Category: Blog

Dear Kate,

You seem like a perfectly charming young lady from what I can see, although I must say I haven’t really seen much, not having watched any footage of your wedding or your attendance at other events apart from the Olympics where the cameras inevitably followed you as you cheered on your fellow Brits with enthusiasm, verve, and fun, which was nice to see, particularly after your Grandmother-in-law’s stern we-refuse-to-be-amused demeanor belied the obvious “good sport” manner lurking behind her skit at the Opening Ceremonies.

Now a French magazine has published topless pictures of you and everyone is up in arms about it; cries of foul have filled the airwaves and questions of privacy have been bandied about rather clumsily.  You’ve expressed your outrage and, I believe (although I’m reluctant to believe everything I read), sadness that such a thing happened. The British media, in a demonstration of good taste, refrained from following suit, even the Sun, that bastion of sleazy journalism which offered no such protection to your brother-in-law Harry.  Of course, I don’t care that he was cavorting naked with a bevy of beauties as much as I do care that he paraded about wearing a Nazi uniform or derogatorily referred to a South Asian colleague as a Paki; he’s an arrogant little prig and you married the better brother!

But Katie—may I call you Katie?  May I?  Thanks.  Katie dear heart, as an Englishwoman you should know better than to express sadness or surprise at anything your neighbors across the Channel would do.  I mean, this a country that might have elected as president a man who was accused of raping an immigrant woman in a New York hotel and seems to have had a checkered past, to say the least; a country whose greatest monument was described by a group of French artists as a “hateful column of bolted sheet metal.”  Besides, you know they love to stick it to you English as often as they can, so don’t give them the satisfaction of responding to their petty pricking, which is merely an attempt to counter their own jealousies and shortcomings—there’s a reason the monument I mentioned earlier is a phallic symbol rising above their capital’s skyline!

So my advice to you, now that you’ve expressed your initial disgust, would be to ignore any further reference to the pictures.  Of course, you should have known, given the history of paparazzi in Europe, that as soon as you started dating William every public and private moment of your life would be on display in one way or another.  Once you took your top off you should have known that the bottom would fall off any sense of privacy you might have naively clung to.  Now of course your breasts will find their way into the prurient gaze of every computer hack in the world.

But Katie, consider this for a moment.  They’re just breasts.  I mean, judging from your pretty face (although I don’t know why that would make a difference, except as part of a total package) I’m sure they’re nice breasts, but when all’s said and done, they’re just mammary glands, or, as some scientists would have it, modified sweat glands, or sebaceous glands as other scientists would insist.  Oddly, there are probably more names to describe them than any other part of human anatomy; would you believe 154 terms (I looked it up)?  Some of them make no sense except within some arcane context; and some are quite hilarious—Bouncing Betties, Conversation Pieces, Dueling Banjos, Non-Dairy Creamers, and Lactation Stations.

Of course, yours are royal jumblies (another term I found), which make them conversation pieces, but there’s no reason for you not to shrug your shoulders (watch out for bouncing) and remind yourself that over half the population has them and quite a few of the other half too, when you come to think about it.  As soon as you and your handlers pay no attention, it will cease to bother you.  Besides, hundreds of other celebrities find themselves in the same predicament without causing much outrage.  How can I say this gently, Katie, but why should your breasts get preferential treatment?  In the interest of full disclosure you should know that I’m an anti-royalist who believes there should be no place in a truly democratic society for kings and queens and duchesses.  But I don’t live in your country so my opinion shouldn’t really matter; your countrymen and women are the ones to decide and they have determined they’d like to spend millions of pounds on palaces and such!  And before you cock a snook through a Queen Anne’s Fan at me, do remember there are quite a few of your so-called “subjects” who think the monarchy is an anachronism.

But I digress.  I don’t want to give you the impression I endorse the French magazine’s actions.  But in the great scheme of things, whenever issues of privacy swirl about women I worry that there seems to be a greater maelstrom around such things as the actions of paparazzi photographing feminine body parts than around questions of abortion, rape, female genital mutilation, minors sold into prostitution, etc.  Perhaps you can make it your mission to take up one of these causes—they may not be popular, but you may actually be able to make a real difference and no-one will care whether you were photographed topless!  And like your mother-in-law, you may be remembered for much more than your pretty face—or breasts!

Anyway, that’s my free, unasked-for advice. Good luck with the paparazzi and the French!  Apparently the women in your family seem to have ongoing problems with both.

Cheekily,

Kim

Every Christmas it came with the inscription “Across the Miles” scrawled across a corner of the envelope in that inimitable hand, a kind of forward-slanted print with its characteristic serifs ornamenting several letters. Jack Bond’s greetings had arrived at my parents’ house ever since I could remember, along with other cards from the UK where many of my father’s family had settled.

When I entered my teens I wondered who he was, this English gentleman with a spy’s name; obviously not a member of the family amid the D’Souza’s and Fernandes’s and Da Cruz’s, all of them part of the expatriate Diaspora that had originated in the Portuguese colony of Goa and then dispersed to Zanzibar, Aden, and, after Indian independence, to England. Besides, this was one of the few cards that had “Par Avion” emblazoned across the front; many of our relatives mailed their cards the cheaper way by sea, which meant they wrote them some time at the beginning of November.

