Usree Bhattacharya: Everyday Life and Other Musings

Coloring the Women: India Edition

2009-02-21T11:46:00.000-08:00

An article in ABC News Online a few weeks ago began: "To see the effects of racism based on skin color most clearly, one should go to the developing world. In richer countries people are increasingly comfortable, and successful, regardless of their natural skin color, but in many African countries like Senegal, trying to change one's skin color is still seen as a way to get ahead." One could easily critique a lot of the assumptions undergirding those statements, specifically whether the effects of racism are "most clearly" visible in the "developing world," or if indeed there are few barriers to success in "richer countries." However, it does cover a topic that gets little international attention: the phenomenon of "bleaching" the skin among darker skinned women, popular in many countries.

Both in India, where I grew up, and in Indonesia, where I lived for two years, "fairness" in women is prized by many. In India, the complexion-lightening industry is worth a staggering US$200 million, increasing at the rate of 15-20 per cent every year. If you look at some of the advertisements from the major companies, the general narrative is: a woman cannot find a husband or employment because she is dark complexioned, and after a few weeks of applying a particular fairness cream, Voilà!, she becomes fair...and snags a husband or the coveted dream job.

You don't have to understand the (Indian) language dialog in the ads below to get a sense of the insidiousness of the message:

Back in 2003, HLL, one of the biggest manufacturers of cosmetic products in India, was forced after months of lobbying by the All India Democratic Women's Association to take two highly offensive TV ads for Fair and Lovely off the air. Many have argued that these creams "perpetuate racial, caste and gender stereotypes and are either ineffective or harmful"; yet the market for these continues to thrive. The advertisements haven't changed much since then; they continue to (re)enforce stereotypes and advance impossible claims. Last week, frustrated with these tall claims, the Indian Health Minister demanded "that manufacturers should produce scientific evidence to back advertising claims." I think he is referring to whether the chemicals "work," not whether the fairness can get one the prized husband or the job.

These fairness creams (re)inscribe through these ads, on a daily basis, how Indian women (and now men) should think about their skin color: that fair complexion is the panacea for all ills, and dark complexion: well, we hope you are ready to spend your life alone, living your life out in a really bad job. It's not as if this kind of thinking is triggered by these ads; these perceptions run deep in our society, and hark back to colonial times. And it's particularly tied to the "marriage market." As one blogger notes, on shaadi.com, the world's biggest matrimonial site, "One of the key pieces of information you must provide is your complexion, which can range from very fair to wheatish to dark." And a brief glance at newspaper matrimonial classifieds reveals just how deeply ingrained this way of thinking is in our society.

These texts and images-the cream ads, the forms on Shaadi.com, the matrimonial ads in newspapers-not only reinforce stereotypes, they reflect the ones we "own" as a society. It's not enough to walk away from them; we have to look within ourselves and ask how they are produced, and why.

Slumdog Millionaire: A Perspective

2009-02-21T11:41:00.000-08:00

The last thing I wanted to do on a cold, rainy, windy night was to venture out for a late-night movie experience. But a Brazilian friend's rather last minute invitation to watch the critically acclaimed movie "Slumdog Millionaire" was too compelling. As we rushed over to Emeryville for the last show of the night, I kept telling myself to keep an open mind. I'd been given too much feedback: from friends who decried the raw violence, others who loved the rags-to-riches narrative, still others who thought it was just "okay" (my parents, in India, belonged to this last group). My friend's somewhat to-hell-with-caution driving and the fact that the car's headlights didn't work only mildly distracted me from my reservations about watching the film, and what I would take out of it.

We got there just in time, and, soon after we had settled in separate spots in the conspicuously empty hall-he likes to sit by the aisle, and I like to sit in the center (this point is only important insofar as this movie is quite violent, and watching it while feeling marooned in an empty hall is quite something)-the movie began.

[Spoiler alert!] The movie itself felt more familiar than I had expected it to be, given that it is a British production. The early sequences of police brutality are very common in Indian films, and reported frequently in the media, and while I cringed inwardly several times, there was no element of shock in my reaction. The beloved game of cricket rang another familiar note, though it was contextualized with brutal violence: policemen trying to beat up slum kids, an abusive ganglord forcing his mistress to submission. People dangerously perched on top of (moving) trains to avoid paying the fare struck another familiar note. And little kids who have been kidnapped and forcibly blinded or amputated so they can collect more money while begging-that story is painfully common. What surprised me most was how familiar the slums felt. While I grew up in a campus in the rather privileged and closed-in setting of South Delhi (India), slums circled the campus like little satellite villages; they are a familiar, an "integrated" part of the Indian landscape, though I didn't realize until yesterday just how much I consider them a part of my imagining of India, just how much the slums are in some way home. During my trip to New Delhi last month, I had occasion to visit several times the school that the orphans I am working with attend, and it's bang in the middle of a nearby slum. The scenes from Slumdog paralleled everything I saw there: the open drains, the stench of which almost make it through the screen; the piles of discarded plastic and garbage everywhere; the human and animal excreta you have to watch for every step you take; the tremendous foot traffic through the narrow lanes; the loud devotional and filmy music blaring from old tape-run stereos and radios; and the spirit, the indomitable spirit of the people who live in conditions that are too horrific to describe, and impossible to capture in words or moving images. And yet millions of people make their lives there.

On a slightly different note, the language shifts in the movie were a little jarring. I find it impossible not to read subtitles if they are provided, and so even through Mumbai Hindi I understood (the language of the first third of the film), I found myself reading the English translations. The transition from Hindi to English is unexplained in the film, and what results is what one critic, Mukul Kesavan, called "a hybrid so odd." He further went on to say, ""the transition from child actors who in real life are slum children to young actors who are, just as clearly, middle-class anglophones is so abrupt and inexplicable that it subverts the "realism" of the brilliantly shot squalor in which their lives play out." This interferes, as he goes on to say, with the suspension of disbelief necessary for enjoying the film's narrative. I totally agree.

There's much talk about whether this movie is "Indian" in sentiment and feel. That's too big a question for me to tackle here. What I walked away with was overpowering homesickness. Was it the narrative? The Indian people? The Hindi? Not so much. It was strangely the moving images of the slumscape that took me home.

A Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women

2009-02-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

Bitter culture wars played out over Valentine’s Day in India, as the New York Times reported. Sri Ram Sena, the über-religious right-wing Indian political outfit, had announced their intentions to “disrupt Valentine's Day celebration as it is against Indian culture.” The disruption, they said, would be targeted against schools and colleges, restaurants and gift/card shops where people were found to be celebrating the event. The chief of the Sena, Pramod Muthalik, only recently made bail after being jailed for having spearheaded an attack on some women visiting a pub in Mangalore, Karnataka, a southern state. See video of the attack here: News media reported him saying: "Valentine's day, Friendship Day... all these are international conspiracies against our culture. They are exploiting the girls by calling it as lover's day. Love cannot be for a single day. This is a conspiracy by the Christians." There were many in India who were not going to take this lying down. A Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women, a Facebook group, was established on February 5 of this year to protest the “moral policing,” and as of today boasts 44,252 members. The group members exhorted members and young women to send pink chaddhis (underwear)-as a symbolic gesture-to Muthalik (the Sena office has been flooded with parcels containing them). It’s too early to call anything a victory, but the show of solidarity for women and the right to celebrate Valentine’s Day certainly sent a loud and clear signal that progressive women and lovers are not going to be easily oppressed. It angers me that these people are called Hindu fundamentalists: there is nothing essentially “Hindu” about this kind of persecution. It’s evil, narrow-minded, sexist and insular mentality which should not have any role in the secular politics and culture that should define our nation. Secular not in the sense of drowning out plural voices, but secular in the sense of embracing of of religious plurality. [The question of how "Christian" an event Valentine's Day really is, is another blog post.] It angers me that women in particular are singled out for retribution: why? Simply because they are viewed as “soft targets”? And these people-who viciously beat up women for “daring” to enter a pub-are crying out against women’s exploitation? And why, when Eid (a Muslim holiday), Christmas (a Christian holiday), Mahavir Jayanti (a Jain holiday) are celebrated as national holidays, in the spirit of diversity, can Valentine’s Day not be celebrated? It’s not like Hindu festivals are not observed: they are marked with tremendous feasts and celebrations nationwide. I’d like to say I am shocked by these events. I am not. What I am really surprised about is that the counter-movement took off from Facebook. I always thought Indians were bigger Orkut users.

Out of Africa...

2009-02-06T23:00:00.002-08:00

I just came away from the most prolonged and intense filmic experience of my life at the Pacific Film Archive.

As a part of the African Film Festival, they first screened a short, Coffee Colored Children (Ngozi Onwurah, U.K., 1988). The film traces two siblings who navigate lives as mixed children of a white mother and an absent Nigerian father. Two scenes, one in which a little girl is powdering herself with Vim to become white, and the boy is scrubbing himself almost to the point of bleeding to "cast off" his color, are remarkably difficult to watch.

The main feature, En attendant les hommes (Awaiting for Men) by Katy Lena Ndiaye (Belgium, 2007) is set in Oualata, Mauritania, and traces, through the voices of three remarkable women, what it means to be a woman, a sexual being, in the Sahara. The women's wall art, realized through viscous blood-red textures and grainy sand, provides a rich textual and artistic backdrop to the film.

The next offering was another short Les Maîtres fous (The Mad Priests) by Jean Rouch (France, 1955). The short captures a West African "possession ritual" of the Hauka sect (formed in 1925). This short left me deeply troubled about issues of representation: the foaming mouths of the men possessed (by the colonial masters, we are told), the dog being eaten raw, the shivering, blood-stained clothes that were all too vibrant in color. What are we seeing? How? The camera never wavers, following the rituals unfolding "faithfully," and I was strangely fascinated even as the viewing was difficult. The narration added another problematic layer to the representation; Rouch plays multiple roles, as if he is a part of the ritual (in a ciné-trance, as it were), yet it is troublingly also the voice of an Other, speaking to an Other. His final analysis seems to hinge on this idea that the possession ritual has a cathartic effect, and is a means of agentive "purging" of colonial oppression, though I found the film too brief, too short on a broader context for the argument to be entirely convincing. Decide for yourself (embedded below is the original French version. For the English version, click here-part one of three).

Les maîtres fou
Uploaded by zohilof

The final offering was the film Chef! (Chief!) by Jean-Marie Teno (Cameroon, 1999). The slow, languid French offers a sobering commentary on the state of Cameroon. There was a point in the film where vigilantes form a mob and almost kill a young thief over stealing one hen and four chicks, and I couldn't stop thinking about how familiar the story was. The nuptial laws, inherited exactly from those imposed by the French first in 1804, send women a single message: you belong to the husband; the husband is the chief. Another narrative revolves around a journalist who's imprisoned for daring to question the President's health. While the narratives wander, and hopelessness seems to swathe the film in tragedy, Teno ends on an optimistic note: “To me we’re all chiefs."

What a night.

25 Random (Language-Related) Things About Me...

2009-02-06T23:00:00.001-08:00

After being gently prodded to do a "post" on this, rather than simply offer an "aside," I thought I'd write up "25 Language-Related Random Things" about me, inspired by the Facebook phenomenon taking the Internet by storm.

1. Sometimes when I am writing quickly in Bengali, I use Hindi letters.
2. When I was two years old, I used to spend a lot of time with neighbors from the state of Orissa, and apparently started speaking Oriya almost exclusively for a while, to my parents' amusement.
3. I went to preschool in Holland. The only Dutch I remember is the word "Dag."
4. The first word I learnt in Bahasa Indonesia was the word "gila" (crazy).
5. The moment I arrive in Delhi, India, my hometown, I dispense with the "word-initial aspirated [p]" rule (pot, paper).
6. I once contemplated a career as a French-English interpreter.
7. My parents and I use basic Sanskrit at home some times. For laughs.
8. I once started a Spanish course in India, but had to stop after the course ended abruptly: my instructor eloped with another instructor.
9. I started the Spanish course to rebel against my father, who wanted me to enroll in Portuguese (we were living in Goa, a former Portuguese colony, at the time).
10. I find it very difficult to read cursive Bengali. My mother has to write out letters in print for me.
11. I took tutorials in writing Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script (thanks, Aftab ji!), but gave up and continue to write it using Devanagari.
12. I am fascinated by some of the similarities among Indo-European languages. I first discovered a passion for this when I was gifted "History of the English Language" by Albert C. Baugh at the age of 12. I fell in love with the book so much, I scribbled in "This book belongs to Mrs. Baugh" in the first page.
13. I regret never having learnt Russian from my father. My father did his post-doc in Moscow, and our home is still full of hundreds of technical books in Russian.
14. I don't understand my own French poetry anymore.
15. I came up with my own "language" at the age of 9. I still have a "text" floating around somewhere back home.
16. I had a collection of Coke cans in different languages including Arabic, French, Bahasa Indonesia, and Finnish.
17. One of the most fascinating things about talk in my family is that in 43 years of marriage, my mother has only called my father "Are you [formal] listening?" (Bengali, "Shunchho") and my father has only called my mother "O go" (untranslatable-"O you?"). In letters they just start off without a salutary preface, and end with "from-" or "yours." This is not unusual among Bengali couples. As a child I used to call my father "Shunchho," thinking that was his name.
18. I drive my German friends crazy sometimes by adding "-en" to English verbs and using them in German sentences.
19. I consider myself a native speaker of Bengali, Hindi, and English. They are languages I feel in, and that's enough for me to compartmentalize myself that way.
20. I find film subtitles very distracting.
21. As a child I was addicted to my Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. I wanted to memorize the whole dictionary.
22. A related point: I have a MASSIVE collection of French dictionaries in India.
23. I recently had a long conversation at the Delhi airport with someone who spoke only Punjabi, while I stuck to Hindi. They are somewhat mutually intelligible languages. If you're patient.
24. Language eludes me.
25. The most treasured word for me in any language is: "Ma."

Safe For Work!

2009-02-06T22:58:00.002-08:00

Want to read at work without getting caught? This outstanding site, readatwork.com, created by Colenso BBDO for the New Zealand Book Council, offers an innovative approach to getting your readerly fix at the office. It's basically a Flash application: with a click of a button you're taken to a faux Windows XP desktop iteration with PowerPoint stories, poems etc in readymade folders! Represented authors include literary juggernauts like Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, Tolstoy, and Emily Dickinson.

I'm not big on reading "high literature" online but I could not resist this site-it is so very addictive! The jazzy powerpoints remediate the texts in such cool ways, you cannot help but marvel at the sheer genius of it all...

Now about whether your boss will buy this or not, well...good luck with that! If you need suggestions on how to try to use this at work, and maximize your chances of not getting caught indulging in this VERY illicit activity, check out this video below...

Chutneyfied English

2009-02-06T22:58:00.001-08:00

The Mudra Institute of Communications in Ahmedabad (MICA) recently organized a popular conference on the phenomenon known as Hinglish. According to conference organizer Rita Kotharu, "Hinglish has been around for some time now, but it tends to be dismissed as the preserve of those who know neither English nor Hindi well. It now deserves its due as the popular idiom, one that has helped us shed our colonial hangover and appears to be emerging as a sort of link language."

As a kid in Delhi, at home I was told to speak only in Bengali, my mother tongue; and at school, we went through a period of nationalistic fervor during which we were told only to speak in Hindi, and later, only to speak in English (both efforts at policing failed-miserably). What happened was that we code switched all the time: I would use a mixture of Bengali and English at home; a mixture of Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, English at school (depending on the context)-not counting the Sanskrit period, where we mouthed words from ancient texts, though I am not sure we could be said to be speaking the language. Linguistic purity was an abstraction, an imposed rule we rarely followed. Growing up in as multilingual a setting as I did, we had at our disposal a vast repertoire of vocabulary to draw from, and we capitalized on the unique linguistic affordances and possibilities of different languages; no amount of policing could hold us at bay.

Hinglish was our most favorite "language" to converse in. Not only was it cool to use Hinglish, it was just so much more convenient. While many people are not fluent in English in Delhi, people are certainly fluent in core English vocabulary that has been appropriated into Hindi, forming an easily understood and, from my perspective, glorious bridge-like medium.

Here are some of my personal favorites from (imo) iconic Hinglish ad campaigns:

Pepsi: ‘यह दिल माँगे more’, [The heart wants more]
Leher salted snacks: ‘‘क्या करें control नही होता’, [What do I do, I cannot control it.]
Close Up: ‘क्या आप Close Up करते हैं’, [Do you do close up?]
Fevistick: ‘No झिक झिक, No चिप चिप,’ [No (untranslatable) No sticky-feeling.]
Rotomac Fighter (pen): ‘क्योंकि Fighter हमेशा जीतता है!!’ [Because "fighter" always wins.]

The first Hinglish ad I remember is for Leher (lit. "wave") Pepsi, made in the early 90s, which went with the line, "यह ही है Right Choice Baby, a-ha" [This is the right choice baby, uh huh.] That's not only the first ever Hinglish ad I recall, it's also the first use of "a-ha" ("uh huh") I can remember on the Indian TV screen. Enjoy below.

Happy Republic Day to my fellow countrymen!

"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn."

2009-02-06T22:56:00.000-08:00

Thus, the anecdote goes, began-and ended-the (über)short story by Ernest Hemingway, the fascinating result of a $10 bet. This was the principal motivation behind Smith Magazine's call for memoirs in six words; eventually, the best entries were published in the bestseller, "Not Quite What I Was Planning." In anticipation of Valentine's Day, there's a new collection of treasures published in "Six Word Memoirs of Love and Heartbreak by Writers Famous and Obscure."

Here's a taste from the LA Times blog:

It hurts even worse in French.--Derek Pollard
I loved the idea of you. -- Audrey Adu-Appiah
Tomorrow, maybe, I'll sell the ring. -- Matt Tanner
Inevitably, his obituary didn't mention me. -- R. Sue Dodea
I thought we had more time. -- Joe Hill
Wonder-filled, and never a dull torment. -- Diane Ackerman
He is married. I am not. -- Hope Truhart
We'll break up before this prints. -- Porochista Khakpour
What once were two, are one. -- George Saunders

Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak from SMITHmag on Vimeo.

More excerpts from the Reader's Digest:

In hindsight, I'd still choose you. -- Natana Gill
Love: eight pounds and six ounces.-- Kenny Clark
Marriage, children, empty nest: Now what?-- Oliver House
I'm your one that got away.-- Mary Elizabeth Williams
He e-mailed again, and I deleted.-- Molly Antopol
May I have the last dance?-- Robert Hass
He told me he was single.-- Esther Newberg
Moved in. No ring. Moved out.-- Melissa Lafsky
Portland, she decided; I, the Bronx.-- Dominic Preziosi
I searched him on Google. Nothing.-- Cybele O'Brien

My own personal contribution (and I bet $10 it's in the book somewhere): It was never meant to be.

Yours?

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

Strange Place Names: US & UK Edition

2009-02-06T22:55:00.000-08:00

Would you agree to live in Ugley, in Essex? Or in North Piddle? No? Then Spanker Lane? Thong, Kent? Or in Pratts Bottom? No? Well then, what about Crapstone? Or, would you care to reside in Diss? Felldownhead? Great Snoring? Or, alternatively, Little Snoring? Would you take a Ham and Sandwich? No?

If not in those cities in the United Kingdom, how about moving to these cities in the United States? Dead Horse sound like a good place to raise the kids? Or your very own North Pole in AK? How does Hygiene sound? Yeehaw Junction? How about Buttermilk in Kansas, or Gas, in the same state? No? Then Crappo? How about Christmas all the year around? Would you be able to entertain yourself in Boring? Cut and Shoot? Or, to Odd (do we have a winner)?

Okay, so my last try...would you move to the thriving metropolis of Puke, Albania for under a million dollars?

Check out a hilarious article on the topic in the New York Times here, and a related book here.

Update: Check out a trail of some very interesting comments on this, crossposted on the Daily Kos.

BA Flight 142, Dep. Delhi

2009-01-26T08:37:00.000-08:00

This is a call to all the BA 142 passengers, who were scheduled to depart Delhi on Jan 18, 2009, from IGI Airport, New Delhi, and were delayed by dozens of hours. Please leave your contact info in the comments, or contact the British Airways customer service site here. Please post any pictures you have to this blog, or send it to me at ubhattacharya@berkeley.edu to upload on this site.

Check out my original post on this here.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks to Ravil Desai for his suggestions.

