Arnab Ray's Blog, page 15

Mahishashur

[In keeping with the tradition of Durga Pujo fiction, here is my attempt at a Durga Pujo short story]

I have always had a crush on Katrina Kaif. She is gorgeous and confident and modern and yet somehow traditional, and I don’t care if she can act or not.

So what are the chances that my girl-friend, yes my girl-friend, would be a dead ringer for Katrina Kaif?

I don’t know if I was looking for someone who looked like her (maybe I was), or whether Ma Durga had planted the seed of this connection years before, but then there it was. Madhushree could pass for Katrina’s twin sister, and to be honest she did accentuate the similarities with her makeup and hairstyle (not that I would ever tell her that to her face, I may be stupid, but not that stupid), so much so that even people at work called her “Kat” and though she would of course would ask them not to, I knew that she quite liked it.

The past year had been great. By the grace of Ma Durga. My business selling Lenovo computers had taken off beyond my wildest dreams. And if making serious money was not serious enough,  Madhushree had come into my life. It’s a long story, the way we met and fell in love, and I would love to tell you all the gory details (maybe I should write my own romance novella, I see they sell a lot nowadays) but right now, there she is, making me pose for a selfie, or as it is called welfie, her new Samsung Galaxy outstretched. I am a little uncomfortable, because we are kind of close together and there are people all around the pandal-park on Ashtami evening, and of course Dada and Boudi and Khoka and Baba and Ma, but she is caught in the moment, and I guess so am I.

‘I never quite understand the concept of Mahishashur.’

That’s my elder brother. Dada. He is the typical Bangali “aantel”, (derived from intellectual), and with his designer kurta, pyjama and the glasses, he looks the part today.

‘What’s there not to understand?’ Boudi asks, throwing back her hair, in that carefully careless way that is so Boudi. She is my best friend. Has always been. And now that we all stay together in the same building (we recently bought three apartments on three floors of the swanky new complex that has come up in Lake Town, one for Baba-Ma, one for Dada-Boudi and one for me), I have gotten to know her more. If Ma Durga has ten hands, she has a hundred, and I am yet to figure out how she juggles a career, a two-year-old, two sets of parents, and most of all, my Dada. The day I understand, I will let you know.

‘Well why is Mahishashur here in this tableau? It doesn’t make sense.’

The dhaki keeps beating the drum.

‘But how?’

‘This is Ma Durga coming to her parent’s place with her children.  Right? This is not a war scene. So why should Mahishashur here? He obviously does not belong to the family, and it’s painfully obvious the way that spear is poking into him, that he is not having a good time.’

‘Yes I understand what you are saying’ Boudi says, ‘That’s why I always feel a bit bad for the poor buffalo-man. It’s not the fear of death that I see in his eyes, but the pain of being alone, you know, not really belonging.’

I touch my fingers discreetly to my lips, stifling a burp. Boudi had cooked a huge ashtami lunch this afternoon, and the mutton had been divine. And I think I had a bit more of it than I should have, which is why five hours later, I am still feeling the heat of the sorsher tel.

I look to the side and there is Baba, Ma and Khoka between them. Baba is pushing seventy and Ma would be close behind, but they don’t look a day over fifty. Even Boudi envies their fitness and Boudi runs 10K for fun.

‘It’s Khoka’, as Baba likes to say in that rich baritone of his, ‘He has given me a new lease of life.’

Madhushree looks at the watch on her wrist and I can see she is getting impatient. ‘They were supposed to join us here, half-an-hour ago, and not even a SMS to say they are going to be late.’

They as in Madhushree’s friends. It’s quite a group—a famous film director (he has been pestering her to act in his next), a well-known TV anchor (the director’s date and to be honest, I find her a bit too overbearing) and possibly the most talented singer in Bengal right now. I could have of course mentioned their names, but then that would be too much name-dropping, would it not?

‘Excuse me, but may we have your chair?’

There is a gentleman standing to my side, leaning slightly forward. He is wearing a white kurta, and there is a volunteer badge pinned to his chest.

‘My chair?’

‘Yes’, he says firmly, ‘The group over there would like the chair.’

What? What does he mean? What chair?

I look at him, feeling more than a bit irritated.

‘I am sorry, what?’

He leans forward even more and his voice, which was not friendly even when he had started talking, seemed to have taken a darker turn.

‘Look this is just the way things work here. You have been sitting here on this chair for the past few hours. If you want, you can go and sit there.’ He says, pointing to a square strip of mud, that had been left bare, right to the side of the park.

Seeing me hesitate, he looks to the side, and gestures, and before I can say anything, I find myself surrounded by three distinctly hostile looking gentlemen with volunteer badges.

‘Please leave. Or we can call the police. They are right there.’

I get up, not forgetting to take my umbrella.

It’s the only thing that’s really there.

Not Dada, not Boudi, not Khoka, not Baba, not Ma, and not Madhushree.

Ma died last year, Baba is at home hooked up on dialysis, Dada and Boudi shifted out when Khoka was born, after that last big fight.

I haven’t seen them in years.

And Madhushree, I haven’t seen her. Ever.

I have seen Katrina Kaif though. As a matter of fact, I see her now. There she is, under the floodlights and on the banner, selling the newest Samsung Galaxy. She really is perfect. There is that ad for ‘sorsher tel’ with the happy family sitting down for lunch, all talking happily at the same time. Right next is Dada Ganguly smiling, inviting us to submit applications for the newest luxury high-rise in Lake Town. An ad for a film, a new music release, a TV show, a gym. Over there, right on top of the organizer’s stage, is the ad for Lenovo.

And over here. Me. Mahishashur.

Not quite belonging but still there.

 

Social Schadenfreude

If there is anything I struggle to understand more than the convoluted structure of relationships in the Indrani Mukerjea case, it is how the hell did Rahul Roy become the spokesperson of celebrities? He has somehow, because I see him on Times Now, whenever there is some celebrity-related outrage, and I wonder if it’s because he has a body double like Saddam Hussain, or whether it was because he had a song in Naughty Boy which went “Iske kabhi room main taake, to uske bedroom main jhaanke, kabhi kaheen durbeen lagake, kabhi kaheen parda hatake” that he is considered to be knowledgeable on celebrity scandals. Whatever it be, the great man, brave as he was in Sapne Sajan Ke to make love in a tabela with well-hung horses prancing about, himself does not sound too convinced, repeating ad nauseam “In my twenty five years as a celebrity” as if trying desperately to convince himself of his fame.

What’s a disappointment even bigger than his presence is that he does not say anything scandalous or insightful. Not that I want to pick on just him. The phalanx of Botox  that Times Now has assembled  are as placid, uttering obviousities like “when you are in a committed relationship you should be honest ” and the rare gem like ” I don’t support this murder”. With no one to shout down, and not even a pretense of a “debate”, even Arnab is muted, and he drones on and on about the same thing, trying desperately to create excitement through the use of hushed tones and flaming graphics, like a polite woman feigning orgasm for the satisfaction of her partner.

This leaves me of course the second most disappointed man watching the whole tamasha, the first being of course Hardik Patel, (he insists you call him Sardar Hardik, which I think is distressing for multiple reasons) who must be feeling very flaccid and soft, at the way he has been stroked away from the headlines.

Again it’s not as if Arnab Goswami is not trying. There is a lot you can accuse him of but never of not trying. He first gives the bromide that “We do not want to speculate”, with the honest tone of a first-timer saying “Will just put the tip in”, and then five seconds later, he is throwing the floor open for “speculations”. Maybe the stress of keeping up the pretense of journalistic ethics with the need to keep the audience reeled in is what’s creating this dissonance, the “wet sari syndrome” of the 2010s, you want to show but you can’t, and that’s just such a buzzkill. In comparison, print is doing a better job so far with the salacious aspects of the scandal and kudos to them for it.

I know I know. The media is out of hand. Trial by media. Intrusive. Scandal-mongering. Unfounded allegations. Character assassination. Yeah yeah. You are all outraged about it.

But you are tuning in aren’t you? You are like wringing your hand, and tweeting ‘How can they do this’ but you still ain’t changing your channel.

