twenty-first century does not detract from it being branded a wonder.
As a young man I had read ‘The City of the Yellow Devil’ by the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). Moving around Dubai in 2009, I knew how Gorky must have despaired when he visited New York in 1906 and published his essay in Appleton’s Magazine, an American publication in August of that year.
Dubai is an ever-changing tribute to world-class quality. The far-sighted and liberal rulers of Dubai have an unparalleled vision that is transforming the emirate into a niche of excellence. The city is shooting up like an adolescent teenager attached to a jet engine.
Like 24x7 ants, thousands of construction workers, from all corners of the world (from India: Kerala, coastal Karnataka, Goa, Bihar, U.P., A.P., Bangladesh), fabricate entire floors of skyscrapers in days. Just the car parks in the basement are three stories tall.
“The bourgeoisie has put an end to … idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the … ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’
Here I should only update my philosopher with the latest touch-screen ATMs and swiping credit cards.
“(The bourgeosie) has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. And it has set up that single, un-conscionable freedom -- Free Trade.”
Like Ibn-Batuta, I scoured the ‘free trade’ malls. Like Diogenes of Athens, I walked through the ‘Mall of the Emirates’ window-shopping for the countless things I did NOT need. The two books I bought: for me, The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel (second edition, 2007, Three Rivers Press); for my close relative, Maverick by Ricardo Semler. Leaving, at the airport, I was shaken by the last-moment scramble in duty-free Dubai; the key-words here being “free to buy”.
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Since our summer vacations with our grand-parents, I had known that generations of my native brothers and sisters had abandoned the comfort of red mud, coconut villages, scattered along the Canara coast, around Mangalore, and migrated to the Gulf in search of the good life.
Serving as an editor in the land of my ancestors, where Konkani is the official language, I had heard of ‘Goan Gulfies’, men who came back with finger-thick gold chains dangling from their necks.
In 1967, when I passed Class 11, a close relative of my father had gifted me a Sovar Prima watch – made in Switzerland, bought in Saudi Arabia, worn in Mumbai. On formal occasions, I still wear it as a precious heirloom.
On our journey back from Dubai, we bought a gift for a baby, newly born into our extended family. The baby dress: made in China, bought in Dubai, was given to the baby’s father in Pune, to be worn by the baby in California, USA.
But a wise NRI shopkeeper in Meena Bazar, Dubai, saved me from the embarrassment of buying an expensive Italian shirt made of Egyptian cotton. He advised me that the finest cotton was Indian, made by Century and Arvind, and available along Pune’s very own Laxmi Road. (“All that is solid (cotton) melts in the (Dubai) air.”)
I have returned from Dubai – humbled and chastened.
Sitting here at my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop (“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”), I dwell in my mind’s eye upon my beautiful, special and different nephew, Adrian Terence D’Souza.
"With sober senses", I visualise the 26 year-old singing Konkani cantara, playing the drums, kicking a football, drawing his blue ‘Time is running out! … Save water!’ picture and laying out the table at the hotel, where he welcomes his honoured guests.
And hot tears roll down my cheek. I hope in international solidarity for my brave brothers and sisters, who toil in Dubai. Peace and love to you, mates.
This then is my Dubai, seen in the words of a philosopher.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 19th July 2009.
A philosopher, whose words are among the most derided today, wrote in 1848, “A spectre is haunting Europe.” More than 160 years later, no such spectre may haunt the world. But for me, he made common sense when I visited Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently.
The visit was strictly personal. I came back refreshed and replenished. But I cannot conceal that it was also political. I recalled a phrase, hanging from the threads of the flower children from the 1960s and 1970s, resisting the Vietnam War: “the personal is the political”, a slogan that was also central to the feminist movement.
The waiter wiped the table with tissue paper
A close relative took me to a family restaurant for breakfast. Outside, it was Dubai in June: hot and humid; cars and concrete. Inside, it could have been any Indian city, any time of the year: dosas and filter coffee; spicy conversation dripping from Indian tongues.
Except, the waiter wiped the table with tissue paper.
I glanced at him. His face reminded me of the waiters who served us at Raj Mahal, an Udipi hotel in Dhobi Talao, Mumbai, when I was studying at St Xavier’s College. I have not seen this happen, anywhere in India. We had our fill of sheera and dosas with chutneys. But as we left by car, our personal meal became my first political insight.
My feelings grew firmer as I rambled for ten days. During a lunch, a student described how she was afraid that Dubai had exploded from a fishing community for a thousand years (dates, pearls) into one of the most modern cities of the world – since the first shipment of oil in 1969, and, more so, within her own memory of barely two decades!
So when I returned to Pune, I dug out and re-read my famous philosopher. This is how I propose to write this post: a sentence or paragraph (in bold italics) from the little book by the famous philosopher; then my observations and reflections. I will try and see Dubai in the words of the philosopher, who dared to change the world.
“The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape (of Good Hope), opened up fresh ground … The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies … gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby … a rapid development. … Modern industry has established the world-market …”
Everywhere in Dubai, you can ‘see’ money shining; and ‘feel’ the naked power of finance capital with “C” in capitals of concrete and steel: in the flashy cars, on the smooth roads, in the magic malls, the Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone; and on people (present on the rich, absent on the poor).
And at the seven-star Atlantis The Palm Hotel, during a fashion show, someone mocked with envy, “Can you see the recession anywhere here, eh?” Merely the air-conditioning had already frozen the marrow of my bones into ice.
