Tired..

Are you happy now?
- Michelle Branch

Tired so tired
of walking the straight and narrow
and following man made dictums
of following the straight and narrow
as defined by a phallo-centric universe
which doesn't let us study
makes us breed
give up homes
countries
lands
for concentration camps
bahus
maids
mangalsutras
sawab
hell.
Made on earth
they walk over her.

To Sofia

Sofia Kovaleskaya, creator of the Kovalesky therom, was the first woman to earn her doctorate in mathemetics in all of Europe and Russia, despite not being allowed to attend classes..
- Dr. Ann Liebowitz, Women in Science

We've worked hard to get here
despite sweating blood every month.

Home

Why do I feel more at home in Germany than I do in any other place in the world.
the sound of the language which made me go around with three Germans, back to back.
The sound of Gauss and math and symphonies.
I dont feel at home in English, though I have been forced to speak it all my life.
Hindustani/Urdu I grew up with.
But none of it is home..
Ich verstehe nicht..

Remember that moment on Frankfurt airport when I walked up the the old man with hat and briefcase and said 'Shalom'.
That was home.

The Faustian Womb

Family formation—most importantly marriage and childbirth—accounts for the largest leaks in the pipeline between Ph.D. receipt and the acquisition of tenure for women in the sciences.
- "Women in the Sciences" report, Center for American Progress

I sometimes wonder if the womb is our Faustian bargain with the universe, giving us the bliss of breastmilk and wombs, in exchange for questioning the universe?
Killing us softly with its song, of baby showers and milk smells, driving us deeper into the abyss of childbirth and death, while our creative juices get transmuted from the laboratory to the nursery.

Der Spiegel or the Mirror

I have only come here seeking knowledge,
what they would not teach up in college;
I can see the destiny you sold,
turn into a shining band of gold.
- Sting, 'Wrapped around your finger'

Was reading and watching the Berlin Wall events on Der Spiegel and thought that Germany IS Faust.
It has lived its namesake in every sense of the word and re-emerged from the ashes.
And fascinating story of Nov. 9 in Germany's history.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,660206,00.html

Land of geniuses and madmen.
Martin Luther to Gutenberg, Aushchwitz to Einstein, Beethoven to Karl Heinrich Marx.
Ich noch liebe dich.

god is great et al

Gott ist tod.
God is dead.
- Friedrich Nietsche.

Read this on a school magazine board when I was 13 and it shook my entire being.

Probably more than any 'spiritual' text I have ever read. None of them did it for me. I tried for years and years like opium..a junkie..the gita to the quran to the dhamapadda to the gnostics to the bauls to the sufis. None of it worked. Like bad relatioships you try to make work, I tried.

I didnt need a school book telling me I should'nt steal or lie et al.
Ironically most people doing that these days believe in some sort of a 'god' or religious text.
Whether its the killers in Gujarat or Pakistan, Texas, Saudi Arabia or the place formerly known as the White House.

As someone said:

They cant even empirically or in anyway, prove or disprove the existence of a god. but are ready to slaughter their next-door neighbor for it.

That's why, on a slightly altered note, I find Bhagat Singh so interesting. a 23 year atheist, born into a Punjabi peasant family, labelled a long-haired Sikh, cuts off his hair and dies at the age of 23, at the hands of the British imperialists, reading Lenin's works, as his last task. His essay 'Why I am an Atheist' is one of the most profound and life altering things I have ever read.
more than Nehru, Jesus, Mohammed or anyone else.

The Rise and Rise of Leah Karpinski..

Feeling like an uber-kuhl East European revolutionary with my gloves, beret and goulash and warm winter boots on the cold November night.
Tonite is the night of birth.. of love and soul.
and love and soul.
and my life.
---

I added some cigarette and tobacco to my life and some borscht, the staple food of freezing starving east european peasants who became revolution and quantum science and made the world anew with their fist and arbeitz and shook whole thrones with one shot.
of vodka, espresso, molotov and bratwurst in brown bread.
Heaven is a hand of rye bread and a poem, wrapped in a papier de tabac.
( tabac, ie. tobacco ie cigarette paper ie. tobacco stores in france)
---

Isn't it interesting that the Jews are the only people to not follow a guru/teacher or a Fuhrer? And most of the European revolutionaries, from Marx, to Freud to Einstein, to Trotsky to Rosa Luxemburg, have been Jews. albeit agnostic, but brought up with that Weltschaung (worldview).
I guess they have always been subversive..not bowing down before any god, stone or man.
you pay a high price for that.
but in the end, its worth it.
Guess my soul is Jewish that way..as someone once said.

The Reich Ends..

This one is for Mr. H Goswami and his buddies who brought 'Mein Kampf' to work everyday in Delhi, when the fascist party, BJP was in power.

"See that? that's where the Reich ends. Behind it, its Russkie/Red Land."
- Der Untergangen, The Downfall: Last Twelve Days of the Berlin/Third Reich

The Male God

Why is god always male?

father and son and blah.
allah putting women in burqas.
the trinity of the hindu gods. creator, preserver destroyer. but he's always male.
how could he create anything without the womb?

Having goddesess press their feet, sitting on lotuses of enlightenment or being worshipped as phalluses/lingams.
One of the reasons I am happy to be not in South Asia is that I dont have to drive past the ubiqoutous phalluses anymore. scattered across every street, Queues of worshippers blocking traffic.
Or have a bearded man tell me what to wear, as my skin is fitna and blocking streets for their weekly trip to jannat, no women, only 72 virgins in sight.

Do they know female rage, the ones who build up the goddess with clay and then throw her into the water?

Platz der Republik/Place of the Republic

I wrote on my facebook a short while ago, that I want to visit: Platz der Republik 1, 10557 Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany

It's the address of the Reichstag (the German parliament).
Perhaps the most fascinating building on earth. More than the Taj Mahal, which is built on the blood of the workers or the pyramids, full of dead kings. or the tombs of dervishes, however intoxicated.

It's a place filled with living people. With the blood, sweat and tears of Marxists and revolutionaries, persecuted Jews and Bolsheviks, pregnant mothers standing in the breadlines, fiery writers, changing the soul of an entire generation.
its the place which captured the soul of the Protest against the church, Rosa Luxemburg and the minds of Einstein, Freud and Marx, whose people, it would get 'gassed' in a few years. (literally and figuratively. The 'Reichstag' fire of 1933, was used a pretext by the Nazis to take over der Republik. And the rest is history).

This piece is inspired by my father..and a comment he made a few days ago which shook me up. He said, "Hitler didnt start it against the Jews.. it was the leftists and trade unions he was after. The whole thing started as a reaction to the rising German Left/labor and trade unions, the Arbeits-nehmer. Rememeber, East Germany had a communist party and became a communist state, though it twisted the original message".

And then, I just watched Pan's Labyrinth and 'Rotation' (a German classic) back to back. Two movies which reveal some interesting insights.
How the land which gave birth to trade unions and Marx, could create Hitler and fascism.
How the Weimar republic (history's most creative, tech-savvy and bohemian era) became the Third Reich.

I have always been fascinated by the puzzle of Germany..perhaps that's why I dated three German men men back to back when I was 23, in England.
The sound of them talking and walking..with Deutschland in their souls.
One of them was quite 'fascist'..male chauvinistic and I always wondered what it was that fascinated me about him.
What fascinated little Ofelia's mother in Pan's Labyrinth, about her tyrannical stepfather, the Captain, of the Spanish Falangists.

and then I realised..it was the 'charisma'.
The same charisma which makes livng, thinking human beings bow down before a clay statue, carved with their own hands. A 'Divine' God/Allah with 'HIS' white beard in the sky, who makes people blow themselves up and slaughter goats to get 'HIS' approval..
The same charisma, which makes perfectly intellectual people, submit to a psychopath like Hitler, because they were hungry and starving and unemployed and he brought mystical healing to their shattered lives.

As Schmidt, the writer-leftist says in 'Rotation', the subtle and fascinating masterpiece, set in the 1930s:

"4 million unemployed in Germany..and rising. Faith-healing won't work. As long as the the state's paid officials keep shooting innocent civilians and workers, I'll stay political".
- Schmidt, 'Rotation', 1949

Russians

Believe me when I say to you,
the Russians love their children too..
- Sting


How we loved Russia..
growing up.

Land of Marx and Das Kapital (well,not literally)
land of Boris Pasternak and the Bolsheviks, who brought down the Czar.

Beloved land of music and Mendeleev
molcules like their music.

Land of Tchaikovksy and his ballerinas, floating like swans on the frozen Neva.
Land of my first Love and Leningrad.
Land of Petrovski and Trotsky, mad with revolutionary rage.
Molotov cocktails in the their eyes, ballerinas in their hearts.
Death in their souls,
Dostoyevsky in their dining rooms
chopping sausages like their hearts.

Long frozen snow covered Urals, flying by Yuri Zhivago's train.

Pasha Antipov and his passion for the peasants..
those sturdy rock hard sons of the Mother
born in India and Pakistan and China and Peru and Colombia
and Argentina..
as Che.

I loved them all..
and now they are all mafias.
Drunk on gold and Bangkok booze
and call girls
roam the sanctum of the Kirov*

*The Kirov is the world famous legendary Ballet theatre, going back centuries.

Je suis la revolucion or Place of la Bastille

I wonder where it comes from?

My love for perfumes and can-cans and songs and Montmartre and parfums and liberty and the revolution and the 1789 and men with berets, smoking chimneys and the gauloises and the paintings and the berets and the absinthe, that I smoke down like a green shadow into my lungs..deep down, sitting with a man in bar, talking about czech maritinis and the savoir faire and the philosophy and the existentialist angst and the sorbonne, where my parents conceived me, even though they were in Delhi and the cinema of Besson and Baudelaire's fleurs du mal/flowers of evil and the art of Toulouse Lautrec, painting poets drunk on absinthe and prostitutes in the Left Bank, the artists quarter..and Loulou (the name my first love gave me at 17).

My mother tells me she was reading Camus's 'Rebel' when she was pregnant with me, even though India and Pakistan were at war and it was her Bible and she had been disowned by her fundamentalist family for marrying outside 'caste'. Dad wanted to join Andrex Malraux and Sartre at the Sorbonne in '68, after his anti-imperialist poems were published and he got an award for being the best young voice at the Afro-Asian writers conference and how he thought Sarte and Beauvoir had a good relationship and marriage didnt need a certificate and asked me to be idiosyncretic and eccentric and question things and learn to read Picasso, his favorite artist.

I guess it was in my blood..
The vive la revolution with La Marseilles in the face of the the Nazis, sung to Ingrid's delightful smile with Casablanca in the backdrop.
Ziggy and I used to hide under the bed and play guillotine games..re-enacting the regicides and Scarlet Pimpernel. Madame Defarge knotting away and a 'Tale of Two Cities'.

The dawn of the modern age..began at the Bastille.

I went to see it, at 23, when I was a poor broke graduate student. Saved everything I had and went to see the Bastille.
There was nothing there, except a rich boulevard called Place de la Bastille.
But I can live now and tell my children, that I stood, where the Bastille stood.

But I realise that I am the Bastille. My parents stormed thirty something years ago. My existence is proof, that the revolution is alive and well.
I am the revolution.

Mom and Dad and Dad: Homosexuality in the animal kingdom

Came across this amazing article, which reinforces what I have been saying all along.
That we are all 'ardh-narishwaras'..yin and yang.

This line is particularly telling:
"Homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" are terms defined by societal boundaries, invisible in the animal kingdom.

-----
http://www.livescience.com/animals/061116_homosexual_animals.html

Some argue that homosexual sex could have a bigger natural cause than just pure ecstasy: namely evolutionary benefits.
It could be used for alliance and protection among animals of the same sex. In situations when a species is mostly bisexual, homosexual relationships allow an animal to join a pack.
"In bonobos for instance, strict heterosexual individuals would not be able to make friends in the flock and thus never be able to breed," Bockman told LiveScience. "In some bird species that bond for life, homosexual pairs raise young.

