No lift to our spirits

The edit page of today's Hindustan Times (Jan 28) carries an article I actually wrote over two weeks ago. It was a reaction to news about the death of several labourers when the "temporary" lift they were riding in, in an under-construction building, collapsed.

Read the epaper version of the article here: No lift to our spirits.

Or, since epaper versions seem to vanish after a while, my original text is below. (I called it "Tale of two photos").

Comments welcome.

***
Tale of two photos

The photograph is stark, and tells a story all its own. A 22-storey building called La Sonarisa in Matunga, I read on the front page of the Hindustan Times (January 10), has two so-called "passenger elevators". On page 5 of the same newspaper is another report, with a photograph of what's scribbled on the door of one of these elevators: "LABOURS NO ARE ALLOWED" (sic).

That is, those passenger elevators are meant only for the residents of the building. So since there was still construction going on at La Sonarisa, and since the labourers doing the construction were not allowed to use the passenger elevators, they had to use a "temporary elevator rigged up in a shaft" to go about their labours. This elevator was in a "dilapidated condition" and "shouldn't have been there", according to municipal officials quoted in the news reports. The PWD even said it doesn't "recognize" such lifts as lifts at all, because they are only "used for ferrying goods." It never issued "permission" for this one to operate.

Permission or not, on Sunday morning the temporary elevator in La Sonarisa plummeted down that shaft from several floors up. It was not ferrying goods. It was carrying people. Labourer people. When it hit the ground, the impact killed five labourers; a sixth died in hospital a day later.

I wonder if the builders and residents of La Sonarisa have stopped to think about their policy, scrawled on the face of their recognized elevators, that forced labourers to use an unsafe elevator that authorities would not even recognize as one. I wonder if they have thought about the implications of dividing people in their building into two classes, with considerations of safety being an unimportant triviality for one of them.

Of course such division is by no means a new phenomenon, nor is it unknown to those of us who live in multi-storeyed buildings. In fact, there's a range of ways people consider these devices that ferry us up and down.

In a building I know of, one resident induced a deal of resentment among her neighbours because the kids who came to her for music lessons would use the lift to go up to her 9th-floor home. In another, vegetable and fruit vendors are barred from using the lift, even though all who live there buy from these vendors on their doorsteps anyway. In a third, residents were annoyed with "outsiders" who cause "wear-and-tear" to their lift, holding to the eccentric notion that their own use of it causes no such wear-and-tear. In a fourth, I once found a sign on the ground floor that said, and I quote, "servants and dogs are not allowed to use the lift."

And now I know about La Sonarisa where labourers cannot use the lift. Yes, that photograph says a lot.

On the edit page of the Hindustan Times (January 11), Anil Dharker finds that another photograph altogether says a lot to him. This one is of Graeme Smith and MS Dhoni, after the recent Test series ended. Dharker tells us that Dhoni's look in the shot is not one of "an upstart who is delighted to be in august company", but "one of confidence, just a bit short of arrogance." A lot to read into one smiling cricketer's face, but that's what Dharker does.

But he uses that smile to expound at length on a theme I keep thinking folks must be tiring of -- but no. Dharker says our cricketers' performance these days reflects new attitudes in India itself. Our "increasing prosperity and [our] rise as an economic power", claims Dharker, is the reason Dhoni has "the confidence of one who belongs … on the world stage." We must love hearing this stuff, given how many people speak like this.

And naturally, this is a contrast to days gone by, when our teams were "beaten before they started." In fact, Dharker tells us, in the 1970s and 1980s "Indians were embarrassed to be Indians". We're having none of that now. These days, he writes, "embarrassment has given way to pride."

As always when I hear this rhetoric, I wonder: just who are these Indians that Dharker is talking about? I lived through the 1970s and 1980s myself, here and abroad, and I know this much: I don't recall once feeling embarrassed to be Indian. I don't recall any of my Indian friends and colleagues feeling embarrassed to be Indian. In those years when we were young, many of those friends and colleagues began successful careers at the world's best-known universities, or high-powered research labs, or widely-admired corporations. Some started immensely successful businesses on their own. Embarrassed is not what comes to mind, thinking of them.

