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Saturday, October 31, 2009 4:32 PM EDT
Invoking Indira
Today India marks the 25th anniversary of the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi. She was shot near the front gate of her home by two Sikh bodyguards, in an apparent reprisal for her decision to send the army in to rout militants from the Golden Temple, Sikhdom's holiest shrine.
Her murder set off days of anti-Sikh riots, in which at least 3,000 people were killed here in Delhi.
Mrs. Gandhi's strong-featured face - the hawk nose, the swooping dark eyebrows, the white streak in her hair - is everywhere in Delhi today. Government ministries and political parties often compete to outdo each other with newspaper advertisements on the death anniversaries (and sometime also birthdays) of this country's top political figures - last month it was Mahatma Gandhi, lovingly invoked on his birthday on every second newspaper page.
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Saturday, October 17, 2009 1:12 PM EDT
A first Diwali in Delhi
Delhi is enchanted this evening: candles and tiny clay lanterns flicker in every window, in every doorway, all along the sidewalks, even cradled in the boughs of some trees. Most houses are decorated with strings of lights, some sedate and gold, some multicoloured and twinkling frantically.
It's Diwali - the festival of light, marked by Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains. At the home of friends where we were invited to celebrate this evening, the young girls made elaborate rangoli - sand paintings drawn at the entry to a home - in brilliant colours and glitter, and marigold and rose petals were scattered in intricate patterns all along the walkways.
The largest houses in our neighbourhood have big clay diyas, or lamps, that cast flickering shadows from intricately carved candle holders. In the small alleys behind the houses, tiny plain clay pots are lit outside the ill-painted doors of the servants' quarters.
It's my first Diwali in India, and it's beautiful to look at.
But ye gods, the noise. The other Diwali tradition, hereabouts, is fireworks, and it appears everyone is setting them off. We did a few sparklers with our friends, but rockets that ignite with a crashing boom appear to be the more popular model.
For a woman who has spent much of her professional life in war zones, this is unpleasantly evocative of nights in Beirut, Baghdad and Kabul. My neighbours tell me the cacophony will, alas, go on all night. But they also say it's been far quieter than in previous years; the government has worked hard to crack down on the crackers, saying the noise and smog they generate has got out of hand.
The most successful campaign appears to have been run through schools: my three-year-old came home last week full of edicts about avoiding noise and air pollution. The children at our Diwali party were scolding the adults about not contributing to the noise, or the rapidly growing haze of acrid smoke over the city - but before very long, they ran out to the garden, too.
They could not resist the annar, the cone that shoots a huge fountain of silver sparks into the air.
None of us could.
A very happy Diwali to all Subcontinental readers who are celebrating this evening.
Read more posts from Stephanie Nolen's Subcontinental blog
Thursday, October 15, 2009 11:39 AM EDT
The trouble with monkeys
We’ve got monkeys.
Huge, messy, mean-looking monkeys. Many. As I write this, they are pounding on the windows of the bureau, eating the plants, and swinging gleefully on the water pipes, steadily prying them off the walls.
It was only a matter of time, really: Delhi is notorious for its monkey infestation. In the most notorious incident, deputy mayor Sawinder Singh Bajwa fell to his death in October 2007 when a pack of monkeys invaded the balcony where he sat reading the newspaper.
The monkeys are particularly prevalent around the major government ministries, where they not infrequently rampage through the halls seeking food and terrorizing people. I once sat through a very uncomfortable interview with a senior official with the Ministry of External Affairs while, behind him, a trio of monkeys larger than my child worked steadily to pull the grating off his window and get in the office, stopping occasionally to have sex.
Many people believe the monkeys to be an incarnation of the Hindu god Hanuman, so the city does not trap or destroy them.
Our monkeys, a quick consultation of Google suggests, are red-faced macaques, or possibly large Rhesus macaques. A few phone calls, and I am now awash in horror stories about the severe injuries they have caused people and the massive destruction they wreak on property.
