Thought of the day

                                          " Don`t take the play
                            out of the players "

                                                 -Anon.
                                        
                                          (..., er, this is mainly about football)

Sparrows, sign of times

                                                                                                                  

Mumbai, a city built upon land barely risen above the sea, a city on the edge in many senses – geological, social, political, cultural – wisely avoided by the canny Peshwas of Pune – had one of its periodic calamitous encounters with the Monsoons the other day. The world saw the gazillions of bytes dealing with stuff about all sides of it. But I also saw after what seem like ages, two sparrows, who came to sit outside my window glass to take shelter from the lashings of torrents of rain darkening the morning sky. Unlike the crows and pigeons I am accustomed to and who have a proprietorial air upon my window-sill – often boldly peeking in to read the newspaper I hold in my hands – these small, gentle beings were indifferent to me across the glass. Wet, shivering, coping, they huddled together looking out at the rain. I am told and I also believe that sparrows are losing out in the harsh survival stakes. I have also read that when sparrows go much else will go too. No wonder most of us who are not Davos apparatchiks have a fellow feeling about them. So while the atmospheric tumult and catastrophe was swirling in the sky I was rejoicing, watching them as a personal visitation, as a social factoid of solace. I sat still without turning the page of the newspaper so as not to startle them, till they flew off into the rain. Sparrows have not quite perished yet -- it takes calamities to push them out of their current hideouts. That morning  was a commentary on the times.

Wars, civil and uncivil : Graffiti Wall

My Germany trip

                                                          

                                               Going In

            Some days before starting the trip I had looked at Germany in Google Maps and I was startled to see that it does not have a shore at the Mediterranean. It came as a late discovery for me. All along I have had the impression that like all advanced nations of Europe it too must have had an intense and civilizing historical experience of Asia through the Mediterranean after Arab expansion under Islam and, indeed, must have pulled itself out of its medieval torpor like the others. It came as a shock and also a revelation. Germany has ports in the northern seas; its southern side is doubly blocked first by Switzerland and then by Italy. It is very significant that of all major European powers Germany alone never had a Mediterranean history – Britain and Russia were never quite fully European, and they aren`t to this day. It only spoke of my ignorance, of course, and while seeing things in Germany during the trip this idea returned to my mind as very significant many times.

            T₂ the new international airport terminal of Mumbai is designed on a huge and grand scale as if it will someday actually handle volume of business like Heathrow, Kennedy, etc. do and it is stylistically identical and imitative of all new airports of the world, all of which show a sameness and timidity of artistic design like all new cars of the world. We do live in creatively cowardly times. The airlines and the police, like all who do real work, finished their business quickly. Only the immigration staff took a self importantly long time. All bureaucracies have a streak of sadism. Indian immigration and customs cannot be different. Lufthansa took off on time and without fuss.                    

            

        Sleep was out of question. My wife who has a simpler relationship with sleep tried a movie on the media screen at the back of the seat ahead and promptly fell asleep. The media screen for me was full of options, movies, games, and much else I didn’t understand, but as usual I watched the progress of the plane in its route across the planet over a realistically simulated landscape passing below. So much of the land is mountainous, or barren, or uninhabitable! No wonder ancient Persians were fighting wars not only in India but also as far as in Greece – and Greeks were returning the favour, in India, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Wars were for booty. It was the revenue model for the State, not very different in essence even today. Agricultural lands around fertile river valleys in China, India, Egypt and Iraq have been old targets of military campaigns. Just the right thoughts, it seemed, while flying towards Germany currently plundering West Asia as a NATO partner of USA. When sitting too became impossible I walked the aisles and the back alley of the plane, which helpfully had German magazines like Monopole, Der Spiegel and others relating to racing cars and fashion. The usual magazine repertory, only dubbed in German. I wished I could read the language, a thought which was to occur many times during the trip. I must have won the battle at some point and slept off. I woke up when Lufthansa was serving breakfast, before landing at Frankfurt.

            Stepping out of the plane gave us the first whiff of Germany on a crisp morning in their summer at 16^oC, coldish for brown tropical Indians. Again the long, long walk from the plane to the business end of the airport. This is a problem the airport designers need to solve: how to handle large number of aircrafts simultaneously as also to minimize exhausting trudges by the passengers. Walkways, electric trolleys for the infirm, show an awareness of the problem but not a solution. Not all travelers are athletic youth; in fact most are not. I remembered Heathrow which had seemed to somehow handle this issue far better. Unlike in India immigration, customs, security etc. were no bother. Immigration is handled by half a dozen federal Police officers, and all they wanted was to see our return air ticket back to India. I had been preparing for long and tough questioning by stern and suspicious racially hardened Gestapo. Nobody was bothered about us. Germany, of many mega wars, has fine-tuned its security mechanisms, or so it seemed.

