Thoughts on Mumbai from Sydney

I woke up today to blue skies in Sydney and rolled out of bed with a receive-and-transmit section for my new Australia book already in my head. After a bit of writing, I logged on to the internet to find that unspeakable horror had been visited upon Bombay, known better known as Mumbai, while I slept, with places that I knew intimately targeted in an apparently tightly-coordinated series of terrorist attacks that at this writing have killed at least 80 people.

I lived in Mumbai - which I always preferred to call Bombay - for the first few months of 2007, and became quite fascinated the city, which was at once engaging intellectually and visually even as its pollution was often wretched for the health and the grinding poverty on display often brutal to the soul. Yet I have such fond memories of my walks around my old neighborhood of Colaba, of the chai I would have at a Parsi café in the Fort Area, with it great book stalls, and of strolling through the always-crowded Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) as I would head to visit friends out in Bandra, or to the Dharavi slum for reporting work. Despite my keen awareness of the inequalities in India, and the not-infrequent scapegoating of religious and ethnic minorities that the chauvinistic Hindu right often engages in, I was never made to feel anything less than welcome there, and was greeted with great warmth and hospitality by my friends in the city.

And now I read that the Taj Mahal hotel, which I frequently walked by and in whose lobby I paused from time to time, has been turned into a place of slaughter, that, in Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, where I remember poor families with their belongings tied together with rags waiting to take a train and beggars asking for alms, people have been mowed down for some sort of obscene motive, for some absurd political or religious end. Could the weathered pages of the Koran or the Ramayana or the Bible or the Talmud ever condone such actions of cowardice? Is their God so feeble that he would approve of leveling an assault rifle at a defenseless person? Would anything that cowardly be worth worshiping?

I think of these questions, having confronted religious and political fanaticism in various forms in various countries throughout my career as a journalist. Though it is still early, I wouldn’t be surpired to find out that the perpetrators of this crime are cut from the same cloth of those who often (though not always) commit extreme acts in this context: impoverished, disenfranchised and poorly educated, heads filled with visions of glory and martyrdom by someone who always remains in the shadows, and does well to protect his own family from either slaughter or martyrdom.

I think of the people in the city - that panoply of faces from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Kashmir and elsewhere that I met - as I sit here on this sunny morning in Sydney. I can still smell the channa masala and hear the clink of the glass of cane juice as a vendor scoops it out for a street boy to slake his thirst.

Bombay, meri jaan, I hope that you recover.

India, justice delayed…

Bombay’s trinubals surrounding the 1993 explosions that killed 257 persons in India's commercial capital took on a farcical, show-trial element today, as an apparently vindictive judge, PD Kode of the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) court, sentenced Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt to six years of “rigorous imprisonment” for possessing a 9 mm pistol and an AK-56 rifle given to him by members of Bombay’s underworld at the height of the riots that preceded the 1993 terror attack.

One might be able to take such an unduly harsh sentence seriously (Dutt already served 16 months in jail in connection with the charges) had any attempt been made to bring the politically powerful who orchestrated large parts of the 1992/93 bloodshed to account.

It is hard to forget, of course, that, following the destruction of Babri Mosque in northeastern India by Hindu extremists in December 1992, Mumbai was engulfed in ghastly rioting that left over 2,000 dead , many of them Muslims targeted by Hindu mobs that a government commission later found were affiliated with the stridently sectarian Shiv Sena political party.

The Shiv Sena (or Army of Shiva, referring to Shivaji) was formed by Bal Thackeray in 1966, promoting themselves as Bhumiputra or "sons of the soil," while propagating that native Maharashtrians (those born in Maharashtra state and speaking the Marathi language) deserved greater rights in their eponymous state (of which Bombay is a part) than "foreigners," which in this case meant basically Muslims (the Shiv Sena also promoted the rather exceptionalist Hindutva philosophy) and "southerners" (those from south India).

The Srikrishna Commission Report on the violence, released in 1998, stated unequivocally that “from January 8, 1993 at least there is no doubt that the Shiv Sena and Shiv Sainiks took the lead in organizing attacks on Muslims and their properties under the guidance of several leaders,’ singling out Thackeray for special condemnation.

To date neither Thackeray , nor any of his deputies, has ever had to answer for the terrible crimes they oversaw against their fellow citizens of India. Much as a shameless demagogue such as Narendra Modi - chief minister of Gujarat state who (at best) stood by in 2002 as 2,000 (most Muslim) citizens were slaughtered and now stands accused of involvement in extra-judicial police killings - has never had to appear and authoritatively answer the charges against him.

Pompous judges like PD Kode, evidently drunk with power, can satisfy themselves with sentencing private citizens to harsh stretches of prison time, I suppose. But until they muster up the courage to start hauling the political leaders who have contributed to so much division and destruction in India in recent years into the dock, their statements about the rule of law in India are as transient, transparent and feeble as the breeze blowing through the banyan trees on a hot Bombay day.

Bombay, Meri Jaan

Sometimes nostalgia bubbles up at the most unexpected and inexplicable moments. For instance, this week, as a stretch of fairly glorious spring weather (blue skies, warm days) has descended on New York City, I have felt drawn to the memories of some of my days in Bombay earlier this year, and particularly to the smog-choked, very-crowded lanes of the Fort Area, where I spent much of my time.

