Religions For The 21st Century

Some weeks ago, I had a discussion with a friend about differences between Shamanism and Buddhism. I think that analysing religions to look for their differences is not such a useful approach in today's world. In the eastern traditions, usually the different religious philosophies are seen as different streams of the same river, and there is not a strong focus on analysing their differences. I think this way of looking at religions answers better the religious-spiritual needs of today.

While humanity needs a spiritual dimension, the practical ways in which this need is expressed through religions depends upon the social, cultural, economic and technological context of the societies. Thus, it is inevitable that in the new millennium, along with our changing societies, our religions will also change.

This post is a speculation about what humanity needs from religions in the 21st century.

Religious Harmony

Like the different human species, the religious beliefs are also in continuous evolution. In the recent history, our different religions, especially the more orthodox religious ideas, have been one of the root causes of conflicts. In the medieval period, there were some attempts to come up with universal religions, which proposed unification of the different religious ideas. Baha'i religion in Persia and Deen-e-Ilahi by the Mughal king Akbar in India were examples of these unifying religions, but they had a limited impact because they were adopted by few persons, though Baha'i religion continues to thrive even today in a few countries.

Today, while we have some large radical and orthodox religious groups, many more persons identify themselves as "Atheists" or non-believers. A large number of persons, who formally belonged to a religion, define themselves as "spiritual and not religious". Many others, while belonging to one religious tradition, pick and adopt specific ideas of other religions.

The pace of changes in the last one century and in the first decades of the present century, related to the technology and our understanding of the universe, has been unprecedented. When technology can give us the answers we need, we don't need to rely on the benevolence of Gods. So, some believe that in today's world we do not need any religions, because technology can provide all the answers. However, the mysteries of life, consciousness and death remain and every new child-birth and a death forces us to think about these mysteries, thus humanity's search for spirituality also persists.

Science and Spirituality

I grew up in a family in India which was sceptical about our religion (Hinduism) and about the claims of different Gurus. Many persons in our extended family and among our friends share this view of Hinduism. However, I have met many persons who do not share this sceptical view of religion, they have no doubts about their faith. I recognise that faith does not need any scientific proof but personally for me, finding some kind of scientific rationale for the spirituality is important.

There are 2 kinds of technological developments, knowledge and understandings, which influence my spiritual beliefs:

(1) The first is our knowledge about the place of humanity in the Cosmos: We live on a tiny planet surrounded by billions of stars of our galaxy, and there are millions of other galaxies, each with billions of stars. The Cosmos is so big that even if we could travel at the speed of the light, hundreds of our life-times will not be enough to see even a tiny proportion of those worlds. This vastness of the universe is almost impossible to comprehend for me.

Even if among the billions of stars in each galaxy there can be only one planet which has life, there must be millions of planets with some life in the Cosmos. To believe that there is a human-like deity or an elderly father-like God looking after this unimaginably enormous universe made of trillions of stars and planets in millions of galaxies, who is observing each of us human beings living on our tiny planet and is keeping an account of the good or the bad things we do in our tiny lives, seems implausible to me. I can't imagine a God who has to look after millions of galaxies, worrying about things like if the people are going to the churches or mosques or temples to pray to him regularly or if women on earth are modest and covering their heads and bodies - these seem like ideas of men to control the others.

This understanding of the vastness of the universe leads me to believe that there is no personal God and instead the spirituality is something different. I think that prophets and all our ideas about the different Gods and Goddesses are metaphorical representations of the divine. Their stories and their teachings cannot be taken literally or in absolute terms, they need to be seen in their historical contexts, as answers to the human need for understanding the mysteries of birth, consciousness and death.

(2) The second development is our increasing understanding of the micro-cosmos through quantum physics: we still do not have a proper understanding of the quantum world which focuses on the laws governing the microscopic Cosmos hidden inside each particle of the universe. In that Cosmos also there are billions of sub-atomic particles circling other particles in an infinite number of galaxies of atoms and molecules. In this quantum world, the laws of the ordinary physics do not work, so that the sub-atomic particles can be at more than one place at the same time and the act of observation changes the nature of the observed sub-atomic particles.

To be honest, I don't understand most of it. At the same time, whatever I do understand, reminds of some of the concepts and discussions in the Hindu Upanishads about the nature of reality, probably because I am more familiar with those concepts and ideas. This world of quantum physics leads me to an understanding of God as the universal energy or a universal consciousness that underlies our atoms and molecules of all organic and inorganic worlds.

I like this idea of the divine as the universal energy with different levels of consciousness that moves the sub-atomic particles, atoms and molecules of billions of stars spread out over millions of galaxies. It unites all our universe and at the same time, leaves us free to use our intelligence to live our lives filled with a significance and meanings that we want to give to it. In this sense, I believe that God is the universal energy inside each of us and in everything surrounding us.

Religions for the 21st Century

In this world of increasing scientific understanding and technological progress, our religious beliefs face the challenges of reconciling science and technology with the ideas of spirituality. Different people deal with this challenge differently. While many individuals born in families with strong religious beliefs might share those beliefs, but many of those will question those beliefs as they grow up and as they find those beliefs limiting their life-choices. Many of us would form our own beliefs about the sacred.

The social media innovations allow us to find groups of people who share our niche beliefs and we can become part of their communities. Thus I think that the fragmentation of religious beliefs will increase exponentially over the next decades and the trend of picking and adopting aspects of different religions which resonate with us would become stronger with time.

This does not mean that persons believing in traditional religions are going to disappear. There is a subgroup of population, which finds a sense of security in specific and even rigid religious norms, and I don't think that subgroup is going to disappear anytime soon - probably with greater religious choices, these orthodox subgroups will also become stronger.

Among the leaders of traditional religions, those persons who can break-off from religious orthodoxy and can speak to the whole humanity, such as Pope Francis and Dalai Lama, will probably find even greater prominence in future.

The technical progress is increasing our sense of individual rights. Therefore, I think that the ideas of human rights are going to play an important role in our acceptance of religions in the 21st century. I think that issues such as equality of genders, rights of persons to choose their sexual orientations, the right to join or leave a religion, the right to live together with the person of our choice with or without marriage, the right to have a family of our choice and the right to die with dignity are all going to be basic starting points for the acceptance of religions of future.

Conclusions

These are my speculations about the future of religions in the world. I am sure that my views are influenced by my biases - those of growing up in a family sceptical about religions, those of being a part of a multi-religious family, those of reading Upanishads and those of my work-experience in the field of human rights.

However, I am aware that history does not move in straight lines. It goes up and down, sometimes it takes two steps back before moving ahead. Looking at the conditions of specific religions might make us feel that instead of the changes I have speculated above, some religions are going in the inverse direction - towards rigidity, greater orthodoxy and a substantial denial of human rights. However, I believe that overall direction of history is different and sooner or later, all religions will join that direction, where the rights of individuals will be stronger than the rights of collective religious groups.

***

Merry Christmas Or Seasons' Greetings?

A few days ago, one morning I read two articles which made me reflect on the two different ways in which multi-cultural and multi-religious societies can look at inter-faith dialogue, respect and harmony.

In this post, I am going to talk about these 2 different ways of looking at religious differences and what we need to do for living with a diversity of beliefs.
The Two Articles

Let me start with the 2 articles which had stimulated this reflection. The first was an article in a recent issue of Readers' Digest magazine. Actually it was not an article but a snippet under the heading "Your True Stories". I am transcribing that snippet here:

Last December, a young lady ringing up my purchases greeted me with an enthusiastic Merry Christmas!” I was not offended, but I am a Muslim, and at the time I was wearing a beautiful headscarf in a manner identifying my spiritual convictions. I responded, “Happy birthday!” At first, she was taken aback, but then she nodded and laughed good-naturedly, acknowledging my point. I smiled back at her and said, “Merry Christmas to you.”

