When East meets West

Easter season seems to be full of pagan rituals in this part of the world. I am not sure if some of them came into vogue only in the recent decades but the people here love and participate in them enthusiastically. I admit they are fun and give these people the feeling that they are engaging in traditional activities (the Czech folk consider themselves a traditional lot) but keeping in mind the colonial writings on India I feel like (for fun) engaging in an activity that we Indians (and some Czech people) at the Department of Religious Studies like to do every now and then in Pardubice.

To a non-academic, the very phrase ‘colonial writing’ may sound boring but trust me some of them are really funny and as Indians we would find even the non-funny accounts very entertaining. Even before we were colonised travellers from all over wrote about India. The ones from Europe in particular draw my interest.  For example, Ludovico de Varthema, one of the first traveller/writers to describe India wrote many things that were instrumental in forming the basis of the European understanding of India. Among some other things he seemed to have been scandalised by the sexual practices of India (they were extremely preoccupied in criticising everything sexual in India or so you would think considering the number of accounts written on it).  In this excerpt he describes what he thinks is yet another (probably common) feature of Indian sexual practices of the place he is in, which is Calicut (Kozhikode) in Kerala. He is talking about wife-swapping.

The Pagan gentlemen and merchants have this custom amongst them. There will sometimes be two merchants who will be great friends, and each will have a wife; and one merchant will say to the other in this wise:“Langal perganal monaton ondo?” that is, “So-and-So, have we been a long time friends?” The other will answer: “Hognam perga manaton ondo;” that is, “Yes, I have for a long time been your friend.” The other says: “Nipatanga ciolli?” that is, “Do you speak the truth that you are my friend?” The other will answer, and say: “Ho;” that is, “Yes.” Says the other one: “Tamarani?” that is, “By God?” The other replies: “Tamarani!” that is, “By God!” One says: “In penna tonda gnan penna cortu;” that is, “Let us exchange wives, give me your wife and I will give you mine.” The other answers: “Ni pantagocciolli?” that is, “Do you speak from your heart?” The other says: “Tamarani!” that is, “Yes, by God!” His compan- ion answers, and says: “Biti Banno;” that is “Come to my house.” And when he has arrived at his house he calls his wife and says to her: “Penna, ingaba idocon dopoi;” that is “Wife, come here, go with this man, for he is your husband.” The wife answers: “E indi?” that is, “Wherefore? Dost thou speak the truth, by God,Tamarani?”The Husband replies: “Ho gran patangociolli;” that is, “I speak the truth.” Says the wife: “Perga manno;” that is, “It pleases me.” “Gnan poi;” that is, “I go.” And so she goes away with his companion to his house. The friend then tells his wife to go with the other, and in this manner they exchange their wives...

This particular excerpt was read out in class in M.A. from the book The Heathen in his Blindness...": Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion, which is the only handbook on cultural difference available in the current market and it was my first encounter with a European account of India. When we heard it we weren’t sure whether to laugh (which we did) or to feel really annoyed. The question was not whether the account was true but the nonsensical and (to us the seemingly) callous way in which it was written. While we were surprised, irritated and amused by what we read, we had our first insight into the kind of framework these writers came from in order to be able to write something, which, for no fault of theirs appears to be a factual description but to us seems to be preposterous. We were amused because their understanding of the world was so different from ours. We were enraged because their understanding became the basis for the general understanding of India and it’s culture. Over the next few centuries their attitude towards this beautiful culture remained unchanged and became so prevalent that we began to think of our culture the same way they do. How many people have you met who say “I am ashamed that I am from such a backward culture”?

Anyway, I’ll come back to my fun exercise. What I’m going to do is talk about random things that happen here and describe them through an Indian pair of eyes (because I cannot possibly see it through a Chinese or a Russian pair). Also, because I am an ‘empowered, educated and modern woman’ who ate and drank Feminism during her days of Bachelor studies, has high ‘morals’ and was taught modernism, egalitarianism, functionalism, Orientalism, postmodernism and many other isms that the western world gave us, which is now taught in the Masters degree in Literature (that I did) and all social sciences, and because I am inspired by the powerful moral convictions with which article upon article are being written on the state of elections, psychological analysis of electoral candidates and other events that are currently happening in India, I am going to adopt the same tone and hurl the same kind of accusations at the things I see here. I do this armed with the weapons that two years of doing Literature filled my brain with, namely, all these isms (whether I really understood them or not is out of question) and the training I received to use big words and produce ludicrous ideas.

Certain things may sound exaggerated but whatever I mention will definitely have some factual truth in it. Why am I doing this? Well, honestly, at least a hundred different customs are followed in my own little Changampuzha Nagar in Kochi and neither have they interrupted my life nor have I cared to question the reason behind their existence but reading what the Europeans painstakingly wrote about our customs centuries ago and the way the West continues to look at us I cannot help being frustrated. Probably this is going to be an inconsequential exercise but perhaps it may help to look at things from a different perspective.

