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.

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Women & Friends - A Book Review

Some months ago I had read an article in The New Scientist about an App for the mobile phones which can help you to keep in contact with your friends and remember their birthdays and children's names. While reading it, I had thought that it must be a dystopian world where you had to be reminded about such things. Our friends are people we really like, without whom our lives are incomplete - if we don't see them or hear from them for some time, we miss them. So I thought that we don't need Apps to remind us about them.

Perhaps the problem is more about whom do we consider as a friend? According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the human beings can have at the most 150 friends, out of which not more than 15 can be called "close friends" and less than 5 can be "intimate friends".

This reflection about friendships was provoked by a book called "Miss Benson's Beetles" by the British author Rachel Joyce. The book is about two very different women, who embark on a journey in the early 1950s from England to the other end of the world in New Caledonia in the south-west Pacific.

The Joyce's book is about being a woman in a world dominated by men, and it is also a book about a female-bonding. This post is about this book and is also about friendships.

Two Women Friends Genre

Two women on a road trip or a journey, with elements of female solidarity and friendship, where the journey leads to an understanding about the self, can be considered as a specific genre. Some months ago, I had written a post about the book "Remarkable Creatures" by Tracy Chevalier, which was on the same theme. Often discussions about this theme veer towards the film "Thelma and Louise" which is probably the most well-known work in the genre. They have a common structure. Often the two women are very different and that adds an element of challenge to their bonding, and acts as a point of tension in the story.

In India we say that all possible story-plots have been already described in the Mahabharata. Good writers can take a plot and add something unique to it. Rachel Joyce also has that knack - within the genre of "two women on a journey", she adds her own dimensions, which make for a wonderfully told story.

Miss Benson's Beetle

Miss Benson, the heroine of the book is not the kind of person who gets to play an important role in the stories. She is closer to fifty, a spinster, tall and big, and without much grace. Mrs. Pretty, the second woman of the book is younger, with curves and hair dyed yellow, with a hint of dyslexia, who tends to end up with the wrong kind of men. Both are running away from something and thus embark on a journey to New Caledonia, a French territory located in south-west Pacific.

In the beginning, Miss Benson can hardly bear to be with the constantly talking Mrs. Pretty and is determined to replace her with someone better suited to be her assistant. Instead, the events force the two women to be together and to face different adventures in their search for the gold-coloured beetle hiding in a tropical forest at the top of mountain.

The different situations force the women to face ever-new difficulties, and finding ways to overcome them. In the process, they learn to accept themselves and each other. Joyce writes the characters of the two women with sympathy and humour. It makes you laugh, even while you sympathise with their terrible situations.

Joyce has a way with words which I loved. For example, Barbara, the maid in the house of Miss Benson's aunts' is described as someone who "took all instruction as a personal affront." At another place, Miss Benson and Mrs. Pretty are described as "a brown ostrich coupled with a pink-hatted canary". When the ship leaves the port, "It wasn’t just the ship that had been unmoored. It was her entire sense of herself." Mrs. Pretty's suitcases look like "coffins for baby dinosaurs" while the light plays across the mountains "like emotion on a human face".

Here is how she describes them after they reach New Caledonia:

French. Another problem. Everywhere she went she heard words and sounds she didn’t understand. Vowels that ran like small motors, tongues purring, explosive combinations of consonants. She tried the everyday phrases in the guidebook, and no one had a clue what she was talking about. If anything, they looked concerned. She had no idea how to get it right.Fortunately, Enid had a flair for communicating in a foreign language that took everyone by surprise, including speakers of foreign languages. She didn’t give a damn about getting it right. She got the hang of basic words like fromage and café au lait, as well as scarabée for beetle, and the minute she got stuck, she mimed. “Bon shoor!” she would yell. “Have you seen un gold scarabée?” Or “Do you know un mountain dans le shape of un wisdom tooth?” She flapped her arms like wings; she pretended she had a great big beetle stomach; she even showed people her back molars.

