Happy Holidays!
with blurry photo love from my fabulous office this Hanukkah,
Lily
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
A Miracle of Re-Creation
Happy Holidays!
with blurry photo love from my fabulous office this Hanukkah,
Lily
Monday, December 22, 2008
On Orphaning Children and Putting Turkeys in Hibernation
26 November 2008: Terrorists attack Mumbai
28 November 2008: Thanksgiving dinner in Kolkata
As the first people trickled in to the room, we were still cooking – I’m always still cooking, usually forget to change into something nice to host, and use it all as an excuse to add some bustle and activity to the quiet beginnings of an eventually eventful evening. The house smelled like stuffing, successfully recreated sans turkey, with a dash of soy sauce to darken the gravy. Soon the voices were gurgling all around me, and after two days alone in my house – enjoying a spot of winter sunshine sprawled across my queen-sized bed with Sen’s thoughts on gender while the bodies were cleaned out of CST*– the swirl of so many people’s company was exhilarating.
The phone call woke me up, and I registered the 212 area code as foreign without thinking about the fact that it was from New York City, not Seattle. ‘There have been unprecedented attacks on foreigners in Mumbai,’ AJWS informed me. ‘We are requesting all volunteers to stay inside their residences for the next forty-eight hours.’
There was: laughing cow and crackers, dates and nuts, mashed potatoes, baked chicken, stuffing and gravy, green beans in excess garlic, vegetarian chili, Israeli salad, pumpkin pie with ginger cookie crust, and cakes (from Cakes, of course). There were: attacks on a train station, an airport, shipping docks, two luxury hotels, two hospitals, a café, and a guest house. I gathered information – the first numbers I heard were eighty dead and nine hundred injured, the last were that over a hundred had died, and maybe another hundred or two injured – from concerned callers around the world, jotted it down on a notepad and tried not to make it look like notes from an academic lecture.
Behind me, the room kept swirling, but I remembered that it was Friday, and that there were candles, and put those two thoughts together with a friend to say a blessing for Shabbat. The mourner’s kaddish waded knee-deep through the back of my mind, but I didn’t let it out, just thought it as I looked up at the oil painting of the flat-owner’s family guru sitting cross-legged above the candles and smiled, pretending not to pretend that I hadn’t heard that hostages were still being held, that the train had been full of commuting laborers and that although they demanded foreigners they killed indiscriminately.
The first article I read was titled ‘Brooklyn Couple Killed,’ from the New York Times. I remembered the couple – we’d followed a collection of diasporic Jews from Keneseth Eliayahoo to the Nariman house after Friday night services last January, and ended up at my first Chabad experience. The imported and recreated food tasted strange rather than comforting, and although the idea of the community was nice and the Rabbi welcoming, I had been eager to leave. Rivka, his wife, was sweet, and we discussed her wig and adorable baby boy Moishe as we walked quickly down the alleyways towards Colaba Causeway.
Fresh from two days of a media fast when the rest of the world was feasting – and I mean feasting in a carrion sort of way, a morbid fascination with spreading the flames in a misguided attempt to honor the dead and understand the shifting fabric of reality – I read for hours, squinting through salt at the same ten images, and finally forming my own headline for my mental marquee:
Followed quickly, on the same mental marquee, by two of my favorite bumper stickers:
When I woke up on thanksgiving morning, America was eating dinner. I had no desire to run away from India, to escape the momentary mess that had been made out of people’s lives in Mumbai and people’s minds around the world – Kolkata seemed far away from all of that, safe despite the warnings, secured by the value of the open Nepalese and Bangladeshi borders and its own markedly faded glory. But I did want to gather around a chattering dinner table – preferably two or three pushed together, with as many different table cloths and some burnt orange and evergreen decorations – so I opened a book, tucked the people and the horror deep inside, and escaped.
The emails came quickly, of course, and I tried to write properly assuring responses, with a pinch of analysis and a dollop of heartache and an empathetic smile at the end:
It’s the cycle, I think, that makes it all the most maddening, the dehumanizing and dominating and not expecting the exact same treatment in return – the idea that these tactics move a cause forward paired with the equally terrifying idea that the American army has made the world a safer place in the last eight years. The question of the day became the concerned inquiry, became whether you’d lost a friend, but questions of the day fade quickly. There were protests and funerals – there was even an unexploded bomb found two weeks later in the CST baggage room – there were op-eds and accusations, speculation on retaliation and billboards preaching solidarity.
