Thank You For the Music

Tuning in to the Christmas program on NPR, I drove around on last minute errands on Christmas Eve as the voice of Mahalia Jackson filled my car with rich golden notes. It was cold, wet and grey here in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Still, despite the horrible traffic (I saw at least one accident on the Post Road), people were up and about and trying to buy last minute stuff. People like yours truly, who in a miscalculated strategic move, had taken upon themselves the task of the annual gift-buying entrerpise.


I doubt people my age listen to Mahalia Jackson regularly anymore, even here in America. But she was such a part of my childhood that it brings tears to my eyes when I catch her voice here and there, bringing back memories of "Little David, Play on your Harp" echoing through our stone walled bungalow in Dehra Dun. How did that happen? How did Mahalia Jackson become such a part of my very Indian upbringing? How did Paul Robeson enter my consciousness? How did I learn to sing along with Yves Montand at a time when I did not even speak French? And how did all of these singers from lands then unknown to me come to occupy a place in my pantheon of musical deities along with D. V. Paluskar, Bismillah Khan, M. S. Subbulaksmi and the diva Kishori Amonkar?


For this, I have to acknowledge the very specific case of my immediate family environment. My parents were a middle-class army couple. But they - and I - occupied an uneasy position between two very different strata in Indian society. On the one hand, there was the uber-westernized elite of immediate postcolonial India, consisting of those who rejected everything Indian even more vehemently than their former bosses the British. This was the world of very smart cocktail parties and very fatuous small talk, with plenty of cigarettes being waved around and enough shallowness to drown a nation. After a hard day of work in a corporate office, one's free time was spent downing gimlet's and whisky-soda's and remembering the good old days when the riff-raff knew their place. This was the world into which my parents had entree due to their educational backgrounds (the good schools of their generation were few and everyone attended pretty much the same places) and family connections and I am still dazzled when my parents break into the foxtrot on the dance floor (in my youth ballroom dancing was no longer a required - or desired - social skill). But this was not a world in which they really belonged, they being entirely too "military" for the upper class pretensions one had to have in order to have any claims to this social segment.


On the other side of our social horizon there was the very traditional, modest Indian middle class whose members lived very humble lives, listened only to Indian music and ate very traditional food. The women wore their saris modestly, the men were gentle and scholarly in their worn bush shirts, the matrons were fat and comfortable, and the food was wonderful and cooked daily by the women of the house with some assistance from part time help. This was the world of my relatives and many family friends where abounded the music of Rabindranath Tagore during impromptu musical evenings and lots of adda during visits to the old hometown of Kolkatta. The worlds of the westernized corporate elite and the ordinary middle classes never crossed. In fact, the denizens of each world would have been surprised by the other's presence and uncomfortable in each other's company. My parents and I moved between both, fitting fully and comfortably only into the alternate universe that was the life of the army. I was required to be proficient in English and Hindi for the outside world, and in Bengali for communication within the family.



What set us as a family apart from all these worlds (including the army) was our taste in music. My parents were not - and are not - trendy. They were quite definitely stodgy, leaning towards the archaic, in their choice of listening material. While my sophisticated friends' parents played Ella Fitzgerald's "Mack the Knife" or Dave Brubeck's "Take Five", my parents dug deeper into western culture and came up with Paul Robeson and Mahalia Jackson. Robeson's and Jackson's talents rose above the limitations of a scratchy, hissy 78 RPM record and introduced me to the music of a country I would only see many years later. On the Indian side, I was never allowed to listen to modern Hindi film music, it being deemed too vulgar and shallow (my rebellion was to embrace Bollywood with a vengeance when I reached teenage). Instead, the radio was put on at 6:00 AM every morning so that we could begin our day with the purifying notes of All India Radio's classical Indian music programming. With my westernized friends, I was unable to enjoy the sweet sounds of Pandit Jasraj singing Raag Basant, the velvet of his voice, the masterful control of his medium. They wouldn't have known who he was, and if they had, would have sneered at his "conservatism". To my traditional Indian relatives and friends I was unable to explain that there was a world outside of Hindustani classical music and Vividh Bharati. While they would have been respectful of Mahalia Jackson and Paul Robeson's music, they would not have known how to fit western music into their lives. I was left humming "Old Man River" and "Bistirno Duparey" by myself.