This is an account of how an Indian girl sees the world she lives in-

In this country of the Czechs where people only make up half the population of Mumbai and call their land religion-less it is strange that they take no less effort to celebrate Christmas and Easter. While like many westerners they give the excuse that these two days were actually important on the Pagan calendar, which is why they are important even if you take Christianity out of the equation, at which point they will assert that their country got Christianised only by as late as the 8^th century, I suspect that such is not the case. While one cannot deny the influence of Paganism in their rituals I have strong reasons to believe that every action of theirs and every value they live by are guided by Christian morals. This can also be seen in the way a section of them who call themselves proud Neo-Pagans talk about themselves, nature and their world-view. While they refuse to accept the biblical God, their devotion towards ‘the Invisible Power’, ‘Magic’, ‘Esotericism’ and a range of other things bear identical resemblance to the devotion of a Czech Christian towards the biblical God.

Pardubice, one of the big cities of Czech Republic is where I live. It has 7% more land area than Andheri and the inhabitants constitute less than 6% of the population of Andheri. While a good place to live in, some of the features of this city include scanty traffic and walking paths almost devoid of people. Intriguingly some of its people find life in this city very fast and flee to their cottages in the mountains or other places in the countryside during holidays. Their idea of a comfortable and normal-paced life seems to be deluded and it would be interesting to see how they would survive in Mumbai. The city goes to sleep after 6 pm and looks almost vacant during the weekends.

The workforce here has many peculiar properties. The sales people lack the skill of selling and sometimes due to this you are forced to not buy things that you want. They mean business when they call it a weekend. A weekend is a weekend and you dare not think of even as much as sending them a text message on those two days. As my Indian friend put it, perhaps they don’t even make love on weekends.

It is a pity to see how Europe is now coping with the loss of ‘God’ that it created in the first place by replacing it with anything that gives it a sense of The Divine. Some say “Science is my religion” while some others say “Yoga is my religion”. How or why Science and Yoga would be considered as religions is beyond my understanding. They seem to be attached to nature (mountains, rivers, etc.) or at least the idea of ‘being in the nature’ as they call it. The nature of this attachment seems strange and unlike anything we feel towards even the trees that grow in our backyard in India. A source says that this attachment was one of the reasons Paganism was revived in Europe. Some Neo-Pagans can be found doing rituals in the forests- beating drums, dancing under the influence of some herbal substances and doing things that they call mental exercises.

They have many queer customs here. One of them is celebrated on the occasion of Easter. During this season I was surprised to find wooden sticks with colourful ribbons attached on one end being sold on the streets and shops. On asking, the locals told me that on Easter Monday young men and boys go from door to door beating girls with the sticks. It is their tradition. In order to escape the beatings or sometimes after the beatings have been meted, the girls give them Easter eggs. They explain that the eggs symbolise fertility. If such practices were conducted in India the Feminists would have said that these are regressive practices and must be done away with. They would have said that even today women are deemed important only for their reproducing capabilities and that the people who engage in such activities are young and impressionable therefore it is evident that such attitudes are instilled in them at a very tender age.  The presence of such practices in Europe is not only not questioned but also celebrated.  One wonders if this is the same continent where women first raised their voice against patriarchy and feminism was born.

Witch hunting was something that regularly featured in the societal purification drive of the Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe in the Middle Ages. While many Europeans today would say that the killing of scores of thousands of men and women suspected of having engaged with witchcraft was a very bad thing to happen they would still celebrate it by making festivals out of it. So on some special days a particular place would be chosen, a structure of wood made which is to be burnt later and there would be plenty of stalls selling witching artefacts and costumes. How absurd is that! On one hand you are condemning witchcraft and on the other you are making business out of witching merchandise? The burning would bring to one’s mind the burning of Ravan’s effigy on Dussehra or Holika on the night before Holi. But the burning of Holika is a good thing compared to the yearly reenactment of the burning of these women which was brutal (as agreed now). This is completely strange.

I can go on and on. The point is Europe has had as many or more bizarre rituals as it may have encountered in India. Some of them might have got integrated into religion, some discontinued and some probably revived but because they thought that the rituals in India surely had something to do with our many deities (as may be the case) and nothing to do with The True God (the very idea of which is almost incomprehensible to us) they saw these rituals as immoral. And therefore western writings are teeming with descriptions of immoral practices of Indians who are heathens and worshippers of Devil. Today, only the words of the descriptions are different but the attitude towards our culture remains the same.

P.S. It is not my intention to ridicule Czech practices or offend my Czech friends. All descriptions were made in the spirit of the exercise.