One December I noticed my mother writing a letter to enclose with the card and asked her about this Jack Bond.
“He’s an English tommy; a soldier.”
“Really?” I said, with growing excitement. Maybe his name wasn’t just a coincidence after all; my young mind clung to all kinds of possibilities. Who was this war hero with the romantic name and why was my mother writing letters to him when all she sent to the relatives were cards with their names?” Actually, that wasn’t quite true, for she often added little notes filled with familial tidbits.

Over the years I was able to piece together the story about Jack Bond. While World War II was raging in Europe, the Japanese were advancing in Southeast Asia, leading to the Burma Front. Britain’s soldiers on their way to the conflict stopped over in Bombay to await further orders, for India was still a British colony. Many of them knew they might not make it back, so they made the most of their time in this Grande Dame of Indian cities at its myriad watering-holes or its sports fields or at the movies. My father Frank was a sports reporter with the Times of India and that is how he met Jack Bond. He invited Jack and a couple of his friends to the Times press and gave them a firsthand look at the working of a newspaper office and printing press.

Years later my dad would take me and my siblings to the office where I would chat in person with famous sports reporters and journalists and read the AP and Reuter wires on the Creed printer. I always felt special perusing the incoming tape as though I was the first person in the city to catch the latest news, which, in a sense, I was! Then to spend time in the case-room and watch the compositors at work on the linotype where huge masses of silver lead melted into the machine and emerged as a fully cast line of text. I would wonder at my father’s ability to read the page, with its reverse dark-leaden text, as fluently as he read the printed sheet. I hoped Jack Bond and his friends had relished as I did the smells of the glue and newsprint and ink in those pre-computer days when printing a newspaper was a collaboration between so many craftsmen. Anyway, Jack and dad met many times and became good friends, swapping stories in the bars of downtown Bombay.

Eventually Jack was shipped off to the guerilla warfare in the Burmese jungles where he also battled tropical conditions of rain, heat, and disease. There were heavy losses among British and Indian soldiers. Jack was wounded and treated at the military base, but carried a piece of shrapnel in his chest for the rest of his life. Back in Bombay he contacted dad with traumatic stories of his experiences, including one about his friend being shot by a sniper as they sat side by side in the jungle, something that affected him deeply every time he thought about it.

All this I gleaned from my mother Doreen; my father rarely spoke to us about his relationship with Jack, which was odd because he was a wonderful raconteur with a trove of stories about sports and celebrities and politics, particularly after a few drinks. He was normally a somewhat taciturn man but had a wicked wit and a warm sense of humor; once the drinks flowed he regaled every company, for no-one in his circle of friends or family possessed so diverse a set of life experiences—as a first-rate sportsman in his youth and then a journalist before and after Indian Independence.

His eldest brother Simon was also a journalist, an editor with a daily column that was savored throughout Bombay, as well as a fine arts critic who hobnobbed with the glitterati of this film capital of India. Between the two brothers were four other siblings but it was these two who were the spinners of tall tales about Indian film stars and interviews with famous personages as diverse as W.H. Auden, Anna Pavlova, Amelita Galli-Curci, Lou Thesz, and John Barrymore, the latter somewhat of a legend in the family for he had once visited their flat for an 8-hour gin-drinking binge!! These tales were relished at family gatherings and speakeasies and handed down as heirlooms to the next generation, sacred relics that could never be stolen but had to be displayed, which I eagerly did (as I do now) throughout my travels, all the way from India to the Middle East and America.

“So, why do you write to Jack Bond, Mum?” I asked my mother several years after that first conversation.
“Because daddy won’t and someone has to.”
“Why does someone have to?“
“Because it’s rude not to. He wrote twice. The first time your father promised to, but you know how he is…says he writes all day for a living and so he shouldn’t have to when he comes home.” She laughed, affectionately. “So I write now.”
“Do you know him, mummy?” Now I found this rather interesting.
“No, I’ve never met him. He was daddy’s wartime friend. I met daddy after the war.”
“So what do you know about him?“
“Quite a lot now after all these years. He has a daughter Jackie.”

I came to learn that when Jack Bond returned to England after the War he wrote to the Sports Department of The Times of India, asking for the whereabouts of Frank Pereira whom he had met when he was stationed there. They gave the letter to my dad, who decided to reply. But one thing led to another and, as my mum put it, if you don’t do it immediately it gets shelved—the letter was never written. When my dad retired from The Times he took a contract job for a short stint in the north-western city of Ahmedabad. A second letter arrived at the Sports desk from Jack to dad. This time my mother took it upon herself to reply. And so began an annual correspondence between her and Jack Bond. He sent us a photograph of himself and his wife and daughter and asked for one of our family, which delighted him and which, he said, would stay on his mantle.

My mother is an excellent writer with a Keatsian eye for the kind of chatty details sprinkled with acute observations that elevate letter-writing to an art. It wouldn’t have mattered that she had never met Jack—her narratives about what’s going on around her and matter-of-fact, pithy comments are delightful to anyone who has been on the fortunate end of them. On reading Jack’s Christmas cards with their little notes I realized her letters were a treat to this English family, for he replied with the deep affection one reserves for intimate friends. And so it continued through the years, this annual correspondence between an English tommy and an Indian woman he had never met. Some years the letters were shorter than others. I find it amusing that my father, the journalist, never wrote to his friend, but he did read the cards and letters that arrived from England; sometimes mother read them to him.

