Bothered by the Baba

Baba Ramdev and the sants: Click through to the Outlook article

He has been a bother for me, and he bothered me last week. My wife has been trying for months to get me to do his pranayama, and thus be cured of diabetes. I have burnt many calories fending off her entreaties. I have seen Ramdev only on television, seconds at a time, sometimes in admiration, but more often I've been suffocated by his garrulity‚ and his hyperactivity. In sum, I've tried to keep him out of my mind but these last two weeks I've joined everybody else, and tossed my opinions to twitter when union ministers went to the airport to dissuade him from fasting, and retweeted outrage when the police cleared him out.

They could have let him be, allowed his tamasha to unravel him. He and the sants on stage don't appear credible one bit. Their grins betray a rajas that has surfaced in all of them, and they are as competitive as any corporate character. None seem to be an exception though in one picture the Pejawar-Shree is frail and lost and wistful for something. He still seems venerable, but he has arrived on the wrong altar. I am cynical of the crowds at the feet of these hirsute men. Have all of them paid the taxes they owe? Are they sure they aren't hiding their own tiny bundle of black money? Have they tempted anyone with bakshish when they needed to bend a rule? And, if they should come into riches, will they pay our state its due, to our state beneath which well-mapped channels have grown robust, through the dark of which you can shuttle cash, and in many ways?

I am comfortable with Anna Hazare, though. I am especially warmed by the enthusiasm he has caused among the youth to clean up our state. Here in Bangalore, the limbs that Hazare set in motion are mostly of the young. The organizations in Bangalore that are providing muscle to Hazare's movement are of students, and of professionals who have just begun their careers. In the hands of these youth the movement appears to be what they claim it to be, and worthy of support.

Today on the weekend I am again bothered by Ramdev. The man has been fasting eight days, and has been carried away to the ICU, with his health faltering sooner than expected, reflecting the erratic character that he has surprised everyone with. Amid suspicions regarding his wealth and his political intentions, his fast is genuine. What should I make of that? And of my own disgust with our collective impotence which helps dark men like the mining barons to rob us daily, and allows them to not merely keep their black wealth but also hands them all the power of the state? Am I grateful enough, now that talk of black money and corruption has gone from the coffee table to the streets, and further on to Jantar Mantar and Ram Lila, and to prime time and all time on television?

I have a question to answer: Is it enough if I try merely to be the change I seek? Should I step out a bit?

Cochin Post

I went round and round the slab of stone in a corner dank in the humid of the monsoons, and went and saw the rest of the simple church and came back and stood about the stone again, and sat down on a bench by it. A woman came up with two kids and whispered "Vasco da Gama" and all sound receded altogether. He had been dead fourteen years from 1524 under that stone in Cochin, and then they took him away to a church in Belem in Lisbon, which is where he is dead ever since, under finely ornamented stonework with a statue of him supine on top.

St. Francis Church, CochinWhen I read of him when I was young his story was all of valor and adventure; when I grew up and read of him again the accounts were of intrigue and intolerance and unspeakable brutality; now I'm grown even more and I've begun this week to read Sanjay Subrahmanyam's scholarly understanding of him. The reason for my enduring fascination for the man, I don't know still, but he will surely bother me for many more years.

After living a life causing and suffering great dangers, at age 55, he fell to the Cochin mosquito on a Christmas eve.

A Dutch cemetery is close by the church, its gates locked, neat and clean and maintained by the Church of South India. And the Chinese nets are near too, still working, centuries after the Chinese installed them at the edge of Fort Island, at the mouth to the sea. When I was there last week, one of the nets was manned entirely by young men, who called out insistently to an attractive young white woman to come on up for a photo. She coped with their attention with silence, and her man with bashful nays on her behalf.

On the narrow road from these foreigners' remnants we passed tiny churches in which lamps (candles?) were lit, and they were performing western customs in the local manner, somewhat like the arti in Hindu temples. The Fort area is clean and pretty with bright, spruced-up colonial houses used as home-stays—Christians, my driver Salim Kumar informed me, weighting the word.