Almost a quarter of black swan families are parented by homosexual couples. Male couples sometimes mate with a female just to have a baby. Once she lays the egg, they chase her away, hatch the egg, and raise a family on their own.
"Homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" are terms defined by societal boundaries, invisible in the animal kingdom.
contd.

Letter to the Mullahs

(This is a simple cathartic letter. All incidents and names in this article are true and have been personally experienced in real life).

Dear Maulanas of AMU:

Peace be with you etc. though you’ve snatched my peace years ago.
So, I finally remebered and wrote this long overdue letter to you guys/the mullahs..
of Aligarh.
Its taken me almost 19 years to do that..long as its been.
Maybe it was the trigger of the women locked up by the Taliban or the girls in Francesa Marciano's book 'The End of amnners'. or maybe some other random image of the Talibs/ students on CNN which brought the whole experience tumbling out of me..

Do you know what it feels like to be called a prostitute?
Not just in abuse. but to have an article written about you being a ‘call girl'..( then later an apology at the bottom of the same page, which most people probably wouldnt read).
This was my punishement for daring to take on the mullahs of AMU (also known as Aligarh Muslim University, India’s elite univesrity, founded in the heyday of the anti-British-imperialist movement) as a callow 18 year old with the 'Topper' trophy in Biology (in the much coveted All india CBSe ex-m), when I left for Aligarh.
and spent 3 cruel months, like roasting on the coals of hell.

From the day I landed, an un-headscarved, jeans-wearing outsider (don’t ask me why I should Have gone to Aligarh with a 92% in Sciences from India's Top board exam anyways, when I could have walked into any top program in Delhi University. That is a family history that is another story).

I was a shocker. Girls from far and wide in the entombed Women’s College campus of AMU came to see me..me not wearing shalwar kameez, not doing 'salamaliekums' to random strangers and not! Asftegfirullah (god forbid), covering and oiling my head, asa the 'tradition; dictated for the first six months.
I who was my father, another son of Aligarh 'Simone de Beauvoir' meets Annie Aapa.. rolled into one.
My father, as a raw intellectual and handsome young 16 years 'Nawab sahab', had been molded into his leftist progressive sensibility by AMU, 30 years before. Met and married by rebel academic Mom, who was also faculty at AMU ( However, she was unceremoniously thrown out from her faculty position, the day she announced her inter-faith/"Hindu Muslim" marriage to my Dad. Her boss's words to her were, 'Either you can chose Azhar Abbas (my dad) or your job'. My Mom chose us :). So the seeds of fundamentalism were there.. loong back then. That she was also 'disowned' by her own Hindu fundamentalist family, is also another story. What this with my culture and throwing people out and 'disowning' them at the drop of a 'identity'?

Its my father's intractable elegance, that despite such a fascist indifferent society, he brought us to be a French thinkers meets Picasso meets Che Guevara, reading Marx and philosophy before we could walk, being told we could do anything e wanted in life.. reach the stars, as long as we didn’t get wasted..with our life, living in illiteracy to some random guy and having his 3 kids. After all Aligarh was the center of progressive writers movement hand the home of some of India’s most famous Muslim feminists..Ismat Chughtai, Q. Hyder (the octogenarian legend, who never married and wrote 'River of Fire', India's 'One hundred years of solitude') and the Gauloise-smoking, bicycle-riding 'Zaidi sisters'..my Mom and Dad's mentors and inspirations). I didn’t just follow these tenets due to my Dad. it was fundamental to me.. which is why I have always got on with him.

So, I also refused to divulge my religion, smoked Gold Flakes/cigarettes openly (In India, its extremely 'shocking' for a woman to smoke publiclly, unlike countries in the West and even the Middle east) and said 'god is nobody’s business but mine'. I got mad at the "aapas' (elder sisters), the so-called seniors who barged into dorm rooms at night and forced girls to cover their head and ask them if they had read their namaz..prayers. I talked back to them asking them why they were harassing the half literate girl from the Bihar villages, who had spent their entire life's savings to send them to this reputed university.

I found this medieval madness hard to swallow and so I was "boycotted".
An official notice was printed out by the senior "aapas' (who were like the Senior 'Talibs' walking around checking who was covering their heads right and reading their namaz on time). WTH.
The only girls who were loved and respected 9 despite speaking English and being 'asgtf. Delhites were the bimbettes who duly got married even before their final exams were over and moved to Dubai, lock stock and barrel like good Muslim wives are supposed to. Brilliant intelligent girls, discussing the Beatles and Rumi with me at night, married off in 2 weeks.. to strangers or men they didn’t love. and cried to me about. The ones who flaunted it, were even more cherished. two of them lived in my neighborhood in Delhi and their weddings were the talk of the town. Never mind, they were college drop-outs who completed their exams, half pregnant. But you must be pregnant by the time you are 21).

Any girl who spoke to me would be boycotted too. and for two weeks I spent my days eating alone in the hostel cafeterias..But I refused to budge. I felt like one of those heretics during the inquisition or in the Middle Ages in Europe. Like Galileo refusing to say' the sun goes round the earth'. you get the picture.
I was gonna show these mullahs what I was made of, with all my passionate 17 years strength. These b..r couldn’t mess with me. I had Voltaire and Rousseau and Che to live up to.
So I thought.

Some of my friends met me secretly behind the girls 'loos' and said how sorry they were they couldn’t talk to me in public.

I also committed adultery by talking to the boys in the labs.. Sinful harmful things like asking them to pass me test-tubes and what biochemistry books they had read. All this was being duly noted and passed to the Aapas. I would hear the name of the guys I had talked to in the lab, when I got home, even before I knew what he was called :)

After all I was from Delhi’s top co-ed school.. and had to show off my arrogance.
A few weeks later, one of the innumerable Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Aligarh and the university shut down..for a few weeks.
There was curfew et al and I was dancing all the way.

I knew it was my passport out of the mullah-land. All my dreams of Aligarh being a leftists paradise, from the days when my parents had met and fallen in love on its campus, were shattered anyways. The home of Naserruddin Shah and Muzaffar Ali and India's top progressive writers.. was now a mullah land.. infested with Wahabi Salafi funded thugs, who forced women to wear headscarves, attend compulsory prayers and generally randomly harass anyone who dared to break the 'traditions'. (No wonder I sympathies with those kids in Iran. Been dere done dat et al)
I did try to inform them of the 'tradition' of Gauloise smoking writers and feminists like Ismat Chughtai and Qurrtul ain Hyder and the famous 'Zaidi' sisters, which Aligarh had been proud of in its heyday, as North India’s elite paradise, especially for its "Muslim' elite. But nobody wanted to listen. The call to prayer/'azaan' drowned out all other voices.

Then the bombshell happened. The Aapas had promised me they would let me get away with it.. me the half-kafir infidel. who refused to bow down.
(I had quoted the fundamental premise of Islam to them when they asked me to bow and do Salaam. I said, "Islam forbids bowing your head before anyone for the One god'. They had been suitably miffed).

The cheesy article, in the local newspaper talked about how 'call-girls' had infested the women’s college and these girls entertained men at night in cheap guest houses, form Dubai.
They said the name 'Lehar Pepsi' was a code word used by them.
Of course later the paper apologized and said 'we did not know there was actually a student named Leher at the college 'at the time. blah blah).
But the damage was done.
But I did go bk to Aligarh.. to face them down once more and made sure the paper published the apology.
But I left with fear. Fear of a kind which is hard to break free.. and a price I am paying everyday. in terms of thought..
Writing this has been catahrtic..and releasing.
I hope all those girls forced into burqas for fear of being called 'prostitutes' willl one day show their faces.. learn to breathe.
and I will never call a woman a 'prostiture' again..
And with this pregnancy obsession of my countrymen, regardless of religion. I am really getting it out of my system. We are already blowing up the earth with our obssession with reproduction.

Wandering..

I have always been a wanderer.

Even as as child, I was fascinated by the creepers called 'Wandering Jews' my Mom grew in our garden in Delhi.
I want to wander very single land/country on the earth.
Part of me wants to see Europe.. to the east ends of Zagreb and Bucharest and Russia
to the coasts of Guantanamera and the highs of Morocco.
Those days in India, when I was young and free..
and in love with something..
maybe life.
Greece and the highs of the Parthenon to the Zen shaolin temples of Japan and opium in Chinese vases..

I have travelled all these lands before..
I know.

Blues for the Barrios or Billie sings the intifada

The brothers are in prison
and the People are on the Rez
and the companeros are illegal anyway
(and the Jews are in Palestine)..

Refugee Part Deux

This is the continuation of my previous story.

the devastation of being thrown out of your home.
being turned out on the streets.
walking and living around with suitcases.
living on handouts of other people's generosity.
paying three times more for a house
when you are a half-broke
foreign student.
'coz nobody will attack you and throw you out of it.
watching a useless third-rate university
watch you die
slowly
a migrant in a ghetto
of white supremacists
strutting around
with their guns and knives
violence in their voice
your dark skin
holding up as condemnation in their
bliztkreig eyes.
I have been chased by fascists out of my house
and not been home since then.

All the other kids, who walked around normally with homeworks and assignments
wee different from me
normal and different
none of them had been hounded out of their homes
thrown out on the streets in the middle of the night.
broke and heartbroken
begging for mercy
and survival
from a silent dogmatic
stiff upper lip
university
which didnt blink an eyelid
when I stopped attending
classes
instead blamed me for 'failing'
and said
I should study more
while I went
back and forth
confused
so as to why I couldnt concentrate
on calculus and design
projects
and Bayseian models of process engineering.

I was envious of those South-East Asian kids
walking around with their Nokias
and laptops
walking around so efficiently
and I wondering why I couldnt concentrate on my homework.

I thought it was the sex and drinks
being homesick, the dark weather..
while it was PTSD
and looking over my shoulder
every time
I breathed.

I was living on the mercy of that guy
almost
he was letting me be
and so I was.
Everything in my life
was out of the window since that day.

How the West was Lost: My true story of racism in England

It’s coming back to me
but its never left me.
The horror of 5 September 1995.
In Birmingham, UK.

The day that destroyed and changed my life.
The nightmare which I have been fleeing from all my life.

The night when I, L, an Indian student barely 22 yrs old, was sitting in my dorm room, filled with my beloved Klimt and Van Gogh posters, my first home away form home
When I heard a thundering noise.
Thuds and the lights went out.

Footsteps outside my door and a clicking sound..
I went to the door to investigate.. in the total blackness
I heard drunken hysterical laughter, shrieks and then someone pushed me. shoved me hard against the wall.
My tall blonde Dutch roommate.
She was drunk out of her head and they were saying random things..I don’t even remember what. Something vaguely nasty about Indians.. I don’t recall anything anymore..
I was like 'Where are the lights?! All the other rooms/ dorms are on'.
They were saying, "We have switched off the power". ha-ha
Hysterical laughter again.
When I tried to go to the power-point at the entrance of our six room dorm/apartment, they stopped me. Stood in the way.
"We won’t let you. Go be to your room ha-ha!"
"I have a test tomorrow!"
Ha-ha.
I went into the room, took my things and ran to the public phone on the building stairways.
Called university security.
Nobody came.
They just asked me "leave the building if I didn’t feel safe".

I slept on the floor of the all male dorm of a fellow international student, sweetheart C from Thailand. he saved my life that night and so many times more with his notes and lectures, when I missed class after class in the first semester, ‘house-hunting' and 'house-changing' and running away from abusive boyfriends. My only relief was partying like crazy and getting drunk..when I should have been ‘home' in my cosy Klimt room, studying Reynolds numbers and genetic mutations., the loves of my life.
I was too scared to go home. Only a man or a party could save me..
And then I went to the other extreme.. but that is another story.

