Logic, Arundhati Roy style

The Booker Group owned most of the sugar industry in British Guiana before it became the independent nation of Guyana. The Booker Group is well known as a sponsor (now replaced by the Man Group) of the Booker Prize, which Arundhati Roy accepted in 1997. The Booker Group ruthlessly exploited indentured labourers in the 19th century, which makes Arundhati Roy and all winners of the Booker Prize complicit in that exploitation, and probably in the Caribbean slave trade as well.
If you like syllogistic reasoning of this kind, mixed with non-sequiturs, apples-and-oranges comparisons, factual errors and conspiracy theories, you'll love the 10,700 odd words of Arundhati Roy's Capitalism: A Ghost Story, which I got round to reading today.

Did you check the dictionary?

I just discovered there's a gallery in Gurgaon named Art Farrago. The gallery seems to focus a fair amount on selling through its website. Images of the gallery's stock on the site suggest the name's pretty appropriate.


I wonder if they serve Miazma wine at their openings.

Save the date

The first 'save the date' invite I received was to my friend Goodwin's wedding. The event was to be held in October on the banks of the Shenandoah (Had to put that detail in because it's such a lovely name), and the letter got to me in March or April. Though I couldn't make it to the wedding, I was given sufficient time to make arrangements.
About two or three years ago, Bombay galleries started sending out cards and emails with the tag 'save the date'. Without exception, they were for openings scheduled within a week of the mail's delivery. It isn't unusual now to get a 'save the date' invitation today for an opening tomorrow. I don't expect art shows here to be planned as far in advance as American weddings, but surely there comes a point at which appointment books should be presumed to have been filled, after which it becomes mildly insulting to ask for a date to be saved.
I used to be bothered by the use of 'vernissage' instead of 'opening' or 'preview', since the French term sound dreadfully snobbish. But now 'save the date' annoys me more, partly because the meme has proven so infectious.

Investigating vegans

I came to this article from Time Out a bit late in the day. It's about a meat eater turning vegan for a week in the interests of investigative journalism. There's precious little investigation done, however; as is normal in the Indian media, anything anti-meat gets a free pass. In all these years of reading Indian newspapers and magazines, I cannot recall coming across a single prominent, coherent defence of non-vegetarianism. What do I mean by 'coherent defence'? Well, something well reasoned and backed by facts, like this great article about foie gras. Since foie gras involves force feeding ducks or geese, it's pretty much the worst thing a human can eat from a moral vegetarian point of view. Among the things Kenji Lopez-Alt reveals in his essay is that geese and ducks do not have a gag reflex; therefore, having a tube stuck down their throat does not traumatise them as it would a human being.
Vegetarianism I can handle, at least of the non-proselytising variety; it offers plenty of healthy eating options for those inclined to eschew meat, and it possesses a strong supporting moral framework. But vegans are like Jehovah's Witnesses: not only do they follow an idiotic, fanatical philosophy, they obsessively try to convert all and sundry to it.
I thought I'd annotate part of Neha Sumitran's vegan-for-a-week article, because I'm annoyed at the silly ideas of a vegan preacher being given so much free play in an excellent publication. Sumitran's words are in itals, mine in normal font.

Now for the snacks. Careful scrutiny of the miniscule list of ingredients on the labels revealed that most of Parle’s biscuits (Magix, Monaco, Nimkin and Hide and Seek) are all vegan, as is Bourneville chocolate (no milk, just cocoa butter) and Pickwick cream wafers.

I've noticed a number of good writers spell 'minuscule' as 'miniscule'. They are so confident of the 'mini' bit they don't bother spell-checking it. But the use of 'mini' as a root is recent, and back-dated in our minds to connect with words like 'miniature'. 'Miniature' has nothing to do with size, however; it is derived from 'miniate', meaning 'to paint or tinge with red'.

The list of ingredients on a bar of chocolate or pack of biscuits is not only minuscule, it is incomplete. A company is only obliged to list non-additive ingredients if they constitute more than a certain percentage of the product by weight. That percentage varies between 5 and 25% depending on the product and the nation. What this means is there's no way of telling a product is vegan by looking at the ingredients' list. In the list Sumitran provides, I suspect not a single entry is entirely free of animal products. Bournville (not Bourneville) chocolate certainly uses milk powder or condensed milk. Ther's no way of making chocolate without dairy products, unless one uses soy as a substitute or else raises the cocoa percentage to something like 70%. The writer's vegan week was, it turns out, pretty unvegan.