With vendors from Sikkim and other remote parts of India clogging the sidewalks, the friendly Nepalese man who would sell me a Diet Coke on hot days, the busy restaurants and sweets shops churning out mouth-watering vindaloo, channa masala and nan (with the Parsi café where I often had breakfast opting for simpler fare of eggs, bread and excellent chai) and the Great Britian-on-ayahuasca architecture of Victoria Terminus and the General Post Office rising in the background, Fort was my first taste of Bombay, and it remained a seductive blend. With the exception of the slum of Dharavi (population 1 million), I don’t know if I have ever seen a part of the city more thoroughly representative of the vast polyglot of modern India, with the tongues of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab and Tamil (and many others) all represented in its lanes.

And then there were the bookstores. It seems to be a well-kept secret, but Bombay is about the greatest place to buy English-language books that I’ve ever found, with dozens of open-air stalls and an equal number of fine bookshops selling new books for as little as 100-200 rupees (about US$3-$6).

Though some favored the more politically-minded Bookzone, I myself was quite taken with the Strand Book Stall, first pointed out to me by my friend Ashim Ahluwalia. Almost hidden among a warren of alleys the Strand is still a favorite of the Bombay literary cognoscenti . Founded in 1948, and much like the eponymous-though-unrelated Strand here in New York City, the Strand in Bombay has become something of a ritual for bibliophiles in the city and, unlike the New York version’s increasingly rapacious pricing (which make it not much less expensive than an ordinary bookshop and significantly more expensive than online buying options), Bombay's Strang has kept its prices modest enough that strapped-for-cash readers can enter knowing that they will be able to leave with something eminently worthwhile. It was in the lanes of Bombay that I discovered the work of Mohsin Hamid, Humra Quraishi and Kalpana Sharma, all significant contributors to my yet-ongoing Indian education.

The most shocking thing in India

As India, where I spent the early part of this year, strides into the 21st century witnessing as rapid an economic and social transformation as any country has seen in the last 25 years, one may fairly ask what is the biggest challenge facing this diverse, vibrant but often problematic mini-continent of 1.2 billion people. Would it be its historic enmity with neighboring Pakistan, which has lead to four wars between the two since 1947 and resulted in both countries exploding nuclear bombs to prove their dominance in their respective deserts in 1998? Would it be the shameless demagoguery of local politicians such as Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat state, who used his position in 2002 to (at best) stand idly by as 2,000 (most Muslim) citizens of his state were slaughtered and is now being accused of involvement in extra-judicial police killings? Would it be the continuing conflict in Kashmir or the country's ongoing Maoist insurgency?

According to Jaipur’s Chief Judicial Magistrate Dinesh Gupta and solicitor Poonam Chand Bhandari, no. The greatest problem facing India is what you see in the photo, the over-enthusiastic embrace and kiss that American actor Richard Gere planted on Indian actress Shilpa Shetty during an AIDS awareness program in the Indian capital of New Delhi early this month. This week, at Bhandari’s request, Gupta’s court issued a warrant ordering the arrests of Gere and Shetty charging that their kiss was “highly sexually erotic” and “transgressed all limits of vulgarity and have the tendency to corrupt the society.”

I can only imagine the guffaws with which this order is being greeted among the Bollywood elite of Colaba and elsewhere in India’s cultural and economic capital of Bombay, but to me, the Gere/Shetty evokes an unwelcome sense of intolerant deju vu, recalling this past Valentine’s Day, when supporters of the xenophobic Shiv Sena party ran amok in Maharashtra state, trashing a shop that sold Valentine’s Day cards and setting much of the merchandise on fire before pummeling a large billboard put up by the Indian cell phone giant Hutch which advertised Valentine’s Day with a host of balloons. A Shiv Sena youth leader at the time explained that "Valentine’s Day-like celebrations are all western concepts and has been forced on our society for the commercial purpose. Shiv Sena will never allow the commercialization of Indian feelings.”

But one must ask if the Shiv Sainiks, Dinesh Gupta and Poonam Chand Bhandari have ever bothered to study their own country's history. As I have noted on this blog before, India, despite what some opportunistic politicians and judges might like to lead people to believe, is hardly any stranger to highly charged eroticism, nor to public displays of it, nor is the rather brief tangle between Gere and Shetty so much as a patch on India’s own highly developed sense of carnal tradition. This is the country, after all, that composed the Kama Sutra, a hefty chunk of which can perhaps best be described as an owner's manual for how to best use the body for sexual enjoyment and, indeed, describes the act of making love itself as a "divine union." Likewise, near the holy ghats of Varanasi (now Benares) resides the 800 year-old erotic temples at Khajuraho, which depict men and women in various acrobatic and highly explicit sexual poses and quite joyfully copulating, often with multiple partners.

Of course, puritanical busybodies are hardly a phenomenon particular to India but, given their relatively advanced levels of education, one thinks that the gentlemen from Jaipur could find something better to do with their time to engage in demagoguery about an incident that looks childish in comparison to India’s own highly-developed (and quite positive) zest for pleasures of the flesh.