Hyderabad Blues

4 Comments

Five years is a long time. The city has changed so much. In fact, it would only be a slight exaggeration on my part to say that Hyderabad has changed more in the past five years than it ever did in the first twenty-three years of my life that I spent growing up here. That fuzzy feeling of familiarity it had as the place I always called home has vanished with all the old buildings that were like loyal friends to me.

Perhaps it is because of the glitzy malls that have sprung up like a litter of rabbits seemingly out of nowhere? Perhaps it is because of all the new money that has transformed Hyderabad from a sleepy, laid back provincial capital into a pulsing cosmopolitan melting pot? Or perhaps it is because of the insanely dense traffic that has turned driving into a most unwelcome chore? Strangely (on second thought ‘surprisingly’ might be a better word) I don’t think it is because of the above reasons. Instead, I think it is because of a new found hurry everyone seems to be in. That typically Hyderabadi unhurriedness has been replaced by a rude rush to get somewhere. And that has made this place, these roads, this city seem unfamiliar. Now, the city seems like a friend I’m meeting for the first time after leaving school a decade back. There are parts that are comforting in their familiarity but for the most part things have changed. So there is this awkwardness. The awkwardness of a long absence. There is distance too. A distance born out of that very same awkwardness.

In the first month, after I came back, I roamed around some places that I used to frequent in the hopes of finding that old familiarity again. That long stretch of twisting and turning road between Taj Banjara and Nagarjuna Circle over which I raced on empty nights against the adrenaline churning through my veins. That beautifully scenic but lonely road that starts after Tolichowki and continues till the second gate of HCU.  That upstart addition to the spine of Hussain Sagar, which dared to call herself a Necklace. That hole in the wall bar beyond Bahar restaurant where you get the best Chicken 81 in the world. Finally, HCU campus itself, which was so wonderfully wild, more jungle and shrub than university. Beyond subtle traces of the old they all seemed to have turned into pale shadows of their former dusky glory. Perhaps their souls are spent under the weight of all the hurry that seems to have invaded Hyderabad. Why the sudden rush? Or is everyone actually running away from something? The old genteel culture, the nawabi laziness, the slow passing of the day over multiple cups of Irani chai; all replaced now by the gloomy glamor of globalization.

I know change is inevitable. In this world nothing stays the same for long. Heartbreaks get transformed by nostalgia into experience. Experience gently develops into wisdom. So a city is no different. It is only a sentimental fool who looks at the past through blinkered glasses colored by false nostalgia. The heart yearns for the familiar but the mind knows better. This duality of reason and emotion drives me into this curious state of lethargy where I seem to be waiting for something to give. Five years can wreak havoc on expectations built across the divide of continents.

However, five years is also a weird length of time. It is not as significant as a decade nor is it as quick as a couple of years. It is somewhat like that indeterminate time between dusk and night when familiar things take on a melancholic aspect that cloaks their true character. So I may be jumping the gun as usual. After all, it has only been a couple of months. Time can heal the awkwardness. Renewed friendship can bridge the distance. Is it possible? Only the city can tell.

|   

Trier Troubles

We needed alcohol. Due to the lack of time and poor planning we had not picked up any before we started traveling. So we hit the streets of sleepy Trier in search of a shop that sold alcohol. But try as we might we could not find one. We drove through deserted neighborhoods and leafy suburbs but there no sign of alcohol on the horizon. We crossed the Mösel many times in our quest. It was as if we were living in a time of prohibition. All our impromptu plans of playing poker with a cold beer in hand at the camping ground were at risk of going waste. So we wandered some more. There were comparisons between the ease of finding alcohol after midnight in India and in the beer capital of the world, Germany. I found it strange that it was taking us so much time to find an open kiosk. Back in Cologne I only had to walk a few hundred yards from my house to find two. It seemed as if the people of Trier had no craving for alcohol after midnight. And so we found ourselves across the Mösel yet again. Cars passed us and their inhabitants seemed strangely content. Had they been more successful than us? Would we ever find what we were searching for? Or would we have to return empty handed and crawl into a tent without the cool balm of alcohol in our stomachs to ease the cold passage of night?

