Of Delhi, and its weather...

Finally, it rained this morning, after weeks of heat and humidity.
After living in two coastal cities, Bombay and Madras, (yeah, not mumbai and chennai- I do not need dirty politicians telling me by what name i should call cities), I always see the difference in how it rains in Delhi: it is a kind of reluctant, forced rain, after the humidity builds up over days and weeks on end, not the kind of heavy, natural rain you get in Bombay or the swift rain in Chennai.
And the rain is generally very light, and stop immediately, and the heat and humidity continues here in Delhi even after the rain ends.
Not surprisingly, the electricity consumption has touched 4,900 MW.
That brings me to the core issue: why have the capital in Delhi at all?
For invaders to India, it made sense: it was an outpost on the frontier, giving them easy access to their homelands in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan and to the Khyber pass. So they settled down in Delhi, and made it the base of an empire.
For the modern republic of India, it would have made better sense to have the capital somewhere where the weather is pleasant, like Bangalore or Bhopal, and far away from Pakistan and China. The summers would have been moderate, and the winters less severe.
Instead, we now have the capital in a place which is very dusty (my car gets a film of dust within one hour of it being washed), has a history of blood, where the hot wind blows in from the Thar desert, and is just a few minutes away from  forward air bases in Tibet and Pakistan.
If the British could shift to Delhi from Calcutta, so can  we, and I guess we still have time to shift our capital. After, we are only 60 years old, a very young republic by historical standards (Aurangazeb or Akbar or Samudragupta ruled almost ruled the same length of time in a single reign), and what's more, thanks to modern construction equipment, you can have a brand new Capital in a decade...
But given the lack of vision which has characterised modern India, I doubt it will happen in my lifetime....

The Hindu Idea of Revenge...

Every morning, I cycle on a DDA park laid out over one of the medieval cities which shook India: Alaudin Khilji's Siri. The park is full of huge cyclopean dressed boulders, and the pathways go up and down, as they go over vast mounds and palaces and battlements.

It would be unbelievable in USA or Europe: the ruins of the empire which reached down all the way to Madurai being neglected, nay, being buried in a staid park over which bureaucrats and businessmen take their morning walks...
Peacock cry out loudly in the  park, and lizards slither amongst the ruins..
As I walk or cycle, I try to imagine, in my mind's eye, how the court must have been, 800 years back, which lies buried below. I try to imagine the hundreds of thousands of south Indian captives, who must have been enslaved and forced to walk all the way here, to die in the cold and the heat, after being worked to death in building Siri Fort.
The scene calls to mind Omar Khayyam's famous Quatrain:

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep

The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
     And Bahram, that great Hunter -- the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep.

But herein lies the whole significance of Siri Fort: more than any other fort in India, it was besieged half a dozen times by the Mongols when Alauddin Khilji was ruling, and they found it impregnable.
In other words, this place, this fort stood between the Mongols and annihilation for the masses of India.
But we, unlike the Taliban, do not dynamite our history: we just benignly build parks over them, instead of excavating them. Guess this is the Hindu idea of revenge for the ending of Warangal and Devagiri and Dwarasumudra....
PS: Why Siri? Legend has it that 8,000 severed heads of Mongols make up the base of the "Siri" fort....