Missing a Moment in History

2009-01-21T04:04:00.000-08:00

As Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president on January 20th, I was dozing off somewhere high over a deep turquoise Atlantic Ocean.

The nightmare began on Saturday night...dense fog enveloped New Delhi, India, as I headed out from the 'burbs to the Indira Gandhi International Airport. On the way over there we counted seven major accidents: trucks, lorries, autorickshaws, motorbikes and cars had crashed into each other because of the fog. We drove at 15-20 km/hour for most of the journey since visibility was close to zero. Nearly 100 flights were disrupted that day, including my ill-fated British Airways flight 142. We returned from the airport after being told it was canceled, and then were called back minutes after reaching home. When we returned to the airport a second time in three hours, we were informed that the flights would not leave till 24 hours later. At that point, a major verbal fight broke out: the two customer service reps BA sent to pacify the 300+ crowd of angry passengers were cornered and blasted. A six-hour standoff ensued. The fog, apparently, was not the culprit: BA did not have a crew ready to fly us out for some unexplained reason. What followed next was a series of "mortifying" events (as a BA pilot described it): 20 hours later, we returned to the airport, only to be told the flight was delayed by 3 1/2 hours, which meant we would miss most connecting flights from London. Beyond the usual worries about missing the first day of class and work, I was most pained that I would miss Obama's-our-moment in history.

In London, after a 2-hour queue at the flight information counters, we were told there were no flights out to SF, and we would be forced to spend the day and night in London. I was informed I would arrive in SF around 1:30 pm on January 20, 2008: several hours after the inauguration. I teared up as I told the BA employee that this was unacceptable, but she simply pushed a hotel voucher towards me and signaled me towards immigration: "Ma'am, there's nothing we could do. Thank you, bye." She turned to the next person in the queue: the conversation with me was over. The immigration officer wasn't very sympathetic: he said it was not his fault that BA142 was delayed, and UK immigration had no responsibility to issue me a transit visa so I could spent the next 20+ hours in the BA funded hotel room; according to him, I should have gotten a UK visa in India...that's the practice if one has a UK layover of even one hour, and one has no intention of leaving the airport. I was too astonished to speak. Very reluctantly, after some pleading, he gave me a transit visa...

An uneventful day and evening in London later, where we stuck close to the hotel, we were airborne the next day, and all I could think of the entire time was how I wanted to be there listening to his speech. Live. I kept thinking of last year: of following the primaries, the presidential elections, the news stories, the blog posts, the video clips, the door-to-door campaigning I did in Reno, attending his rally, the phonebanking till minutes before the polls closed in Pennsylvania, the tears, the hugs, the screams of joy as he was elected president in a resounding victory that was ours as much as it was his. At the cottony clouds drifted past the plane window, I couldn't help but feel cheated.

After I arrived in Berkeley, I checked out the Youtube videos of the inaugural address, the parade, and saw slideshows of the inaugural photos (here and elsewhere). My Facebook had exploded with inaugural fever as well. Through all this, I kept thinking how it was not the same thing...I still teared up during Obama's speech on Youtube...but...I had missed the moment.

While new technologies allow us to watch events later as they were captured live, they cannot capture the magic of events as they unfold, once they've happened.

I watched the same event you did, but I wasn't there in that moment.

Fight at IGI Airport; British Airways messes up

2009-01-18T07:24:00.000-08:00

BA flight 142 first got canceled minutes before departure time at 3:30 am on Jan 18, 2008 from IGI airport, New Delhi. Then, we were sent home and to hotels.

After an hour and a half, we were called back and told flight will take off at 8:30 am.

Then after we arrived, flight was canceled minutes before revised departure, at 10:30 am. BA now rescheduled for 6 am Jan 19, but with no guarantees. The two customer service people were rude, and kept insisting we be compassionate about the "resting" of the crew, which was blamed for the delay. About 300+ passengers created a huge scene near the security check area.

Most passengers were angry, and were treated very poorly, and were given no rational explanation for the delays, and were fed only a cold, soggy sandwich and chips and drink for the 12 hour delay while at the airport. No milk etc was offered for women traveling with children.

We are still waiting to hear about the 6 am flight.

The English Speaking Curse

2009-01-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

Soiled burlap sacks and old, foot worn carpets coat the dark cement floor. Tear-shaped mildew patches stain most of the wallspace, and the paint is peeling, crumbly to the touch. There is a hastily constructed altar housing a few Hindu idols on one end of the room, and a Bisleri mineral water bottle stands oddly next to it. Cheap boys' briefs and dark green gamchhas hang from nylon clothes lines. The beds look warm, though even at a distance I can tell that the sheets haven't been washed in a while. Pairs of Keds and Hawaii chappals lie in disarray at the foot of the stairs. The fragrance of sandalwood agarbattis competes with the mildew smell and the stench of something I refrain from identifying. Two tubelights flicker from the ceiling, and are arranged so that less than half the room is illuminated. The "Happy New Year" sign is still up on the wall, as are the festive balloons and multi-colored streamers.

The tutor sits at the grand sunmica desk, and the children sit in rows on the carpet. Every now and then a child will get up and go to the tutor to clarify a concept, or to find out the meaning of a Sanskrit, English, or Hindi word. The kids are in a variety of grades, ranging from 1 to 6. And if you haven't read my posts before, we're in an orphanage in a suburb of New Delhi, India, and I'm observing the nightly 2-hour study session.

Lately, I had begun noticing that the kids sneak in some of their own books during the sessions. One child, a tiny little boy of 7, brought an advanced Hindu astrological text in Sanskrit entitled "Jantri Rashiphal," and another a short mythological comic on the adventures of Prahlad from the famed Amar Chitra Katha comic series. Another child brought in short stories from the life of Birbal.

What intrigued me most, I must admit, were two books a couple of kids brought, one entitled Easy and Perfect English Speaking Course and another Perfect English Speaking Course, both costing around US 31¢. The former presents two saree-clad Indian women and a "professional" Indian man on the cover, while the latter presents a collage of fair-skinned, "foreign-looking" people on the cover. The Easy and Perfect English Speaking Course claims to teach readers how to speak English in 30 days, and claims to have already helped millions speak better English. I'm a little skeptical of its claims, and you'll see why. One of the common English expressions listed in the book is: "pack one's nose into" (to interfere, apparently). Some extracts from conversations: "Any other service?" (almost a literal translation of the Hindi)-for "Can I help you with anything else?"; "These potato are of inferior quality"; and some interesting conversation around the "cualiflower." The little (and mostly atrocious) English in the book literally drowns in the Hindi it's immersed in. The Perfect English Speaking Course begins with the critical "Alphabates." Here's an extract from the grammar section:"Mother loves mer chilldred, A sentence is the expression of a perfect thought throught a group of words..." Huh?????? And oh, want to learn the English past tense? Here's an example: "We slepy there."

As I took pictures of the pages from the books, I kept thinking of the fraud these authors are perpetrating on eager, unsuspecting, and unwitting second/foreign language learners buying their books. There are no accompanying CDs or audiotapes, no mention of how to work on conversational skills at all-just regurgitation of archaic grammar rules, some sample formal and informal letters, and examples of atypical English conversational exchanges. The language errors in the books, I can personally guarantee, will make any reasonably proficient English teacher weep.

The guardians of these children at the orphanage, I kept thinking, are desperate that these kids learn to speak the language of success in India, learn the language that opens the doors to a bigger world...and they buy these books for the kids thinking of the kids' futures. And what they end up with...is "We slepy there." The guardians, mostly slum-dwellers in the suburbs of New Delhi, cannot read nor write much in Hindi or English, if at all, and would not know that the books they are buying for these kids are literally linguistic poison. I realize I am being really harsh here, it makes me really angry that the authors and the publishers of these books make fools of unsuspecting people wanting to learn English. What's heartbreaking is that for the kids, these books are highly prized....they handle them reverently, telling me they love reading them in their spare time. Why? One child offers: "अँग्रेज़ी बोलने से ही सब कुछ हो सकता है!" (Hindi: By speaking in English only can everything happen!"

I stifle a scream.

For a full gallery, click here.

Facebook Friends

2009-01-07T15:12:00.000-08:00

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal called "The Art of Making Online 'Friends'" caught my attention today. The author suggests that in the troubled economic times we have today, the "weak ties" afforded by so-called "friends" on social networking sites could end up being very helpful. Networking is critical for finding good jobs, and that's where social networking sites may afford new opportunities. The author of the article goes on to say: "...I find that the people who befriend me are often people who didn't seem to like me at the time we knew each other in real life.No matter, you are not really becoming their friend. Accept their friend request." I don't know what unsettled me more: the use of the word "befriend," v. (as opposed to "friend," v.) or the sentence "you are not really becoming their friend."

Here's the main entry for "befriend" from Merriam-Webster online:

be·friend
Pronunciation: \bi-frend\
Function: transitive verb
Date: 1559
: to become or act as a friend to

Can you "befriend" on Facebook? I don't know...to me, it seems like "friending" is a more appropriate word... You friend, you de-friend...you don't befriend, or unfriend, at least not in my book. Somehow, it seems odd to apply the word "befriend" given the Internet-mediated nature of the relationships on social networking sites like Facebook; I don't know why that is, I just feel that is so.

And about all those "non-friends" on Facebook? I realize not all the 332 people listed as "friends" on my FB page are actually...my "friends." in the more traditional sense. But it just made me a wee bit sad to see the article laying that out for me in such clear terms.

And speaking of "friending" on Facebook...

Hat tip: daveski.

More on Facebooking here.

Memoirs: Fact or Fiction?

2008-12-30T11:23:00.000-08:00

Lerner Publishing, publishers of Angel Girl, based on Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat's "love story," announced that they have "canceled pending reprints of the book and will refund the price of any returned books." The story, based on Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived, inspired many, including the highly influential Oprah Winfrey. It turned out to have been significantly fictionalized, or, as the publishers called it, "not entirely true." The famous tale went as follows: "Mr. Rosenblat met his future wife when he was a prisoner and she was disguised as a Christian farm girl and tossed him apples and other food over the fence of the Schlieben camp in Germany. In the story, the protagonist meets the girl again years later on a blind date in New York." Unfortunately, the first part turned out to be a hoax, as subsequent investigations by Holocaust scholars and the New Republic magazine revealed.

The last few years have witnessed other high profile cases of "misremembered" memoiring. One of the most famous cases was that of the Oprah Book Club selection, A Million Little Pieces, penned by James Frey. Many months after the book was first published, and after an initial dismissal of any claims of misrepresentation, Doubleday, the book's publishers, had to admit that they had “sadly come to the realization that a number of facts have been altered and incidents embellished.” My own recall of the week the news broke goes like this: Smoking Gun, Supportive Oprah, Larry King, Defiant Frey, Supportive Oprah, more Smoking Gun, Oprah on the war path, "little boy lost" Frey, browbeaten Nan A. Talese, the end of non-fiction as we knew it. Even I, who had never read the book till the story broke, felt badly cheated.

Another recent famous case comes to mind: Margaret B Jones' critically acclaimed book, Love and Consequences, published by Riverhead this year. The memoir, about a young part-white, part-Native American girl who becomes a part of So-Cal's drug-dealing and gang-banging underworld, turned out to be totally false. A New York Times article ended up being her undoing.

In all three cases, the authors took great liberties with the truth in a deliberate attempt to sell books. Readers felt angry at the authors and publishers in all those cases: "duped" readers felt that the latter should have done their "homework." The problem, however, is that publishers cannot, as Talese noted, "[thoroughly] fact-check every single book. It would be very insulting and divisive in the author-editor relationship.” Some questions occur to me. Is a memoir's "authenticity" entirely derived from its factuality? In fact, what exactly IS authenticity? What omissions, alterations are we willing to accept as readers? Finally, how do we police others' memories?

Charting Disparity: A Digital Story

2008-12-30T11:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I sat in on the children's study hour at an orphanage in a suburb of New Delhi, India. During the session, I noticed a chart the kids kept consulting while studying...they would run up to it every now and then, turning the pages, looking up spellings, or names of colors, or numbers. I took a closer look at it, and couldn't help but be overwhelmed by....

Books in Three Narratives

2008-12-29T20:29:00.000-08:00

5:10 pm. Ma and I find ourselves at the NOIDA Trade Fair at the old circus grounds. There are stalls selling some Limca Book "record-breaking" variety of honey; "stomach flattening" abdominal belts; South Indian gold-plated jewelery; pleather accessories; miraculous "Ayurvedic" herbal supplements promising to cure every ailment known to man; tamarind, mango, and pomegranate flavored digestive "churans"; exquisitely fashioned jute furniture; elaborately woven Kashmiri carpets; thick Garhwali woolen vests for men; and rows upon rows of food stalls-serving up piping hot South Indian idlis and dosas, North Indian chola bhaturas, Mughlai rolls, North Eastern momos, and Gujarati sweets. About midway through the Fair, we find a book stall. I am suddenly shy as I ask the stall-keeper if I can take a picture. He is a little taken aback, then flashes a big grin: "Zaroor!" (Urdu: Of course!). I take in the spread of books through my camera's tiny viewfinder...they are mostly supplementary English grammar, general knowledge, and geography texts, cheaply manufactured. I snap some photos, then thumb through some of the books...their glossy covers are plasticky to my touch, and the ink is smudged on several pages. I put the books down and move outside, where I see two little kids pointing at the alphabet chart..."E IS FOR ELI-FENT!" says one. "F is FOR FLAIG!" says the other. Their mother smiles on dotingly. I then look up at the flyers plastered at the top of the stall. Flyers announcing "Emotional Intelligence" "Pencil Shading" "Common Errors" "Sentence Maker (Must for your Children)" and "First Pictorial Idiomatic Reader for Young Learners (Ages 7+ & 8+) Not to be Ignored" compete for space. We start walking off, when I notice a 5 year old girl holding her mother's hand, smelling an illustrated grammar book. For a second, I am her, at a book fair at the Pragati Maidan, eons ago...my mom by my side, I smell the books, the fresh ink smell so very seductive, and I touch the books that we couldn't always afford, leafing through them rapidly, pretending to "read" them..."Usree? Cholo, jai?" (Bengali: Usree? Come, Let's go?) says Ma.

6:30 pm. After a ten minute search, we finally find some parking in the Brahma Shopping Complex. The unofficial "attendant" rips off a ticket for us, and we head into the market. I feel inside my bag to reassure myself that I remembered to bring my camera. I relax as my fingers press against the thick canvas of my camera bag. Just inside the complex, by the stairs (that don't seem to go anywhere), there's a book "stall." It always carries the bestselling books-by authors like Nora Roberts, Tom Clancy, Frederick Forsyth, Jeffrey Archer, Sydney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, John Grisham and others, all pirated versions manufactured illegally and inexpensively. A few Harold Robbins' are tucked shamefully in the back. I ask if I can take a picture, and the man cringes, asking if I'm a journo. I laugh and shake my head. He allows me to take pictures. I take two, then walk off with ma. We head out to a mall in Sector 18, when I see another stall, this one outside, in full public view. I take a quick picture from the car-it comes out dark, and I worry, but we've got impatient cars, cyclists, motorists, and pedestrians behind us. I wonder why all the pirated books come with plastic covers. As we drive on, my eyes catch the Police Chowki sign right next to the stall.

8:40 pm. The children huddle close to the television set on the cold cement floor at the Orphanage. Their eyes are riveted to the Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Ram episode they are watching on a slow Sunday night on the Cartoon Network. While Ram, Sita, Lakshman, Ravan, Shurpanakha, and Hanuman from the Hindu epic hold them in their thrall, I take the time to wander around with my camera. It's a massive room, with about 25 beds arranged neatly in rows. There are pictures on the wall of gods and goddesses from the Hindu pantheon, with short prayers in Devanagari beneath the images. There are several pictures of some Gurus as well, again with accompanying texts, some in Sanskrit, some in Bengali. I move towards the bookshelves to take pictures. The iron bookshelves, with one shelf for each child, have been recently repainted to mask the rust; on them are are piles of dogeared and much-thumbed notebooks and textbooks, and some trendy brightly colored school bags. I reach out to touch one of the textbooks, and my fingertips darken with dust. The children continue watching Ramayana as I walk away from the room, down the winding stairs, into the Kali temple. I take pictures of the big bookshelves there, lined with mostly "serious" devotional texts, mostly geared for spiritually inclined adults, in Hindi, Sanskrit, Bengali, and English. There's one book that catches my eye: an '80s biography of Sunil Gavaskar, the former Indian cricketing star. Odd. Most of the books look like they haven't been touched in years, maybe decades. I go back up to where the children are, and their tutor, Bidyut, tells me the children don't like to read much, and he wonders why.

Cussing Customs: India Edition

2008-12-28T20:07:00.000-08:00

The Hubli Unusual Abuse competition takes place today on the hallowed grounds of the Dakshina Vaishnodevi Temple in Karnataka, a southern Indian state. The participants will “hurl abuses” (in English, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and other Indian languages), and winners will be awarded flower garlands. There are some guidelines for competitors: the “abuses” should not be “offensive”; the cussing session has to be original, and entertaining for the audience; and participants have to refrain from commenting on “sensitive issues like religion, caste, politics, gender.” The cussing competitors can “perform” their tirades by themselves, or as couples (“husband-wife duo, friends or brother-sister”).

This interesting piece of news made me think of my own experiences with cussing in India. Growing up in Delhi, I was hardly sheltered from profanity in Hindi: I remember DTC, Redline and Blueline bus drivers and ticket-collectors routinely cussing out passengers or pedestrians; autorickshaw-wallahs in their yellow-green sputtering vehicles spewing venom at slow cyclists, wayward cars, or at cows blocking the street; and लाठी-wielding policemen walking their beats, pretty foul-mouthed on a bad day. On an average day in Delhi, you’re bound to chance upon a loud street fight somewhere—with dozens of “encouraging” gawkers in attendance—mostly young men indulging in verbal fisticuffs: anyone interested in acquiring the crudest cuss words in Hindi (purely for linguistic research purposes, natch) would be well advised to stand by and watch one of those unfold.

Using strong profanity in Bengali, my mother tongue, is generally taboo in front of elders or in what are called “polite” circles. I have never heard anything stronger than an “ও!” (Oh!) from my father, rarely anything stronger from Ma, and limited profanity from others in my extended family. The strongest word my late grandfather ever used was “মূল ‘র ডাঁটা” (which means “the stem of a radish”); my mother, on the rare occasion, ventures: “ছাতা!” (“Umbrella!”). By and large, the swearing within my family involves the following Bengali phrases: “ও বাবা” (“Oh father,” usually an exclamation of surprise or wonder. The Hindi equivalent is “बाप रे!”) and “ও মা” (“Oh mother,” an expression of pain, shock, and other sentiments). The most common swear words I have heard in my immediate circles—among friends and relatives—involve calling others (in Bengali): “গাধা” (donkey, indicating thick headedness); “গরু” (cow, indicating a lack of wisdom); কুকুর-শেয়াল (dog-fox, indicating belligerence or bellicosity); and “ছাগল” (goat, a “fraidy cat”); and (in Hindi): कुत्ता (dog, sort of all-purpose word), “भैंस” (buffalo, fat); and “उल्लू का पठ्ठा ” (owlet, indicating gullibility or a certain lack of intelligence).

While Bengalis—so far as I can tell—aren’t a very profane group of people, there’s an interesting cussing ritual that is conducted during traditional Bengali weddings. After the (Hindu) wedding ceremony is over, the local নাপিত (the barber)—generally clad in a ধুতি, with a গামছা flung over his shoulder—is invited to read off the worst kinds of গালি (cuss words) to the wedding party. I’m not entirely sure who he cusses out, or why, but that is the tradition. Go figure.

What are some unusual cussing stories you’ve heard of? [Comments will be moderated.]

खादी: Weaving Indian Nationhood

2008-12-25T09:25:00.001-08:00

A couple of evenings ago, with the temperature in the low teens (in °C), and the stale winter air thickly polluted with smog, my mother and I happened upon the National Khadi Fair in a suburb of New Delhi, India. Even though we had pending errands to run, we were inexorably drawn to the Fair, seduced by the texture of patriotism spun deep through its handcrafted threads. Khadi (Hindi: खादी), a kind of coarse homespun cloth woven from cotton, once called "the livery of freedom," gained ascendancy during the Indian Independence Movement. It's "core semiotic," it has been argued, "lay in its being a commodity of resistance against colonial exploitation”; as a symbol of Indian self-reliance due largely to Mahatma Gandhi's efforts, खादी continues to be deeply entwined with our ideas of nationhood.

