Jesus, money changers and money lenders

The Vatican has been barred by Italy from accepting credit and debit cards, because the Italians feel the city state does not have a proper legal framework to prevent fraud. This means visitors can pay only cash for souvenirs, and will put a major dent in the Vatican's tourism revenues. The Italians were sensible enough to let the Christmas high season pass before clamping down. Presumably the matter will be sorted out before Easter.
In covering the issue, reporters have reached for a Biblical analogy that seems most apt: the cleansing of the temple by Jesus. Reuters, for example, went with, "... the move has nothing to do with throwing money lenders from the Temple or concerns about usury." Which gives me an opportunity to segue into an issue that really interests me, misreadings of canonical texts (I'm not particularly concerned about sales of postcards in the Vatican).
Pretty much every Christian who goes regularly to church has been told about the story of Jesus whipping the money lenders and chasing them out of Jerusalem's great temple. It's the standard text to bring up in discussions about Christianity, usury and the history of anti-Semitism.

Yet, the actual incident has nothing whatsoever to do with money lending. Christian boys and girls have for centuries been fed a lie by their parents and priests (who, to be fair, probably act out of ignorance). By the time they mature, they cannot read what's before their eyes without substituting it with the incorrect interpretation they've been brought up to believe.
Here's the incident as told in the English Standard version of the Bible:
Matthew 21:12
And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.
John 2:13-16
The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father's house a house of trade.”

The phrase used is unambiguous: money changers, not money lenders.

When you think about it, Jerusalem's temple, where most visitors were pilgrims, would have been the last place where money lenders would've plied their trade. Lending to people you barely know, who are in town for just a couple of days, and who live in distant lands, is the equivalent of giving money away.
Money changing was a different trade altogether. It involved providing local currency to those who came in with Roman or Greek coin. It required experts who could tell counterfeit metal from the real stuff, who could gauge whether any corners had been cut (the phrase originating from the practice of physically slicing off slivers of precious metal from coins), and who were familiar with a variety of currencies. The money changers were the equivalent of today's shops with signage exclaiming EXCHANGE WECHSEL CAMBIO BUREAU DE CHANGE. They performed a necessary service, helping pilgrims, local traders and the temple. They kept the entire economy of the locality going, and took a cut for doing so.

Jesus wasn't against any one type of business; he was against the idea that any business at all should be conducted within a holy site. Of course, if priests and parents told children this, they might get asked whether Jesus really did the right thing. Did those petty traders deserve to be whipped and have their little work counters turned upside down? Presumably, if Jesus had gone in alone, the money changers would've banded together and kicked him out. It stands to reason that he was accompanied by a group of followers, though this isn't mentioned in the Bible, and is not how the scene is depicted in the paintings of Giotto and El Greco accompanying this post.

There's another question kids might ask, if told the truth about Jesus's action: since Jesus was so firmly against any connection between places of worship and any kind of commerce, why does virtually every famous church, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, contain a shop selling souvenirs? Why is the Vatican hawking postcards in the first place?