But if Anil Dharker was embarrassed to be Indian in those years, he should speak for himself. Not for hordes of other Indians. Not for me.

But apart from that, if we can divine all this meaning about India from one routine photograph of a cricket star, I wonder what meaning we should read into the photograph I mentioned to start this essay. What does that sign on the Matunga lift, "LABOURS NO ARE ALLOWED", say about India?

Does it speak of a "new-found swagger [that] suits the new India"? Or is it a reminder of an old India that refuses to go away?

Takeaways

So here's the thing. Some months ago, I posted here about takeaways that I, well, took away from an ad for the Chate International Academy. These were important takeaways, because they involved both 720 kilometres and insects that went in circles and dazzling capabilities (of which I clearly have none, because otherwise I might have caught the error in using that word "both").

Well, I'm glad I had those takeaways. Because today's news is that there are going to be some other takeaways from that very same Chate International Academy. Specifically, the one I mean is that the Academy has been fined Rs 500,000 for "misleading students by using the national emblem on its advertisement."

Sort of fitting, in more ways than one, that this news comes to us on January 26.

To my constitution

As my country celebrates 61 years with a Constitution, here in no particular order are some (only some) of the things I wish that I, and my India, would fully understand:

* Freedoms guaranteed to us have meaning and value -- and are therefore precious. Example: the freedom of speech. It does not come to us tempered by religious sentiments or other such. It is absolute.

* Nonetheless, with freedoms, and even absolute freedoms, come responsibilities. There is no contradiction there.

* Therefore, having a freedom does not give you the right to evade the consequences of your exercise of it, if any. If you shout "Fire!" falsely in a crowded theatre and a stampede results and people are killed, you cannot escape whatever punishment is due by invoking your freedom of speech.

* Having a functioning judiciary means everyone, even people we may loathe, gets legal representation. This is the only way to ensure justice for us all; this is fundamental to the idea of India.

* Therefore, people who attack lawyers who defend particular cases are themselves ignorant of what it means to live in this country, to be Indian.

* There is a sense the Constitution gives us starting in its very first word: that we are all Indian and are in this great Indian enterprise together. All one billion plus of us.

* Therefore, it makes little sense to celebrate the dramatically changed lives 250 million Indians lead, but to pay little attention to the stagnation, or minimal change, in the lives of the other 750 million plus Indians.

* All one billion plus of us deserve, not an equality in the way we live, but an equal chance at a life of dignity. There's a difference.

* Patriotism is not founded on standing up in a movie theatre because a flag appears on screen and the national anthem plays. It is founded in what we feel towards our fellow Indians. Again, all one billion plus of them, but I can start with the guy next to me on the train, or on the street, or in that movie theatre.

* We will necessarily have differing opinions on pretty much every issue. Yet this is the essence of democracy.

* Yet democracy itself gives us the means to address our differences, however sharp and wide: it's called dialogue.

* Yet there's no dialogue when we instead call each other names, whether "terrorist enabler" or "fascist" or something else. There's no dialogue when we instead take to violence. When there's no dialogue, we sink the idea of India.

* I owe this point to my son, this morning: this is a day not just for being stiff and formal and solemn, but to celebrate. Please do!

***
A similar list I made exactly 5 months and 11 days ago: To be free.

Pain, suddenly

Four of us at dinner at a Bombay institution, one of the city's oldest Chinese restaurants, last night. As it turns out, I haven't been there since I was about 13 or 14, which by my calculations comes to, let's see, hmm, about 67 years.

Anyway. When we were done, we emerged from the restaurant and two of us walked over to the nearby paanwala to get, you guessed it, a paan. The other two, a friend and I, stood chatting on the pavement.