All of this would have been bewildering mishmash to my children if I had tried to explain it in words. But thanks to Youtube, I can show them and have them hear the sounds of the in-between cultural world that was their mother's childhood. Looking back, it was a cultural education that equipped me to understand the best of both East and West. I hope I can pass on that tradition to my children. So thank you for the music, Youtube, and I hope there are many more years ahead for you.

Snow, Ice and Himalayan Memories

It's not yet 5:00 PM and the day has already fled into a dark and smudgy night. There were some ice sprinkles in the rain that dripped down this morning. More will follow tomorrow, apparently. On days like these, I first give thanks that I don't live in northern New England and then I reflect on my poor pioneer spirit. Would I have lasted two hundred years ago when there was no modern plumbing or central heating? I suspect that had I arrived in the New World before the modern age, I would have traveled no further north than southern Florida.

It's not as though I haven't been tested. My army childhood involved a couple of brutal winters in the Himalayas where my father was once posted. A small town near the Indo-Bhutan border, the station had just been converted from a field area (no families, forward area) to a "hard peace" station (i.e. families could stay but housing was very iffy). The first six months or so we lived in two rooms and a patch of verandah, the next few months we lived off-base in the "civilian" part of town, in the house of a retired war-hero general. This house overlooked the residence of Kazi Lhendup Dorjee whose wife the Kazini Eliza Maria, a colorful European adventuress, guarded her property with the zeal of a hundred guards. God help any child whose ball bounced off the terrace into the manicured gardens of the Kazi's house. As we shivered and shook our way through the Himalayan winters, the Kazini and her booming voice provided a little noise and color in our unheated lives.
Now the chilblains of my childhood are forgotten, but I am still ambivalent about winter. As I am now settled here in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and not likely to move in a long time, I can safely say that I like it best when I am sitting in a warm room with a hot cup of my favorite tea, looking out at the bleak weather. The tea - Darjeeling, the taste for which is one thing I did bring away with me to the warmer plains of the south. And the one taste that has endured a move across the seven seas.

Values Worth Defending

The murderous thugs who attacked Mumbai last week are a cr**py advertisement for the values for which they claim to be fighting. Now there's a way of life I really want to embrace - one that says it's alright to fire on babies and unarmed women and men, just going about their daily lives. And daily life in big Indian cities is so hard to begin with. I cannot even begin to imagine the utter sinkhole of despair that must be the lot of the average person shot up at Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus who was doing nothing more provocative than waiting for a train home after a long shift of work.

Another group of people, from similar age groups as the murderers, provided an alternative model for how all people - old and young - should behave toward each other. Many in this latter group, the staff at the Taj Mahal hotel and the Oberoi hotel, beat constables of the Mumbai police and firefighters of the Mumbai Fire Department, also gave their lives in the defence of their values. And these values - decency, courage, compassion - are certainly worth fighting for, unlike the dead and stinking ideology that motivated their attackers.

Giving Thanks

I could not blog yesterday, and not just because it was busy with the usual Thanksgiving Day busy-ness. All day, I felt restless and disturbed and had a lump in my throat, watching the news coming out of Mumbai. The last time I felt this way was on Sept. 11, 2001. As I chopped onions and stirred and sauteed, my thoughts were with those whose lives had been shrouded in darkness by the grim deeds of young, babyfaced, ruthless killers. The turkey was delicious and so were the pies, but even as I raised my glass and gave thanks for family, friends and loved ones, that old Bengali saying ran through my mind:

Karur poush maash

Karur shorbonaash

(Some celebrate bountiful harvests, others face annihilation)

Waiting For the Other Shoe...