            The vast airport of Frankfurt is bordered by an equally vast maze of “facilitating” systems to help people connect with their onward transport. The profuse signage directing the arrivals tended to confuse rather than clarify. We wandered around like confused aliens. There was nobody to ask, and there were endless manned counters selling beers, banking products, and such. It you asked someone randomly they were polite and pointed to some other counter which was invisible and round some turning. Our arthritic legs had reached their tolerance limits. We remembered India where this job is nicely done by the smiling airline girls who swarm the airports, but in Germany smiling girls are much more expensive. We were outside the airport now but we were not going anywhere. We wanted to go to Karlsruhe in the south. Bullet train, plain train, bus, taxi? Everything seemed to be helpfully surrounding us, but we were lost and couldn’t find a ticket counter – any ticket counter – as we walked crisscrossing the fine roads and pavements full of passing cars and buses a amidst a maze of tall buildings, in the new, foreign-smelling cold morning air. There were many people, of mixed European origins it seemed, patiently waiting for their transport. We saw many people standing in clusters smoking cigarettes deeply and urgently in designated smoking areas, the harsh-smelling tobacco smoke whipping around in swirling breezes. This matter of widespread smoking will recur later. I saw the first derelict of Germany, sifting through trash bins – a reassuring sight, diluting the formidable image of Germany I had carried in my mind.

            Rescue came in the form of a thin young lad with a wispy beard and suffering eyes, who was stationed there by some sort of a church organization precisely to help out confused and tired passengers like us. He chose us and approached us offering help. He heard and understood our problem quickly and pointed the way where, 100 yards away, there would be a ticket counter of ICE bullet trains to take us to Karlsruhe. By then that 100 yards was very important to our legs. Church! Germany! In today’s Post-Everything-21^st century? With its thousands of years of experience and wisdom the Church still beats all the modern management systems in “micro-managing” souls of the lost and the helpless. Yes, I saw this. In Frankfurt.

            Lost and the bewildered souls attract other kind of people too. As we walked the hopefully last 100 yards a thin middle aged bearded Greek god attached himself to me and spoke fine English in mild, educated tones. Quickly I noted with shock the deep imprint of  colonization on my mind, despite being weaned on Naipaul, Edward Said, and all, which gives me the first impulse of seeing Greek gods in all white people – mercifully only the first. Yes, the ICE (Inter City Express) counter of DP was indeed ahead. But trains were Euro 40 to Karlsruhe. We could take a bus at Euro 16 too! Seeing that I was wavering he was encouraged. He was keen. He said buses were 100 yards away too. But my mean-spirited Indian mind was immediately suspicious. He understood this too. Deprecatingly he explained that if he helped us we could also perhaps help him with an Euro or two? Despite my Asiatic distrust I liked him and also told myself to withhold this liking at the same time. No, I said, we would take the train. Very well, I will help you to the DP Company’s counter and interpret German maybe?  Maybe, I said, and immediately regretted it.

“You are from India?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied shortly to discourage conversation, while also somehow enjoying the skillful nature of the palaver. I was on a holiday, after all.

“Too many people,” he said with friendly commiseration.

“Yes,” I bristled defensively. “But so many working hands too!”

“Yes, yes,” he quickly agreed, nodded wholeheartedly. “I am from Ireland, too,” he said.

This “too” floored me completely. Ireland! But we had reached the DP Company`s counter. A very helpful man there heard us, explained all options in plain English, typed and printed out the tickets, and also pointed to the escalator which would take us to the correct platform for our ICE train due in 20 minutes, and smiled. I asked the DP man whether I should help the Irishman, who had politely retreated well away from the brightly lit DP counter but was waiting expectantly as a distance. Not necessary, the DP man said, not unkindly. I couldn’t help myself. I had been given my first German coins by DP as change, but there was no time to indulge in my old habit and linger over these fascinating emblems of civilizations. Ireland spoke too many things to me – British colonization, Joyce, Yeats… I walked over and gave him a 1 Euro coin. It might have been 2 Euro for all I knew.

A plump, young teutonic girl doing the counter of hot buns and coffee for the fatigued and non-german-reading travellers on a cold, windy platform good-humouredly gave us the final help saying that second class coaches will have “2” painted large near the doors. On time, we were aboard on the slick bullet train, streaking across the German countryside just waking up under the mild summer morning sun.

Beautiful, seeing the passing landscape this was the word that came to the mind, again and again. Every bit of the passing scene was laid out like European landscape paintings of 19^th century French, Dutch and German artists – like a work of art – which has formed even for 3/4^th of the (colonized) world’s people like me their artistic templates, standards, and frames of reference. Large farms, but not extra large like in USA, with hedged boundaries surrounding small clusters of white single story picture-book houses with red and brown tiled sloping roofs. Why sloping tiles like in Inda south of Vindhyas, I wondered? Germany did not have heavy rains. Then I remembered: snow. The farms were of ripening wheat, vegetables – yellow, brown, gold and green. Trimmed, subdued trees, occasional neat rowed orchards of plum, apricot and other fruit I couldn’t quite identify. Gently rolling land, low wooded hills in the horizon. We were in the Rhine river’s basin. The sky was a delicate blue with small white wisps of transient clouds evaporating in the sun, like in a Vermeer painting.

 Ah! I had been seeing pictures of this landscape for years since I was growing up, reading books, seeing films, forming ideas. This is where those pictures came from! A strange feeling came over me. At the same time reassuring like a long imagined home coming, and also unsettling, because it was so foreign, something seen for the first time. Somehow this type of landscape was the true and correct landscape, artistically beautiful, worthy of being painted, discussed endlessly, kept in museums, carried in the mind like a yardstick to judge all landscapes by! Landscapes of my own land were beautiful too, sure, but in a different, subordinated class, not artistically affirmed, somehow not worthy enough. Born in a free India, writing this in English language, an ex-colonial subject like me: how many cleavings do I carry buried in my innocent soul? How can I travel, and see the world without churning up old, unexamined sediments?

