Well, I'm writing neither about the Tom Cruise starrer movie nor about the religious minorities which are discussed only during the election in our country.
Here, I’m uploading an article on a particular minority, which never gets its deserving share in any subject matter. It's written by one of the most prolific modern day writers, Aravind Adiga. Since I too belong to this category, I felt a kinda compulsion to upload this one. Hope you enjoy reading it!
Bachelor bigotry
- By Aravind Adiga
Shabana Azmi, an Indian actor, recently kicked up a stir by claiming that Muslims cannot easily buy homes in Mumbai. This may well be true: but as someone who recently looked for a place to rent in the city, I assure Azmi that there is a category of person even less wanted in this city than the Muslim. I belong to this category.
Mumbai's real-estate market suffers from a perpetual shortage of good, affordable housing. Landlords are picky. The lack of any real anti-discrimination law in the city means that the rental market is a bigot's paradise. Some landlords rent only to non-Muslims; some turn down Hindus; some permit only vegetarians in their flats. But almost none of them will gladly rent to a bachelor.
In the rest of the world, unmarried men are called by their proper, varied names – singleton, gay, divorced, celibate – but Indian society still lumps them into one Victorian-era category: the bachelor. And the landlords of Mumbai want nothing to do with this fellow. Where the bachelor lives, there the orgy follows; this is the great fear. In the landlord's imagination, half-clad women appear and disappear all day long through the bachelor's door; gasps of illicit pleasure rent the middle-class composure of the building; disgrace and scandal follow. Interestingly, the unmarried woman is not regarded as a sexually depraved type, and many landlords are prepared to rent to them. It is only the bachelor who is taboo.
Like so many of the stereotypes cherished by Indians, this one needs to go. All the unmarried men I know are hard at work – on a screenplay, a novel, or trying to find a wife. It's the fellows with the wedding rings, I notice, who get up to the debauchery. But even in India's most liberal city, old attitudes are surprisingly resilient.
I spent a week looking for places – and got told the same thing every time I liked a flat. Even if the landlord was bachelor-tolerant, he was helpless; many of Mumbai's buildings have rules that explicitly forbid unmarried men from renting or buying apartments. Especially my kind of unmarried man. Three species of bachelors inhabit Mumbai, it turns out. First comes the "company bachelor" – the fellow who works for American Express or another multinational; most landlords will take him on, grudgingly. Lower down the real-estate food chain is the "married bachelor" – who is living alone, but has a wife in Canada (or so he says). Last comes the "single bachelor" – no company job, no wife in Canada. This is me. Making things worse is that I describe myself as a "writer", a category that doesn't mean anything to the landlords of Mumbai; any young man sitting in front of a computer and typing all day must be playing games of some kind. Instead of doing solid, virtuous things like looking for a wife.
In Versova, a beach suburb in the far north of the city, I saw a second-floor sea-facing apartment with large glass windows. The waves came almost to the foot of the building. I imagined myself here, at a table, drawing energy from the ocean and hammering away on a Remington: I could turn out a hundred pages a day here – I could write a Les Miserables in a year.
"Just one question," the landlady said on the day we were to sign the lease. "When is your wife coming to join you?"
I explained; she stopped smiling.
"The last tenant was a married bachelor," she said. "He had a wife in Delhi, but he lived alone in this flat. And guess what he was doing here?"
"Tell me," I said, my heart sinking.
"He was familiar with young ladies."
"You don't say."
"And he was coolly running a brothel service. In this very flat."
The waves at Versova will never beat near my Remington. Some other writer will finish his Les Miserables in that flat – with his wife looking over his shoulder.
After two weeks of hunting, I did find a place – at a price far below what I was prepared to pay, and in a part of town with too much noise and pollution. I'd like to get out of here in a few months, but where can a bachelor go? A cousin of mine suggests that there is only one solution: marriage. Otherwise I should just pack up and move to Bangalore. He's probably right. I love Mumbai, but my time here may be drawing to an end. This city's not for bachelors.
