Sunday, 24 August 1985
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Animal Sixth Sense
Some weeks ago in another column I had written of the uncanny sixth sense that some animals, birds and insects possess: the vulture’s ability to spot a carcass from several miles, the dog’s ability to sniff dope concealed in the bottom of a suitcase, and so on. M.L. Ahuja of Nanakpura, New Delhi, narrates yet another instance taken from the autobiography of the late Sardar Gurbaksh Singh, founder of Preet Nagar (now on our border with Pakistan) and editor of Preet Lari. He writes of the railway station master of Quetta which was devastated by an earthquake in 1935. The station master returned home late at night after seeing the last train leave. He was tired and wanted to sleep but his dog got him by his trousers and dragged him out of the house. A few moments later the earth shook. Most of Quetta was reduced to a rubble and thousands of sleeping people killed by the falling of debris. The station master and his dog were among the few who escaped.
Samiron Sarkar of Calcutta has sent me another instance of a cat living in a block of apartments opposite the Lal Bazar police station. The cat had a little of four kittens. A few days after giving birth to them she spotted an apartment in a block of flats in a neighbourly building occupied by a kind lady. One by one she took her kittens by the scruff of their necks and deposited them in a corner of the lady’s bedroom. That night a fire broke out in the other building and destroyed the room in which the cat had littered. The incident was reported in all Calcutta’s papers.
7 September 1985
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Separating Religion and Politics
The first thing that Cabinet ministers of the new Akali government of the Punjab did after being sworn in at Chandigarh was to drive to Amritsar to offer prayers at the Golden Temple. For good measure, thereafter, Amrinder Singh proceeded to Patiala along with his maharani sahiba and two MLAs, a Hindu and a Sikh elected on the Akali ticket, to make obeisance to Maha Kali. We do not know if any of them also paid homage to some Muslim pir’s grave in a dargah or received blessings of a padre in a church.
‘What’s wrong in their doing so?’ my friends demand very angrily. ‘Why the hell do you get so exercised whenever a President, prime minister, a chief minister or any state dignitary visits a place of worship? Religion is a person’s private affair.’
‘Precisely! Because religion is a private affair, men in public life should refrain from making public demonstrations of religiosity,’ I reply. ‘If these gentlemen had sought the blessings of their respective deities in their own homes or temples without taking a horde of press photographers and journalists with them, I would have nothing to say. But the object of these demonstrations is publicity: to advertise that because they are religious- minded, they are God-fearing and honest. If they also visit other religious places of worship, it is not sarva dharma samabhav (respect for all religions), but simply to demonstrate that they are not narrow-minded and hope that it will ensure them more votes in the next elections. In any event this goes against the spirit of secularism as I understand it.’ A visit to a place of worship does not make a man a better person than he is, any more than a dip in the Ganga or a pilgrimage to Mecca washes off his past sins. Nor does going to church on Sabbath act like a sponge to wipe out evil deeds done in the preceeding six days. It has been well said:
A Christian is a man who feels
Repentance on a Sunday
For what he did on Saturday
And is going to do on Monday
What do people who clamour about separating religion from politics have to say when political notables indulge in this form of pre-planned publicity?
Sunday, 19 October 1985
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Murder of Mount Abu
I discovered Mount Abu 50 years ago while living in an English village in Hertfordshire. Every morning I came to the station to catch my train to college, I passed under a large, coloured poster with the picture of a marble temple embedded in brown granite rock. It read: ‘Visit India: Dilwara Temples, Mount Abu’. Every other day someone or the other of my fellow-travellers would ask me: ‘Singh, you know this place?’ I had to admit I hadn’t the foggiest notion where it was on the map of India, but the first thing I would do after I returned home was to see it. So I did. I chose Mount Abu to consummate an ongoing love affair. That was in November 1939.
