RETURN OF STREET-FIGHTER

RETURN OF STREET-FIGHTER
19 october 2006

someone’s always demonstrating in Lucknow. today there’s some sort of mass rally going on just down the road. the main sponsor is the Bahujan Samaj Party, at least judging by the blue bunting draped over the bamboo arches over the roads, and all the little blue flags and the 6-foot tall white plaster elephants. but there are also strings of the Socialist Party’s cute red and green flags with white bicycles and Indian National Congress’s orange and green with upraised hands and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s saffron lotuses. i predict the latter will try to start a fight. there have been lines of people assembling since this morning, and music and speeches and chants blaring out of loudspeakers.

“Bara Sahab ka dusra nam?”
“Kanshi Ram! Kanshi Ram!”
[what’s the Big Man’s other name? KR...]

“Jab tak suraj-chand rahega...”
“Amar Kanshi Ram rahega!”
[as long as the sun and moon remain, KR, immortal, will remain...]

“Bacche bacche bheem hai...”
“Kanshi Ram ka bheem hai!”

at least it sounded like bheem. there were more verses but i either didn’t catch or can’t remember them. i also saw the slogans later, painted in Hindi on the walls across from Ambedkar Maidan [Ambedkar was the writer of the Indian constitution and kind of the Dalit version of Martin Luther King. Kanshi Ram was the founder of the BSP.] along with more quite artistically shaded blue elephants.

some things still in use are refreshingly low-tech, whether you prefer to call it classic or obsolete: such as the loudspeakers, which are basically giant flared trumpet bells mounted on roadside poles or moving jeeps. or the railway crossing system, which consists of a guy sitting in the dingy hut next to the tracks with interior walls the color of police khakis, that looks like it hasn’t been remodeled since 1947, cranking the barrier up and down whenever a train comes, all the livelong day.

the BSP controlled Uttar Pradesh government until recently, when the SP took over. as far as i know they’re the two main ones currently jockeying for position in this area. the BSP was founded for the purpose of uplift and empowerment for lower caste people, though nowadays the leader, Mayawati, often gets accused of just being in for her own aggrandizement, having betrayed a) the people she’s supposed to be representing, and b)the legacy of Kanshi Ram, whose memory today’s tamasha is lauding. she builds lots of ostentatious public monuments, including one big Luxor-via-Vegas-esque mausoleum that’s supposed to be more or less a temple to herself when she dies. it’s near our house. [in giving directions to where we live, it’s often enough to say “Mayawati ke aaspaas.”] the ruling Samajwadi [socialist] party is also supposed to have a program geared toward the needs of the poor, economic justice and development, you know, all that socialist type stuff. in practice, people complain that neither is ideological and both are actually about patronage, competing for the same bank of votes. then there are the BJP and the Communist Party of India-Marxist who hang their red or saffron banners out just down the street from each other across from the capitol building. those who know me can guess my thoughts on both of those.

which reminds of a conversation i had the other day with a colleague, who expressed the opinion that those people who really believe in something with fervour and conviction are scary and dangerous...to which a counter-argument is, are those people who believe in nothing, who are either apathetically self-absorbed, or who are amoralistically out for wealth and power, any less scary and dangerous? why can't we all just enjoy life and be happy and be nice to each other: is it ethical to just be happy and nice and no more, in an unjust world? i’m not being rhetorical, i'm interested to hear your thoughts on this: would you rather deal with someone who believes in something and is committed to an ideal, even if you don’t like their ideal...or someone whose commitments aren’t compelling enough to intrude upon daily life? is there a happy medium between fanaticism and apathy? are flexibility and integrity inversely proportional? are tolerance of others’ ideas and commitment to one’s own?

now there are people streaming up the road, getting off busses that ferried them here from neighboring villages. the women are in bright but well-worn saris and the men are in dusty dhotis and long kurtas, or trousers and short kurtas. some carry signs, some carry children. every so often a gleaming new SUV with BJP logos and lotus flags cuts through the line. they do look poor and in need up uplift and empowerment; they’re uniformly thin and weathered. but are they here because of party conviction, or because they were bussed in to beef up the crowd? are they true believers in Kanshi Ram, betrayed by Mayawati, as the editorials suggest? i lack the confidence [mine and theirs] to ask them.

