Invisible threads

My wife says that potato chips are bound to each other by an invisible thread. If you pick up one, the next one comes up automatically. Perhaps, thoughts are the same. Only that, one thought leads to another completely different. Thus, thinking in terms of potato chips, potato chip leads to a jalebi, that goes to a samosa and so on!

As I pedal my bicycle in the morning to the work, most of the time riding the bicycle and negotiating the traffic happens in automatic mode and my mind meanders in different directions. I am convinced that some of those ideas are terrific but the problem is that by the time I reach office and want to write them down, I can't remember most of them!

That is how it was this morning. I was pedalling furiously. Behind our house, they are cutting deep gashes in the green fields. A new road is going to come up there. Further ahead, a new access to the highway is flattening the existing hills and building new hills. Even further, the railway tracks are being moved so that the high speed train lines can be put in their place. Our part of the city is changing face!

The side effect is that the road is full of dust and with the strong humidity in the night, every morning my bicycle wheels raise up drops of dusty glue that sticks to my pants.

And I was thinking about the Anarchytect post I had read in the morning about buildings, spaces, layouts. For a lot of things, I realise that I am very superficial. Buildings are part of those things. I mean, a building is a building, full stop. Thinking of spaces as something alive, that you mould and shape like dough for making chapattis, seems kind of strange. Seeing the landscape around our house changing in front of us, I know it is true but I still keep on believing that the landscape is something physical, fixed, unchangeable, so why think about it!

Another of these things is art. I mean, you watch a nice painting and instinctively you know whether you like it or not. What need is there to dissect it, analyse it?

You are wrong of course, you just need to read the Hindi article of Om Thanvi on Starry Nights of Van Gogh in MOMA in New York to understand how wrong you are. There are eleven stars he writes. The bottom most star, its luminous white contrasting with the wonderful yellow of the moon is probably the morning star that Van Gogh saw from the window of his sanatorium and wrote about it to Theo, his brother. The spire of the church in the background is more like the Dutch churches of Van Gogh's childhood and not the French churches surrounding his sanatorium. The cypress tree in the left rising up like a peacock feather, is it a death wish? Van Gogh did die a few months after making this painting.

Once you read that article of Om Thanvi, it changes the way you look at this painting. It is no longer a question of if you like it or not, you can understand it and see things that you did not see earlier.

Suddenly my thoughts about starry nights and Van Gogh were interrupted by a new song in my earphones. I religiously put on my ipod when I start from my home but I hardly ever remember the songs I have heard during the journeys. But this song was great and different. Ajnabi Shehar it is called and it is from Jaaneman, I found out later. The singer, perhaps Sonu Nigam, sounded just like Rafi did in those wonderful songs from a film called Jhuk Gaya Aasman! It had came out in 1968 and had music by Shanker Jaikishen and had Rajendra Kumar and Saira Banu in it. Not that I liked Rajendra Kumar or Saira banu. There is no rational explanation for this jump from Ajnabi Shaher to Jhuk Gaya Aasman, but that's how thought are. Unpredictable and irrational.

What was the story of JGA like? It had something to do with death. I thought furiously, weaving the bicycle between cars stuck in a traffic jam. Rajendra Kumar dies in it, but then comes back. Actually there were two Rajendra Kumars. One poor and nice, in love with Saira Banu. The other rich and bad. The bad one was supposed to die but by mistake, Yama kills the young and poor. By the time they realise the mistake, his body has been cremated or whatever, so the good one goes in the body of the bad one. I had seen it on a black and white TV in the prehistoric days of Indian TV.

JGA had same story as of the Warren Beatty film, Paradise lost or can wait or something like that! This last bit of knowledge is fairly recent that Bollywood had started copying long time ago. But JGA had lovely songs and this song from Jaaneman reminded me of it - except that it is better, having strange interludes between the stanzas, changing the music styles completely each time.

While trying to think of the Jhuk Gaya Aasman songs, I braked in front of a truck of leaves-collectors in the park, that was blocking the path. By now all the trees in the park are naked with skinny arms and the beautiful golden, yellow, kathai, burnt siena of autumn leaves has been replaced by a rotting mass on the ground that sticks to your shoes and to bicycle wheels, making a squashing sucking sound as you walk on it. The leaves-collectors looked like ghost-busters from the film of the same name, with a motor in their backpack and holding thick tubes blowing hissing air like giant earthworms, pushing the sticky gooey mass towards the suction pump of the truck. Leaves-ghost-busters they are, picking up dead leaves, I thought.

