Living in the shadow of the Commonwealth Games...

I live as it were, on Groud Zero of the Commonwealth Games.
My office overlooks Jawarharlal Nehru Stadium, where much of the action for the Games is going to take place, and my government quarters is in Andrewsganj, barely a couple of kilometres away.
I have lived in the shadow of the Games preparation for well over a year now.
Everyday, on my way to office, I find the road jammed, because of some new flyover or road being built. The route is occasionally closed to traffic, because either the Delhi Traffic police are carrying out some trials, or some bigwig is coming to inspect the venues.
For the last two weeks, I have had to fight to get into my office, because the lane leading to Soochna Bhavan has been closed off, to let in only those who have 'valid" stickers, which is interpreted on a different basis by different policemen/policewomen everyday.
Also, these narrow roads are even narrower; a yellow line has been drawn down the middle, and the lane to the right reserved for the CMW bigwigs. So, getting anywhere at all takes hours, and as a result, we just stay at home.
Today, on Sunday, we cannot go shopping, because the Malls and Markets are closed. Neither can we go to a park, because we apprehend that we cannot reach anyplace because of traffic restrictions.
I went cycling this morning: never have I seen Delhi looking so deserted. It looks like a city having a Total Bandh, with barricades and policemen everywhere.
So, the irony is that while the Delhi citizen is forced to stay home, the Canadian and the Australian and the Brit
are partying away at the disco at the CWG village, swimming in luxurious swimming pools, eating the best of cuisine, and shopping at the Village boutiques.
When the British were blasting away villagers from cannons in the wake of the 1857 Mutiny, and hanging entire village-full of men from trees, I bet they would never have thought we'd be so devoted to the Commonwealth, even after 150 years. How we kiss the boot that kicked us...
P.S: My daughter Ria went to Jammu as part of the Under-19 football team, representing Delhi in the National School Games. She stayed in Jammu in a dormitory, with inadequate communal sanitary and bathing facilites, without sufficient food to eat, not even a solitary vegetable to enliven her dal and roti diet. She came back yesterday, emaciated and tired. Yeah, we serve buffalo tongue, cooked African style, for the athletes at the CWG village, but our budding sportspeople have to put up without buckets in their bathrooms and no sabzi in their diet. Would I ever allow her to get into this line? Never. Imagine how many medals we could have won if we had spent all the money spent on the games to encourage youngsters at the school level...
I would first like to slap Shera, then stamp on him and set his effigy on fire. I will definitely buy a stuffed version today, to work out my fantasy. Let the games begin today evening.....

Lessons to be learnt from the Ipad...

My brother in the USA gifted my an Ipad last week. The minimalist aesthetics are great, but boy, is it difficult to work on...To begin with, it seem to have a problem getting on to the Wi-fi network in my house: you keep putting in the network password, and nothing happens. When you do finally get on to the network (which you do when it relents...), you have to wade through one problem after another...the touch screen keypad is next to impossible to work on, every software has to be downloaded through Apple I-tunes, and for some simple software like Realplayer, there are no applications at all..Finally, you cannot chat, either on Facebook, or on Skype or Google (even a text chat is not possible). It does have a nice feel to it, and is incredibly light, and ofcourse, it is immune to most viruses...guess if you have already a laptop, maybe it will do a second laptop, just to play on, nothing serious...
To get a perspective on exactly how appealing it is, know this: my 15-year old laptop crazy daughter does not want to go anywhere near it.....she prefers a Dell Mini anyday.....
There is a lesson in this somewhere: if you make something beautiful, and if you manage to create hype about it, you can sell anything, even if it is a substandard product, as the Ipad is...

Are we turning into a police state?

