Never Forget!

As an army brat, I have a soft spot for anything to do with the armed forces. And this week that soft spot was reactivated as I drove to a store in Fairfield. At one of the intersections, traffic was stopped briefly by a bunch of police escort riders. At first, I thought it was a VIP traveller or something, but then two big eighteen-wheelers lumbered through the intersection with the words "Wreaths Across America" plastered on their sides. Turns out, that this is a voluntary initiative to decorate the graves at Arlington National Cemetery for the holidays. I applaud such gestures, while I also recommend practical help for veterans and their families like Fisher House that provides practical help for wounded veterans and their families - a military version of the Ronald McDonald Houses. If you live in the United States and are looking for good causes to support this holiday season, these three would surely qualify.

Season of Discontent

Today there was light snow that fell across the region. I love the sight of days like this one when there is a powder white coating on the roads and the holiday season seems a little more festive. Stopping at the stores to browse for possible gifts, though, I caught sight of my reflection and noticed that although I was - am - relatively happy, I had a frown on my face and looked stressed. What struck me was how many of the shoppers at the stores looked stressed, their mouths thin lines of discontent, their foreheads creased with dissatisfaction. I suppose this too is seasonal. Gift-buying is stressful.

At one of the stores where they had a going-out-of-business sale, the storeowner and a customer were animatedly discussing the state of the world and how they could not wait till 2008 to see the last of the current administration. "I want gas prices to go down again!" the woman cried. Her customer nodded. "About time we got out of Iraq." I hated to tell both of them that neither the demise of the Bush administration nor a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is about to resolve the enduring problem of gas prices or that of oil in general. Yes, the current mismanagement exacerbated the crisis, but it was waiting to happen anyway. Time to fund - seriously fund - research into electric cars and other forms of transportation not dependent on faraway resources. Hmmm...on the other hand, on days like this, I don't want to be riding a bicycle either. Someone help.

Relaxing for Turkey Day

It's been almost a month since I last posted. The delay is mainly due to laziness on my part. Several things happened. Durga Pujo at Stamford, the elections, Diwali at two friends' houses, and going to see Om Shanti Om at Bridgeport. All of the afore-mentioned were hectic or fun or both and now it's time to get ready to eat like a pig (or maybe eat a pig, I don't know what my friends are cooking this year). The setting outside is really pretty here in Fairfield County, Connecticut. The late fall has left the trees deep yellow and red and even against the gray skies and the blustery winds, the colors are breathtaking.

I enjoy cooking, I really, really enjoy cooking. I spend hours cooking special meals for my family and friends and I feel happy, not oppressed, when I am in the kitchen (Oppression is the cleaning-up after the eating is over). Thanksgiving Day being K.'s favorite holiday (and my favorite adopted one), the last Thursday of November usually finds the whole family in a frenzy in the kitchen. We love having our friends and family over for Thanksgiving, but we are laidback about the preparations, usually starting things only the night before. With only one oven, that means that the morning is packed tight since all the pies and the accompaniments have to be done before the bird goes in. In between chopping, stirring, beating, whisking and blending like maniacs, there is always the house to be dusted down and made presentable for guests.

The kids spend the whole morning in a tizzy of excitement, usually over-indulged with sugary snacks in lieu of a real breakfast (I mean who has time to cook eggs and stuff when there is so much to be done). They get underfoot in a charming way, the little one wrapping herself around my leg and having to be hauled from one part of the kitchen to the other in this manner. K. is better at finding them things to do - beating the eggs for the pies, stirring the cranberry sauce (under supervision of course). I tend to be a go-it-alone chef because I have control issues. Invariably, there is too much food of one kind and not of another, so K. has to rush out to get stuff like parsley or thyme so that the bird has some flavor. Then the guests arrive and the food is on the table and before we know it, we are eating, eating, eating....and then the daze.

So this year, it will be a little different because we are going to our friends A. and C.'s place for Thanksgiving. As they are more organized about entertaining than we are, I am sure the feast will be amazing and we can relax, drink wine and chat. I find the idea novel and...welcome. This Thursday, will be the first Thanksgiving Day in years that I will not be rising at the crack of dawn to get the holiday dinner ready on time. Ahhh...now if only my little M. could get the idea of sleeping in till 9:00.