After crossing the Mösel another time we took a random turn to the left and found ourselves at an intersection. And standing right there to the right of the intersection like a lighthouse for floundering ships was an open döner shop. My friend ventured out full of desperate hope. I joined him. But our hopes did not last long. The shop did not sell any alcohol. Perhaps he saw our faces droop or felt our hopes slipping away, whatever the reason, as we were leaving the shop owner threw us a bone in the form of a suggestion. He pointed to a bar opposite his shop, tucked away on the corner and suggested to us to try our luck there. Hopes renewed we thanked him, crossed the road and approached the bar. From the outside it was unremarkable. I forgot its name as soon as I saw it. We passed through the open doors and strangely it felt like as if I had crossed some kind of special portal into another world. We walked into a land not often encountered.

The bar was a large room interspersed with wooden benches and tables. Along the walls at regular intervals were garishly bright game machines with blinking lights. At the far end, opposite the door was the bar counter. On the right side of the room were two doors. One presumably led to the toilets while the other opened into a room filled with a pale yellow light. I could not see clearly what the room contained or ascertain its function. It seemed rather odd and out of place as if it was added as an afterthought by a bored builder.

There was an air of impending decay about the place. The bar was not in disrepair but perhaps due to the sickly yellow light or the garish lights of the game machines the bar had an air of approaching apocalypse.

There were six people in the bar. Two young men were sitting in an alcove right next to the door. They were talking among themselves in the harsh guttural German that is characteristic of first generation Turkish immigrants. I was struck by their presence in that bar. It did not seem like a place for young people. What were they doing there? Had they also set out on a similar quest as us, wandered into that place and could not go back across the portal into the normal world outside? What was the strange attraction that the place held for them? I suddenly realized that sometimes when you spend too much time amidst mediocrity and routine and encounter anything out of the ordinary it exerts a force on you that is not easy to shake off. I could almost believe that the young men there were caught in the same force.

The remaining people in the place consisted of two women and a man with a white beard sitting at the bar and drinking. The fourth person was the bartender. He seemed ancient and had the same air of slow decay about him as the bar. His cheeks were sunken in gloom and he spoke in deep ponderous tones with long pauses between his words. It was as if he was measuring the passage of time in the spaces between his words. In this he reminded me strongly of Vajpayee, the former prime minister of India, whose speeches were also filled with such thoughtful pauses between words.

|   

The Shame of the Indian Male

7 Comments

It is as if India is losing her humanity part by part. Coming close on the heels of the recent spate of reports on women molested in various parts of India is this horrific and tragic report from Surat about a brave man named Keshav Vishwakarma who tried to prevent a woman from being heckled. For being a good Samaritan, four hours later, he was doused with kerosene and put on fire. Incredibly, with 75% burn injuries he walked two kilometers to a police station to report the incident. Unfortunately, he later succumbed to his injuries at the hospital.

It is nothing new that women in India have a torrid time in public spaces. Even as a child I could not help but notice how careful my mother would be when she had to go out alone or with me to any public space, be it to the market or to the cinema or to drop me off at school. She would carefully wrap her pallu around herself completely so that no bare skin was visible anywhere between her face and feet. In the bus she always made sure that she sat as much in the front as possible, away from the men’s seats and on the road she would ask me to walk on the outer side so that I’d be shielding her from passing traffic (meaning the sundry Indian male who would not think twice about grabbing or groping a woman in public).

Later, when I was older, I’d listen in horror as my female friends recounted incident after incident about how disgusting and desperate the average Indian male is in public. I was ashamed and embarrassed that the freedom I took for granted came with so many reservations for them. To think that every time they were out in public they had to deal with innumerable snide comments which would range from ‘kya potti hai re’ to men in cars slowing down to ask ‘ati kya?’ showed me how different a world it is for an Indian woman compared to her male counterpart. They had to be on constant guard to not let men get too close in public spaces. For if men got too close more often than not their body parts would be groped, grabbed or pawed in the most obscene way. My friends often would not take it lying down if they were in a group and always tried to fight back. But they also knew that it was safer to keep quiet especially if they were alone. They knew from practical experience how unsafe it is for an Indian woman to walk on the street alone even in a big city like Hyderabad. And these were the so called elite upper middle class women who were confident, educated and unapologetic about what they wore or how they behaved and who therefore, according to some, are asking for such abuse by dressing or behaving unlike a ‘traditional Indian woman’. A male friend, upon listening to such incidents from my female friends, even had the gall to say that if they stopped wearing dresses befitting a whore they would be given more respect! If only the truth is so simple. Even women who wear ‘traditional’ Indian dresses are not spared such abuse. I recall a nonsensical dress code directive by Anna University along the very lines of such an argument about which I had blogged here.