Oh, the Horror!

Two of my closest friends thought it was funny to take me for a horror movie just before I was leaving for Czech Republic in August. It was funny for them for two reasons. One, I am someone incapable of watching a horror movie in broad daylight, with many people around, without my eyes closed. Second, since I tend to associate haunted mansions, houses and evil forces in general with Europe and America thanks to some show I used to watch on Discovery Channel as a kid they thought it would be funny to scare me abundantly about the continent I was going to go to soon. The movie we went for was supposed to be the scariest movie they had ever come up with- The Conjuring. Since it was my first horror movie in a theatre I did open my eyes once in a while to see what was on the screen. Despite having largely only ‘heard’ the movie I was terribly scared and it made me only want to cling to my rosary even more. There was something about the movie that annoyed me very much but only recently did it I begin to understand why that particular thing made sense within the context of the movie and the culture it came from. At some point in the post I will be discussing it in details. As for now let us explore other  aspects of my trysts with terror.

This blog is not as new as it seems. It was actually started in 2005 and was used for logging in stories I had heard from people and ‘ghostly’ things that I experienced myself in the three years that I spent in Sophia College, Mumbai, in the hostel. If any of my co-dwellers of the place from then is reading this she would know what I am talking about. Yesterday, I narrated some of these tales to my flatmate, an ex-Sophiaite who did not live in the hostel and who couldn’t stop laughing at them. The problem with talking to her is that she very easily manages to spoil for me every movie that I like and every Bollywood-y notion I have about life (in some future post I would lament on how she completely destroyed the beauty of Jodha Akbar for me). Need I say that while I was telling her the tales of the dead bat in my wardrobe or the black cat that sprang at me after a 3am bath they sounded utterly ridiculous to me? Anyway, we had an interesting discussion on horror movies and why it worked so well in the West while the genre did not have much success in our country until maybe twenty years ago with the airing of what people of my generation would associate with being the most fear-inducing program to be ever shown on TV- The Zee Horror Show (the theme tune of the show still gives me the chills). Don’t judge, we were only six then. So the following paragraphs contain ideas thrown about in the above mentioned conversation. 

Why is horror such a popular genre in the West? The many reasons stem from the very notion of evil here. When I say evil we must consider looking into the concept of it which is absent in the Indian culture. Technically the notion of evil comes from the Christian concept of evil which invokes a range of images from Satan, the fires of hell, disfigured faces, grotesqueness and what not! Of course, the kind of images produced in the mind of an Indian could be similar (minus Satan and hell) but there is a fundamental difference in the way people from these two cultures perceive horror. Let us try to recollect all the ghost stories we heard as children and try to compare the ghosts in them from the ones we saw in English movies.  

The Conjuring was supposedly the real story of an American family. As mentioned earlier there was something in it that irritated me which is that the evil spirit in it was a woman who was accused of being a witch and only the deeply Catholic endeavours of the paranormal-couple-specialists could save the family. At that time this annoyed me because The Church in medieval times saw people engaging in ‘witchcraft’ as evil and burnt them at the stake. Why? Because the Bible said that these are things that true Christians should not engage in. As a result it came to be seen as things that followers of Satan did therefore these Satan-worshippers had to be gotten rid of. These witches were mostly herbalists, people who were interested in all sorts of things like rocks, gems, etc, etc,. A cursory reading of European history in this matter would give us a fairly good picture of how scared medieval Europeans owing to their Christian mindset were of this suspicious lot. Check out the numerous devices of torture that were used in this period to make suspect witches ‘confess’. One look at them in the Museum of Torture convinced me that even if I was the most pious and puritan Christian on earth I would have confessed to being a witch had I been tortured on any of them for more than five minutes. So yes, what irritated me was that centuries later, the West which is increasingly becoming atheist so to speak very strongly still carries the Christian notion of evil and produces, devours and lives in the fear of it. Despite all the progress they say they have made, at the core of it they are still medieval Christians. This does not mean that every evil shown in western literature and media are directly related to the biblical evil but that same idea of evil sets precedence to things that are perceived as horror-inducing such as darkness, nerve- chilling music, the fear of the unknown, etc,.

Pitching in to the conversation my other flatmate made this very interesting point. In the West some crimes can in some ways be justified. A rapist or the murderer might be insane or has had gone through a difficult childhood and has become what he is. One may not accept the crime, but you can still sympathise with the criminal in the context. Consider a similar murder by an evil spirit. The act of crime itself may not be that brutal here. However, there is no way we can justify this crime or sympathise with the evil. Evil in christianity, as far as it means satan, is absolutely a bad thing. There is nothing good about it, from any angle. Satan can never do good things. He is purely and completely evil. Even if we do sympathise we give it a human form before justifying the reasons for the acts of the spirit.

