The Little Prince

I just read this book, which was a present. It came with an assurance that I would love it because of the person that I am. :) It was completely true. It is widely known as a children's book but I think it is more an adults' book. It is about a little prince, who comes from an asteroid and shares his candid opinion about grown-ups with the writer.It is enthralling with all its fantastic ideas and innocent illustrations. Of little planets where there are one thousand, four hundred and forty sunsets in twenty four hours, big enough to be occupied only by a solitary, tired lamplighter!
For an adult, every line is a new hope. A new way of looking at ordinary life. To care for flowers, or even a single flower with full responsibility. To weep, to open your eyes wide and see what you have around you. To slow down and drink water. To see the stars just because they are pretty and not because they guide us to our destinations.To make every simple thing in your life a source of joy. To have friends and to think of them all the time!

We are all proud of our achievements as adults. The way we use the freedom we get as a consequence of being an adult, what we build for ourselves in whatever space that is "ours" in this world, and the constant urge to get somewhere that we yet have to get to! The pride we take in moving on and still being strong.
No one really pays attention to the huge sacrifice we make in order to turn into an adult. We lose our ability to believe in something just because it is true for us. We lose the ability of not comprehending failure and going for it as though it does not exist.
This is all brought back to life in this book by the prince and his flower. :)

You find yourself giggling like a kid in some parts and in some, your eyes well up even before you realize.
My flower is ephemeral, the little prince said to himself, and she has only four thorns with which to defend herself against the world! And I've left her alone where I live!

A must read, especially if you think you are a grown-up!

The side effects of globalization!

Just a few weeks before I came back to Australia this year, an Indian was stabbed to death in Melbourne. Since then, at every dinner party, I had to explain the "real situation" to everyone. Indian television media is extremely hyperactive. I have said this before and I would say it again. The government had to issue an order of restraint to the media following similar reports of Indians being attacked after the unfortunate incident. Although this causes a lot of anxiety to people who have sent their kids to Australia and also others who have family members living here, one good thing about the whole media coverage is that both Australian police and the Australian government have been put in the spotlight. We cannot deny that it has not helped in a certain way. In today's times, any country would be reluctant to admit that racism is even a small element of their culture. Moreover, labeling Australia as a racist country is unfair. Some Australians could be racist but that certainly does not imply that the whole country is racist.
Amidst this frenzy we had statements from various Australian authorities. The Victorian Police Chief admitted that Indians were being overrepresented in the robbery statistics. Here's a quote from his statement:
"I have said from day one undoubtedly some of these attacks have a racist motive or there is racist elements to these attacks. Regardless of who they are, what they are, what colour they are, what occupation they are, my job is to make the state as safe as I can for everyone."

Now, lets go back to Mumbai. In the good old days of Mahatma Gandhi, Indians learned to boycott. We still do that in our own fancy ways by boycotting something as peripheral and frivolous as a game of cricket. So Mr.Bal Thakrey promptly roared in his own secure forest- Samna that he would stop the Aussie cricket team from playing in Maharashtra. The direct Gandhian line has taken to "relay fastings" where one member of the group sits on the podium on a "hunger strike" to wait for someone who takes his place later. :)
The radical groups have taken to violent boycotting of everything that comes in the way of what they want. In fact, these days it is hard to tell if they really want the end that they are striving for. These kind of statements can be compared to a Rakhi Sawant arranging her own Swayamwar on "reality" television. The whole saga is not really to get a husband, it is for getting everything that she would on the way to her alleged destination. Do we ever have a Mumbai chief admitting that he is responsible for every person's safety? When a Sachin Tendulkar says, "I am an Indian first and then a Maharashtrain", all the hyenas in Mumbai start tearing him apart. When the statement he made is so relevant because he represents India, not Maharashtra everywhere he goes!
Around the same time as the Aussie attacks came to light two years ago, Mumbai witnessed a similar style of attacks. The Marathi-Bihari debate that is still giving votes to the Thakrey family. Mumbai is the most sought after city in India. Everyone wants to be in Mumbai. Naturally people who speak the same language as the rest of Maharashtra would want to assert their importance. The latest official reaction to this issue is seen in the headlines today. To be a cabbie in Mumbai now, you have to know Marathi well and you should present a proof of over fifteen years of residence in Mumbai!
The day I returned, I got into a cab driven by an Aussie gentleman. He shed some light on the "other side" of the whole racist debate. Indian cabbies are attacked in Australia mostly because
1. They do not know the streets at all. They jump into a cab the moment they land in Australia and sometimes even do not know how to use the GPS.
2. They misuse the meter by hitting buttons when the passenger is not looking. Unless you ask for your printed receipt, you will never know you were duped.
3. They play Punjabi (Indian Bollywood) songs in the taxi when they have passengers.
4. Some or all of this is done on Friday and Saturday nights when most cabs are used by Australians who go clubbing and can't drive because they are absolutely sloshed.
Imagine if this happens in Pune. If you get into a rickshaw and the driver has no clue where you want to go and you have no clue either! If he plays loud Ganesh festival music while you are trying to have a conversation with your friend sitting next to you. Worst still, if they charge you Rs.1oo for a journey you know for sure should not cost more than Rs.25! Even if you are absolutely sober, you would pick up a fight with him.
I accept that not all "Indian cabbies" have these ways just the way I say that all of Australia is not racist. But the ones who get attacked and the ones who attack them both fall into the same minority!

