Category: Blog

I’ve been watching October baseball these last few weeks.  Now I will admit that I didn’t grow up playing the game or even watching it; I’m a cricket and soccer kind of guy.  The first time I watched baseball was in 1985. I was in Bahrain and the World Series between the Cardinals and Royals was on Telly.  I watched all seven games, trying to understand the difference between a walk and a single or a ball and a strike.  Without the internet or Wikipedia there wasn’t any immediate resource available and of course TV commentators rightly assumed that their viewers knew the game (fortunately, there wasn’t an infield fly rule invoked or I might have smashed the Telly; or maybe there was one and I just didn’t notice).

I understood the controversies at second base that favored the Cards and the famous one at first that benefited the Royals and by the end of seven games I had a somewhat sketchy knowledge of the American pastime.  I even remembered forever the name of Bret Saberhagen who pitched a shutout in Game 7 after his heroics in Game 3, I think it was; I didn’t remember any of the other players, but the names of the managers stayed with me—Whitey Herzog and Dick Howser (I forgot who was which team’s manager).  I was intrigued by the fact that the managers played such an important role in the proceedings; cricket is managed by the captain on the field and soccer is all about the team on the field!!

Over the years I’ve grown to love the game, even as I’ve watched its popularity wane in favor of football.  One can look for reasons why this is happening, but one never really knows—football’s immediate impact, the violence, speed, etc; baseball’s slow pace, its dominance by Latin Americans, etc.  If I were to make a generalization my guess would center on that old cliché—immediate gratification; we want speedy, bang-bang games, filled with adrenaline and the promise of blood.  Baseball is almost intellectual.  As I’ve written elsewhere, the essential struggle in baseball is in the pitcher and batter trying to outwit each other as they try to guess what the other one’s thinking—curve or slider, high and tight or down and away; or maybe right down the middle to surprise him.  And the catcher calling the game sets the stage.  Then there’s the manager in the dugout signaling instructions—a whole committee of men determining each pitch, a fascinating choreography of hand gestures based on experience, statistics, past performances, and guesswork, all occurring within a few seconds—risk management in a microcosm. I wonder what an actuary would make of it.  What’s not to like?  But it is no longer the national game—even in October!  What happened?  I hesitate to draw an insulting inference here, but is the contemplative nature of baseball too tiresome for our modern sensibility? Are we becoming an anti-intellectual nation?  And is this reflected in other ways as well?  Txt msgs have replaced complex sentences, blogs are more read than novels, snap judgments instead of reasoned analysis, sound bites, video games, on and on…poetry? What’s that??!

But baseball does seem to be strangely un-American.  We have always coveted winning more than anything (it’s everything, isn’t it?) and this game is predicated on failure (hitting 30 percent is the standard of excellence; unless of course we consider that a pitching victory)!  Is there a coincidence that baseball’s great popularity occurred during the twenties and thirties and then in the fifties and sixties, those “hard times” characterized by the Depression and a post-war reconstruction when failure was woven into our country’s tapestry and introspection forced itself into our national consciousness?  And these were the eras of great pitchers as well.  Then declining sales brought in the Designated Hitter in the seventies, which led to more hits, which led to the steroid era in the eighties and nineties, the Age of Greed and Wealth, when batters dominated, home runs flowed aplenty, and modern baseball regained its popularity and lost its innocence!  And I just don’t understand the DH rule, which reduces the game to an ordinary line-up of power hitters rather than a team, a series of players to pitch around or walk, thus banishing so much of what makes baseball fascinating—strategy, anticipation, and, yes, thoughtfulness.

Now football is the unquestioned king of American sports. Somehow, sadly, that makes sense—its inherent violence appears to resonate in our current evolving national ethos; its predictability, lack of complexity, and 10-second segments of brutality seem to reflect the tenor of the times. And yes, I do know that the play-book has several combinations of patterns and integrated routes, but from a spectator’s point of view very little of that matters.  I am also not suggesting a lack of appeal; on the contrary, it can be very seductive, this fast and furious game of destruction.  It requires no viewer patience and lends itself easily to video games.  These are the times in which we live!

 

 

 

How easily we turn people into messiahs.  Steve Jobs was an innovative genius who professed Buddhism yet pursued a relentlessly material career, creating such a fanatical culture in quest of excellence that many Apple employees were estranged from their families.  Here’s what he once said: “You’d be surprised how hard people work around here.  They work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a while. Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product comes out the best it can be.”   Buddhism doesn’t mean walking around barefoot (as Jobs reportedly did), anymore than Yoga means doing a few exercises to stay healthy.  Both of them are profoundly spiritual ways of living, characterized by a ceaseless struggle to find a way to radiate inner peace into the world.  CEOs by definition live in a cutthroat world of competition, lawsuits, and petty maneuverings.  Jobs was no exception; Apple shrouded itself in mystery, prevarication, misinformation about impending products, even some shady business practices.