Now let’s come to India. There is no such conception of absolute evil here. Even a bhoot can do good things. So can Rakshasas. A bhoot will have a human past and thus a justification for the crime it commits. In the stories I heard as a child, there was always a bhatakti aatma (wandering soul) whose main intention was mostly to make his/her presence felt. Mothers would warn their children about Chudail who would take them away if they did not listen to them or a yakshi who enticed people with their beauty although I highly suspect that before colonialism happened yakshis were ever seen as 'bad' beings. Of course the affect of these stories are the same in both western and eastern scenarios but let us explore in what sense we Indians feel the horror. 

What we tend to associate with aatmaas or chudail are mischief, pain, anger, vengeance. Chudails are expected to take children away because these are spirits of women who died for reasons related to loss of children. They are either simply seeking to satisfy their desire to be a mother or take revenge on people who caused her to be separated from her child. There is almost never any other sort of malice involved. Let us look at the movie Bhoot which I have been told is one of the few decent horror movies Bollywood has managed to come up with. I have not seen it but my flatmate explained that the only reason the aatmaa did what she did was because she was killed and she wanted revenge which she got when she succeeded in revealing the culprit behind her mysterious death which was deemed to be a suicide. The spirit's focus was only on the culprit and as soon as her work was done she stopped terrorising anyone. 

I feel afraid of darkness, ghosts and a lot of other things after watching an English horror movie because the feeling it gives me is that evil can strike anyone whether or not you are responsible for it. When I watch an Indian horror movie or show, apart from the fact that it looks comical, the stories never tend to scare me after the show is over. This is because the spirit had a specific purpose which is definitely not to terrorise anyone and everyone and therefore s/he simply wouldn't bother coming after me when I try to go to sleep. There is no other inherent sense of evil here simply because culturally we are not designed to see it. What we see is a supernatural entity who must be feared because s/he is capable of doing damage. 

The question is, except for the very few people like me, are Indians generally scared of horror movies? I don’t know. I have seen people from both cultures who are not scared of horror movies but the difference, I feel, is that a western person who is not scared of it is ‘courageous’ because s/he has been able to fight the fear of evil while an Indian person does not feel scared because, well, s/he does not know what is there to be scared of. Here is an illustrative example- a European person that I know asked an Indian lady “Are you scared of Japanese/Chinese horror movies?”, you know the long hair, pale skinned, floor-crawling creatures was what they both had in mind and she said (sorry for the racist answer) “eh! What can these liliputs do to scare me?”.

*peals of laughter*

Then again, my flatmate speaking about The Exorcist said “eh! If you put terrible make-up on a child’s face who is going to see her as potentially dangerous?!”

P.S. Since this is my first post this year here's wishing you all a Happy New Year. 

'Tis the Season to be Jolly

One of the things we have in common with the Europeans I have known so far is how we associate Christmas with family. Generally I start counting down months, weeks and days to Christmas after my birthday in June but this time the only thing that makes me look forward to the day is the hope of seeing a white Christmas.

I was never the kind who missed home or people but this season in this strange new world is surely bringing out the sentimental side of me. I used to think that in Europe I would see what Christmas really is since it frames the context of almost all Christmas-y things I read and songs I heard when I was small but my experience of Christmas in Europe has so far been absurd.

Europe (subsequently America) is responsible for most of the images we have about Christmas but in this place Christmas is everything but Christmas because the Europeans have rejected Christianity (or so they think). Therefore Jesus Christ is totally missing in action! So to most Europeans it is a holiday to be spent with family. This realisation made me question what Christmas means to me. Or to people I know. So I asked around and there was something they said which is similar to what makes this season special universally. Christmas to us truly is family time too. The difference lies in the fact that there is Jesus in most of the things we do around this time. Like how we observe Advent (yes, Malayalees do that too) and give up things we like till Christmas day (in anticipation of Baby Jesus’ arrival as the mothers put it), the going around in groups singing carols in the off-est of tones to collect money for the Crib, games and other activities in Church. But from what I see and what I have heard from people it also has mostly to do with being with family.

Growing up, this season to me meant going to my grandparents’ place for the main days of Christmas, plotting with all the cousins (21 on my mother’s side) on what to do after midnight mass, how all the aunts start pushing us to get dressed for mass at 9 pm when mass begins at 11 pm, how despite starting to get ready at 9 pm we end up reaching church 15 minutes late when the Church is only a 5 minute walk away, how all the aunts who reached half an hour early for Mass realize that we came late so that we would not have place to sit in the Church and can sit outside either talking or dreaming of going home after mass and  have meat, alcohol sweets and all those things we had given up for Advent. Not to forget the fireworks that lights the skies of Kerala on Christmas night.