The second was an editorial in the Indian newspaper Hindustan Times, written by Mr. Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, under the title "In Memory of Frontier Gandhi, a Plea for Justice for Faisal Khan". It mentioned the story of Khan Abdul Gaffar from Peshawar, now in Pakistan, and his organisation called Khudai Khidmatgar, which worked for promoting Hindu and Muslim unity. Khan Abdul Gaffar was also known as Frontier Gandhi and I have memories of meeting him as a child in Delhi in early 1960s at the home of Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, the charismatic leader of the India's Socialist Party. This article is about a person from Delhi, Mr. Faisal Khan, who has an organisation in India inspired from the ideals of Frontier Gandhi. It described Faisal with the following words:

Faisal Khan has striven without pause for two goals — communal harmony and relief for the neediest. He is also a wonderful singer of the Tulsi Ramayan. Hindus of all types, from venerated guru to college students, have been charmed by his rendering of the Ramayan’s verses. Keen, as part of his efforts towards harmony, to identify with the traditions of his Hindu friends, Khan, along with associates, recently performed the much-valued Braj Parikrama. On the last day of this 84-km yatra, they went to Mathura’s Nand Baba Mandir, where they were courteously received by the priest.
Reading these 2 articles, made me reflect about the two approaches to inter-faith harmony.

Multicultural Approach to Inter-faith Harmony

I think that first article represents the multi-cultural approach to inter-faith harmony, which arose in UK or perhaps in Western Europe. Now this approach seems to be common in the West (Europe, USA and Australia). It is slowly making inroads even in countries like India, at least among some academic and activist groups. It asks individuals to respect the diversity of religions of others, by not offending them by involving them in things related to other religions. Thus, if we are Christians, it says that we should not have overt signs celebrating Christmas or Easter in public spaces and schools. If we have to greet people we do not know, we should use generic terms like "seasons' greetings" and to not "merry Christmas", for not offending non-Christians. People who believe in this approach, talk of tolerance and respect for other religions.

If we believe in this approach to inter-religious relations for harmony, then if we are Muslims, we won't make Eid or Ramazan greetings to the non-Muslims and if we are Hindus, we would greet only other Hindus on our festivals.

Indian Approach to Inter-faith Harmony

When I grew up in India, our approach to diversity of religions was different. While in school, we had holidays for the festivals of all the religions. Since early childhood, I was used to meeting persons of different religions among neighbours, friends and in public spaces.

Over the years, we lived in different houses, where we had as neighbours families of different religions. Even at home, among the socialist friends of my father who visited us included persons of different religions. During our travels, I had stayed at the homes of family friends of different religions.

When I think of those years, it is remarkable that I can't remember ever thinking about the diversity of religions of all those encounters in India. I had been familiar with news of riots and religious riots, but somehow they had no real bearing with my relationships with persons of different religions. My first actual encounter with the underlining of and impact of diversity of religions happened in Italy, when a high school student asked me if I believed in Madonna. I had told him that I was a Hindu. He did not know any Hindu but he knew about protestants and that question was his way of reassuring himself that I did not deny the sacredness of Madonna. When I told him that I respected Madonna, he was reassured.

The basic understanding governing the multi-religious relationships in the India of my childhood was that all religions are about the one and the same God. Therefore, festivals of all the religions belonged to everyone. Having school holidays for all those festivals reinforced that feeling. So it meant, waking up at early morning to go out and stand on the side of the street to wait for Prabhat Pheri of the Sikh when they celebrated their Gurupurab. It meant wishing everyone Eid Mubarak and eating the sweet sewaiyan, that our neighbour Irene brought to our home. It meant going with my Catholic friend to the midnight mass in the Cathedral on the Christmas eve. It meant going into Buddhist temple to pray to Buddha. And, it meant, saying Happy Diwali to everyone and offering them sweets to celebrate the Hindu festivals.

In that India of my childhood, the idea of "tolerance" in reference to other religions, would have been kind of insulting, because we were expected to share the joy and sacredness of each religion and not just "tolerate" them

Which Approach Do You Prefer?

I think that with some exceptions, increasingly the modern world is going towards less orthodox religious beliefs. A large number of my friends and members of my extended family in India, do pray in temples and homes, but they are equally respectful of other religions. There are four inter-religious couples among my cousins' families. My own family is also inter-religious. With time, I expect that religious diversity in our family is only going to increase. This means that we shall have more occasions for celebrating festivals and also picking and choosing some aspects of ideas and practices of other religions in our daily lives. This seems to be in line with the ideas of inter-religious harmony with which I had grown up in India.

It is true however, that even in India, I feel that compared to my childhood, today many groups of persons are more polarised in terms of religions. Though a lot of persons continue to value respecting and sharing among persons of different religions, those with polarised thinking speak louder and dominate many forums. Fortunately, India continues to have a lot of mixed religious spaces formed by inter-mixing of persons of different religions.

I think that the ideas of multi-culturalism approach to inter-religious relations in Europe and America, which are focused on "not offending those of other religions", are a result of increased encounters after the second world war and due to a globalised world, between the more secularised and less religious populations in the West with more conservative minorities, often immigrants, who feel that they need to hold on to their specific identities, for not getting lost in their new lands. Thus, I feel that it is an expression of cultural anxiety.

In many ways, these inter-cultural encounters are also shaped by identity politics and ways of reading all relationships in terms of dominance and oppression. Perhaps historians can tell us from the experiences of the past, how such encounters between people of different cultures can evolve and resolve?

Which of these two approaches to inter-religious harmony do you prefer?

Conclusions

From the way I talk about the Indian way of looking at the diversity of religions, it must be obvious that I prefer this approach to inter-faith harmony. At the same time, after my travels across different countries and encounters with a diversity of religions and cultures, I must acknowledge that many persons feel threatened or at least uncomfortable if they have to accept close contact with other religions. I try to respect their diffidence, though I must confess that I can't really understand their anxieties.

I also try that I continue to deal with persons of different religions in my way. I go rarely to the mass in a church, but when I do, I am happy to bow my head and pray. I am not very religious, and while visiting temples, churches, gurudwaras and sufi dargahs, I try to feel the sacredness of their ambience and prayers. I also wish Eid Mubarak or Merry Christmas or Happy Deewali or Happy Navroz, to all my friends at the festival times without worrying if they are Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Christian or Sikh. However, if I know that a person does not appreciate receiving greetings for festivals of other religions, I try to be respectful of their choice.

I know that we live in polarised times. For whatever reasons, some people have become more aware of religious differences and at least some of them, do not wish to celebrate the festivals of others or to visit the others' prayer places. At the same time, I often find many persons who think about different religions like me, they are happy to listen to religious ideas of others and do not get offended by religious differences.

Personally, while each one of us is secure in his or her own religion, I would prefer a world of acceptance, respect and joy towards all religions. I know that it is an utopia, but I like utopias.

A final note about Mr. Faisal Khan mentioned above: I have read that Mr. Khan was arrested on 2nd November 2020 for offering namaz in the courtyard of a Hindu temple in India, though it was the temple priest who had suggested to Mr. Khan to pray there. I think that a Muslim singing Ramcharit Manas and praying in a Hindu temple can happen only in India because of this approach to inter-religious harmony that I am talking about. It is an embodiment of the Indic thinking which sees different religions as paths to the same God.

I hope and pray that better sense will prevail and Mr. Faisal Khan can be released.

***

The Angry Birds - About Books & Birds

This month our reading group in Schio (Italy) had decided to read The Bird by the British author Daphne du Maurier. The long-story written in early 1950s was turned into an iconic horror film of the same name by the celebrated film-maker Alfred Hitchcock.

Being a part of a Book-Reading Group has substantially changed the way I read some books. First of all it forces me to read books that otherwise I would not read. For example, usually I don't read horror books - they make me too anxious and afterwards I can't sleep. So by myself, I would not have read du Maurier's book.

"The Birds" was not too bad in terms of its horror-impact, probably because I interacted with it differently from the way I usually read books. I read it more critically and consciously, so I felt less immersed in its imagined-world. If you read a horror book without letting yourself get lost in it, probably you enjoy it less and at the same time, it does not affect you in the same way - at least, that's how I felt about it.