Of Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi

I remember seeing Jayalalitha in my Colony in Chennai somewhere in 1986 or 1987.
She was the "Proganda Secretary" of the AIADMK then, and MGR was the Chief Minister.
The post was entirely one created by MGR for her: there was no post of Propaganda Secretary before her, and none existed after her.
No-one, either in the AIADMK or outside quite knew what were the duties of such a post: I guess it would be safe to say that these onerous duties were entirely speculative in nature.
Jayalalitha would have have been in her early forties then, or maybe 40.
She had the beginnings of corpulence in her figure then, and she looked like a fairly fat, fair woman, with big eyes.
The party workers set up a dais at the end of the street where I lived, and it was a very hot summer day.
I do not remember now whether some kind of municipal or byelections were on then, but I remember that Jayalalitha came at around 3 pm in the afternoon, and gave her address.
She was dressed in a dazzling white sari with the AIADMK's party colours at the border, or pallu. The speech was very sedate, and delivered in a very slow, uninspiring way, as if by some person who was learning to speak publicly. The poor in the area, some two hundred of them listened to her, without much enthusiasm, and after half an hour, she was gone. The pandal was taken down within an hour of her departure, and that was that.
I also remember seeing Karunanidhi addressing an election meeting in T. Nagar, but this was when Jayalalitha was in power. It was late one night, and I was walking by the T. Nagar bus-stand, when I saw that a pandal had been set up in one of the bylanes. Karunanidhi was speaking, and I stopped by, to listen.
He was speaking of Jayalalitha's "sadism". Though the rest of what he said was in pure Tamil, he used the English word "sadism" to refer to the pleasure Jayalalitha derived from harassing him, his family and DMK party workers. He went on, slowly, but gripping the audience attention, as he built up his case: Jayalalitha's sadism, his party's tolerance and dedication to the Dravidian cause, his affection for MGR (who had passed away) and his hope that the Tamilian people would return to their senses. It was very different: here was a practised speaker, who knew how to sway people by his oratory.
Years later, as AIR's News Correspondent, when Karunanidhi was dragged out of bed and locked up in jail by Jayalalitha, I came to Chenni to report on the drama for radio. The DMK workers were furious that Jayalalitha had the guts to get their leader physically manhandled by the police, and in the protests, they were obscene and ribald about Jayalalitha. Gone was the pretence that they were gentlemen. In the slogans they raised, they referred to Karunanidhi's great virility ( as evidenced by his bigamous marriages, his various children with the various wives ) and what Kalaignar would do to her, and how Jayalalitha needed a good dose of just that from him.
On the whole, I felt pity for the Dravidian movement, to have splintered and be led by such a poor quality of leaders, and issues which were so personalised and trivial....

Stairway to Heaven

That's a pic of St. Paul's cathedral, as seen from the Tate Modern, across the Thames. The Millenium Bridge looks at though it is leading up to St.Paul's, though it actually does not. I took this pic because of its intriguing Christian allegory of a bridge to heaven...the window through which the pic is taken, also reminded me of the imagery on stained glass windows of churches.

Travails of a parent at school admission time.....

It was school admission time, from 10th to 11th Standard, for my daughter.
We spent 40,000 crores on the Commonwealth Games, and yet last month found me and wifey begging, grovelling and profusely apologising to the principal of school in South Delhi where we were seeking admission, for my daughter's interest in sports, and her medals and certificates in football, basketball and running. It was as though it was a serious and shameful addiction: how dare your girl actually have secret ambitions in the sports arena?
Earlier, two teachers from the school "interviewed" us: with these kind of sporting (read: shameful) activities, your daughter can never keep up with her peers in studies, we were told.
How can you think of studying for the 12th exams, if some of  your energy gets diverted? She was asked.
Our defensive explanations, that we think a well-rounded individual needs to be good at sports as well as academics was scornfully brushed aside: we have seen what happens to those who are interested in sports, they do poorly at academics.
Finally, my daughter was asked to decide: if you want to get in here, forget your sports.
I was asked: what if your daughter does poorly, six months down the line?
The girl's long list of games certificates was not even given a cursory glance.
In the end, we had to give a guarantee: come what may, her academics would always be dazzling, and in no circumstances would her sports activities be allowed to come in the way. And ofcourse, there would be no question of pursuing sports when she was in the 12th standard.
After this ordeal, spread over two days, my daughter, with A grades, and the top basketball player of her previous school, was given admission to this other school.
Furious at the school, I instead lashed out at my daughter when I got home: she would have to give up most of her sports activity, and the most important thing was to ensure that she would get the top grades.
This, I guess, is the fate of most parents whose children, especially girls, participate in sports.
Is it surprising that India's ranking in world sports ( not the decadent game of cricket) is dismal? Will any amount of money, lavished at these sports extravaganzas, change the scenario? If a school in Delhi, located 500 metres from the Nehru stadium, just six months after the Games, behaves in this way, is there any hope left for sports in India's thousands of schools?
Just like maths and physics, excellence in sports needs to be recognized on the report cards, and factored into the CGPA and SGPA. That way, people who are good in sports will not be penalized and forced to give up sports.