The entire coast on Mattancherry that faced my hotel, the Taj Malabar, was lined with colored fishing boats where a bustle was about, because the ban on fishing was coming off that night, with the monsoons having eased their grating on the sea. Behind the boats are the line of ancient warehouses, bastions of the spice trade, to which the captain of my rented yacht took me as close as he could and said is in the control of the 20,000 strong Gujarati community. Their children don't advance much beyond school, he told me. They are quickly put into the family business, one of the measures the incumbents have taken to foil all competition.

Chinese nets, CochinThat shouldn't bother many, now during boom time, when plantation land and the spice trade are less coveted than the business of concrete and construction that you can do anywhere where you can wangle some land and people will buy at your price. And, across the strait from Mattancherry, a new foreign hand is shaping Cochin, this one from Dubai, building a modern port that plans to compete with Colombo for mother vessels. The development is swelling land prices and the locals are dazed and amazed at how rich they've so easily gotten.

Cochin is the only South Indian urban center without a majority Hindu population and is hence a hospitable home to many gods, big and small, local and foreign, who have been accepting ardent reverence for centuries, occasionally making room for a new god seeking welcome. I couldn't make time for the synagogue, so I have a strong reason to go back there, soon.

From the plane, I searched the land below for at least a sliver of brown, but it was green everywhere, even in the places where men have played with sharp objects. They call the place God's own country, and tourists come believing it and they leave saying it is true, but when you're on land you can see without looking too hard that Man is working overtime to wrest God's country from God' giving hands. It is petty to wish failure for him.

Why didn't the sea smell of itself in Cochin? I realize only now as I write of it.

View from Taj Malabar: Cochin Harbor under construction

unconditioning in Pune

German Bakery, PuneA rifle points toward the entrance to Osho International. Its stock is aged, worn smooth from much handling. A rifle just like the other points outward from the entrance to Osho International. The metal is aged also, and for some reason the lean muzzle reminded me of the broad snout of my dog. A black helmet rests on top of the wall of sacks, in both stations, perhaps to be worn after the shooting has begun. Some officers sit out and about the bunker of sacks and chat and read the papers, in the usual manner of maistries overseeing a single mason.

Across the street from the entrance the German Bakery was still closed and its front was hid behind shamiana screens. There was no evidence of repairs going on in the three days I walked before it, last week. Nothing about it suggested the tragedy that blew out fifteen lives; the black had been cleaned out.

*******

The lady at the Welcome Center had the face of Hollywood’s Latino actresses—only, she wasn’t as tall. She asked me if I’ve read Osho. “A couple,” I said, “but his books haven’t catchy titles that you can remember.” She laughed the laughter of disagreement: “All Osho’s books have catchy titles.” I had waited a half-hour for them to open, having arrived at eight-thirty, and had spent the time watching the inmates. Some were astonishingly beautiful, both the Indians and the foreigners; some were so cheerful they didn’t seem to need this campus to expend their good nature; a few were morose; and many seemed like they belonged nowhere but here, serene as they were, walking slowly, deliberately. All wore maroon robes, except the help who wore the uniforms of their jobs.

It would have been absolutely silent, if not for the birds, and the cousin of the cicada, and the soulful, incessant grinding of a machine in the heart of the building before the white-marble Buddha who sat smiling before a curving, leaf-filled pond.

A powerfully built Australian and a slender white man, both tall, were our unlikely gurus for the initiation. The first rites were to remove our conditioning: dancing to various styles of music including the Ramlila; screaming gibberish; jumping and exclaiming hu on each landing; collapsing in a heap after having stirred the kundalini—that is how it went. Each was called a meditation, and none required an asana: “Take is easy; be comfortable.” I could achieve neither in the half-day, and discomfort rose to a shrill in the mind—whereas I had arrived thinking that if I liked it I’d stay on, even for a week, maybe.

I ate a quick meal in their clean restaurant, a health-food kind of lunch, changed in the locker room which had no curtain, and hurried out. Back in the hotel, I relaxed a long time over a single cup of coffee before getting ready to check out and leave for the airport. Now, I’m writing this at home in Bangalore just after watching a video on relaxation and awareness, the talk delivered by him who was never born and who never died, Osho himself, and I’m thinking maybe I should go back to Pune sometime, and make a renewed effort at those meditations.

the king and the good times

The Gateway of India: view from my hotel roomI’ve returned from a three-day trip to Mumbai, and am savoring the comfort of my own bed this morning after.

