Terracottah Warriors

It's an incredible story.

23 centuries back, an Emperor decides, at the age of 7, that when he is buried, he will be protected by an army of warriors, who will be buried with him.
Only, the warriors will be of fired clay, "terra-cottah".
And that, the facial characteristics of no two warriors will be the same: each will be a distinct individual.
Over the next forty years, 8,000 bigger-than-life size statues are fired in kilns, and each one is coloured beautifully.
There are horses, carriages, generals, and they are buried in tunnels around the tomb of the Emperor.
When the Emperor finally dies, the tomb is sealed, and so are the tunnels containing the terracota warriors, in 3rd Century BC. Oh yes, a final detail: there are rivers of mercury in the underground tunnels surrounding the tomb.
And also, the weapons the warriors have are real: and since they are chrome-plated (23 centuries before the discovery of chrome-plating by anyone else), the weapons will remain sharp, century after century, without rusting.
The tomb is discovered soon enough, but the soldiers lie buried for 23 centuries, till they are discovered in 1975.
The Emperor? Chinese, obviously, from the Qin Dynasty.

Well, two of those warriors are in Delhi, at the National Museum. For those of us who are not lucky enough to go to China, it is an awesome experience to come  face-to-face with the Terrocotta warriors. The link to the Exhibition timings etc is this (its on till March 20th):
http://www.delhievents.com/2011/02/of-ancient-china-art-exhibition-at.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+delhiupcoming+%28Delhi+Events+-+Weekly%29

Happy hunting!!

Breaking bread with bloodhounds.....the PM's breakfast with editors

I watched the Prime Minister's 'breakfast meeting' with 'senior' editors today on TV ( echoes of the Agra Summit, and Musharraf infamous breakfast meeting with editors, ofcourse, crossed my mind...)

Ordinarily, put any Prime Minister in a one-to-one interview with a journalist, and 99 times out of 100 he would come out well, because the journalist would be overawed, and would feel obliged, and also because on any given day, a Prime Minister generally has more information than a journo. And, it is not too difficult to "negotiate", and get to know the questions beforehand, and be prepared beforehand. Even some one as argumentative as David Frost was putty in Nixon hands, if one sees the documentary "Frost/Nixon".

But when a Prime Minister takes on two dozen editors, and that too, on live TV, group dynamics take over: they have to demonstrate to each other, and to the world, how leonine each one is, and how "independent" they are, and so, they proceed to outdo each other in aggression. After all, they have nothing to lose: all the suppressed anger at the humiliation each one get from his or her proprietor can be safely channeled and let out, in a heroic amount of indignation and independence. The Prime Minister (atleast not this one) is not going to order raids on their paper or channel, or cut off advertising.

That's what happened today: the Prime Minister was interrogated, and came off apologetic, eager to please, defensive, in front of a group of journalists who skewered him. Apart from the format of the interaction, the second problem, which anybody who is familiar with TV knows, is what kind of TV persona the subject has. Since the PM is not Ronald Reagan, with quick repartees, or Obama, with his made-for-TV eloquence, or even combative, the PR set-up, headed by Information Adviser, Harish Khare, should not gone in the first place for a televised event of this kind at all, in the first place.

But then, Harish Khare has been a press journalist, and after today's performance, it is clear that a newspaper journalist has no business to be Information Adviser in today's TV age. If Prime Ministers before had HK Dua or Baru or Ashok Tandon, it was because TV had still not achieved the kind of prominence it does today.

If the whole idea was to project the message that the Prime Minister and the government are in control, and to tell the government's side of the story, it did not work: it seemed at times that all the editors out there had come off straight from the daily 3 pm BJP briefing to grill the Prime Minister.

Not even Doordarshan was on the PM's side, with its  "senior" editor asking a question on, what else, corruption. Neelam Sharma is a TV presenter, with no reporting experience, and I wonder whose idea it was to send her to the "breakfast' meeting. A big number of anchors and presenters on DD News are still selected with zero journalism experience, with their looks being paramount, in the old-fashioned way, and boy, did it show....

All in all, a worthy successor to Musharraf's breakfast meeting.......

Is The Age of Writing Over?

We know the age of reading is over: reading, that is, as defined as "general reading, motivated by curiosity, for the pleasure of reading, without any specific benefit in mind'. We know it is over: a walk down Nai Sadak reveals that the famous Sunday Book Bazaar consists of little more than textbook guides, GRE workbooks, medical books, and Lonely Planet guidebooks. And what's more, despite the crowds at the Book fairs and the "great explosion of Indian writing in English", the younger generation now spends its leisure hours smsing each other, surfing social networking sites, watching reality shows on TV, and if they read at all, those books are likely to be technical manuals or textbooks.
The Age of Writing, too, seems to be at an end. Emails and Smses have ended the long, detailed inland letters we wrote to friends and relatives, and "u" for you, and 'b4" seems to be the cutting edge of spelling innovation amongst youth. SMS English has crept into emails and Facebook.
All this would not matter, if atleast our youth knew how to convey their meaning, even in such painfully amputated English. Everyday, in office, I find educated youth, with post-graduate degrees, and in responsible posts, writing shockingly poor English, in terrible constructions of words, which would have put a Second-standard student to shame a few years back.
The truth finally struck me: like the Viennese Waltz, or pencil moustaches, both general reading and writing are going to be extinct in a few years from now. Sad, but true. We are going to be a nation of data entry operators, and mechanics and technicians.......
PS: I asked my daughter, who is in the 10th standard, to name a single battle in Indian history. She did not know. Hopefully, I asked her, 'What about the Battle of Plassey?". She replied, "Well, I read about it last year, and now I do not remember what that was'.
And academically, she is amongst the top in her school. God help us!!

