Arthshastra

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..

Global warming activists have been hitting all the right notes lately. There’s the Al Gore Movie, An Inconvenient Truth, there’s the report by the National Academy of Sciences that the earth is at its warmest in centuries and James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences makes a great case on NPR’s On Point Radio talk show.

In scientific circles, there is no more a fuzziness about the facts behind global warming and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times thinks that the time is ripe for a practical Green Party in the US. As I read Collapse, Jared Diamond’s extraordinary treatise on the doomed choices that societies make and do not realize its consequences until it is almost too late, I am repeatedly transported to some of the ominous choices being made today and wonder if a fate similar to the Mayan civilization or the Polynesians in the Pacific Islands will befall us as well. “No! we are smarter and more knowledgeable than those people and we have the power to stop something similar from happening to us”, proclaims a small voice inside my head. That voice does not sound that confident however, after seeing what nature’s fury can do to man’s best laid plans - tsunami, the flooding of Mumbai and hurricane Katrina are too vivid to sound confident - specially when you consider that in none of these events, cataclysmic as they might have been, Mother Nature was at her fearful worst.

So where should we look for signs of action? That something is being done? Jamse Hansen says that the momentum of the green house gases and global warming is now far too great to be controlled by individual actions. You may buy all the hybrids that you want, use all the energy star compatible appliances that you can, this genie cannot be put back into the bottle until governments of the world make a concerted effort. Where shall that effort come from? From the US - whose leaders are so beholden to the fossil fuel industries that they have made every effort to break the Kyoto treaty and tried to smear the scientists stating the facts about global warming with the brush of “fear mongering and hoax”? From China, whose very lifeblood of her booming manufacturing industries is cheaper and more abundant raw material consisting of metals, minerals and petroleum products? From India, whose leaders and population is so caught up in its own hype that they don’t even bother to clean up the river Ganga (Ganges), not even when it is proclaimed to be sacred and equivalent to mother in ancient Hindu scriptures? Europe and Japan have been making all the right noises, but frankly, at this point on the world stage, wind is definitely not behind their sails and their efforts could make only a small impact.

I don’t think all hope is lost yet; between India, China and the US, I feel that with the right leadership and motivation, US and India might still be able to save the day; China has too much of its economy staked on non-renewable fuels to meaningfully support this movement.

What kind of leadership will be needed in the US and India to be able to provide a vision for reducing the threat of climate change? More importantly, who will provide that leadership? While Dick Cheney may proclaim the 1% doctrine to be the operating principle while dealing with terrorists, somehow, for climate change, it is not relevant. Even in the eyes of this administration, isn’t there at least 1% certainty that global warming might be occurring? Why is it then that the US must act, even if there is 1% probability of terrorism but not when there is a threat of global warming? India at the moment is similarly bereft of leaders who can rise to the occasion. Where are the Gandhis, the Churchills, the Roosevelts, the Lincolns, the Kings of this era?

Not surprisingly, the hope for both nations might lie in their respective dominant religions - Hinduism and Christianity.

Hindus take great pride in their ancient culture, the scientific foundations of many of their rituals and their symbiotic relationship with nature and living beings. Jainism and other religions and cultures in India take this respect for all living beings to yet another level. Should it not be axiomatic then that a country, where a majority of people are spiritually and religiously respectful of their surroundings rather than claiming a god given dominion over them, should also be a country leading the way in promulgating a lifestyle and developing technologies that help alleviate the current problems associated with global warming? After all, if you consider all species of living beings to be just another form of yourself, aren’t you morally obligated to stop a process that is leading to extinction of a vast number of species? Unlike the US, India can lay a claim on only a handful of great leaders in the past few hundred years, and the greatest amongst them all was Gandhi. Almost sixty years after his assassination, his warning that “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed” sounds surprisingly true. He was also a leader who understood that the best way to unite this country is through her religion. Gandhi used his religion to give the nation a sense of righteousness and purpose and there is a need for religious leaders in India who can yet again help people renew their ancient relationship with Mother Earth and everything else, green energy, sustainable development and pollution control will simply flow from that.

People of the United States are no less enamored of their Christian roots. Indeed, many of the great movements in the US were created around religion. The idea of John Winthrop’s “City Upon A Shinning Hill”, Lincoln’s Civil War and King’s Civil Rights movement were all deeply influenced by Christianity. Can another great leader originate from the same tradition? Already there are many religious organizations in the US who are breaking ranks with the conservatives on the issue of global warming, proclaiming that it is the right thing to do to take care of the earth; but there are still too many people getting riled up for the wrong reasons, gay marriages, gay bishops, abortion etc. A few days ago, Larry King mentioned on his program that people are too busy to think about what will happen from fifty years from now on! Fifty years! As one of the guests on NPR’s talk show mentioned that if a civilization cannot think fifty years in advance, then that civilization is doomed! During many critical crisis in the recent past, the US has not acted until really pushed hard but once it gets into the arena, it plays to win. Can enough people in this country be convinced, by religious or political leaders that time for inaction is long past?

Scientists have been trying to re-enforce that the time period we now have to act is not centuries but decades or even years. Many amongst us might end up seeing the face of the earth as we know it change during our lifetimes, or we might be lucky enough to see some truly great leaders stride on the world stage to guide humanity through this unprecedented crisis.

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

In this cartoon below, Calvin’s dad makes me think of bloggers in a sense. There is just so much opinion out there passing as facts in blogosphere that sometimes you do not know whether it is fact or fiction!

Is it a requirement to do a favorible story, if there is none? That does not stop partisan Carl Moore, a staunch conservative to mock 60 minutes anyways!