Infrastructure growth but...

In a response to my last posting, vbalki pointed out that we Indians are no better than Americans when it comes to social prejudice. It wasn't hard to find a story that nicely illustrates his point. The article Developed Ahmedabad denies Muslim professor a homecoming that appeared early last year in the Ahmedabad Times, recounts how Prof. Javed Malik, originally from Baroda, found it hard to return to his native Gujarat because he is a Muslim. Having worked at IIT Kanpur for the last 11 years, he was tempted by a faculty position at the recently established IIT Gandhinagar but was turned away from every upmarket housing society solely because of his religion. In what has become a very familiar story, things would go fine until his religion was revealed and then the deal would suddenly fall through. The only open option was to reside in a Muslim ghetto 25 km away from IIT, something he rightly did not wish to do. Prof. Malik commented to the press that Ahmedabad has "excellent infrastructure growth but no mental growth".

The story is over a year old, so I thought I would do some fact-checking. What I found, just now, is that the website of IIT Kanpur still shows a Prof. Javed Malik, Civil Engineering. The website of IIT Gandhinagar not only has no mention of him, but has not a single Muslim name among its faculty. I think we can safely assume that Prof. Malik went back to Kanpur, and after his experience Muslim scientists decided they would not try to look for housing in the town named after Mahatma Gandhi. Though Prof. Malik's story appeared in the press long ago, I couldn't find any online evidence that any politician or ministry or minorities commission or court intervened. So it's still business as usual out there.

Though this story is often used for Modi-bashing, for once I don't think it's his fault (and nor is it Sonia/Rahul's fault, though so many believe them to be the root of all evil in our country!). The remarkable thing is that such blatant and ignorant discrimination is practised not by uneducated villagers, but by the upwardly mobile residents of elegant housing complexes. Even in the stylish new developments in Pune there are signs warning against "renting out to bachelors and foreigners". This is a general statement of prejudice but also comfortably covers the many Iranian students in the city. The same is true in certain areas of Malabar Hill in Bombay, where buildings are declared "vegetarian" in a bid to keep out the obvious communities. And let's not forget the time the actress Pooja Bedi Ibrahim (as she was then) was asked to drop the "Ibrahim" when applying for a credit card. "You see madam, our bank doesn't give credit cards to Muslims" she was told. It wasn't the BJP or the Congress that took this decision. It was a middle-class bank official. In other words it was you, me and our uncles and aunts.

One thing that amuses me is that the same communities which refuse to rent their flats out to bachelors and foreigners in India have sons and daughters in the USA. How would they feel if Americans refused to rent housing to them for the same reason? Here one sees the Indian trait of hypocrisy at its most exemplary: it's fine when I do it to others, but not when the same thing is done to me.

Fifty Shades of Black

I expect not too many Indians found time to follow the recent verdict in the US about the killing of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin by a "neighbourhood watch coordinator", George Zimmerman. The story runs as follows: Trayvon and his father visited his father's fiancee at a gated community in Florida. Trayvon hopped out in the evening to buy a snack. While he was walking home, Zimmerman who was in a car found his movements suspicious, recounting later that Trayvon was peering into windows while he walked. He called the police, who said they would come soon and advised him not to follow the suspect. They came within two minutes! But it was all over and Trayvon was dead. Zimmerman admitted he had followed Trayvon, who - he says - jumped on him and attacked him with his fists. At this point, Zimmerman fired his gun and killed him.

Trayvon was not armed. Whether he was peering into windows and whether he attacked Zimmerman first can never be proved, since there were no effective witnesses.

Zimmerman was recently found not guilty on the grounds that he was defending himself from a physical attack. The case is complicated by the fact that Trayvon was black and Zimmerman white. (Much has been made of the fact that Z was technically Hispanic, but in fact his father was of German origin and his mother Peruvian.) Since there were no witnesses, the story lends itself to interpretation and there have been two popular ones: (i) white man sees black man, wrongly suspects him of being up to no good (out of racism), follows him thereby provoking an altercation and shoots him dead, (ii) black man behaves in a shady manner  a responsible neighbourhood volunteer holding a licensed gun calls police and follows the suspect, who - probably up to no good - turns on him and the volunteer shoots to defend himself. Those who believe interpretation (i) inevitably point out that had the races been reversed (armed black man follows unarmed white man and shoots him dead) the shooter would surely have been condemned. Those who believe interpretation (ii) argue that race had nothing to do with it.