Can trees have ghosts too? I had arrived in the office and so the question remained unanswered and like the last dream of the morning, it also slowly dissipated into nothingness.

***

Exploring madness

Recently I saw the "Exploring Madness", a series of short films by Dr. Parvez Imam. He is a doctor and a documentary film maker. The films are very brief, each lasting 3-4 minutes only.

The one I liked most was where he tells about women who are brought to a mental health hospital and left there by the family. Often, the families give a wrong address to the hospital, so that they can not be traced. After a few months, when the women are cured or are better, they want to go back to their homes, but the law does not allow persons treated for mental health problems to go out alone. Their only way to go out of the hospital is if some family member comes to accompany them. For many of them, no one ever comes to take them back so they are doomed to wait in the mental hospitals for ever. It was heart rending in the film to listen to the women who kept on saying, she had two children and she wanted to go back to her family.

I appreciated that the film respects the privacy of persons it interviews. And I liked the briefness of films. Even in their briefness, they make a clear point and touch the heart. I think that it requires a deep understanding of the theme and a strong empathy, to come up with something like this.

In the film, a lawyer tells about the Indian laws relating to mental illness. In India, if you are declared mentally ill, you lose all your civil rights, including the right to vote or to marry. For the law, it is justifiable reason for asking for a divorce. So like those women doomed to eternal wait for the families to come back and take them, there are many other areas of human rights violations of persons with mental health problems.

However, you can be cured of mental illness. Often mental illnesses are cyclical in nature, so there are periods when you are better. Doesn't the law allow you to regain your civil rights once the doctor treating you has certified that you are better? That sounds very cruel and unfair!

While watching the film I remembered some episodes from a period of life, that I had almost forgotten. It was the time when I was a PG student in anaesthesia at Willingdon hospital (or the Dr Ram Manohar Lohia hospital) in Delhi. Some times there were calls from the mental health unit accross the Tal Katora road and sometimes, I did go there to provide anaesthesia for persons receiving electric shocks (ECT). As shocks also produce convulsions in the body, through anaesthesia, you can relax the muscles so that they don't get hurt or pains afterwards.

I was thinking that in those days, I had never stopped on the way to look around in the mental health unit. It was only rushing to the ECT room and back. Perhaps, just the sight of ECT scared me so much that I didn't want to think about it?

At that time, I did not know that many organisations of "survivors of psychiatric services" are fighting against ECT, they feel that it is inhuman treatment and not useful. However, the textbooks of medicines continue to teach students about usefulness of ECT in certain conditions.

***

The Indian Way: Living in multi-cultural, multi-religious societies

The lady smiled at me. She was one of those culturally aware kinds who want to be sensitive to persons of other cultures. "I know you are not a Christian, but at least I can wish you for a happy new year." Meaning, she will not offend me by wishing me "Merry christmas"!

I guess that it is the western way of thinking that likes things to be neatly divided and separated and put into neat labelled boxes. Thus people with different religions and expected behaviours, the politically correct things to say about them, all are stored in those boxes. There is no place for ambiguity or confusion there.

Europe needs to respond and adapt to the multi-cultural societies, legacies of its colonial past, accelerated by growing globalisation and hordes of desperates who flee from underdeveloped world in makeshift boats to land on Spanish or Italian coasts, or crossing in from Eastern Europe. The European society, even with some differences between the Roman Catholics and the different protestant chruches, had long been uniform culturally, leaving aside some minorities. It is still groping for answers about how to deal with multiculturism imposed on it by the emigrants.

And so, for not offending the non Christians, some say, no more public lighting and displays for Christmas. Others like the lady above, feel that respecting other religions means not mentioning anything about your own religion to others.

Co-habitation between religions in India

I was thinking about the contrast of such thinking from my own growing up experience in India. For Gurupurab, I knew that the prabhat-feri passed very early in the morning, so I would wake up early to get my dose of kacchi lassi from the truck that came down from the Gurudwara, temple of the Sikhs.