Because you want this. Accept it and move on. Cause I do.

Here’s the reason.

We as a society are obsessed by the lives of others. Not poor people of course, they could kill themselves for all we care for.

But rich. Yeah. Super-rich. Even better.

The reason is schadenfreude. While aspiring to the lifestyles of the rich and the famous, we still hate them for it. Because their lives put into stark contrast the misery of ours, of being pushed aside while those flying first class step forward, of sweaty rides in grimy traffic while a Mercedes breezes past in a VIP lane, of being stuck in a job doing the same thing day in and day out while they enjoy frequent vacations in chateaus and villas. The only way we can feel good is to tell ourselves that we are like this because we are better,  because after all only the pure suffer, and that only if we loosened our morals and did the unspeakables, we could be like them and that even though they are living a life we envy, inside they are all unhappy and tormented and drunk and deviant. If you don’t understand what I am seeing, take a look at any Manoj Kumar movie. Or this.

Is Mukherjea couple’s relationship the present & future of marriage as an institution among porn loving elites in India?

— Madhu Kishwar (@madhukishwar) August 27, 2015

 

The Mukerjeas and the Boras are comforting because they confirm our worst stereotypes of the rich and the powerful, being straight out of the pages of the most lurid Harold Robbins, of the heartless social climber femme fatale and the somewhat dim, rich husband, and the mysterious man, and dark family secrets.  Every horrible thing that comes out from this sordid affair secretly delights us, though we keep knitting, happy in our little revenge, Madame Defarge-like, claiming to be disgusted and shocked.

When I was growing up, I used to eavesdrop on adult conversations. A lot. The topic of “high-society” perversions came up from time to time, not that anything remotely sleazy would happen in good middle-class families unless of course Western culture. What got stuck in my mind, from among these many overheard conversations, was the word “swapping”. For me “swapping” meant exchanging duplicates of Thums Up caps in the hope of getting a Thums Up Mini Bat or a Thums Up Mini Ball or action flickers (none of which I ever got by the way). However I was not so naive that I could not figure out there was something innately sinful about it.

“These high-society people come with their wives to these parties”, I remember one aunty whispering with round eyes of terror, who then lowered her voice even further to say “and leave with other wives”. What she said subsequently was drowned out in “Chi chis” and “E baba”s and “Eo ki howe?” (Can such things happen?). I didn’t understand what was so wrong about the concept of course. I mean I go to school with one friend, and come back with another, and if it was so wrong, why did my parents allow me?

It was only later, much later in life, when I saw Ajnabee that I understood, together with password policies followed in Swiss Banks, what the word “swapping” meant.

As I went through life, progressing from one social circle to another, I realized that in none of them is swapping even a topic of conversation, forget other forms of Western deviance. They talk about mortgages rates, and DSLR cameras, and lemon scones, and it fills me with clammy cold-handed panic, because I know, I am still in the band of the virtuous middle-class, and despite my desire to ascend socially, I am not anywhere close to where I really want to be.

And possibly never will.

So frustrated at my own inability to be evil, I sink back into the couch, dally around with my humble dinner of rice and a protein, and roll my eyes at the debauchery of those porn-loving degenerates that have sold their soul to the Westernized Devils.

All the while pretending not to see them puckering their lips through the screen, mocking me back.

 

 

 

 

 

Desi Parents And Their Expectations

This IS the typical desi parent.(picture via NDTV)

After all that Sangakkara has achieved, here is his dad’s reaction.

1. Says his son was kind of okay, should have done much better.

2. Compares him to his friend, and says friend was better

3. Claims that he wins all arguments against his son.

4. Advises his 37 year old millionaire son on career choices

You just CANNOT please a desi parent. You CANNOT.

And in that vein, here are some other “desi” parents through the ages.

Don Bradman’s dad: What? 99.94? What am I going to tell the neighbors?

 

Newton’s Dad: Three? After all the money I spent on the apple trees, just three?

Darwin’s Ma: What? You are going to go sailing in a boat?

Planck’s Dad: Uncertainty? So after all this effort, you are telling your parents you can say nothing for certain?

Maradonna’s Dad: All you ever did was score a goal with your hand.

Steve Jobs’ Mum: It’s still not good as what Gates-ji’s son makes

Bill Gates’ Mum: Everyone is buying a Mac. Even our society bought a Mac. People are laughing at us.

Abe Lincoln’s Dad: Thanks to you now, we don’t have any domestic help.

Madonna’s Dad: Papa Don’t Preach? Is this what we raised you up to say?

Mahatma Gandhi’s Mum: Why do you have to go out like this? Can’t you wear something proper like Jinnah lad?

J K Rowling’s Mum: Guptaji’s son is in New Jersey, he is also divorcee, why don’t you meet him for coffee now that he is in town? What? You want to write a book? On wizards? For children? I told your dad a hundred times, don’t let her read those silly books…I knew it.

Sonia Gandhi’s Mum: You going to marry this Indian guy? Oh my God, what’s going to happen to you, your future is doomed.

Empathy and the Global Corporation

New York Times recently ran a shocking “expose” on Amazon with the ominous title “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace” and the even more scary sub-heading “The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions”. The article is worth reading. There are stories of people crying at desks, of employees seen to “practically combust” (not sure what that is, but I think I get the general drift), and then this:

A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.

A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her bosses.

To counter this corporate PR disaster, Jeff Bezos then sent a note to  his employees, where he referenced a LinkedIn post of an employee who wrote a rebuttal. While taking issue with some nominal factual inaccuracies, what the Amazon-employee says isn’t radically different from what the New York Times article tried to put forward. Ezra Klein in his excellent post on Vox explains why he thinks that’s the case [Link] (I agree) but here is my very personalized TLDR.

The Amazon employee, if you go through the note, is not really challenging the basic premise of the story. All that the man is saying, and many would agree with him, is this.

“Yeah these sissies are complaining cause they were not good enough to work in the greatest company on the world (To quote: Not everyone is qualified to work here, or will rise to the challenge. But that doesn’t mean we’re Draconian or evil. Not everyone gets into Harvard, either, or graduates from there. Same principles apply) but there are many people who are great at their work here, are motivated to work nights and weekends, and feel adequately compensated by it.  Take the heat or get out of the kitchen.  Booyakasha”.

Without judging the tone and tenor of his post, or sentences like “Yes. Amazon is, without question, the most innovative technology company in the world” (Psst Tesla) , I find the employee’s very alpha-male response extremely honest, as it pretty much lays out the world view of those that “win” in our present corporate environment.

James T. Kirk: Why would a Starfleet admiral ask a three-hundred-year-old frozen man for help?

Khan: Because I am better.

James T. Kirk: At what?

Khan: Everything.

Yeah. That kind.

 

What I am less comfortable with is what’s in Jeff Bezos’s note.

NYT article prominently features anecdotes describing shockingly callous management practices, including people being treated without empathy while enduring family tragedies and serious health problems. The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day

Here is why I am not comfortable. Companies aren’t people (sorry Citizens United). People have empathy. Institutions, that exist with a profit motive, don’t. And Mr. Bezos knows this I am guessing.

Why isnt this his company? [Link]

Elmer Goris spent a year working in Amazon.com’s Lehigh Valley warehouse, where books, CDs and various other products are packed and shipped to customers who order from the world’s largest online retailer.

The 34-year-old Allentown resident, who has worked in warehouses for more than 10 years, said he quit in July because he was frustrated with the heat and demands that he work mandatory overtime. Working conditions at the warehouse got worse earlier this year, especially during summer heat waves when heat in the warehouse soared above 100 degrees, he said.

He got light-headed, he said, and his legs cramped, symptoms he never experienced in previous warehouse jobs. One hot day, Goris said, he saw a co-worker pass out at the water fountain. On other hot days, he saw paramedics bring people out of the warehouse in wheelchairs and on stretchers

And this?

Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination, workers said. The consequences of not meeting work expectations were regularly on display, as employees lost their jobs and got escorted out of the warehouse. Such sights encouraged some workers to conceal pain and push through injury lest they get fired as well, workers said.

During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn’t quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.