For all his unquestioned business savvy and cutting edge technological advances, this is a man who carried a lifelong  grudge against the birth father who abandoned him and didn’t acknowledge his own daughter!  Refusing to face an unwanted pregnancy is NOT just a “youthful indiscretion,” as it has been described; it is an egregious breach of honor!   People who criticized the company were punished and some employees were afraid to run into him.  Of course he should get credit for the millions of applications (including medical and charitable programs) stemming from his inventions; undoubtedly, he was a brilliant engineer; yes, he was among the vanguard that reduced the size of the world; but to hail him as a messiah is foolish, particularly when some have described him as a tyrant! And his abrogation of Apple’s philanthropic programs together with his own stated rejection of philanthropy to “make the world a better place by making better products,” leaves more questions than answers.

Several articles state that he made the world a better place.  Really?  Better than what?  Better how?  I look around me and I see a shambolic mess–fractured international relations, wars and skirmishes, students who can text at the speed of sound but can’t spell and haven’t read a single book of note; smartphones that have ironically destroyed the art of meaningful conversations; sterile ways of “keeping in touch;” bloggers (like me, I will admit) with opinions that are cheaper by the dozen; a digital age that permitted facile high-speed financial transactions that at least in part led to our economic meltdown.  Easy and fast doesn’t always mean better!

Perhaps it’s appropriate to see Steve Jobs as a brilliant digital engineer and innovator, like so many others–some equally celebrated, some less.  But a Buddhist in the true sense he didn’t appear to be; nor was he a messiah, however reclusive he might have been!  And are we better off in the long run for all our technological progress?  I guess the jury will return its verdict next century!

 

Every so often the debate is revived about the vast amounts of money in college sports, particularly football and basketball, and whether or not college athletes should be paid.  The billions of dollars generated in revenues every year (The University of Texas ostensibly made a profit of $68 million on football alone last year) from ticket sales, concessions, memorabilia, and gigantic TV rights, coupled with so-called scandals of athletes accepting gifts from boosters even as their schools and coaches pocket vast sums of money each year, have called into question the definition and nature of college athletics.  Perhaps a more fitting debate needs to center on the definition and nature of American economics and our own brand of capitalism.  College sports, indeed all sports and the way they are conducted are deeply rooted in our national psyche, in the way this nation was built and the way we think of ourselves.

American Wall-Street trickle-down economics derives from the rugged individualism engendered in the spirit that founded the country, the so-called immigrant work ethic which promised rewards only if we worked ourselves to the bone and were completely self-reliant!  We set ourselves apart from the “home country,” from European social capitalism which included profit sharing, handouts, and in some cases unabashed welfare!   The sad truth for us is that by at least trying to be inclusive (yes, they don’t always succeed and, yes, they have their own problems) Europeans are moving towards a more progressive society as we either lag behind in a state of inertia or are regressing into more segregated communities on many levels.  Asian, South American, and African societies may not be as progressive as Europe but they have the same sense of collectivism that may ultimately save them; witness India and China.

What has this to do with sports, and particularly college athletics?  Simply this: they are conducted along the same lines as our economic and social agendas—let’s get what we can when we can for ourselves and the devil take the hindmost!  The top colleges say to themselves, “we built these programs by ourselves for ourselves; why should we care about anyone else?”  Thus Notre Dame can sign individual TV contracts with NBC and other universities are courted by Nike or other corporations and the rich get richer.  U-Conn’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun once defended his salary by arrogantly proclaiming that he could do the math, for his program brought in millions to the university.  This seems to be the standard answer when talking about coaches’ salaries and the contributions of athletics programs—they make millions!  What it doesn’t take into account, however, is that there would be no university were it not for the toil and talents of several generations of professors, staff, and students who built the academic programs to attract millions of students.  Only a tiny percentage of students enroll at a university because of its successful football or basketball programs (although they might hear of the school because of them); and the work of the students, faculty, researchers, administrators, and staff over decades is the reason a university can have an athletics program.  Therefore, all successes are dependent not only on the work that went before, on the sacrifices other people made, but also on the continuing commitment of the academic community of the institution.  If you go back and look, you will see that every athletics program came into being because of budgetary sacrifices made by personnel outside athletics!  To view athletics programs outside this context is naïve, shortsighted, and unjust!

Even as universities and the NCAA fill their coffers, they insist on enforcing the most rigorous amateur rules for the athletes, claiming that scholarships worth thousands of dollars is reward enough. Most athletics programs were instituted along the Athenian model of mind-body consonance—this was the ideal, something to strive towards; athletics would work together with academics to create complete human beings.  At some point we moved away from that standard, segregating one from the other until we created a mutually exclusive two-headed monster, each one fighting for a place at the trough, each one nipping at the other!  The NCAA rules of eligibility prevent basketball and football players  from becoming professional immediately after high school so most of them go to college once they meet minimum entrance standards, then cluster into majors favorable to their Saturday schedules, and bide their time to become professionally eligible.  It really isn’t about studying anymore and the sad fact is that 98 percent (who never make it to the pros) will have squandered their chance at an education!  So, when a university willingly spends more than fifty percent of its academic scholarships on athletes who waste them, and the majority of its other students pay a fortune in tuition, what does it say about our priorities when it comes to education?