This is going to be the first Christmas I will be away from everything that I associate with it. Maybe what I am going to miss the most is the typical Malayalee Christmas breakfast which consists of Paalappam and chicken/mutton stew or maybe being in the kitchen while all the aunts are busy preparing these things among many others for the big lunch which follows that is undoubtedly the biggest meal we have in the year.

I can’t help missing home, family and friends for Christmas but like I go to Prague every time I miss Bombay, this Christmas I will be spending time with a family in a village (my substitute for my grandparents’ village) and see how they do it with an invisible Jesus figure.

This probably is going to be the last post on my blog this year. Ever since I got remotely interested in numerology and came up with my own theories regarding the specialness of the number 9 and all numbers that added up to it I suspected that my 27^th year would be special and well, this year did indeed turn out to be magical and eye-opening for me. Through the course of this year I learnt how important it is to keep friends close, be in a group, to accept that you do deserve all the love they give you, to begin to let go of painful memories of an awful relationship, to accept that there will be plenty of bridges to be crossed, to see beauty in the moments spent with someone while crossing one of those, to cultivate love instead of waiting to fall in it, appreciate kindness and work towards being happy.

Hope the new year brings everyone joyful surprises and here’s also hoping that the promised bizarre things happen to that one person who has always read my posts and who loves Christmas and Christmas carols as much as I do.

Merry Christmas you guys!

Of Cakes and Ettiquettes

This post is sparked by a puzzled expression followed by an innocent question that my European friend asked me the other day. “Do people in India bake cakes?”

One day I woke up and realized that Christmas is round the corner and something had to be done about it- something that was typical of my household during the season. Considering being the baking assistant to my mother all my growing up years was my favorite Christmas memory I decided that I would bake cakes for the small family that we have set up here for Christmas. What followed was a long day of shopping that included buying everything from a cake mixer to desiccated coconut. Surprisingly my first attempt at baking was not unsuccessful at all. Not only were my cakes edible they were soft and considerably well-tasting J

So when my friend came home that evening we discussed the cake while he was having it at which point I expressed my disappointment that it did not taste like my mother’s at all. That is when the puzzled expression came. “You mean to say it is normal for you guys to make cakes at home, I mean do Indians do that?” Honestly I did not know how to respond to that. I wanted to say “Of course! We have Christmas too.” But then I was hit with a flurry of thoughts.

1.      Cakes and all those things are obviously something we learnt to make from the lovely colonials so of course we have been baking them for a few centuries!

2.      It was unfair of me to take for granted that a European would understand that.

3.      It did not make sense to say “We have Christmas too!” when cake making was never really specific to the Christian community in India. The Parsis, for example have been doing it much better than us for a long time and…

4.      Well, we are a largely globalised world, so if I can manage to find things like escargot in Mumbai city then why not something as common as cake, which for the information of all Europeans you find in even the smallest village in my country.

At this point the conversation was manoeuvered to another topic. I am not quite sure how it began but it is about an action that every Indian is familiar with if not performing it themselves. Until recently I did not even know that there was a name to it. It was then that my Muslim flat mate told me that they called it ‘bosh’ and I vaguely remembered that my Oriya brethren had a name for it too which I just cannot recall. Anyway do let me know if your community has a name for it and if so what it is. This act is simply making a hand gesture (if you’re Indian you know it) when you accidently touch something with your foot. Basically you touch with your hand what you have accidently stepped foot on, bring it (your hand) to your lips and then on your chest.

Like a true European my friend asked why we did it. It might not occur to a European or a true Indian post colonial child that the question does not make any sense. Why do we do it? Well, it is not good to touch anything with your feet. Especially not books, the popular explanation for that being that you do not want to insult Saraswati- the goddess of wisdom and learning. You are also not allowed to rest your feet on a table which is used for the purpose of serving food.  Again, the popular explanation for it being that you ought not insult Anna devata. Oh, there are plenty of explanations we will come up with as a result of having dealt with such theology based questions for centuries. But then again, leave aside the explanations for they are varied and serve no purpose (I think). What we must see is that this supposedly ‘Hindu’ practice is spread across all religions in the Indian subcontinent. The Muslims do it, so do we Christians- not the Bombay ones (yes, I have a slight disdain for them because they tend to be too non-Indian). The interesting part is, no one teaches it to us. I am not sure about my Hindu friends but I think I speak for them as well when I say that as children when we go to our places of worship or pooja we are taught by our elders many of the etiquettes that have to be followed in these places. But there are so many more, like this particular action that I am talking about, that we pick up, may be not from our parents but our friends like in my case. And they become so much a part of our general way of going about that we are not conscious about them at all until a non-Indian/Asian or an Indian ‘intellectual’ makes us aware of the futility of it.