[Nandita] Shah’s name popped up many times over the course of the vegan week. The founder of Sharan or Sanctuary for Health & Reconnection to Animals & Nature, is from Auroville, near Pondicherry, but travels across the country to convince people that dietary and lifestyle changes can result in better health. Shah’s most popular lecture, Peas vs. Pills, has been conducted in India, Europe and the US. As I sipped on hot herbal tea at her workshop in Lower Parel later in the week, I learnt that vegans rack up karma points for more than being kind to animals. A 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation says our omnivorous diets generate more greenhouse gases than all the cars in the world. It blamed meat production for contributing 14 to 22 per cent of this toxic smog. It turns out that vegans, with their soy-lattes, Pickwick wafers and aloo-tikki subs, are actually saving the world.

It ought to be illegal to put soy lattes, Pickwick wafers and aloo tikki subway sandwiches in the same sentence on grounds of good taste. Why doesn't the article talk about all the great vegan food we eat in the normal course of things in India, roti sabzi, daal chawal, idli sambhar, that kind of wholesome, appetising food, rather than these mutant inventions?

The 2006 FAO report referred not to meat production but to the livestock sector as a whole. It is true these animals are raised for meat in places like the US, but that's not the case in poor countries like India, where male cattle are used mainly as draft animals to produce... the grain and veggies vegans love.

Meat production does strain the environment, particularly in its factory farming mode. But the real threat to the environment began with the invention of agriculture. The most environmentally friendly societies, which regulate their own populations carefully, are tribes of hunter gatherers. And they're all meat eaters. Women in hunter gatherer societies usually suckle their infants for extended periods as a birth control technique; that's because the lifestyle can only support a population of something like 1 human per square kilometer of earth. Agriculture allows a far more intensive exploitation of resources, and therefore permits a massive increase in population density. The huge surge in human numbers that's the ultimate cause of environmental degradation began with farms taking over forest land.

But many vegans in Mumbai haven’t give up animal-derived products just because it is a dearly-held cause. They do it because they believe a vegan diet is healthier and to help them lose weight. Shah’s 50-person workshop was filled with people who would never hoard Pickwick wafers in their bags, as I had. Groups of middle-aged women exchanged vegan recipes and talked about their weight loss, the energy they’d gained and how their skin and hair was glowing more than ever. Shah, a doctor of homoeopathy, has been vegan for over two decades herself. She claims that a healthy vegan diet (one that even eliminates vegetable oil) will not only control but reverse diabetes, hypertension, obesity and auto-immune diseases.
“Who is a mother dog’s milk meant for?” she asked at the start of her workshop. “A puppy. Even a kindergarten kid can answer that. So why are cows any different?” One might ask, what about the vitamins and calcium and protein we get from dairy? According to Shah, a cup of kale or spinach leaves, or two tablespoons of sesame seeds, has double the calcium in a glass of milk. The only essential vitamin that vegans can’t get from food, she claimed, is B12. The debate over whether we should be dietary hunters or gatherers is the religion vs science argument of the food world, and it was clear which side Shah and her crew were on.

I'm waiting for the PETA video showing cattle mistreated in the production of grain. If one is concerned about animal rights above all else, I don't see how one can eat anything in India; not just milk, everything's produced by exploiting animals.

For those who claim veganism is the natural state of humans, there is one insurmountable stumbling block: Vitamin B12. It can only be derived from animal products. Mammals that do not eat other animals get it by one of two means. Many regurgitate food, and the semi-digested cud brings with it B12-rich bacteria that grow in the stomach. Non-ruminants get their B12 by eating faeces. Since humans are not ruminants, and don't in general love ingesting shit, they can only get B12 by eating animals or animal products. An absence of B12 in the diet will cause anaemia and a degeneration of the nervous system leading eventually to death. So how do vegans get their B12? Through vitamin supplements. Since our forefathers had no pills to pop, no fortified cereal to munch, it's safe to say they'd have gone extinct had they not been omnivores. It's disappointing that a supposedly investigative piece fails to question a vegan propagandist more closely on this obvious Achilles heel. But that's the sort of free ride I've come to expect.

The Cruellest Month

With temperatures reaching 45 degrees Celsius up north, Facebook updates have begun quoting the opening line of T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land: April is the cruellest month.