Kali's temple and town

I just spent a day and a half in Calcutta, a city that always makes Bombay look good. The deficiencies of the capital of what was once India’s most industrialised state became apparent days before I got there, when I found all three-, four-, and five-star hotels booked out. Obviously, synchronising my visit with the start of the deciding test of the India-England cricket series didn’t help, but what kind of metropolis has so few upscale lodgings that the barmy army and maybe some suits attending conferences can take over every single room in town?
Plan B was to look at the B&B ratings on Tripadvisor. I found a room available at Relax Inn, which turned out to be perfectly satisfactory.
Ten minutes into my ride from Calcutta airport, I asked the driver for his mobile phone number. He told me he possessed no cellphone.
Me: No phone? But what if there’s no parking where I alight? How will I know where you are?
Driver: I’ll be around.
There was no parking outside Relax Inn. Having checked in, I came out to give the driver instructions, but he had already gone off to find a parking spot. When I was ready to leave for my first appointment after freshening up, I asked the doorman if the driver had returned to tell him where he was parked. He had not.
I called the car rental agency’s number on the receipt.
Me: I think the driver has left.
Him: No, he must be there.
Me: But how can I find him?
Him: Look around, I’m sure he’s there somewhere.
Luckily, autorickshaws are plentiful in Cal.
On my way back from the first meeting, I stopped at a chemist to buy a razor, toothpaste and stuff I’d forgotten in my hurried packing. It was an impressive looking branch of the chemists’ chain Frank Ross. Eight men were at the counters when I entered, each wearing a green jacket embroidered with the Frank Ross name, each sitting at a computer looking like he was doing work of national importance. I saw two customers, neither of whom was being served. When I asked if they could sell me a razor, one of the men gave me a can’t-you-see-I’m-busy look. Eventually, a ninth man appeared from the stock room, and I asked him for a disposable razor.
He said, “We only have packs of four. It’s a Buy 3, Get 1 Free promotion.”
He took a strip of Gillette Prestos off a hook and held them out.
Him: See, four for 54 rupees.
Me: I’m sure you can sell them individually as well. They must have individual prices.
Scrutinising the packaging, he found each razor was priced at 18 rupees. But then he shook his head.
Him: If I sell you one, then who will buy the remaining three?
Me: The same people who buy them when there is no special offer.
He looked at me with a pitying expression. Obviously, I was the only idiot in the world who would buy a single razor when four could be had for the price of three, but the man was generous enough not to say so. He told me, only, that he could not offer me the razor I desired.
A corner shop sold me a Gillette Presto without hassle. Back at Relax Inn, I found my driver had reparked next to the lodge, and was ready to ferry me around. He couldn’t understand why I hadn’t scoured the neighbouring streets looking for him.
The next day, I decided to begin at the Birla Academy, which was hosting an interesting show curated by Shaheen Merali. Getting there, I found the place opens only between 3 and 8 pm. I had consulted the website in advance, but the people who built the elaborate site obviously felt that stuff like opening timings, or even the address of the place, didn’t merit mention.
Next stop was the Kali temple at Kalighat. I’d never actually been inside, since I avoid functioning temples as far as possible, but with time on my hand, I braved the gauntlet of flower sellers, guides and touts. I lost count of the number of people who tried taking money off me between the gate and the sanctum. Every few steps somebody would insist shoes had to be removed at that spot. One man screeched as I passed him despite his warning, as if I’d broken a dreadful taboo. The temple has no official footwear storage, so one is forced to leave slippers and shoes in the care of shopkeepers. They refuse money for looking after the shoes, but ask you to buy a garland or some other item of worship, which I refused to do. Finally, I found a man willing to watch my shoes for five rupees. As I looked for the entry queue, a man asked if I wouldn’t rather pay 100 rupees and gain instant access to the sanctum. I said I’d wait in line.
“It will take three hours”, he said.
“Obviously your goddess has nothing against lying”, I wanted to reply, but ignored him. In the end, it took about forty minutes for me to get my five seconds in front of the startling icon with black face, red eyes and a massive golden tongue hanging out of its mouth. The Kali temple is relatively modern, having been built in the 19th century, and features a domed sanctum, which means it is a little larger and better ventilated than most garbhagrihas. The sanctum’s walls are painted yellow, stained with soot, clad with white tiles at the lower reaches, all of which gives it the feel of an old-style Irani restaurant kitchen. The idol is held in a cage in the centre, above which is a canopy shaped like the hood of a kitchen’s exhaust. As our line slowly wound around the room, pressing against the wall, priests went round thrusting flowers into hands, daubing and smearing stuff on vacant foreheads, and generally ensuring that every individual in line contributed to the temple kitty. Periodically, our line would stop as VIP guests, which meant anybody forking out extra dough, were thrust in from the exit point for an expedited darshan. In the brief time I was given to examine the idol, no fewer than five entreaties / demands for contributions rang in my ears.
“Give me fifty rupees. Ten rupees”
“Don’t give me anything, give it to the temple. Put it in the donation box”
“Put money in this box, in the box”
“You haven’t made a contribution. Give me something.”
It’s a pity that workers in businesses such as Frank Ross Pharmacy have a statist perspective. Rather than government employees, they ought to model themselves on the Kali temple’s priests, who are perfectly mercenary, single-minded in their determination to get some cash from each person who enters their domain. OK, I’d prefer it if businesses left out the cheating, the harangues, the stealing, but no business does that without proper regulation, and temples are among the least regulated commercial operations in the country.
I suppose the money-grabbing at the Kali temple was no worse than I’ve encountered at Puri Jagannath or the shrines that dot Pushkar lake. On the other hand, Kalighat offers neither the architectural delights of the former, nor the marvelous atmosphere of the latter.
As for the city as a whole, I'm amazed I’ve never disliked it. In fact, I’d even concede I am a little fond of Calcutta. It has character, a certain laid-back gentleness, and retains the core of a great city in its monuments, parks, and museums. It doesn't hurt that the place is cheap (everything in Bombay costs about 50% more), and the inhabitants fond of fish, red meat and liquor (though alcohol is reasonably priced, Calcuttans don't drink themselves under the table in the manner of Goans and Keralites). Also, there are plenty of smart, good-looking women around (so what if backcombing never went out of fashion here?). Right now, citizens are feeling pretty depressed, having hopped out of the frying pan of Communist rule and landed in the fire of Mamata Bannerjee’s lunacy. It’s always wrong to believe things can only get better. Like Iranians discovered when Khomeini took over from the Shah, things can always get worse. And yet, Calcutta does seem to be developing fast, particularly in areas close to the airport like Salt Lake and New Town. The development is very much in the Gurgaon mode, all tower blocks and malls, with none of the sense of community that still defines neighbourhoods in Calcutta proper; but that’s preferable to the dilapidation and decay whose depiction has provided lucrative careers for so many painters.

Intercalation and leaps of faith

Every now and then some Muslim scholar will pop up claiming Islam accords with modern science (or at least modern astronomy, Darwin remains beyond the pale). Zakir Naik, a popular preacher, when asked why the Quran refers to Earth as being like a carpet, responds that carpets can be wrapped around a globe. Sure they can, but somehow I doubt Allah would say 'carpet' when He meant 'globe'. There's one verse in the Quran that says, 'He spread out the Earth', which some creative interpreters, Naik included, have suggested can also be translated as 'He made the earth egg-shaped'. I'm reminded of the old saw that every word in Arabic means itself, its opposite, and a camel.
But I'm not hugely concerned about the Earth of the Quran, whether carpet or egg shaped. One thing that does bother me, though, is the Islamic calendar. It's the most useless thing ever invented: no rational being, whether human or superhuman, setting out to create a logical register of days and months, would display as a finished product this calendar.
The background to the monstrous folly goes something like this: the Arabian calendar, which the early Muslims inherited, was strictly lunar, unlike the many Chinese / Indian / Hindu calendars, which are lunisolar. A year in a lunar calendar like the Arabian one is between 11 and 12 days short of a solar year. This means that, every so often, an entire month has to be added to keep the calendar honest. So that's what the Arabs would do, circa 600 AD. When Muhammad began receiving messages from Allah, he denoted four months as holy months, months during which no wars were supposed to be fought. Ramadan was one of them. Occasionally, though, the Arabian calendar would repeat the month of Ramadan to keep in step with the sun, leading to all sorts of problems from a ritual point of view. Imagine 60 days of fasting.
So the revelation came through that intercalation was forbidden. Allah had decreed twelve months, and humans had no business duplicating any of them. With intercalation out of bounds, the new Islamic calendar drifted entirely free of the sun, which was a problem because, in human affairs unconnected to religion, the sun is of crucial importance, while the moon means jack. The Arabian calendar as modified by Islam provided no indication whether it was a good time to plant crops, whether a given day could be expected to be hot or balmy or snowy, and whether the sun would set early or late. The calendar would only tell you whether it was a day of fasting or not; whether it was OK to march to battle or not; and other stuff related explicitly to the faith itself.
It's no wonder that few Muslim nations run their civic and financial affairs on the basis of the Islamic calendar. Saudi Arabia claims to work entirely by the lunar year, but I'm sure Saudi officials peek at a proper calendar before undertaking any journeys. After all, the fact that it's the middle of Shawwal or the beginning of Rajab tells them nothing about whether they should pack an overcoat for London.