I was homeless for the first time. Needless to say, I missed my exam and classes the next morning. The Graduate school, precious Masters in Bioengineering program I had slogged and slaved to enter and pay for.
It was my first academic defeat. The memory of that almost-failed first semester still haunts.
As I changed four houses that fall. Two due to the incessant crime on the streets. And the open prostitution I witnessed very night on the way home from my department.

Later, the university authorities refused to do anything about the actions of those girls.I was a lone 22 year old international with no clue about this foreign university and country I had been visiting alone for the time since my childhood..
all European. French Dutch and one Canadian bimbette with her aggressive boyfrind, who threatend with ' dire consequences if I ever Talk about that night’.
I still carry the thought of his threatening knife in my head... feeling unsafe anywhere I go... anywhere I live... sabotaging my homes and career sometime for stupid abusive men/ whom I think will 'protect' me.

I, the radical green feminist who marched for the Dalai lama and Tibet, ran 100 m sprints, wrote articles about Suu Kyi and slept with a handwritten copy of Lennon’s 'Imagine' by my head/ desk.

No justice or questions were ever asked to those girls, who drove an international Asian student out of her home, within a week of coming from a foreign land.
No Prof. ever asked me how I was.. Asked the University to take those kids to task.
In fact, the only thing was from my adviser who said, 'I understand you have to change houses many times'.
Instead of saying, 'We will ensure your safety and bring those goons to justice'.

I have been deeply scarred by experience in the UK.. And it’s taken me years to speak and heal from it.
I went into a complete desi ghetto mode. Watching Indian films. Eating Indian food, dating 'desi/ south Asian men..Stuff I couldn’t have imagined doing earlier in my life.
The only way I cud make it through the program, a nice 'Uncle' mentor told later was to be a 'nice Indian girl'. Get bk together with my original (abusive) desi boyfriend and stop being like 'those European' girls.
The George Eliots and Marie Curies and Eliabeth Ist-s. I had grown up admiring and my Mother had wanted me to learn from.
"You are an Indian and stay that way".
And so I became an 'Indian', staying home and studying, but giving up my essential soul.. to successfully complete that graduate program.
How would I face my father, who had out his hopes in me for studying in the UK.. the old colonial dream of many Indians and Pakistanis. (and my grandfather,, who wanted to 'read' at Oxford but partition and an early death took it away from him.
My dearest J chachu, who wrote me letters from Delhi, inspiring me on with his poetry and love for English literature).
The only way out was sell-out.
and I didn’t even know it.
Sell out of my 'Rachel Corrie' Lennon-ish soul who wore '60s clothes, round glasses and mocked women dying to get married..
Didn’t believe in the state sanction of love.
Didn’t believe in 'religion'.
Didn’t believe in countries.

Seeking that security in Rani Mukherjee cosy movies with salwar kameez'ed belles an the romantic ashiqs who protected them.
I bought into the parental trap and the baggage of South Asia.
Even Gandhi and vegetarianism..thus indirectly 'Hindutva'..w/out realizing it.

I, who had been brought up like a European-Sufi agnostic with very a French-Persian household..with Picassos and Marx, Ghalib and Shergill.
Started to detest Europe and all that it had stood for..
A betrayal..'dagaa' of my love.
I never went back to Europe again after that.
Since I left England, 5 years later..years of struggle, completing my program, getting my first job in London and breaking up with an abusive desi boyfriend..
I continue to carry the scars..

And didn’t take up on the offer of the immigration official, who gave me a week’s visa to ‘roam' around in London on my way bk from the US.
‘No thanks, I’d rather stay at the airport’.
I did stop in Frankfurt on the way back. But a part of me remains ‘Euro-phobic’..
And I guess that drove my incessant desire to fit bk into my land/ culture..
Much to the bafflement of my parents, who had brought me as a global citizen
In a house full of Mozart, Sartre, Che Guevara and Faiz.

But, I am learning to walk again..
And its been a journey..
I want to share this, because such experiences are shared by many international students (esp. 'third world’ students across the world).
And not many speak about it.
The recent events in Australia against Indian students have brought racism to light.
But it’s an evil which need to be talked about and fought... everyday.

Thank goodness for the USA.
Blasphemous as this may sound to super Left comrades..
I am a leftist too.. But I have lived in the Midwest and Deep South.
And felt nothing compared to the deep pervasive and vicious racism which lurks in the eyes.. of Central London and across working-class England for 'Pakis' ( immigrants of the South Asian origin from the India, Pakistan and the 'colonies') and FOBS or 'fresh off the boat' scholarship holding international students, (especially in second generation British children of the same).. Where you dare to talk with a salwar kamee and a bindi on ur face. (I have known some lovely Brits, esecially my first bosses and editors at the Guardian and the FT, who epitomized that best tradition of Fleet Street, Oscar Wildish-Shavian London, I had grown up loving). Even Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, now Dean at Cambridge University talks about his experience of the same in the 1960s. and how the spires of Oxbridge are 'stained with the blood of hanged Indians', alluding to the phenomenon of racism-driven suicides, among South Asian students, especially in the colonial era.

When the London bombings happened, I was saddened but not surprised.
If an a-religious agnostic Asian like me can turn to temples, mosques and spiritual 'gurus' and Rani Mukherjee, what about those who are born there and spat upon day in day out and grow in up ultra ‘religious’ and working class households, with not much exposure to literature and Camus and Che Guevara?
What of them?

Women as the occcupied

We are the occupied territories.
occupied by
snakes
shoes
israelis
tanks
poles
jews
germans
arabs
priests
boys
ghungats
sindoor
veils
sex
brides

we are the manifest destiny of an ancient land
born again
into the sunlight
but walking
under checkposts
orgasms
burnt alive
at the stake
bonfires
bridal showers
hassled
by incense
burnt before alters of dead gods
priests
consuming us.
setting us aflame to
feed their deity
back dead stone
phallus.

fermented for centuries
we remain
under the thumb
of the soldier
the stengun
of the eternal bride
waiting to be rescued
from her funeral pyre.

-dedicated to lesbians and the women of palestine. and somewhat angelina jolie, who dared to be single and pregnant. and bethany mclean, who wrote about the big boys of enron.

Silk or the reason for my madness

The world is changing for me
opening up
unravelling
like the strings of a cocoon
silk
smooth silk
i had tied around myself

covered myself with
like a shell
of bees
and guzzling honey
from my soul
smooth sacred silk
of the wedding shroud
saree silk
sharara silk
wrapping around my throat

like a noose.
smooth and red
lovely and radiant
it lures
me
draws me
to its sheer hues
glittering
like the eye of mephistopheles
resplendent
with the noor on the head of a bride
red smooth sindoor
mingled
with sweat and dirt of the wedding guests
partaking of my fathers feast.
I wait
waitting by the bed
to be taken
home.

bride of allah
I stay
beside the one
who will take me there
smooth sacred and red
in my silk satin gown.

(here's the reason for my madness -Chef Emeril).

Imaginery Homelands and the descent into hell

I was reading about the events in Iran and they are shaking the core of my soul. In a positive way.
Something in me is shifting, because it a universal cause, but I am also part of it.

My Iranian roots, which have never gone away, like the voice of Africa in the blood of American slaves.. or the sound of Guantanamera in the hearts of Cuban/ Hispanic Americans.

Why did I deny it for so long?
Pretending and giving an almost totalitarian loyalty to the country I was born in. Sure I should love the place..but I didnt and don't TOTALLY belong there..
Part of me is and will be Iranian.
Its just like the third and fourth generation children of migrants, who deny and deny and dney their Chinese and Japanese and Latin heritage, but eventually reconcile their multiple identities.

With all the xenophobia against minorities in India in the recent years, we had even more idolatrous behaviour, pretending to be soo 'Indian'.

The other thing is the alsmot complete decline and 'corruption' of the revolutionary migrants and followers of Ali from Iran and Iraq, who fled to the peaceful subcontinent as refugees..and totally lost their original spirit.
Their 'identity' became the be-all, governed by inbreeding, caste and intolerance for 'outsiders', just like the caste system their belief system protested and forbade against.

Quote:
Zaidis believe Zayd, the revoltionary was the rightful successor to the Imāmate because he led a rebellion against the Umayyads, whom he believed were tyrannical and corrupt. Muhammad al-Baqir did not engage in political action and the followers of Zayd believed that a true Imām/leader must fight against corrupt rulers. The first Zaidi state was established in Daylaman and Tabaristan (northern Iran) in 864 C.E. by the Alavids. The state was revived in Gilan (north-western Iran) and survived under Hasanid leaders until 1126 C.E. Though Zayd ibn Ali was martyred in Kufa, Iraq, many of his descendants either returned to al-Hijaz or remained in Iraq. Some of those who stayed in Iraq settled in Wasit and some then moved to the Indian subcontinent."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaidi

The almost complete decadence, corruption, political and social insensitivity to teeming poverty became part of their/ our soul.I personally never reconciled with the horrors of the poverty I saw on the streets of Delhi where I grew up, in relative 'Air-conditioned' ease, while people died of heatstrokes and hunger down my street.
This indifference to poverty is common to a large parts of India and Pakistan, where the gaps between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' expand everyday, and with hardly any protest against it. Its one part of the world, where the poor are SOOO de-radicalized, and politically unconcious, starved and deprived of basic literacy as they are. (except the Maoist and Left-influenced tribal regions of eastern and southern India and maybe the Punjab and Kashmir, which are 'rebel' states anyways, due to their unique Sikh and Sufi cultures).
I do not see and read about such horrifying extremes in Iran and even other 'fundamentalist' countries in the Middle East like Turkey and Jordan (though artifically created 'states' like Saudia and Emirtaes have the real horror stories about the immigrants who run their countires)
How a people treat the 'poor' and 'others' in their society reflect everything about them.

The ordinary Irnanians out on the streets, fighting the dictatorship and religious fanaticism are very different from 'my' people, and yet I feel more at home with them than I have felt in India..though I love both places.
But I have never been to Iran and it feels like home.
and I have almost always lived in india..and it never felt like my complete home.

As Salman Rushdie says in his interesting piece: "Self government today requires a politics that plays itself out in a multiplicity of settings, from neighborhoods to nations to the world as a whole ... The civic virtue distinctive to our time is the capacity to negotiate our way among the sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting obligations that claim us, and to live with the tension to which multiple loyalties give rise. In a world where capital and goods, information and images, pollution and people, flow across national boundaries with unprecedented ease, politics must assume transnational, even global forms." (Imaginery Homelands)

Anything else, requiring unilateral allegiance, be it to a man, a country, a cause..begins the descent into insanity and hell that is the human mind and its self-delusions.

The Second Wife syndrome and other colonizations

This article is partially inspired by D, my father AZ, 'Pph', A and their inspiring exposure for me, to some of the strong and fascinating women described in this article.
---
So, I was having a conversation the other day with a friend about the whole second wife/polygamy thing..Esp. in the "Muslim" world..and then I came across this website (when I was looking for some hair care tips) on how many Arab women "spend hours beautifying themselves 'coz they have to compete with other wives or their threat to their men". Kinda 'stereotypical'. but also tragically true to an extent, like some of the blase 'arranged marriage/caste' questions one gets asked about India. Stereotypes, but not altogether untrue.

And so, I started to think, when did 'Arab and Muslim' women go from being Fatima, Rabia, Noor Jahan, Razia ad infinitum to being bleached, trussed, over-sexed objects or completely sexless under 'abayas'..trying to hold on to their man?