However, it is through a marginal character, a woman called Freya who works in the natural history museum and appears towards the end of the book, that Joyce explains how she sees the place of women in professional spaces dominated by men, which really struck me:

She didn’t know why but she had a feeling they were the work of another woman. Maybe it was just her fantasy. She was lonely, that was the truth, really lonely. Her working hours were so long she’d given up on the idea of having a family - she couldn’t even hold down a relationship - and when she went on an expedition, she was set apart from her male colleagues by problems they didn’t have to think about. Not only periods, or where to pee safely, not even the endless jokes about her physical strength. But the sense she was never really going to get what she wanted. More than a few times a colleague had reached out a hand when she didn’t need help, and squeezed too hard. She’d been talked down and talked over. She’d missed a couple of promotions she should have got.And yet, deep down, she knew she couldn’t really blame anyone else. Out of some strange mad desire not to upset the status quo, she’d become complicit. She had laughed when she should have been angry, or said nothing when she should have said a lot. She’d belittled her own achievements, calling them small or unformed or even lucky when they were none of those things. And it wasn’t simply opportunities at work she’d lost out on: she had - and, again, this was her own choice - missed the weddings of her closest friends, just as she’d missed their children’s christenings.  

I greatly enjoyed reading Miss Benson's Beetle. Lately, I have problems with fiction books - most of the time, I get bored with them after a few pages - even with thrillers and mysteries. It was consoling to finally find a book in which I could lose myself. After a long time, here was a book that I tried to read slowly so that the pleasure of reading it could last longer.

That does not mean that I don't have anything critical to say about it. My biggest criticism of the book is about its lack of any local characters from New Caledonia because its world is exclusively colonial. I don't recall any of the local characters having a name, unless we can consider the local dog as a character. Giving names to persons is to recognise their humanity and it felt strange to me that with all Miss Benson's empathy, the people of New Caledonia were only nameless waiters, policeman or the shanty town kids, even when she lives with them for months.

Miss Benson explains how she sees the world at one point in the book - unless something is named and classified by a British institution, it does not exist:

“No, Mrs. Pretty. A thing doesn’t exist until it has been caught and presented to the Natural History Museum. Once the Natural History Museum has accepted the beetle, and read my descriptions and notes, and found that it is genuinely a new specimen, it will be given a name. And then it will exist.”

I felt that this was a completely colonial way of reading the world. The locals might have known about those beetles for hundreds of years, they might have their myths and stories about them, but the beetles were only "discovered" when Miss Benson would write to her museum in Britain about it and obviously she can name them after her father!

Since in early 1950s, the world was still largely colonial and as far as I know, New Caledonia is still a French territory, so probably we can justify this way of seeing the world as being realistic for those characters. Yet, the enlightened Miss Benson could have been a little more aware of other cultures and people. Anyway, it is a minor squabble and this lack of sensitivity towards the locals and their culture, did not really affect my enjoyment of the book.

Fiction books are imaginary worlds which the authors make seem like real. While the first 3/4th of the book has some semblance of realism, the last one fourth of the book turns into a fable. There is even an Avatar like scene with psychedelic colours, flowers and golden insects. Generally, I don't like fantasy books. However, in this book, by the time this part came, I was already in love with the two characters, and was relieved that they were spared additional challenges and the story could have an emotionally satisfying ending.

Female Bonding versus Male Bonding

The book also made me reflect on the differences between female bonding and male bonding. I have seen some films on male bonding during a journey, but I feel that is completely different from the kind of relationships between women depicted in Miss Benson's Beetle or in Remarkable Creatures. This particular genre of stories where excluded persons, whom life has bypassed or mistreated, one older and the other younger, and their relationship developing over the course of the story, does not seem to work for men. Scenes like the one in Miss Benson's Beetle, where after taking a nude bath in a forest pond, the younger woman lies down with her head on the thighs of the older woman, would have got a stronger sexual connotation with men, while in the book, it seemed more like an expression of tenderness and solidarity.

