Entrepreneurship: Alive and Kicking in Bangalore

India may be known to the business world as the land of the Tatas, the Birlas, the Narayan Murthys and the IITs and IIMs, but the first thing that hits you when you land in India and you drive out of the airport to your hotel or home is the number of shops lining the streets - big departmental stores, tiny shops selling paan, biscuits, chocolates and juices, roadside stalls selling savories and snacks, makeshift stalls for clothes or just men and women squatting on the pavement selling anything from flowers to toys to books.




A paan seller




Dry fruits and fresh fruits on a slow Sunday afternoon

I wouldn't be surprised if the number of entrepreneurs per thousand in India is the largest in the world, though I sometimes wonder how any of these businesses make any money at all. Some of these are just tiny businesses with just a table and a row of huge glass jars with some chocolates in them in the front room of a house (of course, that business may not be the enterprise sustaining the families).




A chaat stand




A peanut seller finds some shade

Of all the different examples of small business enterprises I've seen, the one that fills me with the most satisfaction is the food stalls operated out of tempos or out of the backs of Maruti vans. Because the vehicles are mobile, they are able to operate out of a small strip of pavement. These vehicles arrive at the designated spot (usually near construction sites of which there are untold numbers in Bangalore right now) with huge vats of smabhar, rice, curries and raagi (millet) balls, throw open the doors and set out the dishes. They also bring with them plates, glasses and jugs of water. There's usually a woman behind the vats serving laborers their breakfast, lunch or dinner.

It's thrilling to see this in operation. The food stall operators make brisk business and the laborers get home cooked meals, the kind they like, probably at even lower prices than the Darshinis.

Another small business enterprise that has gained popularity in Bangalore is the mobile beautician. With every little nail clipper, eyebrow tweezer and cotton ball squared away into their one big bag, the women zip around town in their two-wheelers and snip hair, clip nails, pluck hair, scrub away dead skin, massage tired muscles, moisturize, peel, wax, thread - in short, a provide a plethora of services - all in the comfort of their patrons' homes.

And from all accounts, the mobile beauticians make a roaring business. Building her client list mostly from word of mouth, M, one such beautician I know, works from 6 am up to 9 pm, seven days a week! And on many days she still does not have time to break for luch. At one point in her business, she got so busy that she enlisted her cousin as an assistant and it is a sight to see the both of them zipping through the community on their scooter, or one or the other of them walking briskly to make her next appointment, cell phones hanging around their necks.

With a 10th grade education in which English was part of the curriculum, M does a marvellous job of communicating with her various clients (most of whom don't know Kannada). She has a business card and a rate card and no Blackberry. It is a mystery how she remembers where she has to be at the appointed hour, but she does - she's never missed an appointment and more likely than not, it'll be her calling me to remind me.

Her drive and work ethic are nothing short of amazing, and her level of service exists in a rarefied world. When it comes to deciding whether to head over to a salon or pick up the phone to call M, the choice is clear.

And the day might not be far behind when that Blackberry makes an appearance.

Falling On The Tummy Is Serious Business

Little n turned 6 months nearly two weeks ago. She's progressed phenomenally from the mostly inert infant she was when we got home from the hospital. Initially she slept for a solid 23 hours a day. Eating and sleeping were her only two activities. She would sleep through diaper changes, loud noises, dress changes, hot summer days and cool nights with nary a whimper, sometimes even while feeding!

After Big N, who used to wake up every two hours on the dot, even at night, I wasn't sure if I should be thankful for Little n's habits or, frankly, be worried.

Now, six months later, she still sleeps through the night (hallelujah!), but is awake most of the day. She's also into putting her body into various positions - on her back, on her tummy, on her side, with head wedged against the side of the crib. She also does a really funny backstroke kind of a move on any flat surface that propels her backward at a fast clip.

The process that led to her falling on her tummy is rather intriguing. She first started out lifting her right leg and throwing it over the left, the rest of her body still hanging back. It took her a couple of weeks to figure out that the top part of her body needed to move too. After days of promptly flinging her right leg over the minute she was laid on her back, she finally fell over on to her tummy, but now her left hand was stuck underneath her chest. After a further few days she figured out how to pull her hand out.

The amazing thing is that none of this is learned, obviously. Each time she tried to turn to her side it was as if something beyond her control compelled her to do it. The same is the case with flipping on to back from her tummy which she mastered a few days ago. Now it's a constant flip-flop - on to her tummy, then promptly on to her back.

There is a fair amount of frustration involved. During the time she did not know how to get off her tummy, her neck got tired from keeping her head up and she'd let her head fall forward on the mattress, rest for a few minutes and then lift her head again. Even this got tiring after a few minutes and not knowing how to move from her position, she would start whimpering and looking around for someone to help her out. But none of this prevented her from promptly getting on her tummy the minute I turned her on to her back, her demeanor approximating that of someone working seriously on an important task intent on accomplishing it.

Now that she is able to get on her back by herself the next item on her agenda is to figure out how to move forward while on her tummy. For the present she's stuck in reverse gear.

Weblog Awards 2006: Desicritics in the Top 10!

Desicritics has been nominated for the Weblog 2006 Best Asian Blog Award.

Voting is underway now and will go on until December 15th. Voting is restricted to one vote per computer in a 24-hour cycle. So if you've visted Desicritics and you like what you see, please vote. And if you haven't visited Desicritics at all, now is a good time as any to do so. Mosey on over, mate!

Red eyes from swimming or is it the computer?

Voices against my working on the computer all day began in a trickle, but have now joined together to form a raging river. First it was V, then Big N, then my parents, now even B, the lady who helps me around the house.

I came back from swimming today with bloodshot eyes. My eyes bother me every time I go swimming, but today was particlarly horrid. B took one look and said I had too much heat in my body and moved on promptly to blame the hours I spend in front of the computer.

Watching The Chronicles of Narnia on Christmas Day

Christmas Day 2005 dawned grey and drizzly in Virginia. All hopes for a white Christmas melted away in the unseasonably warm temperatures. As is the case every year, the question of what we would do the rest of the day was hanging in the air. Most of our Christian friends were busy with church and family and Christmas lunches and dinners. Most of our friends who were in the same boat as us (i.e., were not busy with Christmas) had gone away to visit family during the holidays or lived in Maryland and we did not feel like driving all the way up and around the beltway to meet them.

During past Christmases, we had ended up going to the temple and to the free performances on the Millenium stage at the Kennedy Center before going out to dinner at any restaurant that was open (usually an Indian restaurant).

This time around we were at home in Virginia for three weeks on a "home" visit from Bangalore where we currently live. It was good to be back again, back among shops (Trader Joe's, Whole Foods Market), restaurants (Big Bowl, Panera Bread, Chipotle, Romano's), streets and landmarks that were sorely missed for over a year. How good it felt to drive around in the car (without the need for a driver) and tune on the radio to listen to NPR or Eliot in the Morning on DC 101 (someone said he was gone, hope it's not true!).

Best of all, it was good to be home, be able to bake in my oven (my son was probably happier about that), to be able to cook the dishes I couldn't in India without going into a whole lot of trouble (penne pasta with that chicken sausage from Trader Joe's) and to just sit on the sofa wrapped in a fleece blanket and watch the snow flurries settle on the deck and the tall trees in the backyard.

We'd been home about a week and a half by then and had just begun to get over the jet lag, a particularly ferocious one this time around which had us crashing by five in the evening and waking up every morning at two am. Although the weather was inhospitable, we did not particularly feel like staying cooped up indoors. So after breakfast, we hatched a plan to watch a movie. We had wanted to see Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe even since we got there and we decided to try our luck. Were movie theatres open on Christmas Day? We could not remember, but we were going to find out.

In our absence from Virginia, a brand new theater had opened up about ten minutes away from our house. We decided to head out there. By this time, it was pouring. We piled into the car and drove to the movie theater. Aside from church parking lots, all the roads leading up to the theater were deserted as was the theater itself. It was around 11:30 am by this time and we resigned ourselves to not being able to watch a movie that day.

Just then, a car pulled up behind us, a man got out of the car, pulled his jacket up over his head and ran towards the ticket counter. A young girl in the movie theater uniform came out of the building and got into the ticket kiosk. Hurray! There's going to be a movie after all! So I went in as well and found out that Narnia was playing at 1:30 pm.

The good news was that there was a movie; the bad news, we had two hours to kill. We decided to make a quick trip to Washington, DC. There was no traffic to speak of, so it would take us hardly 15 minutes to reach downtown. We hand't gone into the city at all since we arrived and it would be good to see all the monuments, museums and yes, even the federal buildings.

