Smithbarney's Open Salon Blog

Floating in Time: A Houseboat in Kerala, India

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:03:02 -0400

Houseboat in Kumarakom, Kerala

A View from the Bridge

These are the backwaters (lagoons) of Kerala, at the southern tip of the Indian peninsula, and undoubtedly the most beautiful and peaceful spot on God's earth. For a week, we lived on a houseboat, traveling lazily up and down the lagoon, taking side trips in a canoe-cum-punt to watch the birds or for no reason at all, suspended in time and space. Elemental. The verdant earth, crystal waters, pure air and the fire of the sun.

Early morning on the lagoon

Water lilies

Scarlet Ixora (Thetti) in the wild

As we make our way to nowhere in the early morning, the mist slowly lifts to give us glimpses of life on land and water.

Fields ready for planting paddy (rice)

Morning chores

Boatman on his rounds

Kerala is not only the most beautiful and peaceful place on earth, it is also the friendliest. We had come up to the village of Cheeppunkal, and there in the early morning light, against a backdrop of emerald green, was this splash of colorfully attired women weaving rope. We stopped. They welcomed us, not as tourists or intruders; tried to teach us how to make rope; gave us the baby to hold. A man shinnied up a coconut tree, tapped a palm and we drank fresh palm juice. (The same juice, fermented during the day, makes rather potent toddy by the evening.) They wouldn't take any money, just asked us to send them the pictures when we got back to America.

Cheeppunkal village, Kerala

Coir Rope Weavers' Cooperative, Cheepunkal, Kerala

Kerala is a strangely and wonderfully anomalous place even by the exotic standards of India. It has the highest literacy rate (91%) in the country; the most balanced religious demographics (60% Hindu; 20% Muslim; 20% Christian); has been governed by freely elected, horrors, Communists for most of the last fifty years.

The best introduction to Kerala may not be through guidebooks but the imaginations of the great writers who have written about it: Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (Roy grew up in Kottayam, very close to Kumarakom); Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh; Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land. Kerala clearly captured their hearts, as it did ours.

Fishing nets in the Arabian Sea, Kochi (Cochin), Kerala

MAP OF SOUTH ASIA (highlighting Kerala)

Om Shanti. Shanti. Shanti.

Favorite Movie: Satyajit Ray's "Distant Thunder"

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:02:50 -0500

Ashani Sanket, 1973
[Distant Thunder. Color, In Bengali with subtitles. 101 minutes.]

When it came to movies, Satyajit Ray was the God of Small Things, but a god he was.

If you are familiar at all with Indian film, it is probably by way of overwrought Bollywood dance, drama and music spectaculars. But Ray is not of Bollywood. He made his films in Calcutta 1500 miles and a world away. With Ray, the drama is in a look, the dance is in the curves of a cupped hand resembling a lotus, the music is in the melody of monsoon rains and the dissonance of a distant thunder.

Distant Thunder is set in 1943 in what was then undivided Bengal still under the British Raj (see map below). There is a war on somewhere, the people of the village don't rightly know where. The monsoons have been abundant, the rice crop plentiful, there is a sense of simple joy in the air.

The movie begins with an unforgettable montage that is pure, liquid poetry compressing the above into the first few minutes. The images of the rains, the undulating fields of grain, the lowering skies , a shot of airplanes flying in formation which the uncomprehending villagers regard with wonder (one comparing it with the flight of cranes) and of village women frolicking in the water is the work of a master at the height of his lyrical powers. (The only clip on YouTube is of this sequence. The quality is rather poor, but it does convey the essence. The haunting background music, composed by Ray, is not your usual Bollywood fare either. It was based on the folk music of Bengal, especially the minstrel tradition of the Bauls.)

Into this idyl comes our protagonist, Ganga, with his young bride, Ananga. They have come from the capital city of Calcutta, where things are not so idyllic, where food shortages have already started to occur, severe rationing has been imposed as the British sequester available stocks for the War effort and the grain merchants (Indians) have started to hoard anticipating higher profits.

Ganga is an educated Brahmin, of the highest, priestly caste. He is a man with a clever, not particularly venal, plan. He intends to teach school, perform various priestly functions (the village lacks both), including that of apothecary (he has brought along a basic store of pills from Calcutta as well as a book on hygiene). He expects that both as compensation and Brahmin Sewa (literally, service rendered to the priest) he will earn enough, especially food, amid the seeming bounty all around, to make a life for the young couple.

And at first things go very well. He is a good school teacher. A neighboring village calls on him to recite prayers to ward off the evil spirits responsible for the outbreak of cholera there. He does so, while advising them to boil their water for drinking and cleaning cooking utensils. When the epidemic is quelled, the villagers send him off laden with rice and fruit and other goodies.