The relationship between Miss Benson and Mrs. Pretty develops through moments of being vulnerable and acceptance of tenderness. I don't think that we men are much open to being vulnerable or accepting tenderness, especially from other guys. Thus, a book about male road-trip story of self-discovery would probably have a very different feel.

Books about male bonding are those based in male-only schools, in ships with an all male crew and in some stories about wars. There are also stories like the Brokeback Mountain, which are more about gay love. In term of texture and characterisations, they are very different from these female-bonding stories. If you know of any other kind of good books which have male bonding between two very different men as a theme and are not about gay love, I would like to know about it - do let me know.

Conclusions

I had just finished reading this book, when I found that by coincidence, our reading group has decided to read another book by Rachel Joyce - "The incredible pilgrimage of Harold Fry". I am looking forward to reading that.

In the meantime, I recommend - do read Miss Benson's Beetle - I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I did!

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Bonsai & the Life in the Plants

Last month I visited a Bonsai exhibition at the Jaquard gardens of Schio. The sight of tiny plants looking like a miniature version of full-grown trees reminded me of a nature-visit in Bologna some years ago. This post is about two different ways of thinking about the life-forces in the plants. At the same time, it is also a reflection about the relationship between humans and nature.

Indian Ideas About Nature

Let me start briefly with some of my ideas about nature, which are influenced by my growing up in India. Hinduism is full of Gods and Goddesses, each of whom is linked with an animal and a plant species. There are many mythological stories that teach one to respect all the beings as a part of the respect for the sacred.

There are different stories linked with plants in the Hindu mythology. Like the story of the sacred Tulsi plant (Indian Basil), which represents a pious prostitute. Thus, people believe that this plant should not be kept inside the house, but must be planted in the courtyard where the families can pray to it at dawn and sunset by lighting a lamp near it. The 1960's Hindi film Parakh had one of my all time favourite songs, Mere Man ke diye (The lamp of my heart), in which Sadhana lights a lamp and prays to Tulsi plant. According to Ayurveda, Tulsi is an important medicinal plant. Such myths and sacred stories, are ways to remind the communities about the importance of different species of plants and animals, and to safeguard the biodiversity.

I remember my grand-mother once telling me to not to pluck the leaves of a plant at night because "the plant was sleeping". I think that such a way of thinking illustrates the popular understandings of life in the plants among Indians. While in the cities, people have a more transactional ideas about nature (for example, that it is good for breathing and well-being, it is relaxing and stress-busting), in the smaller towns and villages of India, I feel that there is still a lot of respect and traditional knowledge about these ancient understandings of nature.

Bonsai Plants

Literally the term Bonsai means "planted in a vase". The aim of growing a Bonsai is to create a realistic representation of nature through a miniature tree.

An exhibition of Bonsai plants was held at the beautiful 19th century Jaquard garden in the centre of Schio. It is a small garden but is very beautiful, with an old theatre and a green-house. The exhibition presented the plants grown by the Bonsai students of Schio under their teacher Dr. Ennio Santacatterina.

I spoke to Ennio to understand about Bonsai. He explained that he had discovered his passion for Bonsai after his retirement. His school is a part of the Bonsai Art School and its classes are held in a local plant shop called Garden Schio.

Ennio sees Bonsai as a part of the Zen traditions from Japan, in which it is fundamental to understand kamae, the basic and essential nature and characteristics of each plant. He cites the Bonsai guru Aba Kurakichi and says, "We must conserve all the specificities of the nature of each plant because Bonsai is a life-art." This means that each plant will develop according to its own characteristics and the Bonsai-maker must know how to enhance its individuality and highlight its beauty by selecting the appropriate style, branches and spaces.

I think that it means that a Bonsai is not created but rather it is nurtured, grown and gently guided. It is an exercise in mindfulness, in which the Bonsai-maker searches for a connection with the plant through silence and meditation, to understand its nature and develops a vision of how it should grow. Then, with patience and mindfulness, the maker helps the plant to achieve that vision.