Are these actions not quite peculiar? Maybe the action has become so natural for us that we do not feel “sorry” when we touch things with our foot anymore. It could be possible that in a way we are paying reverence to Saraswati and Anna devata unconsiously. OR maybe we ought to think what it is about our culture that makes it possible for such actions to survive centuries of colonialism, modern day secularism and the new wave of post colonial sentiments and still be performed by a varied population at large.

The Centipede Dilemma

"Your blogging career has come to an end" he said this morning while walking to the university. "What? It has just begun!" I said feeling annoyed. But he was right you know. Something happened recently when I went to Belgium for a week. But before I get into the details here's a story to set the premise for my dilemma.

One day a frog happened to come across a centipede. The sight of the smooth functioning of its hundred legs left the frog dumbstruck. He exclaimed "I find it difficult to manage my two legs sometimes how do you do it with more than a hundred of them?" It was a simple and honest statement of admiration but it made the centipede conscious of his ability. Since then he was never able to walk without his legs getting tangled. 

Now imagine a scenario in which let's say you are a practitioner of the Art of Living and after months of living the good life you happen to get the golden chance of meeting Shri Shri Ravi Shankar in person and spend some time with him. Let's say during that time spent Shri Shri tells you that he has been keeping a close watch on you and has taken note of the way you practice his ways. What would your reaction be? Happiness? Yes. Profound happiness. For a while. And then what? Then you become conscious of what has just happened and all you want to do is do things to impress him (maybe?) or maybe you get so paralysed with being conscious about it that you simply become unable to do the exact thing that was effortless to you.

And that is exactly what seems to be happening to me. Here I was happily blogging, mainly for the purpose of letting my friends know about things I found peculiar here and then Belgium happened. Let's just say that the Shri Shri, Jesus Christ of my universe who I went to meet mentioned that he had read my blog and even briefly discussed a few parts from it. At first I was paralysed with happiness. In my mind I kept telling myself "He has read my blog! He has read my blog! He has read my blog!". After a day of mulling over the far more important things we talked about, the same thought came into my mind and this time with a completely different tone.  I felt like how probably Adam and Eve must have felt when they realized they were naked after committing the original sin. This time I felt paralysed with shame. He, who is what he is because of the way he thinks, acts, writes and guides, he had read my blog. My silly silly blog. At that moment how I wished I had wisdom and wrote insightfully with more finesse and class. 

It has been almost twenty days since I met him. While the rest of the things in my life are going according to the scheme of the larger framework I find that I am unable to go back and look at my blog let alone re-read the post that he had read.  And probably I would have put off writing any more posts till I had something eye-opening and mind-blowing to write about, something I wouldnt be ashamed of if he happens to read my blog again (which might have taken years) if my dear dear friend had not remarked this morning that my blog writing career had come to an end. 

At this point I have only two options. Either wait to get enlightened and then disperse pearls of wisdom or write a couple of lame posts to get over the Centipede Syndrome. You know the choice I made :-)   

What James Blunt said. That. And a Few Other Things on Orientalism.

The thing about an average Indian is that when we think of Europe the places that come into our mind are England, Germany and Switzerland. We know they are not the only countries in the continent but we tend to remain ignorant about the others. Maybe it has to do with many of us having relatives in the above mentioned countries that we know have a considerable number of Indians living there. My very lovely Czech Republic happens to be one of the countries with hardly any Indians. In fact in a world that Indians are taking over population wise I came across only 3 Indian couples in Prague when I stayed there for a couple of days (all of them were Malayalees :) definitely something to discuss in a future post). It is only understandable that if the capital city has so very few spottable Indians how many will be there in this small town of Pardubice. As a result of this I am what they would call ‘exotic’ here.

At first the whole concept of being exotic was vague to me. This town has a university that has a few students from Africa, America and India. So it is not like people here have not seen those of darker shades. But a trip to a Moravian village (namely Radvanice) over a weekend opened my eyes to what ‘exotic’ actually is.

Here’s something about India. In my country, at least in the last century, people have developed a warped sense of beauty. Fair skin, skinny body and length of hair are some of the top most criterions to be met in order to be seen as beautiful. Having not been blessed by most of these qualities I had never imagined myself to be ‘beautiful’. But having lived in Europe for just two months I have begun to think otherwise. I have had random women come up to me only to touch my hair and say “Your hair, very beautiful.” Oh, and not to mention those who said I had beautiful eyes, skin colour and what not. It felt very good at first till I began to understand what is really happening. When I went to Radvanice I was told that my friend and I were the first Indians to step on the soil there. Many people there had never seen Indians in real before. Personally, the funniest incident was spending time at the local bar towards the end of which 3 elderly men came up and sat right next to me and started touching my hair and saying it’s beautiful. That’s when it struck me. I was reminded of one of those pictures I found floating around on Facebook recently. You can see it below. To these people I am the white child in the picture!

