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.

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.

Maggi fiasco & Bollywood : Cartoon Tota-Myna

Animal rights vs. Vegetable rights : Cartoon Tota-Myna

Obscenity a la mode : Cartoon Tota-Myna

Dadar in December

                                    

What passes for winter in Bombay is here and having read a good book, rested and watched UEFA championship football matches all day I got out for a walk in the evening. In days of good mood, I like to walk irregular routes. Today is one such day.

From the edge of the sea of Mahim Bay at Prabhadevi, I walk briskly through the dense evening crowds of Dadar towards the seething Local trains` stations, past the awkward-looking  Portuguese Church on the way, reminding me as always that the sound “Dad” in Dadar comes from Portugese, like in Trinidad. It is the old textiles mills` area, planned and built around World War-I, now awash and choking with today`s globalised people and goods mostly from China. I note, again, that globalization is an old thing indeed; it preceded and maybe caused the famous european Renaissance.                                 

My spirits lift, as always, as I near the Tilak bridge’s Plaza cinema, still functioning but now looking like a ruin. It is an old stone bridge, later suitably reinforced from time to time of course, across the Local train tracks, both of the Western and the Central lines -- the major artery of the city. The bridge and the buildings on both sides, blackened and beaten down by ageing and irrelevance, have a charm for me as if I have grown up here, which I haven’t-- I grew up in an altogether different Delhi. Pathways of nostalgia are mysterious, global-- even without remembering Carl Jung.

A bit short of breath as I walk up the sloping road to the bridge itself I see the old, courteous stone-flagged stairways that lead down from the bridge, in short flights easy on the legs and bones, to the different thronged streets below, changed and unchanged by the city’s history. The old Seth Chhabildas School which was once the free and open-to-all evening workshop area for experimental Marathi theatre, the Ideal Book Depot, the Khsatriya Sangha, the nameless colonial two-storey buildings, all aged and still ageing wordlessly -- as if in a Tarkovsky film. The whole heartening and sad history of Bombay. I see the skyscrapers in the evening sky and think of the book on it I will not quite write one day.   

I stop as always in the middle of the bridge and look at the city due north and south. The sky is clear in the sea breeze, blue colour on the ascendant. Local trains are passing beneath the unshuddering bridge, looking dusty, exhausted and unpainted for a long time, their overhead electric cables looking ragged and near their snapping-modulus. People, cars, buses, head to toe, along both sides of the road. I listen to snatches of conversation of people to people walking alongside or on mobile phones. Life itself.  I nod, move on, cross the bridge.

Across the bridge although I know it is useless I don’t fail to look inside the Parsi Dairy. It has a retro charm, and a miserable collection of sweets. Compared to the Baroque Hindu splendours of sweet shops of Delhi, not to even mention those of Lucknow or Kanpur, the Parsi stuff in glass cases looks Neanderthal. But the side lanes and streets are wide, the trees lining them are tall, old, and august. Against the tide, but holding on. Even pavements are wide and decent. The space, the ease, of Dadar East – the older Dadar.

This survival is of course made possible by the new flyovers.  They look utilitarian and just that. I look at the fat Marathi policewoman under the TT flyover directing the dense evening traffic with cool aplomb. Flyovers. The undersung sinews of the future, rescuing terminal cities across the world, overcoming the inevitably foreshortened visions available to the past. Science. The truest godhead.

I cross over – under, actually- the highway due east towards the Parsi Colony. By now I have had a longish walk for me and I am winded. I avoid going inside the Colony. It is persevering with its old people, old buildings, old dress, old language, although here and there succumbing to the intolerable pressures of the present-- rebuilding in bold, garish, neo-Persian, pre-Islamic styles; awful, and sad. But the old culture is still predominant, defiant against the siege of the times, even assertive-- some of the better clubs and gyms of the city are here. And why not? More strength to their elbows, their celebration of particularity! The twentieth century has after all shown up the unheeded undersides of mass scale things-- of both the Right and the Left. And culture? Like religion it is after all seldom deeper than dress, deportment, food, language and such like-- if there can be things deeper.