The early women in 'Islam' fought wars, wrote poetry, held discourses and even the 'many' women the Prophet married.. were ALL (but one) widows and divorcees. and all the marriages were political alliances. The only marriage for love was with his first (and only wife, till she lived) Khadija, a twice-divorced business woman twenty years older to him, who fell in love with HIM and sent the marriage proposal. (Though I find it hard to digest this practise, this was also historically a brutal tribal time in the desert, where battles claimed men on a daily basis and women far out-numbered men.. and had not much social support unless they were married to a male 'protector'. Many women lost husbands twice or thrice over to the violence of this era).

So, when I see the sorry humiliating state of 'Muslim' girls, especially in South Asia today, begging to be 'married off', selling their souls, paying the man's family with refrigerators, cars and what not, and some STILL living with the threat of the ubiquitous second wife, I feel ashamed.

Given that polygamy is almost miniscule among South Asians...but I think of Shahla (name changed) Aunty.. a lovely 'hoori' (angel) and my Mom's best friend for almost 30 years, her love for literature and reiki and how her loving but possessive husband Umar (name changed), a sane loving man, suddenly went 'cuckoo', when he came under the influence of the 'Tablighi Jamaat'(the conservative Saudi influenced/ funded Sunni sect) and decided to marry a second wife, a divorcee (a noble thing)to earn 'sawaab' (good karma to put it bluntly).
Good karma by breaking one woman’s heart.. A woman who has given him 20 years of her life and four children?? (Three of them 'boys', in that male dominated society). He had no logical reason but the delusions of the Jammat which convinced him..
I feel, the status of women in the wider 'Islamic' world represents the colonization of this world itself.
For whenever a civilization turns upon itself and starts oppressing its women and minorities, it declines or gets colonized..History is witness to that.

Tough as it sounds, The state of women in many Middle eastern countries reflects upon the self-destructive colonization of the men.. Who were the pioneers of Andalusia,.. built the first modern libraries, telescopes and had women doctors walking through the streets of Cordoba, Spain in the 11 century.
Interestingly, authors and philosophers from ancient Chinese, Greek and Indian agnostics to the Buddha, to European enlightenment figures, to Prophet Mohammed to the controversial Irshad Manji have said the same thing, on the lines of "Societies flourish, based on how women are treated there".

Of course, there has been a brilliant and powerful Arab feminist movement typified by Nawa al Sadawi and many others. The wider Arab, Persian and 'Muslim' world has produced some of the most inspiring activitts like the Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi and the brilliant and intense Zainab Salbi..but there need to be more Shirins and Zainabs.
Pakistan has its own revolutionary in the brilliant and fearless Fatima Bhutto, the niece of the slain Benazir..who constanlty writes against the powerful mullah-military establisment in Pakistan without fear, has a Masters from SOAS and an Ivy League undergrad degree from Columbia. But where are the rest.. so busy holding on to our husbands that we have forgotten our self..just like colonized women everywhere, like the 'husband worshipping' Satis and Savitris from ancient India, who still continue to be held up as role-model for Indian women, regardless of 'identity'.

But even in India, strong women like Noor Jahan and Jahan Ara were adept hunters, archers, philosophers and lived with their own independence, while in wider India, thousands of women were being burnt alive as 'Satis' upon their husbands' funeral pyres. Many Mughal princesses never married and died as powerful influential dowagers a la Dame Judi Dench.. Not helpless sex objects living in fear of the 'Second wife'.
Some of the greatest writers of the subcontinent have been women like Q. Hyder and Ismat Chugtai.. one called the 'Gabriel Marquez' of India and the other the ultimate dowager 'Badi Bi', who wrote about lesbianism back in the '40s and chose to be cremated in a secular ceremony..for which many fanatics haven’t forgiven her.

These women came from the same community, where now, dignified ladies like Shah Bano have to beg for state mercy to get maintenance from their polygamous husbands, where my beautiful P. Aapa brings up a son on her own for eight years, while their philandering husbands never look back, especially to placate their dowry-greedy mothers, who swing between the excesses of 'Hinduism' (caste,dowry etc.) and 'Islam' (polygamy, purdah) to their convenience. Chosing to walk out of an abusive marriage and NOT taking a penny or the infinite dowry her widowed mother gave him to marry her. Where my beloved Samina (name changed), is living pregnant and alone, 6 months after her marriage while her 'Syed' husband(the right caste she was appropriately married into) gallavants in Mumbai..With rumors of another woman and that he had only married her to placate his family (caste/ religious) obligations. Add to it the horrendous oppression many of them face in countries like India, with state sanctioned rape and murder, as it happened in Gujrat in 2002. Add to it the ubiquitous subcontinental disease of 'caste', which regulates marriages from Bangladesh, India to Pakistan.. a population of almost 1.5 billion across all 'religious' ethnicities living there. So many women I know died or lived under torture 'coz the were "non-Syeds" or "non-Khans" or non-whatever..I was pleasantly surprised to see the relatively common practice of "Shia-Sunni' and even "Moslem-Christian" and inter-faith, inter-country (including western) marriages in Iraqi and other Arab friends..Something which is impossible to think of (without major social ostracization) in India/Pakistan/ Bangladesh. Ironic for a belief system, which decries and forbid not only 'caste' but racial 'differences', which (1400 years before America allowed African Americans to enter restaurants for a glass of water), had a freed Ethiopian slave, Bilal, give the first call of prayer from the 'holiest' place for its followers, the heart of Mecca.

But the men have to let them go first.. or we have to free ourselves.
As long as the Shah Banos and Saminas and Bilkis Banos will continue to spring up and suffer, like the palm trees in the scorching sand.
Think of Fatima, who told off Ali, the warrior of 'god', "You better not bring a second wife to my house or you'll never see me again". Ali never took a second wife as long as Fatima was alive. She who lived opposite her beloved father's house to bring up revolutionaries like Zainab and Hussein.
Zainab, the fiery revolutionary and orator, granddaughter of the Prophet who took on the most powerful man in the Arab world at the time, the Caliph Yazeed. A woman whom fundamentalist mullahs try to hide or present as the 'obedient' sister of her slain brother Hussein, who gave these earth shattering speeches in the Caliph’s court "with her (dead) brothers permission"( a brother who was mutilated and beheaded in the desert of Karbala with 72 revolutionary comrades, from different 'faiths' and countries including Indians). Apparently, Zainab asked Hussein's "permission", while he was still alive, to give these speeches after he died!! at the time when he was battling the 'Caliph's' army of 5000, with 72 starving and thirsty comrades and 50 women and children of his and their families.
Wow!
Men who say women can’t leave the house without their husband’s permission...How was the Prophet's wife running a sucessful interantional business spanning caravans, continents and the Sikh Ruote, and supporting him in his mission without a husband or father to give her permission, especially before she met him and continued to do so AFTER she married him? Now you beg to enter the United States with the government’s permission..You lock women in the house and a Guantanamo springs up. Its politically incorrect but its a pattern of history..and not to justify the horrendous abuses by the previous US govt..But a cause for introspection.For a community which constantly looks without..for its suffering..but hardly ever within. Those who do dare to self-criticize are labeled immediately.. 'western stooges', 'anti-Muslim','infidels'.. and suffer the fate of a Salman Rushdie or an Asra Nomani.

A belief system which gave women the right to 'qubool'/ accept or reject their would-be-husband, 1400 years before the West or India, is now the colony of its men's deluded egos, vanities and their mothers, who bring up sons, like fawning (desert tribal/jahilliya) "infidels" they love to criticize.. the same desert tribals who buried their baby daughters alive and threw their Prophet out of Mecca, 'coz he was giving 'women and slaves too many rights. (including the right to property, work, education, marrying the partner of their choice etc.). How ironic.

When a Tree shook Delhi

So, how long are we supposed to adulate Rajiv Gandhi.
like bimbette women adore their corrupt or abusive husbands..all too human turned into demi-gods?

This is the man who sanctioned the mass genocide of more than 3000 Sikh men, women and children 'coz his Mom had been shot dead by a Sikh. Wow, even W didnt make it so obvious.. at least we didn’t have mobs with swords burning alive every 'Middle East' looking person on the streets of NY within a day of 9/11.

This is the man we have adored for two decades our 'our Rajiv', the handsome son of Indira and Feroz, the beauteous pilot with the lovely Italian wife.
The dream Rajiv.
I cried so much the day he died..in the midst of the ghettos of Sri Lanka..
but I never knew or rather realized, it was his instructions..as the de-facto PM of India..once his mother had been shot, 'When a tree falls, the earth shakes'..that gave overt and covert nods to the Delhi and Indian government to enable the genocide against the Sikhs of Delhi, which went on..unabated for 4 days.
As 'somebody' refused to call in the Army or tell the police to do their job.
I am feeling ill right now.. don’t even know if this is relevant any more as some people may say. I did know it, but re-reading and seeing it for what it was..
We abuse Modi.. rightly so, but nobody in India dare think of 'dear' Rajiv as a Modi.
Taking Modi’s name is almost a 'lanat/abuse (thanks goodness for that) but Rajiv is still ‘our Rajiv'.
Madam’s son.. Madam’s husband. Gudiya and Baba's Dad. Whom we have re-elected to be our Mummy and Daddy.. for the umpteenth time. Benazir did the same thing in Pakistan with her brother Murtaza Bhutto, having him shot and riddled with bullets by 70 army commandos in front of his house..and god knows how many other political 'disappearances'. But this was way beyond.

But it is relevant. It is relevant to who I am as a person and who I had become. A lover of liars and cheats and rogues.
The personal is the political and the political is the personal.
That is not untrue without a reason
Right now I am thinking of the burnt bodies of all those thousands and thousands of Sikhs burnt alive and burnt dead after their 'disappearance' and torture at the hands of the Indian state.
Cowed down, as they never were by either the Mughals or the British.
Betrayed by the country they was their own.
and Rajiv, with his smiling face, was one of those ordered their execution/genocide.
Not one voice in the Indian media dared criticize him.
He was the Prince Charming.
We cried for you Rajiv..but I wonder if those tears were in vain.

"It was 9.20 am"..Memories of 1984

It was 9.20am.
We were playing out in the field, when the bell started to ring.
Clang clang it went.
The sports 'period' wasn’t yet over and neither was it lunch time.
Why on earth would it ring at 9.20 in the morning?
“Mrs. G has been shot”.

We were packed home and sent back immediately.
I wasn’t sure what was going on but I heard something about a "Sardarji"' being pulled off his scooter and burnt in front of AIIMS.
Why on earth would someone want to kill Sardar-jis? (A term of affection and respect for Sikh men)
It didn’t make sense.
I was an 11 yr old studying at an ‘elite’armed forces school of New Delhi, the day Mrs. Gandhi, India's never-ending prime Minister, Mother Superior and India rolled into one, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguard, in revenge for controversial attacks on the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, known as Operation Blue star. (to supposedly ferret out Sikh separatists, but it also became notorious for internationally documented human rights abuses, civilian casualties and sexual violence against Sikh women).
Now I knew all about Bhindrawale and the scary 'terrorists' Khalistani types who went around killing people in Punjab, even had nightmares about Bhindranwale once, but they were 'terrorists'.. Killing Sardarjis was completely baffling to me.
Delhi burnt and raged for the next 12 days. I heard trucks blow up every night from my window and saw the mobs- horrible angry men brandishing sticks who came by to our house' looking for Sardarjis.
I hated them. My uncle, a crazy Punjabi, stood out and spoke with those men.' no jhuggads here'.. a colloquial slang for the Sikhs. I later found he had put his life at risk saving 'Sunny uncle', a cute cuddly friend of his, who hid in the trunk of his car all the way to the Himalayan hill station of Dehradun.