In my family, as in many other families, we patronize खादी clothing not only because we like the texture of the fabric, but primarily because we consider buying खादी a part of our civic duty. During the Indian Independence Movement, my maternal great-grandfather was summarily dismissed from the elite Indian Civil Service in Bengal when his pro-खादी, Swadeshi (Hindi: स्वदेशी) sympathies came to light. Dadu (my maternal grandfather) would wear only खादी dhutis, while Dida (grandma), an active member of the Indian National Congress party, would patriotically wear coarsely spun खादी sarees. My mother's maternal uncle, jailed sixteen times by the British for his involvement in the freedom struggle, never wore anything but खादी. My mother's brother, who was in his early teens at the height of the struggle for independence, spent hours spinning cotton in his spare time. My father, once taken to a jail-as a ten-year-old-for participating in a rally against the British Raj, vividly remembers seeing strong Swadeshi supporters spinning खादी on charkhas in his neighborhood in the Bihari city of Khagaria...

Both my parents recall what Maria Misra labeled the "bonfire of vanities": where foreign-made clothes were burnt in massive piles by Indians, as a part of a refusal to remain dependent on foreign manufacturing (Gandhi was arrested for doing so in 1929). खादी, in that context, became a symbol of our revolutionary zeal, of our struggle to unshackle ourselves from colonial oppression; of our burning determination to self-govern. Legally, the Indian flag may only be made out of Khadi cloth, and at one point, an image of the charkha was on the Indian flag. It makes sense, then, that for my parents, like millions of others, खादी is no mere cloth. It is a symbol of Indian independence; of the sacrifices, hardships, and struggles that got us here. Its texture is woven into the national langscape, the invincible spirit of an oppressed nation, and the hopeful dreams of a free India.

जय हिंद!TYVM "U-Χι" for all the encouragement.

Err…What Language Was That In?

2008-12-22T17:15:00.000-08:00

On the way to grab my favorite Chicken Malai Roll at Spice Mall in a suburb of New Delhi, my mother and I stopped by the National Khadi Fair taking place in nearby campgrounds (see post above).

As we were walking by the stalls, I saw one with some beautiful traditional Bengali Baluchari and Kaatha Stitch sarees hanging from a wall. I watched as Ma walked up to the middle-aged gentleman manning the stall and struck up a conversation with him, while I began looking over some jute handbags in an adjoining stall. I could hear both Ma and the shopkeeper speaking in Hindi, the primary local language in Delhi. A few minutes later, I wandered over to where Ma was, and said something to her in Bengali during a lull in their conversation. As their conversation started up again, I noticed he shifted to addressing Ma in Bengali. He was obviously not a native speaker, though definitely fluent. My mother kept going back and forth in Hindi and Bengali, and at one point I said to her, "What are you doing? You can talk to him in Bangla!"

What happened next made me very confused. From that point on Ma spoke to him exclusively in Hindi (a language she is undeniably less proficient in than Bangla, her mother tongue), while the man and I (now having joined in the conversation) kept speaking with her in Bangla. The conversation ended once we discovered we didn't have enough money on us to buy a saree I liked, and, promising to come back soon, Ma and I walked away.

It was not until we were back in the car that I asked Ma why on earth she'd kept speaking to the man in Hindi when he knew and spoke Bangla so well. "He was speaking in Bangla? Oh God!" Ma said, "I must have misheard-I thought you stopped me at one point and asked me why I was speaking to him in Bangla, and so I thought...he must only speak Hindi, I must have imagined him speaking in Bangla...And after that, it didn't even register that he was speaking Bangla-I thought he was speaking Hindi! How funny!"

How amazing, I think...that since Ma's so used to weaving in and out of Bangla, Hindi, and English so seamlessly in her everyday life, the textures become so familiar as to seem identical at times....

Language Loss

2008-12-19T23:31:00.000-08:00

When all the people of the world finally speak the same language and commune in the same message or the same norm of reason, we will descend, idiot imbeciles, lower than rats, more stupidly than lizards. The same maniacal language and science, the same repetitions of the same in all latitudes–an earth covered with screeching parrots.

-Michel Serres (1997), on language loss

***

A thick, gray fog shrouded a chilly Berkeley evening a week ago, as a dear friend and I ventured into a local Korean barbecue joint. Over plates piled high with fiery, pungent Kimchi; mayo-draped greens; medium-well Korean barbecue; and glutinous, sticky rice, my friend recounted a profoundly moving tale of language loss.

The narrative comes from an autobiographical moment in a keynote address titled Mémoires francophones. The renowned French philosopher Michel Serres delivered it at Stanford in the 2006 conference, Empire Lost: France and its Other Words.

Like the best of stories, it is simple.

Serres grew up speaking a regional language in Agen in southwestern France. Eventually, he became one of France's leading intellectuals, and in 1990, this incredibly gifted man, who did not originally speak French as his first language, became a member of the prestigious Académie française, the official academy invested with the authority to "regulate" the French language.

There was a tragic side to his ascent. Over time, he had become more and more isolated and alienated from his first language. It became a language slowly confined only to those intimate interactions with immediate family members. As the years wore on, his parents passed...and then, there came a day when his brother, the last remaining person he spoke to in his native tongue, died.

In the keynote address, Serres spoke of the grief he felt then: a mourning not only for a loved brother, but a mourning for a language that would "die" with him. The griefs were intertwined.

***

Language loss is of enduring interest to me: I've posted on the topic here, here, and here.

I think
It's because
I fear
I hear
The screeching parrots
Come....

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?!

2008-12-18T00:41:00.000-08:00

An article in the Telegraph, UK, covers what it calls a "growing backlash" in Germany against the popular trend of appropriating English words into German discourse, or what is called "Denglisch." An increasingly globalized world, the spread of English-based technology, and a high rate of immigration into the country (there are some 10 million foreigners in Germany presently) have all contributed to a situation that is alarming to some Germans: sixty out of every hundred new word used in Germany are now English words, up from 1980, when only one word in 100 was in English. Walter Kraemer, a member of the Verein Deutsche Sprache e.V. (the German Language Association, similar to the French Académie française) is arguing that this is detrimental for German science and industry. The Telegraph quotes him as saying:

''There is no way around English...It's the international language. But before you communicate, you have to be innovative, imaginative, creative, and you can't do that properly in a language that's not your own. People think better in their own language. German science is suffering because of this.''

This outcry comes on the heels of a recent addition to the German Constitution (the Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland), the culmination of sustained efforts by German conservatives, which incorporated the following text to Article 22: "The language of the Federal Republic of Germany is German." This addition has been criticized as being aimed against the growing Turkish, Arab and African immigrant communities.

Language has also been a central issue in immigration discussions in the US. I won't go in to it here, but my one comment is that English has done just fine here "despite" the waves of immigration from non-English speaking worlds. To get a really cool perspective on this, check out the video below which maps out immigration to the US from 1820 to 2007:

Immigration to the US, 1820-2007 v2 from Ian Stevenson on Vimeo.

Check out a related old post called "Sprich Deutsch!" here.

This post has been cross-posted at the Daily Kos. Click here to check out the wonderful thread of comments!

Oddest Book Titles

2008-12-16T22:24:00.000-08:00

With only 15 days, 2 hours, 5 minutes, 4 seconds (at the time of this writing) to go before the year draws to a close, the Internet is flooded with all kinds of lists: Top 10 of this, Top 100 of that, and Top 500 of the other. My favorite list in any given year is the one that contains the nominations for books with the strangest titles released annually by the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year. The ones I like most from the last thirty years are both two-time award winners: the "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice" published by the University of Tokyo Press, and "Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers" edited by Derek Willan.

So, what are some of the oddest book/song/movie titles you have heard of? Opening up the floor for the flurry of comments sure to follow...

Rhyme without Reason: আবোল তাবোল

2008-12-14T14:14:00.000-08:00

The King of Bombaria (“Bombagharer Raja”)

"In the land of Bombaria,
The customs are peculiar.
The king, for instance, advocates
Gilded frames for chocolates.
The queen, who seldom goes to bed
Straps a pillow round her head.
The courtiers—or so I am told—
Turn cartwheels when they have a cold

... The King's old aunt-an autocrat-
Hits pumpkins with her cricket bat
While Uncle loves to dance Mazurkas
Wearing garlands strung with hookahs.
All of this, though mighty queer,
Is natural in Bombagarh.."

-Sukumar Ray, translated by Satyajit Ray

I was reared on a steady diet of nonsense poetry in my childhood years. Growing up “prabashi Bengali” (the word for a Bengali who lives outside Bengal), in faraway New Delhi, one of the strongest links I had to Bengal was the nonsense verse of Sukumar Ray, in the form of the absolutely magical anthology of Abol Tabol, or Rhymes Without Reason. I had it read to me by my mother, I would read it by myself, and I even participated in a recitation competition during Saraswati Puja. In fact, one of the most traumatic moments in my life (one I mentioned in a previous post) revolves around an event that occurred during one such recitation competition. I was about five, standing before a huge audience of parents and children, reciting a poem from Abol Tabol. Midway through, I totally forgot the remaining lines—and given the nonsensical nature of the poetry, naturally, there were few cues to be had. Ultimately it ended well for me: I lip read my mother, who started reciting it from afar. Despite that unfortunate incident, however, I have not left my passion for Ray’s poetry behind.

Children’s nonsense poetry has had a long tradition in Bengal. The most popular poems for the youngest children (till around the age of five) tend to be the four-, six-, and eight-line poems called “chharas.” Originally, these poems were “handed down” orally, though since the advent of print publishing in Bengal, the poems have begun to be written down, and illustrated. While written for children, most adults enjoy them tremendously. The setting of such poetry, traditionally, has been a rural village. The focus is on the everyday, on the simple things in life. Though there is attention to form, the content is more often than not nonsensical. One line may or may not have anything to do with the next, and words may or may not be part of the Bengali lexicon (though they always “sound” Bengali). What is interesting is how ingrained this practice is in the life of a Bengali caregiver and the child: they are used to “soothe,” “distract,” “lull,” and “coax and console,” as Sen (1996) tells us. The socialization of Bengali children, remarkably, is mediated, then, by nonsense verse.

Sukumar Ray (1887-1923) grew up under the shadow of the British Raj, and is most famous for his nonsense poetry in Abol Tabol. The book is an anthology, multi-semiotic, with each poem illustrated by the poet himself. Traditionally, Bengali has had a strong poetic recitation tradition, and children are encouraged to recite from very early years. "Proper" or "good" আবৃত্তি (recitation) is considered an art form, a matter of pride in Bengali households. The point is not just to recite, but recite well: they are learnt for competitions, with large audiences watching. As far as I can tell, the functions these recitations serve are the following: (1) the preparations for the competitions instill self-discipline in little children, (2) they allow children to have first hand experiences in “public speaking,” (3) the children are taught to pay particular attention to formal features, such as rhythm, tone, emphasis, and mood/emotion, and (4) children are forced to memorize texts, and hence hone their memory.

Bengali children’s nonsense poetry is seen to primarily be a source of bond-building between the caregiver and the child; teaching the child about how words sound (the phonology, without an emphasis on semantics) in Bengali, and how they may be strung together, and, finally, for providing children small glimpses of typically Bengali behavior: good or bad. In nonsense poetry, as I commented in Youki's brilliant post, the everyday becomes exoticized, and outrageously exaggerated. Through humor, the everyday becomes atypical.

At whatever age, Sukumar's seductive exhortations are un-turn-down-able.

"Come here, innocent one, without any thoughts
In the lap of dreams dance and come
Come here, crazy one, nonsense (abol tabol)
Play the drunken percussions and come."

Reference:

Sen, S. (1996), Tagore's "Lokashahitya": The Oral Tradition in Bengali Children's Rhymes: Asian Folklore Studies, Vol. 55, No. 1. pp. 1-47.

The Multilingual Internet

2008-12-12T22:43:00.000-08:00

Ajit Balakrishnan, the CEO of Indian's fifth largest web portal, Rediff.com, argued recently that data collected over the last decade suggests no evidence that Indian Internet users "want Indian languages." He went on to state that "practically all of the 300 million young people who aspire to something in this country aspire to learn English." According to his figures, while the site (Rediff.com) affords email facility in eleven different Indian languages, more than 99% of Rediff email users utilize English. The CEO of another web-based company in India (called OneIndia), BG Mahesh, provided an apt rejoinder. He commented rightly on his personal blog that "It is wrong to assume Indian languages are not a wanted commodity just because a particular language product (in this case, the language support on rediffmail) hasn’t done well." Mahesh also goes on to note-quite reasonably-that there's a difference between online reading and writing practices that Balakrishnan does not seem to be factoring into his argument.

Several things occur to me here. I myself have experimented with Bengali and Hindi emailing, and given up quickly, having become so habituated to emailing in English, that composing emails in other languages seems inordinately difficult and time consuming. That's probably because I was introduced to Indian language emailing way after my hands were "set" using the English keyboard for churning out emails in English, starting with PINE, to using hotmail, lakehead.edu, email.com, yahoo.ca, csuchico.edu, and so on. Because there was a time lag, during which we got habituated to English emailing, many of us who might have utilized such services got into the mindset that email=English texts. While code switching occurred, we made use of Romanized Hindi/Bengali (here I limit myself to speaking for a large circle of friends and family I have electronically communicated with over the years). What worries me is that if people who wield a great deal of influence over Internet usage practices in India, such as Balakrishnan, don't persevere and try to push local language emailing with the huge new crop of users India adds annually, then the presence of Indian writing technologies on the Net will dwindle before they are given a real chance to take off. Further, Bakakrishnan glosses over the fact that while young Indians may see English as a prestige and/or useful language, and want to learn it, it's not necessary that they won't want to engage in reading and writing online in their mother tongues.

I think Mohan's perspective on reading versus writing practices is very interesting: He asserts that "users [on OneIndia] wanted to ‘read’ our content [in Indian languages] and very few wanted to write in the [Indian] language." [emphasis added] I can't entirely explain why that is, except to note that that's true of many Indians I have talked to, and it is true of my own practices. The danger lies in misrecognizing the distinct practices the two appear to constitute in an online environment, as Balakrishnan appears to do. I think doing a large-scale study on why that occurs would be very instructive...here's hoping it gets done someday...soon.

For more on this topic, check out The Multilingual Internet by B Danet and SB Herring (2007).

Signs from Around the World!

2008-12-08T19:46:00.000-08:00

A really amazing Flickrite, Tony Bowden, has compiled a massive gallery of signs from around the world. Check it out here. [Hat tip: Chris Bodenner.] Looking at the signs he has collected, I was reminded of a very interesting sign I took a picture of, at a park in New Delhi, India, in December 2006. It was so funny, in so many ways, I took the picture and showed it to my Hindi 1A class (of which I was a Graduate Student Instructor here on campus).

As you can see, 5 words have been blacked out. The word that is blackened out is "मना," which means "forbidden" in Hindi. Here's what the sign originally meant to say in Hindi:

"It is forbidden to litter in the park.
It is forbidden to drink alcohol and gamble in the park.
It is forbidden to engage in illicit activities in the park.
It is forbidden to ride a bike in this park.
It is forbidden to play cricket in the park.
It is forbidden to pluck flowers or tear off leaves in the park. "

If you remove the "मना" in the sentences, you are left with (here I give a loose translation):

"You should litter in the park."
"You should drink alcohol and gamble in the park.
You should engage in illicit activities in the park.
You should ride a bike in this park.
You should play cricket in this park."
The flowers and leaves...well, the "censor" left that part be, maybe something of an environmentalist. :)

আমার বাংলা

2008-12-04T18:22:00.000-08:00

The New York Times' book blog, the aptly titled "Paper Cuts," carries a post about a recent UC Press book entitled “One Thousand Languages: Living, Endangered, and Lost,” edited by Peter K. Austin. The description includes this alarming line: "There are more than six thousand languages used around the world today, although linguists now estimate that by the year 2050 as many as half of those will be extinct." I felt relieved-and then immediately a little guilty-to find Hindi and Bengali listed as two of the most widely-used languages in the post, and so-for now, at least-insulated from linguistic "death." The postTulu" that "a mere" 2 million Indians speak, which I'd never heard of (and I've not heard of, probably, 95% of most languages and dialects in India, so this is not really as surprising as it is interesting). And that the gorgeous country of "Vanuatu, with 100,000 people and 120 languages, has the highest language density of any country in the world." And "Njerep...[has only] four speakers left, none of them younger than 60." Most tragically, we're told that "90 percent of the languages currently spoken will probably disappear by the end of this century." Apparently, there's not much we can do, beyond documenting, while we can, the amazing linguistic diversity in the world today...

I just tried to think of how I would feel if Bengali-my Bangla-died....Despite being a native speaker, my fluency/proficiency is limited; I grew up in north India (Bangla is spoken in the East), and though it was always spoken in the home, I had limited interactions in it outside of my immediate and extended family. I never "formally" learnt the language, though as a child, I taught myself how to decipher the script by comparing the letters to Hindi (they are somewhat similar-to see for yourself, go here and then here). Once I decoded it, the first thing I tried was a Bengali children's book, translated from the Russian-I still vividly remember that experience. One time, my mother had me compete in a children's Bengali recitation competition during Saraswati Puja, and I literally froze with stage fright, and though I made my way through with some prompting from Ma, that was the end of my "professional" poetry reading career. My experience with Bengali texts was largely from my singing in the language-the only real texts I know by heart are mid-length songs by Rabindra Nath, Kazi Nazrul Islam, and others, and I don't always even understand all the words. And my most special memories of Bengali literature are the times when my mother would recite Katha-o-Kahini, a collection of short stories by Rabindra Nath Tagore, Indian's only Nobel Laureate in literature, a Bengali. And she only read them to me when I was running a fever...to this day, I carry video and audio files of my mom reciting my favorite stories from it-entire chunks, entirely from memory...which I listen to in the grip of fever for comfort, for warmth, for the touch of home.

Living as far away from home, and my language, as I do, it is difficult not to feel terribly isolated, alienated from "amar" (my) Bangla. Rushed conversations with my parents back home are increasingly marked by code switching-I find it difficult to make the switch to Bangla from the English I am immersed in, in every other context of my life. The only time when I am truly in the comforting embrace of my mother tongue is when I return for annual visits to India. For one month, then, my tongue takes a different shape...English rarely escapes it, at least in speech...I dust off our old harmonium, pull out the Geetanjali and other song-books, and as I sing, or listen to my mother sing, my heart is full of joy, and my heart weeps, for it is a joy so terribly pure and elevating, it is almost spiritual. Ma and Baba laugh lovingly when they see my reaction-sometimes I am so overwhelmed by Bengali poetry when singing, I dissolve in emotions, unable to continue...poetry that I cannot make sense of, words I don't fully comprehend, strange characters I cannot pronounce. My mother finds relief in my continuing passion for our language, and my father-banished to the doorway because of the inevitable emotionality of my singing in Bangla-laughs tenderly and tells me gently what I already know: my language is beautiful, it's literature inspiring, and my bond with it cemented in indelible script. But there's a bond there with Bangla that goes deeper than words, deeper than anything semantics could unpack. And then, there's always that happy shock when we go to CR Park, the "Bengali Town" of New Delhi, where I invariably become mute when shopkeepers, rikshaw-wallahs, and fishmongers talk to me in Bangla. I am so unused to that, I shrug and Ma has to step in for me. And then there's Ma's poetry, her precious words, her incredible short children's poems that I have her read to me every time I go back. For one month, my soul speaks in Bangla.

Baba and Ma are convinced that some day, I will "return" to my tongue, that some day I'll "return" to a language I am born to, the language whose bond with me is deeper than its words. I'm an itinerant now, have been for a while, but there's only one home...English, and the others languages....are a temporary dwelling. For some strange reason, I am convinced of it too.

So what of others who feel like me, those others who speak dying languages...their centuries of oral, textual, cultural pasts, learnings, wisdoms, histories, philosophies, the very tastes and sounds of their languages....endangered? I cannot imagine how painful that loss. mentions several intriguing tidbits: there's a Southern Indian language called "

Linguistic Terrorism?

2008-12-01T18:54:00.000-08:00

Today's Wall Street Journal carries an opinion piece that calls out "many [in the] prominent Western media [for being] reluctant to call the [Mumbai] perpetrators terrorists." He accuses the BBC of being "anti-Semitic" and the New York Times "disgraceful," in their coverage of the Mumbai terrorist attacks. He further criticizes journalists for attempting to "mangle language," going on to ask, "How are we going to effectively confront terrorists when we can't even identify them as such?"