Hamlets. This was the word  passing villages invoked – mainly single storey white houses of painted walls and sloping red and brown tiled roofs, some with gabled ornamentation, huddling around small, narrow churches with their steeples  rising up clear above the houses. The smallness of the churches and their half hearted architectural ornamentation spoke of small parishes being tended, in the past and also today. Carefully tended lands, farms, orchards, dotted with carefully unfelled trees – in rows and clusters – spoke of decades and even centuries of studied and carefully cultivated fertility and fruitfulness of the soil and climate. Colors in pastel shades, passing before my eyes, speaking of orderliness and beauty, and human ingenuity and science, bathed in photogenic mild sunlight of July in southern Germany.

A thought, may be responding to all this gentle beauty: Germany is situated in the northern latitudes of mild, angled sun rays, with long winters and short summers. What causes all this grain, fruits, flowers, trees and colours and tastes to sprout from the soil after all? The sun, of course. The comparatively weak rays from the sun, due to upper latitudes and inclined axis of Earth`s rotation, can only do so much here and not more. All flora, and for that matter fauna at one remove, are what, exactly? Nothing but what the sun’s rays can extract out of the genetically programmed biotic possibilities inherent in the ensemble of soil, seeds and climate. So this: what I was seeing. The lower energy level of the pale sun in Germany can only realize pale thresholds of colours and tastes: Germany’s soil can manage to reach up only  to yield apricots, apples, and cherries for example, not hot stuff like mangoes, bananas, sugarcane, chillies, spices and such like – these need hot, powerful sun rays of equatorial and tropical latitudes. Yet another layer of Germany opened up, as the trans-european bullet train speeded due south, towards Switzerland. Why only of Germany? Whole of Europe’s actually. Europe would not have got its Enlightenment had it not stumbled upon tropical fruits and spices of Asia and Africa and south America. The sun managed to reach European stomachs and spirits only through the 3^rd world! Hold it there, I told myself, before you get carried away; look at the passing land instead.

What was passing was not only villages and a rural arcadia. Every 50 kms along the rail track there were small and not so small towns, although our hot shot trans-european train did not stop at these rail stations. Towns visibly being sustained by one or two large industrial units, but no overwhelming industry clusters which were created all over the world by the first, 19^th century, mode of industrialization. Industrial buildings dominated the cityscapes, surrounded by large, populated car parks, feeder roads, warehouses, transport hubs, shopping malls, banks and schools. Busy and pulsating, I saw, but not frenetic or desperate; there was a stately calm and wholesomeness that gave a lie to the pictures of out-of-control industry-townscapes that we have got from Dickens, Detroit, or Djakarta. Small cities like Gross-Gerau, Riedstadt, Stockstadt am Rhein, Gernsheim, Lampertheim, Darmstadt… awake and calmly going about their daily business, as effortless and natural entities of a known and wholly owned civilization. These places did not have the crazed atmosphere of an alien eruption that envelops Indian industrial places and towns.

Neatness. Care. These ideas slowly made their way to the front of my mind, as I watched the villages and towns from the train. Every patch of land, every road, pavement, drains, culverts, parks, benches, traffic lights, bus and train stops, every public and civic works were clearly marked out and closely maintained and cared for, like it was posing for a brochure. Even smallest of villages with a dozen houses with a tiny church. This local  thing, this municipal or local governance is of course the ultimate level of civilization, like good street paving and tap water is of urbanization. Germany is no doubt civilized, almost obsessively so.

I watched the people going about their business in neat streets amidst neat buildings. Fresh faced teenage children with pink and healthy white skins joyously racing one another on their school bicycles, senior matrons chatting in pairs, pushing strollers filled with daily shopping from the nearby superstore or bakery, big stolid men trundling past on cute looking delivery vans: daily life of white race. Race. This word too started appearing in my uneasy, liberal educated mind, as I watched the civilized German people living out routine lives in German settings. The word also evoked echoes. Race is such a real thing; however abused the idea might have been politically in the last two centuries, and continues to be even today. Seeing a white man or woman in India is different; we see them with native, secure eyes.Here I watched the passing landscape with a divided intent, bifocally.

Even an ICE bullet train has to stop somewhere. Our train was slowing down and the landscape showed the approach of a big industrial city and also glimpses of a broad river quite busy with commercial freight boats, and even huge ocean going container ships! Rhine, surely, I thought with a thrill as the train announced in several languages that we were approaching Mannheim for a stop. Rhine river. So much of Germany’s ancient lore and legends are bound up with this river, which flows down from the Swiss Alps in the southern border of Germany and traverses the whole country northwards to its destination in the North Sea. Again the thought returned: Germany is a North Sea type of land, not a Mediterranean one – by geography, by history, by culture.

The train took a long time to gently roll onto its platform in Mannheim station. This was good. I could see a lot of the big industrial city, a contrast from the idyllic picture book scenery of rural Germany I had been seeing. Container trucks with logos of Siemens, ABB, Daimler, and Temasek etc. explained the huge industrial plants. Siemens and ABB alone account for about half of electricity generation equipment of the planet. The road system was complex and two-storied, but orderly – oh yes, with very Germanic orderliness. In one railway siding I saw huge rakes with gleaming new cars under polythene wraps in 3 storeyed carriages, waiting to be transported for the distant European markets. No pollution visible, no traffic jams, none of that apocalyptic, heedless atmosphere of Indian industrial areas. German industrialists have a calm and trustful understanding of modern industry mainly because they are among the inventors of it. Indian industrialists have got hold of industry by accidental windfall, as a money spinning, mysterious and imported milch-cow which they don’t even attempt to understand; they use it as if there is no tomorrow. Nothing intrinsic to India in this of course. The Satanic Mills of 19^th century England were also like this – the feeling of shock and bewilderment that runs through Dickens` novels came from this. Europeans have learnt their lessons and reformed; Indian are still learning the early lessons.

