Chronicles Of The Return

SB writes:

You clearly lack understanding and find India an easy target.

You say, “In my opinion the filth, squalor and all around pollution indicates a marked lack of respect for India by Indians.”

When you have a large population that lives in poverty, you immediate concerns are not the environment. Maslows theory is well known. And as far the pollution is concerned, the West pollutes far more than what India does. I guess what you really meant was sanitation.

My lack of understanding? Perhaps, as I am not omniscient, but I often find when someone uses, “you lack understanding” as an opener it means they’re just unwilling to listen. As I said, I may lack understanding, but I do not lack the will to understand. So, perhaps we can move this conversation forward and in good faith I offer a few corrections on my end.

Yes, there is a difference between sanitation and pollution. Many of the issues I address are, more properly, understood under the heading of sanitation. India’s very real air-pollution in cities aside, let’s focus on sanitation, as I’ve since been corrected many times, not only about the difference between the two, but also the fact that India’s carbon footprint, per capita, is one of the lowest in the world. I am also aware that the Indian conception of purity and cleanliness is much different than that in the West. It is a cultural issue. My point about sanitation is this: if Indians desire more investment from the West, this is something Indians need to address from a purely self-interested, pragmatic calculation. I’ll say it again: this is India’s choice, and as I have made clear, I respect India’s choices.

I’d also add, in India’s favor the fact that the wildlife in India is almost the most diverse and rich in the world, outside of Africa it certainly is. The lack of hardcore, industrial pollution in India is one of two reasons for this bounty. The other is the simple fact that most Indian’s are vegetarians of a sort, and the wildlife is much safer than in a place like China. This is to be applauded by all peoples, not just the self-righteous environmentalists of the West, in our increasingly small world

You say: “Infrastructure is poor. I just never have the impression that the Indian government really cares. Too interested in buying weapons from Russia, Israel and the US I guess.”

The West did not build all its infrastructure in one day. And when you have two hostile nuclear armed neighbors, you are forced to spend on defense.

No doubt this is true. However, China, which has a population larger than India’s, and started from a baseline GDP per capita similar to India’s created world-class infrastructure in less than 40 years. India is twenty years along in its reform effort and not even remotely close to where the Chinese were in a comparable stage. And China had the same excuse of nuclear armed neighbors: Russia and the US bases in Japan. You can use this excuse all you want, but it is a crutch, just like the one the US uses on the ‘War on Terror.’ It’s a false choice: either we invest in our own people and live up to our own ideals, as democracies, or we don’t. The US falls far, far short of its ideals, actually betraying them far too often for my taste. But having ‘bad neighbors’ or ‘people who hate our freedoms’ is a lame excuse. Nothing more.

You say, “The rich still have their servants, the lower castes are still there to do the dirty work and so the country remains in status.”

The British too had servants in the 19th century while the Americans had their slaves.

The likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson talked about right to freedom but never gave it to their black slaves. In fact racism against blacks continued till as late 1960’s and 70’s. That’s 200 years after they got independence. But those years did not have media scrutiny and internet.There are large number of illegal migrants in US and Europe who actually work as servants at homes.

I don’t dispute any of this. I’ll only say the following two things. One, you can lecture me on racism when a Dalit is prime-minister of India. Until then, I have an African-American president, and while I criticize him frequently, I am proud of that my country has largely, but not perfectly, moved past race. This is one ideal we have lived up to as a society. Not without pain and suffering, but we have made very real progress.

Second: Russia, Great Britain, France and the US all did away with slavery and involuntary servitude in the 19th century. When are you going to do the same? When does the reality of building an economy on the sweat of another man or woman’s labor become too much? And this is not about guilt, historical or otherwise, as guilt is too easy to project. It is about mobilizing the best capital you have in India: all of your people, men and women.

You say, “And I’ve seen 50 other countries on this planet and none, not even Ethiopia, have as long and gargantuan a laundry list of problems as India does”

No doubt that India has its problems. But you never mentioned its strengths. India has democracy. It is perhaps the only instance where democracy has worked despite widespread poverty.

India cannot throw away slumdwellers like China does. For Beijing Olympics, large number of people were simply thrown out.

China has massive pollution. Most people, including those in cities actually drink polluted water.