After dad died, mum wrote to Jack and received a letter of condolence from him. He even wrote that he had tried telephoning us, but (in yet another amusing footnote to this interesting tale), unable to find our number (we didn’t have a telephone at the time), had used our Pin Code (zip code) instead!! A decade later, with her children dispersed across the globe my mother embarked on her international peregrinations and found herself visiting friends and family in England. Jack Bond’s telephone number was acquired and she called him. He was ill and in bed, but his wife gave him the telephone and they chatted for the first time, these two international correspondents joined by words of greetings and memories that began long before they knew each other. It was a warm conversation, I’m told, but they couldn’t meet, for she was in Watford and he in Manchester.  When I decided to write this piece I asked my mother to refresh my memory and many of these words and sentences are hers.

A decade later, Jack Bond passed away. I wonder if he and my dad picked up their part of the conversation over a pint. His daughter Jacqueline wrote to mum to tell her the news and said that as her father had sent us Christmas cards every year, she would like to continue the practice. And so it endures—every year my mother (who now lives in Canada and the U.S.) receives a Christmas card from England with the words “Across the Miles” scrawled upon the envelope!! Greetings between people who have never met!

I think one of these days I will join the conversation!

I was lunching with my friend Lane when, in response to something I said, he assumed the amused tone he acquires when he’s about to say what he thinks is profoundly obvious, and remarked, “Dude, get used to the idea; you’re an American!”

Which of course started me thinking about the whole matter. What does it mean to be an American? Or rather, what does it mean to me, because despite all the jingoistic jargon floating about these days I’m sure that all Americans have their own versions of national identity and I can’t claim to make any blanket generalizations about the subject.

As a graduate student in Tallahassee I would joke that the first stage of my Americanization had begun when I received junk mail in my name, something I wasn’t used to in India. I was now an official pawn on the chessboard of capitalism, someone with purchasing power (or the potential, for they couldn’t know then that I was an impecunious student) to be courted and wooed until I became a commodity like the ones they were trying to sell me.

Then I moved to the Midwest, the heartland of America they said, and how much more acculturation does one need than to walk into a field of corn on a hot summer day and hear it grow—you can, you know, even if it just means that the crackle in your ears is corn popping in the heat.

I did not really give the idea much thought for several years, although I often fielded crass comments from people who, in response to some mild altercation or other, would say sarcastically to me, “Welcome to America,” or, on more than a couple of occasions, “Why did you come here?”  Or “Why don’t you go back?”  These, I reasoned, were ignorant remarks uncharacteristic of the feelings of most Americans; certainly, I had many friends whose affections more than offset the sentiments of a few idiots.

Since 9/11, however, the question of identity has loomed larger in my consciousness. Every time I travel, particularly abroad but also domestically, I am forced to ponder the implications of my sojourn here—can I still call it a sojourn after almost thirty years? Is there some part of me that continues to think of myself as a visitor who has outstayed his welcome? Where does that feeling begin and what keeps it alive? And how much of that is of my own doing, a refusal to claim full membership in the clan either from a need to preserve something essential within me or because of a reluctance to think of myself as part of a herd?

Every year I visit family and friends from India who reside in Canada. They live different lifestyles from mine—I don’t think in all the years I have traveled there that I’ve met many white Canadians at the homes of my friends. There’s a huge Indian population in the conurbation of greater Toronto; friends and neighbors from Bombay live in close proximity to one another, having picked up where they left off in the old country, creating enclaves within the variegated communities of modern Canada; socializing among themselves, drawing comfort from familiar faces, food, and traditions. I refuse to be judgmental about their decisions for they live happy lives and are making significant contributions to their society. It was not, however, the life I wanted.

I came here via the Middle East for the promise of America, searching (although I did not know it at the time) for a diverse community to enrich the international experience I had discovered in Arabia. I believed I would find old and new cultural threads to weave into a coat of many colors. This was, after all, a nation of the most speckled populations anywhere in the world, particularly in its cities. My first love was theatre (although I am not defined by it) and I came here in quest of a global stage which would depict the vitality at the heart of this nation. Theatre has always been for me a way of knowing about the world, a vehicle to understand and participate in universal cultures. Perhaps that’s why I never wanted to be a professional actor or director, preferring instead to leave open doors to different possibilities; maybe that’s why I stumbled into teaching at a university, for I relish being surrounded everyday by smart people from different disciplines, each with his or her unique way of viewing the world and me. And from all of them I can reconstruct my identity. We are mirrors for those who encircle us, exchanging bits and pieces of one another in constant renewals of ourselves, renegotiating old beliefs, discovering new traditions, and reflecting each other like dancers in constant flux.

