Death of a Teacher

News of the death of my old school teacher Hoshang Kapadia who taught me English through classes XI-XII, has come as a shock. Hoshi or Kapadia as he was called was a gentle, genial soul with a peculiar sense of humour which I found quite mystifying then, but seems so civilized and urbane now.

As is our wont when an old companion passes away, I remember him through the fragments of memory that have survived the decades gone by. We were 17, I think, when he got us to debate on the travails of teenagers. In a classful of angst-ridden boys that was a recipe for disaster but he managed to get us to do reasonable soul-searching with his patience and tact.

In between classes on Coleridge and Shakespeare, his great passion was to turn some of us into good public speakers. To that end he would devote enormous time and energy working with us to fine tune our diction, style, delivery and the nous needed for debating. And it worked alright. The A-team of my good friend Sandip Ghose and AP Singh, was considered the crack debating outfit in Calcutta debating circles of the mid 80s. Subroto Talukdar and I were the reservists, a fact which to my great shame I held against our mentor at that point.

In truth he was much too generous and kind a soul to ever have anything but the best interests of his students at heart. I had the great fortune of continuing my English Literature studies in college under his brother Rohinton, a massive influence on a whole generation of students at Xaviers in Calcutta. Both brothers had the unique ability to turn their students into close friends.

In losing Hoshang Kapadia, I feel a sense of great personal loss, like a childhood friend passing away. Ironically I read about his death the same day that my 13-year old daughter went for her first inter-school public speaking competition. In the end she won only an honourable mention. But I know Hoshi Kapadia, teacher of English and mentor of boys at Don Bosco School, Calcutta would have been happy.

Thank you sir.

Proud to be a Punjabi

Sixty one years ago a well-heeled Punjabi hindu family based in Lahore started its long trudge back to India in the midst of the partition riots. Leaving behind a prosperous business, a house large enough to have stables for the horses and kennels for the dogs, the large group of old and young went through hell before reaching Dehradun. Here they confronted their new reality for the first time when the relatives they had hoped would take them in turned them down forcing them into the Government's hastily created refugee camps. Life was tough in these camps especially for the women used to a more genteel living and now having to use public spaces for their daily chores. Snake bites, malaria and hunger were a part of their existence.

Somehow they persevered eking out a meagre existence by selling food at the nearby railway station. Each morning the women would rise early and cook and the boys would go and hawk it at the station. Then the hunt would start for cheap rations. This continued for several years before finally the family migrated to Shimla and started its life all over again.

Through it there were two constants - they would not beg, ever. Not even to go back to the relatives who had turned them away. And they would not borrow because they knew they had no means of repaying the loans. The pain this caused was intense. One young son died of diarrhea and another grew up with polio. For the others, the teens were not an age to frolic but a time to put their shoulder to the family wheel. But they endured and passed on their lessons to another, more privileged generation.

I know this story because you see these were the families of my parents. I learnt two lessons from them - no work is below my dignity and debt is never an answer to any crisis. Often it worsens it.

To an America fattened, weakened and finally flattened by debt Obama says “yes we can”. Another generation of Indians, devastated by a partition they were not responsible for, said ‘no we won’t. They were tough men, often crude and unpolished, and mostly reviled for being grasping and unaesthetic. But today I feel proud of them, glad for the legacy of self-respect and hard work they have left me with.

 

The War in Mumbai

If my blood boiled to see the terror attacks in Mumbai this last week, I was also appalled by the role played by the TV news media. In the first place, someone needs to define for these newbies what news is. Between doling out on-the-spot awards to our bravehearts, pushing to-do lists, and adopting causes, each of them had only one preoccupation – to prove the exclusivity of their coverage. There was little insight, no investigation, basically now news reporting. Old reporting hands in the print media have been shocked by the gullibility of the TV journos who seem to lap up anything that came from anyone in uniform as if it were the gospel truth. The result was that every few hours we were dutifully informed how the Taj had been ‘sanitised’ and promptly the firing would start again.

This of course highlighted the failure of the authorities charged with taking on the terrorists. But frankly the initial weak-kneed response by the local authorities as well as the police wasn't anything new. It has been visible all along, through all the bombings and the attacks in the past. There is clearly no central command ever in these situations partly because law & order is a state subject and the states are least qualified to handle terror which is seen as a central issue.

But the political paralysis this time was new and very alarming. In the past various leaders have been the first to come out and issue empty statements about things being in control (even if they were not). This time around for 12 hours after the first bit of firing there was absolutely no response. In fact, the next morning Mumbai police put out an alert saying don't go out of your homes unless you have to. Now we know that apart from the 9 terrorists killed another 10-12 got away and are probably in hiding somewhere in the city. At that point only the cops knew it and they must have informed the political leaders, which is why they stayed away not wanting to expose themselves.

The crucial issue for me is what was the military/intelligence leadership up to? The NSG commandos appeared so ill-trained and lacking in basic discipline. It seemed like a throwback to Operation Bluestar. Shooting away recklessly for 36 hours at a static target hardly seems a modern operation. There wasn't even a semblance of an intermediary who would talk to the kidnappers while the commandos took charge. I can understand now why we have made such a mess of Kashmir.