Unfortunately, the sharing of wealth is considered anathema by our capitalist system.  We think of ourselves as individuals working towards our own ends; anything else (despite numerous examples of government and public funding) is deprecated as socialism.  If profit sharing is a constant source of debate in American professional sports imagine how much more impossible it would be for blue chip college programs to share the wealth across the board among other schools—that’s un-American!!  So what chance do athletes have of getting even a piece of the pie they themselves have baked?!

I am not advocating salaries or stipends for athletes—I think the question is far more complex!  It isn’t whether we should pay our athletes (what about then paying every student who brings prestige to the university in one form or another?) but whether athletics in their current forms should be part of a university.  The US is probably the only country that feeds its professional leagues from college ranks (except, to some extent, baseball); other nations have a tiered structure of minor divisions leading up to the major league.  This allows college sports to be what they were originally designed for—a way to develop the body along with the mind.  And that should be their only place in the academy!  Until we can find a way to incorporate that into our system, until we can return to some of our former ideals about education, college athletics will continue to be dominated by economics and marked by academic scandals, hypocrisy, and a slow degeneration of educational ideals.

At what point do we become enablers of a broken system?   Worse, when will we start to realize that “the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings” being abused by guilt and misguided fealty to a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy?   How long will we continue, like battered spouses, to stay in a dysfunctional relationship that eviscerates our self-worth, pits us against one another, and destroys our hopes, dreams, and ideals?  Does participation in a putative democratic system begin and end solely with the act of voting?  Why can the act of staying away from the General Elections, accompanied by loud protestations and other actions (mentioned later), not be seen as a courageous referendum by a disenchanted and disillusioned electorate against gridlock and inert government?

Every four years we are herded like sheep to be slaughtered in the abattoir of hustings and ballot boxes, to rubber stamp the coronation of politicians bought by corporate entities and special interest groups; every four years we drift further away from democratic ideals as greed triumphs the public good and more people join the ranks of disenfranchised communities even as we continue to abet plutocrats in their quest for power!   Every four years we bemoan the fact that there’s little to choose between our two major political parties, which in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing except that what we mean is that both parties are inefficient and corrupt.  If approval for Congress is less than 13% (probably the only people happy with them are their families) why would we continue to vote them into power?  Remember how Einstein described the act of doing the same thing over again and expecting different results?

Whenever I raise this issue I’m told that voting is a privilege.  No, it’s not!  Running for office is a privilege, or it should be when it isn’t purchased; voting is a right fought for and obtained after much anguish, at least as far as universal suffrage is concerned, but still a right we could choose not to exercise.  But if the act of voting itself becomes an endorsement of the privilege to run for office then may not abstinence in some circumstances stand as a rejection of that license?  Surely it is the only way we can truly check “none of the above!”   Another caveat popularly attached to “voting privileges” is the admonition that we cannot complain if we do not vote.  The right to complain is embedded in our democracy, protected by the First Amendment; the right to vote is actually not even explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution, and indeed throughout our history access to the booth has been denied to various constituencies based on the tenor of the times; this has led to the aura of privilege that now surrounds the act of voting.

For me to suggest that we abrogate that privilege would appear to some tantamount to heresy—after all, if so many people in history and currently around the world are denied that privilege how can we so callously cast it aside?   The answer to me is clear—voting implies a choice, it suggests that we choose someone we believe in, someone who offers us clear paths of leadership.   Surely we need a more evolved society, one in which it isn’t enough just to vote but in which we are permitted to make informed choices between good and better, not between bad and worse!!  How can we in good conscience say on the one hand that we have no faith in politicians and on the other hand that we will vote for them?   How can we watch from the sidelines as hordes of legislators, in our name and on our behalf, hijack this so-called democracy?

At some point the battered spouse must break the shackles and stumble from the house to denounce from the rooftops the abuse suffered and with as much pride as can be mustered proclaim, “Basta!  Enough!  No more!”  Every time we fulminate against policymakers let us remember that we rage against ourselves for we gave them the power to destroy us!  As long as we continue to participate in a tainted system we cannot sit back and criticize “them” without also leveling blame at ourselves, whether we voted for them or not!  It’s too late to claim ignorance as a virtue, for in our tacit acceptance we gave birth to this monster and nurtured it to adulthood!

Of course, the system will continue regardless—but only for a short time.  If only 13% of us approve and 87% abandoned the polls, not in silent protest but with a deafening clamor (we have more outlets through which to sound our disapproval than ever before) it would shake the roots of this republic.  They will have to take notice.  One can argue that the lack of turnout at local elections hasn’t deterred anyone.  But those tend to happen outside the glare of media spotlights; they have become deeds done in the dark!