India has its problems and at least for the next 20 years, many of these shall continue. But it is our democracy that gives us hope. Ours is an extremely complicated society. We have defied the basic definition of a nation state - which talks about people bound by common culture, language and religion. We have created our own definition. That’s India.

No doubt India has its strengths, some of which I have identified above. There are more. And I will write about them at length sometime soon, when I wind down a few writing projects I am engaged in currently. As I have said before in other forums: my primary aim in my ‘India Critique’ is to impart some realism about the hurdles Western businessmen will face if they choose to invest in India. A myth is being built around the ‘emergence of India’ and I think that myth needs to be demystified. I’m a realist. I see the opportunities in India. But I see them with open eyes, not rose colored glasses.

Do you agree? Disagree with the author’s opnion? Then leave a comment!

Further commentary on India can be found here. Reader responses to this story can be found here and here. Please contact me via Facebook (you can message me via Facebook even if you don’t have an account) if you would like to respond. My only request is that you be polite and not call me names.

It’s the first weekend I’ve had in about two years. It’s not like the recent past has been one long party, but the days have had a tendency to blend together, Saturday being no different from Tuesday and that sad, depressing feeling on Sunday afternoons is something I’ve forgotten. I suppose tomorrow I’ll be getting in touch with it once again. This morning laying in bed was odd: it was just before seven and the voice of discipline was telling me, “get up you lazy bum, shower, eat and then head to the coffee shop and WRITE!” But then there was another voice that said, “wait, wait, wait, enjoy the morning, take your time, don’t hurry. You worked hard this week.”

Soon both voices collapsed into a cacophony of dialogue and argumentation, most of which was about the show I saw last night.

Darrell Scott played at the Cactus Cafe and it was one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen. I’ve been a fan of Scott’s for several years now. I’m not sure what it is about his music that moves me and touches me so. I grew up decidedly upper middle class: my father is a CPA and my mother was an executive with the State Government. Early in life we lived on a farm, but as my father’s career took off we sold it and moved into the city. Of course, we never really struggled–sure after the divorce things were rough for a couple of years, but we never wanted for much. So, it’s odd that Scott’s songs of working men and women, bruised and scarred lives, filled with doubt, alcohol and disappointment capture my imagination the way they do. (Oh, there are more reasons for this, but reasons I’m not willing to disclose just yet. Disclose is not the best word here: it’s story I’ll tell in due time, just not yet.)

Perhaps it’s kind of like my attachment to Bukowski and his story as well. Singing songs and writing poems about the hard edges of life in modern America. I certainly think a lot of it is due to the fact that while I went to school in Austin as a child, I was bussed over to the East-side schools and I learned early on that I could relate to anyone; anyone’s pain, or joy for that matter. I learned early on in life to value all life as a triumph of experience over hope–that the simple act of enduring for many people is vindication enough, like Faulkner’s ‘puny, inexhaustible voice’ echoing loudly at the ‘last ding-dong of doom . . . still talking.’ And while hope is that most essential of ingredients to life, in my opinion, and I have much–ever the eternal optimist am I!–for many hope is luxury they can ill afford. It’s the divergences that make life so rich, so potent and so full of potential.

But, I digress, back to Darrell Scott.

I smiled most of the show. It was just Darrell and his guitar up on stage telling stories. About half way through the show Scott played my favorite song of his, called “Uncle Lloyd:”

He was not my father’s brother
But he wished that he could be
Told us kids to call him uncle
And we would be his family
He had a wife and kids in Fresno
The youngest one was twenty-four
Dad had brought him into our house
They didn’t want him anymore

He helped us work the family business
Building fences in the sun
Worked just like a man of twenty
‘Til the working day was done
He and Dad would spend their evening
Sitting in lawn chairs in the yard
Where they’d drink a toast to Seagram’s
Seagram’s never went down hard

Won’t you wake up Uncle Lloyd
Got a lot of work today
We’ll get Don to make the coffee
Load that truck and be on your way
Friday night you can drive to Vegas
Maybe this time you will win
Buy a trailer by the river
And you won’t have to work again

He was sleeping in the workroom
With a mattress on the floor
When one night I heard him crying
As I passed outside his door
He cried, “Rita, girl I love you
Rita, Darling please don’t go
I’ve tried hard to make you happy
I’ve done everything I know”

Then I heard the bottle open
The tipping up and putting down
Heard the rustling of the covers
Then he did not make a sound
I thought of thirty years of Rita
Standing sternly by his side
All the years of hanging in there
All the emptiness inside

Then I thought of how their children
Have children of their own
And how a man at fifty-seven
Winds up living so alone

In so few words Scott tells the story about a broken man, who finds solace in his friends and his friend’s family. The most potent single word in the entire song is “want: when they didn’t want him anymore.” It sets up the entire story, the fulcrum the song launches out to us from, for us to earn it, or own it or just drink away our sorrows with. Sometimes people just don’t want us anymore and we become discarded like things. It’s this human land-fill which Scott mines for his best songs.