Ashura musings

In categorising the world's major civilisations, Samuel Huntington divided Christian Europe into Western Civilisation and the Orthodox World, but took the every nation from Afghanistan-Pakistan to Tunisia-Morocco to be part of a single entity called the Muslim World. Yet, the clash between Shias and Sunnis is the longest continuously running conflict in the world. It simmers here, boils over there, but there have been no successful moves towards ecumenism in the region, and The Arab Spring has now exposed, on a geopolitical scale, this fault line running through the Middle East. Those living in West Asia have recognised the amplified threat, but the rest of the world has failed to do so, partly because we tend to classify the region exactly as Samuel Huntington did.
The two countries at the fore of crisis are Bahrain and Syria. Bahrain is a Shia majority country ruled by Sunnis, and Syria a Sunni majority country ruled primarily by Shias (Alawis to be exact, members of a heterodox sect who have drawn closer to conventional Shia beliefs in recent decades).
Let's stick with Syria, because it is turning dangerously unstable. Syria's ruling political group is the Ba'ath Party, which espouses a secular, pan-Arabist ideology. The other nation to have been ruled by a faction of the Ba'ath Party was Iraq. Iraq was the mirror image of Syria: a Shia majority nation controlled by a Sunni Arab dictatorship. Since they espoused the same beliefs, it is hardly surprising that Saddam Hussein and Hafez al Assad hated each others' guts.
Seen from today's foreshortened perspective, pan-Arabism seems to have been a convenient way to paper over the Shia-Sunni dispute. When Saddam Hussein successfully rallied Iraqi Shias to his cause in the war against Iran, it suggested that ethnic identity was stronger than denominational identity in the Middle East. Pan-Arabism, though, ended up being a flash in the historical pan, while the Shia-Sunni divide is as strong as ever after 1300 years, and extends well beyond the Middle East into Afghanistan and Pakistan, as recent bombings have tragically demonstrated.
The vote against Syria by the Arab League showed that political alignments now mirror sectarian ones. Iraq and Lebanon, the only two Arab nations with substantial Shia populations as well as some form of electoral democracy, refused to join 18 Sunni-ruled Arab states in condemning the violence unleashed by Bashar al Assad. Should Syria collapse into anarchy, there's a good chance it will lead to a pogrom against Alawis, and that might draw Iran, and perhaps even Iraq and Lebanon, into intervening. In such a case, Israel and Saudi Arabia would not just stand by, and if those two nations were to get involved in the conflict, the entire world would be affected.

Osama, icons and iconoclasm

My Yahoo! column today is about Bin Laden, Wahhabis and Puritans, icons and iconoclasts. Read it here.

Digvijay Singh and bad old Congress habits

Digvijay Singh, who, a few months back, lied about phone conversations with Hemant Karkare, is a throwback to the worst sort of Congress 'secularism'. It's a secularism which panders to religious conservatives among Hindus as well as Muslims. It began under Indira Gandhi and peaked in Rajiv Gandhi's time, symbolised by the twin acts of overturning the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case, and opening the gates of the Babri Masjid to allow a shilanyas to take place. These actions, instead of pleasing members of both communities, led instead to sectarian polarisation, and to Muslim as well as Hindu partisans being able to speak with some justice of the Congress favouring the other side.
Under Manmohan Singh, the party has generally avoided dabbling in religious issues, which is great. But Digvijay Singh, as I said, is a throwback. As Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, he tried to counter the BJP by launching his own campaign for a nationwide ban on cow slaughter; extolling the virtues of cow urine; and accusing his opponent Uma Bharti of offering non-vegetarian cake to Hanuman.
Recently, he's switched to feeding off Muslim resentment. Yesterday, for example, he criticised the United States for not giving Osama bin Laden a sufficiently Muslim burial. Well, if he has a problem with Osama's final rites, he should be even more critical of the way the 26/11 terrorists were treated. The bodies of the nine dead men were embalmed, in direct contravention of Islamic norms, and kept on ice at the J J Hospital morgue for fifteen whole months, though orthodox Islam demands a burial within 24 hours. We have no idea if any religious rites were conducted before their bodies were finally placed in the earth.
Digvijay Singh's own party rules Maharashtra state; why didn't he lobby for a proper religious burial for the nine Bombay terrorists, since he has so much concern for mass murderers?

Rasta to Zion

The Palestine International Festival of Dance and Music, designed to draw attention to water shortages in the West Bank, isn’t exactly the hottest ticket on the global performance circuit. The only reason the disco band Boney M’s gig in Ramallah gained coverage was that organisers asked the band not to play one of its greatest hits, Rivers of Babylon.
Read the rest of my Yahoo! column here.