This was the America I sought, which isn’t easy to find, for it lurks beneath the surface, emerging sporadically to tease me into believing that someday that promise will be fulfilled. Perhaps my disenchantment springs from my lack of understanding of the complexity of this great adventure. As we “slouch towards Bethlehem to be born,” stumbling along the way, “turning and turning in the widening gyre,” perhaps it is precisely this faltering that stitches together the multicolored coat, for it forces us into tangential directions in search of new materials in the web of social fabrics. The Journey is everything. Theatre teaches me that the struggle is all—at the end of the play there may be Death or a Celebration, stark destruction or Bacchanalian revelry, but the payoff matters far less than the odyssey to get there. Will the so-called Promise of America ever be fulfilled? Probably not. And, frankly, I don’t know any more what that Promise really is. I do know that my life here is multifaceted—angst-ridden and ecstatic, frustratingly satisfying, littered with unfulfilled dreams that have nonetheless never stopped me from dreaming, yet glittering with so many dreams come true. Will I live out my life here? I don’t know. I never thought I would live here in the first place! I stumbled into it, as I have stumbled into every corner of my life…South America beckons…but who really knows? Besides, that sounds too much like a goal…and I have never really had a goal! Anyway,  Liesl and Kieran have me ensorcelled for now!

What does it really mean to be Americanized? I live a middle-class “American lifestyle,” which under scrutiny turns out to be not much different from the lifestyles of countless middle-class folk around the world (give or take a shopping mall), foisting Indian curries on my friends, traveling across the world from time to time to avoid, I think, the isolation that sometimes comes with being here and to retain my global citizenship, seeking whenever possible the world at my doorstep (for there’s always someone from some far corner of the globe who travels here), screaming at insane politicians on TV or at rival sports teams (does it say something about my refusal to join the gang that I live in Illinois yet my favorite sports teams are the LA Lakers, the SF Forty-niners, and the Atlanta Braves?)…we’re all pursuing Happiness, with variations on that general theme.

I don’t have to be White to be an American (it’s a notion difficult to shed), even though parts of me strain to retain their foreignness, perhaps because in them lies the possibility of my uniqueness…but the larger issue is that Indian-Americans and Chinese-Americans and Latino-Americans, etc. are also just Americans, especially African-Americans! Eventually that will emerge as a greater truth than it appears today. Which leads me to the great question:  Am I becoming Americanized or is America becoming “Kimized?” If you’ll forgive the inherent arrogance in that question for a moment, consider this: Do I not shape my corner of this society as much as it shapes me? As do all of us? Is that not the real truth ignored by politicians who trumpet America as a monolithic, immutable entity created 200 years ago to bend future immigrants to “its” (meaning “their”) will? Whether we like it or not, we live in a capricious country, constantly re-ordered by those who arrive at its shores. And that has led to the globalization of America, as a nation is forced to shed old notions of individual nationality to become part of an international community. My America is endlessly fascinating, replete with flamboyant people from everywhere, particularly those who arrived here “illegally” with songs in their hearts and insouciance perched on their shoulders; theirs are stories I want to hear because their journeys mirror mine in so many ways and they, as much as anyone, will transform this society over the next half century.

As I emerge from the liminal spaces between cultures to confront the monsters lying in wait for me, I am faced with this burning question: do I slay the Jabberwock or do I follow it into the tulgey wood? Undoubtedly the latter, he chortles in his glee, for there the new adventure lies. That’s the difference-making road! Callooh! Callay!!

“There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination.”  Willy Wonka.

This morning in an interview Annie Clark said that she’s reluctant to explain a song, preferring to leave a little room for people to put themselves in it.  This got me thinking that I have always believed an artist should never have to explain his/her creation.  Unfortunately, we seem to be more curious about the circumstances surrounding a work of art rather than the piece itself.   I wonder if this has to do with the profusion of media outlets, talk shows, etc. or merely a lack of imagination on our part that we are unable to engage our minds and spirits with the artwork itself unless we know more about the contexts which engendered it?  Or has the glut of information at our fingertips led our collective imaginations into a state of entropy?  When I first heard “Rehab” I thought it was a brilliant song even though I knew nothing about Amy Winehouse.  But as her life shredded before our eyes the song appeared to acquire greater meaning–or did it?  Did our fascination with her shenanigans turn the song into something it wasn’t?  Yet who’s to say what a song is or isn’t, that it should be this or that?  Would the song have had the same impact had it been sung by, say, Ella or Barbara?  That’s hard to know except that there was a time when we knew little about the lives of singers (Sinatra was an exception) and measured our response solely by what we heard on the radio or, in some cases, saw on television.  In fact, radio stimulated our imaginations in so many interesting ways, not just with music but also with baseball!  Perhaps singers are the wrong example here, or any performing artists for that matter, because their visible personae are entwined with their work and seem to invite further forays into their lives!

But what about other forms of art?  Playscripts, paintings, sculpture, music compositions?  There’s a rather silly analysis of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata against the backdrop of his supposed love for some Giulietta Guicciardi.  Do we really need to know any of these suppositions to enjoy the piece?  Why can’t we just let it resonate in our imaginations and echo within the chambers of our own experiences?  Isn’t that what makes art so magnificent, that we find bits and pieces of our lives strewn among the brushstrokes, notes, words, and images?  And isn’t that enough?  But then, does that negate the work of art historians or critics?  Not really, because they are engaged in interpreting the artwork within the context of human experiences; everything else is peripheral and of secondary importance.   It’s when the context overwhelms the work that we enter a confused state of artistic apprehension–when the life or the circumstances that created it drown the creation.  The images in Guernica are a tragic and devastating commentary on War beyond the confines of the Basque Country for which it was created.  The original commission is interesting and even significant for the people involved, but the rest of us can look at it and, unfortunately, find our own experiences mirrored there, for who among us today does not have a personal imaginary vision of war that is grounded in some reality?