I don't have anything to add to the story but I'm powerfully struck by the extent to which skin colour determines one's opinion. See this very nice page on the Guardian where the "top 10 commentaries" on the case have been posted. The newspaper helpfully provides photos of the commentators, four of whom are black and six are white. Three of the four black commentators clearly support interpretation (i), while the fourth has a more nuanced view. Four of the six white commentators support interpretation (ii), while the other two differ. Thus there's a clear correlation between one's own race and one's view on this legal case. I find this incredibly sad, though it's not news that modern societies are still highly polarised about identities.

The four white people holding the "official white" view work for right-wing media (one of them works for the extreme-right Fox News). I find some of their comments revolting and dishonest. One says we should "not keep this particular wound open any longer". In other words, bad things do happen! Another refers to "more than one reasonable doubt about Zimmerman's guilt". The Fox News Nazi comes up with a brilliant one: "No one should be charged with a crime unless prosecutors themselves really believe that the person committed a crime." and goes on to argue that in this case they did not. In other words, it should be down to the personal opinion of the prosecutors! At least in this case.

But let's highlight the sensible folk. Alex Fraser (black) writes an open letter to Zimmerman on Facebook: "For the rest of your life you are now going to feel what its like to be a black man in America. You will feel people stare at you, judging you for what you think are unfair reasons" It's an oblique message. And Bob Seay (white), on his own Facebook page, gets right to the heart of it. "I am not Trayvon Martin" he says: "You don't have to be black, or young, or a 'troubled student' or a pot smoker to know this was murder." His point is that white people should stop blindly identifying with their own race and show more empathy with minorities, with the "other", because they are unfairly victimised all the time. I think this is an important message for all majorities in all countries.

This story also casts serious doubt on the jury system in the USA. If the correlation between one's own race and one's judgement on the case holds, then an all-white jury would find Zimmerman innocent and an all-black one would find him guilty. What was the actual composition of the jury that found him innocent? Five white and one Hispanic.

Will 2014 be 1933?

Returning to this blog after a longish time, I'd like to make a very brief comment on what is happening in Indian politics today.

I'll first point my readers to another website: http://www.johndclare.net/Weimar7.htm (thanks to my cousin Harish for the reference).

Next, please answer the following questions (but don't submit your answers to me - this is a blog, not an exam paper!): Do you see the run-up to the 2014 elections in India somewhere on this page? Do you see the Indian middle-class? Indian industry? India in general?

Finally, please focus on the boxed quote from Source C.  I find those simple words more eloquent than all the rhetoric in today's press.

Better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone...

I've always been fascinating with the changing times. So were my parents. My father was an enthusiast - anything futuristic would excite him. My mother tended to be the opposite. Despite her modern outlook, things like "new gadgets" and new ways of doing things annoyed her. My father would share his fantasies with us over dinner. A few of these would be genuinely inspired and on those occasions he would put on a special goofy, wistful expression and proceed to spin webs of pure speculation. My mother never failed to bring him back to reality. She would wait until his (metaphorical) balloon had inflated, and then bring out a (metaphorical) pin and puncture it. This led to explosive quarrels on a regular basis. They look funny only now, in hindsight.

One of my father's most inspired fantasies was what he called (I am not making this up) the "spectro-feelo-graph". This gadget, he said, would allow you to remotely experience sensations transmitted over a telegraph wire. A variant called the "spectro-tasto-graph" allowed you to share the taste of food with someone else in a different location. In today's language, all this is called "virtual reality" and I feel quite proud that he actually thought it up on his own.

But back to my main point. The times, they are a-changing, as Bob Dylan put it so well. There's a profound sense of justice about this song: "For the loser now will be later to win...". And an ominous warning to those in power:  "... don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin, and there's no tellin' who that it's namin'".