Mandu's Bhagoriya festival

Our final morning in Mandu coincided with Bhagoriya, or elopement, festival ('bhag' means run), one of the most special days in the adivasi calendar. We scooted before the celebrations reached their peak, and before our driver could drink himself silly (he not only drove well, but provided a lucid account of adivasi life, on which this post is based). Starting around noon, troupes started arriving in Mandu's main plaza from surrounding villages. Each band carried one massive dhol along with accompanying instruments like flutes. The music, dancing and drinking began soon after. By 5pm every adivasi man and woman (and many children) would be tanked. Then some form of exchange initiated by a female (the acceptance of paan, a little gulaal applied to the chosen man's cheek) would seal her partner for the night, provided he wasn't too inebriated to perform. Men, apparently, don't have much leeway to reject girls. In most cases, parents negotiate with the boy to settle a marriage, otherwise it's just a one-night stand. Among the adivasis a payment is made by the man's family in advance of the wedding, reversing the practice of dowry prevalent among caste Hindus. As a result, girls aren't viewed as a burden, and no selective abortions are practiced.
Unfortunately, the sly intercession of political parties has upset the traditional progression of bhagoriya performances. Look carefully at the picture and you'll see four different platforms in the square. Each was constructed by a political outfit (the BJP, Congress and two adivasi organisations). Loud announcements were made continually on squeaky microphones, drowning out the music that was being played without the benefit of loudspeakers. It was great to see the blaze of colour, the gaudy sarees and the turbans bigger than heads, but otherwise the tamasha wasn't what we'd anticipated or hoped for.

Salman and Chingis Khan and John (not Khan)

Salman Khan is apparently preparing to play the Mongol chief Chingis Khan (or Genghis Khan, or Changaiz Khan, spell it which way you will). This is what Salman looks like:

At least, this is what he looks like after a hair transplant, hair extensions and some Photoshop work.
We don't know what Chingis-Genghis-Changaiz looked like, there are no contemporary images of him. But from portraits painted a few years after his death, we can accept he looked something like this:


Now you might think Salman doesn't look much like the guy to whom he owes his surname. But then, how much does this actor resemble Chingis-Genghis-Changaiz, who did not even share a surname with the emperor?


John Wayne was cast as Chingis (sick of name extensions, I'm dropping Genghis-Changaiz) in a film titled The Conqueror, produced by Howard Hughes, who saw it as an 'Eastern Western'. The Conqueror, released in 1956, has gone down in history for two reasons. First, it is considered one of the worst cases of miscasting in the history of Hollywood.


Second, the exteriors were shot in Utah, downwind from a US nuclear test site in Nevada. Of the 220 crew members, 91 developed cancer over the next two decades, about three times the proportion of the average American population.

Weirdly enough, Chingis Khan has been, at one point or another, considered Indian as well as Caucasian. The Indian bit came early on. Europeans didn't know much about this country back in the 13th century, but they had a vague understanding that St.Thomas had converted a few heathens here. When Chingis first came to their notice, it was as a warrior kicking the butts of Muslim kings. Roman Catholics, who'd waged long wars for control of the Holy Land, took this as a sign that a Christian priest-king they called Prester John was riding out from the east to retake Jerusalem. They applauded as the Mongols overran West Asian kingdoms, grew a little apprehensive when Russia and East Europe were attacked, and finally concluded: "These guys aren't Christians, they aren't Indians, they're coming to get us, and we're screwed." Luckily for them, the Mongol invasion of Europe was aborted at the gates of Vienna.

As for Chingis's European connections, that's a modern tale, but one no less peculiar. Hitler, you may have heard, was a fan of Chingis Khan. Genocidal rulers being a relatively small and select group, this is not surprising. But fitting Chingis into the Aryan pantheon was tricky. The problem was solved by Heinrich Himmler, who decided that Chingis was in fact descended from people who had fled the island of Atlantis before it sank, and was, therefore, as blue eyed as John Wayne.

As a sidelight, the Mongol invasion of Europe explains why children with Down syndrome used to be called Mongoloid. You may think it was only because of the epicanthic fold of the eyelid, but there was more to it than that. Scientists believed that Down Syndrome sufferers represented genetic atavism (from the Latin at-avus, or like-grandfather); they expressed traits suppressed for centuries. Mongols had raped or otherwise slept with European women during the 13th century invasion, and those traits within Europe's genetic pool occasionally burst to the surface. Children with Down Syndrome were like normal Mongol children, and the impairment of cognitive ability associated with the condition was explained by the fact that Mongols were not as bright as whites. A British doctor, F G Crookshank, published a book in 1924 titled The Mongol in our Midst, which explained that since most Mongols were imbeciles, it was to be expected that Mongols who atavistically appeared in Europe should share that imbecility. The book was generally well reviewed.

As it happens, the nations of North and East Asia, Mongolia included, score exceptionally well in IQ tests. From the information available today, it appears that average IQs in these nations (China, Mongolia, Korea and Japan) are 2 to 5 points higher than those measured in white-majority countries.

Raj Thackeray wishes you a Happy Muharram

I usually ignore Maharashtra Navnirman Sena posters, but belatedly noticed this one at Shivaji Park last evening. It's in a prime location, about twenty meters from Raj Thackeray's home, so there's little doubt the man has seen it and approved.
Apart from wishing us merry Christmas and a happy new year, the poster also offers Moharram ke Shubhkamnaye (sic). Maybe Hindi speakers and Shia mourners will give the MNS marks for effort and forgive the linguistic and doctrinal errors.