Now the billboards for the ‘Great Indian Shopping Festival’ (Christmas!) are up, and the disturbing radio ads for recommendations on strategies for India’s ‘War on Terror’ (who thought of that brilliant phrasing?) have receded. If we just, well, kill enough of them, they’ll clearly stop killing us. Simple math. As we stacked the low stools we’d used as ground-level tables for thanksgiving and ushered the last guests out the door to the strains of a husky woman’s voice on our new sound system, the violence that had been graphically splattered across the front pages of the world’s newspapers for the last few days felt worlds away – I could even pretend that the children sleeping in the cement pipes at the end of my road were comfortable on their stained cotton t-shirt of a mattress, almost enjoy the glow of feeding people and being thankful for a colorful community without the sucker punch of remembering the cost of my comfort to millions of other people’s lives. Almost.
*Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal, formerly Victoria Terminal
Note: I highly recommend reading Arundhati Roy’s analysis of the attacks, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy
28 November 2008: Thanksgiving dinner in Kolkata
As the first people trickled in to the room, we were still cooking – I’m always still cooking, usually forget to change into something nice to host, and use it all as an excuse to add some bustle and activity to the quiet beginnings of an eventually eventful evening. The house smelled like stuffing, successfully recreated sans turkey, with a dash of soy sauce to darken the gravy. Soon the voices were gurgling all around me, and after two days alone in my house – enjoying a spot of winter sunshine sprawled across my queen-sized bed with Sen’s thoughts on gender while the bodies were cleaned out of CST*– the swirl of so many people’s company was exhilarating.
The phone call woke me up, and I registered the 212 area code as foreign without thinking about the fact that it was from New York City, not Seattle. ‘There have been unprecedented attacks on foreigners in Mumbai,’ AJWS informed me. ‘We are requesting all volunteers to stay inside their residences for the next forty-eight hours.’
There was: laughing cow and crackers, dates and nuts, mashed potatoes, baked chicken, stuffing and gravy, green beans in excess garlic, vegetarian chili, Israeli salad, pumpkin pie with ginger cookie crust, and cakes (from Cakes, of course). There were: attacks on a train station, an airport, shipping docks, two luxury hotels, two hospitals, a café, and a guest house. I gathered information – the first numbers I heard were eighty dead and nine hundred injured, the last were that over a hundred had died, and maybe another hundred or two injured – from concerned callers around the world, jotted it down on a notepad and tried not to make it look like notes from an academic lecture.
Behind me, the room kept swirling, but I remembered that it was Friday, and that there were candles, and put those two thoughts together with a friend to say a blessing for Shabbat. The mourner’s kaddish waded knee-deep through the back of my mind, but I didn’t let it out, just thought it as I looked up at the oil painting of the flat-owner’s family guru sitting cross-legged above the candles and smiled, pretending not to pretend that I hadn’t heard that hostages were still being held, that the train had been full of commuting laborers and that although they demanded foreigners they killed indiscriminately.
The first article I read was titled ‘Brooklyn Couple Killed,’ from the New York Times. I remembered the couple – we’d followed a collection of diasporic Jews from Keneseth Eliayahoo to the Nariman house after Friday night services last January, and ended up at my first Chabad experience. The imported and recreated food tasted strange rather than comforting, and although the idea of the community was nice and the Rabbi welcoming, I had been eager to leave. Rivka, his wife, was sweet, and we discussed her wig and adorable baby boy Moishe as we walked quickly down the alleyways towards Colaba Causeway.
Fresh from two days of a media fast when the rest of the world was feasting – and I mean feasting in a carrion sort of way, a morbid fascination with spreading the flames in a misguided attempt to honor the dead and understand the shifting fabric of reality – I read for hours, squinting through salt at the same ten images, and finally forming my own headline for my mental marquee:
Orphaning other people’s children will not make this world a safer place for anyone’s community.
Followed quickly, on the same mental marquee, by two of my favorite bumper stickers:
When Jesus said love thy neighbor, I’m pretty sure he meant don’t kill them.
When we attack the innocent, we become the enemy.
When I woke up on thanksgiving morning, America was eating dinner. I had no desire to run away from India, to escape the momentary mess that had been made out of people’s lives in Mumbai and people’s minds around the world – Kolkata seemed far away from all of that, safe despite the warnings, secured by the value of the open Nepalese and Bangladeshi borders and its own markedly faded glory. But I did want to gather around a chattering dinner table – preferably two or three pushed together, with as many different table cloths and some burnt orange and evergreen decorations – so I opened a book, tucked the people and the horror deep inside, and escaped.