As a part of being more critical and aware while reading a book for our group, I also write down notes about the ideas that it provokes, which I rarely do while reading others books. During normal reading, those ideas are fleeting like dreams which I forget the moment I turn the page. By taking notes those fleeting ideas are marked deeper in my mind, and I can reflect about them. That is how this post came around, to share some of those ideas which came to my mind, while reading "The Birds".

The Birds by Daphne du Maurier

The story of this book is about millions of birds suddenly turning into killer machines who want to murder humans. The first thought that came to my mind while reading it was about the video-game "The Angry Birds", which was supposed to be very popular some 10 years ago. I am not a fan of videogames and I had never tried playing The Angry Birds, but I knew that it was about birds attacking some pigs who had robbed the bird-eggs. A TV serial and a film were also made about it. So the question in my mind was, did this book (or the film based on it) in any way inspire the videogame makers?

The second aspect which struck me was about some of the parallels between the descriptions in the book and the present situation of Covid-19. The first line of the story "On December the third, the wind changed overnight, and it was winter" seemed like a description of the suddenness of the pandemic. The phrases about cold autumn winds sweeping away the yellow-brown leaves, seemed a metaphor of the old and sick persons succumbing to this virus. While, the reactions of the farmer Trigg and his family in the book, reminded me of those who do not believe in the pandemic, think that it is some kind of corporate conspiracy and who refuse to wear masks or take precautions. For example, read the following paragraph from the book: "He tried to tell Mrs. Trigg what had happened, but he could see from her eyes that she thought his story was the result of a nightmare. “Sure they were real birds,” she said, smiling, “with proper feathers and all? Not the funnyshaped kind that the men see after closing hours on a Saturday night?” Mrs. Trigg, “no explaining it, really. You ought to write up and ask the Guardian. They’d have some answer for it. Well, I must be getting on.”

I was also struck by the names of a large number of birds in the story - blue tits, robins, wrens, thrush, blackbirds, house sparrows, pigeons, starlings, black-headed gulls, rooks, crows, jackdaws, magpies, jays, gannets, hawks, buzzards, kestrels, falcons, finches, larks, oystercatchers, redshanks, sanderlings and curlews.

Did the British people in the 1950s know and could identify so many birds? I think that 70 years ago, with lesser urbanisation, there was greater awareness of the nature among people, which is difficult today. It made me think of the night skies of my childhood and the way I used to search for and look at different stars and constellations - now the streetlights and city lights are so strong that even when you do look up at the night sky, you can hardly see any stars. Like the names of the birds in the book, probably I can recite a much larger number of names of stars and constellations compared to an average person from today's generation!

If this book was written today, in which ways it would have been different from the book of Du Maurier? For example, read the following passage about Nat, the hero of the story, finding the sea full of seagulls: "Then he saw them. The gulls. Out there, riding the seas. What he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands . . . They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide. To eastward and to the west, the gulls were there. They stretched as far as his eye could reach, in close formation, line upon line. Had the sea been still, they would have covered the bay like a white cloud, head to head, body packed to body. Only the east wind, whipping the sea to breakers, hid them from the shore."

In the story, when Nat sees them, he thinks of going "to the call box by the bus stop and ring up the police". Today we do not have "call boxes", we all have our mobile phones, but if you do find the sea full of gulls, what would you do? I bet that 99% of us would click pictures and share them on WhatsApp with their families and friends. A fair number would put them on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, and many of us would try to get a selfie with those gulls in the background. If the author was writing this story today, probably Triggs and his wife would be shown dying while trying to click a selfie.

The story also made me think of our local popular dish in this part of Veneto region in Italy where I live, called "Polenta e Uzzei", which is corn-cake with roasted small birds. The scene in the book in which burnt dead birds fall down in the fire under the chimney, reminded me of lunches in a friend's home, who loved hunting birds and then roasted them on the hearth along with the corn-cake. I thought that this story was written especially for people who love eating those tiny birds, because it absolves them of the guilt for killing them. I mean, if those birds are actually killers and a danger to the nice humans, it is good that one can kill them and eat them.

Classifying Horror, Terror, Fantasy Genres of Books

During the discussions in our reading group, one of my friends, Michela, said that the story was not really a "horror book" but rather a "terror book". I could understand her point because it is that sense of terror and fear which stops me from reading this kind of books.

After the discussions, I was thinking about how we classify all these different and yet similar genres of books. Classifying them into genres like horror, thriller, fantasy, action and mysteries is difficult because they often overlap. A common element of all these books is the sense of tension and dread which they create. Personally, I like reading action thrillers and some murder mysteries, though I have less patience with Agatha Christie kind of cerebral mysteries. I avoid books with supernatural elements, zombies, splatters and gory violence, while I get bored with books about vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters and most fantasy books.

Some months ago, I had a small Facebook discussion with a friend Francesca, where she had written about Stephen King. She is a well-known translator of books from English to Italian and has translated many Indian authors. I told her that I had never read any book of Stephen King because his books are about horror. She said that King is a master story-teller and the way he develops characters is wonderful, so for her, thinking of his books as mere horror books would be reductive. Thus, I have decided that I should try to read at least one of them before making a judgement. (P.S. Jan 2023 - I have read a couple of Stephen King books and I agree with Francesca, they are very engaging and very much different from what I was imagining!)

While I don't like horror books and films, if their horror is so exaggerated that it become kitsch, I like them. For example, I had liked watching the South Korean film "Train to Busan".

Like "The Birds", this specific genre of horror, where the ordinary things/beings become menacing raises another question about the psychology of their writers in my mind. "The Birds" turns nice little chirping birds into killers. Others have written books which turn clowns, toys, dolls, insects, or even flowers into killers. So, I wonder if these authors have some psycho-pathological problems, which makes them find fear in the beauty? What do you think?

Conclusions

If it was not for our book-reading group, I doubt if I would have read "The Birds", and even if I would have read it, I doubt that I would stopped for 5 minutes to reflect about it. I would have certainly not written a blog post about it. Slowly, I am becoming aware about how reading books for the group is changing me a reader. I think that if you have to teach creative-writing or literature-appreciation, that would also change the way you interact with books. Is that a good thing? By not allowing ourselves to get immersed in the imaginary worlds dreamt by writers, do we lose our enjoyment? I think that it would be an interesting discussion.

I feel that if it is not exaggerated by over-thinking about the books we read, to some extent becoming a more aware reader and occasionally stopping to reflect on what we have read and to talk about it with others is a good skill for today's fast-running world. I am glad that I am part of our book-readers' group!

Note: With this post, I have used pictures of 2 birds which are considered ugly and, in some ways, inauspicious by many persons, though I like them - the crow and the Brazilian Urugu vulture. Both the birds are scavengers, they eat the leftovers, keep our environments clean and live close to human settlements.

***

Cooking For The Dictators

When I read the premise of the Polish journalist Witold Szablowski's book "How to feed a dictator", I was immediately hooked. In this book he has interviewed the personal cooks of some of the more infamous dictators of 20th century, most of whom were also known mass-murderers.

I think that to have the deaths of hundreds of persons on your conscience and to live with that burden, you have to be some kind of psychopath. The history shows that often these persons also had charismatic personalities, as epitomized by Hitler and Stalin. These persons have their die-hard fans, who continue to be their followers even after listening to the stories of tortures and violence committed by their idols. Both, fascism and communism attract believers, similar to the attraction of radical religious ideas for certain persons. Believers and followers are necessary to make these persons what they finally become.

I was curious to know, how did their cooks, who have an opportunity to observe their bosses in their private and personal moments, saw those monsters? I finished the 200 pages-long book in 2 days. The insight it gave me is the extreme banality of becoming dictators - ideology can blind people and make them do all kind of things which facilitates dictatorship!

