Arthshastra

Harvest festivals are celebrated all over the world and Thanksgiving Day, celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November is one of them. However, there is something special about the way this harvest festival is enjoyed in modern day US. While harvest festivals in other countries tend to take regional and religious tones (for example, Baisakhi and Onam in India), Thanksgiving remains a uniquely secular festival enjoyed by Americans of all ethnicities, color and religion. It has evolved from its origins of early settlers giving thanks for the bountiful harvest and freedom of religion to an occasion when families get together to eat and give thanks for the simple pleasures in life.

Of course, everything is not hunky dory from coast to coast on Thanksgiving day and this day is capable of evoking different emotions in different people. For some, it is a day to sit on the couch, drink some beer and watch a couple of football games on the TV, while for some, this is a day when they are stuck in traffic or at the airport making that yearly trip back home to their families while for some guys, this is a day when they would be running around trying to find an open grocery store just because the night before, the wife forgot to put that crucial ingredient to prepare that special Thanksgiving meal on the shopping list (yes, that happened to yours truly last year). Of course, in an ultimately ode to Capitalism in the land that almost worships the concept, for most Americans, this day is inexorably linked to the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade and the early morning shopping deals the day after Thanksgiving. And then, for many native Americans, this day probably evokes mixed reactions. While on one hand, the entire country celebrates a tradition that started at the table of their ancestors and the first settlers, it is also linked to the tragedies and massacres they suffered at hands of the descendants of those very settlers.

Coming from a country that celebrates hundreds, if not thousands of festivals, I am always game to add a few new ones to my repertoire and I have taken to Thanksgiving like a fish takes to water (as Will Ferrell says in Anchorman, “When in Rome….”). Last year, we hit upon this brilliant idea that a bunch of Indians should dress up as, well, Indians on this day and the result was a lot of fun. While I don’t have any such plans for this year, I can’t wait to put an Indian spin (pun intended) on this uniquely American festival and contribute my own bit to this continually evolving tradition. I would love to know how other Desis visiting and reading this post plan to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Is Islam a peaceful religion? Is it a violent one? Does Quran teach violence? Does it teach love and peace? Are all Muslims violent? Are some of them violent while a majority of them just wants to live peaceful lives?

Questions like these and many more have been asked many times over, specially in the West and specially after the 9/11 attacks. President Bush has gone from emphasizing that Islam is a peaceful religion to using the term Islamo-fascists. So how do we make sense of what really is Islam? Or, for that matter, how do we make sense of any other religion? If we cannot answer this fundamental question, then we will never be able to answer the more obvious ones that I enumerate at the beginning.

To be able to answer that question, we first have to answer an even more basic question. Is religion a static entity, as defined in its holy books, or is it a living, breathing entity, as defined by the lives led by follower of that religion at a given period? I would assert that religion is a living, breathing entity as defined by the lives of its followers in the present. Going by that definition, one simply cannot assert or ask the question, “Is Islam a peaceful religion?” for that question is too absolute. The question that needs to be asked is, “Is Islam a peaceful religion today?”

If asking the right question was tricky, answering it is bound to be more so. What criterion does one use to quantify one’s answer? Should we find out the ratio of violent verses to non-violent verses in Quran? Should we find out the ratio of violent Muslims to non-violent Muslims (this criterion is often used when people assert that there are “millions of Muslims practicing their religion peacefully”)?
I think the answer can be found in one of the very basic observations that Mahatma Gandhi made about human nature - that if you want to find out the true nature of a person, find out how he treats a weaker person. Let us apply that simple test to present day Islam. We can say that Muslims are in “strength”, that is able to dictate political, social and religious decisions in countries or regions where they are in majority. Of course, in certain instances, they might be able to dictate terms even in regions where they are in minority but for now, we can simply focus on Muslim majority regions. Let us think of Muslim majority regions and nations like the Middle East, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, certain regions of Africa and Indonesia and see how the “weaker party” that is, non-Muslims have been treated in those regions? Is there freedom of religion? Is there freedom of speech? Can you openly practice your faith? What about civil laws?