But after the harvest, when the grains have been sold to the merchants and middlemen, the food shortages hit the village as well. People are reduced to begging for food. And here is where Ray's mastery is in full flow: instead of shots of starving chidren and rotting corpses (there are none), he drills to the core of a disintegrating society in a few strokes.

Ganga tries to shoo away a starving beggar who has come to his door for food -- a significant violation of the priestly code, Brahmin Sewa is supposed to work both ways. His wife forgoes her own meal to feed the old man. She has to take to manual labor in the fields, a violation of caste and societal norms, and is reduced to foraging for food in the woods. For a few handfuls of rice for her family, a married woman has sex with a man whose face has been horribly disfigured in a fire. Almost imperceptibly, fire images and a sere landscape replaces the wet lushness of the movie's beginning.

And then there is an old woman lying in the middle of a a dry, dusty road. None of the villagers will even go near her because she is of an Untouchable caste. Ganga, the Brahmin, touches her, feels for her pulse. She is dead. He carries her to the river bank, builds a funeral pyre, performs the final rites and lights the flame.

The movie ends as we learn Ananga is pregnant, and with the ineffable image, burnt in my memory since I first saw it 35 years ago, of the entire screen filled with the silhouettes of hundreds of people streaming out of the village, then frozen in a still shot imprinted with the only overt message of the entire movie:

"OVER FIVE MILLION DIED OF STARVATION AND EPIDEMICS IN BENGAL IN WHAT HAS COME TO BE KNOWN AS THE MAN-MADE FAMINE OF 1943."

____________________

Satyajit Ray died in 1992 at the age of 71. If Americans remember him at all, it is for his speech from his deathbed accepting the Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1992.

He was a deeply humanistic and humanitarian film-maker. Distant Thunder is a true work of art from a master at peak form in all aspects of his craft. The cinematography, the music and of course, Ray's always subtle story-telling.

We never see the war (the Japanese were in Burma by 1944, not that far from Bengal), just the one image of the planes flying in formation. We see exactly one dead body in the whole movie. And while society in microcosm is shown imploding because of unseen, unstoppable external forces, Ray also gives us hope through Ganga and Ananga of the possibility of the human spirit prevailing over circumstances. The same Ganga who would not share his food with a beggar redeems himself performing the funeral for the untouchable woman. And his wife, Ananga (Babita, a Bangladeshi actress, is positively incandescent in this role, like so many of Ray's female leads), who is the moral center of the movie (once again, like so many of Ray's heroines), is steps ahead of her husband in accepting and adapting to the world changing around her with sacrifice, caring, love and shared responsibility. Truly one of my all-time favorite movies.

Photo credits: SatyajitRay.org

Happy Birthday, Karen. Om Shanti. Shanti. Shanti.

Mon, 9 Feb 2009 22:02:00 -0500

Chotanagpur hills, Jharkhand, India

Happy Birthday, Karen.

This is a photograph of the hills where I was born. For some reason, it was the picture that gave me hope and strength ten years ago when I was going through my own brain surgery and whole head radiation and recovery that slowly came afterwards. It does so still as I look at it across my desk. I dedicate it to you with a prayer and benediction.

Om Shanti. Shanti. Shanti.

Ted Kennedy: A true friend of the wretched of the earth

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:01:30 -0500

Barack Obama and Senator Ted Kennedy, February 2008

In breaking news, The Boston Globe reported that Senator Kennedy has been released from hospital where he was taken and spent the night after suffering a seizure at the post-inaugural luncheon for President Obama. He is reported to be "feeling well."

Senator Edward M. Kennedy has been my senator for over thirty years. Throughout that time he has been a ceaseless champion for civil rights, social and economic justice, women's rights, gay rights, workers' rights, healthcare reform, immigration reform. As Time magazine said, he has "amassed a titanic record of legislation affecting the lives of virtually every man, woman and child in the country".

But perhaps what is less well known is that his commitment to these causes has not been limited to this country alone. It is his deep rooted values and commitment to the most marginalized, vulnerable, voiceless and poorest people in the rest of the world - truly Frantz Fanon's wretched of the earth - that I want to highlight. Three examples will suffice.

Bangladeshi refugees 1971-1972

After the invasion of East Pakistan (also called East Bengal, now called Bangladesh) by West Pakistani forces in the spring of 1971, some 9,000,000 refugees streamed across the border into India. The world and the United States (Nixon/Kissinger mired in Vietnam, famously "tilting" toward West Pakistan) took little note. All except the 39 year old senior senator from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy.

