Kalpana Mohan's Open Salon Blog

Battle Whim of the Bovine Mother

Tue, 5 Apr 2011 14:04:59 -0400

When I found out today that Tiger Mother’s cub made it to Harvard , I realized that Tiger Mother had gamed the system yet again.

I’m at work on a book these days and I know that the main thing about the publishing world in the days of dwindling budgets is that marketing is now really in the hands of the authors and not so much in the laps of publishers anymore. It’s all about creating a buzz well before a book is out. It’s also about sustaining the buzz long after the book has peaked.

Amy Chua had several slivers of meat to chew on while working on her book project: her book needed to be hotter than a freshly dead deer on the Serengeti plains; every territorial mother (Chinese, Jewish, Vietnamese, American, you name the breed) in the world needed to salivate and drool, knife in hand; and, along the way, some names needed to be dropped, again and again, like a trail of blood from impaled flesh, in the direction of the cherry-paneled walls of an Admissions Office Committee at Harvard.

Once I finished reading Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, I was convinced that she is indeed the unrivaled mistress of orchestration. While some of us stage mothers lick our wounds and slink away by the time our children are in tenth grade, Chua hovers up above in the branches long after twilight, her tail coiled around the twigs, her paws poised, ready to pounce on her game.

After reading Chua's book, I began mulling over one possibility: Chinese mothers may be superior and Caucasian mothers may indeed be gentler; but it was becoming more and more apparent that the bovine Indian mother was often the most balanced. Here are some of the reasons why that may be so. Feel free to add some of your own at the end of the post.

· Gentle Moo: Unlike the Chinese mother portrayed by Amy Chua, the Indian mother does not take the bull by the horns; instead she moos and steers her kid’s hind in the rough direction of where she wants him or her to go. Her motto: Nudge without the Edge.

· Holding pail to udder: Know that the Indian mother too knows to milk the system but she does it with a beatific smile, hot samosas in hand, her childbearing hips undulating with bovine grace inside her sari. She never does it in the manner of Amy Chua, with the unbending stance of a terracotta soldier.

· Above all, be Indian: Indian mothers name their kids Nachiketha and Bhushani and then proceed to prime them with lessons in Indian spirituality, Indian music and dance without ever realizing that pursuing the Indian classical arts is not a ticket to an Ivy. How naïve when there isn’t a national organization certifying Indian music and dance.

· Sense of community: The bovine mother may be called the Costco of motherhood. Like Costco, she does everything big and cheap and she’ll feed you even when you drop in for a second. But like the people at Costco, she almost always moves with the herd. She doesn't go for the unique. If you want Bang and Olufsen, you don't go to Costco, do you?

· No calculating before Calculus: Indian mothers haven’t quite understood that doing Calculus BC the summer before actually doing Calculus BC at school is one way to ensure an A+. “Just how long are we going to protect them?” they ask while packing naan, dhal, sabji and rice for their twenty-five-year-old leaving for work.

· No Hindi AP: Indian mothers don’t care that their kids could nail another AP if only they brought Hindi into their school system. Instead they’re fighting over what should be their national language: Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu and so on and so forth.

· Prom Date over Exam Date: On the other hand, Indian mothers care to dedicate an evening to Bollywood dance at local schools because they have their priorities straight. Another A+ in a transcript can only go so far to get ahead in the social scene.

· Drop and Go: While Amy Chua is in the room taking endless notes at music and tennis lessons, Indian mothers are drinking extra-hot chai latte at their local Starbucks along with buddies.

Should I be checking in at Guantanamo Bay?

Tue, 4 May 2010 09:05:35 -0400

If THAT is my passport photo, should I be checking in at Guantanamo Bay?

I don’t look too bad.

I don’t have a mouth that promises wild wanton whispers like Angelina Jolie’s. It isn’t bird-like and terse and taut like Jennifer Aniston’s. When I’m not smiling, my mouth droops as if to say that the world isn’t a happy place. That’s about right anyway. My nose is short, pert and just. It comes to the point on most things. It keeps out of other people’s business (unless something happens to justify its mindful meddling). My eyes, evenly positioned on my face, voice my mind instantaneously. They don’t have a gate they open and shut when thoughts wander in unarmed (in the same way my mouth doesn’t have a spam filter when, really, it should). On my best days, my skin shines, sparkles and slithers like I’m on the late side of thirty.

Really, I don’t look too bad for nearing the half-century mark.

So enlighten me, please, won't you, as to why my passport photos tell me I need to check in at Guantanamo Bay?

Made for Guantanamo Bay?