The emails came quickly, of course, and I tried to write properly assuring responses, with a pinch of analysis and a dollop of heartache and an empathetic smile at the end:
When I heard about the attacks in Mumbai, I thought about the sickening extremes people are driven to in order to try to protect their sense of community, of a home and a place in the world, and the strange double-meanings of thanksgiving, stuck between honest gratitude and blatant colonization...
I've heard the American media is going a little berserk... people here are more mad at politicians for mishandling the situation than they are at supposed Pakistani ties. With one billion in the denominator, and a series of fairly regular bombings in large cities over the last few years, this is a big deal... but not such an affront to people's sense of the world, and how it works.
It’s the cycle, I think, that makes it all the most maddening, the dehumanizing and dominating and not expecting the exact same treatment in return – the idea that these tactics move a cause forward paired with the equally terrifying idea that the American army has made the world a safer place in the last eight years. The question of the day became the concerned inquiry, became whether you’d lost a friend, but questions of the day fade quickly. There were protests and funerals – there was even an unexploded bomb found two weeks later in the CST baggage room – there were op-eds and accusations, speculation on retaliation and billboards preaching solidarity.
Now the billboards for the ‘Great Indian Shopping Festival’ (Christmas!) are up, and the disturbing radio ads for recommendations on strategies for India’s ‘War on Terror’ (who thought of that brilliant phrasing?) have receded. If we just, well, kill enough of them, they’ll clearly stop killing us. Simple math. As we stacked the low stools we’d used as ground-level tables for thanksgiving and ushered the last guests out the door to the strains of a husky woman’s voice on our new sound system, the violence that had been graphically splattered across the front pages of the world’s newspapers for the last few days felt worlds away – I could even pretend that the children sleeping in the cement pipes at the end of my road were comfortable on their stained cotton t-shirt of a mattress, almost enjoy the glow of feeding people and being thankful for a colorful community without the sucker punch of remembering the cost of my comfort to millions of other people’s lives. Almost.
*Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal, formerly Victoria Terminal
Note: I highly recommend reading Arundhati Roy’s analysis of the attacks, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
The Book List, Part II
June 2008 – November 2008
Summer Reading:
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
I was given a classically tattered, duct-tape bound copy of this by a traveling Oregonian working at a circus that had stopped in Hyderabad just a few months before I was set to embark on an unplanned adventure. It was clearly a matter of fate; my mother suggested I just might find my father tagging along in the duct tape. I shared the opening with a mountain-top companion, devoured the middle in a molding closet-sized Varanasi hostel over the fourth of July, and turned the last dog-eared pages as I lay under fresh white sheets in San Francisco. The story rambled and roamed, as expected, and the characters made excellent caricatures of stories from the fifties, sixties, seventies – of discovering the ecstatic, and negotiating a road between that and the necessarily mundane details of staying alive in a socially bound world.
Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco
From ‘The Book List, Part I,’ posted in May 2008 – my sentiments remain exactly the same: I promised this book to myself as an end-of-thesis treat in Middletown, Connecticut. One year later, I picked it up at a bookstore in Hyderbad, Andhra Pradesh, and have been entranced ever since. It is about the patterns that people make, in their heads and in the sand, during humanity's varied and desperate attempts to find meaning in the world… quite simply, this book explains why I started reading (and writing and story-telling) in the first place.
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (selected stories)
Still beautiful, eleven months after I started to read them. Differently beautiful than the stories I’d read before I’d spent a year in India, but mostly because the details struck different types of familiar chords.
Going Postal and Making Money, Terry Pratchett
My favorite fluff; Pratchett never fails to garner me strange looks as I sit giggling over a paperback on a bus to downtown Seattle. Both books had an entrepreneurial bent perfect for inspiring a year of new projects in a newly familiar place.
The Lemon Tree, Sandy Tolan
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, told in a fundamentally humanizing way by following two families; Arab Palestinians forced out of their home to Jordan, and eventually to Gaza, and Bulgarian Jews who narrowly escape the Holocaust to settle in the same home that the Palestinians so recently ‘fled.’ Twenty years after both families are forced from their land, a young man goes to visit the home he was born in, and meets the young woman who has grown up there. The story is entirely non-fiction, based on meticulous research, and follows the history and trajectory of each family, as well as the friendship that unfolds between the Palestinian boy and the Israeli girl.
When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka
I started this on Orcas Island, read it through a sleepless night in Delhi, and watched at least three movies on the transatlantic flight in between. The poetry of the book’s first-person multi-voiced words and the importance of the story being told – of Japanese American families forcibly interned in camps during World War II – transcended the abrasive discontinuity between reading locations.