Very little is known about Shakespeare; indeed the fact that there is no tangible connection between him and his works has led to all sorts of Oxfordian speculations about his authorship.  What I find utterly beguiling about his plays is that it’s impossible to decipher his personal philosophy.  With few exceptions, ideas and opinions he seems to endorse in one play may be contradicted in another; all he seemed to care about was the legitimacy of his characters, that they spoke their own truth rather than his.  In some ways, it appears that this greatest of playwrights disappears into his work; he exists only in his creations.  Perhaps this may have something to do with the idea that he saw no difference between theatre and life–it was all one; thus, he didn’t feel the need to be present in his art for his characters were enough; they were just parts of him–in all their messy contradictions.  He cared only about their utter humanity, warts and all.  Part of his artistic sensibility appears to be a deliberate attempt to blur the distinction between reality and imagination, to transmute what he culled from his English context and displace it elsewhere in a place that bore some semblance of reality (Denmark, France, Italy, an island, the fairy world, even England) but actually existed only on an imaginary plane.  For him, defining the context seemed to limit the imagination.  Perhaps that explains his universality.

And there’s a lesson there!

Stephen Fry’s excoriating indictment of God, which is making the social media rounds, gave me pause because it sounded reasonable enough. If there is a God who is considered all-loving, how can he permit the horrific suffering (particularly on the innocent) that runs rife in this world? But that begs the question: if there is no God, does having no-one to blame make acceptance of misery easier? Is it more palatable to allow for the randomness of, say, children born without limbs or with disease if we believe there is no God controlling all this? Then what would happen if we take Nature itself out of the equation and blame every single catastrophe on human error or frailty? Lightning strikes or natural disasters are the result of poor environmental stewardship; falling trees wouldn’t kill people if we pruned away the weaker ones; inherited diseases spring from genetic mutations incurred through familial lifestyle choices for generations!

Now we are masters of our universe with a collective responsibility for everything and for one another, accepting that despite our best efforts we can’t control it all. Which actually might be the best way, for it would insist that the plight of someone in Ulan Bator is somehow connected to us. But that may prove to be too much of an encumbrance so we simply focus on our individual lives (or groups) and let the devil take the hindmost, which in our saner moments we realize may not be quite what we want, for we could easily end up being the hindmost at some point! So we create a Custodian who becomes a lightning rod for our frustrations and anger, in return for which we grant him dominion over our universe, hoping that he would somehow ensure that no-one is forgotten or left behind; thus we abandon our communal obligations and have someone to blame when things go wrong and to praise when they go right and to reject when we don’t get what we want! And we are back where we started!

I was watching a performance of Tosca on TV this afternoon and wishing I understood opera better…or classical music…or any form, really.

We didn’t own a record player, so growing up we were dependent on the sparse offerings on our radio, which didn’t work half the time.  We heard pop music once a week, broadcast from Radio Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and I think there was a Sunday morning show called the Binaca Hit Parade (sponsored by the toothpaste, of course). I had a couple of friends who owned LPs, which we wore out, stopping and starting to copy the lyrics!  Not much else. Mostly British groups and a few Americans (obviously Elvis and, for some strange reason, a country and western balladeer named Jim Reeves whose swooning love songs were wildly popular in Bombay!).

We had an old piano at home but not the money for lessons. My brother drove us crazy scratching his way through a violin primer, only to give it up pretty soon, thankfully! It was only when I left home and lived in the Middle East that I bought a cassette player–one of those Japanese things (Sharp, I think) with small detachable speakers. I was so proud of it. I even had a Walkman at one point, but I never really got used to listening to songs on the go, not having had music at my disposal at home. Perhaps that’s why you will not find me wandering around listening to an iPod, even though I have one. Walking is for thinking (it’s what happens when you grow up in a bustling city) and observing people.  But I do listen to music when I’m driving. Keeps me from yelling at recalcitrant drivers in other lanes! I share my son’s Spotify account but most of the time I forget I have it! We once estimated that he has about 30,000 songs on various and sundry devices (not counting Spotify!)

Now, we sang all the time–folk songs and party songs, Irish ballads, and bawdy rugby songs–every family birthday party (we were a huge family of cousins, uncles, and aunts) had a sing-song after dinner. At home my mum and aunts would write down in shorthand the lyrics of songs from the radio…and we’d wait for the next week to fill the gaps.

So although I lack the easy familiarity with popular music that most of my contemporaries have, my head is filled with snatches of melodies.

I love music. It makes sense of the world–it reorganizes the universe in comprehensible terms and transmutes the best and worst of our emotions in ways that permit us to celebrate our humanity. Beethoven’s Appassionata sucks the uneasy turmoil from our mortal coil and elevates the spirit above the trash of our daily lives. Freddie’s rhapsody reaches deep into my Bohemian soul and makes it one with the universe!