Every now and then a breeze lifts the grim green mango leaves outside my bedroom window, but otherwise they are huddled and brooding and appear sometimes to be telling me something through the mesh between us. While I watch them I think of the tree in front which had been dry until only a week ago, and brown like it had been flamed, but it was the absence of the inner flame that had rendered it lifeless. Now, every leaf on it is newborn, only a week old, and a young translucent green. In the neighborhood, the mayflowers are out now in April in the manner of that beer festival in Munich, which hurries to commence in September, even if those good-humored Bavarians call it Octoberfest.

It is promising to be a cruel April in Bangalore, whereas in Mumbai the weather had seemed better, and in the breeze of the evening I couldn't imagine why I'd ever disliked the city. I fought down the urge to get back to the promenade and to the cobblestone environs of the Gateway of India at night when I gazed down upon it from the third floor window of my hotel room. From that height it was clear that even with a quite swollen moon above, the sea couldn’t wet the feet of the monument placed on raised ground by confident Englishmen for their visiting king, emperor.

It is a high arch, fit for a king, and hopefully he walked as tall under it as his subjects wished him to.

--------------------

The woven mats were perfumed and there was not a speck on them; neither did the bright white woven napkins bear a single stain. The small, express meal for the short flight to Bangalore was alright for an airline dinner. There wasn’t a fault I could pin on either of the two hostesses. I should have been having a good time, but I had thoughts: Did their Chairman really recruit them personally? Did he tell them himself that they should treat us as “guests in his own home?” How is the treatment in his “own” home, or on his plane on whose outer body I’ve seen, I think, the names of his children printed below the cockpit door? What did the airline mean, to say we were in King Class? That each of us was king? Or that their Chairman was king, and we were privileged members of his king’s class, because we were being treated “as guests in his own home?"

Indeed, I should have been having a good time, but I couldn’t, thinking for most of the 90 minutes that there was another who was having a better time, and that he is the “King of Good Times” that the billboards proclaim. When the time in King Class was up, I struggled to equal the bright parting-greeting of the hostesses.

But I’ll fly them again, and again, just as I always fly that other airline to Europe in which you are a “Senator,” and the other one which calls you: “Ambassador Class.” I’m happy to have the strength to hold forth against people who take so much money from you and call you names.

another look at that divine smile called Hassan

The stadium in Hassan TownHassan appears abruptly on NH48, without an arch, without an announcement, with no landmark at all. Arriving from Bangalore, you turn right from the highway to go into town. The train delivers you into the same street, which is named the Bangalore-Mangalore Road. You cannot yet fly in—birds still command the airspace over land allotted for an airport. No one is missing an airport in Hassan. There is a wish for a direct train to Bangalore, about which if some people are vocal they are speaking in whispers.

Hassan is a quiet town. You must count out the recent aberration.

The street runs into the town square with the typical buildings of small-town India flanking it. For a town which is the headquarters of the district which covers the Hoysala heartland, there isn’t anywhere a serious attempt at architecture. But there is a strange, becoming air to the town, to the wide main street, and the pleasing, sprawling town-square to which a statue of the great Dr. Ambedkar points from the government offices, without actually meaning to.

In the line of sight of that illustrious man, a leisurely policeman sometimes guides traffic which mostly manages itself.

Bars line the street, some of which open at six in the morning after having closed at eleven last night. I have watched a show in a movie theater in their midst. There were enough mosquitoes for each person to have their own private swarm to torment them, but when the movie commenced and the speakers burst into peak-volume, no one cared about the mosquitoes: the star was Shriya, and with Rajanikanth’s voice at its desired depth, everyone put up with every suffering, ignored even the smell of sweat, and the moist heat and cool that blew from hefty fans on the walls.

Hassan is as agrarian now as in the time of the Hoysala—it was agriculture that powered the art and architecture of his golden age. Today’s farmers may be seen in town, in shops that sell farm implements, fertilizers, and tractors and tillers. The furrows on their faces seem to me the deep lines of fortitude, and I have admired their inner and exterior strength. They are often in Hotel Hassan Ashhok with executives from Pepsi and such, who are helping them to grow potatoes for chips, and I have marveled at their enterprise.