It was three weeks of bliss, living in a villa overlooking Nakki Lake. We spent our mornings chasing a pair of otters on our rowing boat. Our afternoons were devoted to exploring densely afforested hillsides, watching langurs frolic amongst ancient banyans growing out of massive boulders which they held between their roots. We visited the Dilwara Temples many times: nothing more exquisite in marble craftsmanship exists anywhere in the world. We went to the edge of the hill range to see the desert of Rajasthan spread below our feet from a point named after a Parsi lad who, being crossed in love, had plunged to his death at Jehangir Falls. From another point we had a view of the setting sun all to ourselves. We returned to our villa to see Nakki shining in the moonlight and gave our own names to two bulbous mountain peaks which looked like the bosom of a giant ogress from Bhil mythology. There was also an abundance of wildlife: many varieties of deer, bear and wild hog. Panthers stole into bungalows to pick up does. One was shot in the twilight, a bare 100 yards from us, by a 14-year-old Anglo-Indian boy on vacation from school. Abu was then a sylvan hill-top haven of peace with less than a thousand residents. It had no cinemas, no hotels and hardly any motor cars.
I was back in Mount Abu last week. In exchange for peace and quiet, the years had brought Abu prosperity, crowds and vulgarity. Its population had multiplied 15 times: it draws five lakh visitors every summer. Princes who had their mansions on vantage points had long abandoned them. Some like Jaipur House overlooking the city have been converted into a four-room hotel furnished with broken tables, tattered curtains, carpets and settees. Nirvair of the Brahmakumari fraternity showed me a tiny cave beneath where there is a Shiva shrine with a marble plaque saying that it was donated by ‘Moti Lal Vakeel in 1867 AD’. Was it Moti Lal Nehru? No one has hitherto bothered to find out. Mount Abu’s aristocratic wog atmosphere has given way to Gujarati bhel puri-pao bhaji culture. Rows of food stalls, junk shops passing for arts and handicraft emporia are littered all over the place. There are over 70 mini-hotels, most of them boasting of ‘pure’ vegetarian food. (What is ‘impure’ vegetarian food?) There are also half-a-dozen three-star hotels with names cleverly misspelt to trap the unwary: Sherratone for Sheraton, Hilltone for Hilton. Not quite chaar sau bees but close enough. Loud film music blares from every paan-cigarette stall. Buses and cars clog its narrow roads. Every evening large crowds armed with transistor radios assemble at sunset point. What should be observed in a hush of silence is greeted with discordant cacophony of yelling and shouting.
About the only place that some of the old peacefulness remains is in the ancient Jain temples at Dilwara and the new ashram of the Brahmakumaris. In one pervades the spirit of Mahavira, in the other, of Dada Lekh Raj and his intoned prayer Om Shanti. With our own eyes we are witnessing the murder of one of our most beautiful hill resorts.
Sunday, 1 March 1986
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Mama’s Darlings
Some days ago I received at letter from a Dutch girl. It was unusually candid about her personal life. She had been in love with an Indian boy. They had lived together for two years and planned to get married. Without warning, the Indian walked out and tamely married one of his own relatives chosen for him by his mother. I have known innumerable young Indian men in love who, when it comes to marriage, let down their girlfriends on the plea ‘Mummy nahin maantee.’ In this matter, our girls show more guts: if their parents don’t agree, they simply run off with men they have given their hearts to. And still stranger, though we are often told that an Indian male is Papa-dominated and cannot make his own decisions till his father is dead (Koestler described Indian society as a ‘Bapucracy’), when it comes to choos
ing a wife, it is the mother more than the father who imposes her wishes on her son.
How this Mama-domination has come about in a male-dominated society has been lucidly explained by the eminent psychiatrist Sudhir Kakar in a psycho-analytic study of childhood and society in India in his eminently readable book, The Inner World. Kakar is of the opinion that although an Indian girl is regarded as someone’s daughter, wife or mother, her lower status builds strong ties between her and her son which the son finds hard to break. In her parents’ home she is only a sojourner marking time to depart when she is given away in marriage. In her husband’s house she is like a newly-acquired slave carrying out the wishes of her mother-in-law, husband’s sisters and his elder brother’s wives—in short, she is less a wife and more a daughter-in-law. A spectacular change in her status takes place when she becomes pregnant. Writes Kakar: ‘It is only with motherhood that she comes into her own as a woman, and can make a place for herself in the family, in the community and in the life cycle. This accounts for her unique sense of maternal obligation and her readiness for practically unlimited emotional investment in her children.’