It is time to grow a new democracy.  It is time to reach into our local communities and reshape the conversations.  To reject the system altogether would be as irresponsible as enabling it.  Local elections, where important public policies are implemented and where national civic leaders are grown, occur without the participation of most citizens.  That’s where we need to focus our energies—mayoral, municipal, school board, sheriff, etc.  That’s where future national leaders are born and where we can demand the tough answers before they have learned the art of spin, prevarication, and double-talk, where we can separate the wheat from the chaff and put would-be politicians on notice.  It takes time and effort to read and understand platforms and backgrounds; and it takes time to attend town meetings and local debates, which probably explains the exiguous turnout.  But democracy is hard; creating a new republic demands focus and immersion in the process.

But why reject the general elections?  Simply because it would be dishonest to continue to choose between unacceptable candidates, and picking third-party aspirants is a cop-out if we select them out of pique or frustration or by default—our ballots are too precious to waste!   Besides, we need to send a clear signal to Washington that government is a fraud if it isn’t of, by, and for the people!   At this moment we are bystanders at the dismantling of a structure that once held so much promise; we watch with mild frustration as generations of politicians blithely ignore the realities of the street as they pawn our futures for a pittance.  It is time to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!!

 

 

One of my dear friends in India Clarissa Fernandes passed away last night, robbed of more possibilities by the sudden outburst of cancer.  Through the numbness in my heart I am suddenly overcome by a lack of knowledge–how do you mourn someone you haven’t seen in 10 years and who lived on the far side of the world?  There is no immediate removal of her presence from your presence, no sense of physical loss, no funeral closure; the friendship maintained over the years by thoughts, feelings, and the occasional email seems to continue like a swan upon a river, outwardly serene yet furiously paddling beneath the surface, battling harsh undercurrents to stay upright.

You go to work when you should take the day off to mourn the silent passing of kindred spirits, and the crisp summer air outside belies the dark clouds within your soul.  This is the worst part of being an immigrant for you leave bits of your heart trailing behind to guide you back, and on every journey back you leave some more of you –and then one day you have to say, “guide me back to whom?”  And you know with a sense of foreboding that there are more to come, more locked doors behind you, more return journeys you will not travel, more lagging crumbs of your heart that fatal birds of prey will pluck away with their sharp beaks!

So for now you celebrate in silent sadness a life well spent and a relationship that enriched you beyond measure.  Rest well, Clarie.  I will miss your amused smile, the drinks and meals we shared, and how we revived each time the lost art of delightful conversation.

Today India celebrates 64 years of Independence from British rule.  I left the subcontinent 27 years ago—hard to believe that I’ve been away for almost half of free India.  This past weekend I met a friend from Bombay (Mumbai now) whom I hadn’t seen in 28 years.  We had started together as rookies in an advertising agency and so spent several hours reminiscing about old times and old friends.  She said she could see herself going back permanently but I demurred.  My life is here now, with my children, and my entire family—my mother and 5 siblings—in Illinois and Ontario!

And yet I still feel some withdrawals, some feelings of guilt and nostalgia.  There are times I miss the heat and press of my overcrowded Bombay, the vibrancy, chaos, and craziness—hanging on for dear life outside a suburban train in the monsoon on my way to school, knapsack on my back and the rain playing havoc on my unprotected body (it’s a wonder I’m alive); eating roadside snacks on street corners—skewered lamb, spicy chickpeas, masala veggies, and foods with names so exotic it would need a page to describe them (sweet, sour, and pungent at the same time); buying black market tickets to see the latest Hollywood movie the day it opened (now I wait for the DVD); closing bars all over the city, then missing the last train home and having to take a cab I could ill afford; making out in—oh, wait, my mother and kids read this!!

When I left I sometimes felt I had to apologize for India—for the poverty and stench, the corruption and crowds; for the unfulfilled Gandhian dream, the communal unrest and political turmoil.  Over the years, however, a new perspective emerged, and not because India has enjoyed a recent period of 9 percent growth (that’s unimportant to me, because so many people there still live in poverty and only a tiny percentage goes to university—or even high school)!  Besides, economic growth, as we now know, is a fleeting thing if the infrastructure of a sound education and health system is not in place.

No, over the years I watched India slowly turn its liabilities into strengths.  Population explosions led to a burgeoning middle class and a service industry filled with street smart entrepreneurs and a labor force so vast it created work and profit for itself.  I lived on a quiet, tree-lined side lane not five miles from the slum featured in Slumdog Millionaire—there, little kids (like the enterprising boys in the movie) scavenged the city for empty bottles which they cleaned, bottle tops which they hammered into sheets of metal, and anything else they could glean from a large, wasteful metropolis to turn a profit and find food and fun!  These are tiny examples of a country on the move.  Huge workforces became havens for anything that needed outsourcing.