After a whirlwind tour of DC and a viewing of all the watery, hazy monuments that flowed down our windows onto little rivultes on the streets, we headed right back. Lunch had to be taken care of. We headed to a Thai restaurant, the only one that was open in the mall across from the multiplex. The only other guests in the restaurant were a family of four, decked in all their Christmas finery. They must have just finished Christmas church services.

Lunch was the usual green curry/yellow curry items with a dish of Phad Thai thrown in. It was delicious. We had a view of the ticket counter from the restaurant and we could see a crowd building. It was time to go.

Once inside the movie theater, we headed for the last row of seats and pretty soon there were enough movie goers for families to have to split up and sit rows away from each other. Right next to us was a Middle-eastern family and most of the other audience members looked like they did not have anywhere else to go on Christmas Day either.

As the movie progressed the irony of this situation was not lost upon us. Here we were, in this temple of entertainment, gathered together to watch a tale of the triumph of good over evil, of sacrifice, forgiveness and of the savior rising from the dead.

What is a sad dream?

Big N woke up this morning and said he had a really tough time falling asleep last night. Finally, he fell asleep around midnight (a bit of an exaggeration) after he'd had a sad dream.

What was the dream, I asked.

It was about a monster who could not scare anyone, he said.

Crying at the Movies

It was pitch dark in the small Odeon Theater in Washington, DC. The movie had ended, the screen had gone black, but there was none of the creaking of seats, the quiet conversations or shuffling that usually marks the end of a movie. Everyone was rooted to their seats. The only sound audible was the sniffling of a hundred noses punctuated by a few sobs here and there.

Finally, as the movie theater staff came in to clean up the popcorn cartons and the soda cans and bottles, people slowly rose out of their seats and filed out quietly, many still sniffling and sobbing.

The movie was Life is Beautiful (the much more mellifluous La Vita e Bella in Italian). We had all laughed, shook our heads in wry understanding and become tense as the father, played very endearingly by Roberto Benigni, desperately tried to save his own life and that of his young son and tried even harder to save his son's innocence in a Nazi concentration camp. Benigni's antics had kept our spirits up and at the edge of our seats for much of movie. Even his character's death towards the end had evoked shock, may be a little bit of sadness, but not the kind to bring forth tears.

It was only when - after the allied forces had liberated the camp - the young boy suddenly came upon his mother on the road to their town and had fallen into her outstretched arms screaming in joy at having found her at last that tears started pricking the back of my eyes. As mother and son hugged and fell on the ground laughing and crying at the same time, we had all cried, our tension released at this sudden, surprising and happy development.

The reasons why I'm lachrymose at movies are various. Sometimes it's because the character whose voice speaks to me the most loudly and clearly is going through an intensely sad experience; sometimes it's just the connection at a very basic level between two characters - where one shows an act of kindness towards the other, for example; at other times the tears are brought on by an intense feeling of relief at the resolution of some conflict.

The movie I cried hardest at was Cinema Paradiso in the scene where Salvatore finds out that the old reel operator (the projectionist) at Cinema Paradiso, a movie theater in a small village, had carefully spliced together all the bits of film lying on the projection room floor and made a reel for him. As a young boy, Salvatore had begged the projectionist to give him the bits of film but the projectionist had steadfastly refused. Salvatore grows up, moves away to the city and loses touch with small town relationships and values.

He comes back to his village one day and discovers that the old man is dead but has left something for him. It turns out to be the reel. As Salvatore watches the reel with tears rolling down his cheeks, you see, through an adult's eyes, how absurd it was to have wanted the bits of film. Spliced together, they make no sense. But the reel is a symbol of the profound emotional connection between an old man and a young boy brought together by their love of movies. With enormous affection and love for the young boy, the old man had taken the trouble to make something that he knew Salvatore, even as a grown man, would appreciate.

Then there was Boys on the Side in which Robin, Mary Louise-Parker's character, is dying of AIDS and Jane, Whoopi Goldberg's character, sings her Roy Orbison's "Anything you want, you got it." Of course, Robin can't have anything she wants because she's dying. The scene is made more poignant because Robin and Jane start out being crabby at each other but then reach the kind of mature understanding that everlasting friendships are made of. Suffice to say I bawled.

Munnabhai M.B.B.S. is another one of those bawl-worthy movies. The movie had me in stitches for the most part, but certain scenes suddenly brought on tears, such as the one in which Munnabhai impulsively hugs a janitor who's been having a bad day.

Father of the Bride evoked a rivulet of tears when the father, after several desperate attempts, is unable to connect with his daughter before she goes off on her honeymoon; Veer Zara, when Veer pulls out Zara's anklet from his pocket and Zara pulls up her skirt just that little bit to show she's been wearing the other one by itself for all of the years they've been apart.

The thing is I never cried at movies, and would stare, fascinated, at any one who did. As a teenager, I couldn't understand why any one would cry at movies. Didn't they know that movies were not real? That so-and-so is not really dying?

I really couldn't tell you why all that changed or exactly when. Perhaps, as you grow older, your repertoire of emotions grows and you are more able to appreciate, understand and identify with a broader range.

Whatever the reason, my tear glands are getting a lot of use these days.

T + L launches T + L South Asia

Travel + Leisure, one of my favorite magazines, launched its South Asia edition this month.

According to the Editor's Note, "Sophisticated and experienced travellers from Karachi to Kathmandu and Colombo to Chennai now have their very own edition to bring them the best new destinations, travel trends and up-to-date news.... You can look forward to seeing fresh and unexpected itineraries in the region and abroad, a selection of luxurious and unique travel experiences and the most user-friendly information to help you plan your adventures."

The glossy travel magazine filled with exquisite photographs is a sight for sore eyes, but I wonder, Why launch an issue with a South Asia focus? Is the focus on South Asian destinations or is the focus a South Asia clientele?

The first issue contains a cover story on Goa, "Exploring Goa, Its Heart, Soul and History", by blogger, novelist and journalist, Sonia Faleiro, a story on Kochi, "Jewel of India", by Tad Friend, a story on the latest "designer dens in Delhi", by Monalika Namchoom, a story on fashion accessories available in India, and Anindita Ghosh's piece on The Imperial in New Delhi. Other than these, small items in the Reports section on Paparazzi, a new restaurant in Bangalore, a Salvatore Ferragamo store in Mumbai, a heritage hotel in Kathmandu, a luxury yacht in Male and accessories from Mauritius, a roundup of four spas (in Uttaranchal, Chennai, Mumbai and Udaipur) round out the first issue's coverage of South Asia.

The rest of the magazine is given over to other international destinations such as Africa, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Armenia, Paris, London, Orlando, Rome, Middle East markets, etc. that you might find in a Travel + Leisure magazine if you picked one up in the US.

I'm sure the American or Australian readership of T+L magazine will be as or perhaps more interested in Faleiro's nicely done story on Goa accompanied by warm and loving photographs by Prabuddha Das Gupta and will equally enjoy Friend's wonderful commentary and Overgaard's scintillating photography (check out the one of coconuts laid out to dry to be crushed for coconut oil) in the Kochi article.

At Rs. 150 per copy, the South Asia version is as expensive as its American counterpart (in terms of exchange rates), but a tad more exclusive in that it is a tiny part of the vast and populous South Asian market that can afford the price. If there is even a little doubt as to the magazine's intended audience, it is banished the moment you turn to the page on the fashion accessories - there is a Louis Vuitton scarf for Rs. 12,500, Louis Vuitton sandals for Rs. 34,000, a straw hat for Rs. 1,790. You get my drift.

The magazine's initial print order is apparently 80,000 strong and judging by the ads in the magazine (around a quarter of the 160 page magazine is filled with ads for high end products, including quite a few pages advertising T+L magazine itself), many advertisers have reposed faith in the reach of the magazine.

As you make your way through the issue, you conclude that the intended reader is a South Asian resident, the one with a lot of disposable income and an appetite for high-end consumables. And such a reader will not rest satisfied with traipsing around his own backyard, now, will he? Hence the alluring descriptions of a Byron Bay in Australia and that tiny vineyard in Provence.

One hopes, however, that having the luxury of producing an entire magazine focused on South Asia will prompt the publishers to look beyond the clichéd South Asian destinations and overrun hotspots. It would be a great pleasure indeed to open the magazine, flip through the pages and never have to read about Bali.

You Really Should Not Read Bill Bryson in Public Places

I had ignored the warning on the cover of Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island. "Not a book that should be read in public, for fear of emitting loud snorts", said a blurb from the The Times' review.