Over dinner last week, Dr. Nagaraj, soil scientist with Hassan’s Krishi Vignyana Kendra, spoke with me regarding the challenges before Hassan’s farmers. He had returned from a field trip where a farmer had narrated his story before his wife, while his mother tended a buffalo nearby. Last year, he’d pledged his wife’s thali, and his mother’s, to raise money to grow potato, and the crop failed. “What shall I do now—anna,” he had cried. Nagaraj argues that there is no solution for the farmer save a strong intervention by the government.

I don’t understand how, but they enjoy this risky business in Hassan. You can tell that in the district stadium, where in the morning people walk and jog to radio broadcasts on the best methods to grow ragi, sunflower, rice. When I was there last month, the topic was uddinabele. Last Thursday, I listened to the incredible medicinal benefits muttidare-muni holds in every cell, and was filled with remorse at having so relentlessly teased that angel-shrub all through my childhood. The young in the stadium are unto themselves, and I cannot tell if the elders listen, but several of those I pass speak of gains from this crop and losses on another, of buying a tiller or bolstering a bund, of loaning some pipes and losing two valves.

McAuliffe is General Manager of Allana Coffee, and lives on its campus south of Hassan. At 70, after decades of sifting and processing coffee, he is a revered expert. Right now, he is short of labor at his coffee curing plant, but where are all the young going? “The women to the factories; the men to construction work.” But manufacturing jobs are not so many: Himatsingke Seide have employed several hundred women in their new factory in the Hassan Growth Centre. The National Textile Corporation has established a textile SEZ before Himatsingke. But two is not a large number, and in the remaining vast area only a few medium-sized factories have surfaced, for cold storage, automobile servicing, granite processing, hollow-block manufacturing.

Increased construction activity is visible, though: A new “high-tech” bus stand, almost ready; a spruced up train station; new government colleges for engineering, medicine, and agriculture; new hospitals; expansion and diversification among existing educational institutions; a large campus for training for the transport corporation; an institution for biofuels; windmills over low hills in the distance; and fresh activity at ISRO MCF. All these, happening simultaneously, suggest imminent change.

Is growth finally coming to town? There’s a place in Hassan where you can go for answers.

The Hasanamba Temple is on a spacious quadrangle in the middle of a tight maze of small shops and old houses, some pretty and well preserved. The deity is Parvathi, manifest as a hutta in this temple, and in the mind’s eye of those gifted with such sight, she is smiling. So she is Hasanamba, the smiling Goddess, and this hometown of hers is Hassan, after her divine smile. Her darshan is allowed for a two-week period once yearly, around Deepavali. Tradition has it that while closing the temple after Deepavali, they leave before her some rice, flowers, and a lit lamp. Next year, when they open, the rice is hot and ready to eat, the lamp is burning, and on the flowers there’s morning dew. Some say that perhaps miracle of the rice happened only in the virtuous past.

The Hassanamba Temple’s twin is in the compound, whose deity is Siddeswara, carved on a rock face, into which ten centuries of worship have infused a divinity whose weight is in the air. The rock face is plastered with a good number of moist flowers, and when they dry they fall, each in its time. When I entered, an old man had squatted before the deity, was speaking to it. Would something he’d planned succeed? Twice the flower had fallen on Siddeswara’s left, and the man wouldn’t leave without an amen: “So many times you have blessed me; you have given me everything; what happened now?” I closed my eyes for my prayer, and afterward, anxiously avoided seeing what fell, and where—one fall would damn, or delight us both, simultaneously. I left; his monologue continued.

Without new industries arriving, Hassan will stay a mere bed for a night or a place for a meal for those in transit to Belur and Halebid, or the coffee belt, the ghats, or Shravanabelagola. Even emperor Chandragupta came by Hassan, but only for sanyasa. What is it in the air now that signals that Hassan is astir, and will draw people who will stoke great enterprise in it?

They may know at Cafe Coffee Day, who have advanced until the twenty-seventh kilometer to Hassan. When will they arrive in the town square?

Hassan's railway station