The Military and Non-Violence

The launch of India's first nuclear-powered submarine, INS Arihant, reminded me of an embarrassing moment from the past. I was in a city outside Bombay and needed to meet a high ranking naval officer for some work. I spoke about him to a couple of acquaintances, both of whom immediately said, "Oh him, he's on the nuclear submarine project". As I sat making small talk with the officer a few hours later, I casually asked, "So how is the work on the nuclear submarine proceeding? Is it likely to be functional any time soon?" He looked flabbergasted. "Who told you I was working on that?" he asked. I realised that, not only was the project supposed to be a carefully guarded secret, but that, until that moment, the officer had believed his official position as overseer of certain civil contracts was taken seriously. I hemmed and hawed, mumbling I couldn't remember who, precisely, had mentioned the nuclear sub, and changed the subject.
I hope the officer was present at the commissioning of Arihant the other day.
Arihant means 'destroyer of enemies'. A fair enough name for a submarine, you would think. But there's a catch. The word is used in Jain tradition to refer to certain enlightened souls who have, to mix religious terminology a bit, triumphed in the Greater Jihad against hatred and personal egotism. Jainism happens to be the most militantly non-violent faith in the world, if that phrase isn't an oxymoron. In the past, when Jains became prime ministers or high officials, and had to get involved in warfare, they atoned for their sins by endowing temples. The lavish marble monuments of Mount Abu were constructed from these endowments. Jains, literally, would not hurt a fly. Many go out of their way to try and protect insects, wearing masks so as not breathe the critters in, and sweeping the ground before their feet with peacock feathers to brush off any unfortunate beetle who might be chilling in the danger zone.
Many Gujarati Jains, it must be said, have been less than true to their ideals during the reign of Narendra Modi, but that's a separate issue. The issue, right now, is INS Arihant, and Jains are displeased that their prophets have been associated with a machine of destruction.
It must be difficult for the military establishment to cope with all the pacifist traditions we have in our country, but sometimes the brass seem to miss obvious points of conflict. Like, India's first nuclear test, conducted in 1974, was codenamed The Smiling Buddha. A number of commentators have since suggested it was unwise to connect history's most profound teacher of non-violence with the most horrendously destructive device conceived by humankind.
Not that India admitted its interest in stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. The Smiling Buddha was classified as a Peaceful Nuclear Explosion. That seems like the oxymoron to end all oxymorons, but there's actually a treaty governing such tests, because at one time scientists believed nuclear weapons could be of help in building dams and canals. India's own military ambitions used that convenient cloak in 1974.
In 1998, the cloak was thrown off, all pretense came to an end. The Buddha smiled again, they said, of the five tests conducted that year. I doubt he did.

The Problem with Theocracy

Indians love to call Pakistan a theocratic state, though it is not even close to being one. The only country in the world ruled by a theocracy at the moment is Iran. The argument in favour of theocracy was laid out by Ayatollah Khomeini starting in the late 1960s. Unfortunately for Khomeini, other clerics of the highest rank did not buy the idea that all affairs of state should be monitored and guided by religious scholars. Even today, clerics like Iraq's most senior Shia theologian, Grand Ayatollah Sistani, are known to be opposed to the wholesale takeover by priests of the organs of government.
Khomeini was an old man by the time his Islamic revolution bore fruit, and it became imperative to groom and appoint a successor. He chose Ayatollah Montazeri, not a renowned jurist, but one of the few individuals within Khomeini's inner circle technically qualified for the job. Montazeri, however, began moving steadily leftward after 1979. In Khomeini's last years, his appointed heir came out in support of free political parties and a conciliatory foreign policy while criticising extreme actions such as the fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie to death. Khomeini demoted him and appointed in his place Sayyed Ali Khamenei. Khamenei was not even an Ayatollah, but he possesed the quality that Khomeini was looking for above all: absolute allegiance to Khomeini's ideas. After Khamenei took over as Iran's most powerful man, Montazeri clashed with him over issues like the mistreatment of Iran's Baha'i minority, and was placed under house arrest between 1997 and 2003.
Khomeini had argued that a marja (an Ayatollah qualified to interpret scripture and guide followers) ought to lead Iran. He ended up clearing the way for a non-marja to occupy the highest post in the land. The requisite qualifications were, of course cooked up, and Hojatoleslam Khamenei became Ayatollah Khamenei without producing any scholarly work to deserve the promotion.
For the past twenty years, Khamenei has ruled Iran without ever gaining a substantial following or a place in the hearts of his countrymen. Many of his fellow clerics continue to feel he should never have got the top job in the first place. Now, with the result of Iran's election being contested, the schisms are making themselves evident again. Ayatollah Montazeri has come out against the count, saying nobody in their right mind can believe it was fair. The battle currently being played out is between two factions of insiders, one led by Ayatollah Rafsanjani and Mir Hossein Mousavi, and the other by Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. Khamenei has had two decades to appoint loyalists to top jobs like Iran's twelve member Guardian Council which oversees all legislation. He still holds the better hand, but continuing public protests, which evoke the mass demonstrations that toppled the Shah and ushered in the Islamic revolution, could change that. What insiders on both sides fear most of all is that riots will get out of hand and threaten the foundations of Iran's entire theocratic system.
Thirty years of the Islamic Republic of Iran have proved that priests turn every bit as power-hungry as commoners once they are granted secular authority. Not a surprise for those familiar with history, of course. Iran's been burdened with the restrictions that come with theocracy, without gaining the clean government of high ideals promised by Imam Khomeini.