Has anyone taken a passport photograph in the United States? At $7 a pop, an ugly passport photo shot on a polaroid camera which blinds you for life is at least twice the cost of a gallon of Berkeley Farms milk at my local Safeway. We've thought of every possible contraption in this country: the post-it note, the whitener, the velcro fastener, the PC, the iPod, iPhone. And just today Mr. Jobs put out the iPad on the shelves.

Won't someone please create an iPassport app so we click our mugs ourselves and create a passport photo that we like that makes consular officers treat us with more respect when we apply for a visa? Consular offices remind me of funeral homes. The people who go in there look mournful. They are talked to by people who conduct their business looking deathly serious. The visitors are dying to get out as quickly as they can. They spend the better part of the day inside the building and when they finally walk out, their faces are bathed in a curious glow of solemnity and relief.

As the owner of an Indian passport, I've spent the greater part of my life in consulates. Yesterday at a dreary consulate tucked inside a long hallway going to nowhere in a building in San Francisco, I was applying for a six-day tourist visa.

"Ma'am. Which hotel you stay at?" asks the lady to whom I turn in my papers.

"You need hotel information? Your website didn't say anything about it."

"I'm sorry. No hotel. No visa."

"But your website didn't say a thing. I don't have it."

"Sorry. No hotel. No visa."

"I didn't get appropriate answers to two emails. I called your offices in three states and I didn't get a response from any of them. Nothing, nothing, is in English except a six-line list of documents to bring which, by the way, did NOT, I repeat, NOT include hotel information."

"No hotel. No visa."

"I don't believe this. So I take all this trouble to follow through before my long drive from Saratoga to San Francisco, send you two emails for which I don't even get a decent response addressing my questions, call three offices to find out what else I may need to bring that the small English translation may have missed and all you can tell me is no hotel, no visa and that I have to come back all the way another day to give you the hotel information so you can grant me my visa?"

"Yes."

At about this time, another corpulent visa officer behind me tells me to shut up and settle down.

"Madame, when you came to America, did you have instructions in a language other than English? Tell me, yes or no. No, yes? So then, now you better settle down, okay?"

The officer tells me to use his computer to book a hotel. In seconds I have the name of a hotel after making a reservation online. The lady officer then gestures for me to go sit in a chair in front of a camera. Another dreadful picture to validate the dreadfulness of the picture I gave her. She stares at my photo and then at my face, shakes her head, pastes two stamps on the visa page, presses a seal on the stamps and waves me away. And, sure enough, every time I get a visa I walk out feeling I'm rising from the ashes. Strange, isn't it?

Back in the car, I look in my rear-view mirror. My eye-pencil has smudged under my eyes. My hair is out of place. But I don't look too bad. Not as bad as my passport photograph, at any rate.

A Toast to Aging, at a Napa Valley Winery

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:04:12 -0400

What better place to celebrate an “over the hill” occasion than a winery in Napa Valley? A girlfriend has aged gracefully. While she is crushed that the female members of her clique are younger than she is, we remind her that the male counterparts are just about ready to harvest their social security and that she is a long time away from that even though her AARP membership is about to arrive in her mailbox.

This is the first beautiful weekend since the year began. Napa valley is baking. The barbecue smell of August skewers the spring afternoon. The same question rings in our ears. Living in one of the most panoramic parts of the United States, why won’t we head out into the wide, open spaces more often? Why do we seek to go to Europe or Hawaii for a vacation but not even consider taking a day or two every few months to unwind and recharge right next to home?

Even yesterday, with a weekend away from AP and SAT tests, parents like me obsess and find a reason to not head out somewhere because there is so much “work” to do.

“But our children don’t have a life,” a friend in our clique says. "A 50^thbirthday of a close friend is a perfect excuse to make the time.” So my son joins us, his homework and SAT prep books in tow, for a few hours of down time in a life that’s pressure-packed with unrealistic deadlines, guilt trips, supposedly life-altering future targets and a high school electronic grading system that fluctuates faster than the NASDAQ Composite Index.

It’s many years since our group has walked into a winery. Every time I enter the cavernous fermentation room where the cool of the dark fuses with the headiness of oak and wine, I breathe deep the fragrance. Is this the aroma of fermenting wisdom, I wonder? When, after you’re yanked and squeezed and blended by the process called life, you just steep, contemplating what you really are at the core. Does the enterprise of aging slowly dredge away your seed, your bitter core and your veneer so what is left to decant is your essence, an essence that you can now bottle up and market as your true self?

Outside, by the picnic area, the summer sun bores down on the vines curling around the stakes. Our small group of aging married couples laughs about our pet peeves, our advertised obsessions and life with our batty spouses. It's a place where the lust of twenty-five years ago has graduated to trust and is fast decelerating into rust. When you’ve known one another for almost three decades, longer than the wine bottles aging in the cellar of the winery, you can beat one another to pulp and never fear you’re uncorking someone’s dignity.