So what does one do? After more phone calls, I have learned that one hires a langur. Langurs are even bigger monkeys, who look fairly innocuous but, apparently, have a fierce reputation in the monkey world. The government has put langurs and their keepers on the payroll to try and defend the ministries. And apparently I need to track down one who works in my neighbourhood, who, for a fee, will come over with his langur. It will, I gather, pose ostentatiously in the spots where the macaques now play, and leave some telltale odiferous signs of its presence. Apparently this, and this alone, will get rid of the smaller, more destructive monkeys.
Except it’s Diwali season. And the langur – and his keeper – are off with everyone else, celebrating. Which means I’m stuck, for now, with the macaques eyeing me hungrily through the window.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 1:49 PM EDT
Through rain, sleet, or a herd of sacred cows
There has been a lot of major news in this patch of the world in the past few days. Ten armed men managed to burst into the headquarters of Pakistan’s military, take dozens of hostages, execute some senior officers, and hold out for 22 hours, over the weekend (but we’re not supposed to be worried about the country’s nuclear weapons: according to U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, the nukes are perfectly safe.) Several million people have been displaced, and at least 250 are dead, after massive floods in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. The country’s Maoist rebels are killing a dozen police officers every day or two.
What with all this, the occurrence of World Post Day on Oct. 9 escaped my notice. But the nice folks at India Post have helped to correct that, providing me with a helpful list of facts about the Indian postal service. And you know? It’s kind of fascinating. My colleague Mark MacKinnon over at Points East in Beijing may relate to this: The missive from India Post gave me one of those periodic reminders of just how enormous India is, of the sheer scale of so much that happens here.
This country has 155,333 post offices – that makes it the most widely distributed postal system in the world (China has a mere 57,000 post offices.) India Post moves more than 22.5-million pieces of mail each day – that’s 20,000 tonnes a year.
India Post also operates the largest bank in the country, with more than 225 million savings accounts. If you’re prepared to navigate some confusing lines, you can buy life insurance, foreign exchange and train tickets at the post office. Plus, of course, stamps – they have produced 43 different stamps featuring Mahatma Gandhi. The postal system has been in operation since the British East India Company set up post offices in Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai in 1764.
India Post has its hiccups – my January bank statement, from a bank about 10 kilometres away, arrived just yesterday. But mostly, I marvel: mail from The Globe office in Toronto – or my mom in Ottawa – gets here in four days. Four days. Canada Post never did that for me. And they won’t sell me life insurance, either.
Friday, October 9, 2009 8:36 AM EDT
An HIV test with illuminating results
The doctor glanced at the paperwork, pursed her lips, and then looked up with that “this is going to be a bit awkward” expression.
“In India,” she said, “we, um, we often test pregnant women for HIV and …..” she trailed off, looking concerned. I jumped in.
“Great!” I said.
The doctor looked startled.
“I’d love an HIV test!” I said.
Alarmed replaced startled. Her image of me as sedate middle-class wife was clearly being revised.
I’m expecting a baby soon, and the experience of being pregnant in this country has yielded fascinating insights into many aspects of culture and life here, including high-end Indian medical care – the kind you get when you’re paying. (Yet not paying that much – those obstetrician appointments run about $12 each.) Women of the Indian middle class have embraced the most-medical-birth-possible model; the epidural, episiotomy, and induction by your due date (if not before) are all standard here. My queries about midwifery and home birth made my doctor flinch.
But the most interesting moment for me, so far, involved this HIV test. During my first pregnancy, three years ago, I was living in Johannesburg, where I was posted as the Globe’s Africa correspondent. South Africa had then, still has now, the highest number of people living with HIV in the world. One in three women in Jo’burg of child-bearing age was believed to be living with HIV.
So all through my prenatal appointments, I kept waiting for my doctor to suggest – or order – an HIV test. In Canada, after all, where 0.4 per cent of adults have HIV, the prenatal HIV test is mandatory. I wasn’t worried about the results – I was tested for HIV every month or so in my six years in Africa, much of which I spent reporting on HIV. Every time I visited a new clinic or outreach center, the eager staff would ask if I wanted to try out their counseling-and-testing model, or their new rapid result tests. I was quite confident I didn’t have HIV – but I was waiting for South Africa, the country with the worst AIDS crisis in the world, to ask me about it.