It’s easy to vilify Mr. Bezos as a heartless curmudgeon. And I am not going to. (I have an Amazon Prime membership). There is a villain here of course (all stories have them). And I am going to get there, in the time I can order something off Amazon and get it delivered to my door.

Just bear with me.

The model of corporate “benevolence” that people seem to want to hark back to is largely a romanticized ideal of the American mega- corporation in the 50s and the 60s. It was said, with some truth perhaps, that if an American worked hard and honest, he was assured of the “American way of life”, a house of his own, a car and a comfortable standard of living. Unions were strong, people still worked in manufacturing factories, and work-hours were sacrosanct. You showed up, punched in, did your work, punched out, and if your effort was honest and you didn’t steal time (or not too much), well then you were Ah-ok. Salaries were more or less even, and of course the topdogs made quite a bit though not an obscene amount more, and if that bothered you a lot, why you could go to Russia.

Then things began to change. First there was the politics. As long as the Cold War had been on, the American establishment felt obliged to show to the world and to themselves that the American working middle-class was the happiest in the world. It was one of the reasons why Communism fell, because after some time it became obvious that “capitalism” of the American kind works better for the proletariat than slave-labor-camps and communes and Politburo diktats. But once the point had been made, the American ruling class no longer really cared to keep up the pretense. Big business slowly but surely started working away at the unions, labor rights, tariff barriers and the other pesky things that get in the way of truly having fun.

Then came a new age of industrial automation through pervasive computerization and a whole lot of other manufacturing technologies that stylish tech-types would nowadays call “disruptive”. With that came that sinister word into popular lexicon.

Globalization.

The American worker found himself competing with men and women who could work hundred hour work-weeks at cents per hour, with babies strapped around their backs. Companies that still had strong unions sunk, those with weak unions renegotiated their way out. The American worker started working more for less, the forty hours became just a paper construct, and yet jobs flew away, never to return, and then Detroit happened.

Wait, you say. We know all this. I am sure you do.

But this lays the context for what Amazon and many others like them are trying to  implement. The idea is not new, and it’s not rocket-science either. It’s just that the tech has finally caught up with the concept.

Let me explain.

In this world-view, you are not dealing with human beings any more. You are dealing with resources. Human beings are like…let’s say printers. You want to print out a document. There are three network printers. You see which one is not busy, you send that resource the job. There is a printer you believe is consuming too much ink. You measure printer performance, quality of print-outs, speed, with particular attention to how many pages you get out of a cartridge and the cost of cartridge. You calculate a cost per page of printing. The printer that has the highest cost per page is thrown into the dustbin, and a new printer bought. Sure you have to call in a technician to install it, and the printer costs something too, but you know that within a thousand pages (that’s what your analytics package tells you) the printer will recover that startup cost. Oh blimey. The paper keeps jamming in this printer. Junk this one too.

The challenge behind implementing this resource-driven world-view (human resource wink wink) is primarily technological. You have the problem of allocation (how do you optimize the sending of jobs to free resources) and you have the problem of measurement and decision (how do you measure which printer is “best” and how do you take decisions based on that?). It is not a coincidence that Amazon, which is primarily a retailer, has invested so much into tech. Solve these problems (or solve it better than your competitors) and you are future-proof, for a while at least.

First. Allocation.

From “Working Anything but 9 to 5: Scheduling Technology Leaves Low-Income Parents With Hours of Chaos” [Link]

Like increasing numbers of low-income mothers and fathers, Ms. Navarro is at the center of a new collision that pits sophisticated workplace technology against some fundamental requirements of parenting, with particularly harsh consequences for poor single mothers. Along with virtually every major retail and restaurant chain, Starbucks relies on software that choreographs workers in precise, intricate ballets, using sales patterns and other data to determine which of its 130,000 baristas are needed in its thousands of locations and exactly when. Big-box retailers or mall clothing chains are now capable of bringing in more hands in anticipation of a delivery truck pulling in or the weather changing, and sending workers home when real-time analyses show sales are slowing. Managers are often compensated based on the efficiency of their staffing.

Scheduling is now a powerful tool to bolster profits, allowing businesses to cut labor costs with a few keystrokes. “It’s like magic,” said Charles DeWitt, vice president for business development at Kronos, which supplies the software for Starbucks and many other chains.

Yet those advances are injecting turbulence into parents’ routines and personal relationships, undermining efforts to expand preschool access, driving some mothers out of the work force and redistributing some of the uncertainty of doing business from corporations to families, say parents, child care providers and policy experts.

Then measurement. Once upon a time, salesmen were the only ones I can think of who would continually be measured for performance. That’s because it was easy to measure their productivity. Volume of sales. Nowadays corporations are devising measures for everyone, and the lower you are in the food chain, the more you are measured. Those who have worked in call centers know what I am talking about. At retail stores, cashiers see running measures of their performance (basically how fast they are doing checkouts), and their continual employment or bonuses are dependent on staying above the average. Technology now makes it possible to continually monitor multiple sensors for data and calculate, often in real time, these metrices of performance. The companies call this instant feedback, (much of the NYT article is about Amazon’s real-time feedback system) and sometimes, just because they can be heartless, gamification.

We, of course, know what it is. The ticking timebomb on your job.

Now if you ask a captain of industry, or two, they will say that data-driven evaluations are, by definition, the most fair, removing subjectivity and bias and human error. This seems to sound kind of okay till you realize that the lower you are in the food chain, more your risk from such a metric-based evaluation system. The single mother moving the produce across the scanning machine is being judged purely on how fast her hands are moving, and how few times she has to call her manager. She has a single point of failure, herself, and so if she drops below the red-line because she has a splitting tooth-ache she can’t root-canal because she has no money to go to the dentist, she gets the pink slip.  Her manager’s risk is distributed through the employees she manages, the area managers by the stores he manages. Which is why the higher you rise, the more likely you are to make your numbers,  and the more likely you are to write self-congratulatory posts on Linkedin and castigate the slackers.

There is a little catch here. Since industry would like you to believe that compensation is linked purely to merit and value to company, one would have to assume the the productivity/value to company of a CEO has increased by 997% from 1978 (because salaries have) (Link) and in any year a CEO has earned, by dint of his numbers, 303 times more than the average worker. (Link).

The numbers above are worth giving a second to because it shows how the whole value-to-company “data driven” system is calibrated to benefit those at the top. It is not surprising then that the most passionate defenses of Amazon and similar companies come from the Brahmins of the company, those that get paid the most, because they have been made to believe, through the whole data-driven mumbo jumbo that they are, LO’Real style, “worth it”. The touchy-feely “we care” side of the company is exposed only to them, which is why they are genuinely gobsmacked when they hear of other employees in the same organization having radically different experiences. For instance Netflix rolled out paid maternity leave to its employees but only in its online streaming side, not the humble DVD-packers or the customer-service reps [Link]. I am sure there is some data-scientist (or a few) who earned their pay here, and a bunch of employees rolling their eyes at the complainers and moochers.

Which brings me to the point of the post. Empathy.

The modern organization, and specially the post-modern one that visionaries like Bezos dream of, do not plan for empathy. Yes empathy needs to be planned for, else it is just a nice word in a CEO note. Empathy means designing redundancy into an organization, such that the lady who has had a stillborn child is allowed a period of “low performance” because there is someone else who can pick up that work, without making that someone else burn out. That kind of planning of course almost never happens in the modern organization, especially for those at the lower end of the value scale, because the mantra is of leanness, of being pared to the bone, with no redundant cost-centers.

And if you think this is bad, you haven’t seen the future yet. The next wave of automation is round the corner, and Amazon is at the leading edge of that. Bezos will solve the Dickensian problem of workers fainting in the heat of their warehouses by replacing them with armies of robots. I have seen personally robots that implement what’s called “deep learning” and while these are research prototypes with limited functionality I have seen, the potential is truly scary. Outside the factory, Bezos will use drones for one-hour-deliveries to compete with Walmart, and you can be sure that Walmart, a company not known for its empathy, will fight back with more paring-to-the-bone, creating a hellish race for empathy rock-bottom.