Free-Growing Nature

While Bonsai speaks the language of Zen, meditation and mindfulness for creating a connection with plants, it seems as if the plant is moulded into an idealised vision of how it should look. It reminded me of another encounter about plants - in 2011, I had an opportunity to meet Mr. Marco Colombari, a gardener and plant-lover from Bologna, who had some very radical ideas about the plants.

Marco had guided us in the discovery of a forest, talking to us about how to observe and "see" the plants. A century ago, this forest was an "aviculture centre", an area for developing and growing different species of birds. Then it had become a hunting laboratory and a honeybee cultivation centre. In the 1980s, surrounded by multi-story apartment buildings, this area was supposed to be used for building more condominiums. However, the local residents had started a campaign to save it as a natural area. It is now managed by an association called Oasi dei Saperi (The Knowledge Oasis), which promotes it as a site for the conservation of biodiversity. It is known as the Forest of St. Anna and is located in the Corticella area of Bologna.

Marco's point was that every plant is a living being and has its own characteristics. He felt that people decide about planting trees and plants without really thinking about those natural characteristics. Thus, every time we cut the branches of a tree for making it fit into our urban landscaping, it is like closing an animal or a bird inside a cage. In the forest, he had shown us parts of the trees where the branches had been cut, making us look at the seeping liquids from the cut surfaces and drawing parallels with injured animals.

Besides the natural forest, St. Anna Forest also has some other areas including a botanical garden for growing medicinal herbs, a small pond which was used in the past for jute production and a group of ash trees with old artificial nests which were used for keeping birds when it was an aviculture centre.

Some Reflections

Listening to Marco had a very strong impact on me. Reflecting on his words and coupled with the philosophy in the Indian sacred books of Upanishads, I feel that it is the same life-force flowing inside the trees and plants which flows in every living being.

How do I reconcile this understanding with our daily business of living? There is a proverb in Hindi which says "If the horse becomes the friend of the grass, what would it eat?" I think that this proverb sums up the basic dilemma of our life - the impossibility of avoiding violence, if we wish to live.

Thus, I think that all life in the world is inter-connected and there is no way we can avoid eating other life forms, till the time comes for us to die when we return back to the earth, turn into our basic elements and become a part of the never-ending cycle of life, death and decay. To me it means respecting nature and all forms of life, which I translate as avoiding giving unnecessary suffering to my fellow creatures. Thus, I feel that individuals can decide if they wish to eat meat or they prefer to be vegetarian or vegan - it is a matter of choice linked with personal convictions.

However, I think that keeping animals to be used for their meat (chicken, ducks, sheep and cows) in narrow spaces, which do not allow them to move, and making them eat food laced with hormones and antibiotics so that they can fatten quickly, or hurting them unnecessarily, are wrong.

It means being kind to the animals and birds that we keep as pets. It means, taking care of the nature so that our biodiversity is maintained and strengthened. It means that if we have a zoo or a circus, we shall ensure dignified spaces for keeping the animals and treat them with care. I think that zoos and wild-life parks can play an important role in saving species close to extinction and in teaching young people about the importance of safeguarding nature and biodiversity.

Some people would completely separate humans from other animals because they see all human-animal interactions as basically evil and unwelcome for the animals. They are against keeping pet animals, they don't like zoos, they do not want any experiments involving animals - I feel that it is an extreme view and does not help the animals or the nature.

I hope that science and technology would soon progress so that one day we can have all kinds of food, including meat and fish, grown in cell-cultures. In the meantime, I would like more humane conditions for the animals we keep for meat.

Conclusions

Coming back to the plants, does making the plants grow as miniaturised Bonsai trees means that the plants are being forced into unnecessary suffering? Probably Marco Colombari would say yes. I don't think so. I feel that Bonsai practice, by helping us to seek a connection with the plants through mindfulness and meditation, is another path to recognising the importance of nature.