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie … has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals ... ”
Tens of huge cool towers lined up the big, main road like two rows of pillars holding up the hot sky. There is sand where I stand. I pinch myself awe-struck at the lawns in the desert. That Dubai is being erected in the twenty-first century does not detract from it being branded a wonder.
As a young man I had read ‘The City of the Yellow Devil’ by the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). Moving around Dubai in 2009, I knew how Gorky must have despaired when he visited New York in 1906 and published his essay in Appleton’s Magazine, an American publication in August of that year.
Dubai is an ever-changing tribute to world-class quality. The far-sighted and liberal rulers of Dubai have an unparalleled vision that is transforming the emirate into a niche of excellence. The city is shooting up like an adolescent teenager attached to a jet engine.
Like 24x7 ants, thousands of construction workers, from all corners of the world (from India: Kerala, coastal Karnataka, Goa, Bihar, U.P., A.P., Bangladesh), fabricate entire floors of skyscrapers in days. Just the car parks in the basement are three stories tall.
“The bourgeoisie has put an end to … idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the … ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’
Here I should only update my philosopher with the latest touch-screen ATMs and swiping credit cards.
“(The bourgeosie) has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. And it has set up that single, un-conscionable freedom -- Free Trade.”
Like Ibn-Batuta, I scoured the ‘free trade’ malls. Like Diogenes of Athens, I walked through the ‘Mall of the Emirates’ window-shopping for the countless things I did NOT need. The two books I bought: for me, The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel (second edition, 2007, Three Rivers Press); for my close relative, Maverick by Ricardo Semler. Leaving, at the airport, I was shaken by the last-moment scramble in duty-free Dubai; the key-words here being “free to buy”.
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Since our summer vacations with our grand-parents, I had known that generations of my native brothers and sisters had abandoned the comfort of red mud, coconut villages, scattered along the Canara coast, around Mangalore, and migrated to the Gulf in search of the good life.
Serving as an editor in the land of my ancestors, where Konkani is the official language, I had heard of ‘Goan Gulfies’, men who came back with finger-thick gold chains dangling from their necks.
In 1967, when I passed Class 11, a close relative of my father had gifted me a Sovar Prima watch – made in Switzerland, bought in Saudi Arabia, worn in Mumbai. On formal occasions, I still wear it as a precious heirloom.
On our journey back from Dubai, we bought a gift for a baby, newly born into our extended family. The baby dress: made in China, bought in Dubai, was given to the baby’s father in Pune, to be worn by the baby in California, USA.
But a wise NRI shopkeeper in Meena Bazar, Dubai, saved me from the embarrassment of buying an expensive Italian shirt made of Egyptian cotton. He advised me that the finest cotton was Indian, made by Century and Arvind, and available along Pune’s very own Laxmi Road. (“All that is solid (cotton) melts in the (Dubai) air.”)
I have returned from Dubai – humbled and chastened.
Sitting here at my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop (“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”), I dwell in my mind’s eye upon my beautiful, special and different nephew, Adrian Terence D’Souza.
"With sober senses", I visualise the 26 year-old singing Konkani cantara, playing the drums, kicking a football, drawing his blue ‘Time is running out! … Save water!’ picture and laying out the table at the hotel, where he welcomes his honoured guests.
And hot tears roll down my cheek. I hope in international solidarity for my brave brothers and sisters, who toil in Dubai. Peace and love to you, mates.
This then is my Dubai, seen in the words of a philosopher.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 19th July 2009.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Stand up and be counted ...
A judgement of the Delhi High Court thrilled me -- no end.
I remembered with love and affection my dear friend from the 1970s, Askok Row Kavi of Mumbai, a bold journalist and daring editor for his pioneering magazine, Bombay Dost. I have supported the struggle Bombay Dost put up "against the tide" for all humans with a different sexuality.
In my classes, since 1987 in Pune, my students have learned to respect, promote and support various "minority" issues: the beautiful, special and different peoples and causes of our world. One of the reasons why I gave my blog the title, "Against the Tide" is to highlight "minority" issues and the resistance put up by minority groups and peoples.
For example, I have been asking some of my best students, who care deeply about stray dogs, to write about the persecution these street animals face from otherwise sane and respectable citizens.
Though we had pet dogs at home when we were children in Solapur and Manmad, my mother cared deeply about strays. In a quiet moment she would take me aside and warn me that, if I did not care deeply for and sustain my mother tongue, Konkani, this beautiful and ancient language could be annihilated like the stray dogs of this world.
Other issues are strictly not minority issues, but need to be taken up "as if" they affected a minority. For example in Pune, can you imagine that citizens have to campaign for pavements to walk upon? The rights of pedestrians are being neglected in Pune, while civic authorities are creating a city that is friendly for two-wheelers and cars.
Most citizens have to walk at some time or the other; so apparently pedestrian rights seem to concern the majority. But since the "right to walk safely" is being trampled upon, protecting pedestrian rights becomes a minority issue.
Lovers of trees, open spaces, gardens, the hill slopes, small water bodies, rivers, also have to be constantly vigilant. Trees, gardens and open spaces, that cannot protect themselves, are under threat.
My friend, Vinita Deshmukh, who edits the small but courageous weekly newspaper, Intelligent Pune, would say the Right to Information (RTI) law is also a key minority issue that needs to be stoutly defended, considering how even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wants to scuttle this pro-people legislation by making “notings” by bureaucrats exempt from its purview.