So why do we Indian men behave like this? Many men would object perhaps saying that men are the same everywhere in the world. To a certain extent that is true. But I’ve observed how big a difference there is between the average European male and his Indian counterpart when it comes to women. Men defer to women here in public spaces. Although men do eye good looking women here it is limited to just that. There are no snide or obscene comments passed and in my four years here I’ve never ever seen a man behave obscenely towards a woman in public. Yes, there are occasionally teenagers who seem to tease women but they are more the exception than the rule.

|       

The Museum

3 Comments

Plan

How much of history do we remember? As a philosopher once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. But we keep forgetting and thereby keep repeating the same mistakes. Our collective history is littered with examples of the vilest of deeds that have repeated themselves through the ages. From Germany to Gujarat and from Rwanda to Cambodia millions have been murdered and massacred just because they were the ‘other’. A group of ‘others’ who could conveniently be blamed for whatever imaginary wrongs those in power could propagate about them. And people would believe them for it is easier to blame someone else rather than confront a problem.

AI

Therefore, it is important to create symbols and to build special places where memories of the past are kept alive and remembered. For it is necessary to remember even if memories seem futile. For in remembering we make a promise even if we do not always keep it. A promise to do whatever it takes to prevent what we are seeing of the past from repeating itself in the present or in the future.

Space

One such place is the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Among the museums I’ve seen it alone makes brilliant use of light and space to evoke a feeling of great loss and sadness. Each facet of the architecture and arrangement is meant to mean something and that meaning is conveyed using the simplest of means: stark unadorned walls, huge empty rooms, select photos and belongings, uneven ground, all meant to reproduce at least in part the unbelievable horrors experienced by the victims of the holocaust.

Faces

|   

Pourquoi Paris?

7 Comments

I.

Steve McCurry’s photographs were a like a balm to my tired and bored eyes. The intense and saturated portraits of mainly South Asian faces formed a wonderful contrast to the grey and gloomy Parisian streets outside the gallery. He has this amazing ability to capture the wondrous beauty of the eyes of the people in his portraits. Bright blue eyes big enough to fit the world, intense green eyes that arrest you in mid stride and deep dark eyes that you can disappear into on a journey into their souls. There were perhaps twenty portraits there but ah what a pleasure it was to stare at each one of them to my heart’s content! From the very famous ‘Afghan Girl’ to the lesser known but equally captivating photo of a flower seller on the way to the market in a boat on the weed covered waters of Dal Lake, I stared transfixed at slices of human emotion hung up in front of my eyes.

I was therefore grateful that I saw the price list before I embarrassed myself by going ahead with my original intention to enquire about buying one of the prints. The ‘cheapest’ price for a print on sale was 4000 Euros! With a sigh and a last wistful glance around I wandered back out into the now raining streets of the art gallery neighborhood of Paris.

II.

I was lost among graves of people unknown to me. The cemetery was divided into divisions but without a map I was hopelessly lost. I could have asked someone. But even those with maps seemed lost. More than that though, I wanted to find his grave on my own. Call it my own little musical pilgrimage if you are being generous or a foolishly romantic notion if you are just being charitable. So I walked on past grand graves over which angels in stone kept watch, past graves neglected and now conquered by kingdoms of moss, past newer graves that were adorned with small photographs of the dead, past graves that were enclosed within small Gothic chambers that seemed to be designed to keep the dead away from the reach of the living.

|   

The Great Connection

Comment
[audio:Prodigy_Smack.mp3]

Prodigy – Smack My Bitch Up

I.