Twenty years back, after I had got through my UPSC exam, a policeman came to carry out the verification of my antecedents; a pre-requisite for being employed by the state. Today, twenty years later, I have a Home Ministry card with two stars, entitling me to enter all government buildings, and a salute from the guard, in addition. I issue people OBC certificates, attest marksheets, and the government issues passports on my recommendations..
Not suprisingly, I was astounded when a policeman landed on my doorstep with a long form on saturday, and asked me to fill it up by the next day. Titled "Police Verification Form", this form asks us to paste a photograph of the Head of the Family ( whatever does that mean in the 21st century, when man and wife are equals, I wonder), telephone numbers (including mobile), details about who is living with me, from when on they have been doing so, and  and a thousand other details. Also, despite me being in government quarters(and therefore this whole data already being with the government), how long I have been living there etc...
Is there any legislative sanction for this invasion of privacy? None.There is no law asking any citizen to comply with such privacy invading measures.
Given the record of the Delhi police ( they were instrumental in guiding mobs to Sikh dominated areas in Delhi in 1984), and that of the Gujarat police, any citizen would think twice before entrusting this whole load of information to a bunch of ill-educated, corruption-ridden, brutality-ridden force.
Further, this kind of information is being collected despite there being official denials that such information is collected. In Delhi, every time such information is collected, especially from Muslim dominated areas, there is always an outcry, and the police promptly backtrack.
So, being a law-abiding citizen, I had a sleepless night, wondering what to do. By the next morning, my mind was made up: I would not comply, and fill the form. I would tell the constable, when he turned up, that I would not fill the form. But what if he summoned me to come to the Police Station? Well, I would go, but I would call the newspapers, and exercise my right to protest.
As it happened, he did not turn up on Sunday, the next day, but he turned up on Monday, when I was not there. My wife told him our form was not ready, and the constable told us to fill it up and deposit it with our colony's security guards. That may have been a more tactful reply from wifey: so the confrontation is postponed to one more day....since I am most definitely not going to fill that form.
Eternal Vigilance, the saying goes, is the  pricewe pay  for liberty.
If we are going to turn into a police state as a reaction to terrorism, that cost is too high a price to pay, and I, for one, will oppose it with all my strength....

The Best Thali I've had in my life....

A view of the Thali, served on solid silver: note the lotus-shape of the plate

The Dessert (silver again...)

The Sheesh Mahal , where the food is served

The place setting.....

Having lived in Bombay, Madras and Delhi (I'm using those old names of those cities quite deliberately), and having visited some 20 states of the country, I thought I knew all about Thalis: the "Rice-plates" of Bombay, the "Saapadu" of Tamil Nadu, the Andhra thalis, the Gujarati ones, the Marathi thalis, the Punjabi ones, the "Sino-Ludhianvi' Chinese platters, the 'Tandoori" ones from Nirulas...

Well, I had a revelation: I visited Amber fort along with my brother last month, and I noticed a neglected, deserted walkway, as I left the temple inside the fort. Barefoot, i climbed up the walkway, and viola!! I was in  

an opulent restaurant, modelled on a Rajasthani palace. Quite sceptical, we ordered the vegetarian thali ( the most expensive one of my life, at 1020 rupees a thali), and it turned out to be simply the best Thali I've ever had. Cooked in ghee, hot, with just the right combination of spices, I understood what real Rajasthani food must have tasted like, before vegetable soya oil and commercialism set in.

The Restaurant is called "1135 AD", and here's a review;

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/84228/Spice/Eat,+prey+and+love.html

Most importantly, despite the clientèle of foreigners, they have not tried to 'spice down' the food, and make it bland, like they do in any Indian place in Delhi or Europe or America....

I guess the descendants of those who cooked for the Royals must be around still, with those skills being handed down from generation to generation. My brother, the reluctant Yankee,  called it the "best 20 dollars" he'd spent in his entire life...

The Search for the Tomb of Delhi's Most Loved Prince....

   

The tomb of Dara Shikoh

 

The graves of Dara, and his brother (s) ?? The little gravestone is whose, I wonder?