With such somber thoughts I watched the people in and around the Mannheim rail station – my train was at an outer platform and I could see the city outside the station too. Huge men with heavy, large limbs – and stomachs (from beer and meat) – standing silently in clusters and smoking furiously. Ditto for women.The smoking business again. Part of the reason was that these were smoking zones with huge ash trays and the law abiding Germans were clustering around these to smoke. But the dedicated and concentrated smoking looked like something else something deeper– what I don’t know. Men and women not smoking were standing in singles or pairs sunk in glum and brooding silence on the platforms. They looked tired, and somehow silenced. These were the most advanced industrial workers in the world, working with most modern, complex and demanding industrial machinery. Sure to drain the workers of all their vitality which they traded for globally highest  wage levels. May be I was looking at exhausted workers at the end of a shift. A curious sight was provocatively dressed middle aged women with faces lined like grandmothers but with sculpted and well-displayed athletic bodies like gymnasts, and painted like ad models. Then I remembered, Mannheim also has many media related companies based on IT expertise. Marveling at these sights I watched the most advanced workers of the world after their night shift.

The train had halted for quite some time. Some people came into my coach. Young families with beautiful, white, children in prams, their older brothers and sisters prancing around and their educated, careful parents, all white. The coach was filled with chatter and childrens` laughter. Clean, well dressed, white children with pink faces and blue eyes looked lovely like we see in TV – and global TV is mostly white. Businessmen in suits  with briefcases and streamlined, assessing eyes. Men and women with arms thicker than my thighs. Backpacking youth with new beards and breasts, many reading books. Books. This was another thing I was to see in this trip, like smoking: Germans reading books in buses, trams, trains. I watched, trying not to stare. People nodded to one another, friendly but guarded. Nodded to me too, a non-white. The idea of race came to me again, seeing the train full of red-faced, white-skinned, large sized Germans going about their lives. Race remains such an enormous fact. The idea of a nation, born in the 19^th century, was built around race after all. And remains so even today. Contrary to expectations capitalism – also starting in the 19^th century – did not dissolve the fact of race because it was not true to its founding doctrine of free market movement of men, materials and money. Denying free movement of men has kept capitalism hobbled by this vestige of feudalism. No wonder capitalism has failed repeatedly – as the basis of a democratic civilization. Ironically, the expected remedy promised by socialism also retained this feudal unfreedom of the people. When the train started again apron-wearing white young men with curly new beards and blue eyes like disciples of Socrates were serving coffee and snacks to us. Again, waiters evoking ancient Greek elite! Despite so much of cultivated anti-colonialism  how deeply conditioned is my dark-skinned ex-colonized mind!

Feeling profoundly flawed I couldn’t focus on the passing landscape which was mostly small towns interspersing the now familiar farming lands. Companies like ABB and Siemens in Mannheim would need to be fed by many ancillary industries situated not very far away. Although in the low hills banking the Rhine there could be seen neat rows of carefully tended vineyards, I was now drawn more to watching the white passengers with averted eyes. This is the white race, cool and assured of its place in the scheme of things. Men and women absorbed in their laptops, books, and music through ipods or mobile phones. One or two solitary men curiously sat clutching their briefcases. Not very long ago this was the race which had claimed itself as the Master Race and had done a whole holocaust and fought unthinkable wars for this claim. Although these were in German language many of the title pages of the books being read looked like serious stuff, not just potboiler pulp fiction. What do Germans think now of their recent past as the Master Race? My thoughts tumbled around in this disturbing terrain. What kind of world we would be seeing today if capitalism had been practiced in its canonical form and allowed free movement of men along with material and money around the planet? Would we have created a uniform cross-bred peoples’ world – the varnasankara anathema of Puranic Brahmins of India, ancient and modern? Or would we have made a world of mixed race societies with distinct cultures but shared ethos? Would we still have had nations, nationalisms, and consequent wars? The old ifs and buts of history. Useless no doubt, but are they wholly pointless?

            It was almost mid noon and I could see sunlight glinting on the occasional views of the blue-grey waters of the Rhine. The sky was getting overcast with light, grey rain clouds as we started approaching the town of Karlsruhe, our destination. It did not have the industrial, cluttered landscape of heavy industry, so our train’s approach was gentle and suburban. I later learnt that Karlsruhe was mainly a base of IT based industry – even its one complete suburb in the north, Siemensallee, seems to be meant for some office-based, white-collar division of Siemens. Although it had the usual and heavy complement of international shopping arcades inseparable from all cities in the trans-european grid the Karlsruhe station was small and  all of it at the ground level. The information counter people promptly supplied us with many maps and seemed earnest and eager to help, unlike in Frankfurt. There were only a dozen taxies – nearly all Mercedes – and they were also eager to take us to our hotel in an expensive ride. Taxis in Germany are even more expensive than in Delhi – in all Europe, I was told. As we drove along the unfamiliar right lane driving system through well paved, well painted, well signaged and well traffic-signaled streets there was a shower of rain in large, clean drops. In the small dash to the hotel’s entrance we got a little wet. The rain was cold but it was pleasant and seemed to be welcoming us.