The talk in my friends and family circle is - well, all about the economic downturn. My friends and I represent a range of middle class-ness in terms of socio-economics. Some of my friends are modestly-salaried academics with a great deal of creative freedom and just enough money for their needs, others are hedge fund managers with lots of money but no real freedom to wander, except over to their desks to ponder the data on Bloomberg. K. and I fall somewhere in the middle of this range.

When we go out or have people over, the conversation invariably veers to the dismal state of the economy. Most of our friends in the corporate sector are, understandably, extremely worried about their jobs. As yet (knock on wood) nobody is unemployed. But everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I don't see any discernible impact on the downtown stores of our little town. Are people spending less? Not if you see the women I see, dropping $98 on silk tank tops and dragging their sulky teenage daughters around into upscale shoe stores. I am spending less, but there is no noticeable difference in my lifestyle. Having very young children, we rarely went out anyway (when I go out for dinner, I want to spend more than fifteen minutes gobbling down my meal to the refrain of "go home, wanna go home" and since that won't be likely for another three years at least, I prefer to eat at home). I work part-time and K. is self-employed so we had no work-related social life anyway (on the plus side, we also don't have the added anxiety of being laid off).

But we are nervous too. The nameless dread of waiting...

Bollywood in Bridgeport

It is a sign of our times that what was unthinkable only five years ago is now a possibility. I can watch absolutely trashy, thoroughly enjoyable, utterly escapist Bollywood films at the Showcase Cinemas in Bridgeport. I have watched several films there in the company of friends. Most recently, I watched "Singh is King" with my son. As the film is pitched to the emotional and intellectual maturity of a ten year old, he thoroughly enjoyed it. The feature played to an absolutely empty theater except for us.

This weekend, there is a film festival running at the Westport Town Hall. The website for this festival is www.sulekha.com/gopio-ctfilmfestival . I went alone last night to watch "Loins of Punjab." It is hilarious, with some contrived bits, but for the most part really good fun.

Hmmm...I can watch very good or excruciatingly bad Indian films right here in Fairfield County, Connecticut. I don't need to make the trek into New York City for my dose of masala anymore.

The Blaming of the Shrew

Now that Hillary Clinton and Teresa Heinz Kerry are out of the reckoning, I suppose we must have a new witch in town. Is it too much to just accept the electoral defeat for what it was - a decisive rejection of a tired old agenda of fear mixed with hatred? Failure is never an orphan, despite the saying. It always has a "mother". It is, however, always fatherless.

Reflections on an Election

I wish I could feel as Wordsworth did:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! - Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

Instead, I find myself...relieved. As though I had been carrying a big boulder on my back these past few years. And now that burden has gone.

November Resolutions

Resolution No. 1: This will be the last U.S. presidential election I will spend as an observer. Next time, I will be in the line with K., waiting for my turn to cast my ballot.

Resolution No. 2: I will cease and desist from raiding my children's Halloween candy trove. Starting as soon as I finish today's loot: 1 M&M bag, 1 small Snickers bar, 1 small Kit-Kat.

The Name of it is "Autumn"

The skies are blustery grey, and the trees toss their red, orange and golden heads at the oncoming clouds; a single ray of sunlight bursts through the leaves suddenly and makes the Merrit Parkway a tunnel of luminous color. At times like this, I wonder if there could be a luckier person than I am, living my daily life against the incandescent colors of a New England fall. I hope I never get that used to it that I stop noticing. And alright, New Hampshire and Vermont, I grant that your foliage may be more breathtaking right now, but I don't live there.

Elections and the Femme Fatale

Do Sarah Palin's political advisors have any idea just how sexist many of her supporters are? I am amazed that as accusations of sexism float around the whole issue of Wardrobe Gate, just how little criticism is directed at the absolute - insert the plural male equivalent of "bimbo" here - who flock to her rallies and make a mockery of the woman they want to have become a top member of the next U.S. administration. No, I don't think "babe" is a respectful way of addressing your leader.