I was still unwell mentally and thought the whole exercise was insane and completely ludicrous. I had always known deep inside that Mrs. G would always be 'President of India'.. unless someone killed her, ‘coz she was immortal and would never die like the rest of us. It was the child’s awe which had built in through the years of the quasi- dictatorship and 'shah' parasti which characterizes much of the political leadership of the subcontinent. But I remember feeling shocked when I saw my classmate ‘A-deep’ come in, with his long 'joodi/ turban gone..what's a Surd without his hair? Many months later, one of the ‘behenji’ classmates (whowas waiting to get married ASAP) told me in a hushed voice. "Do you know ‘A-deep's’ father was killed?" I was shocked. ‘A-deep’ never said a word or showed a sad face. We all know now about the widows of 1984. I guess his Mom was one of them..what a thought.
It made me uneasy. But nobody, I repeat nobody talked about it. I did not even know that 4000 people languished in refugee camps outside my 'posh' school which taught us morality and 'love for the country'. and secularism. How secular we were.. while the Indians who formed the backbone of our armed forces (Sikhs form one of the largest Indian groups to join the armed forces) were being massacred at our doorstep and our elite Armed forces school did not even pay them a condolence or prayer. I do not recall even a moment of silence or prayer or a volunteer group observed in my school, circles or friends for the dead, wounded and homeless in Delhi on that day. Or ever after.

(There were some laudable citizens’ groups who worked tirelessly for the victims of the pogrom, but they were ad-hoc citizen groups- not really state or even non profit agencies, followed later by Mother Teresa’s missionaries of charity).

There is something about the Sikhs which has always awed me.. they are innocent and ballsy and have a backbone..

But I recall the awe with which the Indian IAS and IPS officers were held in; a large chunk of them were part of the genocide (even the ones following 1984) as well.With notable exceptions like Hemant Karkare, Harsh Mander and the many brave ones we don’t hear about, the ones Bollywood shows. If they are so corrupt why does my family and circle hold them in such awe? I knew, I never wanted to be part of it. Ever.

I only read about it recently, through the years.. about the scale of the atrocities. Somewhere it was taken for granted and at another level, it was like a dark blot, which everyone wanted to forget and move on.
I wonder if that was the beginning of the end. but it definitely stifled my conscience. I hated our middle class circle where people came and went talking of IITs and saris and shopping trips. and all these Sikhs were lying dead outside our door. There are other memories, like the burnt down 'house with the fountains', my favorite bungalow in my locality.. which had (I tragically figured) obviously belonged to a Sardarji. I guess the memory of what happened is strange and baffling to me even today, but it has distorted memory and conscience. The appalling record of human rights by the Indian state, which reports state, kills more people in custody each year' than were killed by Pinochet's regime (Barbara Strasse, NY Times, 1993) is never discussed in international forums or the "orientalist" CNNs. After all, it’s the land of Gandhi and the Gandhis are still ruling it.
-----

The other thing I find shocking is the love and reverence for Sufism and even Islam that permeates the depth and breadth of the Punjab. Day after day for the entire month that I spent living and travelling through the heart of Punjab and its former insurgency, Gurdaspur, I fond people looking after hundreds of Sufi shrines and tombs..with love reverence and piety.. and almost sense of nostalgia. As one old genetleman said, " Since the Moslems left, the light has gone from our Punjab", referring to the Partition of the Punjab into Indian and Pakistani sections in 1947.
So contrary to the Sikh- Muslim rivalry you hear from the 'elite' educated class and even the belligerent Pakistani establishment. I found old Sikh caretakers of a 400-old year mosque, built by the 6th Sikh guru for his Muslim disciples- yes..they existed! A gurdwara/ Sikh temple with the grave of a Muslim Sufi inside it, which had to be revered before entering the Sikh temple.. a Sufi shrine tended meticulously for 50 yrs since partition, where very Sikh bride and bridegroom visit after their marriage and where the caretakers boasted, they had finally asked an old Maulana/ mulla to come from Kashmir to tend the place, as ‘we don’t know the proper Islamic prayers to respect the saint’.. amazing how every year scores of Pakistani dervishes come down from ‘the other side’ to participate in days-long Sufi and Sikh music festivals..I never heard a single anti-Muslim word during the time I was there, something I am used to in the posh educated living rooms of Delhi, London and LA for years. But it all didn’t matter in the long run. I fell in love with the Punjab and its paajis..It felt like home.
As it always has and always will.

NB: The next time, I will talk about the more politically incorrect memories of 1992, all the more difficult for me to talk about due to my last name and the fear of being labels a 'fanatic'

Fabian Socialist nostalgia et al

I am feeling intellectually deprived.
Starved in a way..
Wish I could be back in the London of the '30s, hanging with the Fabian Socialists, Oscar Wilde et al. Shaw and Virginia Wollfe, sipping Martinis at bookstore cafes in the West End.

If I have to watch one more American mind-numbing carb-loaded TV show..I'll be ill.

Can sex and the city, love, music, babies ever be a substitute for intellectual stimulation?
Can men ever make up for poetry and the Love song of J Alfred Prufock?
Can a diamond replace the intellectual trip which comes from peeping into the heart of a molecule?

Read it and weep..

From India's leading independent newspaper, Tehelka.
Read it with your hadn to your heart. I survived this massacre.
Others were not so lucky, trusting in a country, which was supposed to be their 'secular democracy'.
Not in 1000 years of so-called 'Muslim' rule did anything like this happen.
Even the Brits attacked rebels/ mutinners only and except for the atrocity at Jaliianwala Bagh, did not rape and do THIS to Indian women, EVER.
In fact, they protected them from being burnt alive as "Satis".
How can I look my maker in the face, for the deluded love of this shameless land?


http://www.tehelka.com/story_main35.asp?filename=Ne031107Press_release.asp
Press Release: Tehelka Investigation

Gujarat 2002: The Truth
The truth about Gujarat 2002 in the words of the men who did it

Even after five years, the Gujarat carnage remains a hotly contested issue. We have had disputed versions from the State, the police, the victims and civil rights groups. In Tehelka’s ground-breaking investigation, for the first time hear the truth of the genocidal killings from the men who actually did it. In disclosures that are shocking and graphic.

A six-month Tehelka investigation brings forward irrefutable evidence of many horrific incidents that have remained contested in the last five years. For instance:
A pregnant woman’s womb was indeed pierced with a sword and the foetus wrenched out.
How Muslims hiding in a gutter in the hope that they would survive were killed.
In the Gulbarg Society massacre, a first-hand account of how the former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was hacked limb by limb and burned.
Confessions to rape, something the state has consistently denied.
How dozens of Muslims hiding in a pit and clinging together in fear in Naroda Patiya were doused with kerosene and burnt alive.
For the first time, the investigation brings confirmation that the Gujarat murder of Muslims was not a spontaneous swell of anger, but a planned genocide strategised and executed by top functionaries of the RSS, the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and the state authorities, with the knowledge and sanction of Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

A BJP MLA is on tape saying he was present in the meeting in which Chief Minister Narendra Modi gave them three days time to do whatever they wanted. These are his exact words, “He had given us three days time… to do whatever we could. He said he would not give us time after that… He said this openly. After three days, he asked to stop and everything came to a halt…”

An accused in the Naroda Patiya massacre – the biggest incident in 2002 in which over 200 Muslims were killed – is similarly on camera saying Modi came to Patya that evening and thanked them saying, “Aap dhanya ho…”

A senior VHP functionary who was on the Sabarmati Express said, “The Mulsims had played a one-day match with us…. They have given us a target of 60…. We have to win this match at any cost, so don’t stop till you have made 600 runs… Modi gave us a free run to do whatever we wanted…. The police was with us…”

In other incriminating disclosures, it appears that bombs were manufactured in factories owned by senior Bajrang Dal and VHP activists. Arms were smuggled from UP, MP, Bihar and Punjab and then distributed to execution squads led by MLAs and senior members of the Sangh Parivar. Consignments of arms were not just smuggled in once but “there were tens and tens of them.”

Tehelka’s undercover reporter Ashish Khetan met scores of conspirators and rioters who gave first hand accounts of how they had personally killed Muslims. A BJP MLA makes startling disclosures. Bombs – petrol bombs, pipe bombs – were made in a fire cracker factory owned by him. He damns himself further saying they even made rocket launchers which were then used in the pogrom.

Several conspirators mention several key meetings across the State that were held on the evening of 27 February, 2002 itself. The strategy on how to hit back and give a ‘befitting reply’ was devised on in these meetings, barely a few hours after the burning of Coach S 6 of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra.

The investigation has graphic accounts from the conspirators and rioters on how the Police colluded with them. How some dead bodies from Naroda Patiya were sent to Ahmedabad by the Police Commissioner to lower Patiya’s death count. How police officers opened fire on the Muslims.

The investigation further reveals the elaborate legal subversion executed to save those accused for their role in the genocide. There were the cool strategists – leaders, officials, ideologues. And there were the foot soldiers, who actually raped, killed and looted. To help these foot soldiers escape the law, the strategists had constituted a panel of lawyers sympathetic to the ‘Hindu cause’.

Two public prosecutors admit on Tehelka’s tapes how, contrary to their public office, they are secretly defending the ‘Hindu accused.’ How they try and settle deals between the accused and the victim survivors.

The legal subversion continues. A senior lawyer casts aspersions on the two member Nanavati-Shah Commission, inquiring into the 2002 riots. “Shah is our man,’’ he says.

In another ground-breaking part of the investigation, Tehelka exposes a trail of lies and coercion that establishes that the fire in coach S 6 of the Sabarmati Express was a case of spontaneous mob fury and not a premeditated conspiracy as alleged by the state government to justify the carnage. Tehelka has caught several key police witnesses admitting that they have given fake testimonies against the religious and political leadership of Godhra for various reasons.

For instance: A crucial police witness – a petrol pump employee who said he had sold 140 litres of petrol to the accused on the evening of the sabarmati incident – admits he and his colleague were both paid Rs 50,000 each by Noel Parmar, the chief investigating officer in the Godhra case. Two BJP members, who claim to be eyewitnesses and have identified many of the accused, admit they were not even at Godhra station that day. They say the police filed statements on their behalf and they colluded to further the cause of Hindutva.

These are only some of the devastating findings of Tehelka’s investigation. For full details, read the latest issue of Tehelka – The Truth: Gujarat 2002 -- a 108 page special issue that has the complete transcripts and cast of characters exposed by the investigation. Available on the stands from 26 October, 2007.

Tehelka, the Havoc of Truth

From:
http://tehelka.com/story_main35.asp?filename=Ne031107gujrat_sec.asp

GUJARAT 2002 - THE TRUTH
FULL COVERAGE

CONSPIRATORS & RIOTERS

THE BOMB MAKERS

ROLE OF THE POLICE

WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT MODI

LEGAL SUBVERSION

DANCE OF HATE

GODHRA: THE DIABOLIC LIE

First-hand accounts from the men who plotted and executed the genocide in Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Sabarkantha. Mayhem was meticulously planned and carried out by VHP-Bajrang Dal cadres across Muslim localities. READ »

The VHP and the Bajrang Dal manufactured and distributed lethal weapons across the state, often with the connivance of the police. READ »

Shocking accounts of how the guardians of the law colluded with the outlaws to make Gujarat’s horror even worse. READ »

Key BJP, RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal activists speak openly of how Chief Minister Narendra Modi blessed the anti-Muslim pogrom . READ »

How public prosecutors ran with the hare and hunted with the hound, keeping their sympathies strictly for the accused. Government Counsel Arvind Pandya on how he hopes to subvert justice by manipulating the Nanavati-Shah Commission, set up to ascertain the truth. READ »

The truth behind Naroda Patiya, the grisliest massacre of 2002. Ahmedabad police’s collusion in the pogrom and its cover-up. Gory details of how former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was hacked limb by limb at Gulbarg Society, in the words of those who did it. READ »

How spontaneous mob fury was shown as a premeditated conspiracy by the police who produced fake witnesses by bribing, coercion and torture. READ »

Time to Wake up!