After a long twilight zone which passes for jetlagged sleep we eagerly ventured out to eat in our first German restaurant. It was 9 pm and the sun had not set. Clean, wide, nearly empty roads, neat pavements, tramlines being plied by charming looking trams, modern 3-storeyed buildings with sloping roofs for the winter snows and small gable-like, cute, and historical looking projections(I don’t quite remember what these are actually called), very little traffic, no pollution of the air, hedged green areas and gardens. What cities dream of becoming when they grow up. In the ornate lights sent by the setting sun Karlsruhe looked breathtakingly beautiful. It looked good, easy, and friendly, it looked like what a good city in today’s world should look like. The rain clouds had lifted but the breeze was too cold for us not dressed for it. Googled weather said 16 degrees, Celsius of course – only the arrogant Americans still cling to the unwieldy, non-metric, Fahrenheit, Mile, Gallon etc. and even feel proud of it. No restaurant nearby beckoned to us with inviting lights and most shops were closed. Most hotels do not have restaurants of their own. Shivering, we chickened out (ha, ha) and abandoned our fantasies of much googled German food, collected whatever we could gather from a neighbourhood supermarket and timidly hastened back to our hotel.

                                                                                           (… to be contd)

Monsanto, Bayer, democracy : Cartoon Tota-Myna

Hillary vs. Trump : Cartoon Tota-Myna

Advanced democracy, USA : Cartoon Tota-Myna

Cashless future ? : Cartoon Tota-Myna

Riddles of today

 

 

                                                            

                                                               

Myna : What system did India have in the old days after Independence ?

Tota : Socialism.

Myna : Did people flourish then ?

Tota : No.

Myna : Then who flourished ?

Tota : Tatas, Birlas, Singhanias, …

Myna : And what system does India have now ?

Tota : Capitalism.

Myna : Are people flourishing ?

Tota : No.

Myna : Then who are ?

Tota : Tatas, Birlas, Ambanis, …

Revolting Times : Graffiti Wall

Mumbai, Lunar Calendar & the 21st Century

     

        It started when I spotted the packets of aam papad stacked in the makeshift stalls. Those born in the pre-globalized India will remember this tangy-sweet unique thing made out of sugared and boiled raw mango. Sold by itinerant vendors of such folk goodies, calling out to the children and adults about their tantalizing wares, walking down the streets in the lazy, long afternoons of pre-smartphone youth, aam papad remains for us a memorial pillar of the magical side of childhood. Globalized India has lost quite a lot too.

        It was the packaging actually. It was done clumsily, using the standard transparent, yellow, plastic paper used by corporate sweet companies like Haldiram, Bikanerwala, etc but done inexpertly, perhaps by hand – using up too much paper. Haldiram types also now keep aam papad in their in their shops occasionally but these are sleekly and uniformly packaged in standardized and economical design. Even the aam papad taste has been standardized. But here these were all different, packets varying from stall to stall, handmade and amateurish. Even the rectangular slices of the aam papad were of different thickness and shapes.

        So much ineptitude, such neglect of profitability, in this day and age when profiteering is considered the same as profit-making! Who are these people? What is all this?

        Then I saw that the entire winding lane that connects Mumbai’s S V Road and V S Road and hosts a modest Prabhadevi Temple was lined by scores of such temporary stalls selling much non corporate merchandise. It was a full moon festival centered around the temple and the stalls were part of the festival market. The temple was busy but not thronged by devotees comfortably going inside with thalis of offerings and returning with tilak on foreheads and reassurance in the hearts. Instead of the normal one cow of the lane on other days there were several tethered cows today; tethered around bundles of juicy green grass, and devotees bought some grass from the cows` keepers to feed the happy, sleepy cows for gaining divine merit. There were the usual balloonwallas, earthen utensils and lampwallas, a man with two show monkeys, the usual brightly dressed children clutching anxious fingers, and I looked for and eventually found that mysterious man of my own childhood with a pole half-covered by a thick, sweet, sticky spiral running along its length. You paid your money and the man took a small stick and unrolled from the huge tantalizing pole a tiny sweet, spiral of the coloured, gummy paste for you to lick at leisure. I waited to see children haltingly approach this smiling man and buy their little magical stick to slobber over. It was another, bygone era recreated. Or is it that it was always there and it was I who had wandered away from it in order to live what I thought of as life?

        All this on a full moon day, Purnima. Then I remembered that such a modest mela came here every month on almost all Purnima days. Only I had not noticed before. Here was a lifestyle governed by the lunar calendar. There were nearly a hundred stalls. Most had the standard product mix of puffed grain (rice and corn), gur in cute, retro-looking ingot shapes, aam papad as already described, brightly hand painted earthen idols of Ganapati, Gauri and other current gods. Other stalls had jewellery of beads, bindis and bangles looking like photos of excavation-exhibits from Harappan archeological sites, and much similar things which pass below the radar of corporate markets --  one or two stalls had calendars of Nehru, Patel, Gandhi etc. Prayer booklets, dhoop sticks and agarbattis. All life.