Talking of who it's naming, I received the following mail yesterday:

Dear friends,

Observer Research Foundation Mumbai is pleased to invite you to a discussion on the contentious issue of the renewal of lease of the Royal Western India Turf Club (RWITC, popularly called Mahalaxmi Racecourse) at the office of ORF Mumbai on Satuday, 25th May 2013 

If the existence of such a hallowed institution as the RWITC is deemed contentious, one wonders what could be the next item up for discussion. The continuation of the Indian Navy on prime South Bombay land? The existence of TIFR on prime Navy land? I would love to return a hundred years from now and find out what's happened to South Bombay.

Vintage soup

My fridge is a wondrous place. It nurtures all sorts of plant - and occasionally animal - life. Lemons turn bitter, tomatoes get squishy and garlic becomes brown and pungent. Once in a while a vegetable emerges that I'm quite sure I purchased in a previous calendar year. Or maybe in my last life. But yesterday I discovered a solution to all this and it's worked like a miracle. If you try it out be aware that I sometimes exaggerate, and that your health is your own responsibility. Equally, you should know that I didn't fall sick after eating it.

Vintage soup

Ingredients: Old things lying around in your kitchen. Specifically:

1. Part of a cauliflower (gobi), yellowing with age.
2. Some green peas, coated with frost, from the bag in your freezer.
3. A cucumber that was once green, now pale cream and slightly bitter. Preferably still firm.
4. An onion.
5. A potato. The first one I picked up was rotten and I threw it away (there are things too rotten even for me!). I used the second potato, antique but fairly respectable.
6. Two small green chillies from that little tin with holes in it that's supposed to keep chillies fresh but in fact lets them dry out and wrinkle in just over a month.
7. A little water. I used water that's been sitting in a bottle for at least two weeks. If that's not available then you can try it with new water, but your mileage may vary.
8. Salt. In Bombay you get delightfully stale, soggy salt but in Pune the weather is so good that you only find fresh salt. Tough luck.
9. A few cubic centimetres of cheese. I bought it in Dorabjee's supermarket at the other end of Pune. It smelt strong even on the day of purchase, many moons ago.
10. Milk. Boiled three days ago and unlikely to last much longer.
11. Butter. For me this is a sacred item. It really should not be  rancid.
12. Freshly ground black pepper. The peppercorns can be old but the grinding process should be new, if you get what I mean.

You might be wondering about quantities. The answer, in all cases, is "a little, not too much". Now please be quiet while I tell you how it's prepared.

Mix ingredients 1-8 (chop into large chunks first if necessary) and place in a pressure cooker. Cook for 15 minutes. Allow to cool slowly. Put contents in a blender and puree into a thick slush. If you get a thin slush, give up and go out for dinner. It happened because you used too much water to start with. Coming back to the thick slush: place it in a large strainer and stir vigorously with the back of a spoon till most of it goes through. Add some milk to thin it down to the consistency of soup, a pat of butter when no one is looking, some black pepper and the grated smelly cheese. Warm slowly, or else the milk may curdle. Or the cheese could explode. Eat with crisp toast made from those end-slices of bread that you haven't thrown away for ages.

This is the most delicious soup in the world. If you don't believe me, just collect all the ingredients, leave them in your fridge for a month or two (or a year or two) and then try it yourself.

Legacy of bitterness

Former British PM Margaret Thatcher died a couple of days ago. The response to her death has been fascinating and instructive. Anticipating there would be widespread joy in some sections of society and the press over her demise, the Tories and even some Labour leaders publicly asked people to "show respect" for the deceased and permit the family to grieve in privacy and dignity. This is the kind of request that sounds reasonable when you first hear it, but in a few seconds you realise its flaws, and left-liberal media in the UK were quick to take it apart. Columnist after columnist argued that while the family of a private figure has a right to grieve in private, the death of a major politician who has had a powerful impact on her country and the world does not qualify for the imposition of reticence. One article pointed out that no such courtesy was extended to the family of Hugo Chavez when he died, with conservative newspapers all over the US and UK criticising his career and political impact in the most scathing terms. British writer David Wearing put the boot on the other foot by saying "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims."