I was reading it not in any ol' public place, but in one of the very busy lounges at the Frankfurt international airport. There was not a chair to spare as far as the eye could see. Passengers were milling about, the chairs, stacked closed to each other, did not even lose their warmth as one passenger left and another took his place, there was a steady buzz in the area from many conversations - in short, it was as public as a public place could get.

I had started reading the book a couple of days earlier and was now almost at the end, trying desperately to subdue a snort that had started at the pit of my heaving stomach from exploding out of my nose.

I really should have heeded the warning because I am, very famously, given to snorting when laughing.

I had valiantly suppressed a rather long stretch of giggles until then, only the gentle shaking of my body, the swishing noises coming out of my mouth and tears running down my face betraying my helpless condition. In the end, it was no use. The snort exploded any way. Before I could recover from that one, another one followed and then another.

I put my head down, resting my forehead in my palms. That was no help at all. I stole a quick glance around my immediate vicinity. There was a Scottish woman talking in earnest to my husband about her trip, her lilting Scottish accent only slightly eroded by years of living in Canada. That was it. I couldn't take it any more. I slapped the book shut and rushed to the bathroom to compose myself. Five minutes and repeated washing of my face later, I made my way back to my seat and picked up the book. I wasn't done yet.

I picked up where I left off, with some trepidation, but I could not stop myself.

Bryson's trip around Britain is coming to a close in Glasgow, Scotland. As he is wont to do in all of his trips at the end of a long day traipsing around town and wandering in museums, Bryson fancies himself a drink and a sitdown at a pub. What follows is entirely to blame for the snort fest.

He enters the bar, which he describes as dark and battered and spies two "larcenous" looking men sitting together and drinking in silence. He waits at the other end of the bar to be served but no one comes out for a long time. He does all the things people do when they're trying to express impatience - he puffs his cheeks, drums his fingers on the bar, and "makes assorted puckery shapes" with his lips. Then follows some brilliant-as-usual introspection on why we do the things we do when we're waiting for someone. He adds cleaning-of-nails-with-thumb-nail to his routine, but still no one comes.

Eventually I noticed one of the men at the bar eyeing me.
"Hae ya nae hook ma dooky?" he said.
"I'm sorry?" I replied.
"He'll nay be doon a mooning." He hoiked his head in the direction of a back room.
"Oh, ah," I said and nodded sagely, as if that explained it.
I noticed that they were both still looking at me.
"D'ye hae a hoo and a poo?" said the first man to me.
"I'm sorry?" I said.
"D'ye hae a hoo and a poo?" he repeated. It appeared that he was a trifle intoxicated.
I gave a small apologetic smile and explained that I came from the English-speaking world.
"D'ye nae hae in May?" the man went on. "If ye dinna dock ma donny."
"Doon in Troon they croon in June," said his mate then added: "Wi' a spoon."
"Oh, ah." I nodded thoughtfully again, pushing my lower lip out slightly, was if it was all very nearly clear to me now.

Then the bar man comes out and he's in a foul mood.

"Fucking muckle fucket in the gucking muckle," he said to the two men, and then to me in a weary voice: "Ah hae the noo." I couldn't tell if it was a question or a statement.
"A pint of Tennent's please," I said hopefully.
He made an impatient noise, as if I were avoiding his question. "Hae ya nae hook ma dooky?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Ah hae the noo," said the first customer, who apparently saw himself as my interpreter.

"Interpreter" was where I had sunk my forehead into my palms.

You might say that this passage is the written version of slapstick, and I might agree, but it is also a sterling illustration of why Bryson's books exist in that rarefied atmosphere reserved for wildly successful and popular writers of travel memoirs. I am certain that this is not a faithful rendition of what transpired in that bar, but, as he says, his writings are faithful to his memory and perceptions of that day, and give the reader a wonderful sense of a place - which is what I'm looking for when I crack open a travel memoir. If I want straight facts and a report of what a city is all about, I'd reach for a travel guide.

Bryson's books are a heady combination of many factors, each one of which, on its own, is praise-worthy.

He conveys facts in terms that help you grasp them instantly (for example, in Down Under (also published as In a Sunburned Country), while rendering facts to illustrate how scantily populated Australia is with its population of 19 million, he compares it to the fact that China grows by more than that amount each year). He approaches all the things he sets out to see with an endearing sense of wonder - he might end up being disappointed in them, but he will hardly hesitate to tell you that.

He leaves himself wide open to all experiences, pleasant or unpleasant. His enthusiasm and appetite for travel - which after a while can approximate the daily grind - are nothing short of infectious. His books are filled with passages resulting from insight into and introspection about the human condition, a virtue we could all do with a little bit more of. To top it all, all this is conveyed with a remarkable sense of humor and comic timing.

I'll leave you with this passage from Down Under. Bryson is listening to cricket commentary on his car radio on a lonely drive from Canberra to Adelaide on Sturt Highway. Ironically, you will need to understand cricket to enjoy the point of view of a man who was born and grew up in a non-playing country.

After two whole pages of some rather insightful thoughts on cricket ("there's nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry", "I don't wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way", "It actually helps not to know quite what's going on. In such a rarefied world of contentment and inactivity, comprehension would become a distration" and many such gems), including a passage in which he compares cricket to baseball for all his American readers, he carries on.

Neasden, it appeared, was turning in a solid performance at square bowel, while Packet had been a stalwart in the dribbles, though even these exemplary performances paled when set beside the outstanding play of young Hugh Twain-Buttocks at middle nipple. The commentators were in calm agreement that they had not seen anyone caught behind with such panache since Tandoori took Rogan Josh for a stiffy at Vindaloo in '61. [A sentence which conveys Bryson's perception that the bowling run up is long.] This was repeated four times more over the next two hours and then one of the commentators pronounced: 'So as we break for second luncheon, and with 11,200 balls remaining, Australia are 962 for two not half and England are four for a duck and hoping for rain.'

I may not have all the terminology exactly right, but I believe I have caught the flavor of it.

Indeed.

Call for Papers: Book Titled "Women: Balancing Home and Profession"

If you are interested in writing an article for a book titled "Women: Balancing Home and Profession" to be published by ICFAI University Press, please contact Sukhvinder at the following address at the earliest for details:

sukhvinderUNDERSCOREmATyahooDOTcom

Some Memories Haunt You

Growing up, our radio occupied the pride of place in the family rooms of the various houses in which we lived. The radio was a wide, rectangular, wood-paneled Phillips model with gray serrated knobs for dials and square, off-white, push down buttons for the different wavelengths. Ameen Sayani's voice filled our home with his dulcet tones and simple commentary introducing beloved songs from Hindi cinema.

My aunt (my paternal uncle's wife) was a gold medalist at the state level in Carnatic music. My maternal grandmother played and taught the veena and the harmonium. My father and another of my paternal uncles broke into "Lambodara, Lakumikara" at the drop of a hat.

So there was no way I was going to escape from having to take music lessons.

Being the first grandchild on my mother's side, everyone was in awe (rarely justified, I will confess) of my supposed abilities at numerous activities. Singing was one of them.

My mother found a Carnatic music teacher for me when I was in fourth grade. We lived in Tumkur then (we moved every two years to a different town going wherever my father's work with a bank took us). My classes were in the evening, after school.

The teacher's house was about ten minutes away from our house by walk. His house itself was very modest. My teacher's family owned two cows and they supplemented their family income by selling the milk. The cows were tethered to the right side of the front door.

Inside, in the main room of the house (the "hall"), they had a large wooden vessel sitting on the redoxide floor and a long wooden stick resting in the vessel for churning butter out of buttermilk. The wooden stick was tethered to a pole loosely near the top and about three quarters of the way down, and in the center, it had a rope that had two large knots on either end.

The process of churning the buttermilk with this contraption is really simple and if you did not have to do it every single day, even fun.

You stand with your feet planted firmly against the vessel and hold on to the rope with both hands with the knots serving to hold your grip. Then you pull on each end of the rope alternatively. The wooden pole spins clockwise and anti-clockwise repeatedly and churns the buttermilk. After a while, you see chunks of butter floating to the top.

If I went in early and if my teacher was not ready to take my class yet, I churned butter while waiting. Dipping your fingers in and popping a fingerful of freshly churned butter into your mouth is everything it's chalked up to be, I assure you.

The room in which my teacher taught me singing was on the first floor, up a very narrow and steep flight of stairs at the back of the house.

One day, as my teacher and I were climbing up the stairs, I spied the moon between the trees. It was a spectacular full moon, creamy against the starless, velvety sky.

"The moon is so beautiful! You've got to see it!" I burst out.

A nanosecond later, my heart dropped. I wished the stairs would just fall away and take me with them. I was so ashamed, horrified, aghast at my own colossal stupidity. It is one of those things whose memory makes you cringe even years later.