        And then one or two stalls that took my breath away. Small heaps of dimpled, red, wild berries (picked from thorny bushes) called ber, green, sweet and sour jamphal, which have four fins like torpedos, unevenly shaped, antique looking bel fruits – favourite of Lord Shiva and its sweet pulp supposedly good for digestion, wild green jeera bunched in neat bundles, and many small fruits and herbs whose names I did not know but which were both unfamiliar and intimately familiar at the same time. The whole table of the stall was like a visitation from a lifetime left behind, evoking memories and dreams, ungraspable ancestral symbols and forebodings, reminding me that like all of us I too was some sort of an exile.

        An exhausted woman, who must have spent weeks along with her village womenfolk picking these things from their forested land (after bribing the forest guard) and who must have spent the small hours of the morning arranging these offerings in neat piles of her stall. Now she sat at the back watching with tired but proud eyes her husband negotiating prices with the city stickers like me. I saw Marathi matrons with knowing eyes, some accompanied by digital-generation schoolgoing daughters, making gentle bargains for this exotica from the past with a touch of childhood memories and deference for valuable things left behind unwillingly. Marketing chaps would call this Minor Forest Produce. But this market and the labour underlying it exists even today, and surfaces once every month -- on full moon days – and finds customers to complete the product-cycle with enough profit to finance a meagre existence in the hinterland. This happens in Mumbai, in India, in the 21^st century – of rampant Washington Consensus. By the Lunar Calendar. I looked up to see the moon – it was evening. I saw it as the familiar swollen, yellowed orb low in the sky! But no. It was the glowing neon logo of some famous builder on top of a towering building – one among scores of them clustering the horizon. The moon was still hidden behind these buildings, but it was there.        

        I stood and looked at the whole scene again, now with a historical eye. At one end of this winding impromtu  market, on the S V Road, are the glittering giant car showrooms of Ferrari, Bugatti, Porsche, Lamborghini and Tata Motors and Hyundai – each showroom the size of a mini airport covering the ground floors of the new, tall skyscrapers, some still under construction. At the other end of the lane are the middle-class co-op. housing society flats resisting the slow but sure approaching tsunami of the builder-driven future skyscrapers bordering the Mahim bay – where the Portuguese had first set up their military base. The lane was less than 100 yards from the old Century Mills area. The co-op. 3-storey housing surrounding it were white-collar outgrowths of the old labour tenements – “chawls” --  which had served the now extinct textile mills, each factory site now the base of a rising skyscraper. This was the one end of the old Girnigaum -- “a village of factories” – now renamed Girgaum, the other end being the chowpatty on the Marine Drive. Here was the March of History – of Bombay turning to Mumbai – the global sow of Progress whose tits suckle modern politicians, tycoons, and Schools of Business. The Solar Calendar zone of the ruling classes.

         But in the interstices there struggles and survives despite the terms of trade weighted against it the unbanishable Purnima driven monthly market of the below–the–radar economy. The Lunar Calendar zone, of the working classes. This is one face of the much-hyped Resilient Spirit of the city – which is not the televised Peace Runs by the chic after an atrocity -- the working class fighting and resisting the post-Soviet Union capitalism; a new capitalism which wears the government megadole-made masks of Orwellian Reforms. The other face is, of course, the overladen local trains of Mumbai. I looked up along a canyon between the skyscrapers and finally saw the moon, the real one, not a neon.

        I walked back again through the unevenly lined stalls marveling at their historical function, thinking about the ancient Lunar Calendar. And I finally succumbed to the magical man with the coloured, sweet python wrapped around his pole and bought a stick of that sweet. What is wrong with lunar calendar? Why has it fallen into disrepute, if not disuse? What is a calendar? It is a chart to record and plan the passage of time. Come to it, what is time? Time is nothing but the space to live out our lives. There is nothing more visible to everybody and more user-friendly than the moon to mark time. The sun looks the same all year around and just marks the day and night – which is useful to mark daily labour and sleep, sure -- but is a very short term measure.

        The moon handles longer term avtivities! Nearly all crops (except sugarcane) get sown and harvested – the most important function of a calendar – within months, often two or more crops a year. Babies get born within months. Most economic cycles of work – naturally related to the produce of crops – get completed within months. Rural Money lenders even today charge interest -- also related to crops – at monthly rates. All lived life gets nicely handled by a lunar calendar. Most important of all, the moon is much more pleasing to the eye and helpfully waxes and wanes to provide analog reminder of the passage of time! So, what displaced the lunar calendar which handled time in an easy, human-scale manner? Not surprisingly all cultures since ancient times evolved their own lunar calendars. Even the Aristotlean calendar of seven concentric rotating heavenly spheres had an annual calendar of lunar months with an year-end correcting thingummy. And it is worth remembering that the Aristotlean calendar – indeed, the whole  Aristotlean physics, then called Natural Philosphy, including astronomy, tides, eclipses, season, geometry, statics, dynamics, mathematics, life, and all that --  lasted more than 1500 years. Upto Galileo-Copernicus-Newton, when the Solar Calendar was born. Why was this born? Because European feudal economies, saturated and stagnating within their old mode, were wanting to do long-term oceanic shipping (now helped by compass navigation) looking for products and labour globally to plunder and exploit better. In short, the Solar Calendar came with the onset of capitalism. Globalization began with capitalism.