Didn’t happen. Finally, around month seven, I brought it up. “Oh,” said my doctor – willowy, gorgeous, a Prada shoe junkie, she is the gynecologist to hip black Jo’burg, or, in other words, the demographic most likely to be infected with HIV – “I guess. If you want.” The test was not mandatory, but she ticked it off on the lab form.
Off I went to the lab, intrigued to see what the experience of getting tested in Jo’burg’s poshest hospital would be like. The nurse did the other bloods. I looked for the HIV vial, with its tell-tale yellow cap. She didn’t have one. I said, “What about HIV?”
“Oh, you don’t need that,” she said cheerily. “How do you know?” I asked. I could feel my cheeks staining with rage – at the crazy myths about HIV, at the fear and the awkwardness and the assumptions that were fueling its decimation of my adopted home.
“Well, you’re…” she stammered. “What?” I asked. I think she may have meant to say white. Or rich. Or both. And so, she had concluded, probably not at risk. “You have no idea who I’m having sex with,” I said, angrier and louder now.
“Shh!” The nurse hissed, aghast, and flapped her hands towards my partner Meril, who was waiting outside the open door.
“How do you know that’s my husband?” I said. “How do you know who he is having sex with?”
“Ayiee,” said the nurse, now simply eager to be rid of me. She reached for the yellow vial, refusing to meet my eyes.
This time around, I was hoping for better. India has a much lower HIV infection rate (about 0.3 per cent of the adult population) and a government that has had successes in fighting the virus.
My Delhi doctor handed me the HIV requisition. It included a section for me to sign stating that as per law, I had received HIV counseling before my test. How progressive! I was delighted with this chance to see India’s AIDS control system first hand. I waddled off to the lab and took a number.
When my turn came, the technician took the forms from my hand and snatched up the yellow-lidded vial. I brandished the counseling-received form. “Oh, that,” she said. “Sign.” I signed and sat back. She knotted off a tourniquet and started probing for a vein. The room seemed fairly crowded for a cozy chat about my sexual history, but I was looking forward to seeing how she handled it.
Holding vial in one hand and form in the other, she used her foot to slide open a vast wooden drawer. I caught a last glimpse of my “I have been counseled on HIV” form as it landed atop a thousand others, then she slammed the drawer shut again.
“The counseling –“ now I was the one stammering. “You’re supposed to …”
The technician frowned at me and turned away.
“We don’t do that here,” she said.
“Ever?”
“Nobody wants to talk about that. It’s just a paper.”
And she yelled for the next number in the line.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 2:20 PM EDT
India's three-day weekend devotees
New Delhi – Friday is a national holiday in India, as the country marks Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. It's the second big holiday this week: Monday was the festival of Dussehra, which marks the occasion when, in an epic battle, the god Ram rescued his wife Sita from the terrible demon Ravana, who had spirited her away to his kingdom in Lanka – the classic triumph of good over evil. All over Delhi, after dark, people burned giant effigies of 10-headed Ravana. (They burned a huge one at my son's nursery school, too, to the delight of most of the children – although one classmate, my son told me, burst into tears when she concluded their classroom was going to burn too. I asked if he and the other kids had tried to make her feel better. “We did! he said. “We all screamed and yelled! But it didn't help.”) Over the past weekend, India's Bengali community marked the Durga Puja, a celebration of the mother goddess, a frantic festival of dressing up and eating out and flirting that takes place in Bengal, but also everywhere with a big Bengali community. There were pandals – brilliantly decorated shrines – to the many-armed demon-slaying goddess (and carnival rides and snack stands) in neighbourhoods all over Delhi.
The parties went until dawn.