Whether in Mumbai, or in Brisbane, the problem should be "unprofessional taxi drivers" instead of "Bihari (non-marathi)" or "Indian taxi drivers".

We should all condemn the attacks, in India as well as Australia. But we should not close our eyes to the reasons that cause them.
All of us know that it is unfair to attack people just because they come from a different country or claim our jobs but hey! this is globalization for you. This has been happening and will happen until the world becomes one color from mixing. Until the time when every person in the world cannot correctly trace their origins to a single ethnicity. Just the way Indian media and politicians make a big hype about "Indians" in Australia, with all sincerity and gratefulness, I would request them to do something about the intra-country racism that exists blatantly within India itself. This is an underlying reality about every nation. Whether it is visa procedures made more "stringent" for only certain passports or cabbies being abused openly and attacked in a faraway land. Just like the fear of unpredictable terrorism, everyone who is not white lives under a subconscious fear of being pointed out at! It is a choice that people living outside their country make very consciously. The only precaution you can take is to abide by the laws of the land and make sure you are not found helpless at wrong times.
Above this murky, angry and sensational reality lies another one too! Where Australia, India, China, UK, Poland, Jamaica and Fiji meet for beer in a pub after work on a Friday night. :)

Sarpanch Sahib!

This is a new post in brand new year. Let me wish all my readers a very happy and more importantly peaceful new year. :)
I am in India for four weeks. So I have been very lazy with writing. I got my hands on some interesting books while I was out shopping. Sarpanch Sahib is one of them. This is a collection of seven biographies of female Sarpanchs (village heads) of seven different remote villages in India. What is more interesting is that each of these stories is written by a different female journalist who had to get out of her metropolitan existence to meet her subject in a far off village. Edited by Manjima Bhattacharjya, this book shows you a completely different and honest face of the Indian woman.
It starts off more or less to review the effects of the 73rd constitutional amendment that was done in 1993. It mandated elections to be held for membership to the panchayti Raj and reserved one-third of the seats for women. Since then over three million Indian women have become politically active and one million are elected to political office every five years.
However, the role of women in politics is still looked upon with doubts. This book travels through all the trials and triumphs associated with a woman leader and puts them across honestly, without even a hint of dramatic feminism.
There is Sunita, an Adivasi woman, Sarpanch of a Brahmin dominated Tighra village in Madhya Pradesh. I found her story inspiring. It took her about a year and nine months just to open her own account and access the funds granted to her for developmental work. She had to fight with men of power, men of higher castes and initially men (and women) of her own family. All of this just to start working as a Sarpanch after being elected by people. Journalist Manju Kapur narrates Sunita's journey from a ghunghat-clad skinny daughter-in-law to a fuller Sarpanch who looks into her opponent's eyes. She even jokes that all the fighting made her put on weight!
Or even the illiterate Chinapappa of Pachikanapalli, Tamil Nadu. She helped twenty one kids of the nomad Irular tribe with enrollment in a nearby school. She takes us through the struggles of being an illiterate Dalit woman. Each adjective adding a new constraint to her efficiency.
I am always stumped by the "images" that foreigners carry with them about India. Many times, their travel diaries are full of descriptions of the non-existence of women in India. I myself have been caught in never ending, heated debates about how Indian women are not as helpless as the West perceives. Reading this book opened my eyes to a new reality.
We should learn to measure success relatively. For me, Sunita who was married at ten, entered politics at twenty two years of age from a mute Adivasi background is much more emancipated than any metropolitan Indian or even Western woman. Not getting things done with bribes, getting out of her house to go to court because she has been accused on fake charges and silencing higher caste men are her achievements. They are probably bigger than any qualified politician (if there is a term as a "qualified politician"). If these struggles are delaying developmental work, it is like latent heat being absorbed to make something invisible happen- the empowerment of these women. Once they are powerful enough not to care, development will take place with a greater speed and honesty.
Over the past few years, I have learned to open my eyes to these realities that exist around me. It is easy to get wrapped up in your happiness (or sorrow) and not look around. But in every humble woman lies a great power. When you take a step back to look around you find that women who are on the so called lower rungs of the society pyramid are actually emotionally and professionally much more successful than you. Mostly because they have to deal with struggles that would never cross the path of an educated, modern woman. Their expectations are humble and their everyday life makes it impossible for them to dwell on their problems.
It is not so important to be better than everyone else. Sometimes that leads to loss of compassion. The true beauty of a life well lived is to be better than what you were yesterday and also to help others on your way, achieve that dream!