I'm not sure whether Adiga's conclusion that Bangalore is a better city than Mumbai for bachelors is accurate or not!
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
The Father, the Son and the Donkey!
This writing is not my original work, unlike most of my previous ones. I’m writing, in fact re-writing a story, which I learned as a lesson in one of the languages that I studied in my third grade. I’ve been a big fan of this story and I have not only led my life by the teachings of this one, but have also recommended it to many of my friends. May be if you have known me well enough, you might probably have heard this from me sometimes. Another reason I am writing this story here is because I felt it was inapt to study this lesson at that age. People would find it practically beneficial when they go past 20. So, the story goes something like this…
Once, a father and his son go to a market to buy a donkey. They reach this market walking nearly 40 miles from their hometown. Once they purchase a donkey, they decide to use the donkey as the mode of transport and start riding back home. One their way, most of the people who come across them criticize the father-son duo for treating the donkey without compassion and for overburdening it. So, after riding for 10 miles they decide, they will walk the remaining distance along with the donkey. After having walked a distance of another 10 miles, they recollect that people this time had called the duo foolish for not making appropriate use of the available resource. Then the father realizes that their earlier choices were wrong and asks his son to ride on the donkey and he decides to walk along with them. People this time criticize the son for being selfish and insensitive to father’s needs. So, another 10 miles later, now it becomes the father’s turn to ride on the donkey and the son’s turn to walk along with them. This time the father faces severe criticism for being selfish and not caring about his young son. Now they get puzzled as to what might be the appropriate combination to opt for as all the combinations, duo riding the donkey, the duo walking along with the donkey, the son riding the donkey while father walks and the father rides the donkey while the son walks, had exhausted.
It was at this point in time when they were yet to travel a distance of 6 more miles; they come across a sage and consult him for his advice. The sage listens to the entire episode and gives a quite chuckle before he speaks. He asks them, “Having tried all the options did you both avoid criticism. No! So, what you must do… is a very simple option, if you answer this question.” Eagerly the father-son duo says “Yes”. The sage asks them, “Among all the options which one did you find the most convenient?” Both of them reply in unison, “The first option, when both of us were riding on the donkey”. “Then what is the need to be confused! Just do that. But remember, you have wasted 60% of journey, by trying to avoid criticism from the public. Had you not cared about it, by now you would have reached your destination happily”
Bitter truth is that many of us continue to waste 60% of our lives bowing to criticism from the public and end up doing what is NOT convenient to us. May be all of us should follow the sage’s advice in each and every step of our life. Because the choice is simple; Put yourself in discomfort, there will be criticism. Make yourself comfortable, there will be criticism. Why not go for the second option when we are sure of not being able to avoid criticism?
Once, a father and his son go to a market to buy a donkey. They reach this market walking nearly 40 miles from their hometown. Once they purchase a donkey, they decide to use the donkey as the mode of transport and start riding back home. One their way, most of the people who come across them criticize the father-son duo for treating the donkey without compassion and for overburdening it. So, after riding for 10 miles they decide, they will walk the remaining distance along with the donkey. After having walked a distance of another 10 miles, they recollect that people this time had called the duo foolish for not making appropriate use of the available resource. Then the father realizes that their earlier choices were wrong and asks his son to ride on the donkey and he decides to walk along with them. People this time criticize the son for being selfish and insensitive to father’s needs. So, another 10 miles later, now it becomes the father’s turn to ride on the donkey and the son’s turn to walk along with them. This time the father faces severe criticism for being selfish and not caring about his young son. Now they get puzzled as to what might be the appropriate combination to opt for as all the combinations, duo riding the donkey, the duo walking along with the donkey, the son riding the donkey while father walks and the father rides the donkey while the son walks, had exhausted.