In a nutshell, what kind of society have Muslims created in places where they had the power to create the kind of societies that they wanted to create?

Now compare those societies with the societies created by Christian majority states, like those of the Western Europe or in the US. Or the society created by the Hindu majority state of India.

There, you’ve answered the question that “Is Islam a peaceful religion today?” The real violence committed in the name of Islam was not committed when those planes hit the twin towers, not even when those bombs went off in the streets of London or in the trains of Mumbai. The real violence in the name of Islam is committed every single day in those Muslim majority countries like Saudi Arabia where you cannot freely practice any other religion, cannot have a free civic discourse and cannot have basic human rights. That is the real Islamic terrorism, Islamo-fascism or whatever other term that you fancy. The people ramming those planes into the twin towers were only the end result of that terrorism.

Here is a reality check for all you guys who hold candles at the Wagah border, send out emails containing messages of peace and communal harmony, roam around wearing peace tattoos or peace pendants, lie naked in the bed promoting peace or wistfully sing “give peace a chance”. Peace never really had a chance, never did and it seems highly likely that it never will.

You could blame religion, region, nationalism, caste or race but like a water gushing out of a broken dyke, violence will find a way and a reason to break it and flood the plains, no matter how many hands you stick into the dyke. Why? Because human beings are not conditioned for peace - whether by evolution or by design (and you call it intelligent?).

You say that religion is the reason for all the violence? Then explain Shia on Sunni (or vice-versa) violence in Iraq and Pakistan.

You say that race or region is the reason for violence? Then explain the countless wars fought between people belonging to the same race and regions.

The bottom line is that as human beings, we always strive to find what separates and divides us and not what joins us - so Muslims will fight Hindus and if you wipe out all Hindus, then Shias will fight with Sunnis. Eliminate all Shias and you’d be surprised how fast Sunnis start fighting amongst themselves. That great defender of Hindus, Bal Thackerey did not think twice before attacking all those Hindus from South India and of course, the regional feuds between states in the South of India is nothing to sneeze at. Christians have been having a mighty go at each other since centuries, stopping only for short periods of time when they have a bigger pagan to fight.

You might find it depressing but the first step towards solving a problem is recognizing that it exists and realize the true cause behind the problem. By creating these red herrings of religion, region etc., we side track the real problem and start day dreaming. If only there were no religions, if only there were no national boundaries, if only the US would stop its arrogant hegemony, if only we could have democracy in the middle east, if only Israel would relinquish some land in the middle east.

Maybe there is no solution to this problem, this is how it has always been and this is how it always be. Sometimes a few reasonable people like Gandhi, King and Mandela come along and instill a short term rationality amongst their people but the operative term here is short term and in short order, we are back to our true selves.

Like potholes on the Andheri-Kurla Road during rainy season, suddenly, the western media is full of stories on and from Mumbai. The cover story by Time magazine and a politeness survey by Reader’s Digest, which put Mumbai at rock bottom was followed today by a rebuttal of the Digest story by ex-Mumbaite and currently a Brooklyn resident, Suketu Mehta, whose claim to fame is Maximum City, a Pulitzer prize finalist novel about Mumbai. In between, the Wall Street Journal also found time to run a front page story on day traders operating out from cyber-cafes in Mumbai.

Stories by Time and Reader’s Digest were typical mainstream media stories - barely able to hold attention for the time an average person spends sitting on the toilet seat in the morning. While Time’s story was giddy with possibilities of Mumbai, the Digest story was giddy with the stench of apparent rudeness prevalent in the city. But one definitely expected a much more nuanced view from Mr. Mehta, a renowned author and a long time resident of the city. Unfortunately, Mr. Mehta took Digest’s criticism of his native city a little too personally and let go of his objectivity like a person getting rid of his singles in a dance bar on Charni Road!