Chopticks and I

I am often intrigued by the evolution of habits. Especially in cultures across the world. There are those questions that we often end up pondering over. I have a few recurring ones of my own. For example, "who would have declared jackfruit edible?". I mean the person must have been awfully hungry to open such an ugly looking fruit expecting it to be edible.
I also wonder almost after each of my encounters with Asian food over how noodles must have evolved. It is amazing how different cultures rely on different sources of carbohydrates and make them in their own way. Whether it is roti, bread, rice or noodles the basic purpose is same, to provide carbohydrates.
Or sometimes, much to my dislike, I see people happily opening oysters. Who would have first opened an oyster !! I secretly hope that there should have been a lag of a few centuries between the discovery of oysters being edible and people actually starting to relish them.
One of these persistent questions is also, "Which resident by the banks of Yangtze river would have invented chop sticks?!!". I mean, there must have been a point in the history of Asian food habits where one fine morning a plump little Chinese (or Japanese or Taiwanese) man (or woman or child) must have gone, "I am going to eat my food with these two sticks!".
Of all the things that I get tired from like explaining people what I do for a living and trying to preserve my long nails between my lab work, eating with chopsticks is one such utterly tiresome process.
What is more annoying is how Westerners follow the saying, "When in Rome do what Romans do". Most Aussies I know have a black belt in using chopsticks. I am usually the only one in the group who asks for a fork in a Chinese restaurant. But it is funny watching an Aussie insisting on using chopsticks while an Asian sometimes even completely bypassing the English language. :)
When words fail, they are comfortable pointing at pictures of coconuty Laksa soups. :)
I think this is the reason why most Asian women have perfect lean figures. You can only eat so much using chopsticks. After a while the painful effort of picking up your food with sticks must overpower hunger. That is what they should do to reduce obesity across the world. The day when an American eats a big mac with chopsticks there would be an answer to world obesity!
What also surprises me is that India with her formidable culinary arsenal of everything ranging from puran poli to kati kababs could not invent an innovative piece of cutlery! All we could think of was fingers! Although the way Indians eat using hands differs just as much as all the dialects in a single language, it is still a disappointment that the land that gave the world nothing (zero) could do nothing to revolutionize eating.
I must confess that I have fully inherited the Indian attitude. I look at food and decide how to eat it. If I can eat noodles with a fork and I already know how to use a fork, I find it taxing to try and learn a new way of eating noodles just to be a perfect Asian diner. When I see pizza for example, I automatically change over to using hands. And I must also confess that there is no greater joy in this life than eating cold fragrant curd rice with lemon pickle using nothing but your finger tips on a hot summer afternoon!!