Indian mothers fuss over their sons much more than women of other countries fuss over theirs. Some continue to breast-feed them till they are five, caress and cuddle them as women caress and cuddle their lovers. This generates the notion in the male child: ‘I am lovable, for I am loved.’ Kakar infers: ‘Many character traits ascribed to Indians are a part of the legacy of this particular pattern of infancy: trusting friendliness with a quick readiness to form attachments, and intense, if short-lived, disappointment, if friendly overtures are not reciprocated; willingness to reveal the most intimate aspects about one’s life at the slightest acquaintance and the expectation of a reciprocal familiarity in others.’ It is this ‘emotional capital built up during infancy’, as Kakar describes it, that makes the Indian male his ‘Mama’s boy’ for the rest of his life and incapable of giving his girlfriend or wife the love they expect from him.
Kakar cites many instances of the close mother-son relationship. Of his mother Nehru wrote: ‘I had no fear of her, for I knew that she would condone everything I did and because of her excessive and undiscriminating love for me, I tried to dominate over her a little.’ More forthright was Swami Yoganand: ‘Father was kind, grave, at times stern. Loving him dearly, we children yet observed a certain reverential distance. But mother was Queen of hearts, and taught us only through love.’
Question: ‘Why do Indian men make such lousy lovers?’
Answer: ‘They get all the love they want from their mothers and by the time they attain puberty they become emotionally impotent.’
Sunday, 30 August 1986
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Teaching the World about India
One constant lament of Indians visiting foreign lands is, ‘they know nothing about India’. The desire to teach the world about India approaches missionary zeal. They decry information services of their embassies and launch upon self-appointed missions to educate foreigners about everything—Vedanta, temples, curries, how to put on a sari, Five Year Plans and what have you. It is a losing battle. There are too many foreigners; and they prefer to remain steeped in ignorance about the wonder that is India.
My first experience of the foreigners’ ‘knowledge’ of Indian affairs was in Canada in 1948. The high commissioner was away on tour; I was holding the fort. The Hyderabad affair was moving to its climax; even Canadian papers carried stories of border incidents between Razakars and Indian troops. However, Canadian civil servants like our own bureaucrats read only the more interesting headlines. Hyderabad did not qualify for attention. I was rung up one morning. ‘This is the ministry of defence,’ said the voice.
‘This is the Indian High Commission; what can I do for you?’
‘You know sir, from time to time we supply arms to Indian princes. In the past our practice was to inform the British government—purely as a matter of courtesy. Now that you are an independent country, perhaps we should let you know when we execute orders from one of your princes.’
‘That is very kind of you,’ I replied, ‘who is it wanting arms now?’
‘We don’t have to tell you,’ he said somewhat truculently. ‘As I understand it, the princes are independent agents. But this is a large order so we might tell you about it—only as a matter of courtesy,’ he repeated.
‘Sure, sure,’ I assured him in a most honeyed voice. ‘No troubles with the princes; they are one of us.’
‘Well, we are just sending off a consignment of 100,000 rifles to—let me make sure of the name again—yes, the Naeezam of Hyderabad. His agents paid in cash—so no money problems. I hope this is OK by you.’
‘Sure, go ahead.’
I put down the receiver and picked it up again to book a long distance call to New Delhi.
The ‘police action’ took place with incredible despatch; but it left an awful stink in the nostrils of foreigners. The American and Canadian press were full of vile accusations of ‘Hitlerite aggression’ by ‘double-faced Indian pacifists’.