        Happily walking through my local, pre-capitalist market I was about to pop my magical stick of sweet gum into my mouth when my diabetic calorie- consciousness –  as constant as class- consciousness – kicked in and stopped me. Okay, the lunar calendar needs a year-end correction to align with the current solar calendar but what is so terribly wrong with that? I walked up to the magic man with the sweet python-pole, with the children thronging him mesmerized and gave away my stick to a baffled boy. The magic man smiled. Little paper flags stuck into his sweet python fluttered cheerfully in the breeze.

        I had reached the end of the lane where there was a triangular, corner shop so cute and so common in the old parts of Bombay. It still had name City Light Café in faded letters of masonry. But now one half, along one arm of the triangle, was a pharmacy shop and the other arm had a mobile phone outlet. I looked at the city entering into the night, its tall towers glittering sharply in the dark sky, and wondered at the heart-breaking inequity of it. This is what gross inequity, enacted on a vast economic scale, looks like! The very textile mills with their workers, their chawls, which had given economic value to this land were coldly closed down and scattered to the winds of history by patient, back-room political machinations of cold blooded builders so as to encash that very value as capital gains – in these glittering high` rise towers of a global template. This city is built upon the graves of cruel, iniquitous displacements and usurpations. Perhaps all cities of the world are like that.      

        I could not ponder on this enigma because my senses were assailed by the peak evening traffic of speeding, blaring, honking vehicles. The ground beneath my feet shook as behemoth buses of BEST hurtled past. These were the streets in which small forays in my little Hyundai brought my heart to my mouth, and in the same streets these monsters were being driven by superhuman drivers at unbelievable speeds between the red lights. I looked at one bus. Its destination was Kurla Depot, and it had started from the govt. secretariat in Nariman Point. Those who know the city would understand how arduous this route can be. That these drivers can reach their destinations, through this apocalyptic traffic, every day, and keep their schedules and nerves is an astounding, unsung feat. Kurla!

        Ah, I realized with a strange uplifting tugging at my heart, that lo and hehold, Kurla too has its own lunar calendar. There too on full moon days and nights there gathers, centered around the convenient temple or a dargah, a similar congregation of people and produce from the hinterland who live and persevere below the radar of the official economy. And Kurla too was and still is a major residential area of industrial and white-collar labour. The old social and economic networks of the city have not been fully uprooted by the Development parade. I watched the massed traffic. A new model of Mercedes was impatiently trying to find its way through the slow moving jam.

        Why only Kurla? The whole of old Bombay, except the narrow strip of British and Parsi thugs from Malabar Hill to the Fort profiting from the opium trade with China -- the entire city really -- was nothing but factories and the surrounding labour tenements -- chawls. From Girgaum Chowpatty, via the mid-section of Parel, Dadar, Sion, Kurla, etc to far areas like Ghatkopar, Malad, Mulund and Vikhroli. Now the factories are all dead or gone. Malls and Multiplexes have come. Chawls had sensed the winds of change early  and had slowly converted, using instincts of organized labour, to 3-storey Co-op. housing societies, as their workers too had changed in the next generation from the underclass, collarless and blue-collar to middle-class white-collar who now move around on motorbikes, with laptops inside appropriately designed backpacks. On full moon days or even without full moon the working class of the city has built, using the lunar calendar and melas and temples and dargahs, its economic trenches and ramparts for a protracted defensive warfare against the Animal Spirits of the corporate oligarchies of India ceremonially unleashed by Manmohan Singh in 1991. Hm, come to it, this is not only about Mumbai either.

        The single, most powerful word today, in media and government spheres is: Market. It is the Name of the Dominant God today, in India and the world, and all older “national” gods have become its subservient vaahans –vehicles, very much like the earlier tribal totemic gods had done with the “national” gods. It reigns globally, imperially, realtime, and 24x7; and it uses the Solar Calendar.

        Which people in India have come under its way? Recently some think tank in Singapore or Sweden, or Sarajevo had estimated India’s middle class as 30 million – 3 crore people – and there was widespread outrage and consternation; even the FM had to issue a Statement. But that is nothing. We have always known the figure more or less. Total central govt employees, both civil and military, including retired pensioners are around 1.5 crore. Add the police and paramilitary forces and state government employees of about the same number, it becomes 3 crores. Add all private sector employees of about 2 crore and the total kitty is 5 crore people. These are the catchment of Market. That is all. If we then add the odd rural people employed in organized kulak agriculture/horticulture and all transportation and all shops, and workshops, another 5 crore can be added at best. So 10 crore – less than 10% of India’s population -- is the catchment of Market Forces, and use Solar Calendar to live lives that are poor imitations of the American Idol template. This narrow segment of the population is the India seen by the World Bank, G-8, Boeing, General Motors, Monsanto, Shell, Burger King, Cola Cola, Star TV, Nike – that lot. This is the India that dominates the Idea of India and foreshortens it. This thin crust is the bankable of India, the Visible India – credible or incredible – ruled by 24x7 solar calendar.

        The Purnima markets at Prabhadevi Lane represent the Invisible India, 90% of the people of this Jambudwipa – from Phagwara, through Pilibhit, Purnea and Parbhani to Perambudur. Mercifully left out of most of the wordy privileges of the Constitution, the pompous Institutions of governance of democracy, the deep calculations of the global think tanks and the bloodsucking machinations of the Markets, this Invisible India hangs on to its ancient lunar calendar, labours on month by month with the waxing and waning of the moon and of their fickle fortunes, fights and survives in the gaps, penumbras and interstices of the Orwellian juggernaut called the Economy. Births, marriages, deaths take place along old patterns. Even the local money lenders, using monthly interest rates, do not really ever get rich and buy a Mercedes or more away to Mumbai – they stay on in the same old villages; at best make a 2-storey house there. Is this a small space? Is this a small and trivial phenomenon? No. Quite the opposite. This 90% Invisible India is the real dark matter of this land surviving for centuries despite all odds under a lunar calendar.