For those of you engineers who are popping a beer and thinking “Haha losers”, they are going to come for you too. Remember the lucrative profession of “data entry operators”? No? Well there is a reason for that. Low-level testing jobs, the button pressing and running through scripts, are, as you read this, on the way out as sophisticated testing automaton tools become integrated into the development life-cycle. And it’s not just testing. While program-synthesis (gross oversimplification of what synthesis is: computers generating code based on a provided set of input-output sequences) has remained a pipe-dream for decades, we have now have reached the stage where the first practical implementations of program synthesis  are being realized in commercial products, like Flash Fill in Excel. Which means, developers and programmers, come back in twenty years time, and tell me whether you are still a winner or part of the DVD-packing unit.

Let’s all accept this. Humans are flaky resources. They complain, break down at desks, faint during peak packing season, bad-mouth you to NYT, and get pregnant. Any dude who makes 303 times more than normal humans know that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is one where such flaky resources are replaced with predictable, plannable, big-data-friendly automatons.

I’ll be back.

So who is the villain here? Its not Bezos, or any of his extremely rich friends, or the Harvard MBAs who consider themselves Olympian Gods.

No it’s me. (Actually I mean you)

You see, I don’t want to deal with humans when I go to shop. I want to deal with a corporation. If I order on Amazon Prime, I expect my stuff delivered within two business days, and I couldn’t care less if you delivered your baby on the shop floor to make it happen. Tough luck, next time I will buy from Overstock. If I am at my Target checkout, the last thing I want to see is some new hire, unable to swipe a simple item and calling her supervisor for a price check, while my daughter is having a temper tantrum. If my food is cold or not done the way I want, I send it back, and I don’t care whose salary it comes from.  If I want to cancel my Comcast cable account, I want to cancel it, not have to deal with an hour-long “Please stay” from an account retention executive, who is struggling to make her target and is in danger of losing her contract.

See the pattern here? I don’t have empathy when dealing with businesses and yet expect Bezos to run an organization that does.

Because no one really wants empathy, unless it’s they are talking about their own workplace. The socialist model was all about redundancy and empathy and work-life balance and more equitable pay. How has that worked? Not well.

Businesses that put employees before customers are not the people we want to buy from.

Businesses that put employees before shareholders are not the people we want to invest in.

Fun fact. People want to work for socialists but not conduct business with them. For good reason too.

They kind of suck.

And in a season where the Trump fire rages on in the US, it is doubly ironic to talk about empathy.  Trump might not win in the end, but there is no doubt that his message, which can be summed as “America does not win because it has too much empathy. We need to fire some losers like I do in my show Apprentice”, is wildly popular, because many Americans, quite a few of them being the same people dubbed as “non-performing assets” by the corporations they worked for (that’s the irony part), want the same model to be applied to the country.

Because they do believe that ruthless capitalism is the best way for success.

Whether a country can be a corporation, to be run with a profit motive, is a topic for another day, but there is no doubt that of all the things that are redundant in the lean corporation of the future, there is nothing more redundant than empathy (unless it’s an euphemism for a component of a corporate benefit package to be given to that Stanford hire).

So stop hating people. And get with the game.

 

 

 

 

The Fight For Freedom

We won independence in 1947.

Freedom. Not yet.

No this is not going to be one of those “How can we be free as long as there is poverty and exploitation” rant. The cynic in me knows that want and disease and violence and injustice and Salman Khan movies that make 500 crores are what define the human condition. The order of the world is one giant step-ladder of exploitation, that just as we get exploited by our masters above, we too must exploit, be it the earth we claim we want to leave for our children or indentured laborers making Apple components in sweatshops. Freedom in that sense is an unattainable ideal, or to put it in the words of Robin Williams, “Only in their dreams can men be truly free. ‘Twas always thus, and always thus will be.”

What I am talking about is individual liberty, not as an ideal, but a very low economy class version of it.

The ability to send cartoons of politicians without being hauled to jail. The right for two consenting adults to have sex in a hotel room without being arrested and publicly shamed for “public indecency”.  The right to do it in the bum without being considered a criminal. The right to not have a badge enter my house and drag me away without  a warrant.

As I said. Basic stuff. Other countries have it. It’s not a big deal.

One reason we dont is 1947. We got rid of the Tom Alters but we kept its institutions. Why? Because it suited our new rulers. The British had an enormously well-thought out system for oppression and when the DVD is available, why not just “Indianize” the scenes and pass it of as our own. So we kept the structure of a police force that was designed to rule an antagonistic population. We kept the structure of laws that were built on the assumption that “white Europeans” needed to teach us natives “civilization”. and Victorian morality. We defined free speech in a way that disallowed any speech that could be considered uncomfortable to those in power.

And we just didn’t define them. We kept and we built on them. For all these years. It’s truly been one of the most marvelous achievements of our Indian polity, and in that every party should get equal credit, that they have managed to convince us that this is for our own protection. Freedom of speech, we are told, won’t work here in India as it does in Western countries, because we are, somehow, different, quick to hurt with fragile “sentiments”. Indian culture is under threat, the terrorists will shoot your brains out, and the bogeyman will come for you if you don’t drink your milk.

The fun part is we actually believe this shit. Or rather, we selectively believe them. We go along with, no make that enthusiastically endorse state intrusion into our fundamental rights as long as it aligns with our political and social beliefs. If you think your son is watching porn, you want the government to ban it. If you think your daughter is out doing bad things, you want the government to stop it.  If you think item numbers are sexist, you want them to be censored. If you are a xenophobe with a distrust of “foreigners”, particularly those that are leading promiscuous lives while you can’t, you want Bharti-man in his AAPmobile to do something about it.

You want the government to be your concerned uncle, you want the government to be Superman, you want the government to fish out its nipple and pacify your hurt sentiments.

Guess what, they are only too happy to pretend to care. It enables them to keep up the lie that this fundamentally oppressive, heavy-handed system is what stands between you and the barbarians at the gate.

And again, this is not a fight for a vaguely identified ideal. This is a fight for small things. This is a fight for strong laws that protect “offensive” speech in the way the First Amendment does in the US. This is a fight for de-decriminalization of homosexuality. This is a fight for the right to have consensual sex behind closed doors. This is a fight to eat what you want, a fight to watch the films you want, and the fight to shag off to, in the privacy of your own home, to anything that involves consenting adults.

This is a fight for freedom.

Bajrangi Bhaijaan—A Comment

Bajrangi Bhaijaan is the best-Bhai vehicle ever but that’s like saying that the seventeen Venkatesh Prasad scored in Cuttack was his best batting performance. It’s not a high bar.

The cinematic quality is of course not really what held me in awe.

It was something else.

Bajrangi Bhaijaan is a stupendous exercise of image-engineering,one from which everyone, from PR gurus to husbands who have been caught sexting by their wives may draw lessons.

Bhai is a golden-hearted Hindu fundamentalist, the kind of half-man half-child that Aamir Khan plays in every film (no wonder he carried a towel to cry in, this should have been him), someone who never lies no matter what the consequences, so pure that he makes Yudhishtir look like Suresh Kalmadi. This portrayal of an orthodox Hindu as a saint, novel as it is in the annals of mainstream Hindi moviedom, is a marvelous way to placate the group that has traditionally not been his hottest demographic, and this is not just because he needs their business.

No that’s not the main reason.

Now usually a Salman film is a storyless montage of  the man bashing baddies up, ripping off his shirt, playing bongo on female bottoms, brashly justifying his “character dheela”-ness, smiling rakishly at the camera, swinging women onto his muscled shoulders, unleashing neanderthalisms like “Tu ladki ke peeche bhagega, ladki paise ke peeche bhagegi … tu paise ke peeche bhagega, ladki tere peeche bhagegi” of the kind that make his fans in their front-stalls, chest-thump, whoop and clap, “Kya dialogue boss, mard hai sala mard hai yeh banda”.

Admiration and lust though it may engender, it does not gain the man much sympathy.

Though right now, that’s what he needs.

Sympathy. And good will.