I walk away from the old, settled shops along the pavement of the main road lined by decrepit old buildings , crumbling and even locked up, some showing dates like 1929, 1936 … in old proud fonts. At the curving corner away from the main road there is a small, polished granite slab resting on some carefully stacked bricks, probably used by a roadside cobbler during the day. I sit down on it for rest. The sky now is deep blue and clear, stars are out, the roads are lit by streaming golden headlights. The suburbia of an ex-colonial city hunkering down in the oncoming night. But some plastic-draped buildings have atop them those tall steel thingummies -- what are they called, derricks? – with a horizontal, levered steel arm assisting some modern speedy construction. Scenes out of Bunuel, Gavras. I sit and watch and listen.

A gaggle of schoolgirls walks past after their private tuition class, halt and say their loud, cheerful byes at the corner and move off in different directions. Two taxies stop and park on the road and eye me speculatively. A schoolboy with backpack slouches past morosely, his face brightening up seeing his mother waiting for him at the corner on her scooter, climbs up on the backseat, and she drives back carefully with her son, nodding to his excited chatter. Two very old Parsi women walking very slowly, halt for a moment, one of them puts her arm around the others` shoulder, and their heads touch with deep feeling. A plump Marathi woman in a shiny synthetic sari, a tired domestic worker on her way home, watches with soft eyes the two old women with a timeless understanding, women to women. A tall old man with a tall dog too old for a leash walks past, both eyeing me as an oddity sitting there.

This is what I have always loved. This is what I came here for. Standing in some street of some city, rested and exercised, seeing it, hearing its voices. Alone, but happy, even exultant. The evening turning into night proper, I sit there on the cobbler`s slab for quite some time.

With the night almost descended I get up to go home-- in a taxi. In no hurry, replete, I stroll slowly along the pavement, both hands in pant pockets, gazing around with fondness. At one spot I see what I had not seen earlier – a crude square arch over the flyover, its only reluctant stab at ornamentation. Sense of beauty surviving in a PWD heart.

I see more. Above the blunt arch, high up in the inked-up sky, I see the shining Evening Star, Venus. Transfixed at the magical sight, as always since my schooldays, I stand rooted gazing up at it. I said schooldays! Yes, this sight has been with me seemingly forever and always with this magic. A common thing, but it has never failed to fill up my heart with unnameable joy. The closest description of this magic that I have found is, so help me god, in the later, Meccan Suras of the Quran. I stand still, seeing this ageless sight, hearing the traffic on the flyover. Till I see a hand waving at me. I look down to see a middleaged Parsi man in salt-pepper beard staring at me with alarmed, wide open eyes. Are you okay? He gestures with his hands again in concern. Yes, I smile at him, wave back in reassurance; couldn`t be better.

I walk away amused. What sight did I present, in my besottedness with Venus? An old man gazing not at pavement-level things, but raptly at nothing in the sky. Did I look like someone about to give up the ghost? Give up the ghost; I mull at the old phrase. In this maximum city where millions are always on the edge of several kinds of precipices, thousands are also aware of it. So much so that strangers see its signs in the passing multitude. It has come to that.

But I am not on a precipice. If I am at some edge it is an edge of something else altogether. I find myself grinning and try to stop it. But I have been seen by that tall old man with his tall old dog, now returning from their errand. The old man stares at me long and hard. The dog does not bother.

I find a taxi, and surprisingly it easily agrees to going my way.

  

Poetry of the day

    A Bombay Morning

Deep months

of Monsoons in Bombay.

Raining since morning;

grey lowering sky, grey inward sea, mists,

and a blurred city.

I sit watching a tall building

under construction, indifferent, proud

under the pelting rain.

There are many such nearby;

beachhead of a new lifeform,

already triumphant.

We converse, they tell me,

with abiding forces, earth`s bedrock,

unseen motions, limits to things;

we will be here when much is gone,

since we are the expression

of history`s main intent;

we are of the domain of immortality,

of reigning gods, titans, great kings:

and you are a fleck of passing existence,

a drying bird dropping

of foreign migrating flocks,

a low networth individual,

a substance not caught

by nets of history,

like a raindrop