The whole night was like this: a veritable story-tellers feast. He played his standards, “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” and “My Father’s House.” But it was “Banjo Clark” which blew me and the rest of the audience away: it was the consummate skill with which Scott played the guitar, one of the most amazing acoustic guitar solos I’ve ever had the pleasure to listen to. It was rich, not limited to any single genre, a touch of folk here, a pluck or two of jazz, bluegrass spilling off the frets and then the ever present Scott mix of blues and country. There were moments between verses where he just got lost picking away at the guitar, strumming, picking, plucking, hands moving up and down the rosewood-fretboard like a man finding love between the steel frets and the mother of pearl inlay, dare I say he was making love to the guitar. There wasn’t anything self-indulgent about the music, at all: even while he was lost in the music he carried the entire audience right along with him. Seldom do I leave a venue with such a large smile on my face. I felt like I’d been in the hands of a master-story teller, or better yet, a Celtic bard in the Middle Ages.

If you ever get a chance to see Scott do an acoustic set don’t miss it. Trust me on this one.

We weren’t lost, but there were moments, out in the harsh glare of the Gobi that we felt it. In this part of Gansu nothing grows. The soil is a rough gravel–ten thousand miles of conglomerate and worn sandstone turning to dust, empty. More barren than any desert I’ve ever seen, except the Rub-al-Qali.

“Out here,” I wrote in my journal, “listening to sand whistle off the dunes one feels alone and small. Everything is so much bigger, in real time, than it is anywhere I’ve ever been.”

Like all good photos, this one was an accident. I was taking test shots of the mountains in the background. If you look closely you can see a jagged line, hanging on the horizon like low lying clouds in a luciferin haze. When I uploaded the photo later that evening it was this shot that caught my eye, and in the days to come I returned to it many times.

An epochal feeling pervades the scene, as the rough edge of the Kunlun Shan, that great rippling sheet of scraping rocks crumples into the Tarim Basin.  Uplift and subsidence before me as geology comes alive, the power of unfathomable forces in the silence of a cool April afternoon.

But more than that it has a feeling, and although all is still there is movement in the photo. Gao Xuan, our driver, runs fingers behind his neck, in consternation, looking backwards at the young Khazakh standing out in the middle of no where—what was he doing out there, dressed in a suit jacket, fifty miles from the nearest town and miles away from any water? Evocative of the entire day, from Dun Huang all the way to the Jade Gate, this curious meeting of Han Chinese, Kazakh and American not three miles from that great and ancient Eurasian entrepot, the Jade Gate. History repeating itself in an off-rhyme; Occident, Orient and Nomad. Modernity eye to eye with the past.

And the sign in the foreground? I have no idea what it says. Although in my imagination it says something like, “Welcome To The Last Outpost of the Great T’ang Empire.”

Alone and small, surrounded by the immensity of the world. There might be a word for that, but for now I will settle for a picture.

Nota bene: Other photos from Gansu and Xinjiang can be found here, here, here and here.

Vampires suck. Really. And this is a great takedown of ‘em.

Give me zombies over pasty, bloodsucking, hyper-sexual freaks any day.

Which reminds me, if you have a twitter account you should really be following Gus, who is enduring the zombie-pocalypse one tweet at a time.

I received this email yesterday from a friend in India in response to my post entitled, “Reflections on India” and I just had to post it. It encapsulates in a way I never could, all that is India, in all of her glorious complexity. Not only is it a beautiful email, it contains something that I’ve never been explain to people: the music of Indian English. If you’ve never heard Indian-English spoken in India, you are missing something:

At first, I wanted to stab you and snatch your purse, but then I realized I cant do that. Cause you don’t have a purse, your a man! err.. Yeah I read your name after I read the write up, call me careless err.. you already did hehe, sorry I’m sounding so cocky but I’m just a lad trying to grow a French beard for quite some time now.

