Sadistic Part of Diwali

Today I reacted to a Deccan Herald (an English daily) news item such that you react to a needless tragedy brought by a futile pursuit. The article reported that on Wednesday some people injured their eyes by Diwali fireworks. What was worse is that some of them were not even using fireworks themselves but just passing by others using them. The piece was accompanied by a photo of the poor chaps with their eyes bandaged. The article said passersby are most likely to be hurt by Diwali fireworks because they are least prepared.


It further informed that this despite ‘how to celebrate Dewali safely’ educational campaigns the government has been running. I thought how many of the children playing with fireworks even know about those campaigns and even if their parents know and have cautioned them, how many of them are likely to dampen their Diwali spirit by being mindful of boring government cautions. In fact, why blame kids; even their parents put fire to bomb wicks with the innocence and unconcern that will put their children to shame.

I have nothing against fireworks in general. Some of them form extraordinary spectacle and almost all of them add to the festivity of the occasion. Except one: crackers. There is nothing beautiful or festive about them, only eardrum-shattering noise. And sadly, in the squib community, they are the most used ones. For each rocket that whistles up and bursts forming patterns against the dark sky, there are at least ten crackers that go off giving the festival evening the sound and feel of a warzone.

There is a cryptic mentality behind bursting noisy crackers. Unlike rockets and their ilk which are about delicacy and beauty, noisy crackers are aggressive and assertive. They help you announce your arrival and let others know that you couldn’t care less that the noise was bothering them. In fact, the fact that the noise could bother others makes crackers more preferable to their silent beauty-oriented cousins. There is something sadistic and macho about bursting them. As a kid, when I used to burst them together with my cousins, holding them in your hand, instead of keeping them at a safe distance, to light their wick and then throwing them with an air of nonchalance, as if unconcerned about the risk of the act, was a mark of bravery.

The older you were in the group, the closer to you and the longer you would like to keep the combustible. One of my cousins even used to go to his school and stealthily throw a bomb in a solitary corner and then see it go off from a distance and then brag about it to his friends the next day. It was his protestation against a bullying system. Can you tell me what fun the new-money types derive from bursting long rolls of slender red reed-like patakas sinking an entire neighborhood into nerve-wrecking sound?

But let me not blame crackers alone. All forms of squibs are bad in varying degrees. And their use, however warranted by the occasion of Diwali, puts others at risk. After taking off, if a rocket assumes a crooked trajectory instead of a straight one, it’s anyone’s guess what can happen. Similarly, a rangmashal or phuljhari or fire whirl can be equally dangerous to the user as also a person walking by (as the article suggested). And all this or at least a substantial bit of the risk posed to others can be avoided if only one can avoid using fireworks in neighborhoods and go to an open maidan.

But then the anonymous nature of a vast maidan would hardly help you make a point. If the government is really serious about reducing hysteria-induced injuries, it should consign its educational modules on safe Diwali to flames and simply ban the use of fireworks in public place. My celebration shouldn’t become your agony.

Musings on Russia

Lately, I have been having an affair with Russia. I am reading Anton Chekhov (I have written a bit about it below) and accidentally the other day I heard a program on radio: From Russia with love. I can’t remember the channel I heard it on, but I found it quite interesting. It was a long program where the host interminably read out tit bits on Russia in Hindi, in news-reading style, with very occasional interruptions coming in form of Hindi songs. I couldn’t follow whether it was an Indian-government-backed initiative to promote our relations with Russia. Since then I have heard the program a few more times.


The program covers a wide range of topics – science and technology, literature, healthcare etc -and paints Russia with a very lofty brush. I found some of the stuff amusing. Let me share some of them. Somewhere in Russia, child psychiatrists are conducting an experiment where they are having friendly dogs play with mentally retarded children and after weeks of play and mingling with the canines, the children are showing the signs of improvement in their social behavior.

Now potatoes are an inseparable part of Russian diet, but they were not always so. Many centuries back, when a Russian czar went to Europe, he was introduced to the vegetable and he sent a sack of a particular variety of potatoes to a feudal lord back in Russia and asked him to grow the variety of potatoes in his field. After some years although the consumption of potatoes slightly spread in Russia, it remained restricted to elite circles, being served only at parties where boiled potatoes were served with sugar sprinkled on them.

Then, when famine came to Russia and the country slid into an excessive scarcity of food, the Russian monarchy forced peasants to grow potatoes. Forced to grow a vegetable they were not used to, the peasants revolted. The host couldn’t say what happened to the revolt, but the rise in potato consumption in Russia can be, the host informed, traced back to a few years after the breakout of the revolt.

What surprised me most about the bits of information the host shared is that everything sounded surprisingly novel despite the fact that Russia has been a long-standing foreign-policy buddy of India and the Indian-government has sponsored many TV and radio programs (especially on Doordarsan) as part of its relationship-building measures with the Soviet Russia. (The radio program, in fact, sounded like one of those initiatives which have outlasted their purpose and time.)