It's not only liberal feminists who need to raise an outcry here (they've already done so), the protest needs to start with some critical reflection by the Republican National Committee and by everyone whose d**khead son/husband/brother patronizes the Las Vegas Men's Club that recently hosted a Sarah Palin-themed strippers' competition. Do they think this is an act of admiration, some sort of loving gesture by a local fan club? There are people from her own base who are supporting this unbelievably belittling event, these are the people who are reducing her to an object, not some blue-stocking East Coast, latte-drinking, elite circle of New York Times readers. I am not providing links to this horrendous event or naming names. You can google those for yourself if you want to follow up the story.

My American Burqa

My American burqa - my hijab and niqaab - comes in many cuts and colors. It is mainly mass-produced and comes in many different kinds of material. It is sometimes elegant, sometimes demure, never too revealing, and utterly, utterly conformist. Above all, it does what all good burqa's should do. It renders me invisible (mostly). My American burqa can be found here and here. On rare occasions, I go here to find a suitable party burqa. When I first came to this country as a twenty-something, I wore a younger version of the American burqa. That can be found here. The younger version can, depending on the cunning of the Chinese tailor in the burqa factory, be snug and form fitting, but that snugness too is always conformist, never revolutionary.

When I first arrived in this country, I stood out and not just because I didn't know what on earth to do with vending machines (I slunk around, watching practiced veterans punching buttons, retrieving their drinks and candy before I worked up the courage to use them). Besides my incompetence with machines, my clothes always gave me away even before I opened my mouth, and this even though I stopped wearing my much-beloved salwar kameezes (surely, the most comfortable clothes for women ever). My jeans were too baggy, my sweaters too bulky, my hairstyle too - too Delhi, my shoes too inappropriate for the dress. Still, I resisted donning the American burqa for a long time.

Why? Well, some of the American burqas were made of the material that in India we derided clueless, hippie, western tourists for wearing. I swore I would never wear the thin, flimsy cotton tops, the cheap cotton skirts that are so prized here by trendy stores and sold as top-of-the-line summer wear. For the hippies in India, the looseness, the flimsiness, the gauzy fabrics probably evoked carefree whimsy, an abandonment of the structure and rigidity of their suburban homes in the west. For us, they screamed - export rejects from Janpath! Only college students wore those. Young women with aspirations to ethnic chic wore handwoven fabrics from FabIndia (do they still do that, I wonder?). For western wear we depended on the benevolence of visiting relatives from abroad or else we hit the sales at South Extension and Greater Kailash markets and swallowed as we handed over our middle class money to sniffy, sullen sales clerks who snatched the money from our hands and looked over our heads as they handed us our shopping bags.

But slowly I learned to adapt to my new surroundings. I made some mistakes initally. For example, I bought a burqa in yellow silk that had embroidered on it small monkeys drinking champagne, their brown tails curled perkily over their little brown heads. Looked cute but it belonged to some yacht-owning New England preppy girl, not to me. That burqa still hangs unworn in my closet (actually, it just struck me as I wrote that given George Allen's "macaca" remark, maybe I should wear this burqa proudly). I also realized over time that although blue denim burqas are now acceptable party wear, they are not for all parties and definitely not for Christmas parties. In general though, my American burqas are more tailored now, and are the right cut. In the summers, the cheap cotton doesn't feel so bad, and what the heck, the other women are also wearing the same thing. In my American burqa, I can go up and down Fairfield County, Connecticut, without attracting a second glance.

However, in New York City...well, that's another story. I need a New York City burqa so that I don't stand out there as a visiting suburban housewife.

In New York City

One New York traffic cop to another: You voted for Bush last time, you jerk.
2nd Cop (mournfully): Yeah man, and he's destroyed us all.
(Nervous laughter from people waiting for a cab in the taxi line)
It's not a good sign for a political party when lower-level government servants turn against it. It is especially not good when policemen begin to deride a sitting president.

At MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art, to my Indian readers), my eight-year old S. looks at the Vincent Van Gogh art exhibit (running through Jan. 5 2009) and pronounces his judgement: "Very dark." Well, the title of the exhibit is "Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night." About Van Gogh's portrait of the poet Eugene Boch, his judgment was "That's Abraham Lincoln!" Little M. tugs at my hand and says "I want a muffin."