It was at this point in time when they were yet to travel a distance of 6 more miles; they come across a sage and consult him for his advice. The sage listens to the entire episode and gives a quite chuckle before he speaks. He asks them, “Having tried all the options did you both avoid criticism. No! So, what you must do… is a very simple option, if you answer this question.” Eagerly the father-son duo says “Yes”. The sage asks them, “Among all the options which one did you find the most convenient?” Both of them reply in unison, “The first option, when both of us were riding on the donkey”. “Then what is the need to be confused! Just do that. But remember, you have wasted 60% of journey, by trying to avoid criticism from the public. Had you not cared about it, by now you would have reached your destination happily”
Bitter truth is that many of us continue to waste 60% of our lives bowing to criticism from the public and end up doing what is NOT convenient to us. May be all of us should follow the sage’s advice in each and every step of our life. Because the choice is simple; Put yourself in discomfort, there will be criticism. Make yourself comfortable, there will be criticism. Why not go for the second option when we are sure of not being able to avoid criticism?
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Realization, Apology and Beyond
This write up is based on my previous article, The Great Indian Paradox. So, in case you haven’t read that one, do it before you read this one!
My previous article invited a lot of criticism from quite a few of my able readers. This forced me to re-think on it, in terms of the concept, argument and conclusion. After an earnest effort I realized some serious shortcomings in it. They were… My conclusion was based upon very specific examples, and in doing so, I contradicted a golden rule, ‘exceptions don’t prove a law’. Many other reasons were brought to my notice as to why Indians travel abroad and live there, which I had not taken into consideration. At one point I decided to scrap that entire article, but realized that a person cannot be right all the time. Mistakes do happen, but once pointed out; the following actions must be taken. Acknowledge the fact that you were wrong, apologize for it and try to fix it.
So I apologize for my previous conclusion which was based upon a half-baked idea.
Here, I would like to sight some good counter examples to my previously sighted examples and conclude just the opposite of what I had concluded earlier.
A vast majority of Indians travel abroad for more opportunities at personal as well as professional front. If our country has less opportunities (compared to the developed countries), this doesn’t make our country ordinary. Also, just living in our own country doesn’t qualify a person to be termed a patriot. Moreover if a person lives abroad and contributes to his country, directly or indirectly, it certainly is an act of patriotism.
The prominent examples of such personalities which I would sight are Jiddu Krishnamurti, Amartya Sen, and of course Aravind Adiga.
For beginners, Jiddu Krishnamurti (JK as he was popularly known), was one of the awe-inspiring writers, public speakers and philosophers of the 19th century. He came from a very poor family and could barely speak English. But, during the British raj, Annie Besant took him into her custody, recognizing his potential and leadership qualities. This gave him a good exposure to various subjects including English. Later on he travelled to Europe and America giving public speeches in English about spirituality, psychological revolution, the nature of the mind, meditation, human relationships, and how to enact positive change in society. He continued living in Ojai (pronounced as O-high), California, for the rest of his life and was awarded UN peace medal in 1984. He couldn’t have achieved all this, had he not travelled abroad. Also his was a fair choice to opt for travelling abroad when it had boiled down to a prosperous life, growth and opportunities at one end or live in poverty, ill-health and illiteracy, instead.
It is highly unlikely that you haven’t heard about Amartya Sen. Even in his case, had he not travelled to the UK and subsequently to the US, it would have been almost impossible for him to win a Nobel Prize. (He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998) He undertook travel, purely for his academic work and research purpose. There was more opportunity in these two countries than ours, so he could do what he did. Again would it be fair on us to expect him to have remained confined to our country and not made contributions to the economic advances of the world. I guess not!
The last, but not the least, example I would like to sight is that of Aravind Adiga, who won the 2008 Man Booker’s Prize for his book The White Tiger. Adiga, travelled to Australia along with his family at the age of 16. Later he went to the prestigious Columbia University in the US, where he obtained his degree in literature. Later, he travelled to the Oxford University on a scholarship to pursue his Masters. Now having that kinda educational background, it was only appropriate for him to take up a job opportunity in a firm which matched his standard. So, he worked for the Wall Street Journal and again undertook extensive travel. After he won the Booker Prize, in his interview, he credited his achievements to his job which provided him with extensive travel opportunities along with the people of India.