then there’s also the lively crew over at Lucknow University, where student elections have been going on recently. some dude named Rajan Nayak must have an in with the transportation department or something, because he’s managed to get “Vote for Rajan Nayak” painted on the outside of lots of the buses and tempos. the thing is, these are bigtime events since the major political parties groom candidates in the universities as their own likely future rabblerousers. recently there was an attempt to pass a reform law on the student election process, including campaign spending caps, requirements that candidates must be attending a certain percentage of classes, and that they must be under age 25. in other words, that they be legit students. this caused an uproar: how could such ridiculous demands be placed? outrageous! so students shut down a major intersection in the middle of Lucknow, smashed car windows and set fires.

listen up, proud UCSC “vanguard”: so we shut down the entrances to campus a few times in the last couple of years? here it seems to be pretty standard on most campuses. no big deal. students are routinely up in arms. literally. many of them stockpile weaponry. they march on offices and occupy them, physically encircle or attack officials, shut things down, fuck shit up. sometimes people get killed. this is not always an accident. BUT, and this is a crucial but: we’re back to the question of convictions. this is all just tactics. none of it is necessarily linked to any discernible ideological justification or political analysis other than the calculus of power. student politics is a training and recruiting ground for the big leagues, and it’s a high stakes game. government power in UP is about who knows who and who’s in whose pocket, who promises what to whom in exchange for votes or muscle. corruption and thuggery are endemic.

i feel pretty isolated from the political stuff happening in the streets, unless of course it’s right outside, like today. often i only know something’s going on because the streets are blocked up or you can’t get through the city, and then i learn the specifics in the newspaper the next day. i’m still in watching and learning mode. that’s ok, i’ve got a lifetime, and this is not the sort of politics i’d care to be involved in anyway.

NAFEEZ O NASTALIKH

NAFEEZ O NASTALIKH
10 october 2006

this is one of our institute director’s favorite phrases. it means basically delicacy and sophistication, or gentility and nobility, or something like that, and it’s supposed to sum up her goals for our Urdu. aapka khubsurat tehzib ka tasharif laie, akhlaqi tarbiyet sabse ahm hain, blah blah blah. afficionadoes of Urdu literature tend to venerate the highly refined culture of the Mughal and Nawabi era, especially the art of the ghazal-- i’ve even heard people spouting couplets at each other in daily life, drawing on their repertoires for one apropos for any occasion. “do you have a shair[couplet] for this?” at this point i’m less concerned with that than with being humanly functional.

aside from the great mystical and/or courtly poets, the other main thing that Urdu lit scholars tend to be into is the Progressive Writers Movement of the 1930s-60s, who were avid anti-imperialists and anti-capitalists, and aimed to make relevant literature For The People by exchanging couplets about the Beloved and the moth and the flame and the moon for couplets about the Dawn of Revolution and red flags and oppressed masses. actually there’s still a lot of continuity here, it’s just a newly manifest flame for the impassioned moth. the Beloved is now the People, and the ecstasy of the sacred union is to be sought within the Revolution itself. as you can probably guess, i’m kind of a sucker for the Progressive Writers.

but, back to the culture of old Lucknow:
we met the Nawab, who’s a friendly fellow with a polished-looking bald pate and a clear and melliflous voice. he gave a talk on Lucknavi history and culture at our institute and answered questions about the Life of a Nawab Today [which i’m still not quite clear on, though he he doesn’t seem like too much of a threat as a Semi-Feudal Class Enemy.] then later in the week he received us in a room of his house crammed with artifacts and mementos, chandeliers, platters, urns, ivory letter openers, antique vessels and implements, commemorative plaques, pictures of him with notables, etc. he offered us bananas, namkeen and paan rolled in little brass cones, and told a rambling anecdote involving a camel, urination, and some lost pantaloons. it was difficult to know how to react-- even if you’re sure you really understad the words, which is not 100% certain, do you laugh at the dirty jokes of such a personage or maintain respectful quiet? he also passed out his business card which bore the emblem of the two fish that symbolize the old kingdom of Avadh (they look kind of like dragonish dolphins) and his hotmail account.

we also heard an excellent qawwali performance and visited the Bara Imambara, which was built by Nawab Asif Ud-Daula back when Nawabs ruled things and had things built and played power games with the Mughals and the East India Company. it’s next to a handsome mosque which he also built to compete with the mosque across the way which was Aurangzeb's; one is Sunni and the other Shia. inside the imambara it's all cavernous mint-green halls, and outside it bears signs that say things like “This is your ancestral and cultural heritage. Kindly do not insult it by spitting.” [or in Hindi more explicitly, “Paan thuk kar, gande mat karo”] and “Spreading filth is the work of animals. We are humans.” [“Gande phailana janvari ka kam hai. Ham insaan.”] the highlight of the place for me was the labyrinth of stairs and tunnels above the main halls, that give access to little galleries and alcoves overlooking the interior from the edge of the ceiling domes, as well as onto the roof, where there are panoramic views all the important domes and spires of the city. some turns lead up, some down, some inward into pitch darkness, some outward to airy arches. wandering through it you feel like you’re inside an Escher drawing.