A long, awkward silence followed at the end of which my teacher just cleared his throat. As he reached the top of the stairs, he ran his left hand along the wall, reached the door to the room on the left and slowly ran his hand along the door till he found the light switch.

He turned on the light. It was for my benefit alone because it was of no use to him. He knelt down and felt around the floor under the switch for the mats. He handed me one, spread one out for himself, sat down with his back against the wall and asked me where we had stopped last.

The class began. But it was a life lesson I learned that day.

Romanies: The Forgotten Victims of the Holocaust

Hegel once said: "what history teaches us is that men have never learned anything from it". One lesson we must learn from the Porrajmos (the devouring), as the Romanies described their fate at the hands of the Nazis, is that there is one holocaust as the ashes of the Romanies mingled with the others in the ovens of the death camps. We lose our humanity when we arrogate to ourselves the exclusivity of suffering while diminishing the suffering of others.

[...]

By the act of denying or ignoring other holocausts, we rob history of its meaning and commit the folly of not learning from it.

C.R. Sridhar's very interesting and informative post on the Romanies killed in equal proportions to the Jews by the Nazis.

Travel Essay: Dreaming of Rajasthan

Given my experiences in and around Bangalore, I'm justifiably leery of road trips. Even so, when we were faced with the choice of waiting in an Indian Airlines lounge at the New Delhi airport for six hours for a delayed flight or getting in a taxi and driving to and reaching Jaipur within five hours, we chose the latter. Everyone (including the Indian Airlines customer service desk attendant who was happy to refund us the air fare rather than having us wait for the flight) assured us that the roads were good.



And they were. The roads were wide, very well paved, well maintained and devoid of traffic. Suffice to say it was one of the best drives I've had in India (the drive from Jaipur to Ajmer to Pushkar and back is equally good).

As we entered Jaipur around 2 pm, we caught our first of many glimpses of Amber Palace sitting majestically on top of a hill to our right.


Amber Palace

There are three ways to get to the top of the hill - by walk up a winding path, by elephant, or by car. With the April sun beating down on us and with me less than two months away from having a baby, we decided trekking up the hill was not the best option. And apparently, the elephants are mighty popular. They were all taken by 9:30 am - all twenty five of them!


An elephant gets ready to ferry people back down from the palace

Amber Palace is a wonderful combination of brute strength and delicate beauty. The kings and queens paid incredible attention to art and architecture within the walls. The walls and the exterior of the palace are themselves foreboding and somber. The road leading up to the palace is lined with imposing, ancient houses in which ministers and courtiers lived.







Once inside the palace, you will find that the structures are a marvellous coming together of form and function. There is an intricate, latticed vent through which air and water flowed to keep things cool - a sort of an ancient cooler,



lawns laid out in the design of a carpet for the viewing pleasure of palace residents,



mirrored and bejewelled ceilings and walls that retained warmth or rendered the room cool as the season demanded,


Yes! That is a ceiling!



and latticed fronts that served to shield the women folk from the men but at the same time allowed the women to witness all the action outside.


The eldest queen sat at the window in the center to throw flowers at the king as he entered the living quarters

There is one courtyard, a rather large one, flanked on all sides by what appeared to be separate apartments (each section was walled off from the other) that has a rather fantastic story that our guide took enormous pleasure in recounting. The king that built the courtyard, one of the Mansinghs, had twelve wives. Yup! You'll have to use your toes too for that one. And, he did not want any of his wives to talk to the others (even though some of the women he married were cousins). So he built this elaborate apartment complex around that courtyard, three apartments to each side. There were also watch points "manned" by eunuchs to enforce that rule and to make sure they didn't pass notes to each other. (This photo was taken from one such watch point.)

See what you can accomplish with inexhaustible resources? Why, you can even keep all your wives apart!


The Mansingh Courtyard

This outdoor hall used for musical performances brought on a sudden, intense longing for scallops. Wonder why.



As you may have noticed, nature seems to have painted much of Rajasthan with a single palate. Which is why I think the thing we most associate with Rajasthanis is - color. It is everywhere. It is painted onto the buildings,


The ultra-famous Hawa Mahal (another elaborate latticed front to hide the women folk

and it's most definitely an inextricable part of Rajasthani couture.




Umbrellas used in Rajasthani weddings. I thought they'd make cool parasols



The other thing that catches your eye is how ubiquitous camels and elephants are. Camels are like what cows are in south India. The elephants, we were told, are a vital part of Rajasthan's tourism and film industries. In fact, the day we visited the palace, there was a shooting going on with a few elephants thrown in (see the lawn carpet pic).







Can you imagine this rush hour? Traffic jam!

The Rajasthan tourism department has done some wonderful things to encourage tourism. The roads are worth mentioning again. At the palace, we could hear local guides jabbering away in German, French, Japanese and Spanish to their wards. Our guide went out of his way to arrange an elephant ride for my son.

We ventured out of Jaipur, by road again, to Ajmer to visit the Dargah and to Pushkar to visit the only Brahma temple in the world.



The Brahma Temple
I must say, the most striking thing about Pushkar was the clothes available for sale there. They were many, many shops dedicated to clothes, almost all of them selling western fashions. It was obvious they were targeting the insane number of foreign tourists Pushkar gets every year and not only during the annual camel fair.

But even as I appreciated this "know your market" attitude, I was totally unprepared for this:

"Every Shoe Tells a Story"

We wear our hearts on our soles. "Shoes are the best indicator of how poeple are feeling", says June Swann, a shoe historian based in Northampton, England. To hear Swann tell it, you can chart the rise and fall of prosperity from the elevation of a heel; hear the distant rumblings of war in the configuration of a toe; measure social change by the thickness of a sole.

Every shoe tells a story. Shoes speak of status, gender (usually), ethnicity, religion, profession, and politics (the Russian writer Maxim Gorky said a strong pair of boots "will be of greater service for the ultimate triumph of socialism ... than black eyes"). Last, far from least, they can be drop-dead gorgeous.

Every Shoe Tells a Story, in September's National Geographic magazine. Do read. And take the National Geographic poll.

Are beautiful shoes worth the pain that sometimes comes with wearing them? Hell! No.

What say you, Shoefie?

Tagging Along

I've been tagged.

So here goes.

Eight things about myself:

1. Am a mom.

2. Am sleep deprived, but that's my normal state of being.

3. Am doing at least two things at once at any given time.

4. Am an extrovert, very talkitive.

5. Don't like talking to people about personal issues.

6. Love to cook once in a while for a lot of people, tolerate everyday cooking as a necessary evil.

7. Get grumpy if I have to tell people what to do.

8. Love to see new places.

I'm not going to tag anyone else, but if you do decide to follow this tag trail, please do and let me know when you do.

Girl Escapes From Captor 8 Years After She Was Kidnapped

What a story!

Yesterday Natascha's father, Ludwig Koch, said he recognised his lost daughter immediately. In an interview with Austria's Kurier newspaper, he said she looked in bad shape physically and had wasted away. "She has very, very white skin and marks all over her entire body. I don't want to think about where they came from," he said. After being reunited on Wednesday they had both wept. "She told me: Papa, I love you. And her next question was, Papa, do you still have my toy car?'

"I told her I did, and we had never given it away. We still have all her dolls as well."

Career Women's Houses Are Dirty, and Other Male Delusions

There's a bit of a brouhaha on the Internet over an article published on Forbes. The article was originally published on August 22. The following day, Forbes took the article down. A few hours later, the article was back up on the site, but this time right alongside an article with a counterview.

What was all the fuss about? Well, the article in question, written by a Forbes.com news editor Michael Noer, is titled "Don't Marry Career Women". That should explain it all. Right? But wait, there's more. The title is merely the tip of the iceberg. The article itself - in which rocky marriages, husbands' ill-health, dirty houses, dysfunctional kids, divorces, extra-marital affairs and lower rates of childbirth are all blamed on working women - is priceless.

In support of his assertion that men should not marry working women, Noer quotes many "studies". However, in many instances, the author's paraphrasing of the studies, or the quotes he uses, talk about "individuals", "spouse", "people" and not about women specifically. Here are a few examples that Noer ropes in to argue that career women are more likely to cheat and run away with someone:

• When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they'll meet someone they like more than you.
  


• According to a wide-ranging review of the published literature, highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 more likely to have cheated than those with high school diplomas.) Additionally, individuals who earn more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat.
  


• "I also find that the incidence in divorce is far higher in couples where both spouses are working than in couples where only one spouse is employed," Johnson [who "examined data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation"] says.
  