Wildlife Hazards

Here, in Fairfield County, Connecticut, deer are the major threat to flourishing gardens and to highway safety. This year, K. lovingly planted blueberry bushes, raspberry bushes, Jerusalem artichokes, etc. Alas, we harvested only a pitiful bunch of each for our visiting pests chomped everything down to the stems. At least, they didn't threaten our lives, except indirectly through any ticks which may cause Lyme disease. However, we get our yard treated regulary for deer ticks so hopefully we are safe.

The bigger issue for me is that deer can cause often fatal accidents. I see them grazing on the sides of the Merrit Parkway and sometimes even by the sides of the far busier I-95. I have seen many deer carcasses on the Merrit, probably the victims of encounters with cars or pick-up trucks. I certainly hope the drivers escaped the encounter with no injuries. In the tussle between humans and deer I come down on the side of humans when it comes to highway safety.

At least, our deer are not - yet- attacking people directly, as are the monkeys in India. Here is the tragic result of one such monkey assault on a Delhi man, the deputy mayor of the city. In both cases, the solutions are the subject of much agonizing. Cull the offending animals, restrict human expansion into their domain, a little of both? The jury is still out on this issue.

Happy 60th, India!

Well, the land of my birth is sixty years old, enfin! Only twenty years younger than her (there, I gave my age away, not that it was much of a secret), I have seen her through socialist self-restraint and hyper-capitalist excess. K. tells me that things were pretty restrained here in the U.S. too till the eighties when the culture of consumption gripped every sphere of life, from clothes, to cars to houses to education. According to K., my one-person resource on things American, the culture of malls, etc., was pretty alien to him till his late teens. Now of course, that is all there is here. Except small, boutique-y bouts of defiance, like the farmers' markets held in different small towns in Fairfield County.

To me, not being much of a shopper (except for used books, but that's a different story), the biggest difference between my Indian childhood and my American middle age is my use of the bicycle. Growing up in small army cantonments (or bases as they say here), my bike was my chief mode of transportation - to school, to dance lessons, to friend's houses. Grown men and women biked to work, the milkman balanced a precarious load of cans full of milk on his rear wheel, soldiers and officers rode bikes to the parade ground and to the lines, stiffening their arms and straightening up whenever a flag car approached them. Here in Fairfield County, as I bike around the neighborhood behind S., keeping an eye on his wobbly forward movements, I realize that my bike is now my chief mode of recreation. And that's the way it will stay, unless K.'s prophecy of impending energy crisis comes true in the near future. In which case, I guess I will be hauling loads of groceries back on my bike like this unknown.

Anyway, happy 60th India, here's to many more! As for you, Hero Cycle of my childhood, I have more ambivalent feelings towards you. Not sure that your gears were up to scratch, given the tumble I took on the second day of my ownership of a brand new bike.

Health Culture vs. Youth Culture

One of the nice things about living in this part of the country is that most people who live here are not obese. That doesn't mean that they are all skinny, but in general most men and women here are fairly health-conscious and make a conscious effort to stay fit and eat healthy. At the gym, I see women and men in their sixties and seventies ambling along on the treadmills, rowing determinedly, strolling outdoors or riding their bikes, their grey hairs damp with the honest exertion of body and limb. In the Pilates classes, there is a good mixture of the senior brigade with the more youthful lot. And this is a good thing, folks. I remind myself of this whenever I head out to visit family and friends in the Midwest, where I see many people groaning literally as they drag their bulk hither and thither.

The flip side of this is that the fitness obsession sometimes dovetails into the national obsession with youthful looks. It's pretty disgusting to overhear locker-room conversations where women stand around discussing casually the recent liposuction procedure of a common friend or talk about which doctor does a better job than the other.

What's my take on it? I am less critical of some procedures than others. It's mostly to do with the level of pain (physical coward that I am), although I generally disapprove of cosmetic surgery. Restylane injections and Botox: well, if you already wax your legs and your eyebrows, is the pain really any different? But tummy tucks and liposuction? No way. That much pain for something that doesn't involve saving your life or having a baby? Not worth it, ladies. You only need such radical intervention for your looks if you have had a serious accident and/or suffered some serious disfiguration. Otherwise, we women are more than the sum of our physical looks or at least that's how we should raise our daughters to think about themselves. So in this instance, I will take the mu-mu clad midwestern woman over the svelte Fairfield-ite. At least the former is not trying desperately to turn the clock back to some vanished fresh-faced youthful time in her past.