We each can and ought to pick our own minority issue to campaign for. This is what makes us a democratic society, where citizens participate in governance and not merely vote in elections.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 12th July 2009.
I remembered with love and affection my dear friend from the 1970s, Askok Row Kavi of Mumbai, a bold journalist and daring editor for his pioneering magazine, Bombay Dost. I have supported the struggle Bombay Dost put up "against the tide" for all humans with a different sexuality.
In my classes, since 1987 in Pune, my students have learned to respect, promote and support various "minority" issues: the beautiful, special and different peoples and causes of our world. One of the reasons why I gave my blog the title, "Against the Tide" is to highlight "minority" issues and the resistance put up by minority groups and peoples.
For example, I have been asking some of my best students, who care deeply about stray dogs, to write about the persecution these street animals face from otherwise sane and respectable citizens.
Though we had pet dogs at home when we were children in Solapur and Manmad, my mother cared deeply about strays. In a quiet moment she would take me aside and warn me that, if I did not care deeply for and sustain my mother tongue, Konkani, this beautiful and ancient language could be annihilated like the stray dogs of this world.
Other issues are strictly not minority issues, but need to be taken up "as if" they affected a minority. For example in Pune, can you imagine that citizens have to campaign for pavements to walk upon? The rights of pedestrians are being neglected in Pune, while civic authorities are creating a city that is friendly for two-wheelers and cars.
Most citizens have to walk at some time or the other; so apparently pedestrian rights seem to concern the majority. But since the "right to walk safely" is being trampled upon, protecting pedestrian rights becomes a minority issue.
Lovers of trees, open spaces, gardens, the hill slopes, small water bodies, rivers, also have to be constantly vigilant. Trees, gardens and open spaces, that cannot protect themselves, are under threat.
My friend, Vinita Deshmukh, who edits the small but courageous weekly newspaper, Intelligent Pune, would say the Right to Information (RTI) law is also a key minority issue that needs to be stoutly defended, considering how even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wants to scuttle this pro-people legislation by making “notings” by bureaucrats exempt from its purview.
We each can and ought to pick our own minority issue to campaign for. This is what makes us a democratic society, where citizens participate in governance and not merely vote in elections.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 12th July 2009.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Ways of seeing ... with compassion
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
When the news first broke in India about racism in Australia, frankly I thought it was a recent phenomenon. So in response, I wrote a mild piece about how I had suffered at the hands of the racists when I was in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, during 1990-93. And how I could stand up, resist and ... survive, with a little help from my friends.
My intention was to encourage the sharing of experiences -- ugly or bad or good -- from other parts of India and the world, since we have our own perceptions; ways of viewing the world and responding to the behaviour of other peoples.
Deliberately, I did NOT describe the attacks I had heard of or read about in England, merely hinting that I had carefully collected clippings and documents about racist attacks. But when hundreds of students turned up for the protest march in Melbourne and in Sydney, and as I watched the Australian police beating up -- six-cops-to-a-protestor -- nay, curry bashing our fellow Indians, the blood of Shahid Bhagat Singh boiled in my body.
Ninety years ago, a white man "in Defence of the Realm" and the British Monarchy (and aided by our brown sipahis), had massacred hundreds of un-armed innocent peaceful protestors at Jallianwala Bagh. Despite that genocide, across the 20th century in India and into the 21st century in Australia, a former British colony, the so-called "civilised" White Man had not changed his racist colours.
I tried getting in touch with the few I knew in Australia, who could be counted upon to provide authentic information. Also scrounging the world wide web -- like the rag-picker Maharashtra Herald, Pune, had trained me to be -- I discovered the website of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA).
The FISA website is plain and unadorned like the hundreds of simple Indians you see all over the world: my own saviours, the Ekbote and Banhatti families in England; my indomitable mass comm students from Pune, I salute you; the Indian diaspora; like the memorable R.K. Narayan characters roaming the Malgudi landscape and Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake.
So I plunged deep into the FISA website. And what did I find? I will cite only one gem by Ms. Alice Pung. Sad to say, it seems few of our journalists in India have bothered to mine the FISA website.
"Shunned in a strange land ..."
Ms. Alice Pung, a Melbourne-based writer and teacher, "worked for half a decade as a pastoral care adviser and residential tutor at the residential colleges of Melbourne University, in some of the most privileged academic environments". She has written a deeply compassionate piece entitled, "Shunned in a strange land, we should offer them more" on 17 August 2008. The piece has been taken courtesy The Age and the FISA website.
Ms. Pung wrote ten months ago, "I have seen my students through the beginning of their degrees when they are finding their feet in a foreign country, to their graduations and the quest for permanent residency. During this time, I have come to respect and admire their stoicism. They do not live in their own little worlds: they have opened up my world."
We know who these "stoic" Indian students are; students who have left their homes to study far away from the comfort of their families; the love of their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. I too know who these students are. I see them every semester when I start my classes in editing. Their homesick faces yearn for love and compassion; a kind word, a warm smile, a pat on the back. Across the years and my tears, I see some of you: on the front benches; at the back, asking questions, wanting to learn, to get it right.
As a teacher and visiting faculty of print journalism in Pune since 1987, I am known for the fierce discipline, forgive me, I maintain and shall expect in my classes. That is because, I think, the world outside is collapsing into chaos and anarchy. But once the ground rules have been understood and followed; the dialogue of our hearts and minds begins; soon my students and I find ourselves in our place where we can learn safely, make mistakes fearlessly.