It then brought to mind the many many colonial narratives on the ‘exoticism’ of Indian women I had come across. It was disappointing at first. They did not think that I was beautiful because I was beautiful. For them I was beautiful precisely because I was ‘exotic’. So then I began wondering if I was actually beautiful or not. I realized that the very fact that I was pondering over such a thing was disturbing. I looked in the mirror carefully. I saw two things at once. I saw the average looking Tess in India and I saw the beautiful Tess who had come to live in Europe. And the only thing they had in common was the set of eyes, the small flat nose with a purple nose stud, and the lips. Everything else was what my environment and its people had given me. It just rendered the question “am I beautiful?” futile.

Let us move on to the other interesting things I understood after being in Radvanice. The parents of our host, two of the sweetest people I have come across in this country so far, had so many doubts about India. And very genuinely and apologetically asked us questions like “Is India full of elephants?” and “Do you still travel on the roof of trains?”. And it was not just them. I have come across many people here who are under the impression that India is four hundred years later still the way the early colonialists described it. Did I mention my parlour lady who on learning that I am Indian asked “Why wear you no bindi?" More than anything else these questions amuse me and definitely make good points for discussions in lectures. The problem however remains that the West knows us through what has been written and documented through films on us and you can imagine the kind of images these documentaries produce- sickly looking starving people, battered woman, naked children and yes, as one of the guys at the bar exclaimed “you India- Slumdog Millionaire!” And somehow we are responsible for this too. Pick up any brochure on Indian tourism. You will find on them pictures of elephants, camels, ‘native’ women in colourful attire, etc, etc, only reinforcing the image the West gave us. So maybe we have also unconsciously begun to see India as the land of snakes and elephants? We are selling them our exoticism and they are buying from us the bullshit they gave us in the first place. Technically speaking this is a strange situation but in all honesty it is funny too. So next time when a foreigner asks us “Do you still travel on the roof of trains?” let us answer them the way my friend answered that particular question- “Not just roof, we also horizontally hang by the bottom of the trains.” ;)

P.S.- If your knowledge of English music is even worse than mine (and that’s saying something) then it is for your understanding that James Blunt’s most popular song is titled You’re beautiful. Therefore the significance of the title of this blogpost.

~*~ *~ where MAGIC begins ~*~ *~

Because an entire post is dedicated to it, it must be obvious how amazing this place is. Located in one of the alleys that lead away from the Old Town Square in Pardubice is this bar called Klub 29. I have been to this place only a few times but there never has been a time when I came out of it not feeling at least 20 times happier than before.

Klub 29 is attached to Theatre 29 where they say amazing musical and theatrical performances take place but since I have not had fortune of being an audience to either of them I am not in a position to talk about it. So let me steer back to talking about Klub 29.

Other than the fact that this is where I discovered Jagermeister (my eyes are getting twinkly and yeah, I'm only learning about these things now) there are many factors that make this place one of the best in this town.

Factor 1: It has the ‘place next door’ ambience with informal furniture and casual décor. Nothing in this place reeks of artifice or unnecessary nonsense. Well, to be honest other than the beautiful fact that this bar is not stuffy and loud like how many bars tend to get, there is not much about the general looks of the place that sets it apart from the rest but then, that is where the ordinary part ends. I shall now proceed with the other factors listing them according to the level of their greatness in an increasing manner.

Factor 2: To begin with it has two good bartenders. Coy and sweet but always at your beck and call. Wilhelm and Bára (not sure about the former’s spelling). They give you sound and honest suggestions on what to try if you are in doubt.

Factor 3: It has the most number of varieties of Coffee beans to choose from. Yes, this is a coffee-cum-alcohol place, which is something I have never seen in India. So if you are a fan of good coffee this is the place for you to choose from the many kinds from different parts of the world. The one I tried today was from Salvador and it was interesting (pardon my poor geography but before I googled it up I did not know where the place is).

Factor 4: JARIN (pronounced यारिन). He is the owner and without a doubt the life of the place. It is no wonder that people love coming here. You cannot help it, you know, when this man gives you a reason to love this place so much. You will always see him taking turns sitting at each table spending time with his customers. Today we were the lucky ones who he chose to bestow his presence upon. He gave us the best Slivovice we have had so far. Also he demonstrated his elaborate coffee making process through the “vacuum press method”, if I remember right, by bringing a very interesting looking device to our table and dedicatedly brewing coffee in this apparatus that looked like had just been stolen from a chemistry lab. In the picture below you will see the master at work.

Factor 5: Oh, I did not mention the best part, did I? This place is where magic happens J  I am not joking. Be assured. You will never leave the place without having a story to tell. Good enough a reason to come here?

"I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed..."