i’ve also experienced a couple of other aspects of Old Lucknow, directly from our very own rooftop: kibootar-bazi and patang-bazi. this means the afficionado-ship of pigeons and kites, respectively. kites are still a big thing; most days if you look up in the sky you’ll see a flock of them, dipping and spinning like birds, handkerchiefs, manta rays. i’ve seen kids standing right in the edge of the traffic flying kites, since you don’t have to run to get them aloft, just do a special kind of jerking motion with the string which seems to be much harder than it looks. these are pretty much the same type of kites that you would use for kite battles during the appropriate festival, but i hear they outlawed the fighting strings, at least in Pakistan, because they’re coated in glass for cutting other strings and too many people were getting badly hurt.

there’s a guy who hangs out on the rooftop adjacent to ours who’s really good at it. our household has not yet mastered the art of launching, despite the neighbor guy throwing one over for us to use and demonstrating his technique. he also has lovely white or white-and-gray-spotted pigeons up there, and he can control their flight patterns, their wheelings and landings, through whispery hisses and arm signals. it’s pretty amazing. in the old days they used the pigeons for fighting too, and also for sending messages.

and the final cultural activity: cricket. i hate cricket. there, i said it. and yes, i am an apostate and plainly not a real South Asian. [why doesn’t anyone here like soccer?] the Institute has been closing early during the month of Ramadan, during which there’s a hiatus on guest speakers and special field trips. so what’s been happening instead is that after lunch, the teachers and students play thrilling cricket in the driveway. since hand-eye coordination has never been one of my skills and swinging at a ball gives me too many unpleasant flashbacks to grade school gym class, i kept refusing to play; though i did offer my services as a wall-scaler, ledge-reacher and stray-ball-chaser, which are things i’m good at, until the guard at the neighboring apartment building got upset with me. so then i began to serve as half a player-- namely, the bottom half. some batters had been recently sick and didn’t want to run, whereas i love to run and didn’t want to bat, so i became their surrogate legs. this seemed to be a mutually satisfactory system. but i still don’t understand the rules, the scoring, or the general appeal. give me soccer any day.

MY COMMUTE

MY COMMUTE
2 October 2006
(happy birthday, Gandhi-ji)

dear readers:
agar aap Hindustan se parichit hue hain, ya aap yahan rahte hain, maf kijie. yeh sab aapko aata hai. i’m stating the obvious.
ye likhai un logon ke lie hain, jinhone Hindustan kabhi dekha nahin.

so, to the rest of you--
some things i see on my way to school.

cows.
goats.
dogs.
water buffalo.

the goats sound uncannily like humans imitating goats. once i passed a rickshaw carrying 7 kids [i mean the goats]-- 5 with their bellies on the seat and their hind legs trailing off the back, and 2 more lying in the footrest. all plaintively saying baaa just the way you and i would.

the dogs come in two distinct styles. you could call them class differences. the street dogs are leggy and long tailed and jackal-eared, with short coats. aside from the fact that they are so bony and mangy and fleabitten, they look clever and resourceful and they seem the kind of dogs i’d like to have. the pet dogs are the little yappy fluffball type, perhaps to more clearly differentiate them from street dogs.

the cows and bulls fulfill stereotype by being beatifically everywhere, eating garbage or wandering through the traffic with their effulgent eyes, imposing humps, curly horns and smelly bottoms. i once had to literally lean against a cow to get my bike out of the crush outside a movie theater where it was wedged between said cow and a motorcycle. watch out for droppings.

morning routines: men in loincloths vigorously soap themselves up and rinse in buckets on the side of the road. people cook breakfast in mini mobile kitchens, the same kind of cart that’s used for selling fruit and vegetables, selling shoes, ironing clothes, frying snacks, boiling chai, anything you like-- basically a wooden flat mounted on 4 bicycle wheels. also good for sleeping on once you close up shop for the day. some of the rickshaw drivers go home to families at night, but others just sleep on the curb or on the rickshaw seat. i see them at night or early morning gathered in clumps, here and there making little campfires under trees in a traffic island.

police posts: off duty cops sleep on folding cots in canvas tents or hang their towels and khakis out to dry. the ones on duty hang out in front sauntering around or leaning casually on their rifles. a recent newspaper poll determined that the majority of Indian citizens experience the police to be a “threatening and hostile presence.”