        We knew this all along, of course, at the back of our minds – luckily still out of reach of the media overkill, the stultifying 360 degree badgering of Market Forces which makes up more Orwellian things like Discourse or ,lately, Narrative. Not only we, but 90% of the world – from Bagota, through Botswana, Bosnia, Burdwan to Borneo – get to know it afresh every day simply from our working life. That the 24x7, global, Markets That Never Sleep, or Where The Sun Does Not Set, where the Solar Calendar rules,digitally exact, all these are only skin deep and work only  for 10% of this planet’s people.

        What we don’t quite realize is that this 10% world of the Solar Calendar is not a big deal. It has a shallow hold on the world. Its frontages and masquerades and parades are overwhelming and mind numbing, yes, but if we avert our eyes from the wide angled glare of its narratives and disourses, we find that most of world – 90% actually -- has slipped through its grasp, even in today’s Late Capitalism stage. The full moon bazaar in Prabhadevi Lane is the living proof -- for those who need this proof. Things are not so bad! The demise of the Soviet Union is not the end of the world. May be it is a blessing actually. History has not ended at all. Far from it. It is yet to begin really. Long live lunar calendars.

        I see a woman running a vada-paav roadside stall, finally sitting down tired at the end of a hard day of making and selling the stuff, chatting with another woman, may be her last customer and friend. They are smiling, spent, content. The moon has risen up clear in the sky, beyond and above the tall skyscrapers under construction all around.

America`s wars : Cartoon Tota-Myna

Haunted democracies : Graffiti Wall

Ideological Debate : Cartoon Tota-Myna

New Year Vision : Cartoon Tota-Myna

Mind over matter, Fiction over fact : Graffiti Wall

Uber Rape Case : Cartoon Tota-Myna

Coalgate serial , final episode : Cartoon Tota-Myna

America & Regime changes : Cartoon Tota-Myna

The Poor today : Sharp Reminder

                                   

                  The Poor and the Middle Class                        

Do the poor want doles? Of course they do; these mitigate their misery a bit. Are they happy with doles? Of course not.

Lately an idea is being repeatedly broadcast that the so-called social expenditure in government budgets is a waste and actually a drag on something Orwellian called “the economy”. Is it true? Of course yes – the drag part. But a subliminal message is also being planted – as happens in ads – that the poor are being plain awkward and irresponsible by holding back that same economy from reaching super-power heights; that they are anti-growth and therefore somehow unpatriotic.

If seths and tycoons are harbouring such thoughts it is understandable. In their eyes they are the economy and (happy about their doles) any moneys  not coming their way is a loss to them. Seths were always of this mind. But lately the business intelligentsia is also investing in this ideology of Indian Tea Party capitalism inspired by rootless economists like Bhagwati, Panghariya, and their non-NRI cousins, led by the MBA cohorts, and fed by daily doses by pink newspapers and business TV channels.

A sharp reminder is therefore necessary.                                   

The poor did not choose to be poor. They too want Audis, Antillas, and Armanis. Not only now, but always did. They have been made poor against their most fervent  endeavours. Why? Because all the development models have not worked for them. Nehru`s, Indira Gandhi`s, Vajpayee`s, Manmohan-Sonia`s, and Modi`s(actually Manmohan`s, with hindutva packaging). All. The “economy” has failed them consistently before and after 1947. They just could not get rich despite working very hard indeed. That is why they accept and expect doles – to survive, and maybe fight another day. Governments pay doles and subsidies as guilt money.

There is an institutional side to this too. While giving to Indian government in 1991 the Structural Adjustment loan the IMF, with wide experience in the “economies” of the developing world, asked the government to be prudent and provide social “safety nets” in the economy lest the poor start smashing  into the living rooms of the rich. Wise words. They were heeded. Hence the subsidies.

There is also a global dimension to this. Beginning with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989 – the last no doubt tarnished and half-fledged hope of the world`s poor, but hope nonetheless – the middle classes of the world have started moving rightward, i.e. towards the seths and oligarchs. Russia, ex-Soviet Union nations, ex-Yugoslavian nations, China, India, Thailand, South Africa, Ukraine, Egypt … the same broad script is being played. There is a rising impatience with if not rejection of things like poverty, rule of law, parliaments, and even democracy itself. Having dumped the poor because of socialism`s failure, the middle classes are rushing to the oligarchian arcadias and devil take the hindmost. In India it is early days yet.

Finally there is a stark side to this reminder too. What is the ultimate minimum economic function of the poor? They absorb inflation ( by perishing ) and thus keep the prices down. They enable the middle classes to thereby stay in the middle ground. If the poor one day vanished, by policy or by neutron bombs, the middle classes will have to take their place instead. The MBA executives will have to stop over before and after working hours at their employers` homes and do many chores besides mopping floors, doing the dishes and the clothes, minding the children and pets and gardens, etc; and at the same time hamburgers will cost Rs.5000 each. The process has begun already.