The evolution has made different life-forms co-dependent on each other. We have biomes inside each of us, made of billions of bacteria and viruses - every time we are ill and take medicines, we are killing millions of them. Life, death and decay are a part of a never-ending cycle going around us all the time and there is no way we can say that we don't want to be a part of this cycle.

This reflection about the life in the plants, makes me think of Shiva, the Hindu God who controls the never-ending cycles of creation and destruction in the universe. I think that Shiva is a metaphor of the life and death which connects together all the organic and inorganic matter of the universe. It is the life-force moving the particles composing the atoms, which combine to make the molecules of different elements, the building-bricks of everything in the universe. Life and death are illusions, because those atoms and the forces moving their particles, they do not die and will continue to combine and create new forms all the time.

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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.

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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.

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Unusual Vicenza: Discovering the Magic

Venice does not need an introduction. Many tourists visiting Venice have also heard of Verona. However, very few persons visiting Venice and Verona know of Padova and Vicenza.

Vicenza is counted among the 4 beautiful cities in the Veneto region in north-east of Italy along with Venice, Padova and Verona. Each of these cities is a concentration of history, art and culture. At the same time, each of these cities is distinctive - Venice is the city of canals, Padova is the oldest European university and the city of the saints (St Anthony and St Justine), Verona is the city of Romeo and Juliet, while Vicenza is the city of the architect Andrea Palladio and is a World Heritage city for UNESCO.

This post is an introduction to Vicenza, which has a large number of buildings designed by Andrea Palladio, one of the most influential architects of recent history. For example, his little gem, Villa Rontonda (in the image above), has inspired many patrician houses around the world including the White House.

This post is also about unusual ways for discovering the city's magic, seen through my eyes of nostalgia and through the eyes of Chiara Pesavento, who is passionate about languages, history and culture of this city.

Vicenza of My Memories

I had come to Vicenza in 1979 and stayed for a period at the guesthouse of the Filippini Church along the city's central street called Corso Palladio. Listening from my room on the second floor to the concerts of organ music held in the church below, is one of my first memories of this city and of Italy. At that time I was not very familiar with the western classical music and I remember my shock when it had happened for the first time - I felt surrounded by the warm pulsating embrace of the music as it had filled my room, it was absolutely amazing. Probably the particular acoustics of that building had something to do with that experience.

"Ai Filippini" was a 2 minutes walk from the city's central square, Piazza dei Signori (Lords' Square), where I remember spending hours on the weakends, admiring the absolutely amazing Loggia del Capitanio and the imposing Basilica with its green domed roof. Both these buildings were the works of Andrea Palladio, though at that time I had no idea about who he was!

I loved sketching in those days and that had helped me to become familiar with different landmarks of the city including the incredible Olympic theatre, Chiericati Palace Museum, Montanari Palace and 2 wonderfully landscaped parks - Querini park and Salvi park. Another of my favourites memories is that of the climb to the Monte Berico church at the top of the hill overlooking the city. The image (above) presents one of my sketches of the Piazza dei Signori from those days.

When I look back, I feel that I was fortunate to have the introduction to the historical and cultural treasures of Italy through the unassuming and lesser-known Vicenza. Most tourists to Italy know of Rome, Florence, Pisa, Venice and Pompei. A few more discerning ones know about Bologna, Naples, Verona or 5 Terre. Relatively few think of visiting Padova or Vicenza. Knowing Italy through Vicenza has taught me about the joys of visiting smaller and relatively lesser known Italian towns to discover their hidden gems of history, art and culture.

Today, I live in Schio, a tiny town situated 20 km from Vicenza. Even Schio and many other smaller towns of the province of Vicenza, such as Thiene, Bassano del Grappa and Marostica, have so many historical, artistic and cultural sites to discover, that would be impossible to find in any other country! Anyway, enough about my memories of Vicenza - let me now give you a brief glimpse of the town through the eyes of Chiara Pesavento, who is more qualified to talk about it.