Perhaps that is why even people like me who didn’t have easy access to records or cassettes are always looking for music wherever we can find it. We listen to the wind and rain, to birdsong and the hum of traffic. We love  the rhythm of language, the sound of words, and the silence between. It’s why I love Shakespeare and Chekhov and Pinter and August Wilson and Soyinka. And Mishima. They are musicians as well as poets and playwrights.

Yes, you can ask me which part of Asia I’m from. At least you’re acknowledging that people from the subcontinent (and not just fro the far east) are Asians. I know it isn’t PC to ask people where they’re from if the implication is that they can’t possibly be American. But we can tell if you’re genuinely interested in our heritage or just labeling us as foreigners. We can tell if you’re interested in a further discussion about culture and identity rather than a casual toss-off! We’re all from somewhere else, originally, and I would love to chat about your African/Asian/European/South-American/etc background.

I have no problem talking about race or religion or sexual identity. In fact, I am genuinely astonished how few, if any, people over the years have asked me questions about my background (even when I have volunteered information). Is it just fear of being inquisitive or a lack of cultural/intellectual curiosity? Growing up in Bombay we often met people from different parts of the world and I remember wonderful conversations that never seemed inquisitive; in fact, Bombay is populated with so many people from different parts of India and a variety of religious beliefs that such questions inevitably peppered the conversation. How can we live together in any meaningful way without these exchanges?

I was raised Roman Catholic but my personal ethos is shot through with strains from so many different religions, drawn from my associations and conversations with Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Parsees, and Atheists. My travels and reading about the Indigenous peoples of the world have also altered my worldview and I have gleaned so much from chatting with a friend from Samoa here at ISU.

So go ahead, ask me where I’m from. I’m sure it will be the beginning of an intoxicating conversation.

I’ve never really subscribed to the term “patriotism,” but recent events have prompted a more careful consideration of this idea. During the terrorist attacks of the past few years (here in the U.S., across the globe, and in India, the land of my birth) I have felt strangely unmoved by sentiments of nationalism. Not once did I think of those who were killed as “fellow-Americans,” nor did I feel during the Mumbai bombings that my “fellow-Indians” were murdered. I could not profile my Facebook picture in the French flag after the Paris bombings because there were too many other flags crying for inclusion and empathy. That is not to say I didn’t feel some kinship with murdered Indians and Americans, if only because I have spent half my life in each country, but Turks and Bangladeshis also clamored for attention.

Overcome by a terrible sadness at such tragedies as the Boston Marathon bombings (and not just because I’m an admirer of marathoners) or the Norway or Sikh temple shootings or the devastation of Syrians (every time I edit this essay there are several more mass murders added to the list), I studiously avoid TV coverage in the aftermath of each disaster, for media reportage (except for a few important print publications) trivializes these events with shallow analyses repeated ad nauseum and is clueless about the roots of the problem. I do the same when the police kill another black child (or when police officers are shot in mindless retaliation for past and current grievances), which seems to happen with increasing regularity. There’s no real way to avoid knowing about these things, but am I hiding to protect myself? To shield my feelings from the truth? Is it a coward’s way to curl into a cocoon and let the dead lie unacknowledged across my TV screens? Perhaps the least I could do is watch the pictures again and again, judging only the perpetrators and not the messengers (however puerile they might be), laying bare my emotions to be lacerated in bizarre solidarity with the fallen! Why shouldn’t I let my anger froth over when children are dying in front of me?

Is patriotism the price of citizenship, or may one participate in a society without it? Must every contributing citizen harbor feelings of unqualified support for the country in which they live for fear of being scorned by their fellow citizens and banished to the liminal spaces between patriotism and citizenship to perform civic duties timorously without feeling like a full citizen? Where then would they take this inability to love a country the way one is expected to these days? The vitriol heaped on Colin Kaepernick insists we display outpourings of love and gratitude for all the symbols of patriotism, chief among them being an adoration of the military and subservience to the flag. My mother used to quote this verse to me:

“Breathes there a man with soul so dead,

Who ne’er to himself hath said,

‘This is my own, my native land.’”

The romanticism and beauty of these lines screamed “Traitor” when I began to question the concept of patriotism. Some would suggest a difference between patriotism and nationalism, but I am suspicious of the whole idea, for it invariably transmogrifies into jingoism. Citizenship used to be the price of admission into a society with all the benefits that accrue from living in a place, demanding in return participation in such activities as paying taxes, voting in elections despite one’s disenchantment with the integrity of the process, supporting local businesses, and volunteering one’s time whenever able. Citizenship was a political construct; patriotism a rush of emotions towards a nation and all its symbols. But the line has blurred and I am uneasy when outpourings of nationalistic jive gush from Facebook, blogs, the media, and the internet. Unfortunately, their redefinition along insular parameters has created suspicious and malevolent lenses to view other cultures. In this fractured global landscape supporting one’s country sometimes inexorably leads to rejection of other countries.