It was Smack My Bitch Up that was playing as I read a particular section towards the beginning of Bank’s Excession where a drone, if I remember correctly, has to escape from a spaceship that is being taken over. And in one of those inexplicable coincidences the music and the action in the book fit each other perfectly. I could imagine a scene of the same on film with the music on the background and the drone running to escape out of the ship. There was a thrill of adrenaline as the music pumped the page into a 6 minute scene of pulse pounding action. And when the song entered the slow meditative section in the middle the action also entered a seemingly slow motion stage on the page where the drone glides through the air. Spielberg couldn’t have done it better on film. Incredible!

II.

Greece was sunny and bright, the very opposite of Auster’s grey and moody New York in City of Glass. As I ran from one end of Greece to another I seemed to mirror Quinn’s random wanderings through the dark side of New York. It was a wonderful contrast to look out of the window of the ferry and lose myself in the endless blue of the Aegean and a moment later lose myself in a world of a different sort between those pages, a world where wrong numbers led to postmodern detective adventures. And on the plane back as Quinn descended into a spiral of pointless obsession I felt the darkness outside the thick window reach in and for a second grip my heart.

III.

The wild rain and wind made me stay indoors in a bunk bed in a hostel near the Princess Street Gardens in the heart of old Edinburgh. There, Safran-Foer held my interest with his young protagonist dealing with post 9/11 trauma and his mute grandfather, witness to the Dresden firebombing. Reliving the firebombing lying on a hostel bed does not seem, at first glance, the most profound or sensitive thing to do. But what did surroundings matter when body and soul you are beside the narrator experiencing the endless horror. The shriek of the wind outside the window became the cries of people burnt and mutilated. As he ran through the smoking ruins of a glorious city, crazed and horrified, the rain outside seemed to fall in tandem to his running footsteps. The strength and precocity of the young boy instilled hope in a dark world taken over by low grey clouds and muted light.

|     

Riviera Redux

Comment

The Riviera

I.

It was hot and humid. The sun beat down upon me like a bully intent on inflicting bodily harm. The heat was different from the dry heat of Hyderabadi summers I knew so well. In Nice, the heat had a burning quality. As I stood by the unfinished bus shelter waiting for the correct bus to take me near my hostel, after having gotten on the wrong bus, with my camera bag pushing down on one shoulder and the backpack weighing down my back, I could feel every inch of exposed skin burn. But it was a change. It was a change from the cold, wet, grey and miserable ‘summer’ which was on offer in Cologne. So even though I felt like complaining I did not. I just cursed my stupidity in not having taken the correct bus, continuously wiped the sweat off my brow and rejoiced silently when a refreshingly cool breeze off the sea blew across my face.

II.

The waves sounded different. They did not have the majestic power of the waves on the Bay of Bengal nor did they have the soothing synchronicity of the waves of the Arabian Sea. They seemed dispirited and mild. It was as if the Mediterranean herself was tired from the sun. But she made up for the lack of drama with the brilliant blue of her waters, an endless deep azure that seemed to hold infinite beauty in her jeweled tiara. The beach itself was stony, soft and rounded pebbles that could hurt and soothe at the same time depending on the way you walked, sat or slept on them. But they hardly troubled me. On the contrary, they soothed my tired feet by applying pressure on seemingly the correct points. I lay down and amid the cries of children playing in the water and the waves breaking; I read a book set in Ottoman Istanbul and dozed off by the white fence in the shade offered by the shrubs.

III.

She was slightly different from the way I had imagined her from her photos. She was as slim as she was in the photos but not as tall. The spectacles she wore were like a wall, distracting one’s gaze from her pretty face and hiding her big beautiful eyes. Her lips were as lovely as they were in the photos. I had not been wrong.

|   

A Scottish Jaunt

Alone in Kyoto – Air

[audio:Air_Alone.mp3]

The first view of anything below was when the clouds cleared briefly to reveal the grey and choppy waters of the North Sea far below. Small waves crowned by foam marked the surface of the huge stretch of water. I remember feeling a curious mixture of awe and fear. Awe at seeing so much water all the way to the horizon, unmarked by mankind. Fear for the sudden silly scenarios that invaded my mind. What if the engines of the plane failed and we plunged into the water below? What were the chances of survival? You get the picture.