The Re-Immersion Period:
The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh
Selected as my introduction to Bengal – descriptive, adventurous, and insightful. Ghosh is not as artistic or extraordinary a writer as I’d expected, but his story of identity and the complex undercurrents of supposedly ‘simple’ lives in the Sundarbans (literally, ‘beautiful forest,’ the delta where the Ganges lets out into the ocean) left me curious enough to keep an eye out for his other works.
Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Album
Cheesier than I expected, but sweet and wise and a good reminder to live life, find peace with death, and cherish the moments in between.
Netherland, Joseph O’Neill
This is a book about being alone, about finding meaning in seemingly familiar activities and brutally ignoring the discrepancies, a tale of a post-9/11 Gatsby in a smoldering city and a failing marriage. I read it too soon after landing in a new place, but a few months in, it would have made a great read; the sentences are delectable, and the clunky zip-wired plot is well laid to dash the reader from sanity to total discombobulation and back.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
A megalomaniacal rant on philosophy and convention combined with a maniacal love for the technical details of a motorcycle as equal parts metaphor and tool. My training in science and philosophy of science balked at Pirsig’s rough deconstruction of those two fields, but his detailed description of probable escapes from ‘gumption traps’ still comes to mind when I think I’ve lost my last ounce of patience with the Indian service sector. After reading this, I felt decidedly ready to take a break from ‘meaning of life’ books, although I realize this may be difficult due to my conviction that the stories we tell are the only grasp we can have on reality.
Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
After failing to summit K2, Greg Mortenson stumbled down the mountain and into an isolated Balti village. Before he left, he promised to return and build them a school; over the next decade, he built over fifty schools, vocational training centers, and water systems for schools in the mountainous region along the Pakistani-Afghan border. The best and most important parts of this book are the records of conversations Mortensen had with the mountain men and women with whom he worked. The book is not a masterpiece, but it’s a story you should hear; think ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains,’ less artfully written, and with a protagonist equally likely to be shot at by revolutionaries but less likely to cause an intellectual paradigm shift in his field.
The Householder, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
A simple story, told in simple words, about the mental somersaults we turn on the way to viewing ourselves as adults ready to shape our own lives and to take responsibility for the lives of others. [Ruth, Polish by ancestry, married an Indian architect in London, and they lived together in Delhi from 1951 to 1975.]
Current and Ongoing Literary Adventures:
The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen
I’ve made it through about two-thirds of this strangely encyclopedic yet repetitive classic. Sen discusses a billion aspects of life in modern India (gender dynamics, China, Tagore, the Hindu fundamentalist BJP, voice), and how it came to be this way, while repeatedly highlighting two themes; that the strength and beauty of India lies in her (a) heterogeneity and (b) rich argumentative tradition. A collection of academic and journalistic essays, it is slightly dry, brilliantly worded, and probabilistically available even in the most remote areas of India – they sold it at the mountain-top NGO campus I first stayed at with AJWS, forty five minutes north of Mussoorie.
A Tagore Reader, edited by Amiya Chakravarty
My goal is to read anything and, eventually, everything by Rabindranath Tagore, the late great Bengali polymath intellectual. Because I’m in Bengal, and because he’s estimated to be the only person to have written the national anthem for two countries (India and Bangladesh).
Summer Reading:
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
I was given a classically tattered, duct-tape bound copy of this by a traveling Oregonian working at a circus that had stopped in Hyderabad just a few months before I was set to embark on an unplanned adventure. It was clearly a matter of fate; my mother suggested I just might find my father tagging along in the duct tape. I shared the opening with a mountain-top companion, devoured the middle in a molding closet-sized Varanasi hostel over the fourth of July, and turned the last dog-eared pages as I lay under fresh white sheets in San Francisco. The story rambled and roamed, as expected, and the characters made excellent caricatures of stories from the fifties, sixties, seventies – of discovering the ecstatic, and negotiating a road between that and the necessarily mundane details of staying alive in a socially bound world.
Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco
From ‘The Book List, Part I,’ posted in May 2008 – my sentiments remain exactly the same: I promised this book to myself as an end-of-thesis treat in Middletown, Connecticut. One year later, I picked it up at a bookstore in Hyderbad, Andhra Pradesh, and have been entranced ever since. It is about the patterns that people make, in their heads and in the sand, during humanity's varied and desperate attempts to find meaning in the world… quite simply, this book explains why I started reading (and writing and story-telling) in the first place.