It is baffling that the author relies on these statements to conclude that only working women cheat, run off, have extra-marital sex and are responsible for the rise in divorce rates. In a similar vein, Noer makes an argument about "labor specialization" - if both spouses work, the household suffers. Again, the argument should not and does not translate to mean that women should stay home.

Furthermore, people - men and women - will cheat if they are so inclined and if the opportunity presents itself, whether they stay home or go out. What about spouses who stay home and are exposed to the mailman (or mailwoman), the fedex man (or woman), the pool boy, the baby sitter?

The essay is chockfull of other "insights" into marital relationships.

• Households in which the women work are dirty, he says. Really? Is it any surprise? This is a reason why men should not marry career women? And is this really a problem? Where are the men in the equation? Do they really expect the house to be spic and span? If they really do (which I doubt - someone should go check out some bachelor pads and see how they stack up on the cleanliness scale), why not pick up after themselves, take the trash out, mop and dust a little, eh?
  


• Husbands in households in which the women work are more likely to fall ill, he says. Are men really such babies? Did anyone check to see if the women in households in which the men work are more likely to fall ill? No? Why not? Because women are expected to take care of themselves, but the men need handholding and need to be taken care of or else they fall ill?
  


• Husbands will be unhappy if their wives make more money than they do, he says. Well, all the men need to do is to tweak their attitudes a little bit. How about feeling happy that the family is earning more money? How about feeling proud that your wife is earning more than you?
  


• Wives will be unhappy if they earn more money than their husbands, he says. Well, don't worry Noer. This character flaw won't last long. I suspect this feeling stems from having a crabby husband around and women will stop caring what their husbands think or feel if their illogical behavior lasts long enough.
  


• If women quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy, he says. Sure, there will be some sadness. There's bound to be unhappiness over lost friendships, over the loss of professional connections. But that's life. Priorities change when kids arrive. But is this a valid reason not to marry a working woman? That's a myopic view if I ever saw one. And what about the unhappiness a non-working woman may feel that she doesn't work? Does this not count?
  

Just in case the men reading his essay are horrified and are thinking they will never ever marry, Noer exhorts men to marry. Do marry, he says, because marriage is positively correlated to higher incomes for adult men. How wonderful! If you want to make more money, you want to be happy, have children and children who are well-adjusted, stay healthy and have a clean home, marry. Please do. Just follow Noer's advice and make sure the woman of your dreams doesn't have a college degree and makes less than $30,000 a year.

The puerile and inane ideas expressed in this essay are trumped only by Forbes first pulling the essay from the web and then republishing it with a counterview written by Elizabeth Corcoran, also with Forbes. If Forbes did not think that the essay would not stand on its own merit, why did they publish it in the first place?

And oh, before we go, please do read Forbes? You Suck. Lively and quite on point.

Comments

Comments are back on! Thank you for your e-mails and feedback on this topic. They all made a lot of sense. While I may not be able to reply to all comments, I do look forward to reading them. Thank you for reading and commenting.

"Punny" Headlines Driving You to Pull Your Hair Out?

Puns have no place in headlines. That's what you are taught in Journalism class in that chapter on newswriting. The thought behind this edict is that puns can harm a story in several ways - they tend to distract the reader from the story; they make light of what may be a serious news item; headlines with puns may be clever, but they may not reflect the actual content of the story.

Two Gannett editors, Meg Downey and Frank Sutherland, exhort headline writers to avoid puns, which "elicit groans rather than draw readers in or they make light of a serious issue." They point to this headline to illustrate their point: "Levi Strauss to button up six plants" on, they say, "a serious story about the clothing manufacturer laying off 36,000 workers."

"The disease of pun-ism seems to be spreading," says Jim Barger, sports editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Used in moderation, like bourbon, they can leave the reader with a pleasant glow. But too many groaners can lead to glassy eyes and and readers wondering what's on television."

The San Antonio Express-News (via Poynter) went so far so as ban puns in its headlines after one particularly productive day in which copy editors produced nine pun headlines. According to Editor Robert Rivard, the decision to ban puns came on the heels of "predictable e-mails from readers dismissing us as a serious newspaper."

That, in my opinion, was a rather drastic step. I enjoy puns in headlines. If I don't go on to read the story following it, it's probably because the subject matter did not interest me in the first place any way. While there are terrible puns (such as the Levi Strauss one, for example), I have come across some mighty clever ones too that actually add to the story.

I was therefore happy to find that in spite of the prevailing wisdom in the newspaper industry, there were a number of "punny" headlines in the newspapers over the past couple of days - all relating to the one story of the forfeited cricket test match between England and Pakistan at the Oval and each one a play on the umpire's name Hair. (I haven't seen a photograph of Hair with his umpire's hat off. I wonder if he has any.)

'Pakistan demand Hair cut' read an August 21 headline in the Guardian (a clever headline, and I did go on the read the story). "A hair-raising past" says this Cricinfo headline. "Series with fraught histroy sitting on a Hair trigger" opines a Telegraph headline. "Pakistan lay blame on Hair for parting of ways". Now, is that a pun? The headline seems contrived. You can almost feel the effort that must have gone into the drafting of that headline. Moreover, "parting of ways" is not exactly how I would describe the Hair-Pakistan relationship.

Here's another "Hair cut" word play though not as good as the Guardian headline: "Hair cuts an over-officious figure in the game". "Pakistan no stranger to bad Hair day" according to The Times. "Hair's some more bad news for Pak" reads a not so good pun on the CNN-IBN website.

Before we go further, let me confess to my own attempt at punning in my post titled "Umpire Alleges Ball Tampering: Hair Today Gone Tomorrow?" Here's another in Desicritics writer Desh's post, "Darrell Caught in Pakistan's Hair."

Some of them - OK, may be a couple - are good, the rest rather insipid. So what makes a headline with a pun a good headline? A Capital Idea quotes a book called Headlines and Deadlines:

Two tests can be propounded for puns, whether in a headline or elsewhere. The first is whether each of the two meanings of the word forming the pun is appropriate. ...

The second test is based on the theory that the basis of humor is incongruity and unexpectedness. This means that the pun should not be obvious; it should not be just lying around waiting to be picked up ... The best advice that can be given to the headline writer is to avoid the pun unless he is convinced that it is exceptionally good. If there is one thing that most newspapers need, it is more sophistication. The bad pun, like the childish rhyme, is the mortal enemy of this quality.

Almost all of the Hair puns were just lying around waiting to be picked up.

Book Review: Hitchhiker, Vinod George Joseph

Most people cherish three things in their lives - family, friends and career. Ebenezer, the protagonist in Vinod George Joseph's debut novel, Hitchhiker, is no different. He loves his family the way most of us do - he grumbles at them, he complains about them, but he wouldn't know what to do without them. He prepares himself meticulously for a career in engineering, doing all the things one must to in India to get into a good college, and looks forward to the day he can become and engineer and lift his parents and sister out of the financial dire straits they are in. He falls in love with a smart, educated, independent young woman, the kind he had always dreamed of marrying. He and his friends plot and plan their way through high school, teasing each other about their dreams for their future lives, wives and careers.

In other words, Ebenezer is a normal kid with normal dreams.

There is also a crucial fact, however, that rules over Ebenezer's fate with a ruthless hand - he is born a Verumar, an untouchable. There is nothing he or his family can do to escape this unfortunate happenstance. Moving away from their ancestral village does no good because the necessary visits back to the village bring home to Ebenezer exactly who he is and what his place is in society; converting to Christianity proves to be a double-edged sword - on the one hand there is the suspicious eye with which society looks upon them (did they convert for money?), and on the other hand, Ebenezer loses the advantage of the quotas for scheduled castes in colleges because he is now a Christian and therefore no longer eligible for reservations.

This one fact, the fact that he was born the son of scheduled caste parents, lifts Ebenerzer out of the world he is so desperately trying to create for himself, spins him around and hurls him back to the ground, shattering in the process every single dream he has for himself and his family.

Ebenezer's mother and sister are hacked to death by the "higher" caste Edayars on a visit to his village; his family finds out that his aunt had been raped when she was a young girl by the son of her Edayar landlord, and subsequently drives her to commit suicide; his father loses his job because he joins a union demanding reservations for backward classes in the Christian institution run by his employer; his girlfriend's parents refuse to accept him because he's a Verumar although he converted to Christianity; a chain of events starting with the murders of his mother and sister ensures that he fails in the crucial exams leading up to admissions into engineering college, and culminates in Ebenezer never finding the engineering career he dreamt of.