Quote:
from India's national magazine, Frontline:
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1908/19081290.htm

"What Gujarat witnessed were not just crimes against people, but crimes against society as a whole, offences against the pluralist-democratic order and the Constitution of India. Gujarat's barbarism falls into the category of crimes against humanity, such as "widespread or systematic extermination of civilians" or their "persecution on racial, ethnic or religious grounds", and "enforced disappearances". These call for relentless prosecution and the strictest norms of exemplary punishment. This is the very least that the victims deserve. What is at stake is not just legal and moral principles of responsibility for crime and punishment, but foundational values about what kind of society we want to build, and the worth of human life and dignity."

And third, what is at stake is not just legal and moral principles of responsibility for crime and punishment, but foundational values about what kind of society we want to build, and what worth we attach to human life and dignity, and to respect for fellow-human beings and their rights. A situation of recurring communal violence, especially for the besieged minorities, roughly conforms to the following description by Erich Fromm, the psychologist and philosopher who had profound insights into fascist and extremist politics: "To live for any length of time under the constant threat of destruction creates certain psychological effects in most human beings - fright, hostility, callousness... and a resulting indifference to all the values we cherish..."
Concludes Fromm: "Such conditions will transform us into barbarians."
Is this the India we want?

Unquote.

Mecca-free

This came from my blog post below:

What's the use of a Mecca, which excludes more than half the human race, including the Jews who built it?

Breaking the Silence

I am finally breaking free.
Breaking the silence I have imposed upon myself for almost 20 years.
Taking a principled stand against the governments of India or Saudi Arabia has been liberating.
I am not going back or to visit unless these governments change their policies or bring justice to the victims of their 'state-sanctioned' pogroms.

What the heck did I think I was doing? Writing paens and odes to India's culinary and 'religious' diversity while people were being killed by the state in my own backyard? I was like one of those abused wives/girls, justifying her abusive husband till the end, while he beats, maims and bruises her, physique and self esteem..and thinking,"But, he's good at heart. Its just a phase.."

Honey, it's never a phase. A man or a country. They are all the same.

If they are s..wing you, they are s..wing you. and no pansy justifications can cover it up (as good ol' Samantha would say, in 'Sex and the City').

It was getting to me, at some level, walking around the streets of Delhi in my air-conditioned car, drinking coffee at the Habitat, while my own government, 3 miles down the road, has the blood of thousands of innocent civilians on its hand. Is letting an indicted war-criminal like Modi rule the roost in Gujarat state, where 3000 innocent civilians, including poor rural women and children, were 'short-listed', identified, massacred and gang-raped under his government's surveillance. (http://www.sacw.net/Gujarat2002/index.html : includes hundreds of links, incl. international human rights and Amnesty Intnl. reports).

America's conveniently silent on him now (though they HAVE, laudably, denied him a visa, due to his 'crimes against humanity'). But they did the same thing with Saddam.. let him grow to monstrous proportions while he gassed Kurds and Shias in his backyard, and only 'dethroned' him when he came too close for comfort.

We have a home-grown Saddam in our own backyard, who's been widely documented to 'engineer' to the genocide of almost 4000 civilians, unprecedented sexual violence and is supporting state-sanctioned apartheid and boycotts of centuries-old Moslem minorities living peacefully in the state of Gujarat. (His party, the right -wing BJP, recetly replicated his 'experiment' (their words) with the centuries old Christian communities in Orissa. Raison d'etre: They were becoming Christian (!!) and encouraging others to do the same, opppressed as they were under the centuries old caste-system of 'Aryan Hinduism'. The original liberal Hinduism is completely different from the junk being peddled by the neo-con Hindutva brigade).

And then, its the humiliating of the Sikh widows, standing in relief- lines for the last 20 years, begging for the paltry compensation from the very government which burnt alive their husbands, 20 yrs ago, 'coz Indira Gandhi happened to be shot by a Sikh.
As Pastor Niemöller said:
"First they came for the Jews, but I did not speak up.."

It all started with my friend, Y inspiring me towards the boycott of Israeli apartheid, a global movement which is catching on from Scotland to South Africa. For instance, leave l'Oreal products due to their abyssmal human rights record in Palestine-Israel.
Its like that 'good vibration', when you use a 'Body Shop' product, knowing its made from community-traded jojoba oil, like the Kuapa Kokkoo cooperative in Ghana (albeit a bit expensive).
It was this non-violent protest which changed the tide against aparthied in Africa, the civil rights movement in the American South..and even my own country's freedom struggle against the British colonialism.

Like talking about the Sikhs, in 1984.
The Babri mosque demolition of 1992.
The Gujarat genocide of 2002. (Here is the Boston Review and Harvard's Prof. Martha Nussbaum, on the unprecedented sexual violence: http://bostonreview.net/BR29.3/nussbaum.html )
The stupid Saudi government not letting 'non-Muslims', including Jews enter Mecca, ('blasphemous'.. since the Kaaba was built by a "Jew", Abraham and his son Ishmael).
Its not about labels, but a stand for equality for human beings and a "No" to discrimination and oppression.
and the most recent mass killings and state-sponsored rapes of Christians, including nuns, in Orissa..

It has been liberating.
In a crazy way.
Like Rushdie did for the silence in Kashmir or Orhan Pamuk, last year's Literature Nobel Laureate did for the Turkish-Armenian genocide in 1914.
Its the duty and moral imperative of a writer to open his or her mouth and speak the truth.

Emile Zola did it in 19th century France, for the Richard Dreyfuss case and the Jews of Europe.
Perhaps if more writers had opened their mouths in the '40s, the 'Holocaust"/Shoah wouldn't have happened.

Here is the Harvard Law Review on the shocking genocide of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984, which I lived through, watching my classmates chop off their hair and have their families killed, but come back to class, which went on like nothing had happened.
The great Air-Force, English-speaking elite school I went to, didnt even organize a relief drive, while almost 4000 Sikhs were massacred and burnt alive in its backyard.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/hrj/iss18/marwaha.pdf.
Quote: New Delhi was in complete chaos in the days following Gandhi’s assassination. In his groundbreaking report, Twenty Years of Impunity, Kaur revisits the pogroms, utilizing never-before published afadavits and reports submitted to closed investigatory commissions. One of these unpublished afadavits helps readers to begin to grasp the level of destruction in some of
the hardest hit areas of New Delhi. According to pacifist leader Swami Agnivesh:
The carnage was mind boggling. Half burnt bodies were still lying scattered. Some had been mutilated by gorging their eyes. Some had smoldering tyres around their necks. The houses had been completely destroyed and burnt. (15)
Unrelenting mobs forced their way into households over and over again to
ensure that they had killed every Sikh. (16) Women were sexually assaulted, often in front of family members. (17) The number injured or sexually assaulted is not fully known, but some authors estimate that 'Hindu' civilians, politicians, and police officers killed nearly 3,000 Sikhs in four days. (18).
Kaur argues that the pogroms did not result from spontaneous action by the masses, as commonly believed, but rather were encouraged and organized by political leaders. Leaders of the dominant Congress Party who owned oil depots provided kerosene, the primary weapon used to kill Sikhs and a resource that many could not afford.
Unquote/Full stop.

More on the next one, the "Muslims" this time, in 1992 and the demolition of the 500-year old mosque, in full view of the police and government and the BBC.

Island et al

Its interesting how India and China, two of the world's largest and most populous countries got colonized by two tiny islands, England and Japan.
Perhaps it has something to do with binding women's feet and putting them in 'ghunghats'/purdah.. or even, as Irshad Manji said beautifully: " Men who oppress/colonize women in the private domain, get oppressed/colonized by other men in the external-outside domain".. Look at Saudi Arabia and even Pakistan to an extent..
I guess it has also something to do with the tendency of these two cultures to idolize.. China turned the Buddha, the biggest iconoclast of all time, into 20 foot high statues, whereas Japan.. made him a Samurai..and turned Zen into an art of mind control. Of course, there are some Japanese cults which build statues of the Buddha, but that not the form of Buddhism normally associated with the Japan..
Its a culture which has not traditionally worshipped any form..just analysed and conquered it..
The Brits I guess, arrogant as their culture was, were empowered by the secular revolution of Cromwell and their progressive Queen Bess, who literally separated church and state and set the course for modern secularism..and those two crazy revolutions of France and the US.
When will we conquer our idols?

Flowers in my hair

Blooms
orchids
bird of paradise
bloom
in my hair
and heart..

Singing to me of the man
of the sun and sea
bringing his hands
with
his heart..

Sweet
like little birds
they run
up and down
my window
laughing at me
with his eyes..

What about Love

I've been thinking about Love..
since this morning.
If its real or if the world beat it out of my system, saying its an illusion,
endorphin-ally induced stimuli
in your brain.
But, the West..
seeing real marriages
based on love
and not caste, money and parental control.

My parents, who may argue over who turns off the lights
but then discussing Sartre all evening..
Bringing up these three daughters
away from the mould of a repressive culture and society.
Didnt even make us realise we lived in a liberal oasis
surrounded by a conservative ghetto.
Its excruciating.
and then this woman on a relationship show, said something really interesting..
about how we wont take money, clothes, jewels with us..
and if we come back/re-incarnate
it will be 'coz we didnt find love in this lifetime.
Interesting.
Self actualization and Love.
Two things taboo in South Asian culture.
Two things, which are the essence of what we breathe..

La Vie en Rose and Lili Marlene

I love Lili Marlene and La Vie en rose.
quentessential French and German.
the strange love and hate relationship.
Marlene and Edith Piaf.
The husky smoke-filled voice of Berlin's bars
and the bird-like fragility of Paris
which got taken over by the Deutsch.
Lil like me..

As Salman Rushdie wrote in his exquisite'Shalimar the Clown'.
Paris was in the way he held a cigarette
but she was weak
and that is why she fell to the Germans..
But I love both.

Paris and Berlin.
the two sides of the axis.
the art and the science..
One is like a hard, beautiful man..
the other like a bird on a window..
Can I have both sil vous plait?

Wie einst, Lili Marlene..
Wie einst, Lili Marlene.

Habillez moi (Dress me)

Its the buzz..
of waking up.
Like sipping coffee
even though I am off it
for the day.
I have another high.

Feeling lace
legs
feet..
trimmed
tasted
bare.
on the green
grass..

Today

Today is the time to wake up and be free.
Today is the time to go running and breathe in the fresh air, aspire for Jimmy Choos, fall in love, make it big.
Today is the day to go on the 'Skinny Bitch' diet, of Japanese noodles and organic earthquakes.
My body is reeling
from the impact..

My Jimmy Choo Lady Ga-ga

Kind of haute couture.
we all have in us.
The Japanese recognise it well.. the yin and yang.
Zorba and Buddha.
I am not gonna philosophize my love for the fine things of life..
Dolchee-gabbanajimmychoomeetsfendinatori..

going running with the hi-speed 'fashion' song natori on my back
zen on my mind..
and he tells me to write, while I sit here and wait
with my red streaked hair..

"Man, I love them Jimmy choo"..

Even Daiichi Sankyo and Takeda pharma.. how cool is that.

The trinity

So, I think that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are like Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva..
Three yet one.

Bangladesh obviously the creative one/womb..sound of silence and rainforest.
India is the 'preserver'.. of the status qou .. and the money maker..generally running and throwing its weight around, thinking it runs the show.
and Pakistan..aah! of course is Shiva.. the mad tandav junooni..
look wot he's upto in Kashmir..
while hangs out with the ghosts in FATA and the North West Frontier..

Bali Shags et al

The hand-rolled cigarette is the most exquisite invention of man.
especially when inhaled with a Chablis wine
to the sound of Marlene Deitrich
or a kebab.
Paradise is this.
Hameen asto etc.