‘They’ve got his business at the wrong end of the stick,’ said my high commissioner in a very exasperated tone. ‘Call a press conference and we will explain the whole problem to them.’
We called a press conference. In the hallowed tradition of the fourth estate, we plied our guests with liberal potations of Scotch, dry martini and caviar. When they were properly oiled to a receptive mood, the high commissioner addressed them. He told them how Hyderabad was an ‘island’ in the very heart of India; and how India’s independence would be sheer mockery unless it included Hyderabad. He told them of the atrocities committed by the Razakars. (‘Can you spell that word for me, Mr High Commissioner?’) He told them of the massing of peaceful Indian troops on the borders, and the ‘police action’. ‘Now, are there any questions?’
A bright young lady put up her hand. ‘Mr High Commissioner, where exactly is Hyderabad?’
I, the ever-vigilant press-attache, had forearmed myself with a map of India. I unfurled it on a board and with a triumphant gesture ran my index finger along Hyderabad’s freshly obliterated frontiers.
‘But the high commissioner’s been telling us that it is an island!’ cried the bewildered lady.
We called off the press conference and returned to our Scotch, martini and caviar.
Sunday, 22 November 1986
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Boobing on Foreign Words
Our prime minister does not miss an opportunity to mock people whose pronunciation of English does not come up to Doon standards. When it came to himself speaking in Paris he boobed over the pronunciation of the name of the writer Albert Camus pronouncing it as it is spelt, ‘Kamoose’, rather than the way it should have been, ‘Kaamoo’.
Trying to show off familiarity with foreign languages can land you in difficulties. There is the well-known case of a British minister on a visit to Moscow who in order to please his hosts, mugged up a short speech in Russian. On his way to the banquet he realized he did not know the Russian for ‘ladies and gentlemen’. He stopped his car near a public lavatory and took down the Russian equivalent. His speech did not get the kind of applause he expected. Afterwards he asked one of his colleagues what had gone wrong. The colleague replied, ‘Your speech was excellent. But why did you have to start with “Male and female urinals”?’
Sunday, 21 February 1987
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Bandicoot
In the first week of March, pests that pester us throughout the summer months make their unwelcome appearance. No sooner does the day temperature rise above 25° Celsius than come mosquitoes, flies, moths and cockroaches. I have an array of lethal weaponry to contend them with. I have yet to find effective means of preventing incursions of bandicoots. I have over a dozen cats. They have pretty well eliminated mice, lizards and (unfortunately) palm squirrels as well. But they won’t chase bandicoots because they stink and are probably inedible. They give me the creeps. I have had t
hick felt pieces put at the base of my doors but they manage to wriggle in under them.
The other day as I went into my study in the early hours, a bandicoot announced its presence with a staccato succession of chick chick chick and audaciously came towards me. I flung the book I had in my hand at it and jumped on the sofa. I armed myself with a walking stick and chased it round sofas, tables, beds and into the bathroom. Finding no exit, it boldly charged at me. I turned tail, ran into my study and slammed the door behind me. With a sigh of relief I started to read the morning paper.
I heard a rustling noise in my wastepaper basket. The fellow had managed to clamber in. I fled from my study back to my bedroom and warned my wife of the enemy within. We opened all the doors of the house and armed with brooms and towels, finally managed to get the intruder out. Our cats pretended they hadn’t seen it.
Does anyone know why God created bandicoots? Like their rat-n-mice cousins they eat everything. Nothing will eat them. They multiply recklessly, spread filth and disease. I tried to read up everything I could about these filthy creatures. The only worthwhile information I got was the genesis of the word ‘bandicoot’: it is an English corruption of the Telugu pandi kokku meaning ‘pig-rat’.
Sunday, 11 April 1987
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Yuppies, The Future of India
Until a few months ago, I wasn’t aware of the existence of yuppies. They have been around for almost 30 years and are said to be almost extinct. Now I see references to them in many journals. I could not find them in any of my dictionaries.
Notes On the Great Indian Circus Page 8