The Way We Walk

I'm back in Kolkata after a substantial amount of time. A short break, mainly family business that takes its own time and has its own dimensions. On the sidelines, I observe the changed contours of the old hometown.

Kolkata was not a place I ever lived in, properly. It was the city of my ancestors, to which I returned periodically, the mention of whose name evoked memories of a creepy, narrow, three-storeyed house in a very congested part of the city. Childhood routines involved travelling from farflung places in India - mainly border towns - to Kolkata for the inevitable summer holiday pilgrimage to visit elderly relatives and distant cousins. In those days, the city was a place of overwhelming sensation - people spilling out of crowded buses, walking on the broken streets, cars honking madly while belching dark petrol and diesel fumes. What saved these memories from becoming one of many cliched tales of Kolkata impressions was the sudden movement of detail in these mass frescoes of humanity - a man who found the time (and the energy) to wink at me despite hanging on for dear life to the outside of a lopsided bus, a fruitseller at New Market, so old that my mother stopped deliberately to buy his wares, despite not needing (or subsequently eating) his wilting jamuns. I still remember the faded checked bush shirt of the former man, and the grizzled white stubble of the latter.

Aeons later, I notice how the urban spaces here have shifted, as have their uses. First, the positives. There is no question that people in general look better-fed and are better-dressed Maybe they don't appear so to untrained foreign eyes, but those of us who grew up here know the extent of the changes for the better that have taken place. The absolutely destitute who crowded around our childish elbows in the 1970s and 1980s, have receded into the occasional beggar at the Topsia traffic light. And all of this is a good thing, despite its incompleteness and unevenness as a process.

The spaces between the haves and the have-nots have increased, however, quite literally. As M. and I look over the balcony each morning, I notice that the street in front of my parents' house is walked most often by the people who service the homes of this middle class residential neighborhood - maids, fruitsellers, fishmongers, lock-repairmen - and by stray dogs and crows who fight for territory. The Kolkata middle classes who made up such a large chunk of the flaneurs of the preceding era are less visible. Their preferred stroll now is within the more sanitized territory of the shopping malls where the unpredictabilities of the street are well-controlled. Women stroll, window shop, eat pastries and drink cold coffee in relative calm. Part of me sympathizes - the unruly streets outside are particularly hard for the female pedestrian. Who wants to deal not only with stray dogs but with other menacing predators who also hunt in pack - eve teasers? Still, the other part of me laments the separation and segregation of the classes. A middle class teenager now might not learn from her mother to stop out of compassion for a geriatric fruitseller. For such a girl these days, that fruitseller is not only invisible, he is a fellow citizen with whom she will never learn to interact. A pity, really.

A Tale of Two Faisals

So, it turns out that Faisal Shahzad is just another spoilt brat from the developing world, with a massive sense of entitlement and and absolutely no self-awareness. "Why do you have to follow democracy?" asks Faisal, the well-funded son of a retired Pakistani airforce officer, in a long email to like-minded vipers. (Btw, someone needs to find out if the source of Faisal's father wealth is legit, or -as is common - just the well-known cornering of national resources by a corrupt power elite).

"Why do you have to follow democracy (Human-made laws) if you're already given Laws revealed from Allah, Quran and Sunnah?" asks the moron who went nightclubbing as an undergraduate at the University of Bridgetport, before he turned into the proverbial ungrateful viper. Why indeed, Faisal, why indeed? You answered that question very well, didn't you, you self-entitled jackass (can there be a hybrid viper-jackass)? In fact, if you have any more of such "divinely-revealed" laws for the world, well then, thank you very much, but no thanks. The world definitely does not need any more such laws as articulated by the babalog .



Half a world away, there is another Faisel. Dr. Shah Faisel, a resident of Indian Kashmir, lost his father to terrorism at a young age. An incident that might have broken him and his remaining family turned the young boy into something else. Instead of turning that rage into venom, and becoming a ticking timebomb against innocents, Dr. Faisel used the past seven years to turn himself into somebody worthy of celebration. He first studied to become a physician, then decided to take the extremely hard Indian Civil Services Exam, leaving home to study at the supportive Hamdard Study Circle in New Delhi. To give you an idea of just how hard it is to get through, in 2007 approximately 300,000 people took the exam, of which about 800 were finally selected. About the same numbers and proportions for this year too. And Dr. Shah Faisel was the topper, as in "stood first" in Indian English, the first Kashmiri to top the exam and to add to the pool of Indian Muslims within the ranks of India's policymakers.

Perhaps, it is because Dr. Shah Faisel was not one of the babalog, perhaps because his circumstances were so very different from his namesake buffoon in North America, perhaps because he had no one to give him regular cash infusions, perhaps because he didn't have an inflated sense of entitlement, that he was able to do something positive for himself, for the memory of his murdered father, and for his community. As he described the tragedy that struck him, "I had only two choices - to be bogged down, or to stand up and face the challenge." And unlike the cowardly Faisal of Bridgeport, the Faisel of Kashmir will be held up as a role model for other Indian Kashmiris to follow.