In that Bajrangi Bhaijaan is a success that numbers like five hundred crores or seven hundred crores cannot really capture. Kabir Khan is such a consummate artist that when at the end, Salman Khan, bearded, broken and bleeding, like a Christ descended from the cross, without once even lifting his finger against the sinners who torture him like Roman legionnaires of yore, walks across the border, the cocky swagger that is so Bhai soaked away to be replaced by a Gandhian aura of marytrdom, the lines between the projected image of the actor and the perceived image of the character is finally blurred, and you leap out of your seats,  and scream in unison…

The driver did it.

 

 

 

Baahubali The Beginning–The Review

Once upon a time, there lived a lad.

Looking up at the mountain of water towards the misty horizon, he felt inside an indomitable mysterious force, calling him upwards and over. So he enrolled in Physics and Maths coaching classes in Class eight, to get an early start, then Ramaiyya classes at five in the morning to get an even earlier start and correspondence courses to get problem-sets he could crack while on the loo. He would try, one problem after another in Irodov, and then the sequence of solved problems would be broken and he would come tumbling down back to Exercise one. It would have broken lesser men, that fall, but he merely smiled, dusted away his failure, and went back to Newton’s Laws.

His mother (or the one he knew to be his) asked the Gods what they were doing wrong, because the neighbor hood kids were doing just fine. It had become an obsession, this wanting to scale the wall of water, and his muscles grew, till he was moving smoothly through Khanna and Khanna, but still the mountain stood, untamed and proud, and our boy toiled away.

Till one day, in his hand, fell a torn picture.

It had fluttered in from somewhere up the mountain of the water, washed away and grainy, but distinguishable only as a female face.  Our lad would keep the face on a piece of paper, and then lovingly, with his protractor and compass draw boobs around it, of different diameters, for he know not the dimensions of this lovely lass. There was no female in his life, and together with the need to scale the wall of water, attaining the girl in the picture became the focus of his life.

Till one day, while scaling the wall of water, he saw her.

Water-droplets cascading down her perfect spine, there she was, looking at him with come-hither eyes, in a bikini that revealed beauties grander than he could have imagined. In the throes of great passion, he danced up the wall of water, swallowing semesters in epic gravity-defying leaps, while she flitted ahead, through his books, and exam papers, and his programming assignments, turning her head ever so a little, as blue butterflies flew around, or neelachalachitram as he called them,  till one day he did it, he scaled the wall.

And found himself in the United States of America. But where was that bikini-clad goddess of beauty who had inspired him? She was not there.

So our lad goes searched for her, and lo and behold there she was. A confident team leader who commanded the respect of her engineers, whose only problem in our lad’s eyes was the perennial frown on her face, and her frumpy “old maid” get-up, the stitches on her dress resembling more the seams of a Kookaburra ball then the bikini he had seen in his fantasies of her wearing. To express his love, he hid away in the shadows, lurking through her facebook pictures, sending her anonymous messages of passion, one which almost leads her to lose her job. Enraged, she came out to hunt this stalker, and boom, they met. When their meeting was finished, he had revealed her inner beauty, literally, by forcibly taking off her clothes, revealing the bikini-clad beauty he had seen in his dreams. Our lad then told our heroine, “This is what you really are, why hide it”, and immediately she realized the truth, that the hollow feeling in her heart was because she hasnt been objectified so far, despite having that killer bod, of the kind that makes men vault up the Viagra Falls. So she fluttered her eyelids, ran into the manly chest of our lad (He does “Body for Life” program, and secretly Zumba), quit her job immediately, gave it to our hero, and is now found making puliyodharai and going to Patel Brothers at 3 on Sundays, again in that frumpy old-maid look of old, her inner beauty now hidden from the eyes of the zaalim world for a different reason.

Bring out the pitchforks dear readers, and the catapults for good measure, because I did not like everyone’s favorite, the record-breaking, 400-crore-and-counting, epic Baahubali. And trust me, I wanted to, in the same way Aamir Khan wanted to like Bajrangi Bhaijaan when he methodically carried a towel to the screening, because I wanted a non-Hindi pan-India blockbuster to break the moronic monopoly of  100-crore collage of Khan or Roshan scenes, if only to disrupt the sequence of engineered hits, that have taken so much of the fun out of the Bollywood I had grown up loving.

And yet S.S. Rajamouli’s world left me cold, a world of 80s-type machismo and chauvinism and traditional gender-roles, which would make Kanti Shah look like Gloria Steinheim, of black-face painted  Uruk-Hai-like “Jhingalila Jhing” bad-men with terrible dental hygiene, “Mere bete Karan Arjun Aayenge” Rakhi-clones, a lot of bull (literally), plenty of rock-hard pecs, and even more navels, a world of mega-uber-superheroes and mega-uber-supervilliains, whose every green drop of snot becomes a Hulk, who heal faster than Wolverine, who pick their teeth with adamantium, for whom Superman is what Laxmi Ratan Sukla is to AB De Villiers. Its a world I would have loved to get my teeth into, to get caught up in, but then there was nothing fresh, not even an innovative riff on an old trope, or a twist, or a character that showed some dimension, that I could really point to and say “Yes that was awesome”.

What about the CGI you ask? What about it, I ask in return? First of all, pixel tricks in itself cannot be the be-all and end-all of any film, if it was then the Transformers series would be classics (they made a shitload of money internationally, so it’s not that they are not successful). And here is where I think I will make my most controversial assertion—I did not find the CGI jaw-dropping in the least. But you say, “This is much better than we see in Hindi films”. I agree.  If you take as a baseline, the CGI parrot Raja Tota of “Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon”, yes it’s all very impressive, but our comparison-point, in today’s world, should be the best. And in comparison to an Avengers or even the Game of Thrones, a TV show, Bahubali suffers, particularly in the sweeping external shots of the imperial city and the blue butterflies and the green snake, where the CGI looks CGI, breaking the immersion, unlike Khaleesi’s dragons in Game of Thrones (done by an Indian firm) which, for the most part, appear “real”. The CGI works better during the battle scenes, and that’s more because of the thumping music and the battlescene choreography, but even there when a sequence from 300 is being lifted, it pales in front of the visual palette rendered in the original. And given that I saw “Mad Max Fury Road” a few months ago, my standards of “knock your socks off” in terms of a visual spectacle have also risen, and I am not willing to accommodate the clause ‘for an Indian film’ in my lexicon, because there is nothing more patronizing than the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Which brings me back to the original point.  My inability to engage with the story, the characters,  and the conflict, in short, the good old things that made films epic, rather than monster VFX budgets.

Overall verdict: underwhelmed.

 

NABC Diaries Part 2

[First part here]

The next day (Saturday) was my session (or rather the first of the two that I did). So after a lengthy epoch of  “saajuguju” (dress-up), I arrived at the convention center, in an ethnic kurta (what Bengalis call Punjabi) and a six-pocket, a slight variation on the uniform of the internationalized Bangali intellectual, which is kurta-jeans. If I was trying for a more provincial look, I would have gone with a dhoti, but I just cannot say the word dhoti without the song “Mirchi re mirchi kamaal kar gayee, dhoti ko phar ke rumaal kar gayee” popping into my head,  washing away my train of thought in a jetstream of apasanskriti (bad culture), which we can all agree would have a disastrous fallout in the cultural cleanroom I was walking into. Also I can’t tie a dhoti.

Anyways, as I entered the venue, I saw this sign below. This was intriguing because the words “Jatin Pandit”, “free breakfast”, and “lipid tests” normally don’t go together.

 

So I trundled off to the exhibition hall, where saris and jewelry were being sold, and though unfortunately the free breakfast had ended, the concert was in full-swing. This was away from the main venue, perhaps because this was too Bollywood for the mainstream. I mean I get it,  traditionalist uncles sticking their nose up at Jatin Pandit and saying “This kind of music is not Bengali”, but then I would respond with even “lipid testing is not Bengali”, but that doesn’t mean we should not have it.