The first thing I noticed about Edinburgh was the smell. The city had an all pervasive metallic smell of urine. Was something wrong with my nose? Was it because of the incessant rain washing the streets? Who knows? And yeah, the rain. It was a rainy, grey and blustery Edinburgh, with winds reaching perhaps 30-50 kmph, that I walked into. Yes, the famous Scottish weather was welcoming me in all its irritating splendor. My umbrella was broken by the wind within the first 30 minutes. I was battered and assaulted by the shrieking wind and the pin pricks of a million rain drops. Welcome to Scotland indeed!

|    

Doctoral Dogma

9 Comments

Life as a doctoral student sucks. It doesn’t suck in the ordinary nobody loves me suckiness (does that word even exist?) level. No, it takes sucking (pardon my vulgar language) to a different level, a level where you are the lowest form of life in the world. I mean even bacteria have more fun. They are practically immortal. They have sex almost every 20 minutes. They can live on almost anything. And they have the coolest of names. Chlamydia. Nocardia. Vibrio. Contrast that with an average doctoral student. He is a mouse (although even a mouse would be offended to be compared to such a lowly being) like creature, most often with spectacles and irritating habits like trailing off in the middle of a sentence into vague silences. Their only sex appeal lies in their detailed knowledge about how two proteins fold exactly around each other. You get the picture.

What do such specimens of the human species do when a beautiful woman goes up to them and talks? To digress a little, such events do not happen in the real world. The probability of such an event happening, according to knowledgeable sources in the Mathematics department across the road, is 0.00. In fact, apparently, this is the only known event in the world that has such a perfect probability of not happening! So let me add the rider, in a hypothetical world, to the above scenario.

Continuing with the hypothetical situation, the said graduate student will first start perspiring. His pulse will be racing because hormones are being dumped into his blood, leading to rapid changes in his metabolic profile. He starts blushing. When he opens his mouth, either no sound comes out or else mumbled and garbled words pour out, which of course do not make any sense. If that beautiful woman still has any sense she would leave. However, if she is one of those rare beings, who for some insane reason either enjoy tormenting such innocent geeks, feel pity for such lowly life forms or genuinely like disheveled and bespectacled nerds, she will stay and talk further.

|    

Impact of Globalization on Indian Agriculture

75 Comments

(Note: Reproduced below with kind permission, in its entirety, is an essay written by my friend Dipanjali Rao as a research project for her Master’s course. It is long but it makes a very interesting as well as a sad read.)

Introduction

The liberalisation of India’s economy was adopted by India in 1991. Facing a severe economic crisis, India approached the IMF for a loan, and the IMF granted what is called a ‘structural adjustment’ loan, which is a loan with certain conditions attached which relate to a structural change in the economy. The government ushered in a new era of economic reforms based on these conditions. These reforms (broadly called Liberalisation by the Indian media) can be broadly classified into three areas: Liberalisation, privatization and globalization. Essentially, the reforms sought to gradually phase out government control of the market (liberalisation), privatize public sector organizations (privatization), and reduce export subsidies and import barriers to enable free trade (globalization). There was a considerable amount of debate in India at the time of the introduction of the reforms, it being a dramatic departure from the protectionist, socialist nature of the Indian economy up until then. However, reforms in the agricultural sector in particular came under severe criticism in the late 1990s, when 221 farmers in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh committed suicide. (The damage done, 2005) The trend was noticed in several other states, and the figure today, according to a leading journalist and activist, P. Sainath1, stands at 100,000 across the country. (Sainath, 2006) Coupled with this was a sharp drop in agricultural growth from 4.69% in 1991 to 2.06% in 1997. (Agriculture Statistics at a Glance, 2006) This paper seeks to look into these and other similar negative trends in Indian agriculture today, and in analyzing the causes, will look at the extent to which liberalisation reforms have contributed to its current condition. It will look at supporting data from three Indian states which have been badly affected by the crisis: Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Kerala. Andhra Pradesh’s (AP’s) experience is particularly critical in this debate because it was headed by Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, who pursued liberalization with enthusiasm. Hence liberalization in AP has been faster than other states, and the extent of its impact has been wider and deeper. (Sainath, 2005)

|