About Chiara Pesavento

Chiara Pesavento is a tourist guide in Vicenza, active in this role since 2006. Her decision to become a tourist guide can be traced to a visit to an art collection in Chiericati Palace Museum as a child, when she was struck by the description of a painting by the guide. "Suddenly that uninteresting piece of art acquired details and a depth of meaning" she explains, "and I knew that I wanted to be a tourist guide."

She also had a passion for learning languages (she speaks Spanish, French and English) and loves meeting persons from different countries. All these skills combined to create a person who is passionate about the history, art and culture of her town, and she loves to share these passions with people who come to visit Vicenza. For this post, I asked her to talk about some special thematic tours, which help in discovering lesser-known aspects of this city.

Unusual Vicenza

One of Chiara's favourite tours of Vicenza is called "The lost treasures". For this tour, she uses old city maps from '700 to visit and understand how the city has changed over the past centuries. It means going around to see buildings that are not there anymore and to hear about the history of what had happened and how the city had changed. This also helps in understanding the old toponomies of the town. For example, there were about 50 churches in Vicenza in late medieval period, out of which only 17 are still there today, while the remaining are lost. Many of these were lost during the occupation of the city by Napoleon Bonaparte. This tour lets you understand the impact of that occupation.

Another tour of the city is through its art collections. The art collection at Chiericati palace museum, the collection of 18th century Venetian art at Montanari palace, the sacred-art collection at the Diocesan museum and the different art works in the city churches - if you love art, there is so much to see and discover in Vicenza. For example, the St. Corona church has the altar and a painting by one of the famous Venetian artists, Giovanni Bellini.

About 500 years ago, Antonio Pigafetta, a writer, navigator and geography expert from Vicenza, had completed an around-the-world trip. To celebrate this event, together with her colleagues, Chiara proposes the "Pigafetta tours of Vicenza", to discover the Gothic town of the 15th century. It was a period when the town was recovering from the plague epidemic, agricultural crisis and famines. The tour allows the visitors to look at the buildings from that era and to understand the life of those times.

Chiara feels that there are many aspects of the city linked with its artisans and production systems, which are equally valuable to visit and to know better. For example, Vicenza has long traditions of wool and silk production since 15th century. It is also known for it goldsmith artisans. Another example is that of specialised printing such as the Busato artistic printing press specialised in chalcography (bronze plate engraving for printing), lithography (printing with stone or metal plate) and xylography (wood-block printing). She feels that tours to visit and see these artisans at work can be another interesting way to discover and understand the city.

Conclusions

With the Covid-19 epidemic, few persons are travelling around. However, hopefully soon this epidemic will be over and persons will start travelling and visiting other countries. Personally, I miss my travelling very much. However, not to be able to travel to far-away places has a positive side-effect - I can go back and rediscover my old favourite towns like Vicenza.

When travelling will become possible and you will plan a visit to Venice and surrounding cities, I suggest that you keep a few days to discover towns like Vicenza, Padova and Verona, and to visit the smaller provincial towns of Vicenza such as Schio, Bassano and Marostica.

If you want to contact Chiara Pesavento, you can check her website - Vicenza Tourist Guide.

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Snakes, Merchants & Emigrants - Gun Island

Finally, I have read Amitabh Ghosh’s latest book “Gun Island” (Penguin, 2019). This book can be looked at different levels – as the exploration of an old Bengali fable, as a modern fable on emigration, as a cry of alarm about the looming environmental catastrophe, as an understanding of ancient links between India and Venice/Venetian republic in northern Italy, as a book about books, and probably many more.

For me personally, this book’s theme has a special resonance because it touches on the worlds which I inhabit – that of India, from where I come, and of Venice, where I live; and those of emigrants and refugees, especially those coming here from the Indian subcontinent, with whom I identify and sometimes work as a volunteer.

At one level, I was a little disappointed while reading this book because it lacked the immersive imagined worlds which Ghosh can create with his words. It is a fable and thus, chance, destiny and miracles play a disproportionate role in moving and shaping the story and these elements do not need to be always plausible. At another level, I was fascinated by its complexity in bringing together so many themes, and now after finishing reading it, I keep on thinking about them and discovering new angles and inter-connections to them.