I was raised on a diet of European and American literature. My love of theatre began with Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov. In the tradition of English public schools in India I recited English poetry in elocution classes. Throughout my high school years I am ashamed to say I was unfamiliar with the great Indian writers, except for Tagore and a few others. Ashamed, not because as an Indian it should have been the patriotic thing to do, but because I lived in the land of such interesting writers as Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Anita Desai without reading them in school. I could blame this gap in my education on the English system, whose influences echoed through the subcontinent for several years after Independence. We were indoctrinated by the exigencies of education systems far removed from us, molded by externally mandated curricula, which, in a stroke of supreme irony, assigned to my graduating class, more than two decades after Independence, a novel about British colonialism in the South Pacific (A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble). We arrogantly trumpeted the fact that our high schools were modeled on the English public school system, complete with “houses” (“just like in Harry Potter,” I now tell my students), live-in boarding sections, and final examinations conducted by the University of Cambridge Overseas Council. We were trained to be “brown sahibs!”

Another irony was that my very “English” K-12 school was run by Spanish missionaries who tempered cold English traditions with a sultry European flair—football found equal footing with cricket and field hockey; Anglicanism was replaced by Catholicism, but the curricula remained very British. To be fair, they made an honest effort to change the program of studies to a more Indo-centered version; our later history classes and text-books included some of the first published accounts (for high schools) of the Moghuls and Guptas and Marathas, but full implementation took time and I found myself swept along the last waves of British colonialism. My Catholic family, converted to Rome’s obedience in the Portuguese colony of Goa, migrated to Bombay in search of jobs, speaking English at home and eschewing the Konkani of our ancestors or the “national” language of Hindi or the Marathi of our resident city. We studied these languages in school, but with English the medium of instruction they always seemed like foreign tongues, similar to the French we also learned. Here perhaps are where the seeds of my anti-patriotic sentiments were sowed, for we Catholics alienated ourselves from the larger society of India with our “foreign” language, culture, and religion. English was the linguistic currency of business and politics, the original script of the Indian Constitution. Although we had a working knowledge of Hindi and Marathi, they were not our mother tongues and the cultures of our families were European and American—songs, movies, clothes, and even our food, which was derived from the Portuguese. We participated in such Indian festivals as Diwali and Holi, but Christmas and Easter were our feasts. Our lives contained strands of native influences, but our affiliations lay elsewhere.

It’s unfair to blame my high school education for being too foreign, for the central purpose of education is to inspire a spirit of inquiry and intellectual curiosity, which it did in spades. What may have saved me was that, despite it being a Catholic school, the majority of students were non-Catholic. India is constitutionally a secular state and the equation of Hinduism with Indian-ness was for many years largely a factor of population, with almost 80 percent of Indians being Hindu. (Recently, however, there has been a surge in Hindu fundamentalism, a movement echoed throughout the world as religious extremism is on the rise everywhere). Many of Bombay’s important high schools were run by European Christian (Protestant and Catholic) missionaries, but their students reflected the larger population of the city—Hindus, Muslims, Parsees, Jains, Protestants, Jews, and Catholics, as religiously cosmopolitan a group of students as you are likely to find anywhere. We were all Indian (even the Anglo-Indians who had not yet made their way to Britain) in some general sense and fluent in English, but always negotiating our way across the boundaries of religion and mother tongue—Parsees spoke Gujarati (from the Northwestern state where they had originally landed to avoid persecution in Iran); Muslims spoke Hindi or Urdu, Christians spoke English (or Marathi, if they were originally from Bombay or Konkani from Goa); South Indians spoke Malayalam, Tamil, Kanada, or Telegu, depending on their state of origin, which often determined the mother tongue of migrant families from other parts of India; the rest spoke Hindi. This was when the nation, despite its nationalistic passion after Independence, was still groping for its identity amid the detritus of colonialism.

Perhaps this tug between cultures and identities contributed to my lack of patriotism. Was I a Goan (without Konkani) or a Bombayite (without Marathi)? How closely is language woven into one’s cultural identity? I wasn’t British just because I spoke English, and if that seems risible I knew people who insisted they were, despite having no British pedigree; their only claim being that they were born when India was a British colony and that they had a linguistic lineage to England! I wasn’t a Maharashtrian although born and raised in that State (it was a term reserved for native Hindus). A Catholic? An Indian? Each of these exerted a strong pull on me at a time when India was timorously perched between China and Pakistan, the USA and the USSR, all vying for a nation nascent in political history but rich in culture and natural resources and teeming with an expanding workforce. Confounding this further were the provincial divisions—people were identified also by their ancestral State. I was a Goan (despite living in Bombay, even though Goa wasn’t a State at the time, merely a Union territory) surrounded by Bengalis, Gujaratis, Keralites, Punjabis, Assamese, and so on. For some of us born after Independence, being “Indian” seemed a somewhat remote identity without much passion until the war with China, the preference of the USA for Pakistan, and the subsequent Indian treaties with the USSR. And therein lies the rub: patriotism tends to raise its head in times of strife; the longer a country finds itself in a state of war the more it closes ranks and whips itself into a nationalistic fervor.