In the poem, the line is meant ironically. It is spoken from the point of view of those who feel threatened by the awakening of spring, who prefer winter's 'forgetful snow'.

APRIL is the cruellest month,
breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Eliot plays off the prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with its evocation of the sweetness of spring that inspires people to leave their homes for pilgrimages. Here are the opening lines of the Prologue (in somewhat modernised spelling, with difficult words explained in brackets):

When that April with his showers soote (sweet)
The drought of March hath pierced to the root
And bathed every vein (rootlet) in such liquor (liquid)
Of which virtúe engendered is the flower;
When Zephyrus (West Wind) eke (also) with his sweete breath
Inspired hath in every holt and heath (grove & field)
The tender croppes, and the younge sun (spring sun)
Hath in the Ram (Aries) his halfe course y-run,
And smalle fowles maken melody
That sleepen (who sleep) all the night with open eye
[So pricketh them Natúre in their couráges], (spurs / spirits)
Then longen folk to go on pilgrimáges,

All this is a far cry from the oven-like plains of North India. Another misunderstood phrase frequently used in these months is 'Indian Summer'. An Indian Summer has nothing to do with India. It refers to a sudden warming of weather that is occasionally witnessed in parts of North America in October, confounding the expectations of those who assume temperatures will keep dropping through autumn. The Indians in question are Native Americans, not desis.

If life hands you lemons

Anybody watching the T20 series between India and Sri Lanka can't have missed commercials for a brand of mobile phones now being imported from China. The Chinese need to do some investigation before settling on English-language product names, no?

Title Trend

These are the titles of some recently released Hindi films, along with a couple of high-profile movies due for release soon: Blue, Wanted, Wake Up Sid, What's Your Rashee?, London Dreams, Acid Factory, Let's Dance, Paying Guests, New York, ShortKut, Luck, Life Partner, Daddy Cool, Do Knot Disturb, All The Best, London Dreams, Jail, 3 Idiots, Kites and My Name is Khan. It's as if all the Hindustani words in the dictionary have been used up.

Forest Infestation

TV news channels appear to have learned little from their coverage of the attack of November 26, 2008. For twenty-four hours starting 10am yesterday, they focused exclusively on the story of Andhra Pradesh chief Minister YSR Reddy's missing helicopter, even though there were no developments to report. During the 26/11 coverage, they had trained cameras on three buildings, hoping to catch sight of something when it happened. In the helicopter incident, even that was missing, meaning coverage was reduced to speculation and waffle. Other news items, meanwhile, were blanked from the screen, as if nothing else happened in India and the world on September 2.
The area where the helicopter went down is a stronghold of Maoists, as is pretty much any isolated, underdeveloped region in central India. The press thinks of the militants as akin to lice or rodents, judging from the automatic use of some variant of the word 'infest' in connection with Naxals.

Times of India: YSR's chopper goes missing over dense Naxal & tiger-infested Andhra jungle.

Indian Express: Almost twenty-four hours after losing contact with his helicopter over the Naxal-infested Nallamala forests in Kurnool district, hopes of finding Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy began to fade.

Associated Press: A massive search was quickly launched, focusing on a densely forested area infested with Maoist rebels.

Hindustan Times: The reason why Reddy's whereabouts are not being disclosed is because the area is heavily forested and Naxal-infested.

This is similar to the now universal practise of calling Bangladeshi migrants (at any rate the Muslim ones) 'infiltrators'. The term was first used by right-wing parties, but has been adopted by the supposedly neutral, independent press.

Update: Hari Kumar in the New York Times: Andhra Pradesh is infested with Maoist rebels and Dr. Reddy was credited with reducing the level of violence.