The Taslima Nasrin of Europe

That's the woman a lot of extremist Muslims across the world hate, and that's the cover of the book by her that I just finished reading.
So who is she? Well, if you can have a combination of Salman Rushdie, and of Taslima Nasreen, then you would get the picture.
She is the woman who, finally concluded that the problems Muslim women face finally stems from the Koran itself.
She also concluded that the Koran is just a book written by a human, not revelation from God, and that it sanctions violence against women by men.
She went vocal with her opinions, and has been in hiding ever since.
The book above makes for some compulsive reading, and I would recommend it for all those who want to think about issues such as multiculturism, and tolerance of physical abuse.
Ofcourse, we all know how many Hindu women get bashed up all the time by their husbands, and get compelled into marriages they do not want to get into, but what about the situation of women in our Muslim Community?
We would rethink the government's indifference to this issue if we were to read the book...

Do they know its Christmas?

Even as our media keeps its focus on Srinagar and Kashmir, it has forgotten the peaceful and docile people whose land Kashmir originally was, and who fled from the violence and massacres: the Kashmiri Pandits. On Christmas Day, I went to one such Camp for the Migrants, set up in Shahdara, along the Yamuna Riverbed. The camp was surrounded by mountains of garbage and shit, and the sanitation and water supply primitive. Surrounded by slums inhabited by the vast numbers of immigrant workers who keep Delhi turning, the Pandits Camp is a sad and pitiful place, a reminder of how they have been let down, not only by the Government, but by everybody else.
I asked them about how they manage to educate their children, and they simply said " We teach them ourselves." I had forgotten that this was a educated, middle-class community, who preferred to flee than go the Israeli settler way, and move around with a submachine strapped to their back.

     Children playing at the camp, Shahdara

                                                

                       A bird's eye view of the camp

After all, it makes for a more dramatic story to profile and write about the conflict in Kashmir than nose around with stinky refugees, right...this is what happens when you do not strike back at those who massacre you, and turn the other cheek. That's a very unChristian lesson to learn on Christmas, but that's the truth.

A Victorian Angkor Wat

For anybody who reads about World War II, Winston Churchill emerges a hero. That's why it is such a shock, to read in "Churchill's Secret War", how Churchill, with his hostility, racism and arrogance, condemned Bengal to  a terrible famine in 1943, in which three million Indians died. The author, Madhushree Mukerjee, carefully documents Churchill's almost criminal negligence, and his view of Indians as a subhuman race, which led to the tragedy. Food was being exported from India to Britain, even when Indians were dying of hunger in the streets of Dhaka and Calcutta....

By coincidence, I was on Ross Island last week, in the Andaman Islands, which was the adminstrative headquarters of the British, from where the British governed the huge archipelago. It was weird: the equivalent of going to a Victorian Version of Angkor Wat, with twisted trees growing out of Anglican churches and Gothic architecture...we have made no attempt to preserve the place, which was destroyed by the combination of an earthquake and Japanese attack in 1942. A truly fitting end to a racist and arrogant empire...enjoy the pics...

This was the wall of one of the barracks which billeted Brit soldiers..

After keeping down 250 million people, the Presbyterian Church where they used to piously pray....

The Commissioner's Bunglow

How journalists run their backyard...

The other day, I was at the Press Club around 9 pm, and the huge plasma TV (naturally, donated by some company) in the main wood-panelled room was showing Vir Sangvi defending himself over the Radia tapes. There was, as usual a huge din created by drunken journos having arguments, so it was difficult to hear what was being said. Some guys went up to the TV, and stuck their ears right over the speaker, trying to listen in. As usual, the place was overcrowded, the service was bad, and the food was terrible. Lots of people who could not find space in the main room were sitting outside on the hard clay ground (in Lutyens Delhi, the Press Club is not able find a way of growing a lawn yet), shivering at dirty red plastic tables, with dirty red or white plastic chairs to match.

There was no menu card, either for the drinks or the food, and one had to cross-examine the waiter to find out what was on offer (ofcourse, even if you somehow found what was on offer, finding out how much it cost was next to impossible)

The press club has, finally, after twenty years of begging, got a piece of land for building their building (they are currently in rented premises), and now we are trying to find somebody who will fund the actual construction .

Some politicians have been donating one lakh or fifty thousand, relishing the idea of throwing pennies to the beggars...at this rate, it could take a century  to build anything.

Many of waiters are still "temporary" after decades of working there: they must be getting paid peanuts, because their clothes are dirty, and the Club cannot find a way of funding livery for them.

I have been a member of the Press Club for over a decade now, and the way it is run is a shame.

It is even more amazing because journalists keep lecturing everybody on how the country should be run, and this is how their backyard is being kept.

Just a few streets away is the Civil Services Officers Club, and it is much better run: the food is better, the cutlery is decent, there is something for members' families, there are some sports facilities...

That's why, "Radiagate" as it has come to be christened, did not surprise me much: below the veneer is the seamy underside: underpaid, overworked, without job security, with venal proprietors and even more venal editors, the average journalist today is a pitiful creature....obviously, it does not pay to expose truth, but it pays to twist it, hide it, and obscure it, like Nira Radia did, and a hundred "PR" practitioners in Delhi are still doing....