Hitchhiker is a gut-wrenching story. As you read about young Ebenezer, you are hopeful for him and his sister Gwendolyn, two smart kids who seem to have spurned all that their history holds for them; two kids successful in their school, hardworking, extremely capable of achieving their dreams. You feel affection for Esther and Peterraj, Ebenezer's parents, who did what they thought they had to do to give their children the best possible start in life - they converted to Christianity, sought jobs and financial help from their church, obtained education for their children in the church's school and lived life quietly in their corner of the school compound. You secretly applaud when Ebenezer and Gayathri, his girlfriend, decide to marry.

It is almost too much to bear when the threads of Ebenezer's life start unraveling in such rapid succession as to leave you breathless.

Hitchhiker has all the ingredients that make for a great read.

The plot is very well thought out, researched and executed. The events leading up to Ebenezer's aunt, Karuppamma's suicide are set up brilliantly and the section ends chillingly,

Bhadrakaali [Ebenezer's grandmother, Karupamma's mother-in-law, who goads Karupamma into committing suicide] hugged Karuppamma by her feet and burst into loud sobbing. The tears were for real. Bhadrakaali had really liked Karuppamma. She knew that if she were in Karuppamma's position she would have acted exactly as Karuppamma had done. But, she had no choice. Her duty to Alagiri [her son and Karuppamma's husband] and his children came first. Matters had taken the only course they could and the world was now a better place.

Each character (and there are many, many, characters) is fleshed out and the attention to detail is welcome and refreshing in many places. In this passage, for instance, the author takes the time to paint a picture of Esther's workplace, the nursery section in the school run by her church,

There were three-year-olds all around her and most of them were crying out aloud. Deserted by their parents, they were making their fear and anger known in the only way they could. Many of the parents liked to hang out in the school after leaving their children in the nursery. But, Victoria Miss who had been handling the LKG class for the last twenty-five years, insisted that all parents clear off after depositing their children. A few parents, however, could just not be chased away.

The language is simple, and there is ample background information to round out the situations and events in the book. The life of each character is examined under the microscope of religion and its various aspects such as caste, conversion, reconversion, the politics behind reservations for scheduled castes in educational and governmental institutions and untouchability.

And therein lies one of a couple of minor drawbacks - every character in the book is somehow affected by some issue related to religion to the point where the reader feels the message is being pounded home relentlessly. The other is the sheer number of characters which the author spends considerable space fleshing out in such detail that the reader is left wondering where the story is going.

These drawbacks, however, are mitigated to a large extent by the author's simple and evocative writing style and the plot's ability to draw the reader into the lives of the characters.

At the bottom of it all, Hitchhiker is a simple story of unrequited love, of carefully laid plans going haywire, of circumstances beyond your control taking over your life, and it is well told. Reason enough to want to read the book.

Hitchhiker, Books for Change, 395 pp, Rs. 350 (India), USD 19.00 (outside India).

How sick is this

Did anyone, one man asked, know of girls’ camps willing to hire adult males as counselors? Meanwhile, elsewhere in cyberspace, the second group celebrated the news that one of their own had been offered a job leading a boys’ cabin at a sleep-away camp.

[...]

In this online community, pedophiles view themselves as the vanguard of a nascent movement seeking legalization of child pornography and the loosening of age-of-consent laws. They portray themselves as battling for children’s rights to engage in sex with adults, a fight they liken to the civil rights movement. And while their effort has brought little success, they celebrated online in May when a small group of men in the Netherlands formed a pedophile political party, and they rejoiced again last month when a Dutch court upheld the party’s right to exist.

How sick is this.

Of Furry Eyebrows and Hairy Upperlips

“On both coasts, everybody wants a thicker brow that reminds you of Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner,” said Robyn Cosio, an eyebrow stylist who works at the Salon by Maxime in Beverly Hills and Eiji salon in Manhattan. “People love that I leave the two bottom layers of undergrowth and don’t take out so much in between the brows so that they can stick up and look feathered.”

Ladies, lay down your tweezers. Facial hair hasn’t been this much in demand since the advent in 1978 of Brooke Shields. Indeed, this month French Vogue devotes an entire page to the tinted, brushed and glossed eyebrow, recommending a “dense and proud” brow as the best way to structure a face.

There's one fashion trend (NY Times link; requires free registration) I've been way ahead of. Now if they would only catch up to hairy upper lips and sideburns...

Meredith Vieira Moves On

There's a lovely story about Meredith Vieira in last weekend's New York Times Magazine. Here is a snippet.

Her repeated insistence that there was no paycheck big enough, no title prestigious enough, to give up her home life has made her a heroine to viewers who pay attention to such things.

[...]

Vieira is careful to say she does not think less of women who were more willing to leave home than she was and even allows that maybe she is "a little extreme" in her desire to be with her children. "The juggling act just never worked for me," she says now. "Maybe it was the three miscarriages, so all I was thinking about was a healthy baby, or maybe it’s just who I am, but I never wanted to prove I could be macho. And I was quite successful not proving that, wasn’t I?"

There are no universal solutions that fit all families when it comes to managing two careers and children. Some want to juggle both career and children, some don't, some need to juggle both career and children, some don't. Each family has to decide for itself what is best. One is not better than the other, one is not morally superior than the other. What is important is that we recongnize what works for us and we do it, as Vieira seems to have done and is doing.

The only show I remember seeing her on is "The View" which I enjoyed watching. I liked what I saw of her on the show. She was irreverent, seemed comfortable in her skin.

Please do read the whole thing (I think it requires free registration).

PostGlobal: washingtonpost.com's New Feature

PostGlobal is the latest offering on washingtonpost.com and is moderated by David Ignatius and Fareed Zakaria. According to the site,

PostGlobal is an experiment in global, collaborative journalism, a running discussion of important issues among dozens of the world's best-known editors and writers. It aims to create a truly global dialogue, drawing on independent journalists in the countries where news is happening -- from China to Iran, from South Africa to Saudi Arabia, from Mexico to India.

Started slightly over two months ago, PostGlobal is fashioned as a blog on which more than thirty journalists opine on questions posed by the moderators. Readers also have the opportunity to respond to these questions directly or to respond to the opinions of the members of the panel. Questions are posed "at least twice a week" and some recent ones have included, "Who will dominate post-Fidel Cuba and does it matter for the world?", "What two suggestions would you give the U.S. Secretary of State?", "Is the war making the world safer for Israel, America and their allies or more dangerous?".

Although it does not seem to be up and running yet on the PostGlobal page, there are plans for and "Editor's Inbox" area for "... assessments of the latest stories and for links to useful resources for making sense of what's happening." The "Debate" section pits two of the panelists against each other on a topic and allows readers to pitch questions to the debaters.

PostGlobal's layout is easy to navigate with clearly marked sections. Readers' opinions are right alongside the panelists' opinions in two columns on the main page and are given as much prominence in terms of placement and they make full use of it too. The readers appear to be much more vocal when responding to the questions and they stay around to answer other readers that may engage them which cannot be said for the panelists. Of the panelist opinions I've read, not a single panelist has responded to any of the comments on his/her posts. Readers' opinions are also much livelier, more passionate.

The feature is still in its infancy and it'll be interesting to see where it goes. With so many media sources out there, from mainstream media to blogs to online magazines, etc., I wonder whether PostGlobal will be drowned in a sea of voices. PostGlobal seems to be trying to distinguish itself from the rest of the field by offering the opinions of a diverse set of "experts" in one place,

... we'll post a question then solicit responses from members of our diverse network of experts, whose combined views, we believe, will reflect what the world thinks about important issues more quickly and completely than would those of any single commentator.

[...]

Understanding the world is a daily puzzle -- for the prominent journalists who make up the PostGlobal network and for our millions of potential readers around the world. We will try to make sense of where the world is going by putting our heads together.

We'll just have to wait and see.

The Tricolor Flies High

I headed out of the house at 7:25 am and made my way to where the flag hoisting would take place. As I neared the main street leading up the mast strains of Vande Mataram filled the air. More people joined the crowd of people moving toward the mast, little girls in silk skirts, boys in pyjama kurtas, men in Jeans, shorts and the women in chudidhars, sarees, having tried their best to incorporate white green and saffron in their dresses.

People stood around chatting, kids ran off to find their friends and generally run around excitedly. Two women with dogs straining at the leash stood at the fringes. A man placed a handful of flower petals in a folded tricolor and tried to get it up the flag pole.

A huge shamiana sheltered a stage and about a hundred plastic chairs. The sound system screeched as it came on and someone asked everyone to move towards the flag pole. Everyone - there were about one hundred and fifty people - gathered around in a loose semi-circle.

The head of the association untied the rope from the flag pole and slowly pulled it. The bunched up flag made its way up to the top, hesitated for a brief second and fluttered in the breeze.