A small girl approached and asked for money. Also asking us for money were an ancient man sitting on the pavement behind us, and an equally ancient woman sitting on the pavement a few feet on the other side of us. After a few moments during which the girl kept asking, I fished in my pockets. No coins. I pulled out my wallet. Found a Rs 5 note. Gave it to her.

She ran off to the corner, and almost immediately two or three other girls emerged from there, also asking for money. Behind me, the old man grumbled. "You gave her money, you didn't give me any!" Then the first girl returned. With a smile, she said, "The note is torn!"

I took it back. It was indeed badly torn. Looked in my wallet again, no more Rs 5 notes. I pulled out a Rs 10 note and gave it to her.

The old man grumbled some more. The other girls asked again for money. My friend spoke to them, asking their names and where they were from.

Our other two friends came back with their paan. We turned to walk away, homeward bound.

Suddenly I felt an excruciating pain on the back of my knee. I turned around, hobbling for a few seconds. The old man had hit me with a long stick, the size and thickness of a police lathi.

"You didn't give me anything!" he shouted at me.

I just stood there, still in pain, looking at him.

Post-colonial flight

Today's Mint Lounge carries an essay I did on a recent trip to Laitkynsew, Meghalaya. It (the essay) discusses a post office, Bangladesh and a paper plane, and even has a mention of Hatuey.

Check here: Post-colonial flight.

Your comments welcome.

Tea, peanuts and more

Someone says the man in Shiloda village, outside Akola, has a BPL card. He nods his head and tells his wife, "Bring the yellow card! The yellow one!" Minutes later, she gives me their orange ration card. Maybe they can't find the BPL card just now. Anyway, with one or the other or both of these cards, they are eligible to buy 20 kg of wheat and 10 kg of rice a month, for a total of Rs 100. They also get some sugar and kerosene.

She uses too much of the sugar to make us some tea, it's that sweet. He is actually shivering as he brings the tea to where I sit, on a cot outside the hut on which he has laid a mattress and a sheet, all just for me. I tell him, please go make yourself warm. He walks over to a small fire and holds his feet above it. I sip my tea, dipping into it one from a plate of small rusks he has also brought me. On this chilly morning, the hot sweet liquid hits home something fierce.

Minutes later, a young girl grabs my hand and says, come and have my mother's poha. Even as I start saying no, I realize how much they want us to eat with them, so I say yes. Take off my sandals, bend low and walk over the mud floor -- cold like ice on this chilly morning -- to the tarpaulin they have laid out for us.

The mother, a broad-shouldered handsome woman in a sari, is getting ready to make the poha over a fire in their hut. I watch as she quickly and efficiently slices chillies and onions and some other stuff, then flings it all into a vessel that sits on the fire. In minutes, a small steaming plate is in front of me, and the first thing I notice is that it also contains peanuts. I have never had poha with peanuts. It is excellent.

Two young boys sit beside me, watching me eat and smiling. I hand them my notebook and ask if they will write their names for me. In spidery Devnagari, they do so. Then one takes the book back and writes in English: "HANPH". He gives it to the other, who writes: "NIASR". Thus do I get to know Hanif and Nisar, who spend most of the rest of the day wandering Shiloda with us.

Why aren't you in school, I ask.

We heard you both had come to our village, says Hanif. So we came to see you.

Salman Taseer

Blasphemy? Are you kidding me? What on earth is blasphemy? That a person has opinions is turned into a crime? To me, the fact that a country in this 21st Century has on its books a law to punish what it calls blasphemers, that it seeks to invoke that law to put a woman to death, is itself something approaching blasphemy. Though since I cannot bring myself to ascribe meaning and substance to this thing called "blasphemy", I'll call this what it really is, an abomination. A blot. A monstrosity.

More than that. A warning.