Themes of the Book

Its themes are like rivers, sometimes flowing in parallel, sometimes inter-mixing and sometimes changing their course as the story moves, from Sundarbans in India, to Venice and then finally to Sicily. Some of them take centre-stage for some time, only to go underground for long tracts, waiting for another opportunity to emerge. The book has a big canvass but most of the time, it skims on its surface and does not delve deeper.

The book is equally divided into 2 parts - the first part is based inIndia, in Kolkata and the second, in Italy and mostly in Venice.

Book summary: Dinanath Dutta or Dino, as his Italian friend Cinta (Giacinta) calls him, is a solitary ageing dealer of rare books from USA and is the narrator of the book. Back to his home-town Kolkata for a holiday, he encounters people from “The hungry Tide”, Ghosh’s book about river dolphins in Sundarbans, which had come out 16 years ago in 2004. Piya, the young Indo-American researcher working on the river-dolphins from that book, is now older but still single and the love-story between DN and Piya is a tiny river in the book, which emerges in the beginning and then disappears, only to re-emerge and conclude happily at the end.

Apart from “The hungry tide”, the book also makes some references to the slave trade ships and the ship-journeys of indentured workers from India, the subject of Ghosh’s recent Ibis trilogy, starting with “The Sea of Poppies”.

The book also makes different references to other authors and their books, especially to the literary world of Italian author Emilio Salgari, known for his books about exotic India of thugs, princesses and pirates, some of which were centred around Sundarbans and were used for creating some TV serials such as Sandokan in the 1970s. Today Salgari is not very popular among children in Italy, but his books were a major influence till about 30-40 years ago, in shaping popular ideas in about India.

The legend of “Banduki Saudagar” linked with a shrine in Sundarbans, is the seed of the book, which guides the whole story. It brings out surprising connections between India and the merchants of the Venetian republic in 17th-18th centuries. The same legend brings DN to Venice, the Banduki (gun) island, where he fortuitously meets the friends he had met in Sundarbans – Tipu, the son of the boatman from “The Hungry Tide” and Rafi, the son of the care-taker of the shrine in the Sundarbans, along with other emigrants from Bangladesh.

The final part of the book, where Ghosh gives a historical overview of peoples’ movements across the world, starting from the millions of persons from villages and towns taken by the colonial masters and transplanted in far-away lands, and links it with today’s emigrants who start similar life-threatening journeys in search for a better life, is my favourite part of this book. Let me quote a few brief passages from this part: 

Yet there was a vital difference – the system of indentured labour, like chattel slavery before it, had always been managed and controlled by European imperial powers. The coolies often had no idea of where they were going or of the conditions that awaited them there; nor did they know much about the laws and regulations that governed their destiny. ...But all of that was now completely reversed.Rafi, Tipu and their fellow migrants had launched their own journeys, just as I had, long before them; as with me, their travels had been enabled by their own networks, and they, like me, were completely conversant with the laws and regulations of the countries they were heading to. Instead, it was the countries of the West that now knew very little about the people who were flocking towards them. ...I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the overturning of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe.

Few Comments: Ghosh is very eloquent in this part in presenting today's emigration as a kind of retribution of the colonial plundering of the world. However, I am not sure if real-life works like that. Italy was not much of an imperial power, except for a brief spell in Abyssinia (today's Ethiopia-Eritrea). I believe that "Preservation of Whiteness" is not enough to explain the fear of immigrants among the young men in Italy as proposed by Ghosh in his book, it is much more complex and has also to do with religion, culture, language and social norms.

I also think that it is not the young men, as the main demographic group, who are afraid of emigrants. Young people mix much more with persons of other cultures. Instead, it is the older-age groups including the elderly persons, who are more afraid of emigrants and of the changing landscapes of their towns and squares. 

Different episodes of the book ask you to believe in supernatural forces shaping the world, including the old fable of Banduki Saudagar inter-mixed with the Manasa Devi legend from north-east of India. At times, I found that a bit jarring.