Bloomsday

Today, June 16, is known to fans of James Joyce as Bloomsday, the day on which the entire action of Joyce's Ulysses takes place. The day is named after the book's central character, Leopold Bloom. Each year on June 16, Joyce enthusiasts from across the world collect in Dublin to celebrate the revolutionary novel: attending readings, visiting sites connected with the plot, and downing quantities of Guiness in pubs mentioned in the book.
I've wanted to make the pilgrimage since my teens, but haven't got round to doing it even in the era of Ryanair. With each passing year, there are fewer locations left intact from 1904. The pace of erosion has quickened in the past decade, during which Ireland leapt to the front rank of Europe's economies. The Celtic tiger may have been wounded by the current recession, but I suspect the mentality of the Irish has changed for ever. Having been exporters of humans for centuries, they've had to adapt to a substantial influx of immigrants. One Irishwoman I know described her wonder at her first sight of a black man walking down the street where she lived. She'd studied in England, so black people in and of themselves were familiar enough; the man just seemed incongruous in the context of her neighbourhood. Within a few years, she said, such sights became commonplace.
There were a few outsiders in Joyce's time as well, and he made one of them the hero of his greatest work. I call Leopold Bloom a hero, but for Joyce's early readers he was exactly the opposite; a man approaching middle age, of no particular academic or financial distinction, a cuckold, a Jew. Surely the comparison with Homer's epic hero, Odysseus / Ulysses, had to be ironic, an indication of how debased modern life was in comparison with the Hellenic past. It was only as the decades passed that readers began to understand how wise, ingenious and tolerant Bloom was, and how much of himself Joyce had put into his protagonist.
There was a second reason for the misinterpretation of Bloom as a butt of irony, aside from him having none of the common attributes of a heroic figure. Joyce's first published novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, had focussed on his fictional alter ego, Stephen Dedalus. Stephen reappeared in Ulysses, and it was easy to assume that he remained a kind of mouthpiece for Joyce. In fact, the author was much more distanced from his character by this time.
There's no doubt that Stephen is more entertaining than Bloom. He brims with learning and is always ready with witty quotes and incisive interpretations. Early in the book he says something I find particularly perceptive. During a conversation about religious belief, an Englishman called Haines says, "You are your own master, it seems to me".
Stephen replies he is the servant of two masters, an English and an Italian.
Haines, puzzled, asks what he mean by Italian.
Stephen says he's speaking of the imperial British state and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

Joyce idolised Parnell, a Protestant who led the Irish nationalist movement before it was riven by sectarianism. The biggest mistake the nationalists made was to see in the catholic church a refuge from the imperial state, or a locus of protest against it. They were merely choosing one harsh master instead of another. That kind of reductive thinking has infected most 'liberation' movements in the past century. When I see Muslim feminists donning hijab as a protest against neo-colonialism, I say to myself, 'I wish they'd read Ulysses carefully'. Which is strange because the novel is considered one of the most apolitical ever written.

The Hegemony of Would

I am assaulted every day by dozens of instances of would being used instead of will. Everybody's doing it: feature writers, television anchors, cricket commentators, and people sending me emails.

"We would also need a brief bio and picture for our catalogue..."
"I believe the Sensex would be range bound leading up to the budget..."
"Ponting would be wondering what he can do to stop Gayle..."

The misuse has been around in India for decades, but has spread rapidly in the past few years to reach epidemic proportions. Media outlets, unfortunately, appear to be ignoring the infection, though it is far more dangerous than the use of it's instead of its ('the dog wagged it's tail'), till instead of while ('till stocks last') and since instead of for ('since the past five years').

Those Pesky Green Shoots

AFP: Bernanke sees 'green shoots' of US recovery. That's the headline of an article about network correspondent Scott Pelley's interview with Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. The main body of the AFP piece states, "The "green shoots" of economic revival are already evident, Bernanke told CBS program 60 Minutes in the interview broadcast late Sunday, which the network said was the first by any sitting Fed chairman in 20 years."
Green shoots entered the political lexicon during the recession of the early 1990s, after Norman Lamont, then Chancellor of the Exchequer said, during a speech at the Tory party conference of December 1991, "The green shoots of economic spring are appearing once again".


The winter of 1991 turned into the spring of 1992 without any green shoots of economic recovery flourishing, and the phrase came to haunt Lamont. His boss, John Major, led the conservatives to a miraculous general election victory that April despite a continuing downturn, but Lamont had to carry the can for the disastrous exit of the UK from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992. He was offered a demotion in May 1993, and chose to quit the cabinet altogether.
It has since become standard operating practice for reporters to ask about green shoots during recessions. If one turns to the transcript of the Ben Bernanke interview, one can see it was Pelley who prompted him with that phrase:
"Do you see green shoots?" Pelley asked.
"I do. I do see green shoots. And not everywhere, but certainly in some of the markets that we've been functioning in. And we've seen some improvement in the banks, as well," Bernanke said.
So the Fed chairman used a phrase not of his own choosing, which then became the headline of an AFP report. It won't matter much in the US, where few people know or care about Norman Lamont, but things are different in the UK. Two months ago, Shriti Vadera, Undersecretary for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, became a target for the opposition and media after falling into the 'green shoots' trap. Asked by ITV's Alastair Stewart, "You're a former banker and business person yourself and now a minister – when will we see the green shoots of recovery?", she replied, "Well, it's a very uncertain world right now globally but I wouldn't want to be the one predicting it. I am seeing a few green shoots but it's a little bit too early to say exactly how they'll grow."