In defending Mumbai, Mr. Mehta takes the oft-trodden path of romanticism, an old enemy of NRI authors, whose memories of their native towns are often tinted with rose colored glasses of distance and comfort of their new home. As he compares New York with Mumbai, Mr. Mehta contends that:

In quest of its exquisitely well-mannered New Yorkers, the magazine conducted its research entirely in what it quaintly considers a quintessential New York institution: Starbucks coffee shops. Not bodegas, or delis, or fried chicken outlets, where the results might arguably have been very different.

Oops, you really meant that the Digest conducted its interview in White dominated hangouts rather than the ones populated by Blacks and other minorities, didn’t you, Mr. Mehta? Then Mr. Mehta corrects his oopsies in a hurry by casting his lot with the less fortunate (that is, “I am allowed to make that comparison because hey, I live in Brooklyn” ) :

It’s not that people who like to pay three bucks for a cup of coffee at Starbucks are more polite — only differently polite. In the less chi-chi parts of the city I call home now, they might not hold the door open for you, but they’re more likely to help you out in finding a job or an apartment.

Traveling freely on this path of anecdotal evidence, making his argument as unscientific as Digest’s, Mr. Mehta gamely tries to bring up a few good points about Mumbai.

I suggest that the Digest conduct a second survey, using my own measures of civic courtesy: If four people are seated on a commuter train bench designed for three, will they accommodate a fifth person? Will people smile brightly at a stranger’s little kid in a restaurant, stopping by to say “How sweet!” — even when the child is being noisy? And if people are eating in a train compartment, will they share their food with you? I bet Bombay would come out tops.

Well, having lived in Mumbai for a few years, I know for sure that letting a fifth person sit on a seat meant for four in second class compartment of a Mumbai local train is not common courtesy, it is simply a survival strategy - if you don’t move, they will simply push you and make space or will make you get up. Mumbaites are neither rude nor polite in this case - it is a logical response to the number of people in a train compartment. As for tolerating noisy kids, I could point out evidence either ways, whether inside the train our outside of it.

Mr. Mehta takes further offense at this bit here:

Though most Bombayites would consider the Digest’s findings about as painful as a mosquito bite, an article accompanying might cause them to choke on their chapatis. In it, a Bombayite is quoted as saying, “In Mumbai, they’ll step over a person who has fallen in the street.” I’d like to think that the dear old Digest, which I grew up reading in India, doesn’t really believe this grotesque view of the city, for in 1997 they published an excerpt from an article I’d written about the everyday courtesies of the Bombay train.

Sure, I have experienced this myself when I saw two teenagers fall down from their bike on Worli Road and no one was willing to take them to hospitals. Heck, even the famed Mumbai cabbies would not stop when my friend and I, two out of townies, tried to take them to the hospital. It is a known fact that due to silliness of Indian law, often the good Samaritan, ends up getting stuck with wasting time in court cases and FIRs and many times people simply prefer to carry on with their lives.

In trying to paint a more polite picture of Mumbai, Mr. Mehta forgets one single thing about Mumbai. It is a town, which, more than anyplace else believes in survival of the fittest. If that leads to allegations of rudeness, then a Mumbaite will say, “Hey, that is no skin off my nose” (“Abey mere baap kaa kya jaata hai - tu kaltee maar yahaan se!”)!

Years ago, Mohammad Rafi crooned in CID and defined Mumbai for eternity, as eloquently as anyone ever could, as a place where you have to fend for yourself and as a place where you might find everything but a heart. So why take offense now at the editors of the Digest?

Aye dil hai mushkil jeena yahan
Zara hat ke zara bach ke, yeh hai Bombay meri jaan

Kahin building kahin traame, kahin motor kahin mill
Milta hai yahan sab kuchh ik milta nahin dil

Insaan ka nahin kahin naam-o-nishaan
Zara hat ke zara bach ke, yeh hai Bombay meri jaan
Aye dil hai..

BBC’s Soutik Biswas has a superb piece on the flourishing blues tradition in Shillong. A must read.

It is Friday night in the north-eastern Indian hill town of Shillong, and Tipriti and her band Soulmate are belting out gut-wrenching blues in a cavernous pub called Cloud Nine.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | India’s little rock and roll town