Salsa: The New "In" Thing in Bangalore

"Four one, cha cha cha, two three cha cha cha," went my instructor. We, twelve of us students, tried to follow her steps as she sashayed her way around the floor. By the third or fourth session, we barely managed to keep up with her feet movements.

She, of course, was moving way more than just her feet. Her hips swayed, her arms moved fluidly in the air, her shoulders and spine were ramrod straight. I, on the other hand, punched my hands in the air, hunched my tense shoulders, took giant strides on my flat feet and tried not to crash into any of the walls or crush anyone's feet.

But I keep at it. Why, you wonder. Because I'm a glutton for punishment. Well, no. Ok, maybe yes.

But there are also a few other, perhaps more logical reasons. For one, the music is infectious; you can't help but dance. Two, I have delusions of being able to wiggle my hips a la Shakira, the operative word being delusions. (Did you see her FIFA World Cup Final performance? Aye, Caramba!) Three, once you get one sequence right you feel like you can do all of it. Four, my instructor is good at what she does, both the dancing and the teaching parts. Five, any form of exercise that is fun and enjoyable is gold. Finally, and most importantly, there are no mirrors where we dance. So while I feel ungainly and have a faint idea of how klutzy I might look, I really don't have concrete evidence of the blashphemy I commit twice a week.

Over the past few weeks I've been finding out that some or all of the above reasons are responsible for a whole lot of Bangaloreans to turn to Salsa.

And by whole lot I mean thousands.

Lourd Vijay, a businessman and purveyor of all things Salsa should know. He started the first Salsa school in the city, Lourd Vijay's Dance Studio, in 1997. Now he has three of them up and running in which he, along with four full-time and four part-time instructors, teach a total of six thousand students. Yup, that's right, 6,000. And he has plans to open three more studios in the next three months.

Vijay himself came to dancing and to Salsa like many of us do. He saw the movie Dirty Dancing and he was hooked. His sister, who lived in Australia, sent him books and video tapes of dances so he could get familiar with the art. He then went to Canada, to Vancouver and Toronto, to train in the various dance forms. Now he travels extensively all over the world attending workshops, conferences and congresses.

Although the average age of his students is around twenty-five, the classes are so popular among all age groups and among people from all walks of life that his studios offer exclusive classes for those over 40, those over 50, for homemakers, etc.

The reasons most of his students attend the Salsa lessons, he says, are to have fun (which is crucial to any activity that you intend to pursue for a long time), the studios are a great place to network, to meet like-minded people, especially if you are new to the country or to the city, to get fit, and because going to the gym can get boring pretty fast.

The dance form is so popular in Bangalore that the India International Salsa Congress is all set to kick off in Bangalore on August 16th. The official website has all the details of the Congress including the schedule, details of all the performers who are flying in from all over the world, competitions, workshops, parties, etc.

So if you've vaguely heard of Salsa but don't know squat about it, now's the time to go, watch and learn. Lead with your hips and don't forget your heels.

Looking Ahead...

When someone leaves a comment on my blog, I feel compelled to respond and feel pretty bad if I don't. But personal and work commitments don't permit me to do justice to all the wonderful thoughts and ideas that are expressed in the comments section. (Hats off to Greatbong. I don't know how he does it, but he responds to every single one of the 100s of comments he gets on his posts and he does it patiently and thoughtfully.)

So moving forward, there will be a small change to this blog. I've disabled the comment feature. I do hope that you will continue to read the posts I put up (they may become less frequent as well, but hopefully not). I hope to turn the comments feature back on once things get better, but in the meantime, if you have questions or comments related to the post, please do send an e-mail and I will do my best to respond.

Please note that I shall not respond to e-mails with personal comments or comments or questions that do not relate to the subject matter of the posts.

Thank you for reading.

Radio Interview with Kavita Krishnamurthy Subramaniam and Dr. L. Subramaniam

All India Radio's FM Rainbow (101.3) in Bangalore is broadcasting my exclusive interview with Kavita Krishnamurthy-Subramaniam and Dr. L. Subramianiam tomorrow Saturday, Aug 12, between 8 and 9 p.m. This interview is the first in a series (called Pride of Bangalore) that will air every Saturday for the following few weeks at the same time (8-9 p.m.). I'll put up information about the other people I talked to for this series as and when the schedule is fixed. Please do listen if you can.

I interviewed them at their home one morning a few months back. One thing that struck me about them is how modest, kind and unassuming they are. Absolutely no airs about them. They offered us (myself and the sound engineer that accompanied me) coffee, made sure we were comfortable, gave us the best possible sound environment in their home and most importantly, gave me time which is a miracle given their extremely (and I mean extremely) busy lives. And in the process, did not make me feel like they were doing me a big favor.

It was an honor to have met them and talked to them.

Pesticides in Coke and Pepsi

Vikram takes on the issue pointblank.

The Anatomy of a Miscarriage

It hit me finally on the British Airways flight from London to Washington, D.C. Something was terribly wrong. I was six weeks pregnant and I was bleeding heavily.

In the days leading up to the flight, I had refused to believe that my pregnancy was coming to an end. Two gynecologists and one radiologist (who performed the ultrasound scan) in Bangalore had told me that things were not progressing well - they should have been able to see the baby's heartbeat by then but they could not. Was I sure of my dates, each of them had asked. Any history of miscarriages?

I was convinced that the problem was not at my end. Perhaps the scanner was outdated. Perhaps the radiologist did not know what he was doing. Perhaps the gynecologist was counting the weeks from the wrong date. Spotting is common, isn't it, in the first few weeks of pregnancy? Perhaps this was implantation bleeding.

Things could really not be going wrong. There was not even an inkling of a problem the first time around, when I was pregnant with Big N. I did not even have morning sickness. So how could my pregnancy not be progressing well this time?

I decided I needed to get back to the US, back to the same environment that I was in during my first pregnancy. May be that would make the niggling problems of spotting and no heartbeat go away. I was not thinking rationally but my plans made perfect sense to me then. So I advanced the date of my departure flight and still upbeat about having a second child and a sibling for Big N, he and I started on our journey back to the US.

The flight from Bangalore to London was uneventful though a little hectic with Big N (then just past three years old) and two large suitcases and a carry on.

Once on the flight, things progressed smoothly. Big N walked over to the young, newly-married woman who was sitting behind us and was being his usual chatterbox (on every single flight, he ditches me at the first opportunity and goes off to find someone else to talk to and play with). I smiled apologetically at her, letting her know she could send him back if she had had enough. She said, no, she was having a good time. I was happy to let them both be, seizing the opportunity to visit the restroom.

I came out shaken. I sat in my seat, Big N came over to see where I'd been. I pulled him over, hugged him and willed the tears to stop. They did not. The sobs came out unbidden and the two mothers who were sitting to my left, both with small babies on their laps turned to me. Are you ok, they asked? I explained to them, between sobs and wiping my tears, what was wrong. Their expressions of concern relaxed somewhat. One of them told me she had bled as well when she was pregnant with her daughter but everything had turned out fine. There's nothing to worry about, they said.

By then Big N was getting anxious. He did not know why I was crying and was wiping my face with his forearm. One of the air hostesses (I named her Big Bertha) walked over and I repeated my story, feeling better somewhat and beginning to think once again that it was no big deal. But Big Bertha thought otherwise. She went on a war footing. She brought over the head steward who went around the plane looking for a doctor. He finally found one in First Class who advised that I should lay flat on my back and rest completely until we reached Washington. "We're flying over the Atlantic," the head steward said, "so we cannot land the plane anywhere soon." "Land the plane?" I thought. "It's not really that bad, is it?"

Apparently it was or they thought I would sue them or something if my condition got worse. Big Bertha decided it would be better if I went to First Class and lay down flat and she also decided that Big N should not be with me. I decided she was off her rocker. She had no clue how to handle a young child and was convinced that keeping him from me for the rest of the flight was the right thing to do ("he will have to deal with it" was her tone). I put my foot down and took him with me to First Class.

Big N had no place to sit on that one seat if I lay flat on it. After a few minutes of squirming around, we decided to head back to our original seats. At least he had his own space. Big N went back to his friend. "Take rest," she whispered. "I'll look after Big N." I pulled the hand rest between our two seats back, stretched my legs onto his and lay down.

Once we got home from the airport, I called my Ob/Gyn (the practice I go to has five doctors, each of whom I had to see when I was pregnant with Big N, the thought behind this being that each of them would know me and I would know them so there would be no surprises when I went into labor; it wouldn't matter which doctor was on call that day) who said to go get an ultrasound first thing in the morning. The ultrasound confirmed the three diagnoses I had received in Bangalore. By then, I had rationalized my reaction to the whole situation. The pregnancy was not too far along, I thought. If it weren't for those ultra sensitive pregnancy tests, I would not even have found out that early that I was pregnant, I thought. I called V, told him the result. I was calm. He was calm. I drove home and as we were driving, told Big N that the baby was not growing well. I wanted to get it over with, finish talking about it.