Back to Square One

Divisive politics at its best in Maharashtra.
Politicians in India are very fortunate because when they can't get religion to work, they have languages. When politicians have a go at all the micro identities that they could manipulate, it is a sure sign of them losing their own!
Just felt like quoting Tagore on this one. I think we have to go back to square one again!

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic wars;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action - Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!

Ten on Ten!!

I have never really been an ardent fan of cricket. The only cricket I watched with a lot of passion was with my dad. On days when India played Pakistan, specially in the World Cup series, our household would come to a standstill. There would be no going out. We would not by any stretch of imagination think of watching anything else on television except the match. It was a beautiful time in my life. On hot summer days, day-night matches would come with ice cream as accompaniment. My dad would rush to the nearby Vadilal (a brand of ice cream that became extinct with the opening of economy) store and get slabs of it!
The atrocity of that Indian summer was alleviated by the jasmine flowers in the balcony, the ice cream and cricket!
Dad and I would follow the match right from the toss. A lanky Azaruddin standing next to a puffy Inzamam! As the coin was tossed up, I found myself doing all the little girl spells on it. The rest of the day was spent in front of the television.
These matches were played in two parts. In the conventional sense, it was divided as Indian batting and Indian fielding. For us, however, it was before Sachin and after Sachin. Sachin Tendulkar was responsible for a lot of my mood changes in those days. He would not know it I know, but just because this is all out there I should clear my heart. :)
Every time after an opening batsman went out at a sad score the little master would walk in, fiddling with his gloves and helmet. I would fall on to my knees and pray to him. The game then usually transformed to another level with every other delivery being swept across the boundary line like the ball had it all written in its destiny. In one of his "trips" Sachin would sweep over after over at an average of sixteen runs per over and sweep everyone off their feet. We lived each of those with our hearts in our hands. It was not a game. It was more like dance for me for it came as close to art as an Amjad Ali Khan on Sarod or a Jasraj reciting the Shanti Mantra in his soul-soaking voice.
Being a girl, I am not able to throw in statistics in a conversation related to cricket. Nor would I get red in the face when someone would say Sachin is overrated sipping on a coffee that they haven't paid for in Roopali.
Over the years though I have observed something similar in people who have consistently stayed on top. Be it Sachin, A.R Rahman or Rodger Federer. They don't play for us, they do whatever they do because they have been sent with that one purpose. Everything that comes as a result of what they do gets dissolved in the overwhelming presence of their art.
Kudos to Sachin! There would never be another one of his kind. :)

United Nations of Australia

I went camping this weekend. We were a group of ten, from nine countries around the world. India, South Africa, Poland, Spain, Greece, Singapore, Germany, Iran and just to make the host country happy, Australia. :) We labeled the group as 'The UN'.
In my pre-Australia life, I never really thought of "meeting people" as a learning experience. It was always classified as "entertainment". Two years in Australia, I consider myself lucky to be in a country that is so disarmingly multicultural. Whoever thinks of Australia as a racist country should really be in Australia and find out for themselves. The climate and the culture attract a lot of people to this place, including people from European countries. So not every white person is really an Australian.
We were chatting over lunch and breakfast, cooking our own on an electric barbecue. There is a different kind of enlightenment in knowing history of a nation from the person who has been brought up in it. I had tried reading the biography of Nelson Mandela ( Long Walk to Freedom) when I was in India. However, listening to a native from Cape Town talk about his leader was a much more refreshing experience. When he talked about Mahatma Gandhi and how his principles changed the fate of South Africa, I ended up thanking the stars above our heads.
No one really teaches us proper history in schoolbooks. I found this out when I was talking to a Chinese friend and realized that he had a completely different version of the 1962 Indo-China war!
This is just politics and history. I think I should not even try to mention how much of a culinary vocabulary you can build doing these kind of excursions! Plus there is always a lot to talk about and to debate over. Usually, after the first few meetings the differences fall into their own place and the similarities emerge.
No matter where we grow up, what culture we are born in and where we stand in our accomplishments, the basic human feelings are always the same. This has been one of the biggest lessons of my life away from home and the conclusion is very simple- Friendship does not come with a passport!
We are all incomplete and so is the Universe. The things we do, our fates and the people we meet in the course of our journey complete us. In everything we do to complete ourselves we are unknowingly completing the Universe too. Although both these seem like a latent and futile aim, it does make the world a better place after all!