I think in blaming Pakistan, we are just looking for a scapegoat for our own ineptness and the lack of calibre in our leadership. Sure Pakistan is culpable but its political leadership has no control over its terrorist agencies and we should have been working with them long before this incident happened to blow up the terrorist cells in covert operations. If we claim to know exactly where Dawood lives in Karachi why have not been able to take him out in all these years. It’s not like our intelligence agencies don't operate in Pakistan. I think there's just too much bluster and lack of elementary education.

Meanwhile, the US continues with its cynical intervention in world affairs. Its efforts are directed at preventing a war between India and Pakistan only because it fears Pakistan will move a 100000 men from the Afghan border and hurt its own operations in Kabul. Now if China uses this opportunity to mount a limited attack to reclaim its territory in Arunachal, will the US back India? I doubt it.

Some form of a war is inevitable now, largely for political reasons but its impact will be to turn the current recession into a 30s style economic depression.  

Girls for Food in Bihar

As if the misery of the poor affected by the floods in Bihar isn't bad enough, comes horrifying news of how the human trafficking vultures have descended on the blighted state. There have been a few stories on the subject largely in the international press (http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/news/stories/200809/s2355277.htm?tab=latest) but the Indian media is yet to take too much notice. Guess it's old news for them and there are more graphic horrors to report. 12-year old girls being pushed into prostitution by their mothers to buy food for the rest of the family, is too old a story in India to get any reader or viewer overtly worried. And if the audience isn't interested, the media couldn't be bothered. 

It's also a convenient alibi for when you want to shut your eyes to the sad state of real India, far removed from the hype of the rising middle class and its obscenely unctuous avarice. But it's one thing to accept that there are two Indias, quite another to actually superimpose 10% of the population onto the remaining 90% and pretend we are all fine here. Check the scandalous fashion spread in the latest issue of Vogue India, in which poor, nameless people sport $10,000 handbags and $100 bibs. Talk of exploitation and apathy.

Google's Bundles of Joy

In one of his films Rajesh Khanna has this wonderful line “It is so simple to be happy but so difficult to be simple”. And it must be doubly difficult to be simple and yet make others happy. No one in this generation has done it better than Google, the company that’s given us the ubiquitous search option, which like a good massage is the answer to every problem. But besides its thoroughly utilitarian role Google also dishes out ever so often, some of the most memorable pictures interspersed into the letters of the word Google. I have seen so many of them to mark various events but even then I have been taken by surprise at the wonderful pictures that the Olympics have occasioned. In itself they couldn’t be doing anything for the company, not at least by way of increasing its revenues but for the sheer joy it brings to users like me, it’s an unprecedented piece of corporate social responsibility. For that matter, they could well put them on some tees and sell them as Google merchandise! Some people just don’t know how to make money.
You can see some of these visuals. For more just keep googling.

The Sin of Passivity

What do you say to a man who stands by and watches when another is being killed nearby ? Or more precisely what does that man say for himself. That there was little he could do against armed murderers; that he didn't know the murdered man or maybe and most likely, that he saw nothing. Any one of these answers comes from those of us who were in Delhi in 1984 or in Mumbai in 1992 or in Gujarat in 2004. They are good enough to save face or even to avoid accepting any blame. But what of a lifetime of guilt. Can we avoid that? Avoid thinking of the little boy whose life may have been saved if we had as much as taken him home.

It seems people can and did. Time magazine's cover story on Hitler "The Betrayer" in its issue dated May 7, 1945, has this damning indictment of a people who had been thoroughly defeated and discredited by then.

"In all the various emotions which the Germans are feeling now—fear, anger, hopelessness, bitterness, shame, servility and helplessness—there is one which you will rarely find and that is a sense of guilt, the sense of being responsible personally and as a nation for what has happened.
Most Germans realize now or profess to realize that this war was unnecessary and wrong. But they still don't go beyond that to the salient realization that Naziism and everything that went with it was wrong. The main reason the war seems wrong to them is because they lost it. They place the blame on Hitler because he got them into it; if he had won the war few people in Germany today would be concerned with the question of whether the war was right or wrong."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,797474-1,00.html

Funny thing is, it's probably that absence of debilitating guilt which allowed the post war generation to rebuild a ruined nation into the European powerhouse we have today.

Housing Scams

It happened in the last years of the NBFC boom and bust and it is happening now amidst the real estate meltdown. In the late 80s the newly minted non-banking financial companies that were running on hype rather than returns, managed to con a number of gullible investors into placing their funds with them against the promise of whopping returns. Later when investors turned up to collect they mostly met closed doors. The building boom in India, particularly for home buyers, is now in serious danger of going down the same path.

Some years ago a prominent Delhi based builder announced project in West Delhi with the usual fanfare and media hype. I don't know how many people fell for it it and put down advances to book this piece of paradise on earth. But those that did must be ruing their luck. Today the project is in that never-never land where all thoughts of "the ultimate in luxury living " lie banished. What you have instead is a a dirt site with unruly grass growing all over and not a speck of construction material anywhere in sight. Local brokers say the project ran afoul of authorities. But sandwiched between lethal tarnsmission wires and a metro substation, there's no future for this "picture perfect place to park your dreams!"

But if you went to the site of the builder (http://www.parsvnath.com/Paramount/Aboutproject.asp), you wouldn't guess there's any problem with the project. The only giveaway is the pictures under the head "Site Photographs". When 2 years after a project was launched you only see pictures of the marketing office, you know this is one housing dream that's going nowhere.