Moving to Kochi from Orissa 13 years ago made me Bollywood crazy. Having spoken Hindi all my life till then I felt the lack of “Hindiness” when I moved to the southern city where hardly anyone spoke the language let alone watch Hindi movies. Moving to Bombay after 5 years of living in Kochi de-Bollywoodised me. I guess it had to do with being once again in a Hindi-speaking environment and well, Bombay gave me an overdose of Bollywood which made me value it less. After having come to Europe I find that I am once again leaning towards it although my interest in it had virtually died. I find myself helpless when faced with the beginning of autumn and the turning of leaves into yellow, red or brown. It already looks beautiful. How can a once-Bollywood-crazy person like me not feel like picturing herself as Rani Mukherjee singing Tumhi Dekho Na from Kal Ho Na Ho with Shahrukh-I-hate-him-Khan?

Coming back to the point, I started thinking of all the times Bollywood entered and left my life depending on where I was and how I was situated. It occurred to me that Bollywood was only one of the things in my life the importance of which evolved over time and many moves to different locations and situations. Another one of those that comes into mind is religion. I was born Christian and still am a Lamb of God J. But this feeling of being Christian was not something I grew up with. The way I was brought up, going for Sunday Mass was, to put it crudely, the only Christian thing we ever did. In fact in a place where I was the only Christian person other than my siblings I used to feel strange about being a Christian. On one hand I was proud of being different from the rest and on the other I secretly felt ashamed of being different from the rest. Why you may ask. Let me give you a simple example. This is a conversation I very vividly remember from when I was probably eight.

Friend: What did you do on Sunday?

Me: I went to Church

Friend: How often do you go to Church? And where is it?

Me: It is very far from here but we Christians have to go every Sunday.

Friend: So your God is Jesus, na? Why do you pray to a naked God? (Yes, the phrase used was ‘nange bhagwan’)

Me: He is naked because he was stripped off his clothes by bad people.

Friend: But if he is God why did he let it happen?

Me: I don’t know.

Friend: Our gods are very strong. They destroy bad people.

My friends had cool gods, you see, beautiful, exquisitely clad and invincible. And they had plenty of them. I had only one. And he died on a cross. True, he came back to life but why did he have to die in the first place? Yes, these are remarks taken from what could probably have been among the first ‘religious debates’ of my childhood with friends.

At one of the last masses I attended in Orissa before moving to Kochi, my friend- a Christian, another rare creature in my realm of non-Christian friends, brought to my notice that we belonged to a group called Catholics. The word rang a bell. I had heard it somewhere; it sounded cool. But then, I thought, if there were Catholics there had to be non-Catholics too. Who are they? And what makes them different from Catholics? At this point I was almost 13 and I cannot imagine a Christian of that age brought up in Kerala, Mangalore or Bombay not knowing who Catholics are. So there, that was my childhood. I grew up knowing way more about Jagannath, Saraswati, Lakshmi, Vikramaditya and Krishna bhagabaan than I knew about Jesus, Mary or Joseph (at that point God and the Holy Spirit being strange entities mentioned only during mass).

Then came the move to Kochi, a city with a 75% population of Christians. Seeing that I was the only un-Christian being in my circles I took it upon myself to dive deep into Christian knowledge. In 3 years I knew my Bible and I almost became a Bible-verses-spitting self –appointed preacher. The militancy gradually wore off in the next 10 years but I never ceased being a ‘believer’.

Before I came to Europe I thought I knew what Christianity was. Since I had for the longest time wanted to study Indian Christianity I thought it wouldn’t be so difficult for me since I was a Christian myself. I could not have been more wrong. This I started realizing only when my PhD guide and I started discussing what things like faith, doctrines and belief meant to Indian Christians. He prodded and pried my eyes open into seeing what European/ Western Christianity is. It was strange. And indigestible. I don’t know if I can empathize with it still. I explained to him how I understood things and most Christians I knew shared the same understanding giving him specific examples of why and how we practice certain things to which he responded in peals of laughter. He was amazed and fascinated by this odd belief we called Christianity and said that to the western eye it would seem absurd if not blasphemous.

So if a practicing Christian like me, who everyone around believes to have a lot of bhakti, can harbour the kind of beliefs that she does and still be seen un-Christian, what can be said of the few million Christians in India not all of whom have had the opportunity or even disposition to engage in any religious thinking whatsoever? It now begins to make sense why those missionaries said that even the Christians in India are ‘heathens’. We still are and probably will remain so. You see, it takes a lot more than the promise of eternal life to drive the Indian out of you. And now as I sit and wonder what is it that I need to explore academically in order to learn to do good research I realize that I am my own subject and maybe the scores of books written by our very own Mallu priests on the Indian Church may not be able to give me half the answers that my very own experience can. I now understand why they said research is not just academics.