As I barrel towards the finish line of my forties, I begin to think that fifty may not really be a bad place to be. You're, after all, like a raisin in the sun. Less juicy than the grape you once were. Less shapely than the grape but much more practical. Shriveled–unfortunately, in all the wrong places–but meatier. And tougher, but always sweeter.

An Editor decomposes - after House & Garden

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:03:35 -0400

When a writer friend pointed me to a story titled “Losing It” by Dominique Browning, in the New York Times Magazine of March 28^th, 2010, I rushed out to my living room and pulled out the magazine to read what, seemingly, was a heartwarming story of a woman in the writing world who pulled herself out of misery.

In her essay, Browning lays bare her life after being laid off from House & Garden in November 2007, just a little before Thanksgiving. She writes lyrically about how she was sucked into the quicksand of dread and depression but willed her body out of the vortex of over-eating and slovenliness by discovering the joy of gardening and unearthing the meaning of the slow life in a new home.

I was getting ready to shed a few tears while reading the exquisite excerpt from her memoir, Slow Love, when I decided to dig around a bit in the weedy garden that was supposedly Browning’s life following her layoff. What I dredged up made her story wilt right in my hands.

During the two and a half years after she was given the pink slip, Browning disposed of the first house and garden, moved into her other, second, house and garden, deftly shifted gears into the blog lane with an impressive online presence called Slow Love Life, A Conversation with Dominique Browning, and careened into the fast lane of publishing success with a book deal for Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness.

Browning has a three-decade resume that writers like me would kill for. She is the author of three books, has written for O magazine, Food & Wine, The New York Times Book Review, and Departures. She has also been an editor at Esquire, Texas Monthly and Newsweek and she has a column, “Personal Nature”, that is her “distinctive take on all things environmental” for the Environmental Defense Fund website. By her standards, I should be overloading on Prozac and, simultaneously, getting sloshed on Guinness Stout with a hint of lime. May be there is something seriously wrong with me for deflecting rejection like a woman?

“The folding of the magazine was ruthless,” Browning writes, recalling the shock of the closure of the magazine. “Without warning, our world collapsed.”

I couldn’t help reflecting, meanly, on that boomerang called karma. Did Browning ever think of how the freelance writers she assigned stories to at House & Garden might have felt when the stories they bled over were slashed without warning by executive editors like her? The paltry kill fees aren’t even enough to cover a sandwich and a drink at a Manhattan deli. Almost daily, I see freelance writers (many of them single women) on my writers’ forum handle rejection with a proud face, uncertain where the next assignment is going to come from. They lumber on in the petering market, taking any writing project–whether it’s a ghostwriting project, a newsletter creation assignment, a copywriting job–to inch towards the monthly income they need.

Did Browning care to ponder over how her sob story would hardly resonate with the stable of many thousand writers who are now out of a job, thanks to the slow demise of print journalism? Most of all, did she realize how her very brief season in her vegetable bed of rejection couldn’t even compare to the perennial tossing into the compost slush pile that freelance writers like me endure–over and over and over–from editors like her?

When I went back to the essay after reading Browning’s bio, I was fertilizing with fury. For a reason that’s wedged somewhere between a woman’s homing instinct to play mother hen to her family and her primordial need to uphold the domestic fortress, I could simply not swallow Browning’s tying her umbilical cord to her cubicle. “Without work, who was I?” she wonders. And the one that rototilled my brain is the link she forges between unemployment and her mental state. “Being unemployed is a lot like being depressed,” she writes. I happen to be in touch with many talented mothers who, for reasons of their own, are unemployed yet, passionately involved in school-related and community-related activities. They are making the public school system in the United States a much better place to be while women like Dominique Browning have been showing America how to make the home and garden pretty and nice.

I couldn’t glean anything about her life as a mother upon reading the essay. But I do hope Browning took days off to be with her two boys, baked brownies with them, played an active part in the parent committee at their school, fretted about how they fared at school and asked them how they dealt with a mother who was intensely committed to her work at a national magazine. I bow to her ego and her rabid need to support herself all her life. But I do wonder how many employed women, especially given Browning’s legacy, will turn soggy and limp in that brief, uprooted state of unemployment.

A topflight editor like Dominique Browning with a rolodex of topnotch contacts–which would ultimately put her transparent memoir in the pages of nothing less than the NYTimes magazine so that Atlas, her publisher, can be guaranteed whopping sales–spiral into a “whiplashing tailspin” of despair and depression?

Spare me the pain. And hold that Kleenex, please.

Another Godman goes bad in India

Tue, 9 Mar 2010 11:03:25 -0500

The weekend after Godman Paramahamsa Nithyananda was caught on camera–reaching for actress Ranjitha even as he was preaching the Bhagvad Gita–my friends in the Bay Area couldn’t stop cackling.