Who are these "stoic" students from overseas?
Ms. Pung also knows who the overseas students are. She tells her Australian readers in Melbourne, "They are the students who serve our meals in Chinatown, the people who drive our taxis. They are the lowest-paid and often most-exploited workers, un-protected by Australian work-place relations legislation. We refuse to see their toils because it does not accord with our image of how our overseas cash-calves should be."
You can see how compassionate Ms. Pung is, how she is able to put herself into the chappals of the Indian student. "Eventually, most find company and comfort in the presence of each other," Ms. Pung concedes.
And then, from Ms. Pung, come the lines that should be engraved with golden letters in every classic of anthropology or sociology: "No one seems to begrudge Western students latching on to other Westerners when studying in Asia and forming insular little expatriate communities, to observe the locals as if they were sociological studies instead of people who are only separated by a different culture."
I have personally known and seen students and working people from Europe and USA behave in the most insular and insolent fashion, during their stays in our metro cities. So what of it? No! We Indians, who belong to an ancient civilisation that has assimilated invaders of all colours, we do not "begrudge" Westerners huddling around tables, downing their beers and chatting away. Indians try to tolerate others.
But Ms. Pung goes on, "But somehow, we in Australia seem to demand assimilation from our temporary visitors, instead of offering acceptance and understanding. Many international students are acutely aware that their parents back home are breaking their backs and bank accounts to send them here."
Then comes the punch; Ms. Pung is nearing the end of her piece, "It is not their duty to assimilate: many of them come here, under no uncertain terms, for an education. It is our duty to deliver that education. But perhaps it is also our obligation to show to our young overseas visitors that we are also a tolerant society —- and that we see them."
Thank you, Ms. Pung, for "seeing" our Indian and other overseas students. I hope to meet you in person some day, and thank you for your kindness to the young peoples of the world studying in a foreign place, no matter where.
"Never under-estimate the power of perception"
Besides the links, which I have mentioned in my post last Sunday, 31 May 2009, here is another perceptive analysis by Sarina Singh, senior author of the best-selling Lonely Planet guides to India and Pakistan: "Fear of Indian success led to curry bashing" (Times of India, Sunday, 7 June 2009).
Ms. Sarina Singh says her father, "Dr Bhagat Singh - whose father had migrated to Fiji after World War I - came to Australia in 1955 to study medicine at the University of Melbourne. He entered a country ruled by White Australia Policy, a racist legislation limiting non-white immigration from 1901 to 1973, which was spawned by fear that the non-white work ethic - as demonstrated by the industrious Chinese, who came in large numbers during Australia's mid-1800s Gold Rush - could subvert white interests.
Ms. Singh quotes one of the principal architects of the White Australia Policy: "It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors".
She continues, "Under the White Australia Policy, non-white students could enter Australia on temporary visas. My father had some financial support from his family but had to work during the holidays to make ends meet. He took on odd jobs that included manual labour in a tin factory and bar-tender at a working-class pub. He remembers that Indians were "few-and-far-between back then" and were often viewed as a "curious novelty" by white Australians.
"When asked why he thought Indian students in 21st century Australia were at the centre of what has been dubbed 'curry-bashing', he says it could be because of the relatively sudden influx and the perceived potential threat of an increasingly prosperous Indian community. "Never underestimate the power of perception," he says.
On 3 July, I came across this piece, "Lifting the veil on our ingrained racism", by Sandy Gifford, Professor in the School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University, and director of the La Trobe Refugee Research Centre in Australia.
Writing in The Age on 13 June 2009, Sandy Gifford says, "Australia is a racist society. There, I've said it. I've wanted to say this for the past 24 years — from the time I arrived here... Racism in Australia is pervasive, part of the fabric of everyday life and normalised in ways that render it invisible and make it one of the strongest forms of structural violence. Confronting our racism is painful, but denying it is wrong and making up excuses for specific acts of violence makes us complicit. It also makes us racist...
"It is shameful that we are pussyfooting around the current violence with responses directed at the victims — Indian students are soft targets, and that the damage is the potential loss of millions of dollars of overseas student income.
The real damage is about the loss of the kind of society we could be now and in the future. Yes, racism runs deep in my country — Australia. This is what I feel, what I believe and I, for one, have been silent far too long.
Thank you, Sandy Gifford, for your honesty - free, frank, fearless and fair.
*****
Resist the racists ... of all colours. Please, resist racism ... of any kind, anywhere, by anyone, to anyone.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 7th June 2009.
When the news first broke in India about racism in Australia, frankly I thought it was a recent phenomenon. So in response, I wrote a mild piece about how I had suffered at the hands of the racists when I was in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, during 1990-93. And how I could stand up, resist and ... survive, with a little help from my friends.
My intention was to encourage the sharing of experiences -- ugly or bad or good -- from other parts of India and the world, since we have our own perceptions; ways of viewing the world and responding to the behaviour of other peoples.
Deliberately, I did NOT describe the attacks I had heard of or read about in England, merely hinting that I had carefully collected clippings and documents about racist attacks. But when hundreds of students turned up for the protest march in Melbourne and in Sydney, and as I watched the Australian police beating up -- six-cops-to-a-protestor -- nay, curry bashing our fellow Indians, the blood of Shahid Bhagat Singh boiled in my body.
Ninety years ago, a white man "in Defence of the Realm" and the British Monarchy (and aided by our brown sipahis), had massacred hundreds of un-armed innocent peaceful protestors at Jallianwala Bagh. Despite that genocide, across the 20th century in India and into the 21st century in Australia, a former British colony, the so-called "civilised" White Man had not changed his racist colours.