The Times distorts outcome of 'anti-Hindu bias' case

An article in this morning's Times of India is headlined Hindus teach California a lesson, and carries the sub-heading: Group wins $175,000 from state education board for defaming Hinduism. The Sacramento Bee covers the case rather differently; Its headline reads, Hindu group to get just $175,000 in textbook bias suit.
It appears the Bee is right and the Times wrong. The primary contention of the Hindu group, namely that California's textbooks and vetting methods display anti-Hindu bias, was rejected in court previously. The current settlement involves "no curriculum concessions", and the payment will not even cover the plaintiffs' costs. Wikipedia has an excellent entry about the entire case, with a further link to some 70 text changes made by the California Board of Education after consulting scholars in response to protests by Hindu conservatives. The process was transparent and the end result pretty politically correct. For example, instead of saying men have greater rights than women in traditional Hindu society, California textbooks state women have 'other rights than men'. Predictably, vociferous Hindu groups like the Hindu American Foundation stayed away from the consultations, knowing they'd be exposed when they were asked to produce actual evidence to back their claims. Once the process was over, they cried bias and threatened to sue. They lost their case, and are now holding up the settlement money (offered because going through the trial would be more expensive, and California is in a deep financial hole right now) as a sign of victory. They've fooled Indian media outlets, most obviously the Times of India.

The Taxi Driver's Story

Reading a report about Sikhs being forced to pay Pakistan's Taliban a levy, I was reminded of an encounter with a taxi driver in London back in September 2006. After landing at Heathrow, the painter Sudhir Patwardhan and I called for a cab to take us to our hotel in Southwark. Fifteen minutes later, a Sikh man walked into the terminal holding a placard with my name written on it. He was about fifty, dressed in a spotless white button-down tucked into dark trousers. He greeted us cordially and offered to take our suitcases. We declined.
After feeding the details of our destination into the GPS prompter in his car, the man asked in fluent Hindustani where we lived and what brought us to London. Our replies elicited more questions. I wasn’t in the mood for much talk after the overnight flight, but eventually felt obliged to ask him where he was from.

“Afghanistan”, he said.

My interest, and Sudhir's, was suddenly roused.

“Afghanistan? How long were you there?”

“I was born near Kabul.”

“So did you parents move there?”

“No, our family was in Afghanistan for over 300 years.”

“But you speak such good Hindi.”

“I speak many languages. Pashto, Russian, Uzbek, Punjabi, Hindi, now English.”

“And how long have you been in England?”

“Eight years.”

"You left when the Taliban took over?”

“No, before.” His voice turned bitter. “Everybody here speaks about the Taliban, but for us the mujahideen were much worse. The Taliban only made Sikhs and Hindus wear different clothing, so they could be distinguished from Muslims. That way we wouldn't be forced to say namaaz and things like that. But the mujahideen would insist we become Muslims, and we had to keep bribing them to leave us alone”

He stretched his left arm so the sleeve rode back to reveal laceration scars on the wrist. “I have these all over my body: arms, abdomen, back. That’s what they did to people who refused to convert.”

He was born in a village, but his father wanted to educate his sons well, and sent him to university in India. After graduating, he opened a chemist's shop in Kabul. Business was good during Najibullah’s reign; he imported medicines from India, tying up with companies like Ranbaxy and Alembic to supply life-saving drugs. Once the civil war reached the Afghan capital, the bad times began, and got rapidly worse after the Soviet withdrawal. Business declined and persecution of minorities rose. He sold one of his two houses to pay off the mujahideen, and closed one of his two shops. In those days, Kabul had a law that one chemist had to stay open late each night. It was done by rotation and, the day it was his turn, he was kidnapped in the small hours as he returned home after closing shop.

"They tortured me for days. I was sure I wasn't going to get out alive. I tried reasoning with them, saying that God was the god of humanity, not just the god of Muslims, and that force was no way to propagate religion. That only made them beat me more.

"Luckily, a friend from my village was visiting Kabul and dropped in to meet me. When my wife related all that had happened, he told her this country is no good for you any more, you have to leave, sell everything if you must. He used his contacts to locate the kidnappers, fix a ransom, and free me. He arranged transport, taking us all to Peshawar. I barely remember what happened in the days after that, the places we were taken to, loaded onto and unloaded from trucks. Finally, we came to Karachi and were put on a boat to England. The British were very good to us. Their mission in Kabul checked the details I provided, and once they were sure we were telling the truth, we got asylum.
"It's funny where life can take you. I'd never have thought I would be driving a taxi in London. But my son and daughter are studying now, the boy is in university, he won't be a taxi driver."