For this abomination is rooted in just one thing: the creation of Pakistan on religious lines. As much as there are the claims that Jinnah had a vision of a secular Pakistan (and I think he did), the very idea of a country founded on a faith -- whatever the faith, in this case Islam -- carries at its core the seeds of today's blasphemy laws. That founding itself makes it inevitable that there will come a day when a man -- whoever the man, in this case Salman Taseer -- who questions the perversity of blasphemy will be targeted and killed. It also carries the seeds of the ultimate destruction of the country.

Because that's the nature of religion. When you follow a faith, any faith, it enjoins you to hold its precepts higher, somehow more esteemed, than every other religion's precepts. Too easily, that extends to holding every other faith's precepts in contempt, and, by extension, its adherents in contempt too. And a further extension leads to hatred for those of your own faith -- like Taseer -- who question such depraved conceit. Vacuous superciliousness like this is a feature of every religion I've run into, and is manifested in varied words I've also run into, such as "kaffir", "tolerance", "blasphemy", "sentiments", "dirty [outsiders]" and more.

All of which is why the real blasphemy in connection with Salman Taseer is of life and humanity itself. Because anyone who thinks taking a human life has religious sanction -- and the killer of Taseer and his cheerleaders clearly think Islam gave them that sanction -- disgraces humanity.

If blasphemy has any meaning, it's right there, in that disgrace. All I can say is, may a thousand Salman Taseers bloom from his grave.

The sun turns

December 22, or the winter solstice, is the shortest day of the year. After that, the days get longer. So without thinking about it much, I grew up imagining two things: one, that in the days before December 22, the sun rises slightly later and sets slightly earlier every day, thus each day turns out to be shorter than the previous. And two, that after December 22, the sun rises slightly earlier and sets slightly later every day, thus each day turns out to be longer than the previous.

Well, things don't quite match that neat picture.

In the days before December 22, the sun actually does rise slightly later every day. But it also sets slightly later every day, though the daily increments are smaller than with the sunrise. The result: the days get progressively shorter.

In the days after December 22, the sun continues to rise slightly later every day. It also sets later every day, though now the daily increments are larger than with the sunrise. The result: the days start to lengthen, just as expected.

And this trend continues till … today, January 14. It is only after today that the sun starts rising slightly earlier every day.

Questions: Is this why January 14 is a marked day on Indian calendars (Pongal, or Sankranth)? And is this date a function of the earth's latitude? Or of its tilt on its axis? Or something else? In other words, can you explain this phenomenon to me in terms I can understand?

***
PostscriptThere should be a similar, but mirror-imaged, phenomenon around the summer solstice, June 22. Is July 14/15 a similarly marked date anywhere?

Service, above all

The Jan-Feb 2011 issue of HouseCalls is out. I've been writing essays for the magazine for several issues now. This one carries something I wrote called "Service, above all". You can find it on page 62 on that site, but it's a little cumbersome, so it's appended below.

Comments welcome.

***
When my father died, in September 2007, we invited a few people who knew him well to speak about him at his cremation. They said many warm things, making it a little easier for us in the family to get used to his passing. One of the speakers, S, was a colleague and close friend who had known my father for nearly 50 years. S began by recounting one moment from those five decades that, he said, "stood out" in his mind.

My father, JB D'Souza (known to his colleagues as JB), spent his career in the Indian Administrative Service. At the moment S was talking about, in about 1970, he had just been appointed head of CIDCO, the agency that was to oversee the development of the new city across Bombay's harbour, or New Bombay. He asked S, an accomplished urban planner, to join the project. When S walked into CIDCO's office in Bombay's Nariman Point, JB shook his hand and said, "Welcome to public service." As S said at JB's cremation: "It doesn’t sound like anything much, but there was something in the way he said it, something that gave it an emotional charge. Because for him, public service was what life was all about. Being a Government servant was almost incidental. What mattered was public service."

This is not meant to be some kind of hagiography of my father; I know that would be anathema to him. But I think it is worth examining the idea of public service as S and JB meant it, especially at a time when a profusion of scams suggest that it is an outdated, derided idea. When people elected or appointed to public service have little interest in either the public or service.