Had it been America or say Germany, would things still feel so unheard of? Many of the things would still sound novel but as a whole they wouldn’t sound as foreign and unfamiliar as Russia’s. And remember, the US, Germany nor any other country has been India’s friend for as long as Russia.

Our hobnobbing with Russia started in the post-independent Nehru era, although it was informal due to Nehru’s non-alignment policy. The relationship was formalized under subsequent governments as the cold war intensified with the passage of time and it became difficult to stay neutral. And it got an impetus when Russia sided with India against Pakistan during the Bangladesh war. In the early 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Russia and the start of market liberalization in India, we started getting close to the US and moving away from Russia.

But strangely, this long friendship never led to people to people relationship. Russia remained an obscure place where few people, not good enough to get admission in Indian colleges, went to study medical, engineering and other technical courses. We didn’t know enough about its people and society nor were we really interested in them. For us, Russia was a country behind a veil. Sadly, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, not much has changed about Russia. (Last week I read an article which said Russia is still not well understood by Europe.)

I think to us what glamorized American culture deglamorized Russia: Hollywood. If you see Hollywood movies of the cold war era, Russia was their favorite punching bag. Either it was Rambo outfighting the Russians in Afghanistan or James Bond (who is actually a British character but Bond movies and Hollywood are inseparable) outwitting a Russian spy.

In the cold war days, America fought Russia not just through the CIA but also through popular culture, demonizing everything Russian and lionizing anything American. And it worked, because the Soviet Russia didn’t have an equivalent of Hollywood which could combat US popular attack and sell its point to the world. Or being a communist country, did Russia prefer secrecy to transparency, never creating a Hollywood deliberately?

Perhaps that’s the reason why we still know so less about Russia.

Anton Chekhov's Short Stories

I have been reading a collection of short stories by Anton Chekhov, one of the Russian literary greats, regarded as master of modern short stories. What triggered my interest in Chekov is that many short story authors I have read are said to model their style after Chekhov’s.

The most famous of them all are Hemingway and Faulkner; I have reader neither of them. But I have read RK Narayan’s and recently Daniyal Mueenuddin’s and many more well and little known writers’ short works (in books and magazines) who, knowingly or unknowingly, follow the Chekhov style, which bases itself not on an airtight plot but a slow narrative without too many excitements and mostly ends on a sad note. It’s very close to how real life is.

Chekhov lived until 1904 and so the stories show the pre-revolution Russia. The stories are about Russian elite and peasant life (and its miserability). But they don’t make any political comment on the human conditions prevalent before the coming of the revolution.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders: Journey through Pakistan

In the last five years or so, the number of books published in India has increased dramatically but their quality has hardly been good. Apart from some exceptions, the books being published are mostly shallow with very little or no literary value. I’m not particularly being critical of Chetan Bhagat. While he is not spectacular, his plots are good and, of course, he gets people to read who wouldn’t otherwise read helping expand the English reader base in India. But my point is his success has spawned many ‘trying to be Bhagat’ types and the market is milling with them. Their themes are limited – mostly college romance and such nonsense – and mostly they have nothing new to say.

On the other hand, Pakistan may not be producing as many writers but their outputs are of international standards. This has, of course, reasons other than literary. The west has traditionally been ignorant of the subcontinental countries, but even within India Pakistan has mostly been seen through the mist of current affairs issues that may reveal something about the politics of a country but hardly tell about anything else.

9/11 led to curiosity about Pakistan, its society and people. And that curiosity has been very well fed by writers like Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie etc. (Granta, a British literary magazine, published an edition on Pakistan last year where it published their work.)

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Danyal Muidduin comes from the same school. But where it’s different is it has completely steered clear of political issues and dealt with people and society.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders takes you through various layers of Pakistani society and power structure and tells about their cross connections and interdependencies. It ushers you into the drawing rooms of the rich as well as gives you the glimpses of how the poor live their lives.

The book is a collection of eight short stories with some interconnections such as recurrence of characters from same families in different stories that are otherwise disconnected. These families mostly form the elite stratosphere of Daniyal’s rich Pakistan – as if to suggest that wealth is so concentrated in the country as to be a preserve of only a few families while poverty is omnipresent. By bringing in a character or social setup something around which you read in another story, this inorganic interconnection gives you the feeling of being not very far from the world you exited some stories back.

While the plots of urban-centric stories are more intricate, the stories set in rural Pakistan bring about Daniyal’s flair for scenic description.

But of all things, the Indian reader would be surprised by the city life lived by the youth coming from wealthy families. Drugs, booze, night clubs, you have everything. So does the murder of Salman Taseer signify that this particular Pakistan is under attack from religious extremists and it's shrinking? While reading the book I had many such questions forming in my mind. And so will you.

Do you have cold?

I tend to catch cold very easily. Sometimes it doesn’t help that I am an ice cream lover, sometimes just an auto ride with strong wind buffeting me is enough.

I suffered from a bout of cold roughly a month back and am nursing another one currently. And each time the problem returns, it leads to congestion in the chest leaving me coughing and spitting thick and quavering bob of sputum.