Perhaps that’s what led to the economic growth—Indian IT influences on Google, IBM, and Microsoft, micro financing that began in a hundred villages and spread by example across the globe, and, perish the thought (because I’m an unabashed cultural snob), the popularity of Bollywood movies not only among the diaspora of far-flung Indians but everywhere people longed for colorful dances and songs to escape their drab lives of quiet desperation!

But my perspective changed largely because I changed—I became more accepting of things as they are, more willing to celebrate life as it is rather that force my narrow notions of how things should be upon lifestyles different from mine; I became an actor instead of a critic, and that has made all the difference. I know now that I did not leave India behind, but carried her in me.

It is hard to describe India to my friends, impossible to capture in words the diversity of life and the apparent pandemonium that actually masks a strange kind of order, a sort of melodic madness filled with peculiar sounds and smells, yet seems organized along a strangely familiar urban system.  For almost anything I can say about India the opposite is also true.  It’s a magnificent, frustrating, depressing, uplifting thing of beauty, full of unimaginable wealth and poverty, replete with paradoxes and contradictions, marching through the centuries to a set of tunes born in ancient cultures, bred upon aged mountains, and nourished by holy rivers.

So, today I can say with pride and a sense of belonging: Janamdin kii Badhaai, Bharat Mata–Happy Birthday, Mother India!

When I lived in Bahrain, oh, those many years ago, every Friday morning they would head out to the beach, but I was never invited. Thursday nights we roistered late, eating grilled Thai satays and all manner of Asian dishes washed down with exotic beverages. On Friday evenings we met again, they with newly-acquired tans and I armed for a game of trivial pursuit and a small drink to wind down the weekend…

The political hurly-burly of post 9/11 America spawned a growing animosity against the Arab world, even the Muslim world (the two can be mutually exclusive, although it’s virtually impossible to see the difference for the caterwauling), reaching its apogee in Donald Trump’s appeal to the xenophobic fears lurking in our national psyche. It prompted me to look back on my sojourn in the Middle East. Did 9/11 create its own bogeyman or was the resentment brewing long before that? Shared blame abounds in the morass of political shenanigans and my reluctance to venture into that crossfire of accusations might have caused me to miss clues as I went about my daily business in Bahrain; clues in the street among such common folk as I that could have pointed to a breakdown in relations on such a grand scale, if 9/11 was merely a symptom of a disorder in Arab-American relations that had festered over time. Can I actually remember what life in Bahrain was really like those thirty years ago? If psychological science is right that every memory alters the original occurrence (thus negating the existence of eidetic memories), is it possible to reminisce about what seems now to have been a more innocent time without a romantic filter to distinguish it from the cultural events of today?

My ingenuous recollection is that even as late as the mid-eighties, so-called Westerners, specifically Yanks and Euros, strolled the deserts of Arabia with the popularity of minor celebrities. If there’s a modicum of truth there, how did we get here? Were Arabs and Americans/Europeans solely to blame for their souring relations? Where did we migrant workers from every corner of Asia fit into this equation? Did we transmute into some sort of catalysts in the dynamics between these opposing cultures? We couldn’t have been innocent bystanders; after all, we were there, millions of us, integrating and ingratiating ourselves into an evolving international community. Perhaps not woven from the thickest skeins, but still colorful strands in the fabric of a global society. By virtue of our presence we had a role to play. Or did we manage, as is our peculiarly non-partisan Asian wont, to cluster in our own corners, creating a world apart a world away from home?

Compared to the other Gulf States, Bahrain appeared to be a quiet island (which is why the uprising of 2011 first surprised me until I realized that the Arab revolution had roused a simmering Shia discontent), despite the myriad nations represented there—a cosmopolitan workforce driving the off-shore banking institutions that flourished after the “fall” of Beirut; to staff Gulf-Air, the national airline shared between two other States; and to operate the shops in the souk. Quiet is a relative term, especially when applied to an oil State in the Persian Gulf, for Bahrain in the early eighties had transformed itself into the entrepot of the Middle East, siphoning goods and services throughout the area. Perhaps it has more to do with a perception of character than a description of life on the street, Bahrainis being less wealthy and consequently less aggressive than their neighbors. Although Middle-Eastern oil was discovered first in Bahrain in the thirties, the rest of the region was blessed with greater deposits and embarked on ambitious expansion and construction projects—Kuwait, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Oman, and, of course, Saudi Arabia. Surrounded by a gush of oil and dinars, Bahrain quietly (there’s that word again) focused its attention on trade, banking, and the monetary profits and goodwill to be accrued from refining Saudi oil. Oh, and it also became home to a little airbase for the U.S., which sought to consolidate its position in this oil-rich region. By the eighties plans were afoot to attach Bahrain to Saudi Arabia with the King Fahd Causeway, a project that filled Bahrainis with trepidation as they anticipated a massive influx of their cruder, repressed neighbors seeking all the pleasures denied them in the “holy land.” Of course, they also knew that Saudi money would pour into their comparatively poorer country. Three decades later all their fears and hopes have been realized!