The Mobs that Never Came

Thinking of the relative calm and order during the disorderly time last week, when the storm laid low the western sections of Fairfield County, I decided to probe more deeply into the causes of the relative discipline and stoicism on display in these parts. Since these parts are what I call home for the forseeable future, I would like to, er, compare and contrast, analyze, etc.

Hurricane Katrina laid waste to Louisiana and Mississippi. New Orleans is in ruins, and the total breakdown there meant that people were pretty much on their own, which meant that there was widescale looting and rampaging through stores by members of the general public. The January earthquake in Haiti was also followed by lawlessness, looting and rioting. Last month's earthquake in Chile also triggered some sporadic looting of shops in Concepcion and Santiago (although nowhere near what the media reporting would have us believe).

I'd like to think that we are a special people here in Fairfield County, the We Don't Behave Like That kind of people. And yes, all of us who were affected behaved exceptionally well. Those without power and hot water ate at diners and restaurants, built fires and went without showers. Those who had power took in whole families for three days at a time, with no complaint. We all took a break from life and just chilled (well, some perhaps a little too literally for comfort). But might not our good behavior here have also to do with the fact that a) the storm did not affect all of Connecticut, so reinforcements could come in quickly but just as importantly b) we simply never imagined that the powers-that-be would NOT respond to our plight. They had to respond, this is Fairfield County!

Perhaps, that is the difference between us here in Fairfield County and the others in New Orleans, Port-au-Prince and Santiago. We don't loot and riot because the government comes in quickly to aid us in times of trouble, and we expect it to do so. The folks in the other places have no such grand expectations from the authorities. They know quite well that during a catastrophe, they will be abandoned. Rioting, looting, mayhem are not just a result of a breakdown, they are symptoms of a basic lack of faith in government because during normal times, the institutions of authority bypass those in the ghettoes and the shanties. When the punitive powers of the state - the police, the national guard, etc. - recede during earthquakes and hurricanes, the general feeling is that it's every person for himself or herself. Nobody's coming with repair crews and hot food, or at least not soon. It's the jungle and the best-armed will rule, even if briefly. To sum it up even more clearly - it is finally about class and access to power. I would have said that it's about race too but in this country race and class (especially in Louisiana and Mississippi) are so intertwined, that it doesn't need to be said.

Who Wants to be a Toff?

Just finished reading Sarah Lyall's book, The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British. Overall, what stayed with me were the characteristics she outlines of the British upper class, a status that everybody else in Britain aspires to reach, including the "aspirational middle class" so despised by the toffs. Here is what I understood: in order to be a member of the aristocratic upper class in Britain, one has to eat some very bad food and drink a lot of very good alcohol (no doubt to wash down the execrable food). Lyall writes about going for a picnic with an aristocrat of long lineage who served his guests canned soup, bad ham and white bread sandwiches, swilled down with good wine. Given these criteria, here is a list of peoples and nations who will never be upper class Englishmen or Englishwomen, and some who might be eligible:

1. Indians. No way, will the people who eat fragrant biryanis, pulaos, chutneys, dosas, sambhar, curries, spiced dals and fresh yogurt, ever belong to the world of mediocre food. Besides, Indian alcohol sucks. Except for Old Monk rum, when hidden inside a chilled glass of Coca Cola.
2. The French. They are disqualified on two counts. First, the wines of France are ambrosial. Second, why would any Frenchman or Frenchwoman in his or her right mind ever give up Confit de Canard, Coquilles Saint-Jacques and Pommes Duchesse in order to eat Wonderbread and canned soup? No, no, the food and the drink is too good to qualify them for the English aristocracy.
3. Italians, Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese. See last sentence in previous paragraph.
4. South Americans. The alcohol probably sucks (I don't know, have only drunk Chilean wines which are pretty good) but the food is great. So sorry, amigos and amigas, you can't join the bad food club of the English upper classes.
5. Chinese, East Asians in general. Again, no alcohol, but the food - oh my God! So, no entry to them either.
6. Americans. Inspite of the best efforts of McDonald's and Burger King, a people that can invent things like Buffalo Chicken wings and gumbo, and peach cobbler and smothered pork chops, are barred from the English upper classes. Well, maybe the North East with their love of boiled dinners might qualify, except that their clam chowder might prevent them from enjoying full membership benefits.

So what does that leave us? I'm going to offend a lot of people here and offer up for full membership of the English aristocracy, based on the criteria of bad food and lots of alcohol - the Germans.* Any others who might qualify?

*I say this with great sadness. The nation of bratwurst and frankfurters, the land of bad food, how could that be?! Well, it was the boiled cabbage that decided it, for me.