Please let the Jews Come Home..

So, I watched the Valkyrie documentary..
and my love for Berlin and the Jews came spilling out
as always
the primordial guttural love
for what
I always felt were 'my people'.
They always have been.
I am Jewish. in blood and mind and spirit.

I remember the first time I heard the word.. Yahudi.
as a little girl
it was a Urdu-Hindi movie by the name.
a smash hit of the screen icon Dilip Kumar.
I had tingles.. goosbumps. all over. Hearing that name.
Ya- hoo- di.

those dreams,
the Anne Frank,
the Sefirot
the Ashkenazis..
and the frikking Kristallnacht.
and my beloved Berlin.

Please let my people come back home.
Human beings are bound by culture
not' religion"
Look at Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Israel is in the heart. its a state of being.
the state
which made einstein and marx and trotsky
and jazz.
Please let the people return to their homes, countries in Europe
where they were 'exterminated'.

why should they be wandering around the deserts of Palestine
blood on their hands
cries of the Muslim women
wailing
in their hijabs.
They dont deserve this.
Please let them go home
to the countries
which threw them out
Like smoke fumes..

the culture and lands they built
backstabbed them
and now the Gazans are paying the price
for Adolf.

The Rabbis Protest

These are the coolest people on the planet.
Persecuted for 5000 yrs, they've built the bkbone of the West.
only to be backstabbed and betrayed..
I've always had this guttural primordial love for the Jews.
(not the idiotic zionists, replicating the Reich in Gaza).

These are my people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9OIqy6md9w&feature=related

Published articles

So, finally here are some of my journalistic pieces, published all over..

http://www.amsa.org/humed/hv/0106_6.cfm

Hitler's Sufi resistance

http://www.financialexpress.com/old/print.php?content_id=79830

http://www.punjabheritage.org/content/view/1220/28/

Rennaisance wo/man

Its hurting.
Rediscovering who I am.
Used to be.
My childhood and teenage, spent exploring Renaissance artists and science.
The shadow of the Mona Lisa.. looming large above me. As a kid.
When Mom brought it home from London's National gallery.
I was 8.
It never left me.
The smile of Leonardo and how Dad explained it to me.
Wherever you turn. she/he will look at you..
where ever go you, she will never let you out of her sight. (and whatever your expression, she/he will mirror it).

I guess its been a hard journey, re-discovering the Leonardo in me. The piece I wrote on him when I was 17. Looved him. Wanted to be like him. Art and science fusing together in the same being.
Brutalised by crassness and molested by mediocrity.
The whines of the women in my house, forcing me to accept the filth they carried with them.
I guess I led a schizophrenic existence..true to Gemini.
One half of me was turned to Europe and the Renaissance..all the artists and philosophers Dad brought into the house.
The other half me shut my ears to the petty bourgoise gossip, filling my house everytime my Mom's relatives landed up.
Their cacophony drowning out Dad's beautiful Mozart and Ghalib.
I am still recovering from it..
re learning the soul I lost.
From Zen Buddhism to matrimony to religion to lust.
I discovered art/science..the soul of my Renaissance man.
My Toulouse Lautrec whom I had loved sooo much, from the first time I heard the Can-Can at 10..it never left.
Neither did the merry impish soul of Paris, my beloved and Florence, my inspiration.
Steeped with the Moorish cantatas of Anadalusian Spain.
Rushdie revived me too- the anglicised Euro-Asian man, quentessential Midnight's child, steeped in bacon and ghazals. Atheist/agnostic to the T..the discoverer of condiments. The 'Indian Muslim', straddling 2 cultures, the 'heretic', loving the Urdu couplets of the subcontinent's agnostic Sufi culture..

Blogging alert

Someone told me to restart my blog..wash myself anew..
part of my revolutionary soul, long lost down the centuries..
I rediscovered him on the streets of Brooklyn and the spires of New York, found him walking down the boulevards of DC, with a tilted cap/beret and drank wine from his hands in Baahston harbour.
I thank him, for being there. Deep within myself.

Beret Man

So, I have fallen in love..again. With the lost part of my self, I rediscovered on the streets of DC..
city of boulevards and cafes, revolutionaries and artists, untrapped in museums made of light.
I loved it all. The soul of America, as it was born..
Conceived in Baahston, born in DC and bred on the rough streets of NY.
The holy trinity of my love story.
Boston is like french Foie gras, delicate.. love struck, with a glass of wine, you find ubiqutously flowing down its streets..
New York is a barbequed steak- hot and spicy, grilled on the streets of BrooHklyn, with a De Niro accent. (Whot aah you ttohh-kin aahbout)
DC is a gentle delicate kebab..Renaissance artist, filled with the fresh spices of the French enlightenment..gentle and charming, beautiful beret man.
I dont know who I love more..

Macchu Pichhu man

It happens to me everytime I meet a hispanic man.
The fizz
the ride up to Machhu Pichhu

I become an eagle feather

floating above

rocks
revolutions

coffee springs
ripe with red
flowers.

Guantanamera
becomes my name
marisposa (butterfly) with the
tank top.

Marisol (Sea and sun)
and Marisombre (Sea and shadow)
I become both..
riding the
slow scorching
heat of
the desert.

India as pi-njra

gandhi killed me.

I have to say. All the idealism and forcefulness which helped me combat British racism swung my pendulum the other way.

From the genetics student who calculated momentum in her head each time she saw cars swerve and thought of quantum particles as the face of god, was sucked into a quagmire which buckled rationalism and scinece and embraced a wishy washy-eyed idealism of the India way.

The Indian way, which realistically hadnt done much n the way of psychology, or physics or biology for a couple of millenia now, coz it was too busy creating tribal liasons and deciding which one was superior.

Even the egalitarian philosophy of Islam which came to the subcontinent got contaminated by the same diease and basically lost its spirit...becoming a much ragged minority in its own country. Its assertive side turned into the madness of Mullah military statism of pakistan.

Point remains, Pinjare was subtle insidous. seductive.

It numbed the pain of the racist white brits to think I was from the land of Gandhi who taught me how to spin.

I embraced a lot of nonsense which is at the heart of Indian civilisation- the prrof lies in the pudding.

The diversity is great but nowhere close to that of the US at the moment. NOt that I am not aware of its imperialsm.. but the subcontinent is essentially a pre- industrial Victorian society which is still learning to walk..the culture has been towed away by the low sesne of self esteem and the fake embrace of the west's plastic side..Emrabcing the Indian village without thinking- with blind faith made me embrace much of its psychosis- the same which keeps ppl dependent on world bank toilets and so on, and commit caste and religous massacres routinely, dragging women out of their homes and sending them to total stranger's houses - in the name of tradition/culture. Inbreeding in castes is the routine in this part of the planet- I embraced it subconsciously.

GAndhi had some good points but he was not superhuman.

India has its good points but,

its not some super idyllic paradise its made out to be.

Its just another land.. with its good and bad points.

The insidous creep of super nationalism- however secular mine was.

How could I 'worship' such a deluded place?

How could my friend Natasha marry such a moron, who ultimately killed her?
Her death occured around the same time , 1.2 million Indians committed the biggest organised massacres-gang rapes in the land of Gandhi, Gujrat. Both killed something within me- perhaps I should have seen I was as deluded as Natasha, expecting pregressive thinking with a flower child like innocence from a traditional patriarchal caste worshipping culture- we were both so eager to belong/marry into. I came to the edge of it..'worshipping' idiotic dubious guys who epitomised cool on the side and had an unethical corrupt side- some being routine womanisers, some funding porn films, some taking bribes, some cheating on exams - while looking nice religous respectable on the surface.. all I found too soon thank god.

Oh the danger of 'mother' worship- but that is another Freudian topic. Mother worship epitimoses our origins- and becomes a delusion, a disease of self/ parochialism - and a dangerous tribalism, idealising our origins, land, tribe, community, nation, religion,,. whatever.

Even Aurobindo faked me- the whole deal of mother India and the super consciousness...never made sense to me.He was a great poet and all but again to confine spirituality to the One land of india and infest it with divinity is scary.. to say the least. It reeks of land worship ..like Native Americans and Middle easterns or the japanese dont have a spiritual legacy. Like the human race is not spiritual by its very existence.

freud and modern psycology are what freed me- not some mumbo jumbo spiritualism.

Even the buddha is too idealised- the modern buddhas are frued n co..each age has seers.. the point is not the seer- but the seen.

Thats why the Sufis say: La Ilaha..

No god but..

-----

I had never grown up feeling like an Indian or Pakistani or Jew or anything.

I prided myself on being global citzen and wrote an article on world government at 13..science was my creed- the face of nature and god.

What happened- pinjare mein daakhil kyon hoga... ho gaya..

If someone like me can creep into the subtle pinjra of delusion and duality/ separation - what of the thousands of millions who never read a book or understood about light waves?

Phas gaya

Kya tune yeh socha tha, yun hoga hogaya
Pinjare mein kyun dakhil, tu hoga hogaya
- Song, film "Aamir'

This is how I felt when I left the US for India 7 yrs ago..
walking into a minefield like the unknowing 'Aamir' of the film by its name.

A country I didnt recognise any more, with fascist goons walking around and the saffron pulping my land.
The Graham staines case, distortion of history, anti-Muslim/ minority propaganda spewing from all channels, news and media, even stupid films.
Then 9/11 bombed us all and our pals in Gujarat found a good pretext to conduct gang rape and become "Hindus".

For someone who lived with only one name- global soul- it was shock to wake up one day and find myelf a' minority'- awful word.
Phas gaya.
Then the murder of my close friend N, still called a mystery and 'suicide'.. a girl I grew up with- watching her blossom from party girl, to philosopher- to model to mum to murder victim.

Phas gaya.
And the political wheels of the land churned on. Thank God they threw them out of power in 2003 but the violence stil simmers under the surface. I see some hope, ironically in Bollywood, which maintians some decorum of secularism and humanitarianism. The betrayel, by my Mom's best friend's, son in law, whom we had helped to get married to her daughter- against family resistance. Him becoming my colleague by chance and taunting me at the workplace for my 'religion', and later learning that he was part of the Indian Neo-Nazi outfit, which killed Gandhi and committed the Gujarat genocide in 2002.
Living through that. Yeah- living through it. In my own land. Waking up in the middle of the night, hearing the mobs..are they here? Walking through Delhi's street and seeing the jat policemen. with my bohemian poet friend Imran cringing ' I dont have the right name Le'..
feeling scared for Dad as he drove home from work- they do random checks on streets and arrest anyone with the 'm' surname.. and lock them up under POTA. It happened to many.. the BJP was known for their skills in that. Killing journalists like Irfan Hussain, the legendary cartoonist of India's top magazine. We lived through it like Zia's pakistan.

Pinjare mein dakhil kyun hoga, ho gaya..

Then came two more murders- of my freind C- who gave me a tape of Farida Khanum ghazals, the lasttime I met her in People tree- the avant garde alternative store where she worked. Next time I walked in, I saw her picture on the wall with candles arond it. Smoke bomb. No sound. I never went back to my beloved People Tree after that.
I refused to drive around CP after that.

And the final straw was the death of S aunty- my 'guru- mother', former local guardian and more. Brutally killed in her sleep, a month after I last met her and stayed at her place in Aligarh- I saw her murderers, had tea made by them- the domestic help, who were later arrested. How can such things happen in this world. I still hear her voice- tinlking like bells, as she was famous for.. and her eyes, legendary as "Cleopatra'' eyes. Sigh.

and not to forget the nice 'liberal' guys who ultimately showed their fanaticism, concealed under the guise of " I want a girl whose parents have the same religion from both sides'.
Phas gaya.