This is also a cultural thing, I think. Nobody I know in India has had her appearance altered surgically, atlhough sadly, the culture of artificial youthfulness is catching on in India too . What is not so good though is that a lot of older women in my family also lead very sedentary lives, except for the exertion of housework. Personally, the happiest blend I find are among some of the older Indian women I see who now try to fit in some physical exercise into their routine. And instead of surgery, they pamper themselves with facials and massages and manicures and pedicures. Among the middle class , I loved, and still love, the sight of older Indian women, well-coiffed, skin glowing with good care and a judicious use of make-up, their cotton saris starched and worn elegantly in summer, their silk saris immaculate in winters, their single well-chosen gold chain, their gold bangles...you get the idea. As for the others, who could have a problem with this? Beauty defying the oppressive weight of poverty. Now if any of these women appeared with their face pulled hideously tight by surgery, I would scream and run in the opposite direction.

Reading List of Shame

OK, so instead of working on well, work, I procrastinate. Some women go shopping, others go to the spa, yet others call their friends to gossip. Moi, I go - reading. So here is my reading list of shame: the books I read to escape the world of reading for work. Last week was Innocent Blood by P.D. James. You see, this makes the shamefulness of my reading list even worse. Most of the time, I don't escape into abstract masterpieces of literature. I procrastinate by immersing myself in thrillers, mysteries, chick-lit, sometimes a good novel to balance things out. OK, back to procrastination now. Next on the list is An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, again by P.D. James.

Out-of-Placeness

As we finally push on with the long-delayed landscaping, I feel sometimes like adding a garden temple to Ganesha. It was a lovely temple in the courtyard of the Mayfair Hotel in Puri, Orissa that first made me think about it. Every morning, the priest would come and clean and decorate the Nandi in the little temple. How nice, I thought if I could have a little grotto for Ganesha in my backyard, although I doubt I would keep it as nicely as the priest did his little Shiva temple. But now that I live in Fairfield County, I wonder if my efforts will meet with approval or with suspicion. Here, anything that is not Christian in form or substance is viewed as crazy New Age or even worse, as black magic. My kids' babysitter N. described to me with horror how she had decided against the purchase of a home where the owner practiced, she insisted, black magic. How do you know, I asked? Well, she replied, he had a room full of images and there was a black book in there. It made me wonder, was the owner perhaps a Hindu with a puja room? After all, Kali can look pretty fearsome. But then again, Hindus typically won't cover their sacred books in black. Perhaps the poor man was just an avid collector of what seemed exotic art to him. Either way, it made me rethink my plans for my garden Ganesha. This is what it means to be a minority in a foreign land: you really have to think about your actions and how they might be perceived. I've temporarily shelved the idea of a little garden grotto for Ganesha. I certainly don't want the benevolent god of good luck to be scorned as pagan, or heathen or a deity of black magic. But most of all, I definitely don't want him to be taken for a god-awful garden gnome.

There's Criticism and then there's Criticism

I finally read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book, Infidel. It was troubling to read, both for its content and for the author's attitudes to her native land and faith. At one level, I completely understand her incredible anger against her own upbringing. We feel the oppressiveness of our own cultures far more than do outsiders to our cultures. The disillusioned Catholic or Lutheran has far more anger against his or her own faith than would a Hindu who has only a hazy idea of what Christian guilt or original sin is all about. Similarly, we as outsiders can only shudder at Hirsi Ali's childhood experience of circumcision and of the oppressive gender relations in Saudi Arabia. But our lives are not affected by it so we have only a partial understanding of these issues.
So why then am I not wholly persuaded of the utter horror of Islam, as Hirsi Ali would have us believe? Partly, because I am familiar with the work of other reformers of Islam. The most notable being Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi. Now Badshah Khan was a Pashtun, a member of the same groups of people who live in Pakistan and Afghanistan, peoples now being pursued by NATO, the Pakistani armies (with lukewarm enthusiasam) as they are now great supporters of the Taliban. But less than a hundred years ago, these same Pashtuns became the best example of nonviolent resistance to the British, their leader the Frontier Gandhi, the living example of how any faith and any people can be harnessed for the cause of good.