I must say, it’s an impressive write, I’d relish it with a tinge of lemon in root beer if I were in any other country (I dont know how root beer tastes with lemon) but as it is, I’m an Indian (with no motives to kill you)

Its good to know that you’ve seen almost all of India and better, came up with so few problems. Makes me think.. is 4 your favorite number? Cause I can be sure that there are a few thousand more problems in India. Your observations and explanations are really nice and pictures. pollution, lack of infrastructure , corruption etc etc are indeed very Indian. But India is not a city built in an Age Of Empires game. Millions of people divided on probably more lines than there are people have just one thing in common, we are Indians. Conservative, primitive, careless, hypocritical or whatever suits the mood, and have been a part of this ever growing world with due attention and equal consideration. Everyone is cared for, people care for themselves, selfish as one might call it, but I see it to be as an effort to promote and make place for personal interests. Simply, its like the millions of crazy school clubs that the kids in the US come up with. Only here, its grown ups fighting for rights and also end up getting free publicity. These are the games Indians play, its actually a book, called Games Indians play, nice and funny. You should read it.

I read this other book called Keep off the grass, a book by a second generation Indian who made about half a million dollars working on wall street. The book starts with his feel of wanting to know his roots, and he comes down to India for an MBA. His experiences of India are quite similar to yours and he knows nothing of his mission of soul or root search. By the end, he begins to read a few books by Ruskin Bond and relates himself to Mr. Bond. He feels that Mr. Bond would be able to clear out a few things and plans a visit.

The protagonist asks “why did you leave London? Why did you settle down in India?” To which Mr. Bond said “hmm.. well, it always had to be India, it couldnt be anywhere else, I guess. I belong here. No publishing deal or pound advances in the UK could change that.”

He paused, “you know I read a joke in the newspaper this morning. If Brooke Shields marries Ruskin Bond she would become Brooke Bond. Silly, I know, but well, I almost fell down laughing. Could I ever appreciate that in London or anywhere else in the world? Belonging, thats what it is about. You cant be happy if you cant be whole. Does that make sense?

The protagonist, Samrat Ratan decides to do away with the life his parents chose and settles down in India.

You are right, I am careless, actually carefree, carefree of what you have to say about me. I want to change, I know it would only do good, but things are not in my hands, I cant go out overnight and tell people not to wear green socks, cause then people would first ask me why, then tell me that i didnt have the right to say, then that they like green socks and there are people who would ask me what socks are.. I hope you get my point.

I do not have numbers, nor do I know more to be able to speak to you. But India is not a book, not a word, not a country. Its a feel. I like to call myself a world citizen, but there’s only one place I call home. Sentimental fool I might sound, but that again, is Indian! It’s a place where we offer milk to snakes, touch and worship a cow thats blocking traffic. My dad doesnt fight with the father of a kid who beat me up, nor have I learnt his credit card numbers by heart. But I have people to go home to. The inability of the government to provide me with amenities is replaced by the care and comfort of my home. change this, and I would cease to be me.

~Shree

Well said.

———-

Do you agree? Disagree with the author’s opnion? Then leave a comment!

Further commentary on India can be found here. Reader responses to this story can be found here and here. Please contact me via Facebook (you can message me via Facebook even if you don’t have an account) if you would like to respond. My only request is that you be polite and not call me names.

I know it’s not Tuesday, but I re-read Yeats’ poem again last night, which compelled me to write. But first, Yeats’ poem:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

~William Butler Yeats 1892

Few poems have stayed with me my entire life. Few resonate year after year after year. As a late teenager, early twenty-something it was love poetry, Petrarch and Catullus, unrequited, quite silly and partially mad. I didn’t have the patience yet for the great epics of Dante, Homer and Virgil. In my late twenties I found the aggrieved anger of Bukowski, and while many see him as a misanthrope and misogynist, I’ve always believed he was, at heart, a secret romantic, raw, shredded up and thrown into the dumpster of life, only to emerge from it, pristine, like an American phoenix.

After Bukowski came Rilke and all of his existential angst. I could relate to much of it, his peripatitc wanderings, his loves, his failures as a man, his disciplined lyricism and the visual feast his images conjured.