Just before that was Eid al-Fitar, one of the two holiest days of the year for India's 115 million Muslims. And now, everyone is gearing up for Diwali, the Hindu festival of light, in two weeks' time – which, in Delhi at least, seems to involve a staggering amount of shopping. It's festival season – there are fireworks around the neighbourhood most nights these days, and party invitations coming thick and fast.
Thursday, September 17, 2009 3:21 AM EDT
Cheaper than thou
New Delhi – Oh, so awkward.
There was Suresh Taware, first-time member of parliament for Bhiwandi, an industrial area north of Mumbai, all settled into his business class seat on an Air India flight from Delhi to Mumbai on Monday. Drink, paper, feet up – all good.
And then, moments before take off, who should get on, and walk right past him to her own seat in economy class, but Sonia Gandhi, chairwoman of the Indian National Congress, head of India's government, mother of the nation.
The very woman who has been appealing to the members of her government to exercise the greatest possible austerity, as the country faces up to a crippling drought.
Mr. Taware had the sense to hastily head back and greet Ms. Gandhi with a deep namaskar greeting, and then insist that a no-doubt bemused older gentleman in economy take his front row seat, while he shuffled back to steerage himself. “Soniaji has set an example and I shall travel only economy in future,” he told the Times News Network.
The next day Ms. Gandhi's son Rahul, a Congress member of parliament, went one better, and travelled the equivalent of economy class on a train from the capital up to Ludhiana in the Punjab – on a ticket that cost the Indian taxpayer $11. (He eschewed the $19 executive class fare.) The Indian press and public are having a bit of a gleeful time with this austerity campaign. First, Ms. Gandhi suggested a 20 per cent voluntary salary cut for all her members of parliament and party workers, with the balance to be donated to drought relief. (Monsoon rains are 40 per cent lower than normal in parts of the country, and there are huge swaths of many north Indian states where poor farmers have been unable to sow any crop at all.) No one, of course, wanted to be the staffer who declined to make the donation.
Then the party went after travel fees, which an audit revealed was swallowing as much as 75 per cent of the budget in many ministries. No more business-class flights, and no more five-star hotels – in fact, no more international junkets unless absolutely necessary, Ms. Gandhi said.
Days later, it was revealed that two of the party's hot-shot ministers were in fact living in five-star hotels in New Delhi, and had been for months, while their official residences were under renovation. One was Shashi Tharoor, one of the most intriguing characters in the new government: now Minister of State for External Affairs, he is a former United Nations undersecretary-general, an author and a human-rights activist. He's also erudite, a global sort of thinker, a hit on the party circuit, and a devotee of the micro-blogging service Twitter, on which he is one of India's most-followed people. He used the site to point out that he was paying his own hotel bills (his suite was reported to cost $1,000 a night) and would vastly prefer to be in his residence, if it was habitable.
True, many of the colonial-era mansions that now serve as ministerial residences are a bit crumbly, but then, the average Indian could also be forgiven for wondering just who defines “habitable.”
Wednesday's Indian Express revealed that incoming cabinet ministers have requested such humble repairs as granite windowsills, Spanish wall tile and Italian marble bathrooms in their offices.
Now Mr. Tharoor is facing possible party discipline, after a Twitter pal asked if he would be flying economy in future, and he replied. “Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows.” Some things, apparently, are not to be mocked.
As a whole, the austerity drive has won Congress as much ridicule as it has affection, and mostly served to highlight the extraordinary gulf between what the political class assumes as the bare necessities, and the way the aam admi , the “common person” in Hindi, who is the focus of all Congress's election sloganeering, actually lives.
Sunday, September 13, 2009 3:41 PM EDT
He who must not be named
New Delhi - Those who fear for the future of the book – that quaint, old-fashioned medium – can take heart from the latest political furor in India, all of it caused by a fat biography published between two hard covers.
Last week, Jaswant Singh, a former foreign, defence and finance minister from the Bharatiya Janata Party, the official opposition, launched a book titled Jinnah: India-Partition Independence . The odd use of punctuation was immaterial; mention of either the partition of India at the end of the colonial era, or of one of its architects, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, remain sufficiently sensitive topics here that the mere presence of the words in a title are enough to ensure inflamed debate, 62 years after independence.