Now, would it not be appropriate for us to term these intellects as true patriots who have put us on the global map because of their contribution to the society. In deed this is true service to the nation.
All the above mentioned people achieved personal as well as professional growth by traveling abroad. So if a person wants to grow, by no means he/she becomes less patriotic towards his/her nation. A country becomes great only if its people achieve higher standards on both, personal as well as professional front.
These were just few names that I sighted, and I am sure you could find a few hundred more similar names without much efforts. Clearly the counter examples outnumber the earlier sighted examples. So, the conclusion based upon the counter examples must be definitely stronger and more accurate than the previous one drawn.
My previous article invited a lot of criticism from quite a few of my able readers. This forced me to re-think on it, in terms of the concept, argument and conclusion. After an earnest effort I realized some serious shortcomings in it. They were… My conclusion was based upon very specific examples, and in doing so, I contradicted a golden rule, ‘exceptions don’t prove a law’. Many other reasons were brought to my notice as to why Indians travel abroad and live there, which I had not taken into consideration. At one point I decided to scrap that entire article, but realized that a person cannot be right all the time. Mistakes do happen, but once pointed out; the following actions must be taken. Acknowledge the fact that you were wrong, apologize for it and try to fix it.
So I apologize for my previous conclusion which was based upon a half-baked idea.
Here, I would like to sight some good counter examples to my previously sighted examples and conclude just the opposite of what I had concluded earlier.
A vast majority of Indians travel abroad for more opportunities at personal as well as professional front. If our country has less opportunities (compared to the developed countries), this doesn’t make our country ordinary. Also, just living in our own country doesn’t qualify a person to be termed a patriot. Moreover if a person lives abroad and contributes to his country, directly or indirectly, it certainly is an act of patriotism.
The prominent examples of such personalities which I would sight are Jiddu Krishnamurti, Amartya Sen, and of course Aravind Adiga.
For beginners, Jiddu Krishnamurti (JK as he was popularly known), was one of the awe-inspiring writers, public speakers and philosophers of the 19th century. He came from a very poor family and could barely speak English. But, during the British raj, Annie Besant took him into her custody, recognizing his potential and leadership qualities. This gave him a good exposure to various subjects including English. Later on he travelled to Europe and America giving public speeches in English about spirituality, psychological revolution, the nature of the mind, meditation, human relationships, and how to enact positive change in society. He continued living in Ojai (pronounced as O-high), California, for the rest of his life and was awarded UN peace medal in 1984. He couldn’t have achieved all this, had he not travelled abroad. Also his was a fair choice to opt for travelling abroad when it had boiled down to a prosperous life, growth and opportunities at one end or live in poverty, ill-health and illiteracy, instead.
It is highly unlikely that you haven’t heard about Amartya Sen. Even in his case, had he not travelled to the UK and subsequently to the US, it would have been almost impossible for him to win a Nobel Prize. (He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998) He undertook travel, purely for his academic work and research purpose. There was more opportunity in these two countries than ours, so he could do what he did. Again would it be fair on us to expect him to have remained confined to our country and not made contributions to the economic advances of the world. I guess not!
The last, but not the least, example I would like to sight is that of Aravind Adiga, who won the 2008 Man Booker’s Prize for his book The White Tiger. Adiga, travelled to Australia along with his family at the age of 16. Later he went to the prestigious Columbia University in the US, where he obtained his degree in literature. Later, he travelled to the Oxford University on a scholarship to pursue his Masters. Now having that kinda educational background, it was only appropriate for him to take up a job opportunity in a firm which matched his standard. So, he worked for the Wall Street Journal and again undertook extensive travel. After he won the Booker Prize, in his interview, he credited his achievements to his job which provided him with extensive travel opportunities along with the people of India.
Now, would it not be appropriate for us to term these intellects as true patriots who have put us on the global map because of their contribution to the society. In deed this is true service to the nation.
All the above mentioned people achieved personal as well as professional growth by traveling abroad. So if a person wants to grow, by no means he/she becomes less patriotic towards his/her nation. A country becomes great only if its people achieve higher standards on both, personal as well as professional front.