I tried getting in touch with the few I knew in Australia, who could be counted upon to provide authentic information. Also scrounging the world wide web -- like the rag-picker Maharashtra Herald, Pune, had trained me to be -- I discovered the website of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA).
The FISA website is plain and unadorned like the hundreds of simple Indians you see all over the world: my own saviours, the Ekbote and Banhatti families in England; my indomitable mass comm students from Pune, I salute you; the Indian diaspora; like the memorable R.K. Narayan characters roaming the Malgudi landscape and Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake.
So I plunged deep into the FISA website. And what did I find? I will cite only one gem by Ms. Alice Pung. Sad to say, it seems few of our journalists in India have bothered to mine the FISA website.
"Shunned in a strange land ..."
Ms. Alice Pung, a Melbourne-based writer and teacher, "worked for half a decade as a pastoral care adviser and residential tutor at the residential colleges of Melbourne University, in some of the most privileged academic environments". She has written a deeply compassionate piece entitled, "Shunned in a strange land, we should offer them more" on 17 August 2008. The piece has been taken courtesy The Age and the FISA website.
Ms. Pung wrote ten months ago, "I have seen my students through the beginning of their degrees when they are finding their feet in a foreign country, to their graduations and the quest for permanent residency. During this time, I have come to respect and admire their stoicism. They do not live in their own little worlds: they have opened up my world."
We know who these "stoic" Indian students are; students who have left their homes to study far away from the comfort of their families; the love of their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. I too know who these students are. I see them every semester when I start my classes in editing. Their homesick faces yearn for love and compassion; a kind word, a warm smile, a pat on the back. Across the years and my tears, I see some of you: on the front benches; at the back, asking questions, wanting to learn, to get it right.
As a teacher and visiting faculty of print journalism in Pune since 1987, I am known for the fierce discipline, forgive me, I maintain and shall expect in my classes. That is because, I think, the world outside is collapsing into chaos and anarchy. But once the ground rules have been understood and followed; the dialogue of our hearts and minds begins; soon my students and I find ourselves in our place where we can learn safely, make mistakes fearlessly.
Who are these "stoic" students from overseas?
Ms. Pung also knows who the overseas students are. She tells her Australian readers in Melbourne, "They are the students who serve our meals in Chinatown, the people who drive our taxis. They are the lowest-paid and often most-exploited workers, un-protected by Australian work-place relations legislation. We refuse to see their toils because it does not accord with our image of how our overseas cash-calves should be."
You can see how compassionate Ms. Pung is, how she is able to put herself into the chappals of the Indian student. "Eventually, most find company and comfort in the presence of each other," Ms. Pung concedes.
And then, from Ms. Pung, come the lines that should be engraved with golden letters in every classic of anthropology or sociology: "No one seems to begrudge Western students latching on to other Westerners when studying in Asia and forming insular little expatriate communities, to observe the locals as if they were sociological studies instead of people who are only separated by a different culture."
I have personally known and seen students and working people from Europe and USA behave in the most insular and insolent fashion, during their stays in our metro cities. So what of it? No! We Indians, who belong to an ancient civilisation that has assimilated invaders of all colours, we do not "begrudge" Westerners huddling around tables, downing their beers and chatting away. Indians try to tolerate others.
But Ms. Pung goes on, "But somehow, we in Australia seem to demand assimilation from our temporary visitors, instead of offering acceptance and understanding. Many international students are acutely aware that their parents back home are breaking their backs and bank accounts to send them here."
Then comes the punch; Ms. Pung is nearing the end of her piece, "It is not their duty to assimilate: many of them come here, under no uncertain terms, for an education. It is our duty to deliver that education. But perhaps it is also our obligation to show to our young overseas visitors that we are also a tolerant society —- and that we see them."
Thank you, Ms. Pung, for "seeing" our Indian and other overseas students. I hope to meet you in person some day, and thank you for your kindness to the young peoples of the world studying in a foreign place, no matter where.
"Never under-estimate the power of perception"
Besides the links, which I have mentioned in my post last Sunday, 31 May 2009, here is another perceptive analysis by Sarina Singh, senior author of the best-selling Lonely Planet guides to India and Pakistan: "Fear of Indian success led to curry bashing" (Times of India, Sunday, 7 June 2009).
Ms. Sarina Singh says her father, "Dr Bhagat Singh - whose father had migrated to Fiji after World War I - came to Australia in 1955 to study medicine at the University of Melbourne. He entered a country ruled by White Australia Policy, a racist legislation limiting non-white immigration from 1901 to 1973, which was spawned by fear that the non-white work ethic - as demonstrated by the industrious Chinese, who came in large numbers during Australia's mid-1800s Gold Rush - could subvert white interests.
Ms. Singh quotes one of the principal architects of the White Australia Policy: "It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors".
She continues, "Under the White Australia Policy, non-white students could enter Australia on temporary visas. My father had some financial support from his family but had to work during the holidays to make ends meet. He took on odd jobs that included manual labour in a tin factory and bar-tender at a working-class pub. He remembers that Indians were "few-and-far-between back then" and were often viewed as a "curious novelty" by white Australians.
"When asked why he thought Indian students in 21st century Australia were at the centre of what has been dubbed 'curry-bashing', he says it could be because of the relatively sudden influx and the perceived potential threat of an increasingly prosperous Indian community. "Never underestimate the power of perception," he says.