Some Personal Background

Let me start with a confession - lately I seem to have become very weak-hearted. I can't watch any scenes of gory violence or the horror films. I also can't read any books about violence. Earlier, I was not so weak-hearted, but over the past few years, I just can't bear the feelings of dread such films/books can create.

Thus, reading Szablowski's book was an unusual decision for me. I started reading it with the idea that if it had any graphic scenes of violence or torture, I would stop reading it. However, it does not go into the details of the deeds of those dictators. Most of the time, Szablowski only skims the surface, giving superficial accounts of the killings and the tortures.

During my travels around the world, I have been to many countries with communist regimes and some countries with dictators. Once, I even risked being taken prisoner by a group of communist guerrilla fighters. Listening to the stories of persons who had lived in these places, has cured me forever of the romantic ideas about revolutions and the charm of all kinds of ideologies such as communism and fascism.

I believe that violent struggle/revolution to fight against injustice and oppression is not a solution - it substitutes one kind of oppression and injustice with another kind, which is usually equally ferocious and implacable, and sometimes worse than what it replaces. Szablowsky's book has many stories about it.

Sometimes, I used to have long and animated debates with friends who believe in communism - I have learned to not argue with them. They are blinded by their beliefs and there is nothing I can say which can convince them otherwise. For example, I am sure that they can read Szablowski's book and find justifications for everything.

Dictators in Szablowski's Book

In his book Szablowski presents the stories of the cooks of 5 dictators - Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Idi Amin (Uganda), Enver Hoxha (Albania), Fidel Castro (Cuba) and Pol Pot (Cambodia).

I already knew many things about all of them except for Enver Hoxha, the communist dictator of Albania. To read about him was a revelation. All the 5 protagonists of this book were paranoid personalities or perhaps, it would be better to say that once you become a ruthless dictator and are forced to kill people or to get them killed, you have no option but to become paranoid.

All the cooks of this book are men, except for the cook of Pol Pot. All of them, were associated with their bosses from their early carriers, before they had become the famous dictators. All were forced to become cooks because their bosses were suspicious of others and wanted someone they knew for this role. All of them walked on a tightrope, aware that their boss may suddenly feel that they are not faithful and decide to get them killed. Any dish cooked with too little or too much salt could have been seen as an attempt to poison.

The cooks' stories bring out the insecure men hiding behind the persona of ferocious dictator for whom they were working. Their stories bring out the specific personal traits of each of them, like Fidel Castro, who thought that he knew everything and gave long and boring lectures to everyone about how to do something, including to his cook. These parts of their stories give a comic touch to the book, even while in the background, the purges continue and the people surrounding the dictators fall out of favour and disappear.

The most fearsome person in the book is Pol Pot, also known as Brother Pouk or Brother Mattress or Angkar. He is fearsome because he is very handsome (according to his cook who sounds in love with him), always gentle and smiling. He is surprising because he is kind to his obviously mentally ill wife. He is fearsome because he believes completely in the teachings of Marx and Mao, and is willing to go to any length to realise his communist paradise - including killings of professors, doctors, writers and all the persons who have an education, and relocation of millions of city inhabitants to countryside so that they may learn the virtues of manual work and hunger. He is also most fearsome because he evokes obedience even from persons he has ordered to be killed. Even his cook who knows that she can never betray him, says that she would have been happy to be killed because "If Angkar has taken a decision, then he must be right".

I have never been to Cambodia, but I had heard many similar stories during my journeys in China and Vietnam in late 1980s and early 1990s.

Away from the cameras and the journalists, in their private lives, these mighty dictators were just little guys, missing the cooking of their mothers and their home towns, getting drunk, sometimes petty and sometimes generous, finding a refuge in their ideologies.

Conclusions

Sbzablowski's book does not make any new revelations but it gives a different point of view of seeing the infamous dictators of 20th century - persons who had made history and influenced their worlds. I felt sympathy for those cooks, who now try to hide behind ordinary lives, so that no one comes to look for them and to hold them responsible for those events, which took place when they were close to the powerful.

Some of them, who had met kings, queens and prime-ministers and had cooked for them, travelled around the world in private jets and Mercedes cars, are now living lives of poverty, usually ignored by most regarding their illustrious past.

I think that it is good book to read if you are interested in history and in humanity - it shows you how chance and destiny can shape a life and how power corrupts. It also shows that nothing lasts for ever and sooner or later, one day even the most powerful dictator would have to concede defeat.

*****

#bookreview #books #bibliophile #historybook #dictators

Searching for Dragon Bones

Recently our Book-Reading Group in Schio (Italy) decided to read Tracy Chevalier's book "Remarkable Creatures". It is the story of 2 women in early 19th century England and their love for fossils and old bones.

Reading this book reminded me of a visit to a museum in Bologna some years ago, as well as, of discussions about dinosaur bones in the Gobi desert in Mongolia. Friends had told me that in Mongolia and China, people used to believe that the dinosaur bones were dragon-bones, and were used as medicines by traditional healers.

This post is about Tracy Chevalier's book, as well as about discovery of fossils in medieval Bologna. It is a kind of a rambling post about how scientific discoveries are inter-connected and can change the way we see the world around us. Let me start with Chevalier's book.

Remarkable Creatures

Chevalier is a British author of American origins who writes historical novels. She became famous with her book "The girl with the pearl earring" in 1999 while "Remarkable Creatures" came out in 2009.

The book is set in the coastal town of Lyme Regis in south England. The tiny town of Lyme has been the backdrop of many books, including "Persuasion" by Jane Austen and "French Lieutenant's Woman" by John Fowles. It is a fiction-book based on real persons, who lived there in the 19th century. On her website, Chevalier provides the following background to her decision to write this book:

A few years ago I went with my son to a small dinosaur museum in Dorchester, on the south coast of England. Among the usual displays, there was a wall devoted to Mary Anning, who lived in the early 19th century in the nearby town of Lyme Regis, where fossils are abundant. The display showed a sketch of Mary on the beach, holding a hammer and wearing a top hat to protect her from falling rocks. At age 12 she discovered the first complete specimen of an ichthyosaur, a marine reptile about 200 million years old

The book starts with the friendship between the two women - the 12 years old Mary Anning from a working class family and a resigned-to-spinsterhood, Elisabeth Philpot. Mary searches for the fossils on the coast to sell them to the tourists. Elisabeth has been sent to live in Lyme, as her brother has decided to get married and his wife does not wish to share the house with his sisters. In Lyme, Elisabeth discovers her love for the fossils and old bones, and in the process, recognises the genius of Mary in finding them.

A dinosaur skeleton, now displayed in the Natural History museum in London, discovered by Mary Anning, plays a key role in the story. I love that museum and have been there a few times (2 of the images used in this post are from that museum). However, before reading this book, I had no idea about Mary Anning and the role she had played in discoveries of the dinosaur skeletons in England.

Book's Themes

The story is set in the early 19th century England, a period when class distinctions were still strong and the society did not accept friendships between persons of different classes. It was also a period when women were much lower in the hierarchy compared to the men - they did not have any independent rights and were dependent upon the men of their families for all decisions. It was a period when religious orthodoxy dominated and was hard to challenge.

It was a period of transition, where the finding of fossils was problematic as it raised issues for which the answers inevitably led to a questioning of religious dogmas. The Bible said that God had made the creation over a period of 6 days and all creatures made by God were perfect. The fossils and dinosaurs did not fit into this narrative because they implied that some creatures had existed in the past and had become extinct. The church negated these suppositions which did not fit the theory of creationism.

In that period, only men were supposed to be discoverers and scientists while women like Mary or Elisabeth were not supposed to be one. Thus, men interested in the fossils and old bones of giant animals (the word dinosaur had not yet been coined), took the knowledge and specimens from Mary and showed them off as their own finds. The book concludes as the first fissures apear in this male-dominated construction of the scientific world and Mary becomes known as the person who understands fossils much better than anyone else.