It takes me a complete cycle of antibiotic to find relief and then a month or two later, the demon is back again. Last time, when I was suffering, my mother told me taking antibiotic so often would make me immune to it and that’s a troublesome thing to happen. Last week, after hawking for a day or two and bringing up sputum, I decided it was time to visit a doctor. After the doctor had finished talking about his customary stuff, I brought up the antibiotic topic.

He informed I have already developed some amount of immunity to antibiotics; otherwise, I wouldn’t catch cold so soon after going through an antibiotic course. Generally, once you complete an antibiotic course, you should be all right for next six months or so. So could I go for other stream of medication to cure cold? “No,” he said and continued: “if I want to cure fast.

“Nowadays the problem is people want quick exit from ailments. There are mild dosages of antibiotics but they don’t ensure quick cure and you might think the doctor is not good enough and go to another physician who will give you stronger dosages only to improve his clientele. No one wants to risk loss of clients by giving mild dosages, even if it’s ethically advisable to give milder dosages first and in case of poor response move to higher ones.”

It reminded me that health is a big business. It works through a nexus between doctors, medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies pay doctors to promote their medicines and they work with hired PR houses helping them with their promotional activities by giving favorable quotes to media and delivering talks at health conferences.

Medicines that are taken up for promotion aren’t just those that become available in the market after meeting established ethical and medical standards but also those that have government ban on them forbidding their use either completely or for certain diseases. The outcome is biased health stories and programs in newspapers, magazines and on TV.

The doctor said a long term solution to my tendency to catch cold lies in improving immunity through physical exercise of the kind that taxes your lung causing heavy breathing; which causes inhalation and exhalation of air improving the health of your lung. He recommended yoga. Then he gave the ‘done to death’ advice. “Leave smoking.”

I am not a heavy smoker nor do I live a sedentary life (I do freehand exercise everyday), but whether the exercise helps in this matter or the fact that I smoke, however moderately, adds to the problem, I am not sure.

Where will Anti Corruption Movement go from here

The huge success that the UPA government has conceded the Anna team may be euphoric for theoretical reasons like trump of people, assertion of democracy etc. But it’s also equally worrying. Emboldened by success, Anna has announced his mission number two, a nationwide campaign to ask people to punish corruption-tainted MPs by not voting for them. I thought the bill they have proposed was enough to address corruption by MPs.

Anna has also said that our educational system requires correcting, so another campaign will be launched to address the concern. Is there anyone to tell him that education is handled by HRD and they can make their recommendations to the ministry?

This disregard for the system is ominous. Even the staunchest of Anna supporters would not like the country to lose whatever little it has in the way of system. It’s one thing to picket at Ramila Maidan but quite another to have Ramila Maidan replace parliament. Moreover, no popular movement remains apolitical forever. Anna’s movement has been alleged to have mild BJP leaning but there has been nothing found to conclusively prove the allegation. However, it’s anyone’s guess which party will gain the most from the movement and which will take the hit.

You can say the political fallout is a natural corollary of the movement and something the Anna team can’t be blamed for but can’t argue that in the highly competitive environment of Indian politics a politically virgin movement (considering that it doesn’t have any political association already) which is supremely popular will not be snapped up by a political outfit.

I don’t doubt Anna’s integrity but the movement’s course of action is not decided by Anna alone.

Is Anti-Corruption Movement Degenerating?

When a popular movement develops a huge following, it runs the risk of becoming jingoistic basing itself not on reason or concern for common good but the collective might of a community/group religious or otherwise. Anna’s movement has currently acquired this muscular characteristic.

Anna Hazare enthusiasts have become a common sight on the streets, going by bikes or walking in processions waving the national flag and sloganeering aggressively. This aggressive enthusiasm leaves me thinking whether they are open to any kind of reasoning. I shudder to think what would happen of me if I approached them and told them that, while I want a corruption-free India and don’t doubt the intentions of Anna, I would like to see the other versions of the bill discussed in parliament. Or Anna is great, but, like everyone else, he is also fallible.

But you can’t blame them for that. They are behaving that way because they have internalized the message of the movement. The movement has become an outlet to ventilate their pent up feelings. Anna has become a stick for them to hit the high and mighty with. The success of the movement for them no more lies in combating corruption and improving the society but to have their way if not by the power of reason then by power of the lung.

However, funnily, it’s not the fringe supporters alone who are behaving this way; even the core team of Anna, which advises him and comprises of highly professionally-accomplished people, is behaving likewise. How else can you explain their insistence on flouting the standard parliamentary procedures to pass their bill? Why would they say they were not happy with the government agreeing to 70 per cent of their bill and would want 90 per cent of it accepted? Why would they not understand that before a fair government, which UPA is certainly not, their bill is one among many bills proposed by various parities? If this is not gundagiri (hooliganism), then what is?

I think this intransigence of the Anna team has swelled the ranks of its detractors in last four to five day. To be fair to the Anna team, the government has done little to inspire their trust and it has done everything it can to undermine the credibility of the movement. But, even if all that is true, the government can’t forgo certain procedures. And if it does, it wouldn’t be good for our system. The Anna team has to understand this.