On 3 July, I came across this piece, "Lifting the veil on our ingrained racism", by Sandy Gifford, Professor in the School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University, and director of the La Trobe Refugee Research Centre in Australia.
Writing in The Age on 13 June 2009, Sandy Gifford says, "Australia is a racist society. There, I've said it. I've wanted to say this for the past 24 years — from the time I arrived here... Racism in Australia is pervasive, part of the fabric of everyday life and normalised in ways that render it invisible and make it one of the strongest forms of structural violence. Confronting our racism is painful, but denying it is wrong and making up excuses for specific acts of violence makes us complicit. It also makes us racist...
"It is shameful that we are pussyfooting around the current violence with responses directed at the victims — Indian students are soft targets, and that the damage is the potential loss of millions of dollars of overseas student income.
The real damage is about the loss of the kind of society we could be now and in the future. Yes, racism runs deep in my country — Australia. This is what I feel, what I believe and I, for one, have been silent far too long.
Thank you, Sandy Gifford, for your honesty - free, frank, fearless and fair.
*****
Resist the racists ... of all colours. Please, resist racism ... of any kind, anywhere, by anyone, to anyone.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 7th June 2009.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Please resist racism ... of any kind
My dear students, friends and colleagues,
Students being beaten up in Australia! Were the attacks racist? Even from the initial sketchy descriptions, I was sure the attacks were racist. The news and images took me back in time to Leeds, Yorkshire, England, during 1990-93.
My visa read "Accompanying wife". Kalpana had won an open merit Commonwealth scholarship to do her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Leeds. We landed at Heathrow airport, with its arrogant immigration officers (white and Asian).
We were then dumped in a bed & breakfast cubby-hole in a cold, wet and miserably damp London. Outside, I saw the statues of the imperialist and racist, Cecil Rhodes, and the murderer of Jallianwala Bagh, Reginald Dyer. Clinging to the fire of Shahid Bhagat Singh, close to my heart, I prepared for the worst.
Now it's recession, and I can empathise with the anxiety of the jobless in Australia. For authentic information from Indian sources and students in Australia about what's happening in Melbourne and elsewhere see the website of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA), which was set up in 2002. According to FISA, more than 500 (!!!) incidents against Asians have taken place during the last seven years.
When we stayed in Leeds in 1990, the UK and USA had got together to attack Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait. Anyone, whose face even remotely resembled Saddam's with his beard, was targeted in Leeds, which is next door to Bradford, with its highly visible Asian, more precisely Pakistani Muslim population.
Within the first weeks of shopping in July 1990 at the Leeds city centre, we knew that we must avoid going out on Friday and Saturday evenings. The weekly salaries were paid in the markets, latest by 6pm. Then the favourite sport of "Paki-bashing" would begin. First, the lager louts would down some beers with a "vindaloo" or "curry". Then they would pick upon the Asians -- Indians, Pakistanis or Bangladeshis, who ran the restaurants that served the cheap vindaloo and hot curry -- all of whom were tarred with the derogatory "Paki!" brush.
That branding took me back to the Mumbai of the 1970s. Then, the Shiv Sena fanatics branded all south Indians as "madrasis" or "lungiwalas" and all Hindi-speaking north Indians as "bhaiyyas". Sadly, in the Noughties of the 21st century, the MNS goons hound north Indians across Maharashtra in a macabre repeat. (All PR and Corp Comm professionals, please note the usage "brand".)
Sheer ignorance drives racists to hate
I vaguely felt it then, but I am certain of it now: it is sheer ignorance; whether they are white teenagers in Melbourne, Victoria, of 2009; white lager louts in Leeds, Yorkshire, of 1990; or son-of-the-soil Marathi-speaking shiv sainiks in Mumbai of the 1970s; all these persons are driven to hate by sheer ignorance.
First, they are un-educated, though they may possess degrees. Second, they are afraid of the "outsider" or the "foreigner". Third, they do not act on their own and are prey to racist propaganda. They are supported by political parties or fringe groups, no matter how tiny. And above all, they have the secret sympathy and hidden support of the local police, many of whom also subscribe to the narrow blinkered mindset and harbour hate for the intrepid migrant.
Walking down the back-to-back terraces of Woodsley, Burley and Autumn Grove in Leeds, I recall the pinch-cold faces peering out from the bedrooms above. First, hit the spit of hate; then "Sorry, mate!" with a sly smirk that said, "Damn, I missed me Paki!" target. Walking down the city centre, that spit of hate would come spattering down from the West Yorkshire buses. And always the "Sorry!" with that smirk.
Outside the Leeds Kirkgate open market, standing near the bus-stop, one cold and wet, grey and muggy day, the only reason I missed getting bashed up was that I was wearing the typical black Gannon overcoat, worn by the local police, which I had bought at the second-hand Oxfam store. So the thugs mistook me for a cop!
But hundreds of Asians in England had not been as lucky as me. I have a detailed file and carefully collected clippings of racist attacks on Asians, some of them fatal. And always the police managed to cover them up. But at least the British government has admitted the existence of racism and sincerely struggles to cope with it. Now Australia must face up to the bitter truth of racism too.
Vivek Pinto, my school-mate from St Mary's, Byculla, Mumbai, who's currently in Tokyo thinks the racism in Australia is, to use a cliche, only the tip of the racial iceberg. He had sent me an NYT link long ago, before the current explosion of racism: "What Color is that Baby?" (NYT, 11 May 2009), by Bob Herbert, an op-ed columnist.