It is a gentle book, focusing on the social milieu as well as, on the inner lives of its female protagonists, and is very easy to read. There are parts of the story, like the man who had duped Mary suddenly discovers his noble side, which are a little unconvincing but overall the book is informative and enjoyable. Even Jane Austen makes a fleeting appearance in the story. For me, the most interesting parts of this book are those where the process of finding the fossils and the beginning of slow understanding about their origins are described.

Aldrovandi & Geology

Reading about fossils reminded me of a naturalist from medieval Bologna in Italy. In a recent article by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker, Bologna is described as "the giant churches, the red-tiled roofs, the marble walkways under arched porticoes; a stately city, low-slung, amber hued, full of students and indomitable old couples. During the Middle Ages, Bologna was home to more than a hundred towers, the skyscrapers of their era, which served as show-places of wealth and ambition for powerful oligarchs. Two of the remaining ones have become symbols of Bologna: one slightly out of plumb, the other as cockeyed as its cousin in Pisa."

This article touches on the social transformations brought about by the pandemic of black death (plague) in the 14th century and proposes that the pandemic had led to the period of Italian Renaissance and to a new way of understanding the world. It asks what kind of the transformations will be stimulated by the present Covid-19 pandemic and in which ways those will shape our future world.

One of the key figures of 16th century Bologna who had contributed to the scientific transformation of Renaissance was the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi. He was born in Bologna in 1522. Leonardo da Vinci had died a couple of years earlier while Michelangelo had yet to start painting the Sistine chapel. Thus, we were in the middle of Italian Renaissance period. It was also the time when the Spanish inquisition had already started and it was easy to be accused of being a heretic. In fact, Aldrovandi himself was imprisoned for about a year and a couple of decades after his death, in 1633 Galileo was sentenced to life-imprisonment for suggesting that the earth was not the centre of the universe and it revolved around the sun.

Aldrovandi had suggested that nature had to be looked at as "juxta propria principia", that is without religious or metaphysical conditioning. Among the objects collected by Aldrovandi were some seashells found in the mountain expeditions. This raised questions in his mind about how those sea creatures had reached the mountains? The Biblical justification to these findings was in the story of universal floods and Noah's ark. These made him think critically about the study of different layers of earth and how it was composed of different kinds of rocks and minerals. In his testament written in 1604, he used the word "geology" for the first time to indicate "the study of earth".

Some diaries of Leonardo da Vinci have also been found, where he had written about the finding of seashells and fish-fossils in the mountains. One of his hypothesis was that at some point in the earth's history, the mountains had been at the bottom of some sea. Thus, while Bible imposed certain beliefs regarding the creation of the world, and inquisition awaited persons who questioned those beliefs, persons already had other ideas, which contradicted Bible's idea of creationism.

Poggi museum of Bologna holds the Aldrovandi collection and includes the collection of "Diluvianum Museum" created in early 1700 by another local naturalist, Giuseppe Monti. It presented the fossils as part of the objects created by the Biblical floods (Diluvianum). The wall paintings of this room show those floods as imagined by the artists (an example in the image below).

Thus, it was not only Mary Anning and Elisabeth Philpot, but countless others including Androvandi and Monti, who had started to explore the world with new eyes and to question it, which had created the foundations which had led to Darwin's theory of evolution and forced the church to change its position on creationism. In "Strange Creatures", Elisabeth tentatively proposes that the "6 days of creation" of the Bible could have been 6 eras of creation.

Conclusions

Often, specific scientific ideas are associated with names of specific persons. For example, the theory of evolution is linked with the name of Charles Darwin. However, as this post shows, scientific advances do not come out of a vacuum, basic knowledge which contributes to them is the work of countless others who are not remembered by the history books.

So much of history and society is taken for granted. Like the discoveries of fossils, dinosaurs and the Darwin's theory of evolution - we accept all of these almost uncritically.

Art and literature can play an important role by reminding us how and in which conditions those discoveries took place and their human costs. That understanding helps us to look at the past in a more realistic way, so that we can understand better where we have reached and where we are going.

*****

#dinosaurs #tracychevalier #bookreview #remarkable_creatures

A Liberian Story of Dung Beetles

The moment I read the title of the book "The Dung Beetles of Liberia", I knew that I wanted to read it. My links with Liberia go back to almost 25 years though I visited it for the first time only in 2018.

When I visit any country, I like to know its people and to understand their history and culture. However, though I have been to Liberia a few times, I have found it difficult to find a connection to the country's spirit, and in understanding its culture and history. Thus, the title of the book "The Dung Beetles of Liberia" immediately attracted me.

Dung Beetles

Dung beetles are found in the savanna regions in different countries of Africa and are not specific to Liberia. In my visits to Liberia, I have yet to come across these insects.

The tropical grasslands of Africa known as "Savanna" play a crucial role in ensuring the continent's bio-diversity. They are characterised by tall grass with a few scattered trees. According to National Geographic, the African savanna is the site of complex and inter-linked life-cycles:

"Healthy, well-balanced ecosystems are made up of multiple, interacting food chains, called food webs. Carnivores (lions, hyenas, leopards) feed on herbivores (impalas, warthogs, cattle) that consume producers (grasses, plant matter). Scavengers (hyenas, vultures) and decomposers/detritivores (bacteria, fungi, termites) break down organic matter, making it available to producers and completing the food cycle (web). Humans are part of the savanna community and often compete with other organisms for food and space."
According to Dr Frank Krell of the Natural History Museum in London, there are different varieties of dung beetles in Africa which play a fundamental role in ensuring the sustainability and survival of savanna by spreading the dung on the ground and by depositing it underneath hard soil so that it serves as fertiliser and nutrient for the savanna grass:

Dung is more than just waste, explains Krell; it is often full of seeds and burial by dung beetles may be crucial in the germination success of several plant species found on the savannah. Tunnelling and rolling species together not only distribute nutrients over the surface of the savannah but also dig it in for good measure, providing fertiliser at all levels of the soil profile to ensure a lush growth of vegetation during the rains. Around one tonne of nutrient-rich dung is deposited per hectare of the savannah each year, so there is more than enough to go round, especially once dug in by the enterprising insects.

Thus, though the dung beetles may be vital for the African biosphere, they are seen as dirty and the word "dung beetle" is used to denigrate. Therefore, it is important to specify that dung beetles are not "Liberian", they are present in different parts of Africa. In Meier's book, we are introduced to them in the first chapter, when Ken, a young American pilot flying an Africa Air Service (AAS) plane, has to make an emergency landing in a field near a nuns' mission because he has diarrhoea. Hidden from the nuns among the tall grass, he is busy shitting when he finds the dung beetles trying to crawl on his legs.

"Leaving the engine idling with the prop turning over slowly, I bailed out of the cabin. I ran to the bush, which was mostly grass and weeds about chest high, and, with only moments to spare, relieved myself. While this relief was occurring, I heard the distinctive wuush, wuush, wuush of dung beetles crawling through the grass. I had been told that they could hear a mouse break wind from five miles away and could follow the scent. With my pants around my ankles and the sun beating down on my head, I started a little hippy hop, hippy hop movement to keep away from them."
Apart from the first chapter, the dung beetles do not make further appearances in the book, at least not in the insect form. The dung beetles in the title of the book, make one think that it is an entomology book. When I started reading it, I thought that it was a light-hearted story of an expatriate in Africa and his struggles with local fauna and flora. Instead, the book refers to his encounters with other kinds of dung beetles, many of whom are also expatriates.

Other Dung Beetles in Liberia

Some dung beetles eat the shit, others live in it. Meier's Liberia is about 7 years in the life of Ken Verrier starting from 1961, while he is trying to escape from his guilt at his brother's death. The country seems to be full of bipedal kind of dung beetles - from a corrupt system oiled by "dash" and ex-slave Americo-Liberians living in the replicas of American plantation houses where they were slaves; from the Nazi pilots refugees from Germany on their way to South America to the Israeli spies. As the next excerpt shows, it seems that in the 1960s, Liberia was one of the richest economies in Africa and had different groups of expats.