Hmmph! I think cultural education will have to wait a few more years.

I Am Not Looking for an Indian Life Partner in Connecticut!!

Two of the most aggravating websites have recently wormed their way into my life - bharatmatrimony.com and shaadi.com (please do NOT click on them).Perhaps because I surf so many Indian websites, these two horrible sites embedded their cookies deep into the inner reaches of my computer. Now whenever I surf any website - even the most corn-fed uber-American ones - I am presented with advertisements assuring me that I will find my perfect Indian partner in Connecticut. How do I uninstall these monsters from my computer? I am happily married already and have no interest in finding partners - Indians or non- - in Connecticut or anywhere else.

Some Assistance for Main Street, Please?

One of the young men doing electrical work in the house wanted to make us an offer on our two unused oil tanks. We had to send him away disappointed as the tanks are empty. Thanks to K. we have moved off oil and are relying now on a combination of solar/geothermal/propane. This combination has its problems but at least we are off the uncertainties of heating oil. Winter is coming and the price of heating oil is the great unknown in Fairfield County where the vast majority use heating oil for warmth. We really could use a far-reaching comprehensive administrative review of this problem. In a cold climate, a heated house is not optional, it's a basic requirement for survival in the winter. People might go without food, but not without heat.

Will anybody bail out Main Street anytime soon? I doubt assistance will come in the short term future, but even Americans - a famously patient people when it comes to governmental flaws (and yes, yes, I know they had a Revolution but that was then...) - are going to start protesting. I find it very disturbing to read the news about the growing numbers of slums (alright, dignify them by calling them "tent cities" but they are still slums) in some parts of the country. It is not a good sign.

Religion and Madness

I know there is so much going on here - the whole Sarah Palin thing, the crash of financial giants that has become almost an everyday occurrence. But I am going to write today on another kind of madness that seems to get people all riled up - the perceived intrusion of new religions on "their" turf.

Perhaps because I have the eye of an outsider here (despite years of living here and being very fond of the country and the people), I am more sensitive to the way that outsiders are perceived and treated everywhere. Call it the immigrant syndrome. Anyway, in just the last two days, the Washington Post's section on religion has reported that Hindus are persecuting Christians in India, Christians are harassing Muslims in Italy, the construction of a Hindu temple in suburban Washington D.C. is causing strained relations with the community, and that anti-Semitism is on the rise among Europeans .

I am less than convinced that any one religion holds the entire truth in its meager pouch. Events around the world have left me more convinced than ever that while religious traditions inspire much beauty (I can write pages and pages on the beauty inspired by religious devotional traditions), the practitoners of religion can do more harm to the reputations of their own faiths than any so-called "outsider religions."

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Two years ago, K. started his Edible Forest Gardens project. Oh my God, the poor man worked like crazy after work hours and before! He got up early to whack at undergrowth, rushed out the minute the markets closed and lingered till after dusk digging up rocks the size of small boulders (this is New England after all, home of the stone wall, where do you think all that stone came from?). I had very little to contribute beyond moral support and hot, cooked meals.


What's been the result after two years of unrelenting toil on his part, clearing bushes, digging beds, planting fruit trees and berry bushes, strawberry ground cover, winter gold and winter green? All without any help, mind. Well, for one thing, we have the usual summer problem of all gardeners: zucchinis coming out of our ears. It's almost to the point where I can't stand to look at them in their smug, self-satisfied green plumpness, presenting themselves to be grated into dal, made into soup, sauteed with olive oil, baked with pasta. Aarrrgh!

Second, it goes without saying that creating an edible garden means that there is going to be some serious pilferage. We have lost the tops of our Jerusalem Artichokes to deer. The plants have grown strong and tall but not one has sprouted a flowerbud. The dwarf sunflower -all one of it - was stunning, but has been pecked pretty well by birds, making a big dent in the sunflower seeds bounty K. was hoping to collect. Rabbits have munched on tomato plants, birds have feasted on blueberries and raspberries and are now working on pecking at the tomatoes.