A meeting with Sai Baba, 32 years ago

In 1979, as a 11 year-old boy, I first saw Sai Baba, in person, at the Sai Baba Headquarters in Bombay.
It was on the extensive grounds of what was called, Dharmakshetra, as the Headquarters was named.
My father, mother, and two brothers had come in around 1 pm to the vast shamiana. Though the Darshan was only to be at 5 pm, people had come in from the morning, and there was a vast sea of humanity, singing bhajans.
As time went on, the crowd kept increasing, and the excitement grew.
It was a very different and unique kind of excitement: the excitement that, at 5 pm, you would actually see God in person.
The bhajans kept increasing in tempo, and people started singing them full throatedly.
After 5 pm, everybody's attention was on the stretch of road down which Sai Baba would come in his Black Mercedes.
When he finally came, at 5.30 pm, everybody held their breath, as the Black Mercedes stopped, and there was a glimpse of an orange robe, and Sai Baba came out.
A collective sound, half gasp, half roar went through the crowd, as people strained to see him.
Some people folded their hands in veneration, and others put their hands up, palms facing Baba's direction, as though to catch the rays of holiness coming from him.
Goose pimples erupted through me, and I watched him, rapt in attention.
Sai Baba pulled up a little bit of his robe with one hand, so that it would not snag, and delicately walked through the walkways built through the crowd. Wherever he went, people in the front rows reached out to him. Sometimes he talked to them, sometimes wrote on the slip of paper they showed to him, and sometimes he took the petitions people gave him. He would hand over the petitions to orderlies coming behind him, hunched over lest they block people's view of Baba.
Occasionally, he would materialize Vibhuti, and distribute it in the crowd.
There must have been a crowd of 50,000 there, and every pair of eyes followed Baba, as he walked down the length of the shamiana.
Baba would, once in while, move his hand in circular motion, as though in wonderment at God's creation, or Maya.
Finally, he went up to the podium, and delivered a speech in Telugu, which was translated into English by an interpreter. The speech was about being good, about the need to pray to God, and about the transience of earthly life. He never referred to himself as God or talked about his miracles.
After the speech, he sat on a throne-like chair, watching us, as we sang Bhajans.
There was a sense of being his children, a sense of perfect safety and fulfillment.
When he left, there was a feeling of loss, a sense of 'what are we going to do with the rest of our life".
The kind of feeling you would get if you had actually seen God, and spent an hour with him, and then he went away.
In the ultimate analysis, Sai Baba may or may not have been a fraud or fake, but the emotions we felt, our devotion was genuine.
Perhaps, ultimately that's what matters.
What's more, I  believe that every single person who was in that crowd of 50,000 in 1981 would have   succumbed to the belief that he was divine: the electric atmosphere, the hours of singing, and the way Baba was showcased ensured that.
If you have not seen Baba in the flesh, at his darshans, you will not understand the phenomenon......

Stumbling on to Anish Kapoor in a natural setting

In February, like so many Delhiites, I went to the National Gallery of Modern Art, to see the famous modernist sculptor, Anish Kapoor's work. Like so many others, I found the circular mirrors, and the black spaces boring, and wondered what the fuss was all about. Well, last week found me taking a walk in Kensington Gardens in South London, and I stumbled onto this giant mirror in the park:

Ducks were pecking at it, and it looked absolutely stunning in its setting, amidst verdant English turf and a crystal clear pond. There were no placards saying who the sculptor was, or what the work was titled. Unmistakebly Anish Kapoor, I thought. When I went back and googled it, sure enough, it was "Sky Mirror" by Anish Kapoor, unveiled four years back. Of such stuff are serendipitious discoveries made, I thought....