When I arrived in Bahrain in the mid-eighties I took with me, I must admit, a certain prejudice against Arabs, for my only experiences were of those who had descended on Bombay in search of nightclubs, women, and Indian cuisine. That they seemed arrogant might have been more a reflection of my lower middle-class state of penury than of anything else, although anyone who lived in expensive hotels with the express purpose of having no real purpose other than to spend money was arrogant to me. How naïve I was in the ways of the world! They bought anything they wanted, everything I couldn’t have—arts and crafts from specialty stores, fabulous night lives, jewelry, and leather goods; and they always had beautiful women in tow. And I was jealous of all of it—the money, the women, and the luxurious lifestyles. More money than brains, was my generalization about all Arabs! I viewed them the way Brits saw American GIs during the War—overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here!

It was with some foreboding, therefore, that I landed at Bahrain airport that October day in 1984, carrying in my resume several years in the theatre and short careers in advertising, banking, and teaching, and holding in my hand a visa that stated I was a goldsmith! How I came by that visa is a tale in itself. The short, stress-deleted version is this: after my wife left for Bahrain as a stewardess with Gulf-Air, I tossed about Bombay listlessly, working for an advertising agency but desperate to join her through a job anywhere in the emirate. Finally, when most of my attempts had foundered, she met an Indian Businessman (we never really discovered what business) who sold her a visa which he had acquired from an Indian goldsmith whose shop was owned by a local Bahraini who had worked in the Labor Department and therefore had contacts to procure visas. So—I was suddenly a goldsmith! If they wanted me to pretend as I went through Immigration, I’d give them the best impression of an alchemist. After all, I was a good actor, and the visa was only my entry into the State; beyond that, I was on my own and at the mercy of the Businessman who extracted more money from us before surrendering all my papers!

My story was not much different from millions of other Indians thronging the Persian Gulf; indeed we congregated from all over the eastern hemisphere, with hope in our hearts and bluff at our fingertips, ready to work anywhere, for almost any job paid us more than we could have earned at home. And it was tax-free. At one point there were more than fifty countries represented in Bahrain—blue and white-collared workers from major cities and remote Asian villages, so-called specialists from every part of Europe and America, and traders from any manufacturing hub around the globe. Surely, with my education and experience I could find a job in this desert waterhole. After all, my years in the theatre and my education in the English system had endowed me with a lilting voice, clipped syllables, and the attitude of an intellectual. I was shocked out of my naiveté to discover that the contents of my career portmanteau mattered little; what I lacked was a white skin. This was my first foray into the international arena and I soon realized what I had suspected in India—the lighter your skin, the better your chances.

Caucasians, particularly Brits and Yanks, had an automatic ticket to virtually any place or job in the Middle-East. The beach I referred to at the beginning of this piece was the Emir’s private beach and only white-skinned people were allowed there—even the local Bahrainis were barred entry! So my circle of friends (which included a Dutch woman and her son, an Englishman, and an American), fraternized with me everyday except Friday morning (the weekend), when they quietly strolled into the sun and sand of the Emir’s private “public” haven. I remember their mild embarrassment the first time they told me I couldn’t join them, but then they fell into a comfortable routine. I was always a little put out by it and compensated by gleefully destroying them at Trivial Pursuit!

Should they have stayed away from the beach in solidarity with me? Would I have done so had the situation been reversed? I wish I could aver in agreement, but the truth is that I have in my life been to several places denied to my less-privileged friends. The way of the world is such that almost everyone has less-privileged friends; and the privileges of race are in effect often not much different from the privileges of class and wealth!

What surprised me was how pronounced the distinctions appeared to be. After all, I was from India and we wrote the book on social divisions. Perhaps they appear less egregious when you grow up with them, when they play themselves out across your childhood, hoping you won’t notice, skulking in your consciousness to accuse you later of having permitted them to flourish through silent acquiescence. But in the Middle East it seemed as if we were all pilgrims with the same purpose, except that some were more privileged than others. I met a self-styled automotive engineer from Manchester whose experience, I gathered after a few draughts of ale, had been a year spent in his father’s backyard garage. There were free-lance writers who penned articles for in-house magazines and whose qualifications were that they were from Britain and, therefore, apparent proprietors of the language; ad-men and women who had never worked in an advertising agency, salesmen with not much more than a good smile, secretaries with great smiles; managers of large hotels from the wayside inns of the European countryside, and bankers, bankers, and more bankers, who seemed to be the only ones with bona fide qualifications, for they were employed in the branch offices of multinational investment and financial corporations.