There's too much going on in his article, so I am going to confine myself to some select points about his argument. Gross (the author of the piece) expresses outrage over the Times' (UK) decision to use the word "militant": "Do they somehow wish to express sympathy for these murderers, or perhaps make their crimes seem almost acceptable?" First, I found many articles in Time containing both the words "militant" and "terrorist" in the same article, especially in my review of the latest Mumbai attacks. Second, as a citizen of a country with a long history of "terrorism," I am actually more used to hearing the word "militant." The word "terrorism" reached a certain preeminence with the 9/11 attacks, but that isn't the only word that has currency, isn't the only word that can convey heinous attacks against a hapless citizenry. Many Indians-and the Indian media, and the government-routinely refer to terrorists as militants, as I am wont to do. I defy Gross to tell me that I-and others who use the term-necessarily feel sympathy for those who attack my country, my people, simply because I use a word he doesn't find appropriate.

How are we mangling language? Words are nuanced, words come with their own histories, their own contexts, their own pasts. Is his implication that we must use one word, and one word alone, in denouncing those that attack us in vicious ways? Gross' net argument is that we should clamp down on our vocabularies in order to get it right? We don't all understand "terrorism" the same way; our experiences with it, immediate and distant, shape how we understand it. Whether we call something terrorism or militancy, the context of the anger and outrage around it must exceed mere word boundaries.

Returning to his question: ""How are we going to effectively confront terrorists when we can't even identify them as such?" I think it's downright dangerous to think there is only one label that you can apply towards such reprehensible groups. Such kind of linguistic prescriptivism, I feel, trivializes the myriad and complex ways in which "terrorism" or "militancy" should be framed and understood by the public, the media, and various governments.

A little bit of funny...

2008-11-30T17:38:00.000-08:00

Russel Peters rocks. On a day in which I'm particularly homesick, here's what I am watching to cheer me up. Enjoy.

Leave my country alone!

2008-11-30T16:17:00.000-08:00

The latest threat from the Deccan Mujahideen, which claimed responsibility for the terror strikes in Mumbai, is that Delhi is the next target. I half-anticipated this, minutes after I heard about the Mumbai strikes, knowing that the political capital of India might be next. Apparently they are planning strikes by blowing up three-wheelers (auto-rickshaws).

I am tired, so very tired for my city, my country, and my people.

I HATE that I worry every time my parents go to the market, especially during festive times, knowing something terrible could happen, as it has for others over the years.

I HATE that I worry when my sister and nieces visit malls or the cinema on their trips back home. Those have been targeted.

I HATE that I fear every time my father flies anywhere, or I fly into Delhi, knowing that terrorists have targeted Indian planes and airports.

I HATE that back home, it is something we warn each other about as a matter of routine...be careful, stay away from crowds, don't go there, too many people go there...it is a part of everyday discourse, everyday talk.

Enough.
Enough.
Enough.

Mumbai attack: "Small incident"?

2008-11-29T19:10:00.000-08:00

Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister R R Patil said "such small incidents happen" on the recently concluded Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Money quote:

"Bade shahron mein aise ek adh hadse hote rahte hain. Woh 5,000 logon ko marne aye the lekin humne kitna kum nuksan hone diya." (Such small incidents happen in big cities. They (terrorists) came to kill 5,000 people but we ensured minimal damage).

This reminds me of another horrific comment, one made by [UP Chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav’s brother] Shivpal Yadav, describing the Nithari serial murders (in which nearly 19 young children were slain by a serial killer) as a "small and routine incident."

How ugly is Indian urban life supposed to be, that such things are considered routine?

Endpoint Mumbai: Resignation or Resilience?

2008-11-29T12:47:00.000-08:00

It's been hours since the last gunshots rang out, the last explosions went off, and the thick, smoky flames that were licking the Mumbai sky died. Indian television stations, domestic and international news media, and bloggers are struggling to get beyond reporting the horrifying events; it is now time to mine for new heroic and tragic narratives; for "rational" explanations; for intellectual postmortems on the devastating failure of the security apparatus in India. It is time for a search for new directions, new understandings of the old and familiar face of terror in the Indian financial capital.

As I watch multiple live video news feeds from Indian television channels (see here), and scan Indian and international newspapers, blogs, and news sites, I am struck by the focus on Mumbaikars' (that is how local Mumbai residents are referred to in Marathi) "resilience" in face of terrorism.

Several major personalities, mostly Mumbaikars, have been making rounds of major 24-hour Indian television channels such as NDTV, Times Now, and CNN IBN, among others. Local voices seem to be asserting repeatedly that Mumbaikars should NOT get back to work as normal; businesses and other establishments should NOT open up as if nothing-or just a little something-happened; Mumbaikars, they suggest, should be angry, they should be defiant, they should grieve: they should NOT forget. Several commentators specifically said that Mumbaikars should NOT show the much-vaunted Mumbai "spirit of resilience," for this "spirit" would only signal resignation, or fatalism, instead. One columnist says angrily, "to hell with those who keep on harping about the `great spirit' of Mumbai." If Mumbaikars appear to be dispirited, commentators say, the Central government would be forced to sit up and take notice. If they go back to business as usual, the Central government would move on to the next order of business: the wounded, bleeding city forgotten until the next tragic moment in history. The citizenry, implies a columnist for the Times of India, needs to use the anger to fuel a war.

Simultaneously, there are those who praise the "stoicism" of Indians in face of terror; others who suggest:

"People will get on with their normal lives...This is the way to defeat terrorism. If you sit at home, this would be victory on a plate for the terrorists."

Another says:

"Mumbai and India will survive” is perhaps a cliché but it is an apposite phrase for a city of great strength. Its people have learnt over the course of many tragedies to survive and to move on. Gun-wielding terrorists will not destroy it because bombs and bullets cannot defeat the spirit of its people

Having grown up in the Indian capital, New Delhi, through years of terrorist strife, I am not sure how to situate myself in this debate. The comparisons between post-9/11 New York and post-attacks Mumbai are inevitable. However, the difference lies in the fact that Mumbaikars-and Indians on the whole-have been battling terrorism on the home front for decades. The attack was not unprecedented in Mumbai, as one could argue it was for New York (to some degree); it was unprecedented in terms of scale. I do not find terror attacks unusual on Indian soil; after all,

The [U.S.] State Department said this year in its annual assessment of terrorist threats that 2,300 people died in 2007 in attacks by various groups in India, making it perhaps the country most affected by terrorism in the world.

What are the people to do? There are no easy answers...

Please check out my diary from yesterday for more here.

This post was first published in the Daily Kos, here.

Life Between Terror Strikes

2008-11-27T11:24:00.000-08:00

Minutes ago, on the NDTV live feed I’ve been riveted to for the past 24 hours, Rahul Bose, the renowned Indian actor, (demanding of an Indian politician) asked what quality of life Indians could expect between terrorist strikes. The larger context of his question dealt with what steps the Indian government (especially the major polarized and polarizing parties) had done to prevent such attacks, and what steps it would take in the future. It was, however, the normalizing of terrorist strikes in that particular question that stood out for me. India has so long, and so intensely battled terrorism, it has become intrinsic to the discourse of Indian life. That is of little surprise, given that according to 2006 figures, over 38% of Indian districts are actively battling terrorism to different degrees.

Is it just the fact that these strikes happen, that it becomes so internalized in a nation’s psyche? No. Language has played a pivotal role in the process of internalizing terror. Growing up in the capital, New Delhi, India, I rarely remember reading a newspaper which didn’t cover the topic of terrorism. Blasts are common enough that they have found themselves relegated to the deep inside pages, in the “National” section, sometimes sidelined by more “pressing” topics like cricket and Bollywood scandals, even in the mass-circulation, national newspapers. Television crews cover the stories for a few hours or days, then move on to the next scandal; the bleeding, wounded, and the dead largely forgotten in dusty archives. A friend of mine, a resident of Mumbai, updated his Facebook status three hours ago, while the hostage situation is continuing, saying: He “is amazed with the media… the big news is that cricket has been cancelled!!!!” I don’t mean to just come down on the media for normalizing terror-ultimately, it is motivated to spotlight issues it perceives as “of interest” to the public; however, I feel that it does control the public’s gaze, and contributes to normalizing the terror the public sees by choosing to feature terror strikes in particular ways.

How else has language contributed to normalizing terror threats for us? In all DTC (Delhi Transportation Buses), ever since I can remember, there were signs asking one to look for suspicious objects, and report them. Such signs have long been plastered around train stations, government offices, malls, and other places where large groups congregate. Somber full-page ads are taken out in all major newspapers warning people to be especially careful around festive times. The signs have become so common, they barely stand out; they are part of the Indian life landscape, an inherent part of its modern backdrop. The threat of terror is tasted, felt, underscored and read in every walk of life.

My point here isn’t that all this is bad. Old news stories will inevitably give way to the new, and in some ways the public’s “shake it off” attitude possibly also speaks to its resilience as a group. What I am wondering about is if this discourse has somehow not led to encouraging a more cautious, careful public, but a public resigned to its fate, resigned to living life between terrorist strikes.

Gunmen on the Rampage in Mumbai

2008-11-26T13:48:00.000-08:00

BREAKING NEWS: According to CNN, "Gunmen rampaged through a series of targets in the Indian city of Mumbai killing indiscriminately and taking hostages at two luxury hotels." 78 people have died, and there are about 200 wounded. According to the New York Times, the coordinated attacks used "machine-gun and grenade assaults on at least two five-star hotels, the city’s largest commuter train station, a historic movie theater and a hospital."

Since October 2005, nearly 700 people have lost their lives in India as a result of terrorist bombings.

My thoughts are with friends and family in Mumbai at this terrible time. If you're in Mumbai, and can donate blood, see here. Americans concerned about family members who are US citizens in Mumbai can call the State Department at 1-888-407-4747 for more information.

[Pictures via CNN and BBC.]

More here.

Update: numbers stand at 80 dead, 900 injured. Live TV feeds here and here.

Unleashing the Dragon!

2008-11-26T12:16:00.000-08:00

An article in The Hindu just caught my attention: Dragon Naturally Speaking 10, a voice recognition software, now comes with the option "Indian English." It claims to recognize Indian English accent patterns, allowing Indian English users to dictate text directly through speech, without having to manually enter text on the keyboard.

Check out the video, starting at the 52 second mark to see an example of how this works:

My accent being a mishmash, I am wondering which option I would select...can't wait to try it out!

Youtube in the tank for gays?

2008-11-25T20:27:00.000-08:00

K. Daniel Glover's post over at NewsBusters alleges that Youtube is "looking like just a new-media arm of the liberally biased media of old." And, apparently, it is in the tank for gays:

Instead of exposing its viewers to the hostility of gays toward religious people, YouTube has promoted a more positive message about gays standing up for their supposed civil rights. Since the election, two such videos have been promoted on the YouTube blog.

He slams Youtube for promoting "citizen news reports of the day" videos that "cast [Prop 8] protests in a positive light." For example, they recently featured a video that showed (GULP!) a Harvard professor "waxing eloquent about justice and fairness in marriage," and spotlighted another that covered "Nepal's Supreme Court upholding gay marriage" (you can read more about that here and here).

The official page for Youtube's Citizen News does not reveal what the selection criteria is (that I could find), but it does say that its purpose is to "highlight...some of the best news content on YouTube." It's unclear what criteria determine the "excellence" of the content, or who has ultimate editorial control. Oh but wait, the Youtube news manager is listed as a resident of (yikes!)San Francisco!

Glover needs to get a life. Pronto.

A Case of Classic Confusion

2008-11-23T23:21:00.000-08:00

The Indian government recently decided to confer “classic” status to a select few languages, using the yardstick that a language has to have been around at least 1500 years in order to make the cut. The official designation of a language as “classic” comes with a sizable grant to be used for its “preservation and propagation.” Naturally, in a remarkably multilingual country (home to hundreds of languages and dialects, many of which are endangered or seriously neglected), where language is a politically, emotionally, as well as ethnically charged issue, this has led to not little consternation. What’s troubling to many is not just the privileging of some languages at the cost of others, it is the arbitrary nature of the yardstick itself, a sentiment I share myself. There are other discontentments with this kind of assignation. According to India Today, for example,

…Sukumar Azhikode, former chairman, [Indian] National Book Trust [said]: “It is foolish to stake claim for the classic status. For it is an honour granted by fools to fools.” According to him, only literature and not languages can be classified classical or non-classical. “There is no concept of a classic language in linguistics.”

Not so, would say our very own George Hart, chair of the Tamil Studies at UC Berkeley, who, in 2000, wrote a letter in which he wondered “why Tamil has not been recognized as a classical language.” In the letter he argued,

“To qualify as a classical tradition, a language must fit several criteria: it should be ancient, it should be an independent tradition that arose mostly on its own not as an offshoot of another tradition, and it must have a large and extremely rich body of ancient literature. Unlike the other modern languages of India, Tamil meets each of these requirements.”

One of the questions that persists is how “ancient” a language has to be, then, to be so qualified (leaving aside the question of whether the qualification of languages as such is even a good thing to do). The Kerala government is understandably up in arms about the exclusion of Malayalam, a language younger than 500 years, and thus not given the “classic” status, despite meeting some of the other criteria.

It’s a little difficult to try to assess the public mood and sentiment about this when filtered through the lens of media, as I am forced to do, but I can imagine the resentment that many must feel…for now, I am opening the door…for comments.

“Full of odd names and customs”

2008-11-22T01:10:00.000-08:00

David Baddiel, a former judge for the coveted Booker Prize, my Times of India tells me, revealed that he has long held “narrow-minded” views against Indian authors writing in English. Among other things, he admits to “a prejudice that Indian novels are likely to be magical, mythic, sweepingly historical, quirky of humour, and spring from the tradition of folk tale; all things I don’t want in a novel.” [It is interesting, by the way, that I find it less astonishing that he held these views than that he chose to "air" them so publicly.] He goes on to say that his prejudice is “Not a racial one, hopefully, but a literary one” [emphasis added]. Hopefully? He characterizes an entire nation-a race, if you will-as generating a particular kind of literature, and somehow we are to understand that his prejudice is not racially framed and underlined? In what intellectual dimension does that make sense? I am deeply offended at the self-confessed ignorance and lack of depth of someone who has wielded power in British and Commonwealth literary circles, someone who’s had some control over how Indian authorship in English is perceived and rewarded. The concern is not simply that he indulged in stereotypes in such a frivolous and shallow manner; what bothers me especially is this rather untenable notion that ideally, “novels” do not contain elements of “magic,” “sweeping history,” “quirky humour” (his-British-spelling, not mine), or that they should not be birthed in “folk tales.” If this reasoning is applied to British novels (that is, English novels authored by British authors), and all those texts found to contain these elements singled out, many mainstream canonical texts would find themselves orphaned from the genre. It’s not unusual to hold strong views about what does and does not belong in a textual genre-we would not have a canon or be able to talk about genres otherwise-but this is absurd.

“I know my prejudice against it is a narrow-minded impulse,” he said, adding he feared Indian books were “full of odd names and customs and sometimes with ornate decorative covers.”

Gay Mariage Legalized in Nepal

2008-11-19T11:03:00.000-08:00

It's astonishing to me that the legalization of gay marriage in Nepal has received virtually NO press attention in the international media. I first saw the story on an Indian newspaper yesterday, which stated:

the Supreme Court on Monday delivered full judgement regarding a ground-breaking verdict it had announced last year, recognising sexual minorities, who were among the most oppressed in conservative, patriarchal Nepali society, as being born such and entitled to all the rights and remedies all other Nepali citizens enjoyed.

and in the intervening 24 hours, there are only TWO other stories that refer to it online, according to my search on Google News.

Why such a silence, given the historic nature of the Court's decision? Especially at a time when there's a massive domestic and international spotlight on California's Prop 8 controversy? Nepal may not be a nation that's commonly in the news, except maybe in Mt. Everest- or Living Goddess- related stories, and maybe that's why this is flying under the radar. It's still a little maddening that such a progressive measure, from a Maoist-run country in Asia, would be ignored.

Mode-Switching

2008-11-18T23:54:00.000-08:00

Email. Email. Email. Email. (switch). Text. Text. Text. (switch). Phone call/Skype? (switch). Face-to-face. (switch). Facebook wall post. Facebook wall post. Facebook message. (switch) Email. Email. Email.…You get the drift. Our daily interactions are frequently mediated through a variety of different modes. However, what’s interesting to think about is when these switches from one communicative tool to another occur; when we, as interlocutors in what are increasingly multichannel and linked conversations, make the decision to choose one communicative medium over another. [I am aware that I am here somewhat problematically using the words "channel," "medium," "mode," "tool" as if they were synonymous, easily substitutable words, and...oh well.]

I’ve been tracking my own practice over the last few weeks. It seems that not all my interactions are “multichannel”; with my mother, sister, and nieces, I only use the telephone (I do, on occasion, send a “group” email to my sister, but that’s rare); with my father it’s usually a combination of email and telephone conversations. With most professors, colleagues, and students, my conversations tend to be conducted exclusively through email. However, there’s a growing group of friends and acquaintances with whom I communicate using a variety of different tools, some times all on the same day, such as Skype (voice/text/video chat); Facebook (sharing links, posting on walls, commenting on pictures, sending messages, Superpoking, etc); telephone calls; text messaging; emailing; and face to face interactions.

I seem to make the switch from email to text when there’s an issue of pressing urgency (but not enough “urgency” to warrant a phone call), such as confirming/reconfirming dinner plans with I House mates or others, catching up on someone’s day briefly, or simply in carrying on mini-conversations when I’m on the move, away from my laptop. The switch from email or texting to telephone occurs in the rarest of circumstances, when there’s too much to say and I’m too tired to type, or if it’s important to hear the emotional context behind someone’s words (an aspect which is woefully “invisible” in emails), or if it’s a question of great urgency. The switch to Facebooking occurs when I’m interested in using some of the unique features that the platform affords, such as sharing links, commenting on “statuses,” posting gifts on someone’s walls, Superpoking, dedicating songs, or making a comments: that is, communiques, that for whatever reason, I want to be rendered publicly visible.

The switch from email to Skype happens regularly only with one friend, though to be honest I should say I resort to emailing when my friend is not available on Skype, not the other way around. Our relationship is primarily mediated through Skype, and it is only when time difference or scheduling problems intervene that we resort to emailing, and then our emails are terse, primarily used to make the next Skype appointment. Even on Skype, we tend to play around with the different features, usually chatting through text (with a liberal dose of cutesy emoticons), using voice-chat only when between certain hours (The I House has certain noise curfews, which I must observe), and most rarely, video, since for me, the video is a bit too immediate). Interestingly, my friend nowadays also calls me on my cell through Skype, when there’s too much delay, or if there’s a bad connection on PC-to-PC voice chat, but I find that strangely disconcerting, and we tend to keep that to a minimum (expense is another factor here). What of face-to-face interactions? When I think about it, it seems that this particular form of communication is what I probably do least of with most of my friends, probably because so many of those dear to me live far away (shout-outs to my beloved peeps in India, Indonesia, Italy, and Germany). Even in situations where I do have face-to-face interactions, it is stunning how much we reference conversations that have already occurred via email, text, or Facebook.

As I was parting company with a friend today, when he walked away, he said “I’ll call, text.” We were a few feet away when I turned and asked, “You won’t email?” How interesting that this is how a face-to-face encounter ended?

iGoogle, Therefore I am

2008-11-18T23:52:00.000-08:00

As a hardcore Googler (is that already a noun?), I am maybe a little too proud of the pun in the title [iGoogle is a customizable home page offered by Google; and I want to say I Google (verb)]. Incredibly, millions of people reading this could ask: why does she feel the need to explain this? [Quick side note: I am aware millions of people are actually NOT reading this. This is a purely hypothetical statement, using exaggeration for effect.] The reference is hardly obscure. I Google, and it seems, so does everyone in the world (at least those privileged with Internet access). [And no, I am not getting paid for this endorsement.]