The final conclusion of the book seems to be written for a Hollywood film with an Ethiopian woman standing tall in a little boat full of a ragtag bunch of emigrants, lit by a green fluorescence, with dancing dolphins and whales and a sky full of thousands of migrating birds.

Thunderstorms, islands getting submerged in the sea, tropical spiders in Venetian homes and shipworms eating the wooden base on which Venice is standing, strange and extreme weather events including the high tides which drown Venice frequently, dying dolphins and whales, sea-monsters in the Venice lagoon, all make an appearance in the book to underline the dangers of climate change.

Other Aspects of Illegal Emigration

The book touches on some uncomfortable aspects of illegal emigration, including the links with different branches of mafia of different countries which controls this traffic, but mostly it glosses over these aspects. The network which facilitates this traffic and lures unsuspecting young men (and some women, mainly from Africa) full of dreams, who take loans and sell their properties, to embark on a journey that takes years of their lives, often including passages during which they are forced into slave labour or even sexual labour and sometimes ends in drugs, alcoholism or prisons, is seen only in brief glimpses.

"Without the guys from Bangladesh, Venice won’t survive, because they do everything which local Italians don’t do", the book explains. The other side of this story is that emigrants can be asked to work with one third of the minimum salary, without a proper social security cover and to do long shifts, all conditions which locals do not accept and emigrants are too weak to resist.

Often the families of these immigrants think that they are living in Europe and imagine the European lives they see on TV and films, and keep on asking for money and other things from their sons and brothers. A few of them do find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but for almost all of them, the dream of that pot of gold extracts a heavy price, as shown through the words of "Palash" in this book, who hides behind a pseudonym in the book:

It’s impossible for me to go back now. My family still does not know that I dropped out of university and am now scraping by on the streets. My parents would not be able to imagine that a son of theirs was doing that kind of work. They think I’m still a student going to lectures and writing papers, at my university. If I tell them the truth now I would have to admit that I had been lying all along; that they were right to tell me not to go abroad; that I had made a terrible mistake and would have done better to listen to their advice. I would have to acknowledge that in chasing a dream I destroyed my life.
There is another dimension of emigration which is mostly left untouched in the book – it is that of a conservative version of Islam among a percentage of emigrants and the backlash that it provokes, especially in small towns and communities in Europe and its perceived links with radical Islam. Ghosh touches on it only briefly through a clumsy air-travel scene, where DN's agitation due to vision of snakes and the accidental switching on of an “Allah” song sung by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan leads to panic among the passengers, thinking that he is a terrorist.

Conclusions

Quality of Story Telling in Gun Island: I think that this book Gun Island is substantially different from Ghosh’s earlier works. He has a way with his words, and this book also gives him plenty of opportunities to show-off those word-building skills, to weave unexpected inter-connections. However, that pleasure of reading is hampered by feelings of disbelief because of too many coincidences, convenient dreams and visions and some cheesy miracles which dot the whole book. While reading it, I wondered if he has become lazier as a writer or does he let himself be guided too much by his concerns and activism for the climate?

Books' Characters: Compared to his earlier books, especially the ones from the Ibis trilogy, which had a whole bunch of characters that I had liked, I did not find any such character in this book. For me, both DN and Piya were kind of colourless persons. Tipu and Rafi were a bit more alive, but were difficult to identify with. Even the character of Cinta was, at times, a bit of a caricature.

I know that Ghosh has been campaigning over the past few years for greater awareness and action on the issue of climate change. Even in this book, climate change is a key force shaping the events. Yet, I felt that by bringing in the fables, supernatural forces and miracles, he seems to be saying that we don’t need to worry about the climate change and the earth or the nature will do something to right this situation – I am not sure if he actually wanted to give this message.

To conclude, for me Ghosh is one of the best story-tellers of our times. With that kind of placement on a high pedestal, for me reading this book was not as fulfilling as his previous works.

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