The Guardian featured an editorial about Thatcher last Monday. The first part is a survey of her influence on politics, but the second half is blunt and forthright in its criticism. Some sample quotes from the article:

"the harmony she sought in the long term was one whose terms were set overwhelmingly in the interests of the British business class as she perceived them."

A "good society", for her, was "a low-tax, home-owning, privatised, high-carbon, possessive, individualist, winner-takes-all financial model whose failure haunts the choices still facing this country today".

And here is the concluding sentence of the editorial:

"Her legacy is of public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed, which together shackle far more of the human spirit than they ever set free."

That was two days ago. Today's Guardian has a dozen or so articles about her, with titles like: "Clearing up the mess that Thatcher left", "Thatcher's dark legacy has still not disappeared", and "A legacy of bitterness and division".

Of course these opinions are hardly uncontested. Today's London Times is full of stuff like "Royal respect as Queen leads mourners", "great Prime Minister but awful mother", and an attack on The Guardian via an opinion piece titled: "the selfish Left, not Thatcher, divided us". The Telegraph describes her as "kindly and careful". All this is no great surprise to me. Once a respected publication, the London Times is today a Rupert Murdoch-owned right-wing rag, at least that's how I perceive it. About The Telegraph, the less said the better.

The Times of India too has an admiring piece about Ms Thatcher by US journalist David Ignatius (who writes for another right-wing publication, the Washington Post). The basic thrust of this piece is that Ms Thatcher was great because she destroyed the ultra-rich and ultra-poor and gave everything to the middle class. Nice, if you're a middle class person with no ethical sensibilities.

On the other hand the poor did not appreciate being destroyed, and protested vigorously. One of their slogans was "Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher". This came about because, according to Wikipedia, she "imposed public expenditure cuts on the state education system, resulting in the abolition of free milk for schoolchildren aged seven to eleven". (The right-wing newspapers dispute her role in abolishing free milk, so you see that almost any issue concerning this lady ends up being divisive.)

It's natural that this whole discussion makes me think about India. Here, when important figures die we aren't even allowed to question whether they should have a state funeral (note that Ms Thatcher is getting a "ceremonial funeral" which is one step below a "state funeral" even though she was a former Prime Minister!). And in India there are no polite appeals to withhold negative opinions - if any such opinions were expressed, however mildly, there would be violent people and a vindictive, politicised police force ready to attack.

But it gets easier to say what you think and survive it when the politician in question has been dead a long time. Ms Indira Gandhi has been gone nearly thirty years, and like Ms Thatcher (and scores of other politicians around the world) she was a powerful figure who caused lasting damage to society in her country. Positioning herself on the Left rather than the Right (which shows that damaging leaders can be of any political persuasion) she was a divisive figure and her legacy, like that of Ms Thatcher, is that of "public division". She systematically undermined India's democratic institutions and personalised politics by implanting in it her personal prejudices, her sycophants and her children - notably the uneducated, spoilt and brutal Sanjay Gandhi. She bullied and threatened the highest courts in India. Fortunately she was not successful in destroying their integrity, though some High Court and Supreme Court judges were not above being her sycophants as my late father complained on many occasions. While it was sad for India to have a prime minister assassinated in 1984, and I have no sympathy for the politics of her assassins nor for the concept of assassination itself, I certainly wasn't sorry when she was no more.

Sanjay Gandhi's demise was quite simply a joyful occasion. He unauthorisedly piloted an airplane belonging to the Delhi Flying Club, and literally drove it nose-first into the ground. Poetic justice had never been more poetic. A man who had bulldozed people's homes causing several deaths, and presided over a forcible sterilisation campaign, was destroyed by his own arrogance (and by his mother, who allowed him to pilot a plane without the requisite qualifications). It's hard to imagine the level of damage he could have caused this country, but at the least his death saved countless lives. On the fateful day I was in a train from Delhi to Bombay. Somewhere around Surat we got the news and passengers erupted in joy, myself included.

Meanwhile back in England, yesterday there were parties to celebrate Ms Thatcher's death. I know it sounds tasteless. But the late Ms Thatcher is no one to complain about bad taste. In 1987 she famously referred to Nelson Mandela's African National Congress in the following terms: "ANC is a typical terrorist organisation ... Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land". Today the cuckoo seems to be on the other foot. Pallo Jordan, a former ANC minister, said of her death: “I say good riddance. She was a staunch supporter of the apartheid regime. She was part of the right-wing alliance with Ronald Reagan that led to a lot of avoidable deaths.”