Coming out from a Hindu temple, we did not ask people if they were Hindu, Muslim or Sikh before offering them a bit of prasad.

When Irene, our neighbour came with the plate of sweet seewiyan for Idd, we were taught to say, "Idd mubarak".

In the morning, when I saw Sajid bhai I would say Salaam Valekum and he would answer with a namastey. For the midnight mass of Christmas, more than once I went to the Cathedral near Gol Dakhana in Delhi and when everyone else around made the sign of cross, I also did. It was just another way of ringing the temple bell.

Religious ambiguity, the smudged confines between different religions, is part of Indian identity. By venturing in the other religions, by embracing them, by celebrating them you didn't loose your own identity.

Western preoccupation with neat separate categories

Perhaps that is part of Indian system of logic, I am asking myself. We have a particular way of thinking that does not seek the clean separate boxes with neat labels, so dear to the western thinking?

Sometime ago, I was reading a book that talked about a census carried out under British in early 1900s. During the census, a huge number of persons in Punjab had declared themselves to be Hindu-Sikhs. No, you can't be a Hindu-Sikh, you have to be either Hindu or Sikh, choose one, they were told. It laid the grounds for creating divisions among Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab, the book claimed.

Perhaps, the British did have a clear strategy for dividing and ruling India or perhaps this was just a by-product of western way of thinking that does not accept ambiguity that we seem to embrace?

In a world that is dominated by great conflicts between the three monotheistic religions Christians, Jews and Muslims, I sense that we are moving towards polarisations. Everyone seems closed in their own boundaries with common spaces bounded by rules that they call "tollerance and respect for all religions". To me, it seems a way of saying, I believe that I am superior, my religion is better, but I will not waste my time in telling you about it, so just lets not talk about it.

The way forward

This polarised way of thinking is seeping in India as well, by well meaning persons. Unfortunately.

But I think that there are lot of merits in our Indian way of reasoning, that does not call for "tollerance and respect", it calls for "embracing and acceptance" of the other.

We don't need to stop public displays of joy at Christmas, we need to extend it to other religions, so that we can celebrate festivals of others, like we celebrate our own.

May be western way of logical, rational thought, that prefers clean unambiguous answers is good for somethings like science and information technology, while our own Indian confused, inclusive, ambiguous way is better for other things, especially about religions and about living together!

***

In India

It was the first time that I came to India through Bangalore. We were going to have a regional meeting on traditional medicine. The arrival hall of Bangalore international airport was a shock. Though the Delhi international airport is quite a let down but Bangalore was even worse. All the thoughts about Bangalore being the silicon valley of India and an international symbol of the new resurgent India seemed like a joke when we arrived in that airport. They are building a new airport I was told, but a city that hosts the new infotech giants seems to be taking a rather long time in getting its act together!

Outside, the narrow streets of Bangalore choking with traffic, blaring horns and an unfinished fly-over close to the airport, is in sharp contrast with its bright shops selling top international brands. We were staying on Brigade road off the famous MG Road. The row of shops selling computers and latest infotech gadgets, and the swanky malls seemed out of the first world, squeezed in the third world of old poor India.

The traditional medicine meeting was organised in collaboration with People's International Health University and Ayurvedic medical college of Bangalore had participants from Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. It was very interesting and provided an opportunity for reflecting on the dominance of western thought that relegates everything else to "old, traditional, indigenous" boundaries. That ancient wisdom of milleniums that have resulted in systems of medicines like ayurveda, yunnani and sidha, are forced to "prove" themselves "scientifically" is a sign of that dominance.

Naturally we found time to go around the city for some tourist visit. The old palace of Tipu sultan completed in 1791 is beautiful with its dark browns and mahagony. On the last day, on my way to the airport, Krishna, our driver, insisted on taking me to the Shiv temple next to the Kids Kemp shopping centre. The giant statues of Ganesh and Shiv in this temple are very imposing.

***

On 19th, I flew to delhi. I had some work but mostly these days in Delhi are for family reunions. Delhi is the new home of Luca and his wife Polly. Luca is my old friend Enrico's son and has come here recently. So it was natural that to visit him and to check if everything was ok for their settling down.