We met only a few Americans, for most of them lived in gated communities in the posh suburbs. In memory, Bahrain now seems rather like a border town in a Star Wars movie, full of a strange conglomeration of people with much to sell and buy. I was quickly reminded in this “third-world country” that despite my master’s degree and nice voice I was still a denizen from a “third world country.” This was before the cyberspace explosion, in the pre-outsourcing age, when the only good Indian was a scientist or doctor! Indian merchants and shopkeepers had made their presence felt in the malls and souks across the Middle East, but I was looking for a job in advertising where all campaigns were created overseas and thumbnail versions sent to the Middle East, which was seen as a rich outpost to be exploited as inexpensively as possible. No attempt was made to study the buying habits of Bahrainis or the other thousand expatriates living there. It was deemed sufficient to place a simple press advertisement informing the consumer of the sale price. The implication was that they/we had money to burn; no need to court “their” sensibilities, if indeed they had any! All that changed later into much more professional models, but at the time advertising business depended on handshakes, roughly-hewn campaign sketches, and relationships built over time.

In the two years I lived there I met a few Bahrainis, particularly the men (rarely a woman) who worked for Gulf Air, but I never socialized with them. It would be easy to say they kept to themselves and viewed us as foreigners to be tolerated and then ignored. The fact is that we saw the Middle East as a transient oasis on the way to somewhere else; a place in which to make money and then move on to the real business of living and settling down. I didn’t know where I was going, just that I was going. This was a common attitude among us, that there was money to be made from the oilfields and we were going to get ours. It was colonization in a minor key.

No wonder, then, that the Bahrainis left us alone. They knew why we were there; they knew we had scurried from the flats and tenements of Southwest Asia to exploit their land for work and opportunity and, if truth be told, in those days they were glad for our presence.

In the late seventies and early eighties local Bahrainis had not recognized the new garb of their state as an international commercial center needing to shed its old attitudes and ways. Bahraini businessmen were exhorted by their Labor Department not to depend so much on a foreign workforce, but the locals were loath to alter their working hours to a full day when much of the Middle East had been used to a half day workload, particularly in the scorching summer months. In fact, during the really hot months the day was divided into a morning and evening session, separated by a Spanish-style siesta. I often heard my boss complain about his inability to comply with Labor regulations because he couldn’t always find qualified Bahrainis willing to work long hours.

This became another bone of contention. Asian immigrants work endlessly, perhaps in an effort to make ourselves indispensable, for there is no going back. Such desperate, single-minded diligence is hard to compete against, for it precludes any meaningful social life. Such work ethics breed resentment from those who prefer a more relaxed lifestyle, in much the same way Asian communities in Britain felt the antipathy of their white neighbors as they gradually began controlling that economy.  Undeterred, we scratched and clawed and built our little nest eggs, then left for Canada and Australia and the United States, and in our wake was an interminable stream of our countrymen eager to fill the vacant spots.

Does it matter that I look back with some shame at not having attempted to understand the local culture better? I remember my quasi-intellectual eloquence, quick to criticize my English friends over a glass of beer for perpetrating their “colonial propensities” all over the world. European colonists of the past went looking for spices, gold, oil, and other minerals; we descended on the Middle East in search of the jobs to be had in an oil nation. Both of us could rationalize our actions by pointing to our social and commercial contributions (the same argument British colonialism used in India), but in retrospect I can’t shake the feeling that I was there for one reason only—to make a quick buck and get out of Dodge!

Can I console myself with the thought that every expatriate in the Middle East had the same approach? Even the Saudis saw Bahrain as a playground to indulge their forbidden whims. Is it a viable excuse that citizenship was not available to foreigners, thus encouraging short-term residencies and the cavalier attitudes that spring from a lack of emotional investment in a city/state? I can’t really decide now if Arab societies, at least in Bahrain at that time (it’s much different now with plenty of Indian investment in the Arab economies), seemed closed to us because we were seen as just the hired help or because we did not care enough to understand the culture beyond the business district. American military families around the globe find themselves in similar predicaments—it is convenient to create a world–within-the-barracks and to venture forth only for a change of pace or in search of some new entertainment. I have already admitted to my prejudices and I’m sure they worked against my integration into the local culture, whether I realized it at the time or not.

Should we wonder at the resentment of Arabs towards such a blatant profiteering of their homelands? From the least politically influential group of Asian workers to the super-powers jockeying for control of Middle Eastern oil, everyone saw the Gulf States as the avenue to some version of economic stability. It is easy to criticize governments for failed foreign policies in the Middle East, for propping up one dictator as a bulwark against the rise of another; for preferring Israel over the Arabs even as they reached for Arabian oil. The sordid truth is that all of us are to blame. We forced a closed society to close even more, to feel exploited for their natural resources and misunderstood for their traditions. We went there with our preconceived notions of culture and lifestyle and democracy, with our prejudices of race and religion, with our highly critical attitudes towards foreign traditions, even ones as ancient and established as those in the Middle East; and, with little or no effort to understand and accept beliefs and practices different from ours, plundered them and left.