At the beginning of the 19th century, when the British attitude to India was full of arrogant contempt for the culture of India and its history, there came something which changed the European view of India: the first translations of the Upanishads from Persian to European languages. Max Mueller and others did the translations from Persian to French and Latin. The Upanishads had been translated into Persian by Prince Dara Shikoh, Shah Jahan's eldest son, between 1654 to 1657. Appropriately enough, the translation was titled "Sirr-i-Akbar", or "The Great Secret", since it had to prised out from the Brahmins of Varanasi. The Prince lost out in the succession battle, and was beheaded by Auragazeb. No prince was loved more in the history of Delhi, (with perhaps the exception of Prince Khusrav, the son of Jahangir). Thus, the Upanishads reached Europe, thanks to the eldest son of Mumtaz Mahal, a Sufi of the highest quality, whose life was spent in intellectual pursuits. What infuriated the Mullahs and Aurangazeb even more was Dara's bold statement, in the preface to the translation, that this was the great book, the "Hidden Book" alluded to the Quran.

A lot of books say that he was buried in an unmarked grave within the Humayun's Tomb complex, but for many of us who are his admirers, the search for his tomb is the Holy Grail of the Mughal Empire.

Well, after years of searching, me and my brother, finally found the grave one rainy morning, on the south-west corner of the platform on which Humayun's tomb stands. The sarcophagus is a marble one, ornately carved with flowers,  and bisected (Dara was beheaded, and his head was sent to Shahjahan by Aurangazeb, so the head could be interred only after  the torso was).

The grave is in a line with two graves, that of Shuja and Murad, the other two brothers who lost out to Aurangazeb, and were killed by him. Notably, the other two graves, also in marble, are decorated with verses from the Quran, unlike Dara's, reflecting the view that he was an apostate, and a crypto-Hindu.

Ofcourse, in a way, these are pseudo-graves, since according to Islamic tradition, the body has to buried at ground level, in contact with the ground, in a  simple cotton shroud (not a coffin), and without any name on the grave. So, with the platform of Humayun's tomb being a good 40 feet above ground level, the actual earthen grave must be exactly below where the marble sarcophagus stands. And since there are no names, in the absence of a DNA test, only oral traditions and legend can point out specific graves within reasonable limits of 

certainty.

And who showed us Dara Shikoh's grave, which guidebooks and historians failed to? A humble sweeper working at the Tomb. The oral tradition must have survived in him. He also told me and my brother that we were the first to ask for the tomb in all the years he had worked there...... Thus, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings shall truth be born....

The best speech ever written....

For the last twenty-five years, I have been listening to Indian politicians delivering speeches, on television, on radio, in parliament, and a zillion other places. Uniformly, I have found them badly written and badly delivered.
Speeches delivered extempore have been good: Vajpayee and George Fernandes used to hold the Lok Sabha spellbound when they started speaking.
But Vajpayee's written speeches were dull as ditchwater, and delivered in a deadpan voice. I remember asking Ashok Tandon, who used to be his Information Advisor, why the speeches were so poorly written, with jargon, cliches, and convoluted sentences. His one-line answer was : " That's because bureaucrats write them!"
One of the best speeches ever written, I believe, is Nehru's speech in the Central Hall of Parliament, on the eve of Independence, on August 14, 1947. The English is lean, spare and lyrical: the delivery full of emotion and rousing. Like Gandhi and Bose, his English language skills were terrific, and the accent clipped British upper-middle class.  Today's politicians, especially the younger ones, are not a patch on Nehru, Bose, Gandhi and Rajaji, even in language skills and oratory, much less other abilities. A look at that historic speech by Nehru, then, first a clipping on Youtube:

http://ishare.rediff.com/video/entertainment/15th-aug-1947-pandit-nehrus-speech-tryst-with-destiny/23244

The text needs to be read, and here it goes;

"Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity. 

At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?

Freedom and power bring responsibility. The responsibility rests upon this Assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people of India. Before the birth of freedom we have endured all the pains of labour and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. Some of those pains continue even now. Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now.

That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

To the people of India, whose representatives we are, we make an appeal to join us with faith and confidence in this great adventure. This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill-will or blaming others.