In the evening, we visited my Ob/Gyn who recommended that I not do anything but just to let the miscarriage take its course. I had no clue what she meant, but was happy not to take any medication since I'm not a big fan of medical interventions when there are natural alternatives. She told me to call if my bleeding or pain got so heavy that I could not manage it.

I only remembered days later that the ultrasound technician had said that my Ob/Gyn would probably not let me go through the miscarriage but would do some kind of a procedure. I did not make the connection between those two statements then. We just went home, Big N and I went to bed to sleep off the jet lag. V went to work the next day and Big N and I unpacked and got ready to leave for Chicago in a couple of days for a family get together.

Towards the afternoon jet lag had caught up with Big N and he was already in bed. I lay down, exhausted from the journey, the emotions, the unpacking, the repacking. Suddenly my stomach started cramping in waves, from left to right, from front to back. I instantly recognized what they were - labor pains. I was thoroughly confused. I had no clue why, if everyone said I had miscarried, I was going through labor pains.

I gingerly rolled over to my left side. The pain subsided. I relaxed and started breathing freely again. Two minutes later, the pain was back. This went on for a good fifteen minutes before it stopped. I was completely shaken out of my sleep by then. Perhaps this was what my doctor meant by pain. It was gone before I could take any medication. I got up and walked over to the closet. I might as well pack, I thought. I sat down on my haunches to get to a chudidhar that I wanted to take.

It was then that the worst imaginable thing happened.

Whatever it was that had grown in my body for six weeks into the size of two palms held together, that thing that was going to be my baby, that thing that would have fed my baby for the next nine months, came out in a rush. I don't know why I thought of this, but I wanted to save it. I grabbed a big wad of napkins and mechanically rolled the bloody mess in it. Other than cleaning myself up and saving that thing, there was no thought in my head.

I went down to the kitchen, got a paper bag and put the napkin wad in the paper bag and called the on-call doctor. She came on the line. I got my name out. That was all.

I held the phone and bawled.

I did not know why I was crying. I thought I had felt perfectly all right until then. But I could not bring myself to explain to the doctor what had happened. The doctor's kind voice did not make it any better. I was suddenly filled with sorrow. Sorrow for the baby that was not to be, sorrow for the placenta that had grown, so full of expectation that it would feed my baby but now was lying waste in the paper bag, sorrow for all the anticipation for the following nine months that had been laid bare, sorrow for the emptiness I felt in the middle of my stomach.

A while later during which the doctor patiently held on to the phone, all cried out, I asked what to do with the paper bag. She gently said to bring it to the clinic the following day and set up an appointment to see the head Ob/Gyn. They might have to do a D&C she said.

Two days later, we scheduled a D&C. They put me under and my doctor scraped out whatever residue was left. As we were driving home, V said the doctor told him I kept saying "home" over and over during the procedure.

They say in the stock markets that past performance is no guarantee of future results. That is a great life lesson.

P.S.: I never got to see the young woman who sat behind us on the London-Washington, D.C. flight when we got off the plane. I wanted to thank her for her kindness and for her help. I did not feel alone on that flight.

And thank you to my doctor who just listened to me cry over the telephone.

Update:

I wanted to draw your attention to an amazing but thrilling story. A friend of mine who was pregnant about three months ago started bleeding profusely. She went to her doctor who advised her to get a D&C done. Well, a few days ago she thought she had become pregnant again, visited another gynec and discovered that her previous pregnancy had not in fact ended in miscarriage and that she was 15 weeks pregnant!

This probably happens in the rarest of cases, but the lesson in this is to get a second opinion. I don't want to raise false hopes through this story, but do want to alert you to the need to be deeply involved in the medical procedures that are carried out and the medical advice that is given to you.

Read India Books: A Treasure Trove of Children's Literature in Indian Languages (and English)

When you read a well-written children's book, nothing seems easier than to write and publish one. What could be difficult? All you need is a good idea and simple words that a child can understand. Voila! You have a children's book. Right?

Wrong.

Just as a well-written book makes it seem so simple, a badly produced one is a lesson in how easy it is for a children's book to come out all wrong. Children's books are, or should be, all about capturing the child's imagination and making the child want to read. The language should be simple and straightforward (not at all easy to achieve, I tell ya), the illustrations rich and eye-catching, the layout easy to navigate, the pages child-friendly, and the length just right.

While there are numerous publishing houses that cater to the children's market, most of these books are written by non-Indian authors, primarily for a non-Indian market. Yes, Indian children can and do read these books. Most of us are familiar with and love Dr. Seuss (my review of two of his Horton books here), Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Tintin, Asterix and Obelix, etc.

But what about books that are set in India? Books that draw from our rich cultural heritage? Books based on the Panchatantra? Books based on our history? Most importantly, what about books in Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, our languages?

When my brother and I were growing up, we were fed a steady diet of Chandamamas and Amar Chitra Kathas. We read and our mother read to us many stories from Indian mythology and history. Both these books, however, were for the older children. The Chandamamas told stories in long text with few pictures while the Amar Chitra Kathas told the stories through dialogues and pictures in comic book format.

Moreover, the stories, especially those from our religion and mythology are not told in child-friendly terms. Here, I'm thinking of the story of Krishna and the events leading up to it, including the slaying of seven of his siblings by Kamsa, hardly appropriate for a child just learning to read or even slightly older children. When I first read the story to N from a "children's book" (he was slightly over three then) I had to skip the pages where the language was particularly gory.

My search for Indian books for N was proving to be hopeless. That is, until I found Read India Books, quite by accident. I found Indian stories with Indian characters set in Indian households, towns and cities. The language was excellent, not childish but definitely child friendly. Here's an example from a story called A Royal Procession:

It was early in the morning when Parvati and her brother Laxman entered the monastery through the tall gates. Their father was a potter and they had come to deliver earthen pots, plates, bowls and glasses.

Putting down her basket, Parvati looked around the courtyard, which was surrounded by a row of small rooms, and asked, "Is this where the Buddhist monks stay?"

"Yes," said Laxman. "They live in those rooms and pray to Lord Buddha in that temple. This place is called a vihara."

The Royal Procession is from a series called "Once Upon an India" written by Subhadra Sen Gupta and illustrated by Tapas Guha. The set contains four books, one each from the Maurya period, the Pallava period, the Mughal period and the Freedom Movement.

(N's thoughts on The Royal Procession, a story about two children who got to see King Ashoka in person: the story was good because it really happened (which he tells me he figured out from the last section of the book, "Fun Facts of History"), because he got to see the king on the elephant, because the art was good, and because the children were very lucky to have met the king.)

Read India Books is an arm of the Pratham organization. According to their website,

Pratham Books is a not-for-profit trust that seeks to publish high-quality books for children at a affordable cost in multiple Indian languages. Pratham Books is trying to create a shift in the paradigm for publishing children’s books in India. The low cost model proves that children’s literature can be attractive and affordable and therefore more accessible.

Read India Books is an imprint of Pratham Books and is the first of several publishing brands that we hope to create. Over the next one year Pratham Books will publish an additional 100 children’s book titles under the Read India brand.

The books are categorized by age groups and are available in a few Indian languages in addition to English. For example, the Tell Me Now! Series, Khikkhil Tota (Hindi, Marathi and Kannada), a series called Primers are all recommended for 3-6 year olds. Books such as Hum Sab Prani, Paheliyaan, Out and About with Ajja (available in Hindi, English, Marathi, Kannada, Urdu and Gujarati), Wild and Wacky Animal Tales (available in Hindi, English, Marathi, Kannada, Urdu and Gujarati) are recommended for 6-9 year olds and The Quirquincho and The Fox, The Magic Powder, Ganga ki Lehrein (English, Hindi, Marathi and Kannada), a set of short stories in Hindi, Marathi and Kannada are all aimed at 10-14 year olds.

The books are printed on glossy, high-quality paper and book lengths range from about 15 pages to about 30 pages each. The color and the quality of the illustrations are excellent, as is the print. The type face is large and spaced so children can follow the words easily. The books are priced from Rs. 5 each (the Tell Me Now! Series) to about Rs. 25 each, and can be ordered online from Read India Books' website.

If you've been looking for high quality children's books in Indian languages with Indian stories told well but have been disappointed so far, I say your search has ended.

Crossposted on Project Child.