Over the past months, I read a series of articles (in preparation for a class) exploring whether Google is en-dumbing us (read this and this, for example). I won’t go into all the many issues these articles raise; however, I do want to speak to one aspect that I think some of these articles paid scant attention to. That is, the element of customizability. The incredible power of Google as an entity, for me, lies in its ability to cater to my needs in a very particular way (though sometimes it misses its mark, of course: when I visit my family back home in India, it’s a pain when Google privileges Indian sites when I am trying to access American news stories or sites; I know it’s trying to do the whole customizing thing, too, here, but this customizability is built around geography, in this instance, and fails to consider the question of my needs transcending that). But I must give it credit: Google, most times with (verging on the scary) uncanny accuracy, caters to my search-related whims and fancies. I am not its slave; it, I like to think, bends willingly to my will.

There’s another aspect that makes Google vital to my everyday life: Google (to a large extent) mediates my creation, revision, and evolution of self. When I say I Google, I don’t just mean the search engine; I use a variety of Google owned services, as many of us do, like Youtube, Picasa, Blogspot, and the stalkerish Google Analytics. I have my own Youtube account that I use to upload videos, Picasa to create, sort, and share albums, Blogspot to create my own personal voice online, and Google Analytics to track visitors to my personal blog. [This list would have been really complete if I Orkuted, but I don't, and I won't. That's a separate blog post]. The search engine, is, inevitably, the tool I use most often, and helps me to find everything from scholarly articles, historical trivia, what the weather’s going to be two hours from now, where my old classmates are, and oh yeah, sure, I Google myself (in a world where many of us are Googleable, it helps to know what Google offers up about us-and what the hey-Google has made me, like others, intensely curious, about myself as well).

Google, for many of us, then, is not just a search engine juggernaut: it is a complex network of channels that facilitate a creation-and Internet-mediated dissemination-of this virtual self, and I am unclear what the points of intersections and divergences are from our “real” selves, if one argues that there is a “real” one distinct from the virtual. Maybe I should Google that?

Prop 8 Rally in San Francisco

2008-11-15T21:07:00.000-08:00

We marched for hours today to protest against Prop 8. I went out today not just as a temporary resident of California, I went as an international citizen standing up against the oppression of a basic civil right. The rally was, as reports indicate, somewhat disorganized. I couldn't hear most of the speeches, though I was pretty close to the City Hall steps at one point. However, the energy, enthusiasm, and electricity of the crowd was a sight to behold. There were thousands of protesters, many fielding buttons against prop 8, proudly brandishing banners, and wearing politically charged T shirts; rainbow flags fluttered everywhere. Hundreds of gay couples came with their children, and it was empowering and a little heart-breaking at the same time. Once the speeches ended, around 12:30pm, we dispersed a bit, and then marched from City Hall, all the way to the Wharf, and then returned to the City Hall, what seemed to be around 4 hours later. Throughout our march, we saw patient drivers trapped in cars and buses (because we ended up blocking traffic quite a bit) honking in open support, cheering us on, and others waved from windows...There were also dozens of very quiet bystanders, who appeared to be gawking at us, but such people were few and far between. We marched for four hours or so; I was bringing up the rear, and it was interesting that a phalanx of police cars followed us for the entire duration.

I think what we accomplished today was momentous. We marched on for hours with tired, blistered feet, a little dehydrated, our voices nearly giving way, but the happiness we felt cannot be adequately captured in words. All of us who came together, did so in a show of solidarity that cut across gender, racial, and sexual orientation lines. One thing that was particularly heartbreaking was that one of the cheers was "What do we want?", to which the crowd roared back, "Equal rights!" When do we want it?" "Now." I broke away and piped, "Yesterday." Though people around me laughed supportively, it seems depressing that this is something we have to want NOW. It should have already happened. It did. For an all too brief moment in time.

My Favorite Four-Letter Word

2008-11-14T23:21:00.000-08:00

“What’s your favorite word in another language? Why?” asks a prompt on my favorite blog, Found in Translation. English being an “another language” for me, here’s my favorite word: “Love.” My linguistic history with the word has been a long one, probably going back two and a half decades, though I did not ever utter it to another person until I was in my mid-teens. Growing up in a traditional but progressive family in India, where Bengali was the language of the home, Hindi the language to be used with friends, and “love” an emotion felt, acted out, and expressed, but never in words, I had no reason to use the word “love” in my everyday life. I have never told my parents or my sister I love them in any language, and I never will, for not only is not a custom, but I have been brought up to believe it goes too deep within for words. And “love,” a “foreign” word, came late to me, and I doubt I have yet fully made it my own. At some level, the word is alien to me, or is it I who am alien to it?

In the last few years, I have indulgently told my nieces a thousand times that I love them, in English (our interactions tend to be a hodge podge of Bengali and English), though, never to my sister, their mother. I have spoken the words “Ami tomake bhalobashi” (Bengali); “Main tumse pyar karti hoon” (Hindi); “Je t’aime,” (French); “I chinta kamu” (colloquial Bahasa Indonesia); “Ich habe dich lieb” (German), all variations of “I love you,” too many times to enumerate; but the English phrase “I love you,” for some reason, stands out as this enigma, embedded with this incredibly versatile word that has no exact equivalent in any language I know. I don’t mean the same things when I say “I love you” in different languages. When I say it in English, it somehow has a different taste; it is too clearly articulated for me, yet it is my only option to express my feelings for those who cannot speak my tongue(s), or do not understand my own background in a culture that doesn’t value its articulation as much as it does its expression in other ways. This cultural enigma that the word “love” represents for me, makes it ever more special.

The only circumstances in which I use the word are in the context of friendship or romance. As far as close platonic relationships go, it’s a word that rolls off my tongue with ease that amazes me. It is in that context where I do not wonder too much about it. In a romantic context, the word becomes inadequate, even if it is the closest English approximation of what I feel. I can feel the pull of my Indian upbringing, where it wasn’t the verbalization of that emotion that was as stressed as making it known through every act of life. Regardless of how much a mystery this word is still to me-and how much it is a question of trying to grapple with semantics in a language not intrinsically my own and how much life experience contributes to this I cannot answer-I find magic in this most amazing of four letter words.

My (Page)View on Political Blogging

2008-11-12T23:18:00.000-08:00

This story just caught my attention this morning: a seven-year-old named Stanislaw “Stas” Gunkel, who’s been providing political commentary on his blog, was lauded by (now) President-Elect Barack Obama five days before Election Day. A 2nd grade blogger, in the national media spotlight for political blogging! I could barely contain my happiness; blogging, people, has arrived.

Blogging has received a great deal of interest during the campaign season; some view it as a powerful new force in grassroots level political engagement, others see it as a disruptive, dangerous force capable of quickly disseminating unfounded smears. [There's the middle path, but that's not that interesting-he he.] Regardless of which camp you belong to, you can’t deny the pivotal role blogs played in the recent elections.

Like millions of others, I found myself constantly visiting DailyKos, the Huffington Post, America Blog, the Jed Report, AndrewSullivan.com, Think Progress, the Corner in the National Review Online, the Daily Beast, the NY Times’ Caucus, the CNN Ticker; I probably contributed to at least hundreds, if not thousands, of pageviews over the last few months.

What made blogs so popular? For me, one of the coolest aspects of this is that there’s a great deal of intertextuality that fascinates me…commentaries are sprinkled with links to other articles, images, videos. Blogs also support community building in powerful ways; most are open to comments, and some threads extend to thousands; most blogs also allow you to share the blogs quickly and easily on social networking sits like Facebook, Digg, and others. [Blogs also generally allow you to comment only when you've registered, so it kind of "forces" you to pledge your readership allegiance before you can have your voice heard.] And blog readers are more overtly referenced within blogs, I find, than readers are referenced in newspaper articles. The writers in blogs are rarely invisible; they get a byline; they are very visible, even if they only use a pseudonym. The blog reader is not just reading a news story; he or she is reading a news story written by someone, a someone who’s personality peeks out through posts.

As a blogger, I couldn’t be happier at the great traffic successes of blogs during this season. DailyKos had 9 million pageviews on election day, Andrew Sullivan had over 23 million pageviews this October, and Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, and the Drudge Report also numbered millions of unique visitors (see table below). A fluke? A flash in the pan? No, the future.

Ashwin Madia and Republican Race-baiting

2008-10-30T17:22:00.000-07:00

There's a rather revolting news story circulating in the "Internets" today, about an Indian-American Democrat named Ashwin Madia, running for congress in Minnesota. Republicans released an attack ad:

[which] invites viewers to “meet the real Ashwin Madia,” but the still photos featured in the spot present a noticeably darker version of the 3rd District DFL congressional candidate.

“At least three of the photos of Madia were obviously darkened, using one method or another,” public affairs and media consultant Dean Alger told KARE 11.

This is absolutely reprehensible; this kind of race-baiting should be summarily condemned. See a news report on that here.

Obama Rally in Reno, Oct 24, 2008

2008-10-25T19:48:00.000-07:00

I had gone to volunteer in Reno, Nevada, for the Obama campaign, having no clue that Obama was expected to give a speech at a rally there this morning. As a self-confessed Obama girl, this ended up being one of the most exciting days of my life. The speech was inspirational, and it was such a blessing to be able to see his rhetoric unmediated through a television/computer screen...the crowd's energy was unbelievable! Here are some pictures...

Campaigning for Obama in Nevada

2008-10-19T22:39:00.000-07:00

I just got back from campaigning for Obama in Nevada, and it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Details after the elections.

Vote.

Politics of Hate: The McCain/Palin Rallies

2008-10-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

"Rabid crowds," "supporters gone wild," "angry mobs" is how those flocking at the McCain/Palin rallies are being described, and there is something deeply unsettling and disturbing about the fact that the McCain campaign isn't coming out in open denunciation of the hatred spewing from the political pews. As the Associated Press reported, "Shouts of "traitor," "terrorist," "treason," "liar," and even "off with his head" have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them." John Kerry expressed his disgust at the "ugliness" at the rallies, Bob Shrum noted that the McCain/Palin rhetoric is inciting a "dangerous reaction," and John Sweeney expressed his anger at McCain campaign's very insidious encouragement of the "racists and extremists" who attend the rallies. While McCain did finally call Obama a "decent" person today at a rally, this comment runs counter to the constant otherizing rhetoric that pervades the McCain campaign.

Want to see what I am talking about? Watch this Youtube video at a McCain/Palin event:

I also want to share the opening lines from Frank Schaeffer's open letter to McCain:

"If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence."

As a person of color, as an international student in America, I am particularly sensitive to the blatant "Othering" that's patently obvious to everyone. In an interview, Sarah Palin recently stated that Obama was "so far out of the mainstream." What she meant is clear to anyone with half a brain. As an Indian citizen living in America, how much should I fear this kind of vitriol? I hope the McCain campaign decides-before it is too late-that dignity is much more important than fanning the racist fires that lurk beneath the surface in this country. I shudder to think what will happen if it doesn't.

I desperately don't want to find out.

Drunk Emailing: Google to the Rescue

2008-10-09T23:43:00.000-07:00

Google announced a new Gmail lab feature Monday, entitled "Mail Goggles," which promises to "check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email." What it does is make "you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind." Kind of like an electronic breathalyzer, a "Googly" monitoring system which will help ensure you don't send off reckless emails in a moment of intoxication. It's an interesting concept, though I doubt it's going to limit "drunk emailing" too much. Inebriated people have an impulse instinct that's hard to control.

Most of us have, at one time or another, fired off an email we've lived to regret. If we're very lucky, and not often given to impulse, that has happened only once. The Mail Goggles lab creator, for example, regrets "the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together." There's something about the facility afforded by email that gets us into tricky situations. Emails shield us from direct, face-to-face interactions, so we can say things virtually that we might not be able to say in person. There's something coolly impersonal, and ephemeral, about electronically mediated communication for me; somehow, it just doesn't seem as much of a commitment when I say something electronically as compared to when I speak with someone directly, on the phone, or communicate via a hand written letter. And, well, when it's late at night and a phone call is "unseemly" at that hour, post-drink session, emails-which you HAVE to check anyway before you turn in for the night-make perfect sense. Unlike drunk telephoning, where the recipient of the call will be able to tell that you're drunk-the slurring of words is generally a dead giveaway-when you drunk email, those contextual cues are lost.

I think a general email check-"ARE YOU REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY SURE YOU WANT TO SEND THIS?" should be built into ALL emails. How many times have I fired off an email and regretted it the second my mouse clicked the SEND button? Too many to count. Sometimes, email say too much, while saying too little.

Come on, Google, do more.

The Presidential Debates: Round One to Obama

2008-09-26T21:32:00.000-07:00

As a self-confessed "Obama girl," (I'd say woman, but it would not be as snazzy) I spent the entire day in a frenzy of excitement and nervousness, expecting everything and nothing. Now, having watched the debate, and browsed the first post-debate impressions inundating the "Internets" (smile, Colbert fans), I am certain Round One went to Obama. Here's my two cents in the flood of punditry.

This was a debate meant to center around issues that are traditionally framed as McCain's core strengths: foreign policy, the military. The recent collapse on Wall Street prompted a revision of what needed to get talked about during the debates. The discussions around the economy, which started off the debates, have been Obama's strong point, and its emphasis in this debate undoubtedly helped him. He came across as nuanced, firm, and interested in more than just quick fixes, unlike McCain, whose bumblings over the past week ("suspending" and "un-suspending" his campaign in the span of 48 hours, the line "fundamentals of the economy are strong") have severely undermined him. McCain, at least for me, came across as more of the "same old, same old"; an old school Bushist, out of touch and out of wack. On the topic of foreign policy, McCain rambled about the countries he had visited, as if his foreign "visits" (most of which are choreographed) give him some unique insight into the lands. Putting your feet on foreign soil doesn't mean you get foreign countries, Mr McCain. Also, there was this really weird remark:

As far as North Korea is concerned, our secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went to North Korea. By the way, North Korea, most repressive and brutal regime probably on Earth. The average South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean, a huge gulag.

Huh???? What does that have to with ANYTHING? This is the man Republicans tout as having greater foreign policy experience than ANYONE? Oh yeah, this from a man who thinks Palin is the greatest VP pick in the history of America. McCain also tried to weave in his "hero," "maverick" narrative into the debate, but I found it unseemly, boring, and...a little crass. Obama, on the other hand, came across as cool, confident, and knowledgeable on issues, though I think he undersold his own story of rising from humble beginnings. He held his own.

I found that Obama speaking first during the debates gave him a distinct advantage: McCain was forced to defend himself, rather than be given a space to identify himself and his beliefs to the public. McCain, as they say in cricket commentary, was constantly "on the back foot," having to address Obama's comments rather than just the audience. Though Obama had to do the same in response, he didn't have to appear quite as defensive. And, I thought that McCain's uber-negativity and smug dismissal of Obama repeated times made him appear somewhat "elitist."

The question is not whether Barack Obama is ready to be president-he has proven tonight he is-the question is whether America is ready for Barack Obama. I hope the answer is going to be, "Hell to the ya."

Silly Season in German

2008-09-23T01:20:00.001-07:00

As I raced towards my friend who returned from Germany to the United States (after nearly a year) tonight, I yelled out loudly, to the surprise of several suitcase-toting passengers at the San Francisco International Airport, “Nummer Eins!” My friend embraced me, leaned down, stooping a little to compensate for the nearly foot-and-a-half that he towers over me, and whispered back tenderly, “Nummer Eins!” After months of being deprived of any German interaction, it was comforting and thrilling to hear the language again in actual practice. The simple words, vocalized for the first time in months (and not just pixilated on Facebook inbox or on my Skype chat boxes), brought the language to life for me. As he looked at the tears streaming down my cheeks, I shouted in happiness, “Du bist hier!”, an elementary sentence that I drew from what is admittedly a very short repertoire in German. But, with those three very basic words, I had said it all.

My relationship with German goes back some twelve years; an intense, competitive summer course at the Goethe-Institut in my hometown, New Delhi, India (called the Max Mueller Bhavan). Except the so-called “dead language,” Sanskrit, which I had acquired with years of formal instruction limited to the classroom, I had previously acquired Hindi, Bengali, and English in India in engaged practice, with the languages functioning in core aspects of my everyday life. I was also fresh out of three years of sustained efforts with French at the Alliance Française, and the German-language pedagogy at the Goethe-Institut took a little while to adjust to. In the Goethe-Institut, I had no choice but to participate and engage in classroom discussions much more frequently than I did at Alliance, where larger class sizes precluded verbal participation from too many students. It turned out that I ended up speaking more German in the two months that I was at the Goethe-Institut, than I did in the three years at Alliance. That is not to say that I could say more in German; I just had more confidence to speak in it. It seems a little strange to say it, but German was more real to me, leaping more easily off printed texts, because it was more voiced. And because it was a Beginner course, I ended up feeling comfortable looking silly in German; the point wasn’t always to get things right; the point was that I was trying to get there.

For the next eleven years, I had almost no interaction with German at all. Every now and then, though, I would come across words like “Doppelgänger,” “kitsch,” “Schadenfreude,” “Gestalt,” “Angst,” “Bildungsroman,” or “Strudel,” and then spend a moment wondering about the language I once dove into briefly. It was like thinking about a special someone you meet at a party, sparks flying for a brief few moments frozen in time, and you think there is potential, and then...like so many romances that get lost on the bridge to nowhere...you never see them again. And, in unguarded moments of nostalgia, you wonder about the what ifs...That is what German felt like it was to me, a special someone I could have learnt to love.

Then came last year, and I moved into the International House at UC Berkeley. The entire year was spent in the company of a half-dozen German exchange students, and I discovered German again. Initially, my closest German friends and I decided we would practice our French together, so both English and German were temporarily banned. However, that system soon broke down—none of us had retained our fluency in French after years of disuse—and we decided on English and German as the languages of choice. They “dumbed down” their German, and I was the language learner again, fumbling, stumbling, though comfortable being silly again. The lack of vocabulary didn’t always stop me: if I didn’t know a word, I would try to make an English word sound German. Two examples stand out for me: “happig” for “happy,” and “Hukken” for “hugs.” My German friends would every now and then provide grammatical explanations, correct my genders, or provide a word I didn’t know; by and large, however, the point of the exercise was to get me speaking in German.

With “Nummer Eins” back, I look forward to many nights reviving my German again, preferably over some (appropriate) beer, “Prost”-ing to familiarizing myself with the tongue again. Maybe I’ll continue to “coin” some words, allowing me to fill in blanks temporarily in the midst of conversation. Maybe I’ll continue to debate with him about whether "schlafmützig" is really a word (I found it on an online dictionary, but can’t seem to find any Germans to agree it is a word). Whatever happens, it’s silly season again...and what better way to learn a language!

Stop Press!

2008-09-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

As an (unassigned) experiment for a class I am taking entitled “Writing and Technology,” I decided to forgo reading the New York Times online this week, committing only to reading the paper version. This didn’t really wean me off reading news online: NYT is only one of my news sources: I continued to browse CNN, BBC, the Huffington Post, Google News, and other sites as often as possible. During politically charged hours, I gave in to temptation a couple of times, cheating by doing “Quick Reads” of NYT articles on the Huffington Post, but that was about it. Otherwise, I was forced to engage in an activity that is alien to my Internet-driven existence: I had to wait.

It’s not that I haven’t missed the touch and feel of a newspaper. There is something very magical and sensual about reading the print version of a newspaper usually. I associate it with Darjeeling tea with breakfast in India, since in the last 8 years living abroad, I have never subscribed to one. But growing up in India, reading newspapers was one of the most highly anticipated moments of the day. With a cup of piping hot tea beside me, and toasts (and an occasional poached egg), my day started between 6:00 and 6:30 am. I would pore over the paper, reading everything from the all-too brief world wrap up, national/domestic news, the classifieds (everything from want ads to personals to legal tender notices), the gossip columns (with the endless Bollywood stories), the sports pages splashed mostly with cricket or tennis stories (and the occasional soccer reports). For many of those years, we subscribed to only one newspaper (The Times of India), and my father and I would compete to get up earlier and grab the paper. Whoever got up first got the first page (and the attached last page), getting access to the main headlines and the coveted sports stories. I didn’t usually mind too much: my father is generally a “scanner,” so I wouldn’t have to wait too long to get it, in case he “preempted” me.

At one point in my early teens, there was a big movement in India called “Newspaper in Education,” with the aim of building students’ interests in current events. I had to buy the same newspaper at school as well, but that one went unread: I had scoured the newspaper by the time I got to school. At another point during my teen years, we ended up getting two newspapers every day because of a special promotion going on. This continued when we lived in Goa, where we got a local paper in addition to the national Times. Having two newspapers went a long way in doubling my pleasure as a news aficionado.