Om Thanvi, editor of the Hindi newspaper Jansatta invited me to his home for a party, introducing me to his other guests as "he runs a webzine call Kalpana". Surrounded by his literary friends, I felt as if I was playing a new role, used as I am to be seen as a doctor! It was a lovely evening with wonderful Rajasthani vegetarian food cooked by his wife Premlata. It was also an opportunity to meet some interesting persons like Renuka Vishwanathan and Madhu Kishwar.

Finally I saw the new central park in Connaught Place. The new metro station of Rajiv Chowk has been completed and all the "work in progress" boards have been taken off, replaced by green lawns and flowing water. There was a beautiful exhibition showing off the changes in C.P. in the central park.

***

As usual, the travels to India get over so quickly and I am back to Bologna, getting nostalgic about the India days!

***

Mermaids in Bologna

December means Christmas time and it also means "Motor show", one of the bigger annual trade fairs of Bologna. This year, for the annual Motor show, the Swatch people, makers of the small car Smart, organised a Smart Night in the historical central square of Bologna, la Piazza Maggiore. With 12 and 13th century buildings of red stone, this is one the most beautiful squares of Bologna. The Christmas lights were making it look like a fairy land.

The Smart Night brought colourful psychedelic lights, giant film screens, dances, drums, acrobats and high decible pop music to the square, creating a wonderful contrast with the old buildings surrounding the square. The beginning of the show was with Kay Rush, a half-Italian half-Japanese TV show girl, appearing at the top of one of the giant screens, with her huge image on the same screen, to give an explanation of the theme of the event - exploring the different metro-communication languages.

The flying acrobats with colourful skirts, appeared next, flying in the sky, throwing strange shadows on the walls of the old palace, doing song and music routines from some famous films, dancing in front of the giant screens showing the strange art world of Escher.

Then it was the turn of singer l'Aura. She has a real nice voice and a very distinct style of singing. Lovely. She was followed by Piero Pelu, one of the famous Italian pop stars who joined Kay Rush on the stage as a presenter.

And then it was the turn of the mermaids. They had placed transparent tubs shaped like champagne glasses, filled with water, in front of the cathedral. Three girls in swim suits appeared, did some synchronised dancing and then jumped inside the tubs to become the mermaids. All the while the upcoming young piano star Giovanni Allevi played wonderful piano. It was like a dream, though with the cold night and temperatures of around 3 or 4 C°, it reminded me of the Mumbai film heroines who stoically go through dances and songs among snow covered mountains, dressed in the skimpiest of clothes. From the vapours rising from the girls' bodies, I think that the water was quite warm, still it must have been strange to take bath in the shivering cold in one of the oldest squares of Italy!

Here are some pictures from this evening:

***

Spirit of Dilli

There was a time when Delhi was hardly there in the Mumbai films, except for that passing shot in front of India Gate or South Block with the rashtrapati bhavan in the background. As someone had cribbed after watching Kal Ho Na Ho, films do tend to distort the geography of cities, and if New York could not escape it, how could Delhi do it!

The films are such that you would think that India Gate and Red Fort are close to each other and next to the railway station and the airport, so that if you come to Delhi, you can't avoid passing in front of them.

This year, I have already seen 4 Hindi films where hamari Dilli plays a key role, and the year is not yet over. Perhaps, in 2006 there were other films too, that were based in Delhi, that I have missed. The question I am asking is, which of these films reflected the real spirit of Delhi?

It started with Rang de Basanti. In RDB, India Gate was not just a distant shot seen from the windows of the passing car or autorickshaw but it played an important role in a crucial scene along with the spacious bunglows of the ministers, not too far from it. It was essentially a south Delhi kind of Delhi in RDB, where upper middle class lives. There were a few scenes of old Delhi and the Muslim culture but they were more like cameos and didn't affect the overall voice and texture of the film, that remained essentially south Delhi. I felt that, Aamir Khan as the sikh son of a dhaba-owner and his disgruntled companions, suceeded in giving life to the growing up experience in Delhi. I could identify with it. Its language, ambience, people were the kind you find in Delhi.

Then came Fanaa, another Aamir Khan starrer. Here Delhi was just an interlude, a background to the shairo-shayari and songs. The film highlighted the touristy part of Delhi. It skimmed superficially over Delhi, not really trying to look at the life of the city. In spite of the luminous Kajol, I felt that it was a synthetic make-believe world, not really reflecting anything real about the city or its people.