Parsis, vultures, cows and dogs

Sooni Taraporevala's Little Zizou is a charming tale of two intricately connected Parsi families, the Khodaijis and the Pressvalas. The youngest Khodaiji, Xerxes, sees in Roxanne Pressvala a substitute for his own dead mother, to the annoyance of Liana, the Pressvalas' younger daughter. Liana's older sister Zenobia, meanwhile, is an unreachable object of desire for Xerxes's brother, Artaxerxes. Boman Presswala, father of Zenobia and Liana, is the liberal editor of a tabloid caught up in a battle against the born-again orthodoxy of Cyrus Khodaiji, faith healer, charlatan, and father to Xerxes and Atraxerxes.
The ideological dispute between the two fathers primarily revolves around giving mudbloods and half-bloods the same status as purebloods. Unfortunately, Khodaiji is a caricature who, as played by Sohrab Ardeshir, lacks the charisma required to be a convincing congregational head. Pressvala, on the other hand, is a nuanced character essayed with relish by the excellent Boman Irani. The imbalance between the two seriously weakens the central premise of the film.
Taraporevala obviously wanted to avoid steering too close to a figure like Khojeste Mistree, leader of the revivalist faction in the battle being played out in the community today. Among the many disputes between conservatives and liberals is the manner of disposing the dead. For centuries now, Parsis have built dakhmas or towers of silence, where corpses are placed to be consumed by vultures. Unfortunately, there aren't enough vultures left to do the eating, and corpses lie rotting for days on end, a prospect that horrifies many Parsis when they think of their own end or that of their kin. Solutions such as special mirrors to focus the sun's rays have been suggested, but conservatives resist the idea, proposing instead a breeding programme to augment the vulture population.
As a child, I liked spending holiday afternoons up on the terrace of my building gazing at vultures soaring in the sky. The woman who stayed on the top floor and kept the key to the terrace thought the habit weird, and looking back I sort of agree with her. Even after my vulture fascination dissipated, I was interested enough to look for the familiar circling flock of birds as I walked around the park or to the bus-stop . So I was probably one of the first to notice that the vulture population of Bombay was diminishing. Since other species, sparrows for example, were also disappearing from the metropolis in those years, I did not take the drop in vulture numbers to be a sign of a general decline, but that is precisely what it was.
In the late 1990s, I heard about massive falls in south Asian vulture numbers, and could see why it was so puzzling for experts seeking its cause. Vultures, after all, are hardy carrion eaters. They consume flesh that's been lying in the sun for hours. To digest that stuff, they need the strongest immune systems in the animal kingdom. Since there was no shortage of food in the subcontinent, and little likelihood of a deadly infection, why were they dying out?
By the time American and Pakistani scientists found the answer, south Asia's vulture population had fallen 95%. India contributed to the process of investigation only negatively. Not only did our scientists fail to come up with anything close to an answer, our government blocked foreign researchers from taking tissue samples back to their labs citing a law banning export of genetic material.
I was gobsmacked to hear the cause of the vulture decline. The culprit was diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug I, like millions of people across the world, took regularly to treat muscle pain. In the 1990s, diclofenac, known to damage kidneys, was introduced on a mass scale in south Asia as a cheap veterinary treatment. Farmers across the subcontinent jabbed their lame cattle with the drug to get a little more work on the land out of them. Milch cows, their knees affected by standing in one place for long periods of time, were similarly treated. When these bovines died, the diclofenac in their bodies was ingested by vultures whose kidneys were specially sensitive to the drug. Researchers estimated that only one dead cow or buffalo in 250 needed to have been treated with diclofenac in the week before its death to cause the observed 30% annual decline in vulture numbers.
Diclofenac is now prohibited for veterinary use and vulture numbers will hopefully pick up. The primary beneficiaries of the vulture decline, meanwhile, have been stray dogs. They are the main competition for the raptors in tearing out bits of dead cattle flesh. Parsis, incidentally, prize dogs as much as they do vultures. Before the practise of dakhmas was instituted, Zoroastrian corpses would be exposed to the elements on specially designated plots of land. Dogs and vultures would share in the feast. Even now (correct me if I'm wrong), a dog is brought to look at a corpse as part of Parsi funeral rituals.
Parsis can get very upset when the issue of dogs comes up, as the Brits in Bombay found out back in 1832. The administrators organised a cull of stray canines, only to have a riot on their hands. Of course, Britons, Europeans and Americans have their own peculiarities in this respect. Used to owning the animals as pets, they are repelled by the East and south-east Asian practice of putting dogs on menus. Aside from questions about the conditions in which the animals are reared, which apply to all species, there is no objective reason for considering the eating of cows and pigs civilised, but condemning as barbaric the consumption of dog flesh. But westerners have a habit of advancing their cultural prejudices as universal moral concerns.
Sorry if I digress, but this entire post is a series of digressions.
The data bear out the fact that stray dog numbers in India have risen as the vulture population declined. How much of the increase is a result of less competition for food is impossible to quantify. Unlike vultures, though, dogs frequently bite living human beings, and are the main carriers of an incurable disease with a mortality rate greater than that of any other affliction known to humankind. Over 80% of the world's rabies cases occur in the Indian subcontinent. About 40,000 cases per year, and therefore about 40,000 deaths. That, you will agree, is an astonishing figure.
When I was a child, alongside my fascination with vultures, I liked dogs very much. The closest I came to having one as a pet was to adopt an abandoned puppy along with galli friends. One day, the puppy-turned-dog went crazy and bit three of us. The injections were not pleasant. I'd have to stand in a long line at KEM hospital each day for a dose of the vaccine. That more or less killed my enthusiasm for dogs.
In Little Zizou, the young Liana Pressvala is a dog lover. Near the end of the movie, she is promised a pet puppy. There is no mention of vultures in the film.

All That Is Holi

Holi must be the oldest widely celebrated festival in the world. Indians are fond of tracing everything back to the Vedas, but I suspect the Holi rites were in place long before those texts were composed. Though the Holi bonfire has been connected with Hindu legend through the stories of Kamdeva being burned by Shiva's third eye, and Prahlad being saved from a fire in which the demoness Holika was consumed, these tales do little to explain the ritual as a whole.
It's pointless looking for godly explanations, actually, that's not what Holi is about. People gather round a bonfire under a spring full moon, sing obscene songs, and get drunk. The next morning, they gather to smear each other with pigment powders, get drenched in coloured water, and consume enough bhaang to be stoned for the rest of the day. What can be found of spiritual worth in any these activities?
What Holi needs for it to be enjoyable is a community. As soon as strangers come into the picture, the festival threatens to become predatory rather than participatory. That, unfortunately, is how it is in most cities. I foresee a time when there will be large-scale Holi celebrations conducted the way Navratri dances are organised now. I'm surprised nobody's taken the lead yet, I'm sure there's a substantial market out there.

