Notes from a southern country

We are settling into life here in Sydney, amidst temperamental weather that provides us with sunshine and blue skies in the afternoon and sweeping, chilly winds in the mornings and evenings. Lorikeets serenade us in the garden out back, we get to know the local butcher, the grocer, the coffee vendor and the like, and, from the perch of a place that I never thought I’d live, I discover the convict history of Robert Hughes, re-discover the songwriting of Paul Kelly and the music of the Warumpi Band, and become enthused with the idea of tracking my way across an immense and sparely-populated continent and elsewhere along the Pacific rim. Across a churn of water, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and beyond .

The world is throwing us some curveballas these days. The events in Mumbai, with their apparent links to Kashmir, continue to reverberate, as I read my good friend Mira Kamdar’s heartfelt and heart-rending article about the deaths of her cousin Reshma and Reshma’s husband Sunil at the Oberoi hotel in last week’s Washington Post. Back in my native land of the United States, factory workers, in a show of unity that I strongly support, are occupying the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago, with president-elect Barrack Obama saying that “The workers are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned. I think they’re absolutely right and understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy.” In Miami, a city where I lived briefly, the situation has gotten so bad that the group Take Back the Land is relocating homeless people illegally into foreclosed homes. From this quiet street in Sydney, it appears that there still is much to do to make the world whole again, if it ever was.

Christmas approaches these palm-dotted shores, and much work awaits.

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.