In the brutal heat and monsoon muck of August, Senator Kennedy traveled to refugee camps throughout West Bengal (the neighboring Indian state) and reported back to the Senate in an extraordinarily passionate document ⁽¹⁾ about the plight of the refugees in India and what he called the "reign of terror which grips East Bengal."

He concluded: "America's heavy support of Islamabad (West Pakistan) is nothing short of complicity in the human and political tragedy of East Bengal."

Kennedy not only bore witness, he jolted the world into taking notice and aiding the refugees if not the independence fighters in East Bengal.

Bangladesh gained its independence in December, 1971 after Pakistan was defeated in a short and brutally effective war by India. Senator Kennedy returned to India and now Bangladesh in February, 1972. The United States had so far refused to recognize the new nation (see Kissinger's extraordinary memo). Kennedy called for its recognition. He was lionized in Dhaka, the capital, with cries of "Joi Kennedy" (Hail, or literally, Victory to Kennedy) as well as in Calcutta, India, when he revisited the refugee camps.

Senator Kennedy has remained a steadfast friend of Bangladesh and India. In fact, there is a move to recognize him officially as a Bangladeshi hero, along with the late George Harrison, who had organized the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, the archetype for such benefits in later years.

Ethiopian Famine 1984-1985

In 1984 Ethiopia was in the middle of multiple civil wars, which together with a failure of the rains caused one of the most severe famines in recent memory, one in which over a million people are believed to have perished.

In December, 1985 Ted Kennedy was one of the first U. S. officials to visit Ethiopia during the famine. Along with Jerry Tinker (see more about Jerry below) of his Senate staff, with him were his daughter Kara and son Teddy, traveling to what was decidedly not a vacation spot.

Directly as a result of the Senator's efforts and the publicity surrounding them, President Reagan asked for a $400 million increase in aid for Africa for 1985. A later Senate report said that as a result "seven million people have been spared starvation by a remarkable success story of international relief."

The senator wrote movingly about his trip in the form of diary for People magazine:

I have visited two profoundly moving places in my life. At ground zero in Hiroshima in 1979 I resolved to do all I can to stop the nuclear arms race. Africa has been another ground zero—and I will never stop working to end hunger in the world.

One Iranian Jew

Not all of Senator Kennedy's efforts were on such a large canvas. Susan Estrich (who was as much of a trail blazer as President Obama, being the first female editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review), then a Kennedy staffer, recounts a story of the 1980 Presidential primary campaign in New Jersey.

A woman asked him what his position was on helping Iranian Jews, such as her family, stranded under the Ayatollah Khomeini regime. The senator did not have an answer handy, but promised that his staff would help. He nagged them incessantly, and Susan (and, of course, Jerry Tinker) did succeed in helping her. As Estrich writes:

It took a few months, long after the presidential campaign had ended and the Senator was no longer seeking the votes of people in New Jersey. (I don't think the woman was a citizen yet, anyway. She had just come to the event to ask the question.) But we got visas for that family. Lives saved. Another day in Sen. Kennedy's office. That was our job because it was his job.

_______________________________

Jerry Tinker R. I. P.

Now the longest tenured member in history of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Kennedy has been either the Chairman or Ranking Member of its Subcommitee on Immigration and Refugee Affairs for most of that period. And for much of that time, his chief aide for these matters was Jerry Tinker, who passed away untimely in 1995.

I first met Jerry in the early 1960s in Calcutta, India, when he was a student there and later worked for the (now defunct) United States Information Service in cultural affairs. The USIS was not then as much of a pure propaganda machine as it later became. Through its auspices and Jerry's instrumentality, we met such non-establishment figures as Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Prof. Logan (an African-American scholar deeply involved in civil rights), Pete Seeger, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg!

Jerry presided over an informal salon of students and visitors, including as ragtag a bunch of young idealists as I have ever known - the first members of the Peace Corps. We imbibed deeply of American culture and politics (and such other iconic American artifacts as Jim Beam) in what were heady days for American prestige abroad (Vietnam was in the future).

Jerry had a deep and abiding love and concern for the struggles of the developing world, especially India, and in particular, Bengal. He rose to be the staff director of his subcommitte and chief author of the Immigration Reform Act of 1990 (and the unacknowledged one of the "Crisis in South Asia" report footnoted below). But at his heart he remained a "field rat".

I met him in Calcutta in 1972 when he came through. He always seemed as much at home there (then as now, not an easy city for most Americans to like) and in the villages as he was in Washington. I ran into him in Nairobi, Kenya in 1984 or 85 (I was there as part of my job with an international aid organization, he was going home after another field trip to Ethiopia). And over the years, we stayed in touch, both as friends and whenever my professional needs required his help, which he always gave unstintingly.