The third film that I saw was Khosla ka Ghosla. It was a more of a west Delhi kind of ambience, people who usually live in Punjabi Bagh or Rajouri Garden. It was also very real. The way neighbours reacted, the way people talked and went around their lives, it was able to catch the spirit of dilliwallas. There was a part of the film dealing with Mandi house and Bhartiya Kala Kendra part of Delhi, the part involving theatre-wallas. This part was slightly less real in the way the two main actors behaved (Navin Nischol and Tara Sharma), but even in these scenes, all the side actors were very dilliwallas. KKG was also quite enjoyable in a Gulzaar-Hrikeksh Mukherjee kind of way, that was refreshing.

Finally the last Delhi-based film that I saw was Ahista Ahista. It was mainly an old Delhi, Chandni Chowk kind of Delhi, around Jama Masjid, Dariyaganj and Red Fort. In the film, at times the way the actors (Abhay deol and Soha Ali Khan) walked effortlessly from Red Fort to Niajammuddin or to Qutab Minaar did jarr a bit but overall, the ambience of narrow streets and the Muslim culture was quite real. However, the film was marred by the actors, their way of speaking, their general way of behaving, that seemed false and out of place in Chandni Chowk. Abhay Deol is a nice looking guy, reminding me of Dharmendra in vintage films like Bandini, but he did not look like or act like old Delhi person. His dialogues did not ring of old Delhi, they seemed very Mumbaiwalla. His other friends, they seemed as if they had come out of the TV serial Nukkad, falsely nice and synthetic. This does not mean that film was very bad, but in my opinion, it could not catch the spirit of Delhi.

So which of these films did catch the dil of Dilli? I think that the real competition is between RDB and KKG. Ahista Ahista and Fanaa were not about real Delhi. I can't decide between RDB and KKG.

It is difficult to decide, perhaps because the two films look at very different parts, people and cultures of Delhi. These two Delhis are quite similar geographically and do overlap, though obviously RDB is not about everyday places and persons (like the shots behind the airport or the shots at the old monuments, the scenes at India Gate and All India radio), while KKG is about everyday middle class Delhi. On just this basis, perhaps KKG wins for me.

And for you - is there a film that represents the spirit of Dilli - Delhi for you?

***

Against nature?

There was yet another debate on the TV about nature versus nurture, this time provoked by the news that the museum of natural history in Oslo is organising an exhibition on homosexuality in animals.

It is never easy to say what do we inherit from our parents through the genes and what is more a "learned behaviour" depending upon where we grow up. Somethings things that may seem clearly hereditary are not always so.

Like people often said that my voice sounded exactly like my father's. And now on telephone, my son's friends mistake me for him and my friends and colleagues mistake him for me. Is that because of genes or is it because growing up together - did I subconsciously internalised my father's voice and my son did that with my voice?

Illnesses like high blood pressure running in families, have similar confusions. Do you get high blood pressure because your ma or grandma had it or because living in the same house, you share all your habbits of eating, exercising, reacting to stress?

It is much easier to deal with physical characteristics like the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your ears. That you did get through the genes.

There are many practical implications of the final conclusions of such debates, and that is why any conclusion is hotly debated. For example, if we accept that mental illnesses like neurosis are the result of genes, then perhaps all theories of Freud and therapies like psychotherapy trying to find the cause of your illness in the way your mom wrapped your nappies when you were three months old, can be considered as useless!

Another practical example is about criminal behaviour. If we accept that criminal behaviour is because of genes, then what use is putting the fellow in the jail or worse, hanging him? What could he do, he had no choice but to follow his genes?

So to go back to the debate on the TV on homosexuality in animals, the stakes are much higher. Different religions consider homosexuality to be against nature. Here, vatican officially assumes a similar position. If we accept that animals can also be homosexual, such arguments will be difficult to sustain.

Actually such debate is not new. Some years ago there was lot of discussion about some male Humbolt penguins in a German zoo who preferred to stick with their own company while the females were left in peace.

In the debate on the TV, there were similar arguments. They said, for example: it is the stress of living in the zoo, it is the stress of increasing urbanisation, these are not real serious relationships but only playful behaviour in animals, and so on. So it will always go on, each side refusing to be convinced by the other.

***