Take the Adarsh building in South Bombay. The details are too well known to need me to spell them out, especially given that they forced a Maharashtra Chief Minister to resign. Still, in a nutshell: when first proposed in about 2003, Adarsh was to be a six-storey building to house widows of soldiers killed in the Kargil war. When it was finally completed several years later, it was 31 storeys tall and none of its residents were remotely connected to Kargil. (That is, if you don't count two "soldiers", listed by Adarsh as flatowners, whom the Army denied having any record of). So who does own flats in Adarsh? A motley collection of bureaucrats, their children, politicians from various parties, their siblings and in-laws, retired senior defence officers, possibly their relatives, and possibly some more.

What's more, many of those same bureaucrats were involved in passing one clearance or another for those who built Adarsh, including the way it magically grew to 31 storeys.

If this Adarsh narrative wasn't real, it would make an excellent comedy film, containing as it does everything from winking officials to windfalls for relatives, a five-fold growth in height to fictitious soldiers. Which Bollywood scriptwriter could have dreamed up all that, all at once? Yet Adarsh really serves best as a commentary on contemporary India, where the rise of the middle-class is more than matched by a rise in the scale of corruption and greed.

There is much to investigate in the Adarsh episode, and we can at least hope that justice will be served. But in the meantime, give some thought to how relatives of public servants -- sons, daughters, in-laws and more -- have benefited from Adarsh. Give some thought not to the legality or otherwise there -- I have no doubt that the bureaucrats concerned, especially, will explain smoothly how everything was legally done -- but to an old-fashioned idea called "propriety".

In other words, give some thought to this question: should a senior bureaucrat really use his position to help his relatives in any way?

The point about public service is captured nicely in the name itself: it's about serving the public. No more, no less. You are accountable not to your family, not to some particular Minister, not to something called Government, but to the people. You answer to that idea of propriety. That means you don't do things, you don't take decisions, that will raise questions later. That means, yes, no favours for sons and wives and daughters and mothers-in-law, period. That means your primary concern is serving the public interest, protecting it, period.

This is the implicit contract that binds you when you join the IAS. But more than that, it is a good way to define what you will be doing in the IAS. If this makes little sense to you, or if you think it is impractical and impossibly idealistic to be so bound, you should find a job somewhere else. Maybe some of the Adarsh crowd need to have followed that path.

Possibly you believe I'm wandering too far with, making too much of, the Adarsh grab-bag of political and bureaucratic kin? Well, think of Enron then.

In his startling book "Power Play", Abhay Mehta spells out the Enron scandal of the 1990s in Maharashtra in close detail. This was one great benighted saga of bribes and skullduggery that consumed the state through that decade. (As Adarsh may yet consume the state through this decade, who knows). Its ways of doing business, if we can call them that, eventually consigned Enron to the trashcan of history. But not before everything that Enron's critics, like Mehta, had predicted about their operations in Maharashtra actually came true. Yet of course, these same critics were consistently scorned for being "anti-Maharashtra" and "anti-development".

As you might expect, the skullduggery happened because of the ordinary greed and negligence of many ordinary Indian men. Mehta explains that Enron came to India intent on getting itself the best possible bargain here, doing "what most business houses would have done" in that pursuit. Nothing intrinsically wrong there; by definition, a business chases profits. But Mehta writes: "The problem lies mostly with us -- the Indian nation state of India and all that term represents or should represent. At the core ... lies our inability to deal with or look after our own interests and to take responsibility for our actions or the lack thereof."

For it was India's own Indians -- politicians, but a whole swathe of bureaucrats too -- who gave Enron what turned out to be the most lucrative contract in its history. Doing so, they left Indian interests -- the interests it was their job to protect and promote -- wallowing in the dust.

There's as good a trashing of the idea of public service as any. For I'd like to suggest that when you see your IAS job as a way to help relatives get flats, it's not much of a leap before you start flinging rules out the window so that an Enron can cheat its consumers. Cheat a nation.