Every time I return home, my early mornings are not defined by a mad rush to go online to get the latest news; that follows the ritual of the long, loving time spent with a newspaper. My father and I still compete to get the paper first.

Today, after leafing through what appeared to be an overwhelming tome rather than a newspaper, I am reverting to the online form, at least in the US. The number of pages in the NYT did not make sense to me; why so many ads? I felt as if I was drowning with information overload (a thing that does NOT only occur to people trying to access information online). Who has the time to work through so many pages, especially with so many ads interspersed throughout? It takes 75,000 trees to make the Sunday edition…what could possibly justify having all these huge, full-page ads? I don’t know if it’s just what seems like a waste to me (given that I, at least, can save a tree or two by not necessitating the publication of a copy, since I have online access) or that it simply doesn’t work for me here in the US, where it doesn’t always accompany breakfast, and does not have ritualistic significance for me (is it the paper? or my life here?). Whatever it is, it is nyt.com for me.

Fusion Music in a Wobbly World

2008-09-06T13:42:00.000-07:00

Last night, I attended a concert by Wobbly World at UC Berkeley’s International House, an experience of multilingual/multicultural musical richness I am not going to forget in a lifetime. Wobbly World is a “Jazz, afro-cuban, funk, world music” band that “brings together musicians from many continents, integrating the instruments, languages and traditions of each musician’s heritage in unusual sonorities” (see their MySpace page here). The band comprises the talented frontman/guitarist/singer Fresno native Freddy Clarke; the skilled two-time Grammy winning Danish violinist Mads Toling; the multi-talented Ney, Santoor, and some time wine/water bottle (!) playing Iranian Mohammed Nejad; Nhut Bui, the skilled Vietnamese Dan Bau player; Cuban Eric Barberia who sings in Cuban Spanish and plays the Conga with equal fervor and passion; East Bay native Brian Collier whose fingers light fire to drums (and sings like a dream!); Bulgarian Vassil Babelekov, who masterfully plays a self-crafted Bulgarian inverted goatskin bagpipe; and, last but not least, Chicago native Victor Little, the super-powerful bassist.

Last night’s concert was nothing short of riveting. The confluence of melodies, incorporating the Cuban, African, Iranian/Middle Eastern/North African, Vietnamese, Indian/Pakistani, European and American heritages of the instrumentalists and singers, was something that had to be heard to be believed. The cross-cutural/cross-linguistic effort led to an enthralling musical tapestry that was, remarkably, simple and complex. The captivating harmony that the band achieved was not in uniting as one tongue or sound, or even blending the diverse influences seamlessly; it was in forefronting the different linguistic, cultural and historical influences and talents of the band members. This band is a must-see!

Speaking more, saying less....

2008-08-29T16:57:00.000-07:00

An email from my father yesterday forced me to consider how my relationship with him has evolved as a result of changing technologies over the past few years. Having lived outside of India for the last 9 years, I have tried various modes of communication to stay in touch with my parents back home…when I moved to Canada to pursue a graduate degree in 1999, my dad and I exchanged emotionally charged emails where electronic communication was a faster (but seemingly identical) substitute for the painstakingly handwritten letters I used to receive from him growing up, those long missives to his family from his frequent travels abroad. We exchanged nearly a thousand long emails over the course of two years; and weekly phone calls were expensive and treasured, mostly directed to my mother who was out of the “email loop.” Then, during my two years teaching in Indonesia, my parents and I began a little Yahoo! chatting, but phone calls were cheaper, and emails became supplemental, almost peripheral to our communications. I briefly discovered a Bengali emailing site, but it was laborious to use the code, and I soon gave up. Though we were in touch often, the content of our conversations became mostly superficial. Then, in my two years at Chico, phone calls again became forbiddingly expensive, and I was forced to resort to emailing yet again. I didn’t have internet connection at home, so emails became shorter, and there was no chatting with family online. Over the last two years in Berkeley, phone calls have taken center-stage: we talk almost every day without fail, international calling prices have fallen so much. The conversations are brief: did you eat? How is school? How is work? My father every now and then sends a one line-email, more out of habit than anything else, and my responses are equally terse.

Then yesterday, I received a long email from my father. It was an “old-school” email, one that was more like a handwritten letter, and I was gripped with nostalgia. He didn’t just ask how school was; he asked me what courses I was taking. He didn’t just ask how work was, but asked me questions about how I manage my time between school and my two jobs. It astonishes me how, with the ease of communication through evolving and developing technologies, we say less than we could have when it was harder to communicate across oceans that stood between us. As I sat down to respond to his email, I remembered the old days when it took two weeks for my letters to reach my father in the US. How we would all wait impatiently for the mailman to arrive, to see if he had written to us…to see the familiar printed and perfectly shaped handwriting inked across a page. As I stared at the screen, my Gmail reply window opened, I was struck by a shocking thought: with the entry of Skype and cheaper telephonic conversations, I communicate more often. I don’t necessarily communicate more.

Vegas Slot Machines: Cents and Sensibilities

2008-08-25T14:48:00.000-07:00

On a trip to Las Vegas in the height of summer in late June this year, I was struck by the interesting “slot machine literacy” I saw everywhere. In the cool, air-conditioned halls where players sat obsessively dumping hopeful coins into slot machines, these glamorous, lit up signs are designed to attract a big following. These machines have short, evocative names, such as the ones below: “Wolf Run,” “Wild Cougar,” “5 Dragons,” “Cash Time,” and my personal favorite: the “Hot, Hot Penny.” All these names are inscribed in catchy fonts, have artwork relevant to the names on them, and the play of light adds to their allure. While there were many others, due to constraints of time and space, I’ll focus on these ones that caught my interest.

The Wolf Run for example, has a picture of two wolves, and a wolf’s paw stands on for the “O.”

The Wild Cougar has the letters “WILD” written out on the top left, almost as an afterthought, in bright red, evoking danger. The cougar image growls atop the lettering “COUGAR.”

The 5 Dragons name is bottom center of the image, with variety of dragons and the font conjuring up Chinese mythology.

Cash Time is very interesting; notice that the entire thing is ensconced in a clock, with the 15 minute intervals marked by the images of dollar signs. The “s” in the phrase is also a dollar sign. Green and white, evoking money, are the two predominant colors of the sign.

Finally, there’s the Hot, Hot Penny where the lettering literally seems ablaze, and the lettering seems a little off-center, as if the heat is making the letters bounce.

It’s funny; I’m not a gambler, never play the slots: however, there’s something about these catchy signs that’s irresistible. I imagine thousands of dollars are invested in developing these signs, an investment that, I imagine, pays back handsomely. They didn’t draw me in financially, but the fact that I am blogging about it probably speaks to their success in drawing people in! :)

India's dying languages

2008-08-16T01:23:00.000-07:00

Today, the day marking the 61st anniversary of Indian independence from British rule, came upon an article entitled "India lingers lovingly over British past." Another one in a long line of alarmist articles that surfaces every so often, bemoaning the fact that under the globalizing onslaught of English, languages indigenous to India are facing inevitable death. I have commented on this before, but feel obliged to speak to it again, so incensed do these alarmist writers make me. Roshan Doug's (the writer's) perspective is that the popularity of English is somehow reflective of the Indian love affair with Britain, that English is popular because somehow we Indians haven't quite recovered from having "lost" Britain as colonial masters, if I understand his argument correctly. The laudable efforts of linguists, Doug tells us, to encourage Hindi/Urdu in its stead are failing:

"In Indian schools and government offices, I was rather astonished to see how Hindi is being replaced by English as the official language. To nationalist India this is so alarming that some of its leading academics and linguists are trying to reverse the trends, challenging the supremacy of English as a global language by asserting Hindi or Urdu as its official mode of communication.

But, it has to be said, with very little success – for such is the attraction of English."

The imposition of Hindi/Urdu is at least as contentious (if not more), even a superficial research of Indian linguistic politics will tell us, as the imposition of English. For some, English is a more "neutral" language than Hindi or Urdu. In any event, the imposition of ANY ONE language where multiple proliferate is bound to be violent. I would argue that one of the reasons for the popularity of English in India is that it is seen NOT to belong to any one community (hence the neutrality I mentioned before). Not that everyone feels that way, but certainly, there is recognition in India that Australians, Americans, and the British, to name a few, have English as a dominant language; in no way is it correct to state that Indians as a whole associate English with Britain alone. Also, merely because the language is popular in schools, government offices, etc, does NOT mean that local Indian languages are being steadily substituted. I grew up in cosmopolitan New Delhi, and well, English was only one of a variety of different languages we grew up speaking (I spoke Bengali at home, Hindi with friends, heard Urdu in movies and songs, and prayed in Sanskrit as a child; English was only for studying in).

Also, our "appropriation" of English entails its reconfiguration, so that we end up, by many accounts, with a variety of English that is our very own. It's not a straightforward case of losing our linguistic identities in this global behemoth that is English. Hardcore multilinguals, my friends and I enjoyed being able to slip into a variety of languages...I could not imagine that we will that easily give up the advantages of multilingualism (especially in local languages) that Indians pride themselves on. Finally, I do not know a SINGLE monolingual speaker of English in India. Not a one! I doubt the whole country is suddenly going to become a land of monolingual English speakers...a billion people losing their native tongues overnight? Not going to happen.

So, here's my two cents: in English. And I'm probably going to dream in Bengali tonight. :) English, beware.

My Life’s an Open (Face)Book

2008-07-27T22:18:00.000-07:00

4,158,720 seconds have transpired since my last Facebook post, and I am guessing at least a few hundred thousand of those have been spent in the networked realm of Facebooking. When I penned (or rather, typed) the previous post, it was when the madness of finals season had just recently come to a close; the sun was shining through brilliant, cloudless skies; and life was happily filled with the promise of an extended break. I could finally, I thought, get my Facebook fix guilt-free. School was out, and I was anticipating indulging in long hours posting links; dedicating songs/videos; uploading, tagging, and sometimes untagging (unfortunate) pictures; commenting on notes ("It's not catching, is it?"), photos, or status updates ("Hope it's not life-threatening..."); Superpoking (where else could I have a cow, a sheep, AND a cheesecake "thrown" at me?); sending Cosmos, Mai Tais and Absinthes in a virtual world where IDs need never be flashed; and sending and happily receiving a wide range of Gifts ranging from rats (yes, rats), to plaid micro-mini's; and, last but not least, spending leisurely time poring over my Newsfeed in serious deference to my voyeuristic needs. I could, finally, "get my Facebook on." And I did.

Is my case really unusual? I doubt it; Facebook users range from a wide spectrum:

1. Level 1 users: People whose profiles have only the most basic information about themselves (avoiding information like Relationship Status, Political Views), between one and one dozen profile pictures (most of them tagged by "Others"), a mostly bare Wall with rather "mundane" posts (mostly "Hey! How have you been?"). Level 1 users generally have few applications, if any. They don't send you Green Patch requests, and won't be virtually "mooning" you any time soon. They rarely use the Status Updates.

2. Level 2 users: People whose profiles contain a good deal of information about what kinds of movies they love, what books they've read, and what they like to do in their spare time (that is, that which is not consumed by Facebooking). You might find out they're in a relationship, but not know with whom. Their political/religious views are tantalizingly "Other." They have about a couple of hundred Wall posts (some of which might be racy or obnoxious), and check in on Facebook about once a day, but not really "do" anything on it personally. They use and are active on several applications (and will be sending you requests to try things like Texas HoldEm Poker or Who Has The Biggest Brain?).

3. Level 3 users: People whose profiles contain vast amounts of information about their lives (almost from the time of conception), and hundreds of (sometimes only mildly interesting) photographs documenting every flash-filled second of their lives. They have almost every application known to man, and will send you requests to take quizzes on your sex life, or how well you know all the Friends characters, or to buy virtual Louis Vuitton bags). They have thousands of Wall posts, most of which render their personal lives not that "personal". Their Facebook profiles could have posts or comments in a variety of languages, and be connected across dozens and dozens different Networks.

I am somewhere between Level 2 and Level 3; and between these levels, two aspects of Facebook usage become salient: privacy and networking addiction.

The very point of Facebooking is social networking; therefore, in entering that world, one automatically forfeits at least a level of privacy. Regardless of how stringently one applies the Privacy Controls afforded by Facebook, there is a part of you-the self- and other-constructed-that is publicly available and accessible, even if it is merely the fact that your name appears in Facebook searches (the fact that you are on the site, for example, says something about who you are). The "you" created through socially-networked multi-modal literacy is inherently commentable. In addition, there's the whole question of privacy when you have unlimited access to someone's profile. A heterosexual friend of mine, new to Facebook, didn't understand the question "Interested in?" which is meant to get at sexual orientation. For a few days everyone thought he'd "come out" on Facebook, when his response was listed as "men." Another friend didn't realize that he added a singles dating application by mistake, which temporarily traumatized his girlfriend, who saw it on her Newsfeed. Relationship break-ups or hook-ups are also announced publicly on Facebook through the Newsfeed updates, such as "Unluckyinlove is no longer listed as in a relationship." One no longer hears things like that through the grapevine; it's more often through the Facebook Newsfeed. What you put out there in writing, and through images, can come back to haunt you, but that hardly seems to serve as a deterrent to most Facebook users. Privacy is no longer at a premium; visibility is.

As far as Facebook addiction goes, I am only one of millions of habitual Facebook users who visit the site daily or even hourly. It is hard to figure out what it is about social networking sites that makes them so addictive...Is it the ease with which one may invent or reinvent the self? The power to create a self which is "networked," rather than one that is "merely" social? Is it the voyeur in us which must feed on others' personal lives? Or the need to know that our lives are important, important to document so very painstakingly, document for others, and document for ourselves? Perhaps it is that the Facebooked self is always in conversation with a larger community of Facebook selves, and in societies marked with alienation and fragmentation, this affords a sense of belonging, a sense of interconnected "communityness" no longer (or only inadequately) afforded by traditional networks?

At the end of the day, I think we haven't developed a meaningful scholarly vocabulary for discussing what it means to develop and manage our "selves" online, or explain why self-construction through networking sites is so attractive...I don't think we do justice to its nuances by trying to map on old identity/self categories...Hmm...I think I'll start on that research...on Facebook. :)

The many “Englishes”

2008-07-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I was flipping channels when I came upon a new Target ad:

Ordinarily, I have no patience to watch TV commercials; I usually watch two shows at a time so I can watch something else when a commercial is playing (yes, I know that's a little extreme, but I am sure I am not the only person out there doing this). However, this particular commercial had me spell-bound, even if it lasted just 15 seconds. What really stood out for me was the music...it was peppy, unique, and gripping.

I immediately began a search to locate the commercial online. My first stop was Google, that trusty search engine, where if something isn't, it isn't. I was convinced that the song was in Portuguese [it seemed to be in a language like Spanish-which I can recognize, if not fully understand-and Brazilian Portuguese seemed like a good bet]-it had what appeared to me a Brazilian feel. Coming up empty, I tried what seemed like a gazillion search terms on Youtube-"target commercial dance brazil," "target brazil commercials," "target college ad Portuguese", to no avail. There were many Target commercials, but none of them was the one I was looking for. I began thinking maybe I was "off" on the language, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what other language it could be.

My next couple of days passed in a daze...I obsessed at every turn about that song, and my irritation at not being able to find the song online mounted. Then, three days ago, an infomercial for a CD set called "Tropical Thunder" was running on TV, and I was only half listening, absorbed as I was on catching up on the news online. Suddenly, I heard the unmistakable melody of the song I was searching for...and I (embarrassingly) "Eureka-ed" out loud as the name of the song and the artist flashed momentarily across the screen. I furiously typed in the name of the song "Calabria" by the artist "Enur," expecting to be routed to non-English sites.

As I held my breath, a site offering up its lyrics popped up, and I clicked on the link. Imagine my amazement when I read the lyrics, and could understand the words! I found the song on Youtube, then heard the song while reading the lyrics. [ Watch the video here:

and find the lyrics here.]

I could make sense of almost all the words!

Now having downloaded the song and having heard it many, many times, I am unsure why I didn't think even once that it could be in English: was it the kind of music? The "tropical" beat? I don't know. The idea that there are many "Englishes" is certainly not new to me...but the way Jamaican patois threw me off was a fun way of being reminded of it. In a life circumscribed by mostly "standard" academic English, it was good to pause and remember that that's not the only kind out there.

Apu and The Indian Accent

2008-07-13T22:47:00.000-07:00

“Did you grow up here? You don’t sound like an Indian!” I’ve been told, not once, not twice, but too many times to recount. Usually, I stammer out some apologetic answer-I’ve lived in the States for the past four years, I spent a couple of years in NY as a child, or that as a lifelong student of languages, I have an ear for accents, and am good at mimicking them. I say apologetic answer because while the questions are always posed as compliments, I cannot but feel like I am being accused of cloaking my very Indianness behind what is only an acquired and surface accent. I’ve never deliberately “acquired” accents to fit in, however; I’ve just always had the ability to pick them up…and regardless of how limited my proficiency in a language, the accent has always been something that has fascinated me, and something I’ve taken pains to approximate.

Having said that, several things bother me about the perceptions regarding the “Indian accent.” First of all, there is no broad Indian accent; there are hundreds of languages and dialects in India, and each imbues the L1 speaker of an Indian language/dialect with a distinct accent. That is not to say that there are hundreds of different kinds of accented English speech in India, just that there are variations, even if those are only subtle ones. I remember being very irritated when I encountered a reading in a Language and Identity class, when in a discussion of Ben Rampton’s work, Nikolas Coupland describes what Rampton labels as Stylised Asian English: “A reasonable approximation to SAE,” Coupland says, “from global popular culture might be the speech style of the Apu character from the TV Show The Simpsons” (p. 139).

First of all, the term “Asian” is a misnomer here: the “Middle Eastern” English accent is different from the “Japanese” English accent is different from the “Indonesian” accent is different from the “Indian” accent, if any of them could be so reductively considered. In addition, the “Apu” character speaks with a very exaggerated accent, exaggerated for the purpose of mockery of the very same accent, that is, for comic effect . Secondly, there is an element of mockery of a people embedded in this blanket-terming of the “Indian” accent (for more on this, click here).

Why blog about this now? Recently when I was walking down a hallway, I overheard a student retelling an encounter about another student who had a heavy “Indian accent.” He couldn’t see me walking down the hallway, and his voice carried across the corridor. He was recounting his conversation with the Indian student, exaggerating the accent (I imagine), and his conversant was laughing loudly. He remarked, “It’s a wonder these Indian dumbasses get the customer service jobs,” and he proceeded to mimic an Indian-accented customer service person offering technical support. As I walked away, I could hear titters of laughter in the distance. Close on the heels of that incident, I stepped into a local bus, and walked in on a conversation the bus driver was having with another passenger about an Indian driver who couldn’t speak any English. Or, as he explained, because of his accent, he might as well be speaking “Indian” (there is no language called “Indian”!!!!!), he was so incomprehensible. This was followed by a couple of jokes, again, about Indian telemarketers, the Indian accent in general, and the ineptitude (to put it euphemistically) of Indians. For some reason, my presence did nothing to change the nature of the conversation or the offensive commentary (I am not clear why).

I came away from both incidents feeling a little angry and frustrated. Yes, people in India speak English with different accents, sometimes they sound “funny” to the foreign ear, sometimes they sound “funny” even to the “Indian” ear. No, not every one in India speaks with the exaggerated “Apu” accent. And an accent is not always the best indicator of a person’s proficiency in the language, though it can certainly affect comprehension at the other end. And it certainly is not reflective of a person’s intellect.

I am thinking this is all a little dumb.

Viva Las Vegas!

2008-07-04T11:19:00.000-07:00

48 eventful hours in the Sin City...magical, fantastic, chaotic, and hot. I would have imagined that with the temperature in the 100s, Vegas would be emptied of tourists; I could not have been more wrong! Millions of people thronged the Strip in the run up to the 4th of July weekend...having grown up in the second most populous nation in the world, I was still taken aback! Anyway, Sin City lived up to its name...a paradisaical land of every kind of indulgence: gambling; extravagant shows; elaborate replicas of streets in cities like NY, Paris, and Venice; fine dining...the list goes on and on.

One of the highlights of my trip was this elaborate Cirque du Soleil show called Mystère. It was this elaborate, beautiful, intricately choreographed show that had me on the edge of my seat for a riveting hour and half. I laughed uproariously at the overgrown baby in the diapers; gasped in awe at the trapeze artists and acrobats; and pretty much clapped so hard at everything, the palms of my hand were sore at the end of the show. If you're ever in Vegas, CHECK IT OUT!