As neutral an answer as one can imagine. But her use of Lamont's phrase under Stewart's prompting led to articles in the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times and other newspapers with headlines like "Green shoots: Shriti Vadera's economic optimism sparks outrage". Vadera had to apologise for her supposedly insensitive failure to sympathise with those losing jobs, and her irrational exuberance about the economy. That last phrase, 'irrational exuberance', was made famous by Ben Bernanke's predecessor as Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, who used it in a speech he gave at the American Enterprise Institute in 1996. The question Greenspan asked then was, "But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values...?" The term didn't come back to haunt him as quickly as 'green shoots' did Norman Lamont, but it is gradually doing so now that we know how Greenspan's enthusiasm for fancy derivatives helped create housing and financials bubbles, the bursting of which precipitated the present global crisis.

Dialectics

I've been reading an article by Steve Coll published in the New Yorker, which made news a fortnight ago by revealing that India and Pakistan were close to a deal on the future of Kashmir. I was struck by this relatively unimportant passage: "The Indian troops on occupation duty in Kashmir-- about five hundred thousand soldiers and paramilitaries--rarely speak the Kashmiri dialect. Locals resent them, and they return the attitude".
The New Yorker, world renowned for its obsessive fact checking, failed to recognise that Kashmiri is a language, not a dialect. The confusion between the two terms was a regular source of annoyance when I lived in England. Some well-meaning professor or fellow student would ask me, as standard small talk, "So which language do you speak at home?"
"English, mainly, though my mother tongue is Marathi".
"Marathi? Is that a dialect of Hindu"?
"Hindu refers to a member of of a religious group. The language is Hindi. But Marathi is a separate language. It has its own literary tradition going back nearly a thousand years. It's as different from Hindi as Portuguese is from French."
"So there are, what, a dozen or so languages spoken in India?"
"No, hundreds".
"Surely you're speaking of dialects."
Resisting the urge to point out that I might know a bit more about these matters since I studied literature while he studied biochemistry, I'd say, merely, "I'm speaking of languages. If you count dialects, the figure would be much higher."At this point, the person would look away, unconvinced, then change the subject.
What was annoying was the racial division always implicit in such conversations. White people spoke languages. Dark people mainly spoke dialects. Just like dark people in white lands were immigrants, white people in dark lands were expatriates. It didn't matter if Arthur C Clarke had settled in Sri Lanka for life; he was always an expat.
Going back to the New Yorker's assertion about security forces in Kashmir: since most of those personnel come from outside the state, it is obvious they won't speak Kashmiri. But referring to Kashmiri as a dialect rather than a language makes it seem like the military men are unwilling rather than unable to speak to Kashmiris in their own tongue.
I'm quibbling, I know. It's been a slow week mentally.