A lot of wealth was pouring into the country, mostly from international corporations. The national transportation system was still largely underdeveloped. Most of the roads had been built by international mining, timber, and rubber companies. These roads served the companies as well as the people of Liberia and were not paved. During the wet season they often became impassable. There was one national airline, Liberian National Airways, but it flew only to a few nearby destinations outside of Liberia.

I was surprised to read about the Nazi pilots hiding in Liberia, I had never heard of it before. The description of their adoration for Hitler's ideology, makes for a disgusting and yet fascinating reading, in some ways reminding me of the Tarantino film "Inglorius Bastards". For example, check the description below of an evening at a place called Heinz & Maria in Monrovia:

I noticed that the volume of voices had gotten much louder. Beer was flowing more freely and the pilots started singing old beer hall songs, then Luftwaffe fight songs. One of the pilots stood up, swayed several times, took a couple of gulps of beer, and started singing the German national anthem. Everyone joined in, including Ana. When that was finished a pilot, whose name was Willy, climbed onto the bar, rolled up his right shirt sleeve to reveal a tattoo of a red swastika on his upper arm with “Deutschland Für Immer” inscribed beneath it. He started goose-stepping up and down the bar giving the Nazi stiff-arm salute and shouting, “Leben sie Langa, Liebe sie Langa, Fur Gott, Fuehrer und Vaterland, Machen Deutchland Wieder Groß!”The pilots cheered and toasted Willy with mugs of beer and then began a rhythmic pounding of their feet on the floor while shouting, “Ein Reich! Ein volk! Ein Füehrer! Deutschland für immer! Ja, ja!”

Liberia Today

Meier's book is about Liberia and Africa of 1960s and it looks at the country from a white American expatriate's eyes. Apart from the Germans and persons from international corporations involved in diamond mines, it touches on two other groups of expatriates - missionaries and Lebanese businessmen.

The Liberia that I have known over the past couple of years is very different and yet similar to the one described in the book. It has been devastated by decades of an incredibly brutal and prolonged civil war, followed by the deadly Ebola epidemic. During my visits in the areas affected by the civil war, I have heard nightmarish stories of violence by persons who were children at that time and saw their families raped and hacked to death in front of them. I have also talked to some who were forced to become child soldiers and who still carry the scars of their experiences on their souls.

I have heard that after the end of the civil war in 2003, for a decade Liberia was full of European NGOs and U.N. forces who had come here following the scent of reconstruction money and emergency aid programmes. They are all mostly gone now after the Ebola scare in 2014, when the GDP growth had plunged from more than 8% to less than zero. Though the Ebola epidemic was controlled in 2016, its shadow still seems to dog the country. The corruption mentioned in Meier's book still seems omnipresent while the violence seems to be hidden just below the surface of ordinary daily life, threatening to erupt now and then in the protests and witch-hunts, just like it does in the book during the part about President Tubman:

Tubman decided to make an example of them, so he announced there would be a Justice Day. And when that day came, justice was to be held in the football stadium. It was done at night for full effect. You know, like the Nazis used to do at Nuremburg with their torches and vertical lights. Herr Speer called it the ice palace.“It was like a sports affair. Vendors were selling cotton candy, beer, shit like that. And just at the right moment, he got up into the speaker’s stand and called for the criminals to be brought out. The same white Mercedes was driven out onto center field and two policemen got out. They opened the rear door and dragged out three guys who were handcuffed and chained together. Then Tubman made this long speech in the style of der Fuehrer about how he was going to put an end to crime and, after a timed pause, he extended both arms and said, ‘Now let justice be done,’ and the crowd went wild.”The cops dragged the three guys around to the rear of the car, opened the trunk and threw them in, and slammed the trunk lid down. A pickup truck drove out to the scene and the cops started offloading five-gallon cans of petrol. They must have dumped fifty gallons of the stuff in and on the car. Tubman gave the signal by suddenly lowering his arms, and the cops lit the car off. At that point the crowd let out a scream that made what’s left of my hair stand on end. I’ve never heard anything like it. It was like ten thousand people at the height of supreme ecstasy.

The book ends with a cliché image of Africa, a Guinea worm - Ken takes out a male worm from his knee, wrapping it around a match-stick and he realises that the demons chasing his soul are gone and it is time for him to go back to his home in the USA.

Looking for the Real Liberia

While visiting Liberia, I have felt as if I am visiting a country without a history. Which may be true in a way because it was created in 17th century by the freed slaves coming back from America. Their cultures and histories had been snatched away from them when they or their fathers had been captured and taken away in the slave-ships. They were brought back and had been implanted in the midst of local tribes. They had become the Americo-Liberians, subjugating the local tribes exactly as they themselves had been subjugated.

Given this history as the seed of their nation, it is no wonder that Liberians had to struggle to find a unity in their nationhood. It is quite likely that the process of assimilation is not yet complete and continues to erupt every now and then, in the lack of trust between its people.

Over the past five hundred years, the empire-builders and exploiters from north Africa and Europe have crushed and cancelled any sense of value the different African people had regarding their own cultures and beliefs. Religious proselytisation by Islamic and Christian preachers have brought new cultural values to replace the old beliefs. Except may be for Yoruba people in Nigeria, none of the civilisational cultures of Africa have survived this onslaught. Compared to the rest of Africa, the cultural challenges which Liberia faced were probably even worse and thus their transition to the modern nation state has had its ups and downs.

Conclusions

Today's Liberia is changing. There are no longer any big groups of German expats here. The Lebanese are still there but over the past couple of years, many of them have left the country. Instead there are groups of Indians, Chinese, Ghanaians and Nigerians who dominate the country's commerce. Thanks to the Chinese, there is a nice road from Monrovia to Ganta, though travel to rest of the country continues to be back-breakingly difficult, especially in the rainy season.

For me Meier's book was an opportunity to take a look at Liberia's recent history. I enjoyed it but in the end I feel that it is only a very superficial glimpse and has left me craving for more. I wish a writer like James Michner could have written a book about Liberia (like his books on Alaska, Hawa'i and Caribbean)!

Probably most African nations would also need such writers, who can combine the mythical with historical and civilizational ethos and with an ambitious vision to unearth their people's histories. Probably Nigerians and Ghanians have had more success in this, but I may be biased in the favour of anglophone world while similar voices exist in other areas of the continent,about which I am not aware.

*****

Our Black Gods

Some of the most popular deities of Hinduism are dark-skinned. Considering the Indian obsession with fair skins, I had often wondered, how did that come about and why did ancient Hindus imagined their Gods to be dark-skinned? I have thought a lot about it and I have not yet found any convincing explanation about it.

Over the past couple of centuries, it seems that we have started a whitening process of our dark-skinned Gods, much like our craze for the whitening creams. If not fair, they are shown as light blue or green coloured figures, as the figure of lord Ram in the picture above. In plays and films, light-skinned actors are taken to play their roles.

For the past 10 days we are closed in our homes because of the Corona virus epidemic. Schio, the tiny town at the foothills of Alps mountains in the north-east of Italy where we live, has been largely spared from this epidemic so far. Thus, I have a lot of time to think and write for my blog! This was how I started to think about the popular Gods of Hinduism and ask myself, why are they shown as dark-skinned?

Dominant Narratives

For the past couple of centuries, the dominant narrative about ancient Indians and Hindus in India has been that of lighter-skinned Aryans, who had come from central or west Asia, and who pushed the darker skinned original inhabitants of India to the south or in the forests. Some believe that they were invaders, who had destroyed the Indus Valley civilisation. However, that invasion theory is not considered now because no evidence had been found of widespread violence and war in the archaeological explorations in the Indus Valley. 

It sounds like a linear and clear explanation, and seems quite plausible. However, I find it difficult to place the black-skinned Gods of Hinduism in this narrative.

Why Did Aryans Choose Black Gods?