Elmer Fudd, I get you man! Totally, totally.

And just like Fudd, I am also helpless against the onslaught of unwanted visitors to our edible forest gardens.

Away in the Midwest

Haven't blogged in a while because of family vacations, etc. We went to Minneapolis after a gap of two years, the kids and I. No, I never lived in Minneapolis but visited there very often from Chicago, on account of my brother. The Twin Cities are both lovely and...midwestern. Having lived away from the midwest for eight years (we moved to Fairfield County from Chicago), I saw and compared my new and old habitats with fresh eyes.

OK, so most people already know about the Arctic winters, but then you know that Minnesota is where the lower taiga meets the prairies. So you have to expect the howling winds and the thigh-deep snow, etc. Going from the Northeast, it is striking how different the vegetation is. I had forgotten, cliched though it is, the big midwestern skies. Not as big as Wyoming and South Dakota, true, but still huge compared to the smaller heavens of Connecticut. When a tiny kestrel dived down to catch his prey, it was quite spectacular because there was nothing to block our views down to the ground.

Driving west, even just a little outside the twin cities, the roads are bordered by tall, waving prairie grasses. And the highways are huge. My eye is not used to having such a wide range to scan while driving. Again, very different from the wooded, petite dimensions of the Merritt Parkway or Route 7. Given that the highways are so large compared to here, you would think that driving would be a breeze. In fact, it is alarmingly not so. Bumper-to-bumper traffic is the norm in the Twin Cities during rush hour. And even more alarmingly, Minnesotans are allowed to hold their phones while driving and drift in and out of lanes with cheerful abandon.

The number one reason I might not move back to the Midwest: no, it's not the winter, that's reason number two. No, the top reason for giving the midwest a miss is because I am not used anymore to driving long distances for day to day stuff. E.g. my sister-in-law thought nothing of driving ten miles to get to Trader Joe's. We had a great time with the kids doing the rides in the Mall of America, but one has to drive a lot to get to routine fun places. Most days here in Fairfield County - outside of work, that is - I rarely drive more than three to five miles. As for the winter, it's true, it's not for the fainthearted. And as I am getting older, the prospect of shoveling yards - not feet - of snow off my driveway is less and less appealing.

The Illusion of Wealth

So what happens when the economy takes a downturn? On the downward curve, apparently, the economy reveals a lot about people, their attitudes to money and their lifestyles. Recently, both the New York Times and the Washington Post have run stories, featuring people and how they got into debt and how they cope [again, you may need to create free accounts to read the articles I refer to]. Overall, the stories highlight the differences between two opposing schools of thought: one side believes that the current crisis of personal insolvency resulted because of predatory lending practices by banks and financial institutions, who were greedy to make big bucks of endless fees and interest payments. The opposing camp holds that stories of personal debt reveal a lack of personal ethics. In other words, that you get into debt because you are morally lacking in essential qualities such as self-control, responsibility and so on.

The July 20 edition of the New York Times featured an article about Diane McLeod in suburban Philadelphia and her descent into unmanageable, all-consuming debt. The story is a familiar one - a woman's struggle to keep her head above water as she struggles through divorce, medical woes and job losses, while lack of fiscal self-discipline makes a bad situation worse. The reporter, Gretchen Morgenson, has quite a detailed outline of how exactly various predatory lending practices came together to pull McLeod into a quagmire of debt that ultimately ended with debt collectors hounding her and her house being foreclosed. Not to mention that her relationship with her son is in tatters as he washed his hands off the whole mess, moving in with his girlfriend (the article mentions this only in passing, but the dissolution of family bonds is quite awful, in my opinion).

The discussion in the comments section is also worth reading for the opposite view (I set the NYT comments from newest to oldest so the lower numbers are the newest comments): that debt symbolizes a lack of fundamental values such as responsibility. Many readers felt that while it is true that banks and lenders were unethical, they were only doing what businesses do: try to sell their product. Many felt that McLeod's situation is primarily of her own making. Some ask whether someone who was in such a financially precarious situation deserved to shop QVC (the shopping channel, for my Indian readers) or indulge in expensive bad habits such as smoking. One reader pointed out that:

Yes, lenders made stupid loans and offered terms that were usurious, but people can say no. Its now become the entitlement that everyone has cable tv, cell phones, video games, flat panel televisions, etc.