Kiss of Death

In India, 'advice' is a countable noun. You can listen to 'an advice', or even, occasionally, 'a good advise', as if the speaker were thinking, "since I'm butchering the language anyway, why not replace noun with verb". I haven't come across plural versions yet, as in, "Five advises for saving your relationship", but I'm sure that's only because I haven't looked in the right places.
'Research', too, has switched to countable. This morning's Times of India speaks of, "a stunning research, which can change the way medical emergencies are dealt with". Reading further, one encounters this gem: "There has been growing consensus among the medical community that for people who witness a cardiac arrest if they are concerned about performing mouth-to-mouth then they should carry out only chest compressions."
In this case, the Times of India employee who repackaged the article is not to blame. The same punctuation-free sentence occurs in the Daily Telegraph piece that was the source of the Times report. Shockingly, the Telegraph's version was composed by its Medical Editor, Rebecca Smith. Smith goes on to write, "The study, published in the journal BioMed Central Medicine, shows that for every second paused during compressions there is a one per cent reduction in the likelihood of success, which was measures (sic) as return of circulation." The Times takes no measures to rectify the typo, and adds another error of its own near the end of the article: "The American Heart Association's first aid guidelines updated last year, suggesting that the mouth-to-mouth component of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was unnecessary." The Telegraph has: "The American Heart Association's first aid guidelines were updated last year..." (italics added).
Putting aside the mangled grammar of the article, let's consider its message. Mouth-to-mouth is useless at best, and potentially counter-productive. How are lifeguards on film and TV going to survive if that component of CPR is eliminated? Any plans to revive Baywatch, or make a big screen adaptation, will have to be cancelled immediately.
Indians never took to the kiss of life, even in Pam Anderson's heyday. They did, however, begin trying their hand at stomach and chest pumping. I heard this from a doctor at INS Hamla, where victims of Aksa beach's treacherous rip current are taken. The naval base has (or had in those days) the only well-equipped hospital in that part of north Bombay. Bodies pulled from the Madh-Marve stretch were brought to the base for treatment. Most would be dead on arrival, but now and then a life was saved. Hamla's authorities had put up a huge billboard on the road to Aksa, providing a regularly updated death count, but it didn't deter beer-sodden youths from venturing into the sea deep enough to be dragged in by the ebb tide.
I was invited to a dinner at INS Hamla when Baywatch was at the peak of its popularity. The conversation turned to television programmes, and that's when the doctor sardonically mentioned the CPR phenomenon. He said people were drowning at Aksa at the same rate, but fatalities were higher because companions now mimicked the procedures they had seen on television instead of rushing their friends to hospital. None of the victims ever coughed water, stood up and asked about dinner plans (that only happens in fiction anyway), but quite a few were killed by wrongly administered first aid.

The Times of India: Confused as Usual

Yesterday's Times carried a prominent headline stating, "Indonesia Bans Yoga for Muslims". The body text indicated something a bit different: a religious body in Indonesia has issued an edict prohibiting its followers from chanting mantras while practising asanas. For the Times, one Muslim council directing its followers to stop saying 'Om' equals a multi-religious, multi-ethnic nation proscribing yoga entirely.
In today's international section, a headline reads "Queen escaped Oz govt's plot to assassinate her". Apparently, back in 1970, while Queen Elizabeth II was journeying in the Blue Mountains, a large log was placed in her train's path. Had the train been travelling faster when it hit the log, it would have gone off the rails, threatening the lives of the queen and Prince Philip.
The main suspects in the plot, which has only now been revealed, were members of the Irish Republican Army, but Australian republicans were also considered possible perpetrators. The Times article omits the IRA, and capitalises 'republicans'. The copy editor obviously concluded the word referred to leaders of Australia's ruling political party, rather than to anti-monarchist activists. This confusion resulted in a headline blaming the Australian government for the plot.
Those readers who merely scan headlines will come away with some twisted ideas about the Indonesian and Australian political systems.

Hobson-Jobson

Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive is a fascinating dictionary devoted to the influence of Indian languages on English (with a smattering of words from other colonies). The dictionary supplied substantial portions of the vocabulary used by British sailors in Amitav Ghosh's novel, Sea of Poppies.
A native festal excitement, is how Hobson-Jobson defines its own title, whose root lies in Ya Hassan, Ya Hussain, the cry of mourners beating their breasts during Muharram processions marking the killing at Karbala of Imam Hussein, grandson of prophet Muhammad. Tonight's the night for those processions, climaxing ten days of prayer, preaching and tears. Those in Bombay interested in viewing the flaggelants can make their way to Dongri, a precinct with a strong Shia Muslim presence.
Dongri, which gets its name from dongar, Marathi for hill, figures in Hobson-Jobson as the root of a word all of you will know. The area was a center of textile trading in the 19th century, producing a rough cloth called dongri kapad. This eventually mutated to dungarees, referring to overalls made from denim. Denim itself is related to another place name, the town of Nimes in France, which used to produce twill fabric known as serge de Nimes.
Back in the nineteenth century, when the word Hobson-Jobson was in common use, the Ashura procession was the single largest religious gathering of the year in Bombay. Sunni Muslims participated in large numbers, as did Hindus, "especially the Mahrattas". After Lokmanya Tilak came up with the idea of public Ganeshotsavs, those Mahrattas got their own celebration to look forward to, and gradually dropped out of the Muharram ranks, switching from Ya Hussain Ya Hussain to Ganpati Bappa Morya.