At a party last Saturday, an old friend walked up to me, a puzzled look on her face. “Do you know to whom this belongs?” she asked, pointing to a beaded chain curled snugly in her palm. Seconds later her face crumbled into raucous laughter. According to her, the chain had fallen off during her private dalliance with none other than the Swamiji himself the previous week. My wild gang of friends had presently found something and someone to make fun of and so the jokes sputtered and sparkled late into the night until it was decided that someone among us would get his or her hands on the original video and hold a party to discuss the lurid details. Along with the puns and jabs came dissections of the creativity of tweets on the subject and, naturally, more serious discussions on matters of religion and faith.

“I’m sorry, I’m a skeptic,” said one man, a self-realized agnostic. “I really cannot believe that another human being can take me to whoever is up there.” Then there were those like my husband who do believe in the tenets of Hinduism but prefer to visit temples to admire temple architecture and socialize with temple staff and visitors. The recent agony and ecstasy of yet another saffron-attired guru only served to cement his cynicism over godmen.

“Every Godman gets into some trouble or other. And that’s why I’d rather not trust anyone wearing orange!” he claimed. He had just found scientific evidence to prove his theory that most swamijis (other than the one that his parents owed loyalty to, of course) would rather choose frequent flier miles on Earth over a gnarly one-way trek on foot to the gates of Heaven.

Hours after the news broke, my son and daughter (who pray to their favorite elephant-headed Ganesha twice a year at the end of their respective semesters) chimed in with profound theories constructed on years of study and contemplation.

“Mom, and this is why I say what I say,” my newly minted 16-year-old son turned philosopher observed. “I don’t trust guys who say they’re vehicles to god.” My son’s current god is Vladimir Nabokov whose book, Lolita, has transported him, unfortunately, to bad karmic places where good boys don’t go.

My daughter’s reaction to the Swami files was tepid because, when you’re turning twenty in a few weeks, you know everything about life and nothing, absolutely nothing, has the power to shock anymore. “Cool!” she said perfunctorily and then proceeded to tell me why composer A. R. Rahman and tuft-sporting singer Hariharan were her gods of choice, at least for now.

I wonder if my husband and my kids are wiser for their skepticism. I don’t have a spiritual guru of my own but if someone introduces me to theirs, I’ve been happy to meet them, listen to their lectures and find out what they have to say. I’m always in awe of people who have the power to mesmerize a million others and, in the process, feed the poor, build hospitals, raise money for disaster relief and, in little ways, make the world a better place. From what I can see, Swami Nithyananda has, through his many centers, conducted eye-camps, medical camps, staved off the hunger of many poor people and educated countless children who, otherwise, may not have seen the inside of a school. And that’s why, whenever I see another saffron-robed Indian Godman fall from his gold-plated perch, my heart goes out to him and to all the million disciples scattered around the world. The devotees must feel betrayed; a part of them must hate to come to terms with that worm of doubt now crawling through their hearts.

One of my friends is a follower of the fallen Swami Nithyananda. A relative of mine is also a follower, one who wears a Nithyananda bangle to show her allegiance to him. She is still a staunch supporter of her guru and believes, of course, that the tape making the rounds is the work of some scheming conman whose technical expertise is in splicing images on video. I’m sorry to see these hapless devotees suffer the ignominy of wagging tongues and tagging twitterers. The Internet has turned into a loud, garish lounge for gossip: scandal today is feasted upon, judged, and archived for instant recall.

On another, lighter note, however, when I watched the video of Nithyananda, several questions kept burrowing into me. The man sported a Calvin Klein-lookalike underwear instead of a meager, tattered loincloth. He was lounging in bed watching television. Do modern Swamijis watch television? And why do they need pedestal fans? Do they feel heat? Weren’t they beyond day-to-day cares? Didn’t they live the life of mendicants, eating thin porridge, sleeping on cold stone floors, sporting slippers made of wood, fanning themselves with fans made of coconut fibre? Instead the holy man in this video had a pedestal fan, a vast bed with a headboard doubling up as a shelf on which a number of things were kept within reach, an air purifier (I found out later that the lying camera was attached to it), creams, medications and what have you. And you must listen to his take on celibacy here. If this man had really given up the worldly life, the first thing to go should have been fancy underwear, don’t you think?

Recalling those Brooke Shields advertisements of the eighties, what came between him and his Calvin Klein should, really, have been “nothing.” Instead, what purportedly came–pun never ever intended, my faithful readers–between him and his Calvin was a shapely woman named Ranjitha. No wonder my female friends are breathless as events unfold in a scandal involving the next famous Indian man of god. Little wonder they’re screaming in anticipation: “Yes! Oh Yes! We want more!”