There wasn’t a particularly a big crowd around, nothing close to what there should have been for one of the true icons of 90s Hindi films,  the stage was nowhere as close to professionally done as the main performance stages (which were magnificent) and there was a laptop-driven slideshow going on behind Jatin Pandit, showing his pictures with Shahrukh Khan and Yash Chopra, almost as if he had to establish his credentials to an audience that might not know how big he was. From time to time, he had to interrupt his performance to point out the blood-giving activities going on the side, with a rejoinder that you don’t need to be fasting to undergo the tests, and somehow seeing one of my idols from so close, someone whose music had carried me through my college days, through love and heartbreak, I got “thoda emotional”, almost emotional enough to get my damn lipid tested, but then I will do anything for love but I won’t do that.

After a lovely lunch of Indian-style Chinese, it was time for my session. I was going to be sharing stage with Harsha Dutta, the editor of Desh. For those of you who do not know, Desh is the Bengali New Yorker, a legendary magazine that has published some of the biggest names in Bengali literature,  occupying pride of place on the Bangali coffee table for nearly eight decades in the same way that the Rabindranath picture has occupied its place on the Bangali wall. So, of course, I was slightly (okay more than slightly) intimidated.

His contention was that people no longer want to read Bangla, and authors don’t want to write in Bangla either, because they think they won’t get the audience to be commercially viable and because English is supposedly just more fashionable. My counter-contention was that I didn’t believe that Bengali authors had to necessarily write in Bangla to be considered to be genuinely Bangali. I mean here I am, with the name “Greatbong”, and I write in English, and the reason I do so is simply because I am more comfortable in it. That does not make me any less Bangali or my work any less authentic or my motives any less pure.

Why restrict ourselves to English and Bengali only? Many Bengalis today are writing Java and C in most of their waking hours (and some sleeping too). And who is to say that code is not literature or a genuine Bangali product? Like a good novel or a poem, it communicates ideas and thoughts, between man and machine as well as between man and man (those who maintain code and build on code others have written know what I mean), and there is a notion of “well-written” code versus sloppily-written, just as there is in literature. Maybe, twenty years from now, most Bengalis will be writing stories in Java and while I personally might not consider that to be my definition of bed-time reading, who am I to speak for those that would use this to define their Bangali identity? And yes, people do read less  than they used to, but that’s because television and internet provide so much more competition for our spare time, but all that means is that the bar for popularity has been set higher. Today’s children easily digest six-hundred page Harry Potters and go on to remember every page and every character, so it’s not as if reading as an activity is extinct. Which is why perhaps the more appropriate question, I felt, should be “Where is the Bangali Rowling and why isn’t she here yet?” It was all very lively and exciting, and I spent some time answering a very interesting moderator-posed question on why  I think Thakumar Jhuli hasn’t become the Bangali Potter, and maybe I will put my thoughts down on this later in another blogpost, or perhaps in another literary panel (yes I am fishing for invitations).

With that session over, I roamed around a bit, from stage to stage, and stayed a while at a place where noted director Gautam Ghosh was holding forth on film, particularly the transition from analog to digital. It was fascinating, not just for what was being said, but how it was being said, for Gautam Ghosh is just the most lovely communicator. Then I was in a session where musician Debojyoti Mishra was on stage talking about music. It was a largely empty hall, with a few disinterested gentlemen furiously texting away on their mobiles, and at least one bringing his child into the hall to calm him down, when suddenly, it happened. Within seconds, from every exit,  like ants rushing towards a slowly flowing streak of honey, they poured in, jostling and shoving. A huge elbow hit the side of my head as an auntie sat down right next to me,  and without a word of apology for the blow, asked in a loud, angry voice, “Konkana ashe ni?” (Konkona Sen Sharma isnt here?). I picked up a program that had fallen to the floor to find myself in the event where Konkana Sen Sharma would make an appearance, along with Saswata and Parambrata. Aah, I told myself,  Paoli Dam is going to be here too, Paoli Dam, famous for her performance in Hate Story. Well, I should have seen this coming, but following Paoli’s Exclusion Principle, she was excluded, which meant that watching people gawking at Konkona quickly become my only source of entertainment.

And boy was that a lot of that. Of course there was a lot of serious discussion on film, like why is Parambrata’s dog called “Appel” (apple)?. One part of my brain was of course dismayed at this gratuitous gushing over celebrities while the other part of my brain ruied the missed opportunity of giving Parambrata and/or Sashwata a copy of my book Yatrik, because I was too worried someone else would be judging me the same way I was judging others. That’s the damn problem in a Banga Sammelan, everyone knows what the other person is thinking. Anyways, there was a lot of noise in this session, and at one point, an uncle enthusiastically clapped to something Konkona had said, and then turned to his wife and said, “God knows what he said, couldn’t hear anything” Then the rude auntie who had hit me on the head, suddenly leaned forward and, perhaps in an attempt to atone for the blow, confided in me “They should have brought Deb. He has such better personality”, at which point I got up and left.

There was one more place I was mildly interested in looking at, the Bengali Matrimony dating event, primarily because I was interested in writing a romance novel, but a rather strict looking lady next to the sign kept repeating “For singles only” mainly to ward off people like me, the kind who should be at the lipid and EKG-testing booth. So I went to the awards ceremony, where there were “Shera Bangali” (Best Bangali) awards and then “Sherar Shera Bangali” (Best Best Bangali Award) which went to Shera sorry Shreya Ghoshal.

I had another literary panel discussion, on Sunday, which had Chitra Divakaruni as the main guest, on diaspora literature, and then before you knew it, it had come down to this.

The end. The literal bottom of the barrel where all that remains are the broken aloor chop of pleasant memories.

But wait, there was still the Shreya Ghoshal concert. She was late and the lines were huge, and when I found myself in my platinum seats, even they had filled up considerably. Then two dancing ladies and two dancing gentleman ran onto the stage to the tune of “Bang Bang” and I knew I was in for a treat when lady next to me complained about their “uchnigrer moton naach” (grasshopper like dance steps). Then Shreya Ghoshal came out, the backup dancers went in, and the dancing started.

Some people say Bengalis don’t dance. Some people haven’t been to NABC. No sooner does the beat drop, than the boudis and mashimas leave their purses on the chairs and jump up in a spontaneous Midnapore wave, proceeding to thump the floor with forces that would make tectonic plates shift. And just when you think that auntie doing the “Esho ei boishaak esho esho” (Oh summer come hither) dance step to the tune of Chikni Chameli or the mashima pulling herself up in a “Amar ei deho khani tule dhoro” (Lift my body up) dance mudra as Shreya Ghoshal belts out “Barso re megha megha”, there bursts forth, like a sudden shower, an uncle, pot-bellied,  hair dyed as black as the ash buds in the front of May, bosom heaving Vidya Balan style to the tune of “Ooh Lala Ooh Lala”, and even though those behind may plead with him to stop for he is blocking their view, he careens on, without a care in the world, caught in the throes of a “tu hai meri fantasy” where he is joined by another force of nature, a gentleman whose dance moves look suspiciously inspired by exercises to relieve arthritis pain in the knees.

And it was somewhere around this time, that I had my mini-epiphany.

It doesn’t matter whether I write novels in Bangla or not, or whether I can tell my Manik from my Sunil, or whether I never win a “Motamuti Bangali” award, or whether I don’t go to Prantik for Durga Pujo and instead stay home to watch Game of Thrones,  as I will always remain a Bengali, as authentic as all these people here.

For one simple reason. I consider myself one. For life.

And that’s all that matters.

 

NABC Diaries Part 1

Culture is a word most treasured by Bengalis. Pronounced “kalchaar”, it conjures up multiple images in the Bong mind, of harmonium-handling humans swaying their heads in musical cadence to the rhythm of Rabindrasangeet, of the tremulous vocal-chord shaking of a Shombhu-Mitra-style elocution, of post-modern art drawn by a bearded once-Communist, of abstruse verse about a burning tree standing against a bare sky, of the screening of a Gautam Ghose or a Rituparno or a Satyajit Ray, or even the poetic stylings of Didi, though most who consider that high art are now all Trinamool MPs. Away from the homeland, in imperialistic capitalist America,  it is this culture that the Bengali immigrant misses the most. Of course they go back sometimes to this mythical “Bongoland” , for a month or so, but the entire time is taken up by going to State Bank of India renewing lockers, or fighting with real estate brokers and cousins out to grab you off your ancestral house, or  visiting homes of relatives you increasingly care less for, leaving precious little  for a concert or a play or a Charminar or an evening discussing the difference between Derrida, Neruda, Prabir-da and Florida.