The Frontier Gandhi worked tirelessly against medieval Pashtun practices as the veiling of women, their segregation from larger society, their powerlessness. He also campaigned against the daily violence and the gun culture that prevailed among his own people. He endured prison and torture for all these activities. But he was so powerful an influence among the Pashtuns that the day he died, hundreds of thousands of Pashtuns crossed the Afghan border to join other Pashtuns in mourning the passing of this great man. His Khudai Khidmatgars - red-shirted volunteers - have passed into legend as the reformist service-oriented league that captured the imagination of an entire generation of freedom fighters. Why did he succeed (albeit briefly, as after independence in 1947, he became a political prisoner of the Pakistani government)? Ghaffar Khan succeeded because his criticism was rooted in love for his country and his people, not in hate of these tribal people. This, I think, is the difference between him and the Hirsi Ali's and Irshad Manji's of the Islamic world. The Frontier Gandhi often said that it was difficult to love the Pashtuns, who are a notoriously violent and abrasive people. But in order to bring about change in these societies, he insisted that one has to love them. His whole life was a testimony of the power of love that enabled him to work amongst the worlds's most "unlovable" people.

Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji might make me nod in agreement at the plight of their status under Islam. But their ill-concealed hatred of their own people make me realize why they are not female avatars of the Frontier Gandhi. They have huge audiences among the non-Muslim western audience that applauds them but they have no standing at all among their own people, ironically, the very ones that they wish to change through the story of their lives. Are there any Muslim activists who do seem authentic to me? Yes, there are. For example there is Pervez Hoodbhoy, physicist in Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, who is a voice of reason. He is unafraid to criticize fundamentalists and their government patrons. So is Asma Jehangir, human rights activist in Pakistan. Why are they both more convincing to me than Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji? It is because they both live and work in the societies that they want to change and they have at the very least affection for the people to whom they want to bring change. Affection or even respect for Somalis or Muslims in general is not something that comes across in the books authored by either Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji.

Bridal Decline

I was so sorry to read about the plight of sari weavers in Varanasi in the Washington Post this morning. Both realities exist in my native land. On the one hand, there is the relentless upward march of the middle class and on the other, there exists also the downward spiral of some of the most beautiful traditions of the country. I'm so glad that I bucked the trend of wearing purple - or whatever the couleur du jour was - and decided to wear a beautiful, traditional red Benarasi sari for my wedding all those years ago. Here in New England, I wonder what handicraft traditions went for a toss as the age of plastic and cheap imported clothes caught on. Anyone knows?

The Bourgeois Life

It's been two years since I had this blog. Never told friends or family about it. It's just there. But what really is it about? It's hard writing about things when you exclude work, neighbors, family and friends. After all, these are the daily material of our lives. But early on, I decided to write about my life outside of work. So, although I find my part time job very stimulating - it's useful, not just a part-time vanity job - and although I like most of my neighbors and family and all of my friends, they are off-limits to this blog too, except in a very general way.
Of the things that remain, I find myself reflecting mainly on my lifestyle. And living here in Southwestern Connecticut, it's all about real estate, the price of gas, and the activities at school. Once in a while I go into the city and look wistfully at the could-have-been me me as she joins her friends for an evening of fun. The alternative me wears snazzy clothes, preposterous high heels and looks, I have to admit it, very fetching. Then, after a dizzy evening of socializing, my substitute self deflates her spirits, puts herself onto a late evening Metro North train and returns to her bourgeois life in the suburbs.

Edible Forest Gardens

The magnolias are done swooning on my lawn, their fat pink opulence already becoming this year's spring memory. There are the usual forsythias, the dogwoods are still a tender, tiny white and pink glow. It's springtime, folks, and summer is just around the corner. K. is outside planting his "edible forest garden." He hated gardening (or so he claims) until this past year when he read a book called Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke (with Eric Toensmeier) and now he has gone absolutely crazy, planting pear trees and plum trees, blueberry bushes and hazelnut trees (bushes?). I, who never could tell a zinnia from a dahlia, have also been infected but my enthusiasm is more muted. My energy is directed at keeping something pretty and flowery around the yard. I chose a ground cover of strawberries and goldenstar and hopefully that will be attractive to look at. To this K. added wintergreen which, so I am told, has edible berries.

In the backyard, I have become an expert chipper. While K. digs up the pesky bushes that we can't eat (and the deer won't eat either), I use our new machine to grind all of them into chips to be composted into topsoil. Farmer K. contemplates his soon-to-be edible yard with a beatific smile. I am less entranced, thinking of all the deer that will now show up. In any case, I'm more of an indoors-type. Prefer polishing the newly-installed shelves in my office so that I can finally start work. Or maybe I'll just surf the internet a little while longer...