The Times They Are a-Changin', Again

Just saw Revolutionary Road, a tale about the boredom of suburban life in 1950s America. The director, Sam Mendes, has also made a film about the boredom of suburban life in 1990s America, but I want to stick with the 1950s for now.
Through that decade, and into the mid '60s, the highest selling albums of the year in the United States were soundtracks or cast recordings of musicals. My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Camelot and Hello Dolly all achieved the top spot, but the run ended after 1965's Mary Poppins. By the end of the 1960s, a very different sound had grabbed possession of the charts. The best-selling record of 1968 was Are you Experienced? by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The following year, the psychedelic rock of Iron Butterfly won with In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. The only musical to head the annual charts in the next thirty years was 1971's Jesus Christ Superstar, banned in more than one country for its supposed irreligiosity and unusual take on Judas and Mary Magdalene.
How could Mary Poppins give way in just three years to Jimi Hendrix, musically and politically a world apart? The move from one to the other reveals, as effectively as any other bit of data, the cultural fracture that attended the coming of age of the baby boom generation.
Demographic / cultural changes in the US since then have been less drastic, but the results of a survey published yesterday show a clear shift in the nature of Americans' religious belief in the course of one generation. Identification with a single religious denomination, such as Baptist or Catholic, has dropped substantially; the number of non-denominational Christians has risen; and the percentage of people identifying themselves as non-religious has doubled in 18 years, to 15. New England is looking more like old England: an incredible 34% of Vermont residents now classify themselves as non-religious, and Boston's Catholic numbers are haemorrhaging.
The success of novels like The DaVinci Code obviously owes a lot to the movement in religious attitudes. Dan Brown offered more than a criticism of the Catholic church in that book: he proposed a multicultural, gender-sensitive spiritualism, which was bound to find a receptive readership in a nation in which 2.8 million citizens now identify themselves as pagan, Wiccan or Spiritualist
We've already witnessed the political impact of the change in religious habits with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. In his inaugural speech, Obama acknowledged the demographic roots of his victory by mentioning a number of different faiths, as also agnostics / atheists. In a sense, the 2008 election represents a victory for the counterculture of the 1960s. The immediate political impact of that counterculture was to create a backlash among conservatives that gave right-wingers a virtual stranglehold on the Presidency. Ronald Reagan's vision of militarily assertiveness, socially conservatism and low taxation resonated strongly among working-class white Christians. Now the bedrock of the Reagan coalition has splintered, thanks to the incessant pressure of those 1960s cultural values, and not a moment too soon for the world.

Darwin: A Bicentennial Tribute

Charles Darwin was among my first heroes. As a primary schooler, I read a Ladybird account of his life, and was deeply fascinated. Beagle, Galapagos, iguana: the words felt wonderful on the tongue. I dreamed of discovering unknown creatures in malarial swamps far from civilisation. As I grew older and realised I had capacity neither for the self-sacrifice nor for the meticulous persistence required for explorations of that kind, my admiration for Darwin and those who followed in his path was reinforced considerably.
Darwin's central thesis of natural selection acting on random variations is very different from, say, the Theory of Relativity. Anybody of sound mind can understand it. It is so simple, in fact, that that any intelligent person living in the early Victorian era might have hit upon it independently, given the right circumstances. The reason nobody did is that, while the mechanism Darwin proposed was elegantly simple, its consequences were so far-reaching as to overturn all traditional notions about how trees, reptiles, insects and humans came to occupy Planet Earth. The idea was so radical that even today, exactly 200 years after Darwin was born, in the 150th year of the publication of his celebrated book On the Origin of Species, and after a century and a half of discoveries that have proved his idea true beyond all reasonable doubt, a majority of people across the globe reject its validity.
I never had a mental block against the idea of natural selection because I didn't believe any of the explanations religions provided for the origin of life on earth. My immediate family members were not religiously inclined. The only time I attended prayers was when an uncle or neighbour installed a Ganapati during the annual festival. I gorged on the modaks made in that period, but the fervent chanting always struck me as faintly ridiculous. I found it mind-boggling that intelligent, well-educated adults could actually believe their prayers would be answered by a deity with a human body and elephant's head.
It was evident that the world was very unfair to some individuals and extraordinarily kind to others; and that the unfairness and kindness did not correlate with any discernible external factor like religious faith, goodness or intelligence. Those who worshipped Ganapati were no better off than devotees of other gods. Why, then, believe in the dogmas of one faith over another?
Once I understood Darwin, life made sense. The facts as I saw them, and as they were observed by people everywhere, could be explained in ways that did not create an infinite regression of questions ("If everything must have a creator, who created the Creator? And who created that Creator?"), or unsolvable contradictions ("If Allah is omnipotent, it follows that he made me a disbeliever. Why, then, will he condemn me to hell and an eternity of torment for my disbelief?"). By the time I turned thirteen or fourteen or fifteen (past years coalesce in memory as one gets older), I was convinced that natural selection was the driving force behind the creation of the varied forms of life visible on earth, and nothing I have read or experienced since has shaken that conviction in the slightest.
I have written this post without using the word most associated with Darwin: evolution. It is, in many ways, a misnomer, implying as it does that some states of being are inherently better than others. It places Darwin in a category that includes a number of misguided thinkers who came before him, like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and leaves the door open to criticism that he was not the 'father of evolution'. He wasn't, just as Gandhi was not the 'father of non-violence'. Gandhi's originality lay in demonstrating how non-violent protest could be the basis of political struggle. Darwin's resided in his explanation, backed by hundreds of practical examples, of how life began with extremely simple forms and changed over hundreds of millions of years, without any external impetus, to the mix of simple and complex living things we observe today.

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.