We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell. The appointed day has come-the day appointed by destiny-and India stands forth again, after long slumber and struggle, awake, vital, free and independent. The past clings on to us still in some measure and we have to do much before we redeem the pledges we have so often taken. Yet the turning-point is past, and history begins anew for us, the history which we shall live and act and others will write about.

It is a fateful moment for us in India, for all Asia and for the world. A new star rises, the star of freedom in the East, a new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materializes. May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed! We rejoice in that freedom, even though clouds surround us, and many of our people are sorrow stricken and difficult problems encompass us. But freedom brings responsibilities and burdens and we have to face them in the spirit of a free and disciplined people.

On this day our first thoughts go to the architect of this freedom, the Father of our Nation [Gandhi], who, embodying the old spirit of India held aloft the torch of freedom and lighted up the darkness that surrounded us. We have often been unworthy followers of his and have strayed from his message, but not only we but succeeding generations will remember this message and bear the imprint in their hearts of this great son of India, magnificent in his faith and strength and courage and humility. We shall never allow that torch of freedom to be blown out, however high the wind or stormy the tempest.

Our next thoughts must be of the unknown volunteers and soldiers of freedom who, without praise or reward, have served India even unto death. We think also of our brothers and sisters who have been cut off from us by political boundaries and who unhappily cannot share at present in the freedom that has come. They are of us and will remain of us whatever may happen, and we shall be sharers in their good [or] ill fortune alike.

The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.

We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for any one of us till we redeem our pledge in full, till we make all the people of India what destiny intended them to be. We are citizens of a great country on the verge of bold advance, and we have to live up to that high standard. All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligations. We cannot encourage communalism or narrow-mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action.

To the nations and peoples of the world we send greetings and pledge ourselves to cooperate with them in furthering peace, freedom and democracy. And to India, our much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new, we pay our reverent homage and we bind ourselves afresh to her service. Jai Hind." 

That speech can be put along Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and Churchill's famous 'We shall fight them on the beaches" speech, in terms of its sheer beauty...

P.S: Wonder whether 40,000 crores spent on the Commonwealth Games fits in with "The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity." ??

What would those idols inside the Ka'aba looked like?

Imagine this: that someone would rise up someday and say: the Tirupati temple is sacred, that is,  the structure is sacred, built in a sacred spot, but that the idol of Venkateshwara inside should not be worshipped, but should be smashed...
And then that person would say: you're worshipping the wrong way, and you need to do it my way. And then those worshippers would say: let us pray to  our Venkateshwara idol the way we want. And then that person would say: no, you need to give up that idol, but you can worship that structure in which the idol stood, and the place where it stood is holy.
So finally, a new religion is born; the worshipers of the idol finally give up the idol and the temple after years of war, and the idol is duly smashed, and the building in which the idol used to stand becomes the center of the new religion.
That, roughly, was what happened in the 7th century when the idols inside the Ka'aba were given up by the Meccan tribes, after they were militarily defeated . Prophet Mohammed smashed the idols inside, but the Ka'aba became the centre of the new religion, Islam. Muslims believe that the Kaaba is holy because it was built by the Prophet Abraham.
As an idol-worshipping Hindu myself, I always wondered what those idols would have looked like, inside the Kaaba.
Well, an ancient kingdom, Lihya, excavated in Arabia, threw up massive statues. Those statues are on  display at an exhibition in the Louvre, which is on now. Though those statues are thought to be of the Lihyan kings, they give us a clue as to how, artistically, those idols in the Kaaba may have looked like. The massive 2.5 meter polished red sandstone statues show amazing sophistication. Even more likely is another statue, with minimalist design, titled 'suffering man" which is probably closer to what those idols may have looked like.
I'm attaching a link to the exhbition, which has the pictures of both the Lihyan statue, and the 'suffering man', and details of the exhibition
.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-26/saudi-king-a-no-show-as-treasures-glitter-in-louvre-show-jorg-von-uthmann.html

You can be sure that the Saudi King, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, is not too happy with people excavating statues from Arabian sands, 14 centuries after the Prophet destroyed all the idols of Arabia....