I recall with love and affection
Were all my experiences of Leeds and Yorkshire, so bitter and racist? Certainly not! I recall with love and affection:
- Rev. Paul King and the International Student Evening at Emmanuel Church every Wednesday;
- the wonderful teachers at the Fourman Nursery and Mrs. Burgess of Rosebank school, where our daughter Pallavi learned "me" English for the first time;
- the peace "Not in Our Name" marchers in London, resisting the mounted police of the rottweiler Maggie Thatcher;
- the gentle Simon Welsh and Ron Strong of Unipol Leeds, house-hunters on our behalf in Leeds;
- Ann Heilmann, annotating her feminist studies;
- the dignified old folk sing-song-ing, "Tra, la, love ..." in me open market;
- Peter Coltman's homely offer to learn on his "Typing Tutor"; and
- the always warmth of the Leeds Central Library, free with ten books to borrow at a time, where I discovered how the English dreaded Shivaji, calling him "mountain rat", and feared Kanoji Angre, branding him "pirate".
And how ever, how much, can I thank the ever-gracious Ekbote family (Sunalini, Anjali, and the late Mr. Ekbote) of Leeds for the unasked warmth with which they invited us to their hearth and held us to their hearts? And the Banhattis of York: Rajeev and Seema, Baba and the late Aaee, Ruchi and later Suhrud? For me, these two families made the "Cold and Wet" of England human and the subtle racism bearable; and re-assured me that the welcome "Heat and Dust" of India could not be far behind. ("If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" sang Shelley.)
Were all my experiences in Mumbai tarnished by the Shiv Sena? Certainly not! I recall with love, affection and solidarity:
- the wonderful comrades working with Prabhakar Sanzgiri, Madan Naik and Dr. Vivek Monteiro at Kaju Tekdi, Bhandup;
- the late "Feriwala" Francis and Bhabhi and their children Jyoti, Rajesh and the late Ladis;
- my Vistas friends at the Centre for Education and Documentation (CED), Mumbai, behind Regal Cinema and the Taj Hotel;
- the Mukadam of Manmad with his walrus moustache learning me the "bara-khadi" of Marathi; and
- my four years of rural apprenticeship in Pathardi, where I fell in love with the Marathi-speaking people.
So I survived.
So have dreaming migrants in the past. So will bold migrants today. And daring migrants to come tomorrow. We shall overcome. We are not afraid. We shall resist the cruelties and harassment, and beatings and the discrimination of the racists ... of all colours.
Other lands, other struggles, other experiences
As and when I pick up other experiences and sharing, I'll keep updating under this section. The first piece is by Aparna Das-Sadukhan, my student from SIMC, Pune, who as "Ketchup Girl" is respected for her blog, "Life and Times of a Cha Lover". She stays in Sydney, Australia, and shares her experiences and views in her post, "My two pence on curry bashing". (4 June 2009). Note the subtle racism, unlike the beating and bashing, many other Indians are receiving.
Mohan Sinha from the old Maharashtra Herald, Pune, thinks it's pure envy: despite the recession, the Indians are doing reasonably well, while the Australians suffer. See his post: "The Ugly Australian, it's just envy, mate!" (5 June 2009).
I'll keep adding more as you send them and I get them.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 31st May 2009.
Students being beaten up in Australia! Were the attacks racist? Even from the initial sketchy descriptions, I was sure the attacks were racist. The news and images took me back in time to Leeds, Yorkshire, England, during 1990-93.
My visa read "Accompanying wife". Kalpana had won an open merit Commonwealth scholarship to do her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Leeds. We landed at Heathrow airport, with its arrogant immigration officers (white and Asian).
We were then dumped in a bed & breakfast cubby-hole in a cold, wet and miserably damp London. Outside, I saw the statues of the imperialist and racist, Cecil Rhodes, and the murderer of Jallianwala Bagh, Reginald Dyer. Clinging to the fire of Shahid Bhagat Singh, close to my heart, I prepared for the worst.
Now it's recession, and I can empathise with the anxiety of the jobless in Australia. For authentic information from Indian sources and students in Australia about what's happening in Melbourne and elsewhere see the website of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA), which was set up in 2002. According to FISA, more than 500 (!!!) incidents against Asians have taken place during the last seven years.
When we stayed in Leeds in 1990, the UK and USA had got together to attack Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait. Anyone, whose face even remotely resembled Saddam's with his beard, was targeted in Leeds, which is next door to Bradford, with its highly visible Asian, more precisely Pakistani Muslim population.
Within the first weeks of shopping in July 1990 at the Leeds city centre, we knew that we must avoid going out on Friday and Saturday evenings. The weekly salaries were paid in the markets, latest by 6pm. Then the favourite sport of "Paki-bashing" would begin. First, the lager louts would down some beers with a "vindaloo" or "curry". Then they would pick upon the Asians -- Indians, Pakistanis or Bangladeshis, who ran the restaurants that served the cheap vindaloo and hot curry -- all of whom were tarred with the derogatory "Paki!" brush.
That branding took me back to the Mumbai of the 1970s. Then, the Shiv Sena fanatics branded all south Indians as "madrasis" or "lungiwalas" and all Hindi-speaking north Indians as "bhaiyyas". Sadly, in the Noughties of the 21st century, the MNS goons hound north Indians across Maharashtra in a macabre repeat. (All PR and Corp Comm professionals, please note the usage "brand".)