Mr. Jinnah was the head of the Muslim League, and played a key role in convincing the British of the need to divide India to create a separate Muslim nation. In Pakistan, he is revered as the father of the nation.
Mr. Singh, in his book, portrays him as urbane and intelligent, and advances the thesis that Mr. Jinnah was in fact in favour of a united India, home to both Hindus and Muslims, but the power-hungry Congress Party left him no political space.
Within days of publication, Mr. Singh found himself ousted from his party – by, he sniffly noted, telephone, not even an in-person meeting. His crime, it appears, is painting an excessively sympathetic portrait of the Muslim leader, and thus contradicting the view of his Hindu-nationalist party. One Indian newspaper has taken to referring to Mr. Jinnah as “He Who Must Not Be Named,” in a cheeky reference to the villain Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter books. The turgid 674-page book, meanwhile, became an immediate bestseller, on the strength of the BJP feud.
Some have deduced from the row that the BJP leaders are taking the party harder to the right. Others think it has more to do with internal jockeying for power, after the BJP's surprisingly poor showing in national elections last spring. Another senior party leader, Arun Shourie, derided the party's expulsion of Mr. Singh as “Alice in Blunderland”; now the leadership is mulling what to do with him.
Predictably, the whole furor has caught the delighted attention of the Pakistani media, which has made hay with the idea that Mr. Jinnah has such a high-profile Indian admirer. The biography is said to be selling fast in Pakistan, and Mr. Singh on his way there to promote it – if he can get security clearance.
Meanwhile, relieved of his party loyalty, Mr. Singh has been dishing dirt at a great pace. One of his latest revelations is that former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee wanted to oust Narendra Modi from his job as chief minister of the state of Gujarat, after more than a thousand people, mostly Muslims, were killed in communal riots there in 2002, while the state did nothing to stop the killing spree and in many cases assisted the killers. But L.K. Advani – the BJP's candidate for prime minister in the last polls – blocked the firing, Mr. Singh says, and has protected Mr. Modi, who today remains chief minister and whose name frequently tops the list of future BJP leaders.
Mr. Modi, lest there be any question where his sympathies lie, took immediate action on the new Jinnah book by banning it in his state – before anyone in his government had read it. There is a public interest court case under way now to lift that ban, which critics say clearly violates India's constitution.
While the internal BJP politics are burning up the airwaves and front pages, there are certain to be some satisfied smiles at the Delhi Book Fair, a huge literary festival that opens this weekend in the capital: the continued power of the humble book has been decisively confirmed.
Thursday, July 9, 2009 3:05 PM EDT
Love on the line in Pakistan
Islamabad -- As with many dramatic love stories, this one has three protagonists: the shy and comely Amreen, her generous lover, Tariq – and the Nokia cellphone that brought them together.
In some ways this is an old story, of the kind that has been heard in Pakistan for generations: Tariq Mehmood and Amreen Hussein met and fell in love in secret, a romance they had to hide from their families, who were anticipating an arranged marriage. They had to beg an older relative to intercede and smooth the way with their parents.
But there is one thoroughly modern twist in this story, one that offers a small window into how technology is changing relationships in conservative corners of the Muslim world.
Amreen is 17, and in her last year of high school in Islamabad. She lives with her family in a small mud house on the edge of the Pakistani capital. They cook over a wood fire and goats wander in and out of the small compound.
Her father, Faisal, is a security guard with an airline. But Faisal and his wife, Suraya, have ambitions for their children; their eldest son, Asim, 21, is studying at a local computer college, and youngest daughter, Asiya, 14, is a top student who they are determined will become a doctor.
A year and a half ago, Asim bought a cellphone, a cheap Nokia model of the kind that is ubiquitous in the developing world. And sometimes, he let Amreen borrow it. Late at night, when her parents were asleep, she used it to call or send text messages to friends from school.
One night Amreen called what she thought was the number of a pal. She called twice, got no answer.