old aristocratic houses that look like they were sketched with smudged ochre pastels, framed in tangled gardens and picturesque decrepitude behind walls. domes and pointed arches and frilled balconies and intricate screens and arabesques, all crumbling. fruiting and flowering tropical trees.

construction sites: workers perch high on rickety-looking scaffolds of rope and bamboo. more workers at the bottom toss gravel against angled mesh screens until it’s winnowed into fine sand. for concrete, i guess. the dogs like to make nests in the piles of sand-- soft, warm, form-fitting-- to sleep in.
people toil in the sun along the broad new flyover road, bent over breaking up big slabs of rock into smaller chunks of rock and smaller chunks of rock into gravel. others tote the chunks of all sizes in baskets or on their heads. at night they make cooking fires and stretch out to sleep right there by the worksite under shelters of tarp or plastic sheeting slung over bamboo poles.
a woman in a parrot-green sari with necessarily perfect posture piles a castle of bricks on her head. a woman in a candy-pink sari bears a bundle of grass the size of a haystack on hers.
it never ceases to amaze me how people can do hard physical labor from dawn to dusk every day for years, on painfully substandard nutrition. like running a marathon on one cup of juice. the cost is that it ages them fast, so that someone you think is 50 or older might actually be 30 or younger.

bicycles, motorcycles, scooters:
milkmen hang a big metal cannister on each side. office workers hang tiffins on the handle bars. wives balance skilfully behind husbands, kids behind dads, moms behind daughters, any 2 guys, any 2 girls. if you ride on the back, make sure your legs are hanging off on the left. if you learned the road in North America, remember traffic flows on the left not the right, but if you forget it’s not that big a deal because half the time people are cruising unconcerned up the wrong side of the road anyway. if you’re wondering how women ride bikes without getting tangled in their dupattas, the secret is that you tie the ends behind your back. let me tell you, wearing a dupatta and a backpack at the same time can have complex results. all bikes, for you bike people, are basically fixed gear, and very upright with narrow handle bars and broad springy seats.

cycle rickshaws. auto rickshaws. more cycle rickshaws. they’re basically giant tricycles with a passenger bench on the back, and a fold-up awning for when it rains. they’re personalized with patterns of birds, fish, and flowers done with rivets and scraps of of red, yellow, blue and green metal, or with names: Deepu, Qaif, Suresh 2, Bobby.
they’ve been having student elections at Lucknow University, which is a bigger deal than it is in the states because it’s seen as a training and recruiting ground for the major political parties (and their partners in organized crime, it appears. more on this later.) this dude Rajan Nayak must have an in with the transportation department because he’s gotten “Vote for Rajan Nayak” painted on scads of city buses and tempos.

there are some cars, but they’re outnumbered by all of the above. most of the cars belong either to the police, the military or the government. these are the most obnoxious things on the road, big white Ambassadors that barge through like the original Juggernaut crushing anything in their path, honking continously at a level that would be 11 on a Spinal Tap amp. i cuss at them every time they pass, trusting that my English cussing does not raise hackles the way Hindi cussing would. though i know those words too and keep them ready just in case for when i might need them, like for Eve-teasing.

i sometimes take rickshaws if i’m going out with friends on the weekend, but usually i bike or walk. at the beginning i was doing the rickshaw thing by default, before i learned my way around, but i didn’t like it. partly just because of my native restlessness and my preference for physical activity and personal autonomy. but also because the whole situation of sitting pretty while someone pulls you around with the sweat of his skinny brow makes me feel weird. we’ve all discussed this amongst ourselves, and everyone comes up with their own rationale. for some, it goes something like this: you are not refraining from exploiting the drivers by not taking rides from them; you are merely depriving them of their income. so ride, and just pay handsomely.
but, but, but, am i supposed to just embrace a paternalistic role in an inequitable system? do i just accept that my sole obligation as an economically privileged person is to treat my peons with beneficence? i am uncomfortable with this. i prefer to simplify things by conveying myself through my own labor rather than buying someone else’s. i prefer to not use the services of anybody for anything i can do for myself, and that is very different than the way things most often work here. self-reliance is not expected, or even necessarily assumed desirable. (it makes me realize how deeply ingrained the liberal-individualist assumptions are in my cultural training.)
of course the choice to walk or bike is not going to change the economic relationships, any more than the choice to ride. but my ideal of interdependency is of mutuality among equals, and this is all one-sided.

tune in next time for the Rant of the Day and more politics in the street.