In an essay on Senator Kennedy and his efforts on behalf of humanity, I think it is only fitting to pay tribute to Jerry Tinker, who was the humanitarian heart and soul of much of the senator's work and a true friend of mankind's poorest and most dispossessed.

Om Shanti. Shanti. Shanti.

Notes:

(1) Report to the United States Senate, titled "Crisis in South Asia". The most complete excerpt online is to be found here, not a site whose views the writer otherwise supports.

Photo credits: Wikipedia commons, People Magazine

End the American Gulag: Thoughts on MLK Day

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:01:58 -0500

From Birmingham to Barack, what a dream it has been.

In April, 1963, Birmingham, Alabama, Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor let loose the dogs and fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators on Palm Sunday. Martin Luther King was jailed, held incommunicado in solitary confinement. While there, he wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail ⁽¹⁾, probably the single most important document in the history of the civil rights struggle. In it he said:

I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.

_________________________________________________

President-elect Obama, tomorrow, as we inter forever the memories and injustices of those days , let us also resolve to honor Dr. King by redressing the injustices visited upon another group of alien people. These injustices are still here.

___________________________________________________

The Creation of the American Gulag

In the days immediately following September 11, 2001, over 750⁽²⁾ immigrant men and women, many of them legal residents, mostly Muslim (but not all, Hindus and Sikhs and even Christians from the Middle East were a sizeable number) were rounded up in an anti-terrorism sweep in the New York City area alone. Most were held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, a Federal facility. The War on Terror had begun.

A Department of Justice report ⁽³⁾ details their treatment. They were subjected to a "communication blackout", not allowed visitors, legal or social telephone calls for several days to several weeks. They were in "lockdown" 23 hours per day. They were subjected to "restrictive" escort procedures: handcuffs, leg irons and "Martin chains" - four foot long heavy chains linking leg irons to handcuffs. There were numerous complaints of verbal and physical abuse. In at least one case the government reached an out of court settlement with an Egyptian detainee, Ehab Elmaghraby, who had charged he had been "subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one in which correction officers inserted a flashlight into Mr. Elmaghraby's rectum, making him bleed."

After incarcerations lasting upto several months, and most proceedings held in camera, not a single detainee was charged with any terrorism related offense.

Expansion of the Gulag

After the start of the invasion of Afghanistan, large quarters were needed to detain captives. In what can be seen in hindsight as a fitting twist of history, the U. S. authorities chose for their purposes a disused airfield and hangars built by the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan. Given an Orwellian-sounding name, the Bagram Theater Internment Facility has been home to thousands of prisoners, held without trial or hope thereof, rife with stories of abuse, torture and even death. One such story I had recounted earlier, that of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.

Guantánamo was opened simultaneously. Its horror stories are too well-known for further discussion here. Abu Ghraib was taken over (this, of course from Saddam Hussein) in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq and converted into an American facility for prisoner processing.

The point to note is that all these prisons were deliberately created outside the territorial boundaries of the United States. In doing so, the authorities intended them to be outside the constitutional reach of U. S. law.

Justice Scalia inveighed against "the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well)". But even this thin reed of a defense was broken in the June 2008 Supreme Court decision (Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195) granting the right of habeas corpus (and arguably, other constitutional protections, as well) to Guantánamo detainees, with Scalia in dissent.

Populating the Gulag

Operating behind the presumed protection of the extra-territorial shield (or perhaps knowing full well that it was a fig leaf) as late as 2006, the CIA was given broad new latitude to transfer prisoners to other countries solely for the purpose of detention and interrogation, otherwise known as "rendition".

This despite "the accounts provided by former prisoners who say they were beaten, shackled, humiliated, subjected to electric shocks, and otherwise mistreated during their long detention in foreign prisons before being released without being charged."

Their number is legion. Here are three from the same New York Times article:

Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, who was detained at Kennedy Airport two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks and transported to Syria, where he said he was subjected to beatings.

Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanese-born German who was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border in December 2003 and flown to Afghanistan, where he said he was beaten and drugged.

Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian who was arrested in Pakistan several weeks after the 2001 attacks. He was moved to Egypt, Afghanistan and finally Guantánamo. During his detention, Mr. Habib said he was beaten, humiliated and subjected to electric shocks. He was released after 40 months without being charged.

___________________________________________________

Dr. King ended his Letter from Birmingham Jail:

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King, Jr.

___________________________________________________

Om Shanti. Shanti. Shanti.