My travels abroad inevitably find me chatting with locals in pubs and bars. I like visiting diners and dives in rural America for the same reason. They remind me that geopolitical divides are often barriers to kinship, forcing separations among the people of the world. Not that traveling is filled only with wonderful experiences—I can be exasperated by much, often wishing for more efficiency as I meander through cities and bazaars, staring quizzically at touts who attempt to con me or at shopkeepers who would overcharge me, reminding myself that there’s no such thing as civic perfection—we’re all engaged in minor and grand experiments; touts and shopkeepers want just a few cents from me, whereas corporate and government marauders rob me daily. Besides, those are often the most memorable moments. One can stand on the curb, waiting for the incessant flow of traffic to dwindle, or one can dodge all manner of vehicles and jump over and through potholes to enquire why there’s a crowd of animated people on the other side. Once we leap over our real and imagined borders we may find similarities rather than misgivings, and differences worthy of celebrations.

Patriotism often leads to international conflict. Or is it the other way around? I remember two poems from my youth. Rupert Brooke’s naïve, saccharine sentiments about war, “When I am dead think only this of me/That there’s some corner of some foreign field that is forever England.” His belief that it was sweet and proper to die for one’s country betrays a mawkish obliviousness to the grime and horror of war. For that we have to turn to Wilfred Owen, who knew firsthand what it meant to cower in trenches and trudge through fields of devastated humanity:

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.” (Sweet and proper it is to die for one’s country)

Few pluralistic nations are defined by the character of any particular culture; in fact, the vibrancy of a country exists in its intercultural exchanges, however tiny—the more open those interactions, the less imposing the artificial boundaries that contain them. In the America of today, almost everyone comes from somewhere else—in that platitude lies a kernel of progress. We’ve been acculturated to believe in a melting pot society where unique cultures are boiled away to create a hodgepodge of something new—an American-ness. A paradox! But the new equation encourages a rejection of “the other” (which may include what originally defined us or similar cultures) in favor of what is “ours,” this new culture.

I know what being an American is not. It isn’t beating my chest to proclaim this the greatest country in the world: even a cursory examination would eviscerate that claim. It isn’t the flag, the idolatry of which has deflected attention and care away from the ideas and turmoil of the people it was designed to represent. It isn’t military or economic control of the world, for that illusion breeds discontent at home and resentment abroad. It isn’t even freedom, which in so many ways is a questionable concept because there are always groups of people who surrender their freedom or have it forcibly purloined to serve the needs of others! It may be only one thing, and I’m still not sure of this. Being an American means looking around and celebrating the fact that there’s a Filipino in the room, and a Mongolian, and someone from Congo, Botswana, Cameroon, and Rwanda (they’re all here, you know); a Spaniard, an Italian, and a German…Chinese, Taiwanese, Indian and Pakistani…Palestinian and Israeli…English and Irish, etc. I suppose being an American means in some way rejecting the term American and celebrating the world, for the rest of the world is present here more than in any other country. Yet we invent so many ways to reject it!

The so-called Mommy Lobby is outraged at some Victoria Secret ad that uses young women selling underwear and swimwear, etc., and at how this objectifies women, contributing to the moral decrepitude of our society! I’ve heard this argument for decades now, holier-than-thou self-styled custodians of our moral standards inveighing against commercialization and sexual mores and social attitudes!  So let’s consider this for a moment.

Listen, Mommy Dearest: I know you’re worried about your Daughters and you don’t want them exploited by “society.”  But instead of spending all that energy attacking VS, you may want to address the people at the root of the problem—your Sons!  If you taught them that women are not objects NO MATTER HOW THEY DRESS, if you taught them that when a GIRL SAYS NO IT MEANS JUST THAT; if you paid close attention to what they’re doing in school or at their friends’ houses; if you slapped them silly (figuratively, I mean, although the other kind might also work) for believing that every woman is their reward because they can throw a perfect spiral; if you taught them that every woman is an extension of you and you keep at them rigorously without EVER once winking at their Neanderthal ways because “boys will be boys;” if you discipline them severely EVERY SINGLE TIME they get out of line, then you would never have to worry about your daughters’ safety and they could express themselves without being made to feel guilty because their idiotic “brothers” grew up with a sense of entitlement that’s appalling!!

They don’t want young girls to dress in skimpy outfits.  In fact, they don’t want any women wearing them.  And I’m not talking about dressing in class or at the office or in church; although why that should make a difference I don’t know; but it does and I’m willing to concede the point—for the moment!   Somewhere else we can talk about how religious leaders are morbidly afraid of women’s bodies!  Why does the Mommy Lobby not want it?  Oh, because they’re provocative!  Inherent in this thought is the idea (and we seem to have accepted it almost without demur) that women who dress in skimpy outfits are responsible for the emotions they awaken.  After all, how can men control their natural tendencies?  How can they not be aroused?  Of course men will be aroused.  Yes, it may be natural.  But that isn’t the point, is it?  Walk around with a boner all day for all I care!  The only thing that matters is that you keep it to yourself!  If women dress “provocatively’ (and I’m not even sure what the hell that means, because a smile can be even more provocative than cleavage) it may be an invitation to look but you can be damn sure it’s not an offer of anything else, because if it were you can be damn sure they’d let you know!  Oh, but how can I tell?  I assumed she wanted it!  If you took your attitude out of your ear you might actually hear them say NO!!  Ay, there’s the rub!