A poster that totally draws you in...

The most adorable baby!!!

My favorite moment in the show...these two men had acrobatic chemistry like I have never seen in my life!

Check out the show brochure here.

The Fizz on the Soda

2008-06-26T00:07:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago, if anyone had predicted I would willingly go to watch a black and white film, made in the 1930s, starring actors I had never heard of, and sit through it spellbound, I would have laughed my head off. Really. However, incredibly, I just returned from a fifth such movie, as a part of the Joan Blondell retrospective playing at the PFA, titled "Joan Blondell: The Fizz on the Soda." It was my second double bill in the last fortnight, and I am unabashedly addicted. It's not just Blondell's spunk and versatility that has appealed to me; every film I have watched so far has allowed me to immerse myself, as cliched as it sounds, in a different world and time.

One of the things that I find most thought-provoking about the movies has been the transparent sexism of the language, the dialogs. I remember how I squirmed throughout "Blonde Crazy" (1931), where James Cagney playing a sleaze ball con artist, continuously referred to Blondell as "hoooooooney." Every woman, it seemed, was "honey." I cannot explain very clearly why, the way he said it (with an extended drawl)...and that he said it...seemed to be very belittling and derogatory. I have heard infinitely more "derogatory" stuff in contemporary mainstream cinema, but there was something so shocking about the almost salacious way he said it, I guess it was because I had never imagined "old films" to have any kind of sexual "bite" to them, especially not in terms of language (I don't know why I had such a preconception). The Night Nurse (1931), Footlight Parade (1933), There's Always a Woman (1938), and Three Girls About Town (1941), all contained at least some startlingly sexist language. Common themes in the men's dialogs included that the "little woman"'s place was in the home, that she was by and large brainless, and should leave the thinking to the men. However, the spunk, wit, and intelligence of Blondell show the sheer stupidity of these "evaluations," which I find very interesting. Despite the surface but open sexism of the language, Blondell, for the most part, glitters brightly in these roles, as a brilliant and industrious detective, as a smart con artist, as a capable and compassionate nurse, and as a very resourceful hotel "hostess."

With every utterance of sexist language in the films, there was an audible collective gasp that rose in the darkened PFA theater. For someone like me who, very unfortunately, has little more than a glancing acquaintance with the history of the feminist movement, it was literally shocking to see the kind sexist language that was freely employed in the Depression-era movies. The objectification of women is not something that surprises me to see, since that is still a thriving tradition in Hollywood and elsewhere, but the overt sexism of the language is. As much as I adore these movies, I cannot wrap my head around the fact that such language was acceptable, or normative...How was it ever possible to talk about women this way? And, even if the language has been "cleaned up" now, to what extent has the political correctness in public discourse really been matched by changes in how women are perceived and treated in actuality? Ok, no easy answers, but nevertheless important to think about....

For any of you interested, there are a few more screenings left...go check them out. Prepare to be transfixed, mesmerized, and...a little revolted.

Censor This!

2008-06-23T00:24:00.001-07:00

George Carlin, the legendary, irreverent comedian par excellence, arguably most famous for his "Seven Words You Can Never Use on Television" routine, died a few hours ago in LA. I'm not generally given to grieving for celebrities, but the news of Carlin's death hit me hard. I discovered Carlin a mere three years ago, in Chico, when a roommate invited me to watch a Carlin special that was playing on HBO. That one show was enough to hook me; I was immediately addicted to his "acerbic, cerebral, sometimes off-color" stand up routines. And since then, I've devoured his books, and laughed uncontrollably at almost every word he penned. His HBO specials, so many of which are Youtubed, are oftentimes my morning viewing staple...and there are numerous hilarious one-liners of his I can recite from memory. Less than a month ago, as I was packing up to move from the I House to a sublet, I had Carlin classics such as Life is Worth Losing, Jammin', and George Carlin at USC playing on my laptop while I packed. There are few things that are as guaranteed to act as de-stressers and elicit laughter from me as his incredible comic dexterity and wit. For a variety of reasons, this loss is very personal.

The Grammy-winning comedian had a tumultuous personal life (marred by long term drug use), and was arrested several times for what were deemed his “obscene shows.” His routines overflowed with profanities, and he was very anti-Establishment, attacking organized religion, the government…pretty much everything “organized” that got him riled up. His anti-Establishmentarianism wasn’t run-of-the-mill comic irreverence; there were moments of startling, deep, and penetrating insight that marked his “counter-culture” brand of humor.

Carlin’s routines were not merely meant to be comically provocative; they were aimed at attacking censorship that regulated language that was permitted in the media. As Richardson (2000) noted,

In 1978, comedian George Carlin’s classic routine, “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Radio,” challenged existing media censorship regulations in two critical ways. First, by mentioning the seven “forbidden” terms repeatedly in the routine, he succeeded simultaneously in de-mystifying them while at the same time mocking the US Federal Communications Commission’s preoccupation with “filthy words“. Second, and perhaps most importantly, Carlin raised the question of agency (individual or collective resistance to some kind of external control) and the media. Given the immense power that the media has over what we see and hear, how can we question and resist its tendency toward the promotion of global consumerism, Eurocentrism and cultural homogenization?

These are questions that we battle and will continue to battle as the media continues to permeate more and more aspects of our daily lives.

There was something very powerful about his comedy; it wasn’t just his comic timing, the turns of phrase he employed, or the deadpan delivery he was the master of. It was comic subversion at its best, one imbued with rich commentary that unraveled the very fabric of human life.

So what did Carlin say about death?

"The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating...and you finish off as an orgasm."

Carlin should have the last word; I am embedding a video of one his most famous routines...Rock on, Carlin. You'll live on in my laughter.

I Facebook, Therefore I Am

2008-06-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

It was some 25,056,000 seconds ago, at the time of this writing, that I joined Facebook, a megalith among social networking sites. Having tried, tested, and deleted my profile on MySpace a year prior, I was incredibly wary of joining a site I felt too old for…wasn’t Facebook for the unjaded and perpetually-partying undergrad crowd? But, as the old saying goes, you should try everything once, and I did. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Facebook is addictive like few things known to man: it’s like the Cocaine or Heroin of the internet age, the hard drug of a networked mind, the nicotine dependency of a digitized society. A few hours without it and I feel a searing withdrawal: a desperate craving in my soul, a cramping in my fingers from (imagined) disuse, a terrifying disconnection with the world at large…I feel all the four symptoms that the Urban Dictionary lists for “Facebook Withdrawal": 1) Craving, 2) Fear, 3) Denial, and 4) Depression. [Okay, so I put this last sentence in here primarily because it’s funny (and not entirely untrue).] For this reason, I have the official Facebook Toolbar built into my Mozilla Firefox browser. If I receive a Wall Post or mail, am “tagged,” or receive a gift, I see it the second it is done. Patience, as my friends and family will attest, is not one of my virtues.

To paraphrase Descartes, “I Facebook, therefore I am.” I find myself needing to validate my existence through the site. Who I am-or who I seek to be seen as?-is constructed daily and diligently through my Facebook profile. My political views (”Obamaniac”, the daily political articles posted on my “Posted Items”), religious views (”Whateverist”), emotional states (through “Status Updates”, “Wall” postings, tagged photos, “Notes”), hobbies, interests and affiliations (”Groups”), and musical tastes (ILike Dedications, Recent Plays) are laid bare for my friends’ perusal. I am unclear at this point, I have to say, how much of this is for others, and how much of this is for me…for, Facebook is also a forum for self-construction, self-reflection, and-not to forget-narcissism on a grand, networked scale. I am not merely connecting with others; I am fashioning a self, the self I want public, the self I want “out there.” I can control the “digital” self I put out for “public” consumption through a plethora of privacy settings: I can control who sees what in my profile, and-by extension-I think I control what people “make” of me. How deluded that is is not something I have figured out yet.

Recently, I told a friend of mine a story of how a “Friend” wrote a highly objectionable Wall Post on my profile. I told the story stuttering with indignation and anger. She stared at me like I was a kook, and said, “Usree, that’s Facebook, that’s not real life, you know? Who cares what anyone says on FB?” I couldn’t understand her statement…of course it matters, it’s Facebook! It IS real life-isn’t it? Well, at least it’s a reflection of my real life-with the added benefits of privacy controls, the ability to untag, remove news from your mini-feeds, Block stalkers or people you would like to avoid and-that most important of tools: “Remove Friend.” It’s like a policed, self- and Friend-fashioned life forged through multi-modal literacy. In this very individuated society, Facebook is my savior: it is my life, only better. When I am on it, I feel connected to humanity-and my own humanity-in ways I haven’t in too long. If that sensation is mediated through Facebook, is there something wrong with that?

Re-viewing "Sex and the City"

2008-06-05T00:44:00.000-07:00

I doubt I'll ever buy or crave Prada handbags, Manolo Blahnik shoes, or a Vivienne Westwood dress...but for years I was an avid fan of a show which revolved around the lives of women for whom these things meant much. And men, and Cosmos. (The order remains to be determined). So, on this very gorgeous and sunny Wednesday, a friend and I decided to spend a long, lazy day together, and go watch the highly-anticipated and talked about big screen version of a television show I've loved to LOVE, Sex and the City. I figured no matter what, it would be enough just to see the girls together again, revel in their chemistry. I'd read multiple reviews, many of which were rather brutal, and thus I was somewhat prepared to be disappointed. And what a disappointment it was.

I felt cheated. I didn't find the narrative cohesion that glued the old series together. Jennifer Hudson came across as a "token" African American figure, a caricature, a waste of a phenomenal talent. The scatological humor was a far cry from the biting wit that made the series edgy, sharp, and incisive. The editing was shoddy, and the screenwriting a bitter disappointment. There was no catharsis...none at all, and I felt as if I plummeted into this abyss of mindless inanity and materialism that I did not recognize at all. It was alien to me, just as it seemed alien to the characters who made this show such a massive success. There was only one moment in which I was roused from my boredom and torpor; and it involved a man being pummeled by a bouquet of roses. Of course, the dresses were gorgeous, the shoes outstanding, the purses-well, most were beautiful. But that was always a "side note" in the series, never the central charm for me.

I still love the girls, and will always love the series. The movie, however, gets a D-. My heart breaks to say it is so.

Trapped in the bubble of literacy

2008-05-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

“I should write my name here? First name last name?” The man asked, standing next to me by the cashier’s at a Cold Stone Creamery outlet. I looked at him puzzled, a little taken aback, preoccupied with trying to juggle a speedily-melting Founder’s Original sundae, several napkins, an overflowing purse, and an ATM card in my hands. I looked at him, a little annoyed, wondering if he was trying to con me, or “hit on” me (I don’t know when I became so jaded about humanity). His skin was dark, like my own, and I thought to myself, though he didn’t look Indian, he did look as if he was from the Indian subcontinent. He was wearing a faded red sweatshirt and loose, stonewashed jeans, and flashy yellow running shoes which had seen better days. I couldn’t place his accent, but it was strangely familiar.

The cashier held out her hand for my credit card, which I handed over. The man pushed a half-filled form towards me, and pointed to a section towards the bottom: “I write my name here? You see if it’s okay?” I didn’t understand why he was pushing the form towards me; what did he mean? My skepticism sharpened; I’ve fallen for a few schemes in my lifetime, and was in no mood to have history repeat itself. I leaned over and looked at the form, which appeared to be an employment application form, and had to squint to make sense of what first looked like a series of squiggles. He’d put everything down incorrectly; the references merely repeated his own name, the date was a string of alphabetic characters, and his address was illegible. I took a deep breath and tried to explain what he needed to do, and he just kept repeating his name, saying he needed the form filled out. My friends, who were standing beside me, were hurling questions at me at the same time, and the cashier handed me a receipt to sign. I hurriedly tried to explain the form to the man, but he was growing visibly frustrated, and my patience was wearing thin. The cashier cast an irritated glance at the man. I signed the receipt, then turned to the man, pointing out where he needed to write his address, insert references, sign, and finally, what the date meant. He filled it out with painstaking slowness, and as we looked at each other briefly, my heart went out to him. We both knew he needed the job but was most probably not going to get it. And he was going to be facing this hurdle many more times in his life, some in places where he would have no help. As he finished the form, I hurried out…I could not look him in the eye. I felt his eyes burning holes in my turned back…I was confronted with my own deep sense of failure.

I teach literacy, study it as a doctoral student at Cal. Most of my daily, lived experience is mediated by literacy. My emotions, my innermost thoughts, my familial and other relationships are mediated through it. It is the window into my soul, the opened doors of opportunity for me. But for all my mediations, meditations, and theorizations about/on literacy, how rare it is to encounter someone for whom literacy means so much; not the languid introspections of the soul, but that which must deny the angry pangs of hunger in a starving belly, or a warm jacket to keep out the cold.

Growing up in India, I was constantly aware of the problems of “illiteracy”; there were subtle reminders in every walk of life, from the thumb print section in all forms right next to the signature box, the massive governmental billboards that exalted the positives of literacy, and spoke of how we as a country were plagued with “illiteracy,” to the very orality of our culture which allowed us to circumvent some of the problems of “illiteracy”…There, I expected “illiteracy,” it was everyday, I smelt it, tasted it often in the hot, muggy Indian air. However, in my academic and scholarly bubble at Cal, immersed in its theory, immersed in its practice, my laptop keyboard worn down from constant usage, my fingers exhausted from texting and typing, my eyes tired from reading, I see the world without through a haze, a haze of distance, and distortion. That ivory tower I never wanted to live in is suddenly home. I must make my way back.

Globalization: buzzword, reality, or myth?

2008-04-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

It was in the nineties in India that the word "globalization" started seeping into my daily discourse. The word gripped a nation which was reeling with continuing political uncertainties, civil strife, terrorism, and social and economic economic problems. It was upheld as a beacon of hope, the promise of economic and social salvation, the wondrous solution to the ills that plagued our society, the key force that was going to allow us to finally unshackle us from an oppressive colonial past. Technology suddenly intervened in the daily lives of upper and middle class Indians in unimagined and unanticipated ways: electronic mail, dial-up Internet, cell phone service, "hip" FM radio, and cable television offering a plethora of foreign programming. Coke, McDonald's, and Pizza Hut billboards plastered the metropolitan cityscapes. Overseas travel was suddenly infinitely more affordable, and High School graduates began leaving in droves for American, Canadian, British, and Australian universities. By all surface accounts, India was a new "network society"; India was going global. Now, as Radio Australia notes, "India...has become the poster child of globalisation."

Lately, I've becoming increasingly wary of this buzzword; every where I turn, in India, here, the word continues its stranglehold in the popular, and academic imagination. Yet something within me is deeply dissatisfied. At the recent AERA conference in NYC, I heard frequent references to the increasingly globalized nature of our world; apparently, it is the inescapable truth of contemporary society [question: who is included in this category?]; we are all interlinked in a networked world, spiderfeed trapped in the webs of interlocked and intertwining societies, cultures, languages, and peoples. The global village is the new modern nation-state; it is the superarching structure that has permeated into the fabric of every society. No nation is isolated, alienated from the ineluctable pressures of "global flows." Globalization, we are told, is universal.

Though I haven't fully formulated my position on this, I have deep analytical reservations about these perceptions, especially when applied to India. Some "220 to 280 million" Indians live in dire poverty, according to the BBC. Ethiopia outperforms India in terms of the malnutrition index, according to one study, and India was placed "94th out of 118 countries on the Global Hunger Index", and a Doctors Without Borders report states that "83 percent of women [in India] are anemic". According to one estimate, despite the popular conception of India as an English-speaking (and thus increasingly global, by some accounts) society, some 98% of Indians are not English speakers. While economic ramifications of a furiously networking world cannot be denied, these forces have a tremendous impact in particularly urban areas, whereas nearly 70% of India lives in agrarian societies in rural villages, with such problems that a farmer commits suicide every half hour, s ix thousand children perish every day to malnutrition, and a huge percentage of people remain illiterate.

When we talk about a "global" India, who or what do we speak of? It appears to me to be an elitist formulation that can not be applied across the board in a country as markedly divided on urban-rural lines. I'm not postulating that "globalization" is a myth in India; it is not fantasy; but analytically it has taken on mythic proportions, and seems to be obscuring the less powerful micro with the macro, a macro-structure which is city-centered and urbane. The "global" gets reworked very differently in local contexts, and it must be attended to, and carefully. Again, I do not lay claim to any notion that the forces of globalization don't matter; they do, at economic, political, social, and cultural level. But they don't matter in the same ways, nor must they matter everywhere.

Six thousand children die in India everyday, as noted earlier; the "globalization" afforded in the form of Micky Dee burgers or Domino's pizzas doesn't seem to be doing too much.

Does Hindi have a future?

2008-02-24T00:33:00.001-08:00

Just finished reading a somewhat alarmist article in the Indian national newspaper, The Times of India, entitled Does Hindi have a future? In that article, the fate of Hindi in the Indian urban landscape is considered precarious; the writer, Mohammed Wajihuddin, asserts that "An unsettling reality of metros and towns of India is that Hindi is slowly becoming an alien language." That, in the writer's words, is the "unkind truth" of our day.

Wajihuddin next goes on to "show" how academic interest in Hindi has declined over the years, quoting a former Mumbai University (in a region not a part of the “Hindi belt”) teacher who notes that the number of students enrolling in graduate programs in Hindi there have halved since the 90s. The decline of Hindi is bemoaned in other settings as well; an anecdote the writer provides as a case in point is this: “Soha Ali Khan [a young up-and-coming film actress in the Bollywood (Hindi) film industry, based in Mumbai, when asked] whether she speaks Hindi at all when she is not mouthing dialogues on the sets, [offers]: ‘Yes, I talk to my driver, dhobi [washerman] and liftman [elevator operator] regularly.’”

Not everyone believes the language is dying, however, as Wajihuddin notes; a Hindi “optimist,” Prasoon Joshi, thinks all is not lost, that there is hope to salvage the language, saying: “Yes, Sanskritised Hindi of Doordarshan [the government-run national television channel] is dying and it should die.” His point is clearly directed at the increasing popularity in the last decades of "Hinglish," and the increase in less formal structures in Hindi popularspeak. The language, if it is able to adapt to an increasingly Anglicized world, and rid itself of the rigors of Sanskritic formality, will not only survive but flourish. The overall tone of the article, however, indicates that Hindi is endangered.

There are too many comments I am tempted to make here, but for the sake of brevity, I am going to address only a few. Let me start with a Forbes article published two days ago, entitled the Bleak Future of English, asserting that the increased thrust in education across India will result in greater Hindi usage, and diminish the number of English speakers there. The article goes onto note that since English is the second language of many speakers across the globe, the first languages are not endangered, a point that Wajihuddin totally misses. One count puts the number of first language speakers of Hindi at a reasonably respectable 180 million people, a fact Wajihuddin neglects to mention as well. He is not alone in his beliefs that Hindi is endangered; politicians and scholars are commonly quoted in the news media lamenting the rapid decline in Hindi usage. However, the alarm bells are rung regarding its usage in towns and cities, where people have become increasingly bilingual in Hindi and English, not monolingual in English. Hindi continues to thrive in the heavily populated rural areas of the "Hindi belt" and beyond. My own observations lead me to believe that there is a popular decline in “Sanskritised” Hindi use, but that doesn’t automatically mean that English (that dreaded colonial inheritance!) is being increasingly incorporated into the language; popular Hindi has adopted a lot of Urdu vocabulary as well. The adaptability and elasticity of the language, as Joshi notes, will help it survive. I think scaremongers are generally more troubled about the survival of “pure” Hindi than about the survival of Hindi. There is plenty to comment about the question of "purity," but I will have to reserve detailed comments for another posting : as a Native Speaker and former teacher of Hindi (I taught five semesters at Cal), I have many mixed feelings on the issue. Briefly, I believe linguistic purism is principally rooted in nostalgia, and while I totally understand that sentiment, I also feel that it sometimes leads to blinkered perspectives (e.g. failing to recognize recognizing popular varieties as legitimate), that is, resistive linguistic snobbery.

I have no doubt Hindi will survive. It may not remain the literary Hindi of yore, but it’ll be a Hindi of the people. Let's not ring the death knell for Hindi yet.

Sprich Deutsch!