These were just few names that I sighted, and I am sure you could find a few hundred more similar names without much efforts. Clearly the counter examples outnumber the earlier sighted examples. So, the conclusion based upon the counter examples must be definitely stronger and more accurate than the previous one drawn.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
The Great Indian Paradox
I am writing this article, after a kind of discussion or rather call it an argument. With whom? Ah! That doesn’t really matter. But I guess my observation over past few months has forced me to write on this topic. So, here I go…
My first question is, “Is India a great country?” If you are an Indian you not only answered “YES” but also would have used some swear words at me in your mind for this weird question. Now my next question is… “If India is such a great country, why are many Indians trying not only to go abroad, but also to settle down there?” Ha! Now that’s a question which doesn’t have an obvious answer. Right?
I have couple of friends from Europe, namely from France and Germany. Even they have come to the US for their higher studies. I have had conversation with both of them about their future plans. Both have similar kind of plans, complete studies and get back home for a career. But most of my Indian friends have only one aim, or rather set of aims. It goes something like this… Complete studies, find a job, get a H1B visa (work visa), stay long enough so that they can obtain a green card (permanent US residency) and ultimately settle down here.
I have also had several conversations with some American folks. I have asked them, if given a chance would they prefer to work in India for some years. Their polite answer has been, India is superb country, which is certainly worth visiting. But when it comes to working, our preference remains US and only US. There is so much of cultural difference between India and US, the food is entirely different and the weather too doesn’t suit us.
I discussed these two instances, the European guys’ one and the American guys’ one, with a friend of mine. He was not at all surprised by their respective words and reaction. This prompted me to ask him some questions… “If the European guys feel US is more advanced than their home countries but still want to return to their home countries, because they miss their own people, own language , don’t Indians miss their home country, their own people and own language?” “If Americans feel that India is too different compared to US in terms of culture, climate and food, don’t Indians feel that US is too different with respect to the same parameters.” He was silent when asked these questions to him.
The only two conclusions I could draw from the above were; One, India is not a great country, otherwise why would people be so eager to go away and never come back to it. Second one; there must be something wrong with Indian people who are more than eager to leave their own motherland, culture and people, which they feel is great. Logic says that either one of the two conclusions must be true.
My first question is, “Is India a great country?” If you are an Indian you not only answered “YES” but also would have used some swear words at me in your mind for this weird question. Now my next question is… “If India is such a great country, why are many Indians trying not only to go abroad, but also to settle down there?” Ha! Now that’s a question which doesn’t have an obvious answer. Right?
I have couple of friends from Europe, namely from France and Germany. Even they have come to the US for their higher studies. I have had conversation with both of them about their future plans. Both have similar kind of plans, complete studies and get back home for a career. But most of my Indian friends have only one aim, or rather set of aims. It goes something like this… Complete studies, find a job, get a H1B visa (work visa), stay long enough so that they can obtain a green card (permanent US residency) and ultimately settle down here.
I have also had several conversations with some American folks. I have asked them, if given a chance would they prefer to work in India for some years. Their polite answer has been, India is superb country, which is certainly worth visiting. But when it comes to working, our preference remains US and only US. There is so much of cultural difference between India and US, the food is entirely different and the weather too doesn’t suit us.
I discussed these two instances, the European guys’ one and the American guys’ one, with a friend of mine. He was not at all surprised by their respective words and reaction. This prompted me to ask him some questions… “If the European guys feel US is more advanced than their home countries but still want to return to their home countries, because they miss their own people, own language , don’t Indians miss their home country, their own people and own language?” “If Americans feel that India is too different compared to US in terms of culture, climate and food, don’t Indians feel that US is too different with respect to the same parameters.” He was silent when asked these questions to him.
The only two conclusions I could draw from the above were; One, India is not a great country, otherwise why would people be so eager to go away and never come back to it. Second one; there must be something wrong with Indian people who are more than eager to leave their own motherland, culture and people, which they feel is great. Logic says that either one of the two conclusions must be true.
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