So when I read news about Enrons and Adarshes, it takes my mind back to the lesson my father taught well: being the children of a senior bureaucrat brought my siblings and me no favours. This became clear to us early. For example, he would not let his official car take us anywhere unless he was also in it, travelling to or from work, and we could be dropped off en route.

To this day, I remember the time that it was pouring as school ended one afternoon. I found a phone and called JB to ask if he could send the car to take us home. He listened and then said one word: "Walk." But we'll be drenched, I wailed. He said six more words: "You can dry off at home." It seemed cruel. We did get drenched. But we were dry long before he got home, and then I grew to appreciate, respect and absorb the example he set. And then it occurred to me: he had taught me something I value every day. Not cruel at all.

When he died, the Guardian in England carried an obituary for JB. It had this line: "In the gigantic heap of pestilential and growing venality which passes so often for the Government of India, he was one … who remained, despite all odds, dedicated to the idea of public service, a notion becoming almost quaint in modern India's world of swashbuckling capitalism, the fast buck and devil-take-the-hindmost."

It made me proud, sure. But it made me yearn for quaintness once more: whether with unscrupulous companies or with flats in fancy buildings. It made me long for more public servants to greet each other with that "emotional charge": Welcome to public service.

Each of us

Mark Rendeiro is a world-traveller. Every time I hear from him, he's somewhere else Siberia, the US, Portugal ... Naturally, I was delighted that he read my Roadrunner and wrote about it on his thoughtful site, CitizenReporter.org.

Take a look: Roadrunner in Each of Us.

Three deaths

All three were killed in retaliation for some perceived affront or threat to members of some religion.

All three killers have their vocal defenders who celebrate their deeds.

Two were killed in public places.

Two were killed by members of their security detail.

Any more parallels/differences?

I refer to Mohandas K Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Salman Taseer.

Not terror?

For all those who regularly write condescendingly to me, or leave comments, saying I don't know the definition of terrorism and I mix things up when I refer to massacres like 1984 or 2002 as terrorism -- for all those folks, I have some questions.

In this report, a woman speaks of the murder of her father in 1984. (This is only one such: There must have been plenty of other incidents like this then).

So I wonder: As this father he was hunted down and set on fire, as he escaped the mob and ran for his life and was hunted down again, as he was tied up and set on fire again, as he was beaten with rods -- through all this as he died, did the man not feel terror? Did his family not feel terror?

By what convoluted logic or intricate definition does this not qualify as terrorism?

Prepared for surprises

As expected, Binayak Sen is challenging his sentence of life imprisonment in the Chhattisgarh High Court. While I hope it will be overturned, there is what a good friend, a lawyer, said to me the other day: "Be prepared, always, for our courts to surprise you." And he did not mean pleasant surprises.

There are many things about this case that disturb me.

One, the way a law (Section 124) the British used against the giants of our freedom struggle is used by an Indian government against Indians.

Two, the way this use of the law is uncritically applauded and justified by so many.

Three, the flimsiness of the evidence against Sen. He carried letters? He spoke to jailed (but not convicted) Maoists? He got email from the "ISI", only that turned out to be Delhi's Indian Social Institute?

Four, the way governments seek to stifle any discussion of why we have this enormous problem of the Maoist movement hanging over us.

Five, the way so many of us go along with that stifling, and abuse anyone who seeks such discussion.

Six, the meaning of Indian democracy itself. Does holding elections every few years make us a democracy? Or should the standard be the fundamental promise and ideal of democracy: that everyone feels she has been heard?

Seven, and this follows: the meaning of India itself.

KG Kannabiran

KG Kannabiran, 1929-2010.

Among much else: "In 1971, he filed a writ petition successfully challenging the Andhra Pradesh Preventive Detention Act, 1970, under which writers, poets and intellectuals had been arrested." (The Hindu, December 31 2010).

Especially at a time Binayak Sen has been imprisoned, you will be missed, Mr Kannabiran.

Go in peace.