The North American Bengali Conference, henceforth referred to as NABC understands this. Which is why every year they bring to the North American Bengalis a veritable cornucopia of culture, flying in top artists from the homeland, both Bengal and Bangladesh, for a carnival of color, chilli chicken and chaa.

Now I have been in America for nearly fifteen years now, and despite the “Greatbong” in my name, I had never been to a NABC. I have often been asked, “Why haven’t you?” in the same tone that people query a forty-year old single man on why he isn’t married yet.

One reason for that, and old readers of my blog will know this, is that I am more attracted to bad-culture or apasanskriti than anything else and NABC, I feared, would be for me what a walk in the daylight is for a vampire.

I am not exaggerating my insecurities. Being called out for cultural “bellelepana” is what truly taps into the primal fear of a Bengali, way more than “season change” or “industrial stagnation” or “flight of skilled jobs”.

Plus, I am just not the social type. While I can converse for hours on “issues”, be it politics or literature or films, I really struggle at small-talk, which is why I have always kept a distance from local Maryland Bengali and Indian associations, preferring to spend my evenings writing, watching useless Youtube videos, and trolling random people on the Internet.

Don’t get me wrong. I have been fascinated by NABC for years and it has been on my “Shall do this one day” list, like running a half-marathon, but truth be told, I have never really seriously planned for it.

All this changed when the kind folks at Du-kool, the bilingual magazine published in the US that I write for, decided to have me on literary panels at this year’s event at Houston.

Not that I was not a bit scared of how I would do when I landed at the Hobby airport.

My sense of fear was not calmed by this elderly couple I met at the baggage carousel. On learning that I had flown in with them on the same flight from Baltimore, the lady looked at me suspiciously, “You say you are Bengali but I have never seen you at Prantik”. She was right. Prantik is one of the big Bengali associations in the Greater DC area, and me never having gone to their events had evidently put my Bengali-ness in doubt.

Was I Bengali any more, I wondered, as I got into the taxi? Then what am I? I am not a saheb (what Bengalis call foreigners), I am not a Hindustani (what Bengalis call non-Bengali Indians who are poor), I am not Marawari (what Bengalis call non-Bengali Indians who are rich), and I am not Punjabi (something Bengalis wear). So what am I?

Lost in thought, I slept for a few hours at the hotel and then came down for the opening ceremonies. Thanks to Du-kool, I was given a Platinum badge or Robert Vadra privilege level, which meant I could sit anywhere I wanted in the auditorium. I went and sat in the first row, just behind two lines of red and white sofas, which I rightly assumed were for the really really important people. They were filled soon, with Texas state dignitaries, a few Trinamool MPs (I was tempted to walk over to them and ask if Bangladesh was on the border of Pakistan), and the lead organizers. Just when I was resigning myself to a spate of “Sudhu duto katha bolbo” (“Will say just two words”), the standard prologue for a long speech, my Spidey-sense began to tingle and I looked back to see, sitting in the row behind me, Parambrata and Saswata.

Yes. Parambrata and Saswata.

For those of you who are not Bong (i.e. have a notion of V), Parambrata [he was the cop in Kahaani] is the intellectual icon of the Bengali film world, the man every cultured lady thinks of when they are making love. And Saswata, known worldwide as “Bob Biswas”from Kahaani, is a cerebral celebrity in his own way, though I am not so sure about his dreaminess quotient. Just when I was about to squeal like a teenage girl at a One-Direction concert (because who doesn’t like a close encounter with philm-stars), the two men came and sat right next to me, and I thought for a while of asking them if we could have a selfie, but I thought that would totally ruin the gravitas of sitting in the Platinum seats. So with a “Amra sobai raja amader ei rajar rajjote, noile more Rajar saathe milbo ki sotte” (We are all kings in this kingdom of kings, else how shall we sit with the king?) song on my lips, I focused my attention to the stage, more specifically to the male master of ceremonies.

While appreciating fully his flawless command of the Bengali language, I will accept that it’s not easy to drop words like “beekoshito” and “byaprito”in a spontaneous monologue, which kind of reminded me of my Bengali teachers describing Apu’s flights of fancy, I could not get over that pronunciation. It’s not the first time I had heard this, this rather sing-song way of articulating words (the Bangla word would be “chebano” or biting into your words), sometimes called the Dakkhini (South Calcutta) accent, which supposedly has an association with high culture. For me personally it’s jarring, and only the next day I heard Gautam Ghosh, the noted director speak, using Bengali as perfect but in an unaffected accent, that I seemed to retain some of my sanity, for at least it meant that my “normal” pronunciation was not deprecated now, like a 1990s Java library, by the cultural “kornodhaars” (controllers) of Bangali culture.

Aajkal tags me “Bangla’s star” by association (That’s Parambrata and Sashwata and me)

After the slew of speeches, and a very professionally choreographed program by Tanushree Shankar, I was out into the main area. I had been asked to move one seat after another, by people who wanted to sit next to Parambrata, including a ravishingly beautiful lady who did not know me and so I didnt know her, and was on the verge of dropping off the side on the side of the row, when I decided enough was enough. Not knowing that my platinum badge would give me access to the VIP lounge, I went and stood in the dinner line, thinking I would avoid the rush by getting in early.

I was wrong.

The queue for dinner (I think tickets for general public cost $25) was like a line in front of a ration shop after a 24 hour bandh. It was pandemonium. Did I say line? I meant band. In the spirit of Bong brotherhood, people were standing shoulder to shoulder, aunties built like a Arjun tank elbowing uncles wearing kurtas cut from a trapeze artist’s bustier, some cribbing about the price of the optional dinner ticket (“I told you we should just eat outside at a Subway or something, chicken there and chicken here also”), some ruing the price of saris on sale at the convention center (“It is thrice as expensive as what I would get in Calcutta, just multiply by 50 and…” “Not 50, it’s 60 now”, “Oh my God, it’s even worse than I thought”), some bragging about the selfies they had already taken with Parambrata, some….well trying their best to get ahead in the queue. There were many techniques for line-hopping on view, from the time-honored (finding someone you know standing ahead in the line, yelling loudly so that everyone can hear “Oho Baren-da, haven’t seen you in years”, and then hopping ahead to continue the conversation) to the new-age (an entire family pushing forward through the crowd, their eyes focussed on the chicken manchurian, while shouting ‘My sugar is dropping’) down to the pure Kohli (“Dada, I am not breaking the line. You are”). And it was all very entertaining, and though the dinner was somewhat generic, the fish stood out in its excellence, and that was all really I cared for.

 

[To be continued]

 

 

On Bobby “I am Not Indian” Jindal

[From here]

Jindal stresses how he avoided telling his parents of his new faith and how disappointed they were when they found out. He said he read the Bible by flashlight to prevent being discovered by his folks, and compared his clandestine study to the early Christians “hiding from government persecution.” Jindal’s process of finding his true religion also involved participating in an exorcism of a college girlfriend.

There is a lot of Jindal that I don’t agree with. But this I got to give the man.

It’s better to be thrown in front of lions or be crucified upside down than to have to go through the ordeal of being a second-generation Indian immigrant growing up in US in the 80s. How do I know? I was one (for a while).

My parents were kind. They didn’t, for instance, make me dress like Anil Kapoor in “Suit boot main aaya kanhaiyya” as Jindal’s parents did. They also left for India after some time, which is why I perhaps never exorcised my college girl-friend. Of course for desi parents, there is nothing even remotely distressing about conducting an exorcism on your girl-friend, it’s not like you had sex with her.