The next day Tariq, a 31-year-old taxi driver, woke up and saw two missed calls on his phone. That night he called back – and Amreen answered. He asked why she was calling him. She said he wasn't. He asked her name. She panicked and hung up.
But the next night she called back, and they chatted for a few minutes. She told him a fake name. Before long, late at night, they were talking for ages – Pakistan's cellphone airtime is wonderfully cheap. She confessed her real name. And eventually, a meeting was arranged. Tariq bought her a phone of her own.
Soon, they knew it was love.
But what to do? Amreen couldn't tell her parents she had a boyfriend, and certainly not a boyfriend whom she met by calling up strange men on the phone.
In desperation they turned to Amreen's older half-sister, Shabir, who counselled patience. Gradually she introduced the parents to the idea that Amreen had met someone. (She left out the part about Amreen telephoning strange men in the dead of night and was vague about just how, exactly, their daughter, who attends a girls-only school, had met a man.) Amreen's startled parents ordered that the young man present himself for inspection at once.
Tariq was sick with nerves. Not his gal: “I knew they would say yes,” Amreen recalled serenely.
But at first there was a bit of drama.
“I was angry! This is the age of studying, not for marrying,” said Amreen's mother, Suraya.
Suraya had met Faisal on the day of their wedding, 22 years ago; the whole affair was arranged by their parents. That is more or less what Suraya envisioned for her daughters, too – a love match would be all right, she said, but she expected that she and Faisal (and assorted aunts and cousins) would have an instrumental role in the finding and vetting of any potential husbands. She was skeptical of this groom-out-of-nowhere.
“But she put pressure on me,” she said with a scolding frown at her daughter.
“Until you gave in,” Amreen said, pulling her orange hijab down, but not quickly enough to hide a grin.
The first visit went well: the parents could see that Tariq was a good fellow, and they were impressed with how hard he worked. Soon he brought his entire family for a visit, and everyone got on brilliantly. Tariq began to relax.
“He will be a very good son-in-law,” said Faisal.
By now, Amreen could reveal her cellphone, and everyone had mostly forgotten the question of how they met.
Tariq hopes they can wed in the autumn. He is anxious to have a wife to warm his lonely bachelor's existence; all his visits to Amreen take place in the company of her family of six. Her family – and indeed Tariq – would like her to continue her studies after she graduates, perhaps at a Quranic college, but Amreen doesn't care much for school, and looks forward to life as a housewife, she said.
Today, Tariq's consuming preoccupation is how to pay for the wedding. He earns $60 a month, but his share of the wedding expenses will be about $2,800 – he must pay for the feast, and for the gold that is the bride price. Her family will pay another $5,700, for wedding entertainment, outfits for the family, and all the furniture and household items Amreen will need to outfit their new home.
Driving away from the Hussein home after a recent evening visit, Tariq sighed with longing. “Isn't she beautiful?” he asked rhetorically.
Right on cue, his cellphone beeped with an incoming text message: Amreen, sending a few quick transliterated Urdu words of love.
Sunday, June 28, 2009 1:11 PM EDT
Gay pride grows in India
When gay and transgender activists decided to throw big gay pride parades in each of Indias major cities last year (only Kolkata had had a Pride before), they organized against a backdrop of uncertainty. In Delhi, they didn't know until a couple of hours before if the police would let them go ahead with the march through the centre of town. Nor were they sure of public reaction or even if anyone would show up to march.
But they did show up - about one thousand people in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore and the event, plus its largely favourable media coverage and cheering onlookers, left organizers thrilled.
Subcontinental Contributors
Stephanie Nolen
Stephanie Nolen is the South Asia correspondent for The Globe and Mail, based in India. From 2003 to 2008, she was the Globe's Africa correspondent, and she has reported from more than 40 countries around the world. She is a three-time National Newspaper Award winner for her work in Africa, and a three-time recipient of the Amnesty International Award for Human Rights Reporting. Her book on Africa's AIDS pandemic, 28, was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award and has been published in 15 countries. She lives in New Delhi.