2008-02-12T21:59:00.000-08:00

The International House (endearingly truncated as the “I-House” by residents) at Cal affords an unparalleled multicultural and multilingual experience for residents, staff, members/visitors, and cafe regulars. In my six months here, I’ve witnessed and been engaged in numerous cross-cultural and cross-linguistic exchanges that have amused, moved, and confounded me. This blog focuses on linguistic interactions between a group of my fellow residents, all German Economics graduate students (in their early twenties), visiting Cal on a year-long study abroad program. [*To preserve anonymity I have changed some names and genders.]

A constant source of tension and strife in the group dynamic is Markus’ (one of the exchange students) insistence on speaking in English to his fellow German friends (a group of about ten). The whole group is constantly thrown together because they take many of the same courses, and generally socialize together, and Markus’ insistence on speaking English is bitterly resented. As an “outlier” member of the German troupe, I have had an interesting vantage point from which to observe how this resentment has unfolded. Initially, I figured Markus spoke to others in English out of compassion for me, so I would not feel left out, with my poor command of German. [His direct interactions with me, however, were in French (we both were trying to increase our fluency) and English.] Every time I observed a conversation between Markus and other Germans, I sensed a marked irritation on the part of my German friends, and the reason for their anger did not require any complicated sleuthery; it was patently clear that Markus’ English usage was the prime source of friction.

Markus is not about to back down, even after six months of being at the receiving end of some very choice epithets. As he explained to me, “I’m only here for a year…I came to America not so I would spend all my time speaking in German to Germans….I came to America to practice my English! I want to practice as much as I can!” My other German friends, however see things differently; Edith, for example, says that speaking in English to fellow Germans makes one “pretentious.” Erika thinks it’s “unnatural,” and feels that if Markus wants to improve his English, he should do it with Americans. Uwe doesn’t like the “Germanic structure” of Markus’ English.

The friction has taken many forms: the boys have refused to respond to Markus if he spoke in English, threatened him with ostracism, openly confronted him on the issue, and, during a recent trip to Hawaii, they started the trend of charging him a quarter every time he used an English word; Markus, needless to say, has bought several pitchers of beers for the boys [when I asked Markus why he paid up so easily when he could just use German, he said (1) he is not going to back down from using English and (2) he is paying for a good cause-drinking.]

I’ve found this issue very interesting on several different levels. Both sides are convinced they are right; Markus cannot understand why he should speak German in America, whereas the others do not understand why they would need to resort to speaking in a foreign language with a native speaker of their mother tongue. Markus is constantly frustrated but perseveres in his English use, whereas the boys are constantly angry and equally stubborn in their beliefs. Markus spatializes his language use, whereas the others think language use should be a function of the immediate community with which one interacts. For Markus, this is an incredible opportunity to exploit the immersion context for FL acquisition; the boys, I think, embrace the touch of home German represents for them. As Edith told me, only half tongue-in-cheek, “We’re protecting the German language!”

I’m not quite sure if this will ever be resolved…three more months to go. However, I have a feeling Markus is paying for many more pitchers of beer this semester. I don’t think he’ll be complaining too much. It, as he notes, is for a good cause.

Sanskrit, not quite as dead as a dodo?

2008-02-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

Not your typical question that teases the intellect at a late hour on a rainy Saturday in Berkeley, but then is anything typical on a precipitative night? So, is Sanskrit, the language which is considered “quite dead, really,” living on purportedly only in liturgical services or in classical literature, really, honestly, extinct?

Before I hit my teens in New Delhi, I received Sanskrit initially in somewhat low doses…during Hindu festivals like Durga Puja and Saraswati Puja, and during wedding ceremonies. During the former, we would repeat parts of the priest’s prayer recitation. During the latter, almost the entire ceremony would be conducted by the priest in Sanskrit, with the bride and groom chiming in occasionally, when instructed to do so. Even at a young age I was sensitive to the accents in which priests spoke Sanskrit: at the bare minimum, the Bengali priests’ tendency to pronounce the “v”s as “b”s and frequently add “o”s in the coda always caught my ear. Apart from religious and social ceremonies, I had very little exposure to Sanskrit, mainly in the form of little sentences we used in the home, mainly because my mother was doing a doctorate in Sanskrit, and my father picked up little introductory books in Sanskrit for a little fun.

As a teen, I received intensive instruction in Sanskrit, from grades 6th through 10th, as many Indian students do. It was mandatory till grade 8, after which I elected to pursue it (with some coaxing from my parents). However, the texts were drawn from ancient writings, exciting in that they provided glimpses into life and beliefs in ancient India, but definitely far from immediately relevant to our modern lives. I remember the texts today as being moralistic in tone, though not in overtly religious ways. The instruction was primarily grammar-centric, which made studying Sanskrit quite easy, since its grammar is highly structured and grammatical patterns relatively predictable. After I finished my final year of Sanskrit, I came out thinking it was “deader” than I had thought.

However, in my very recent trip to India, on a trip to an orphanage, I was struck by its life. I observed little boys, mostly between the ages of 4 and 6 (1st language speakers of Bengali, and 2nd & 3rd language speakers of Hindi and English respectively) doing their prayers in Sanskrit, and singing devotional songs in Sanskrit.

In the little boys’ “dealings” with Sanskrit, there is a special kind of spiritual and devotional engagement; even though it is mostly parroted and recited, and the uses confined to ritualized settings, their perception appears to be that the language is sacred, holy, but meaningful and expressive of their spirituality. Of course, due to the limited data I have, I am not sure I want to stretch this too far, but suddenly, a language I had left for dead has just…resurrected as a living force, at least in my mind. Sanskrit, for me, is not quite as dead as a dodo.

Linguistic Assumptions and Expectations

2008-01-21T11:23:00.000-08:00

As I sit in a café at the Helsinki-Vantaa airport in Finland, I marvel at the linguistic miracle that is the modern day airport. I am thousands of miles from home, having left another linguistic wonder (Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi, India) hours ago, yet a young Indian man just walked up to me, and asked in Hindi, “Wireless kaam kar raha hai, kya?” (“Is the wireless working?”). To my left, a young man is speaking tenderly on a cell phone to his wife in Bengali, and I turn away in mild embarrassment since he is speaking blissfully unaware that there is an overhearer who can actually understand the language. Minutes later, an elderly German lady asked me if bringing in outside food into the café was “verboten,” and I mumbled, “Nein” (I had just read the sign which said one could). It was interesting, because I hesitated a few seconds before answering, the “Nein” stuck in my throat momentarily, wondering first what would make her think that I spoke German. The Indian man assuming I spoke Hindi was, I instinctively thought, natural: I boarded the plane, like him, in New Delhi, have Mehendi designs all over my palms and the back of my hands, and—most importantly, with my dark hair and wheatish skin, look (I think) unmistakably Indian. The Bengali man, on the other hand, probably noticed the Mehendi and assumed I was not Bengali, since it is less common for Bengali women to stain their hands with it. But I was stunned that beyond German borders, in Finland, the lady approached me in her mother tongue, a language she could not—on the surface, I thought (and as I write “on the surface,” I wonder what that means)—associate with me. In hindsight I think she thought her tone and the gestures she made would carry the content of her utterance; it was not, I imagine, that she thought I was a German speaker. Her reaction told me she was clearly taken aback that I responded in German.

This little interaction was illuminating for me on multiple levels. I realized that I have expectations about how others (should) recognize me linguistically. The interaction also revealed how these expectations are driven by some very surface considerations and cues (cues that I expect others to recognize, and feel baffled when they aren’t). I did not expect to be spoken to in German because I was (1) an Indian (2) at a Finnish airport. The lady’s astonishment at my response, monosyllabic as it was, showed that she also expected that I didn’t speak German (note: I don’t really “speak” German, just have high beginner knowledge of it).

I started thinking about other interesting incidents from my life which connected with the question of “linguistic assumptions.” My mother and I recently visited the Great Indian Bazaarshaakha-paula-cultural insignias that signal her Bengaliness and her marital status. Street vendors in Janpath, a traditional open-air shopping area in Delhi, are well versed in this art, of being able to guess where one’s from, and quote prices accordingly. If my mother walks in a store with me, one of the first questions someone asks is if we are “from Kolkata” (the capitol of Bengal), a question inspired either by our “Bengali faces” or my mother’s bangles. If I walk in alone, I generally speak very colloquial Hindi, slurring my words as local Delhiites are wont to do, signaling that I am a local (a point which drives down prices by a third, generally). When I resort to English then, my accent is distinctively “Indian,” again signaling that I belong to this community. During this winter break trip to India, I did exactly that: when the vendor began by quoting an exorbitant price—for a Delhiite—I said, in the most slurred Hindi possible, “Bhaiyya, Dilliwalon ko kyon loot-te ho?” (Why do you loot Delhiites?”). The seller laughed and slashed the price to about a fourth of the original quoted. As my mother and I walked away, we began speaking in Bengali. He angrily called after us, “Arre, aap to kalkatta se ho!” (“Hey, you are from Kolkata (the capitol of West Bengal in East India)”!). I turned, and put on my most hurt expression, “Dilliwale Bengali nahin bolte kya?” (Don’t [some] Delhiites speak Bengali?”). Despite having spent 22 years of my life growing up in Delhi, though, I felt like I was cheating him a little bit by modifying my speech to lower the price. (an Indian mall), and the elevator man addressed my mom in Bengali, without her having spoken a word. The first clue would have been that my mother wears

There is another side to this: I still vividly recall my first week in Canada, where I went to study for a Master’s, and the serviceperson helping me open a bank account insisted that I could not have just arrived from India because I spoke English “like us.” She was quite suspicious and rude, and it wasn’t until I showed her my arrival papers and the passport with my date of entry that she relented. This has happened to me many times, and though I think most people think it flatters me, it is something which angers me; I see no reason why, even though English is not my first or second language, there is surprise in my proficiency based on how I look. In a second language acquisition classroom, in a different Master’s program in an American university, a professor told the class it was shameful that I knew more English vocabulary than others. I remember seething with anger for days, wondering why there was assumed to be a correlation between the way I looked, where I came from, and my expected competence in English.

Now, as I put things in perspective, though I don’t condone her reaction, I realize that I have expectations about how people should perceive me just as people have expectations about where we stand, linguistically speaking….Can I fault others for making assumptions when I bring my own set of assumptions and expectations as well?

Language and identity: Notes from an Indian orphanage

2008-01-15T01:18:00.000-08:00

Two days ago, on a windy, foggy Saturday evening near New Delhi, I accompanied my mother to an orphanage where she volunteers. The orphanage is run by an Ashram, and takes in mostly orphans, and some children who have impoverished single parents (generally mothers). The children (all Bengali boys) hail from desperately poor backgrounds, and are mostly between the ages of 6 and 8. There are about 26 children who live at the orphanage at this time, and this number changes frequently because many of the single parents want the children to return home and start contributing to the family’s finances (child labor, as is widely reported, continues to be a menace to Indian society, regardless of the laws that prohibit it). The Ashram administrators counsel parents extensively, trying to convince them that education will ensure the best future for their children; however, these measures don’t always succeed, and so the numbers at the orphanage tend to fluctuate quite a bit.

My experience there was humbling and exhilarating at the same time; when we first walked in, we heard joyous shouts of “Happy New Year!” The boys were sitting in front of the Kali temple, dressed in traditional Bengali garb of white dhotis and cotton shawls which were somewhat tattered and dirty. Their unwashed, scruffy faces lit up with joy as they scrambled to find their notebooks. They then settled down and sang devotional songs in Sankrit for the next hour, their voices loud and strong, their Bengali accents just slightly tingeing their Sanskrit, and they occasionally cast curious glances in my direction. Next, my mother introduced me, and then the boys spoke to me about their lives, speaking in Hindi and Bengali, and also proceeded to show off their skills in English. When I asked them what languages they knew apart from Bengali and Hindi, a few said they spoke Bhojpuri or Rajasthani as well, and some children volunteered that they had developed a language to speak in amongst themselves, and they then proceeded to speak rapidly in this invented language.

When I left that day, my heart was full and my mind caught in a tempest of questions…

Yesterday, when I returned there, a multilingual chorus of voices greeted me: “Didi eshe geche!” (Elder sister is here!-Bengali), “Aa gayee na didi!” (She has come, no!-Hindi), and “Good evening!” They finished their evening prayers in Sanskrit, then sat around and talked to me for a while. At one point, they demanded my mother tell them a story, and I said, why don’t you tell us a story? And then one child, Sanjeev, volunteered the following story:

In a village, a little Bengali boy’s mother sends him to the city to learn English. Many years later, the boy learns English and comes back to the village. Then, his mother serves him food. As the boy is eating, he starts choking, and starts screaming ‘Water! Water!” in English. Not understanding, his mother doesn’t bring him water, and the son dies.

This story was greeted with loud guffaws by the other kids, who had obviously heard the story before. I was amazed by the story, thinking, wow, this is such a personal story for these kids…this story speaks to their own-and others’-uneasiness with English, to the fears of mothers about their children losing their own linguistic identities and paying a high price for learning English (a language that must, in this story, be learnt at the cost of one’s own), and the of urban India/rural India divide that seems to cut through the lives of these children…As I walked away that day, this story stayed with me…the relationship multilingual India has to English is a complex one, one well worth researching…I can’t wait to come back and do that some day.

Imported Benchmarks of Literacy

2008-01-11T09:36:00.000-08:00

Navigating the clogged streets of New Delhi at rush hour, by the Rashtrapati Bhavan (the President's mansion), is no mean feat. Scores of buses, cars, motorbikes, three-wheelers, two-wheelers and cyclists, battle for limited space. Further, this time of year, a wintry smog cloaks the city by early dusk; and security roadblocks don't help matters much either. While we were trapped in one of a dozen traffic jams that delayed us today, something the driver Rehman said really got me thinking....as a huge DTC (Delhi Transport Corporation) bus roared past us on the wrong lane, Rehman exclaimed, "Paper'e announce kore chilo bar bar, 'Overtake nahin karna!' Keo shone'i na!" ("The paper was announcing [sic] over and over again, 'Don't overtake!' (But) no one listens!"

The sentences were trilingual: "paper," "announce," and "overtake," of course, are from English; "kore chilo bar bar" and "Keo shone'i na" are Bengali, and "nahin karna" is a Hindi phrase. Rehman, a long time resident of Kolkata (in West Bengal) has just moved to North India, and speaks to us in Bengali (our first language). He is very fluent in Hindi, the national language, and says his prayers (namaaz) in Urdu/Arabic. He also follows basic English conversations, though he responds only in Hindi/Bengali. For all the linguistic calisthenics he performs in everyday life, he's stuck with the appellation "illiterate"....To the world at large, he represents the failure of the Third World to educate its masses, a canker on its path to progress. One of teeming millions of "illiterates," he stands between India and its glowing tomorrow. Or so one would think, looking at newspaper, television, and billboard ads...

India's "illiteracy" has been a priority and a pressing issue since before Independence in 1947. Recently, the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, had this to say:

No modern country has less than 80 per cent literacy....India needs a new revolution in modern education. Source: The Hindu.

I think we focus too much on numbers, on percentages in this Indian "War on illiteracy." A simple Google search will reveal millions of documents asserting the rampant illiteracy in India. Yes, there are many people in India who are considered illiterate by many standards, but I also want us to acknowledge that literacy takes shape in myriad ways in India, and perhaps this old way of judging one's "literate" status should give way to a standard cognizant of the cultural and linguistic plurality that marks Indians...why must we measure Indian literacy with imported benchmarks that don't take India's diversity into consideration? There are people, like Rehman, who spend their lives stigmatized as the illiterate in India, but are able to traverse multilingual boundaries with ease, and make sense of the world in so many rich, complex ways...There's something very off here...

Auto-mobile literacy in India

2008-01-05T11:31:00.000-08:00

“Ok. Tata. By. Phir Milenge (see you again).” The cursive white lettering (a mixture of the “Western” alphabet and the Hindi Devanagari script) stood in stark contrast to the grassy green body of the three-wheeler (called “autos“), the ubiquitous mode of transport on Delhi streets.

Growing up in Delhi, I’d always been fascinated by the words handpainted with a thinnish brush on the back of autos, trucks, and two-wheelers. While American bumper stickers and innovative license plates amuse me tremendously, there’s something very different and unique about this “auto”-”mobile” literacy. The one I saw today (see above) reveals more than one would imagine at first glance: Indians do tend to say “tata” and “bye” together, almost as if they were not synonymous; the English-Hindi bilinguality is a reflection of the linguistic mixing that is a vital aspect of our society; and, the hopeful optimism of the “Phir milenge” is endearing in a very “Indian” way. The words are not always simple and secular; many autos have religious sayings (generally drawn from Hinduism/Islam), some are political, nationalistic (a common phrase seen is “Mera Bharat Mahan” which translates into “My India is great”), and some are moralistic in tone. A common cautionary one to be found on trucks and autos is: “Buri nazar waale tera muh kala” (You with the evil eye, may your face become black). Another one I once read out loud to my dad (to my horror and embarrassment when I understood what it meant), at a traffic light, was: “Paanch minute ka mazaa, nau maheenon ki sazaa” (Five minutes of pleasure, nine months of pain), back in the day when population control seemed to be the number one priority for the government. I am almost willing to bet my life that every truck in India has the words “Horn Please” (actually, both “horn” and “please” may be found in a variety of avatars in terms of spelling) blazoned across the back. Sometimes an “Ok” will find itself sandwiched in the middle, and I’ve never been clear why, but it appears to have some kind of cult status.

Sometimes there’s a loving reference to a departed mother, or a tender reference to a wife. Some proudly proclaim the name of the driver: “This driver’s name,” as one informed me, “is Rajiv.” I have found references to Bollywood/Hollywood films, Hindi pop and film songs, and famous literary figures…

For a country which gets such a bad rep for having high levels of illiteracy, I thought it would be fun to celebrate a very unique kind of literacy which is quite special in its own way but nearly always overlooked….

Marry your rapist?

2008-01-04T20:39:00.000-08:00

I just excavated a newspaper article that kept rankling for the last few days...a couple of rapists had married their victims. The headline went, "2 Accused Wed Rape Victims: Earn reprieve after showing proof of marriage to court" (The Times of India, 1/1/2008, p. 7). It was buried deep in the (Delhi) Metro pages of the paper: it wasn't presented as a story of a social anomaly; rather, the tone of the article was rather factual, like standard journalistic reportage. The Hindu also reported the story, titled Two get bail after marriage. The victims, as both articles pointed out, "expressed the desire" to marry their rapists, and the families agreed as well. Both victims were around 4 months pregnant at the time of their marriage. Notice how the words "reprieve" and "get bail" are juxtaposed next to "marriage": the insinuation is implicit, but not overtly spelled out (why?). Initially, I thought that perhaps this was a case of parental opposition to "love affairs" (which cause "umpteen honor killings"). You know, parents angry about who their daughter is dating, not recognizing a "love" marriage, claiming rape when the daughter gets pregnant by the man she's "married" to in secret (standard themes in Bollywood films even today).

Then I did a Google search, and discovered that this is not the first time accused rapists have, at the last moment, gotten married to their victims, with the immediate consequence that their cases are thrown out. Here's a horrifying case from 2005:

Hospital Attendant Bhura was handed a life sentence in the shocking Shanti Mukund rape case. The sentence came two years after the horrific incident, which took place on September 7, 2003.
Not only had Bhura brutally assaulted the 22-year-old nurse, he had also gouged her right eye and severely damaged the left one.
The victim has had four surgeries since and is yet to come to terms with the horrifying incident.
But what made matters worse was the judge asking her to consider a marriage proposal from the man convicted of attacking her. While the nurse strongly rebuffed the proposal as being “horrible and audacious”, it also sparked strong protests from women’s rights groups. Source: NDTV.com

Imagine that...being raped, having your eye gouged out, and then...asked by a judge of the Delhi High Court to consider marrying your rapist. Another account from 2005:

....in Charthawal village, Muzaffarnagar district, Uttar Pradesh, Imrana, wife of Noor Elahi, was being forced to separate from her husband and marry Ali Mohammad, her father-in-law, who had raped her. The decision was supported by the local panchayat, which declared her existing marriage null and void. She was commanded to observe a period of seven months to 'purify' herself and then marry Ali Mohammed. Source: India Together

In both cases, fortunately, the victims "held out" and managed not to be forced to marry their victims. This wasn't two hundred, three hundred years ago; we're talking less than three years ago. And this (a rapist marrying a victim) is not a purely Indian phenomenon, as anyone familiar with the much-publicized Mary Kay Letourneau case in the US knows, or a lesser known case from Peru.