There's so much more to say about this awful person and her instinct to ally with other awful people, for example General Pinochet. But I'm done here and will refer you to this very moving article in The Nation: "Why would anyone celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher? Ask a Chilean".

Footnote added on April 11: I've now come across the following speech about Pinochet on Margaret Thatcher's own website. Reading it has somewhat modified the opinion I had of her at the time I wrote the piece above. I should apologise for using words like "awful" and "evil" -  she was much, much worse than that! If there is no hell, let's hope someone is busy constructing one for her.

The unbearable rightness of being

It looks likely that either Narendra Modi or Rahul Gandhi is going to be the next Prime Minister of India. Both are getting a lot of press coverage. Of late the English-language press is working hard to rehabilitate the first and trash the second (along with his mother, family, party, government etc) so it's quite clear who they think is going to win.

The key point is that there are going to be two distinct models on offer next year. Both have their positive and negative features. Most people I know would like to stay within their comfort zone and keep repeating one of the following statements: (i) I detest Mr Modi because he is a fascist, (ii) I can't stand the Sonia Gandhi family, and the UPA government has been a failure. A few people say both, but most will agree that one of these two sentences resonates more with them than the other.

I've long been in the category for whom (i) resonates more than (ii). In fact I don't have any negative feelings about this particular Ms Gandhi: it's clear to me that she had a popular mandate to be Prime Minister of India in 2004 and was hounded out of the post by middle-class bigots crying "Foreigner! White person! Woman! Christian!". For me that remains one of the more ugly events in the history of Indian democracy. She handled it very gracefully, and grace has continued to be her hallmark. And look at the rest of her family. They don't preen and posture in public. When they do say something it may not be brilliant or insightful but it is usually quite accurate. And they maintain their grace in the face of venomous abuse from a right-wing that despises both their liberal agenda and their good manners which make other Indian political families look even cruder than they already are.

Of course you can't run a country on grace and good manners alone. The Gandhi family and the Congress government don't come across as dynamic, a label that sticks better to Mr Modi. He is seen as pro-industry, pro-infrastructure and, as a bonus, non-corrupt. Responding to the fascist label, his supporters point out that he has not actually been found guilty of masterminding the 2002 anti-Muslim riots, and they add in the same breath that the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, conducted by Congress supporters, killed more people and the guilty were never punished. On both these points I don't disagree with them.

And yet, by his own admission Mr Modi is no liberal. His vision is a muscular and majoritarian one in which concern for the underprivileged is a convenient showpiece rather than a deeply felt principle. One doesn't have to read too far between the lines to see that in his world the poor, weak and marginalised are expected to understand their place in society and stay within its confines. He and his party would like religion to play a more powerful role in our lives and will pressurise us to cede our individual preferences to a common, majority-determined agenda. It is this composite package, rather than a single period of bloody riots, that really typifies the right-wing universe. And the pressure to surrender individuality is indeed the seed of fascism.

Is this what one wants India to become? That depends on who one is. I suspect that under right-wing governments the rich tend to benefit, while the poor tend to do worse (the poor can nevertheless be induced to vote for such governments, as both US Republicans and UK Conservatives are well aware). So it's quite likely that under Mr Modi the rich will get richer. In itself, this is no bad thing. I don't share the popular Indian middle-class view that people richer than us are evil just because they are richer than us. But how the poor will fare is important too, and far less clear. What are their relative prospects under the "dynamic" rightwingers as against the more sluggish dispensation presently in power? Among industrialists -- and the journalists who are so often their proxies -- it's taken for granted that if the government unconditionally supports the generators of wealth then everyone will be better off, and therefore Modi is the right choice. But history tells us this claim is sometimes true and sometimes false, so I would say it remains an open question. It's quite possible that in today's India the sluggish dispensation will, like the proverbial tortoise, actually get there faster for the people who need it most.

Still, I'm betting on Mr Modi to win the top position next year.