 

 

 

All Right!! I’m tired of listening to some people say that soccer is too boring, too long, etc., so here’s my take on the beautiful game, adored by millions the world over. The loveliness of soccer lies in its endless creativity and Americans who hate it because of its low scores just don’t understand its gorgeous design—a free-flowing, constantly changing game where players describe several new patterns instantly with their movements. The complexity of soccer lies not with the player who has the ball, but in the choreography of everyone else as other players attempt to move into open spaces to receive the ball and the defense tries to second guess, cover, and thwart those movements. Of course, goal scoring is the ultimate “goal” but the wildly adventurous journey to get it is what imbues soccer with its thrilling moments. Some teams are better than others at doing this and, obviously, some players have greater imaginations, because it demands instant creativity.

It is interesting to me that this central matrix of interconnectedness through movement without the ball also characterizes hockey and basketball—to really enjoy these games we have to understand and appreciate not just what the ball or puck handler is doing from moment to moment but what also everyone else around him (or her) is trying to do—exploiting and possessing the open spaces on a rink, court, or field. In the final analysis, acculturation aside, the playing of soccer AND the enjoyment of it, demands imagination.

Consider this for a moment—the most exciting moments in American football is when a “set play” breaks down and a quarterback or some other player has to scramble, improvise, and find an open man. Well, that’s what happens throughout a soccer match—at least, in the good ones! So much time in American Football is filled with standing in a huddle, calling plays, sending in plays, walking to the” ball”, calling timeouts, breaking for commercials, etc. Now don’t misunderstand me—I enjoy American Football (being the son of a sports journalist, I love all sports) but, in comparison, to suggest that soccer is boring is just risible!

To continue in that vein, I would add that the excitement in baseball lies not in a routine put-out or sacrifice fly but again when something breaks down or someone improvises—a runner attempting to stretch a single into a double or triple, a misfield forcing a scramble, an awkward bounce off the wall or, more amusing, a ball lost in the ivy. Besides, as I’ve written elsewhere, for me the greatness of baseball lies not in home runs (I actually find triples much more exciting), but in the mind games between pitcher and batter as each tries to outwit the other—that’s why Greg Maddux will always be my favorite player!

As far as low scores are concerned—please!!!! Hockey and baseball have low scores and a 21-14 American football score is for all intents and purposes just 3-2!! But of course we have to inflate it to accommodate field goals—interesting how we do that, isn’t it? We love putting a “grandiose face” on things; thus, a batter who gets a hit 30 percent of the time (that’s 0.30) is said to “bat 300;” when I first heard that I thought it meant 300 percent. But, of course, that’s the idea, isn’t it? To make it sound grand—we wouldn’t want to suggest that America’s pastime is a game predicated on failure, where the best players fail 7 times out of 10. That would be like admitting that we are preoccupied with failure—not a good thing for our national psyche. And yet that is precisely what makes baseball so fascinating for me—a game where players fail constantly, get into huge slumps, yet grit their teeth and persist. It is heroic in itself and doesn’t need a “smiling face;” it’s slow, precise, and even intellectual in some ways!

But back to soccer. There are no timeouts except for injuries, no coaching from the sidelines, and no unlimited substitution of players. If you don’t like what the opposing team is throwing at you, you can’t take a moment to talk about it. Once you get onto the field you live or die by your talents and your ability to improvisefor ninety minutes. Requiring no fancy equipment, the game flowers as easily on a cow pasture in Bangladesh, a back street in Colombia, a beach in South Africa, or a meadow in Portugal. Starving, thirsty, barefooted children on a dirt strip in South America or sub-Saharan Africa seek the harmony of this beautiful game in the midst of abject poverty with the same devotion as brightly uniformed boys and girls in Munich or suburban America do in the presence of their soccer moms! Played with an aerodynamic ball at the World Cup or oranges in a backstreet in Brazil or a bundle of socks in an Indian village, it is the ultimate leveler, this ballet with a ball, a great exercise in democracy (much like basketball in the US), where some dreams come true, passions run sky-high, and the world stops for 90 minutes!

Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan may be famous, their names are certainly familiar to people around the world, but they will never know the godlike worship that follows the Brazilian soccer star, Ronaldinho. From the tiniest hamlet in Eastern Europe to the tip of South America, the jungles of Africa, and the small islands of Southeast Asia, soccer stars are greeted as messiahs. Their names are mentioned breathlessly like a litany of saints. The mercurial Brazilians, known only by single names in the tradition of their god Pele Kaka, Maicon, and Lucio; Messi of Argentina coached by Maradona the magnificent madman; Ronaldo of Portugal, Carlos Vela of Mexico, the Dutchmen Van der Vaart and Van Persie; Rooney and Gerrard of England, Keisuke Honda from Japan, Drogba from The Ivory Coast, Zambrotta the Italian, and Landon Donovan of the United States. Amen!