Most immigrants, or to use the politically incorrect term FOBs, settle down in middle-class neighborhoods (this was particularly true in the 70s and 80s), and can only afford to send their children to county-assigned public schools. Here the stars are the football quarterbacks, and the cheerleaders, and the Jindals of the world, slight of frame and not the most natural of athletes, find themselves ignored by the “cool kids” or worse mercilessly picked on. American schools are extremely stratified, kind of like Twitter, at least far more than Indian ones, and dorks (the picture above is an accurate representation of the condition) would have to resign themselves of a life-time of being having “Kick me” sheets taped to their backs, of being pushed around by the jocks, and of being laughed at by the girls.

If life is bad for black geeks and white geeks, it’s worse for the brown. Not that Americans are always shooting down black people in churches, but there exists a culture of casual racism in its institutions, and nowhere perhaps do you see it as nakedly as you do in schools. School kids are cruel to each other, and that’s all over the world, but being a geek and being brown, well that’s just doubled your attack surface. Unlike blacks, whose culture of sports and music is deeply part of Americana, and Hispanics, who are are slowly integrating themselves in the same way, South-Asian-Brown is always foreign, always a butt end of racial humor, and no matter how much a Piyush with a green shirt and a white tie, may try to be American, he can be picked out and picked on from quarter-of-mile-away.

Then there is the accent. While you may have a perfect American accent (kids pick up accents very fast), your parents will always speak like characters in the Simpsons and you will be left, being ribbed for it, of having to silently apologize for the strangeness of your father and mother. Here is Jay Leno, a talking penis, who many Americans find insanely funny, making fun of Jindal’s father’s hypothetical accent, *after* he became a governor of a major American state, and also note, Jindal’s squirming-in-seat reaction.

 

An extract from Vanity Fair.

Now here was Bobby Jindal on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the glad-handing Mayor of America. “Tell us about your background,” Leno said. “First-generation American, correct?”

“Born and raised in Baton Rouge,” Jindal said with a distinct drawl. He launched into the story of his parents’ journey to LSU. “[My dad] walked uphill going to school… and coming back from school,” Jindal joked.

“So your parents have an accent?” Leno asked.

The young governor winced, like a bookish kid who’s just realized he’s wandered into the wrong area of the playground. He looked down into his spidery hands, arranged at the moment as if they were holding an invisible bowl. He searched inside the bowl for the answer to Leno’s question.

“My dad more than my mom,” Jindal said of the accent. “But my dad, you know… none of his brothers or sisters got past the fifth grade… He went all the way to college. That’s pretty amazing.”

“When you were born… did he say — ” Leno bobbled his large head, playing to the studio audience. He put on a corny, over-the-top, Apu-from-The-Simpsons accent: “We will name him Bobby!“

The crowd roared.

“Nooooo,” Jindal protested, faint though distinct, his chin drooping to his chest, clearly mortified. His hands knit together protectively and fell into his lap.

Here is a little exercise. Do you think that Jay Talking Penis Leno would ever make fun of say Senator from Illinois Obama’s father’s African accent? No, not unless he wanted to lose his sponsors. or worse his liberal credentials.  But for Indians, and also Chinese immigrants, accent-shaming is considered to be clean fun and you can thank the Simpsons for its mainstreaming. Now take Jay Leno, shrink him down to a five-year-old version of himself (closer to the intellectual age of Leno), multiply him by thirty,  take away the comforting environs of a late night show and replace it by a baseball diamond, and you may understand why Bobby Jindal at the age of four, (as he claims) started asking children at school to call him Bobby, instead of Piyush.

Which brings me to something that is very important in understanding Bobby Jindal. Religion.

But before that a little story. Once many years ago, a true-blue American had said, “Oh I had forgotten, in India you drive down the wrong side of the road”, to which I had replied, “Not the wrong side. Just the other side.” Fed on a corn-beef diet of exceptionalism, a concept that can be explained simply as “The rules we expect of others do not apply to us because we are special”, anything that is not American is wrong, either to be bombed flat or to be laughed at.

Hinduism, being very different from the traditional Abrahamic One-God-and-one-Prophet  underpinning assumption of religion, is considered to be the strangest of all.

Haha, you worship a monkey? Oh my God, is that a fat elephant? Do you really drink cow piss like for breakfast? Will your mother be burnt alive if your father dies? Some of these questions stem from genuine curiosity, the kind that children have, and some from malice, which children also possess in good measure. At least in my case, this was taught in school, the elephant-God as a representative of Hindiusm, and I remember everyone laughing at how silly my religion was, and I was the only one in class whose religion was laughed at.

It wasn’t a nice feeling, I can tell you that.

Parents are not much help. They want you to win the Spelling Bee or get into Harvard or Johns Hopkins and tell you of the time they came to the country with only eight dollars in their pocket, which translates to “shut up and stop whining”. And so after some time you just don’t want to tell them about the stuff you have to go through school. Instead you blame them for just being what they are. Pushy-uncle and overbearing-aunty from India come visiting and uproot you from your bedroom (this only looks good in Metlife Insurance commercial where the son very happily makes the bed for the visitors), and then they criticize your parents for your accented Bengali or Tamil, and then your parents force you to learn Carnatic or Rabindrasangeet on Sundays, when you would be hanging around the mall, trying to make small talk with Meagan.

Your faith is not of much help.

Parents take you along to the temple right after the weekly Patel Brothers trip for samosas and dhaniya powder, spend an hour offering Puja or doing aarati, and then come back and pop an old Hindi movie into the VHS and have stale samosas. There is no Imam or Pastor at the temple to eloquently define a notion of “us” and “them”,  no congregation where you can connect with others your age going through the same experiences, there is no personal engagement of community-leaders with those whose faith is wavering, no “we are better than the rest” rhetoric. Nothing.

So isolated, bullied, you start hating everything about who you are. While you cannot avoid being dorky or wash away your skin, you can change your name and then your religion and hope that somehow this will make you American.

A large part of Jindal’s Bobbyness is because he has always wanted to be President.   And much as America might hector and advice other countries on pluralism, it is singularly majoritarian when it comes to its politics. When Obama first came onto the scene, and the Republicans started spreading the canard that he was a Muslim, the counter-line from the Democrats was not “So what if he is a Muslim?” but “Oh no he is not Muslim. The Christian faith is extremely important to him. Hell he prays to Jesus everyday”. Things are so bad that President Obama had to cancel his visit to the Golden Temple, over concerns that if he covered his hair, and the picture of that got out, it might be construed as proof that he is Muslim. In this political environment, it is impossible to stay a Hindu and dream of the office of President of the USA, and so much of Jindal’s overt religiosity is carefully calibrated to resonate with his Christian conservative base, and compensate for the foreign-ness of his face.

This is Bobby Jindal’s official portrait. Photo credit: Robin May of @theInd pic.twitter.com/QBzSsMOoYZ

— Lamar White, Jr (@CenLamar) February 3, 2015

While Latino-Americans and Jewish-Americans find no conflict in endorsing and championing Latino/Jewish issues and, as a matter of fact, draw significant political strength from their composite identity, Jindal goes through great pains to de-hyphenate himself from Indian-American to pure American.  His conversion to Christianity is not enough, he still has to keep on saying “Dude I am not Indian”.  From his hilarious “tanned” campaign line to his rather Fair-and-Lovelied official portrait, (Nikki Haley, yet another Jindal-clone, lists herself as “white” in her voter registration) and his refusal to associate himself with any  political cause that can be considered Indian, this heavy-handed denial of his roots is not only ridiculous, in a Uncle Tom way, but also pathetic.

[From LA Times]

Bobby has never supported a single Indian issue, he refused to join the India Caucus when he was a congressman [on] Capitol Hill and is conspicuously absent from any event with a visiting Indian leader,” Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician and author, wrote in a recent book, “India Shastra.”

“It is as if he wants to forget he is Indian, and would like voters to forget it too.”

Of course, not every Indian-Hindu becomes a Bobby Jindal and thank God for that. But a lot do end up growing up alone and rootless in a culture that does very little to welcome them. And while it is perfectly good fun to mock Jindal and his stance on guns and homosexual marriage and evolution and, yes also his loathing of his roots, it might not be a bad idea to take a step back, pause on the #YoJindalSoWhite hashtags, and contemplate what it is about the American immigrant experience for second-generationers that makes a Bobby out of a Piyush.