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (selected stories)
Still beautiful, eleven months after I started to read them. Differently beautiful than the stories I’d read before I’d spent a year in India, but mostly because the details struck different types of familiar chords.
Going Postal and Making Money, Terry Pratchett
My favorite fluff; Pratchett never fails to garner me strange looks as I sit giggling over a paperback on a bus to downtown Seattle. Both books had an entrepreneurial bent perfect for inspiring a year of new projects in a newly familiar place.
The Lemon Tree, Sandy Tolan
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, told in a fundamentally humanizing way by following two families; Arab Palestinians forced out of their home to Jordan, and eventually to Gaza, and Bulgarian Jews who narrowly escape the Holocaust to settle in the same home that the Palestinians so recently ‘fled.’ Twenty years after both families are forced from their land, a young man goes to visit the home he was born in, and meets the young woman who has grown up there. The story is entirely non-fiction, based on meticulous research, and follows the history and trajectory of each family, as well as the friendship that unfolds between the Palestinian boy and the Israeli girl.
When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka
I started this on Orcas Island, read it through a sleepless night in Delhi, and watched at least three movies on the transatlantic flight in between. The poetry of the book’s first-person multi-voiced words and the importance of the story being told – of Japanese American families forcibly interned in camps during World War II – transcended the abrasive discontinuity between reading locations.
The Re-Immersion Period:
The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh
Selected as my introduction to Bengal – descriptive, adventurous, and insightful. Ghosh is not as artistic or extraordinary a writer as I’d expected, but his story of identity and the complex undercurrents of supposedly ‘simple’ lives in the Sundarbans (literally, ‘beautiful forest,’ the delta where the Ganges lets out into the ocean) left me curious enough to keep an eye out for his other works.
Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Album
Cheesier than I expected, but sweet and wise and a good reminder to live life, find peace with death, and cherish the moments in between.
Netherland, Joseph O’Neill
This is a book about being alone, about finding meaning in seemingly familiar activities and brutally ignoring the discrepancies, a tale of a post-9/11 Gatsby in a smoldering city and a failing marriage. I read it too soon after landing in a new place, but a few months in, it would have made a great read; the sentences are delectable, and the clunky zip-wired plot is well laid to dash the reader from sanity to total discombobulation and back.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
A megalomaniacal rant on philosophy and convention combined with a maniacal love for the technical details of a motorcycle as equal parts metaphor and tool. My training in science and philosophy of science balked at Pirsig’s rough deconstruction of those two fields, but his detailed description of probable escapes from ‘gumption traps’ still comes to mind when I think I’ve lost my last ounce of patience with the Indian service sector. After reading this, I felt decidedly ready to take a break from ‘meaning of life’ books, although I realize this may be difficult due to my conviction that the stories we tell are the only grasp we can have on reality.
Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
After failing to summit K2, Greg Mortenson stumbled down the mountain and into an isolated Balti village. Before he left, he promised to return and build them a school; over the next decade, he built over fifty schools, vocational training centers, and water systems for schools in the mountainous region along the Pakistani-Afghan border. The best and most important parts of this book are the records of conversations Mortensen had with the mountain men and women with whom he worked. The book is not a masterpiece, but it’s a story you should hear; think ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains,’ less artfully written, and with a protagonist equally likely to be shot at by revolutionaries but less likely to cause an intellectual paradigm shift in his field.
The Householder, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
A simple story, told in simple words, about the mental somersaults we turn on the way to viewing ourselves as adults ready to shape our own lives and to take responsibility for the lives of others. [Ruth, Polish by ancestry, married an Indian architect in London, and they lived together in Delhi from 1951 to 1975.]
Current and Ongoing Literary Adventures:
The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen
I’ve made it through about two-thirds of this strangely encyclopedic yet repetitive classic. Sen discusses a billion aspects of life in modern India (gender dynamics, China, Tagore, the Hindu fundamentalist BJP, voice), and how it came to be this way, while repeatedly highlighting two themes; that the strength and beauty of India lies in her (a) heterogeneity and (b) rich argumentative tradition. A collection of academic and journalistic essays, it is slightly dry, brilliantly worded, and probabilistically available even in the most remote areas of India – they sold it at the mountain-top NGO campus I first stayed at with AJWS, forty five minutes north of Mussoorie.
A Tagore Reader, edited by Amiya Chakravarty
My goal is to read anything and, eventually, everything by Rabindranath Tagore, the late great Bengali polymath intellectual. Because I’m in Bengal, and because he’s estimated to be the only person to have written the national anthem for two countries (India and Bangladesh).
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