Sheer ignorance drives racists to hate
I vaguely felt it then, but I am certain of it now: it is sheer ignorance; whether they are white teenagers in Melbourne, Victoria, of 2009; white lager louts in Leeds, Yorkshire, of 1990; or son-of-the-soil Marathi-speaking shiv sainiks in Mumbai of the 1970s; all these persons are driven to hate by sheer ignorance.
First, they are un-educated, though they may possess degrees. Second, they are afraid of the "outsider" or the "foreigner". Third, they do not act on their own and are prey to racist propaganda. They are supported by political parties or fringe groups, no matter how tiny. And above all, they have the secret sympathy and hidden support of the local police, many of whom also subscribe to the narrow blinkered mindset and harbour hate for the intrepid migrant.
Walking down the back-to-back terraces of Woodsley, Burley and Autumn Grove in Leeds, I recall the pinch-cold faces peering out from the bedrooms above. First, hit the spit of hate; then "Sorry, mate!" with a sly smirk that said, "Damn, I missed me Paki!" target. Walking down the city centre, that spit of hate would come spattering down from the West Yorkshire buses. And always the "Sorry!" with that smirk.
Outside the Leeds Kirkgate open market, standing near the bus-stop, one cold and wet, grey and muggy day, the only reason I missed getting bashed up was that I was wearing the typical black Gannon overcoat, worn by the local police, which I had bought at the second-hand Oxfam store. So the thugs mistook me for a cop!
But hundreds of Asians in England had not been as lucky as me. I have a detailed file and carefully collected clippings of racist attacks on Asians, some of them fatal. And always the police managed to cover them up. But at least the British government has admitted the existence of racism and sincerely struggles to cope with it. Now Australia must face up to the bitter truth of racism too.
Vivek Pinto, my school-mate from St Mary's, Byculla, Mumbai, who's currently in Tokyo thinks the racism in Australia is, to use a cliche, only the tip of the racial iceberg. He had sent me an NYT link long ago, before the current explosion of racism: "What Color is that Baby?" (NYT, 11 May 2009), by Bob Herbert, an op-ed columnist.
I recall with love and affection
Were all my experiences of Leeds and Yorkshire, so bitter and racist? Certainly not! I recall with love and affection:
- Rev. Paul King and the International Student Evening at Emmanuel Church every Wednesday;
- the wonderful teachers at the Fourman Nursery and Mrs. Burgess of Rosebank school, where our daughter Pallavi learned "me" English for the first time;
- the peace "Not in Our Name" marchers in London, resisting the mounted police of the rottweiler Maggie Thatcher;
- the gentle Simon Welsh and Ron Strong of Unipol Leeds, house-hunters on our behalf in Leeds;
- Ann Heilmann, annotating her feminist studies;
- the dignified old folk sing-song-ing, "Tra, la, love ..." in me open market;
- Peter Coltman's homely offer to learn on his "Typing Tutor"; and
- the always warmth of the Leeds Central Library, free with ten books to borrow at a time, where I discovered how the English dreaded Shivaji, calling him "mountain rat", and feared Kanoji Angre, branding him "pirate".
And how ever, how much, can I thank the ever-gracious Ekbote family (Sunalini, Anjali, and the late Mr. Ekbote) of Leeds for the unasked warmth with which they invited us to their hearth and held us to their hearts? And the Banhattis of York: Rajeev and Seema, Baba and the late Aaee, Ruchi and later Suhrud? For me, these two families made the "Cold and Wet" of England human and the subtle racism bearable; and re-assured me that the welcome "Heat and Dust" of India could not be far behind. ("If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" sang Shelley.)
Were all my experiences in Mumbai tarnished by the Shiv Sena? Certainly not! I recall with love, affection and solidarity:
- the wonderful comrades working with Prabhakar Sanzgiri, Madan Naik and Dr. Vivek Monteiro at Kaju Tekdi, Bhandup;
- the late "Feriwala" Francis and Bhabhi and their children Jyoti, Rajesh and the late Ladis;
- my Vistas friends at the Centre for Education and Documentation (CED), Mumbai, behind Regal Cinema and the Taj Hotel;
- the Mukadam of Manmad with his walrus moustache learning me the "bara-khadi" of Marathi; and
- my four years of rural apprenticeship in Pathardi, where I fell in love with the Marathi-speaking people.
So I survived.
So have dreaming migrants in the past. So will bold migrants today. And daring migrants to come tomorrow. We shall overcome. We are not afraid. We shall resist the cruelties and harassment, and beatings and the discrimination of the racists ... of all colours.
Other lands, other struggles, other experiences
As and when I pick up other experiences and sharing, I'll keep updating under this section. The first piece is by Aparna Das-Sadukhan, my student from SIMC, Pune, who as "Ketchup Girl" is respected for her blog, "Life and Times of a Cha Lover". She stays in Sydney, Australia, and shares her experiences and views in her post, "My two pence on curry bashing". (4 June 2009). Note the subtle racism, unlike the beating and bashing, many other Indians are receiving.
Mohan Sinha from the old Maharashtra Herald, Pune, thinks it's pure envy: despite the recession, the Indians are doing reasonably well, while the Australians suffer. See his post: "The Ugly Australian, it's just envy, mate!" (5 June 2009).
I'll keep adding more as you send them and I get them.
Your support is my strength,
- Joe.
Pune, India, Sunday, 31st May 2009.
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