The question which I ask is this - if Vedic Hinduism was brought by light-skinned Aryans, who had come to dominate India and had pushed many indigenous groups to the margins of the societies, why did they choose so many dark-skinned Gods as their principle deities?

Two of the most popular deities of Hinduism - Ram and Krishna, both known as incarnations of Vishnu, are described as dark-skinned. Krishna's name, itself means black/dark. On the other hand, most of their consorts, the female deities, are described as fair skinned, except for Kali, one of the female deities associated with Shiva.

Possible Explanations

According to a Hindi article I found on the internet, the black colour of Hindu deities was a philosophical choice because the black colour is formed by mixing of all the colours and thus it has all shades of the Prakriti (nature) in itself. However, I find it difficult to accept this explanation, because it seems like a more cerebral answer and does not say anything about the ideas and attitudes of the common persons, who needed to pray to those deities.

Vedic culture has been characterised as a Patriarchal Society - why did a Patriarchal Society choose low-in-hierarchy black-skinned figures as their male deities? One explanation can be that ancient Indians who believed in Vedic culture were themselves dark-skinned persons (or were a mixed group, somewhat like today's Indians, and dark-skinned persons among them had high-prestige roles) and that is why they preferred dark-skinned deities. If we accept this idea, what does that mean for the Aryan-Dravidian theories, as well as, for the caste theories?

Another explanation can be that the ancient Vedic Indians believed in the mother-goddess and female deities, while the dark-skinned male deities belonged to Indus Valley people and indigenous people of the forests. When Aryans arrived and gradually assimilated with pre-existing Indian groups, they took over the pre-existing male deities. Thus, the dark-skinned deities came to Hinduism from the indigenous people of India, as the two groups assimilated and inter-mixed their deities.

Yet, another explanation can be that the principle deities of Hinduism arose as representations of the natural forces, and thus deities representing dark forces such as clouds and thunder, took on dark colours. But this logic does not seem to apply to the figures of Ram and Krishna.

Or, perhaps, there are different explanations for each of them and it is by coincidence that we ended up with many dark-skinned deities? It is also possible that when Aryans imagined their Gods in anthropomorphic forms, they did not imagine them to be similar to themselves, but as dark-skinned "others"? Or, can it be that the Aryan-Dravidian narrative is not so linear as has been implied?

Can you think of any other explanation about the dark-skinned deities of Hinduism?

Whitening of the Dark Gods

I am not sure when exactly did we start whitening our deities. One way can be to look at the Hindu deities in countries like Indonesia and Vietnam. Hinduism is supposed to have travelled to places like Bali in Indonesia and Champa in Vietnam in first-second century CE. Do they have any dark-skinned Hindu deities in these countries discovered in the archaeological excavations? If yes, that will help us in dating the choice of dark-skinned deities.

We can also look at the probable dates when our epics like Ramayan were written, because Ramayan describes Ram and his youngest brother Shatrughan as dark-skinned, while the two other brothers, Laxman and Bharat, are described as fair-skinned. However, the claims about probable dating of Ramayan are very variable.

According to David Kinsley, "The Vamana Purana has a different version of Kali's relationship with Parvati. When Shiva addresses Parvati as Kali, "the dark blue one," she is greatly offended. Parvati performs austerities to lose her dark complexion and becomes Gauri, the golden one. Her dark sheath becomes Kausiki, who while enraged, creates Kali."

Vamana Purana is a late text, it has been dated to 9-11th century. Thus, this could mean that by 9-11th centuries, Hindus had started whitening its deities or at least to make them seem less dark? Or perhaps the Kali-Parvati story has other origins and looking for explanations based on a predilection for fair skins is misplaced and over-simplification of this issue.

In the second half of 19th century, Raja Ravi Varma popularised the Indian deities through his calendar art, where all the dark-skinned deities were shown either in light blue or fair-skinned. Those calendars had a huge influence and continue to affect how we imagine our Gods even today.

Devdutt Pattnaik in his article - Black Gods and White Gods, had written about this Indian fascination for the fair skins, with the following words:

And so we had gods who were always pink, demons who were always brown and dark gods who were always blue. Indra, Brahma and Durga were pink, Asuras and Rakshasas were brown. Vishnu, Ram and Krishna were blue. Somehow, an unnaturally blue Krishna was preferred over a naturally dark Krishna. ‘Because blue is the color of the sky, of ether, of divinity,’ we were told. No one dared point out that Krishna and Shyam were both proper nouns and common nouns which referred to gods as well as the color black. We forgot to refer to traditional Patta chitras in Orissa where Krishna and Vishnu are always shown using black paint while Balarama and Shiva are always shown using white. When making Krishna blue, we forgot all folk songs, even Hindi film songs, where there is constant reference to Krishna’s dark complexion.

Shiva is the only one, who is described as Neelkanth, the one with the blue throat, because he had drunk the poison threatening to destroy the humanity. Thus, he has been imagined as a blue coloured God. In the past few years, while thinking of increasing pollution and the climate crisis, I have often thought of the blue-throated Shiva as a metaphor and the need for finding a way of "collecting" all the pollution-poison and saving the earth. At the same time, I have wondered, what kind of poisons could have been there in the environment in the antiquity which had necessitated Shiva's intervention, and the origins of this story? Can this mythological story be linked to a big volcano eruption or a meteorite impact which had covered the skies with dust or ash for months or years?

In the 20th century, the process of whitening of the dark skins of our Gods became even more prevalent. Now, Krishna and Ram are usually shown as light blue or green coloured, or sometimes even fair-skinned. In films and TV serials, often light-skinned persons are chosen to play the role of these deities. This has been coupled with an obsessive search for lightening the skin colour through different skin creams among the general population. India is one of the biggest markets in the world for such creams and its TV and magazines are full of advertisements for selling such products.

In 2017-18, Bhardwaj Sundar and Naresh Nil had launched a campaign to create awareness about this change by using dark skinned models to portray Indian gods and goddesses to recreate the paintings of Raja Ravi Roy. The series of images was named ‘Dark Is Divine’ and they had created 7 portraits, each featuring a different deity. The image above shows a dark-skinned Laxmi from this campaign. I don't know if this image makes you feel strange like it does to me - I think that it forces us to reflect on our colour-biases.

Conclusions

For a long time, I have wondered about the origin of dark-skinned deities of Hinduism, because they do not seem to fit in with the Indian fascination for the fair-skins. In fact, black-skin is seen almost as a synonym of ugly and inferior by many persons.

The dark-skinned deities also seem illogical in the context of dominant narratives of fair-skinned Aryans who came to India and brought the seeds of Vedic Hinduism with them. They also seem illogical in the context of caste sub-divisions, which were supposed to place dark-skinned persons in the lowest groups of the hierarchy.

Perhaps, the understanding of logic and rationale is not good for understanding Hinduism - because the roots of ancient Indian philosophy and its ways of understanding and interpreting the world are very different from the Western systems of logic. Thus, perhaps my questions about the dark-skinned Gods of Hinduism are wrong and need to be rephrased?

If you have some other ideas about this theme, do let me know!

*****

Fighting Superbugs

65 years ago when I was born, dying due to a simple infection such as diarrhoea or pneumonia was common. Our family history had numerous stories of persons dying young. At that time, average life expectancy in India was less than 38 years. While I was growing up, during 1960s and 70s, slowly we had become familiar with names of antibiotics like Tetracycline and Chloramphenicol. By the time I finished my medical college in late 1970s, average life expectancy had increased to 53 years, while the list of available antibiotics had become much longer with drugs like ampicillin, amoxicillin, erythromycin and gentamycin. Every year, new medicines were coming out. Occasionally we had infections which were resistant to some of these medicines, so we had started doing cultures to check which antibiotics could be more effective in a patient who was not responding to treatment.

In the last 50 years, the situation has changed drastically. Every now and then we hear of infections which do not respond to any medicine. Matt McCarthy's 2019 book "Superbugs: The Race to Stop an Epidemic" is about this subject.