One year, however, stands out. On the cusp of my thirties I took a trip to Ireland and Northern Wales. I spent a month backpacking in the hills and mountains of northwest Ireland around Donegal and then in Northern Wales, a place that still haunts my dreams. The only reading I took with me was Yeats, determined to decipher the lyrical knot of his poetry. Of course, I’d read Yeats, and the ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ many times before. Ed Hirsch had introduced the poem to me while teaching at the University of Houston.

One unseasonably warm summer day, as the car I was in sped north between Donegal Town and Killybegs, I saw the ‘Lake of Innisfree.’ No, it’s not called Innisfree, or maybe it might be. Memory is fickle and the lack of notes in my journal prevent me from recalling.

It was still a time when one could hitchhike across Ireland–before the great real-estate bubble obliterated much of the country with American-like track housing—when a lone Yank wearing a baseball cap, carrying a backpack could catch a ride with a pregnant mother, two howling kids in the back seat. A long time ago, indeed, another Ireland. But, my benefactor that day, a young man from Sligo named Tim Egan on his way to deliver Guinness to Killybegs, noticed a copy of Yeats hanging out of my pack. He pulled over and said, “Aye, you’ll be liking this. They say this is where Yeats wrote some of his finest poetry.”

We looked at the dedicatory plaque, which said Yeats had built a house of sorts here with his bare hands. I smiled, looking about. There were no hives for honeybees, or bean-rows, but the day was bright with the sun and the soft flapping of linnet’s wings. In short, peace did come dropping slow.

Tim whispered the words of the poem. Horripilations rose along the edges of my spine. The words caromed around in my head and settled in my heart and then I forgot it all and the years passed. My tastes in poetry changed once again. Dante called. And so did Homer. Czeslaw Milosz made a guest appearance as well. But Yeats was ever there, lurking, hiding, biding his time. And from time to time I find myself thumbing the well-worn pages of that summer journal, filled as it is with lots of not-so-good writing and equal amounts of even worse poetry. What that journal has in abundance, however, is a voice–for it was that summer that I found my writing voice.

And in that voice I still find ‘nine bean rows’ in the discipline of writing. And I become an engineer of cabins and bee hives with my words, memories and images. I can feel ‘peace come dropping slow’ after a long editing-session, sitting back with a glass of scotch, pride in a job well done.

And best of all, the soft sounds of ‘lake water lapping’ can be found anywhere I choose: watching the silent silhouette of ships skating along the blue waters of the Bosporus, hearing the crush and throng of humanity in all its glorious diversity on an Indian railway station, pacing back and forth along the dilapidated battlements of the Great Wall, but easiest of all when I am sitting on the deck of my favorite Austin coffee house in the cool air of late winter.

I choose, then I remember, and then I smile.

Sean Paul walked with Reyes down the narrow medieval streets in the false-dawn. He screeched like a little girl when a gargolye-zombie lurched out of a hidden passage, looking like a sick, pale harpy.

“Chill, Pablito,” said Reyes, “it’s just my ex-wife.”

When I see things like this it makes me shake my head. Not because I am intolerant. If you want to get your freak on, by all means do so. It’s just that I get the distinct sense that this is what the late Roman Republic must have been like, as all the bizarre Eastern mystical cults spread while the ennui and boredom of life forced people into stranger and stranger associations.

Most people tend to think it was the imperial period, during Caligula’s and Nero’s reigns that the moral life of Rome was terribly decadent–it was politically decadent, no doubt, but morally? Not what it was a hundred years before.

In reality it was the late Republican era that was decadent par excellence. Auguries and foreign gods proliferated as much as orgies and Bacchic Rites while poets such as Catullus’ wrote of Caesar’s (female and male) conquests. Caesar is reputed to have been one of Catullus’ lovers. Republican virtue was drowned in wine, sex and the worship of foreign deities, one of which would wash over the Mediterranean Basin and transform the world.

But lurking in that decadence was a counter-attack from the conservative forces of Rome’s old civic religion. Augustus was an example of that, of sorts, in his exhortations late in his life that the young marry, have more children, be more family oriented. Sound familiar?

The sprouting and proliferation of cults and strange entertainments was crazy in the late Republican period, although limited to the upper classes. The head count still suffered as they must, while the powerful did what they could. And now, we live in a kind of global imperial twilight, our life and times, I suppose, but now the blue and red of dusk turns violet and crimson until purple night covers our dying republic.

Shine, perishing republic.