Here and there, some commenters (like No. 48) pointed out that what really broke McLeod was not the purchase of handbags and knickknacks (although they helped to raise the total bill), but huge medical bills from surgery and hospitalization. In other words, the rising costs of everything didn't help her situation at all. But in general, there was little sympathy for Diane McLeod and her plight. As No. 105 put it:

Are we supposed to think that these banks are giving out loans just to feel good about themselves? Of course they're going to try and maximize profits. It is the sole responsibility of those such as Ms. McLeod to make the informed decision of whether or not to take out a loan in the first place.

Here is my take on the issue:

1. Yes, Diane McLeod needs financial self-discipline. Of that, there is no doubt. Perhaps she should take some tips from Big Mama, or get counselling from local religious organizations, although stories like those also get annoying with their thriftier-than-thou attitudes.


2. But there is also no doubt that the system is geared towards the creation of debt for the profit of corporations. Let me illustrate this with a personal anecdote, for what it is worth. Some years ago, someone I knew who worked in the credit card industry told me that in order to maintain my credit profile, I should leave a small amount due on my cards from time to time. Not always, just from time to time. If I paid off my credit card every month, that signalled the credit card company that I was struggling financially and therefore was a bad credit risk (I don't know if this is true, just what I heard). Having just emerged from years of grinding poverty as a student, I did not think much of this plan. It just didn't make much economic sense to me. Now, that I am reading more on the topic I realize that for credit card companies, that made perfect business sense because the nature of their business had changed over the years. By the late 1990s, they were no longer in the business of making money by collecting on loans, but rather they made money through fees, penalties, and by selling off the loans to second, third, multiple parties. The loan itself had become the money-generator. This inverted pyramid - the debtor the point of the upside down pyramid - was bound to collapse as soon as the debtor could no longer pay his or her dues. I guess that time has come - when the debtor is unable to meet his or her obligations.
3. Turmoil is sure to follow. But how extensive will the upheaval be and how long will it last? I don't know. More thoughts later.

More About Wall Street and Main Street

Did I say that James Kunstler's outlook is pessimistic? I hope you get elegant understatement. I meant to say that he is positively apocalyptic in his outlook. So to balance out those doomsday pronouncements, I also read more measured analyses. For example, there is Robert Salomon, professor of business at the Stern School of Business at New York University. His blog posts also parse the details of the dreadful news that seems to pour out every day from Wall Street, Washington, D.C., London and Los Angeles. Like Kunstler, Salomon is downbeat but the academic calm helps to put things into perspective and doesn't send me rushing around the house in a panic-stricken tizzy, wondering if I should stock up water and firewood.

In fact, sifting through financial commentary on the internet has been amazing self-education. I have found some real gems of postings and articles in unlikely places that have helped me, a non-specialist, to understand both the bigger picture and the details of the current downturn. E.g., from the rather apocalyptic sounding website, dollarcollapse, I linked to this really well-written article in Harper's magazine that helped me understand some of what is going on. According to Eric Janszen, the American economy has shifted from a boom-bust cycle, a traditional business cycle model, to a bubble model. It is quite fascinating but I wonder, could it be true? Could the American economy have been transformed into a giant Ponzi scheme where the loser is the last sucker left holding the (now empty) bag? I need to discuss this with more economics-educated friends.

In the meantime, as I run errands in the various little downtowns of the various little towns in Fairfield County (OK, just two or three neighboring towns), I see nothing really amiss. People are still shopping, ordering salads for their lunches, eating ice cream. There are no mobs breaking down the banks or breaking into stores. In fact, calmness prevails everywhere. I hope the adjustment - and of that I am sure, a major adjustment is coming - will be like this. Calm, gradual transition to a newer, less costly system. The alternative is too awful to think about.