Use of Antibiotics in Livestock

The first use of antibiotics in the livestock was approved by the Federal Drug Agency (FDA) of USA in 1951. They started to be used in small amounts in concentrated animal-feeds for growth promotion and prevention of diseases among the farm animals, especially in the poultry and cattle destined for meat production. They helped chickens, pigs and livestock to grow faster and put on weight. Since then, the use of antibiotics in the industrial production of meat has become routine.

Eating this meat introduces those antibiotics in our bodies and in the environment, promoting drug resistance in the bacteria. Already in 1969, a British committee of experts had concluded that the use of antibiotics in animals was contributing to antibiotic resistance in humans. Thus we are aware of this problem for a long time. However, its importance was under-estimated.

Apart from the use of antibiotics in the livestock, another problem has been indiscriminate use of antibiotics. Many doctors prescribe antibiotics for viral infections, even when they know that these are not useful. There is no control on the sale of antibiotics in many countries, so that people can buy them without prescription.

Antibiotic resistance and resistant bacteria both travel around the world, passing from one country to another. Thus, it is global problem affecting everyone and no one is safe from it.

Over the past decade, numerous cases of infections non responding to any medicine and leading to death of persons have brought this subject to the attention of general public. Extremely resistant cases of diseases like tuberculosis have appeared and are widely feared. The World Health Organisation has already issued some catastrophic warnings and asked for urgent search for solutions.

Matt McCarthy's Book

McCarthy's book on the subject of superbugs is written in an extremely engaging style. He works at the Presbyterian Hospital in New York, where they try to identify new antibiotics which can treat resistant infections. He explains the difficulties of treating superbugs through stories of individuals who turn up in the emergency department of his hospital. Reading the theories of antibiotic resistance is very different from reading about someone who has this infection.

For example, the story of a person, whose diagnosis of cancer has devastated his family. When it seems that chemotherapy might save him, a minor infection suddenly takes him close to death, unless the doctors can find some new treatment to treat it, but it is not responding to any medicine. McCarthy's book has a series of these real-life inspired stories, which start as a character sketch of the persons and their families and then reach a sudden turn of random events which turn their lives upside down, showing the fragility of our lives.

Once I started this book, I didn't stop reading it till 4 days later when I finished it. While I have known about superbugs and the problems of antibiotic resistance for a long time, the book explained the different challenges associated with it. Mixing of scientific information with human stories makes it very interesting. The book mainly moves around the human trials of a new antibiotic called "Dalbavancin" or Dalba. It also mentions some other new medicines and the persons involved in their research but most of its stories are of persons on whom Dalba is being tried.

Over the decades, doctors engaged in research for new medicines have not always behaved in an ethical manner. Recently, I was reading about an unethical research done by Armeur Hansen, who is known as the person who had discovered the leprosy bacillus in 1873. McCarthy shares the details of inhuman and unethical research done in the Nazi camps. Then he tells about another research carried out in Tuskegee, Alabama (USA), where hundreds of black men and women were recruited in a research, given false information and denied treatment which could have easily cured them, so that the doctors could study the natural evolution of the sexually transmitted infection syphilis. This had happened in 1950s-60s, years after the Nazi experiments.

The book also touches on the world of Big Pharma. For many years, I was part of a group fighting for people's right to health. In these groups, multinationals and especially the Big Pharma, is seen as villain, as they look only at their profit margins and are uncaring of the poor persons' need of medicines. McCarthy's book avoids painting the drug companies in black and white.

For example, McCarthy's explanation about insufficient research on new antibiotics and the role of the big Pharma is in the following terms:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, is the man responsible for establishing federal funding priorities for research on antibiotic resistance, and he told me that developing new drugs is, in fact, one of his top priorities. But the situation is complicated. “You don’t want the federal government to be a pharmaceutical company,” he said, “because you’d have to build an entire industry, and that would divert away from what the government does well, which is scientific discovery and concept validation. We need a partner.”And that partner, for better or worse, is Big Pharma. “If the federal government tried to re-create Merck,” Fauci said, “it would cost billions of dollars. The expertise of production, filling, packaging, and lot consistency. People take that for granted, but that’s an art form that has been perfected by these companies, not the government.”The problem, ultimately, is that many antibiotics are not very profitable. When a new drug emerges from an idea, there’s a step-by-step process that costs upward of a billion dollars to bring it to market. If that leads to Viagra, the expense is justified because you’ve just made a multibillion-dollar drug. With an antibiotic, however, the profit margins are narrow because of three characteristics: they’re usually given in short courses, they’re prescribed only when someone is sick, and sooner or later even that terrific new antibiotic is going to develop drug resistance. The latter is not a matter of if but when. “The incentive to make major investments in antibiotics,” Fauci told me, “is not something that attracts the pharmaceutical industry, so how do you get around that?”

The book is also an ode to McCarthy's senior colleague and mentor, Tom Walsh , director of the Transplantation-Oncology Infectious Diseases Program, who seems to live only for his work and does it with great empathy. It is difficult not to share McCarthy's admiration of such a wonderful human being and professional, and wish that if one day we would find ourselves in a hospital, we shall have a doctor like him.

Apart from his skills as a clinician and researcher, McCarthy also has a way with the words. For example, he introduces Tom Walsh with the following words:Walsh is a wisp of a man, pale and thin like a potato chip, with deep-set eyes, a warm smile, and a surprisingly firm handshake. His modest features are a notable contrast with my own: I have a high forehead, broad shoulders, and a nose that’s slightly too large for my face. We make for an odd pair.

Conclusions

I love reading books about health and medicine. These give an overview of the issues in a way which is impossible in the medicine textbooks, which limit themselves to dry facts - symptoms, diagnosis and treatments. On the other hand, a good book on medicine aimed at general public, provides a glimpse into its history and how our understanding about the disease condition changed over a period of years or decades.

For example, I have been really impressed by a couple of books on psychiatry and autism, which I had read recently - they had opened the doors to a largely unknown world to me. "Superbugs" by Matt McCarthy didn't have the same impact, because I was already familiar with some the ideas and questions it discusses. However, I loved reading it and will recommend it to everyone for gaining a deeper understanding about an important subject, in an engaging way.

Note: In 2019, after writing this post I had contacts with Dr Abdul Gafoor who told me about the WHO initiative on antibiotics resistence and that spread of resistant strains through lack of sanitation was a much bigger contributing factor compared to the irrational use of antibiotics. He referred me to his article in The Hindu, from which the following excerpts are presented below:

"... back in 2010, people like me sincerely believed that AMR was caused primarily by the misuse of antibiotics by the medical community. We all wrote a few lines about infection control, but 90% of our articles, research papers was about irrational antibiotics usage. I did not write about environmental sanitation. I did not write about most of the things that I know today, because that the concept has changed over the last 10 years. At that time, we thought that antibiotic stewardship was the most important component in tackling AMR, along with infection control, and then made a mention of the importance of sanitation. Now if you ask me, what is the most important component of tackling AMR, I will say in a developing country such as India – it is sanitation. I will put sanitation right on top, then I will put in infection control, and then, antimicrobial stewardship, rational antibiotics usage - whether at the hospital or over the counter.

Why? Thanks to scientific evidence that has emerged, since, and changed our perspective. A commentary published in Antibiotics, an open access journal, recently showed that AMR rates were found ‘positively correlated with higher temperature climates, poorer administrative governance, and the ratio of private to public health expenditure.’ When a more complex analysis was done, then better infrastructure (e.g., improved sanitation and potable water) as well as better administrative governance (e.g., less corruption) were strongly and statistically significantly associated with lower AMR indices. And this is significant: the comment stated that ‘Surprising, and contrary to most current beliefs, antibiotic consumption was not strongly associated with AMR levels. This empirical evidence implies that contagion, rather than antibiotic usage volumes, is the major factor contributing to the variations in antibiotic resistant levels across countries.’"

*****

#bookreview #antibioticresistance #mattmccarthy