I want to be able to say goodbye to all three remarkable ladies.
Iconoclasts, intellectuals and idealists- as all three were.
One was a philosophy topper and model, upcoming photographer, en route to the big time. I saw her grow up before my eyes, battling her demons but still retaning that incandescent smile and demeanour. Till today they dont know if it was murder or suicide and how she got to the top of the Hyatt hotel roof- or so they would like ppl to believe. Nice Indian wife she was not, living with custody battles and an abusive marriage she walked out of. I call it an honour killing. She had already been beaten up twice in public and asked for police security.. but who cares for a woman's life in the subcontinent. The media went hysterical for a few days and then was silent.

Kya toone socha tha..yun hoga ho gaya.

The second was a gentle remarkable artist and activist from Chicago's school of design, who counselled women and children in her free time and ran an artist/desisgn line for Indian art and handicraft. The first time I met C, surrounded by clay pots and hand paper books in Delhi's People tree, I was taken aback by her glow and smile- and air of quiet confidence, so unusual in an Indian woman her age. I remember sitting, half reeling on a stool in PPl tree, with her smiling photo on the wall and the sweet uncle telling me: She was killed for rhyme or reason by some random domestic help and found after 3 days.

The third was the legendary English Professor, with the 'tinkle bell' voice and cleopatra eyes, hearthrob of 2 generations, who had taught my Mom and Dad, spoke Virginia Woolfe and lived on her own with tea cups, after not conforming to a typical Indian marriage. She died without a voice, strangulated in her own house, by 'domestic help' she had helped to save from the streets.
Three remarkable women, lives cut short for no rhyme or reason.
Here is my tribute to them and my farewell. I feel so helpless that I couldnt do anything.. despite all my 'empowerment' and education.
Kucch haadson ki yeh tasveer hai..]
kya tune socha , yun hoga, ho gaya..
Pinjare mein daakhil, kyon hoga..
Phas gaya.

May you rest in peace and be brought justice.
Ameen.

Budapest, live in Istanbul

Jethro Tull's classic is baffling me.
Like the smog in cities of Eastern Europe.
Like cigarette smoke in Budapest..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUZMbfzrdWQ&feature=related

South Asian/ "She said she a dancer"

I am tired of the South Asian objectification of women and all that culture that goes with it.
feeling kind of delienated..almost like I am drifting away..
from something, I was clinging to.
Like a life raft, only to find it was sinkable.
I learnt to swim.
Coz I knew it all along.
The whole Euro-American identity which was concealed under the angst of colonialism, came out.
The girl who loved grunge and Daisies..like the Marc Jacobs ad.
Who was essentially a ballerina.
'She said she was dancer'
I cannot be the aishwarya rai types, independent Indian woman, aiming to get married to a rich man, as the consequence of a career.
They are still living in the pre-20th century Victorian age there.
The whole Bollywood thing is a sham.
Blondes with bleached hair, do not a feminist make..
I'll go with the Ozzie girls.

Land down under and other assorted blogs

So, I heard the song again.
which took me back to Ozzie land again.
land of hippie trails and madmen.
reminded of the cool girls I met in Portland.
Ozzie girls. They were backpacking TV journalists and we shared a room.
I on top of a bunk and they below, chatting.
Taking the mickey out of Ozzie men and how beautiful Portland was.
We laughed and spoke of tolerance..
very smart and dyanamic they were. I've not met South Asian women with that sense of power.
Something abt that land and the vitality of the women.
"women glo n men plunder'.
I like that.
Kinda like the crazy French girls I met in Boston, eating tofu with the intel Koreans.
I miss those hostels..and the flavour of the land down under.
Like tofu with bean sprouts.

There will be an answer: Let It Be

So its Milad ul Nabi and Nouroz and Good Friday and Holi and Easter coming up.
Words of Wisdom..

"I believe in the kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
Well yes I'm still running

You broke the bonds and you
Loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Of my shame
You know I believed it.."
-

Rhapsody of an Indian Muslim in three cords n the truth

Written on Milad ul Nabi.
To U2's version of Dylan's All Along the Watchtower
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ixs57zxTiQ&feature=related
Why does the world need Jews to tell'em the Truth??
Bob Dylan's said it in this song.
Three chords and the Truth.
There must be somwhere outta here./
said the joker to the thief,
There's too much confusion here
I can't get no relief.
business men they drink my wine
ploughman dig my earth..
no reason to get excited
the thief then kindly spoke..
you n I we've been thru that
this is not our fate
so let us not talk falsely now. the hour is getting late.

How Dylan wrote the song. Dylan, recovering from a motorcycle accident which had marked a shift in his career, had been seen reading the Bible on a daily basis. As with many of the lyrics to the songs on this album, the words to "Watchtower" contain biblical and apocalyptic references.
The Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5-9, contains the following:
"Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye princes, and prepare the shield./For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth./And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with such heed./...And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen.
And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground."

Moral clarity

In search of moral clairty is what I am afraid of.
Seeking the truth.
The fancy word sought by saints and mutilated by religious jargon as some sort of elevated place in the mountains.
While I was living surrounded by the stench of the most morally ambigous society of its time.
Worshipping cows and money, while leaving people to die on its doorsteps.
When there is no heaven and hell. I guess there is nothing to look for, but parties and bourgoise gods, supported by fake certifcates from bankrupt universities.
My Indian dream.
I woke up one day. 30 something yeras of weandering and seeking Allah, God, the Truth.
and found in the morally unambigous cinema of Hollywood, where people fight for their souls, often at a high price.
Jesus, Socrates, Hussain (a), what of them in a place which burns its demons once a year and goes back to its play acting?
You dont hear their names. You hear of kings so powerful they chopped off women's noses, kings so virile they had 16,000 wives, kings, kings, kings.
The country loves kings. They are its gods.
Its dissent for me to write this. I cant pander to kings and their slaves anymore.
I'd rather talk of carpenters and goatherds, who stood up to the Pharaoh, with sheepskin droppings on their shoes and parted the Red Sea.
The children of Israel are everywhere.

In search of Marzia

In search of Marzia
(inspired by Broken verses, set in Karachi, on Faiz's life)

To Marzia Aunty,
whom I never met, the Karachi activist

They say she disppeared into the wilds of Karachi
the mosques and minarets in flames
leading marches down the streets
protesting.
twice exiled.
from india to karachi to germany
the indian shia from lucknow
we are in exile.
while we live in india
as citizens of a free democratic state.

The Samurai

"In the heart of a man
lives the soul of a warrior"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKn7lkpU1fE&feature=related

Haqq

'Ali ibn Abi Talib (A) to his disciple Kumayl ibn Ziyad about the 'friends of God' (awliya' al-Haqq), who exist in every age:
Knowledge has led them to the reality of insight, and they are in contact with the spirit of certainty. They find easy what is regarded as rough by those who live in comfort and luxury. They are intimate with what terrifies the ignorant. They are in the company of people with their bodies, yet their souls are lodged in the highest realm.
(Nahj ul Balaghah, No. 147).

Inquilab Zindabad

Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much controversy as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky's extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible mark on revolutionary conscience. Yet there was a danger that his name would disappear from history.

"In the 1930s, Trotsky, with a handful of followers, attempted toblock the path of Stalin's relentless hurricane of betrayal and murder. His epic defence of the soul of the Revolution against its bureaucratic executioners was a torchlight in the storm. In one of thevery greatest modern biographies, Isaac Deutscher redeems the legacyof this astonishing revolutionary and humanist thinker." … Mike Davis

Originally published in 1954, Deutscher's masterful three-volume biography was the first majorpublication to counter the powerful Stalinist propaganda machine that had sought to expunge Trotsky from the annals of the Soviet Union. In these pages Trotsky emerges in his real stature, as the most heroic, and ultimately tragic, character of the Russian revolution. The Prophet Armed is the first volume of the trilogy. It traces Trotsky's early years, the formation of his distinctive theory of permanent revolution, his long feud and reconciliation with Lenin and Bolshevism, and his role in the October insurrection of 1917. Thevolume ends in 1921, when Trotsky, then at the climax of his power, unwittingly sowed the seeds of his own defeat.

More on: http://www.versobooks.com/books/cdef/d-titles/deutscher_prophet_v1.shtml

Talkin' about a revolution

Don't you know
They're talkin' about a revolution
It sounds like whisper..
Talkin' about a revolution..
-Tracy Chapman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rZbvi6Tj6E&feature=related

Two songs I grew up on.. Gone with the Wind and Lara's theme recently burnt through to truth.
The lies I was fed in the name of romance only serve to scare.. to the level of untruth one can be fed and how insidious the role of romantic subtlety- ART. can be.

One glorifies the bourgeoisie capitalism of the Russian upper classes.. romanticizing the Tsar.
not that one endorses Stalin’s fascism.. but the film paints a one sided picture of the Russian revolution with all peasants and masses ashungry uncouth barbarians and the poor landed gentry as the epitome of civilization. No mention of Trotsky, no mention of the hungry millions who were betrayed by Stalin..
NO mention of Comrade Trotsky.. the father of the revolution, exiled and assassinated by the Communists he fought to save soul of the Russian revolution. The entire revolution is painted as black, 'coz it took away the beautiful homes of the French educated landed gentry!
Just a simplistic bourgeoisie picture of how bad the proletariat is.. no marches, no Internationale.. Much as I love Yuri Zhivago and his beautiful wife the only concerns for the director seem to be the life story of one man, vs. the teeming upheavals and sufferings of the millions..Although, Tonya’s is one of the most beautiful female characters to ever appear on screen or in literature. The epitome of motherhood, rationale, dedicated and yet strong, rooted in the soil and exuding motherhood with a sophistication, strength and vulnerability in one person. I could write pages about her and how she inspires me..as a young woman and a potential mother, with a devoted poetic husband, who is wedded to a cause larger than himself. Her times with her son Sasha, in the long and mysterious absences of the husband, her grace in the turbulent times when the Russian world is falling apart, and her feeding her son and carrying an intellectual understanding of the revolution are exquisite.
But, nowhere do we see the corruptibility and decadence of the Russian uppers classes, who danced and drank while the masses suffered hungry.. and built the first workers state.
Stalin seems to represent the entire epoch..
The other one.. is that insidious propaganda machine called Gone with the Wind..
The worst apology for racism, fascism and brutality ever depicted on cinema.
Again chocolate coated in the name of romance.
White KKK militias thugs murdering African Americans are romanticized as chivalrous Southern gentleman, saving the honor of their wives. Northern Yankee Liberators are portrayed as rapists of a ‘civilized’ culture, which lived off the blood of a million human beings.
The traitorous south/ Confederacy, which actually broke off from the United States of America for wanting to enslave a million Black people, is portrayed as a 'civilization' gone with the Wind.
The African American are portrayed as emotional fools, who cannot manage or live on their own.. with freedom. Only the white master can provide a semblance of logic to their 'carpetbagger' lives. Embodied by the capitalist landowning Scarlett O Hara, who marries and divorces with a calculative panache, hardly rivaled by a female character. Her old slaves don’t know how to deal with freedom and all the freed black men are 'rapists', waiting to pounce on the vulnerable Southern belle. The other rapist in the film is the hungry Yankee soldier, portraying the contrast with the honorable black lynching White southern men- who walked out and went to war with their own country, coz it wouldn’t let them abuse and own slaves!!
I remember this girl in school whose Mother had forbidden her from reading GWTW.. as a racist piece of propaganda.
Now I know why.. fascinated as I was by Rhett Butler and the cotton fields of Georgia, which were caked with red blood.
I still love Lara’s theme and the beautiful Urals and the soul of Russia which peers through the lyrical camera of David Lean. But I don’t buy the propaganda anymore. The revolution was killed by romance. Rang de basanti woke me up after a century of slumber.

Makeup and Modesty

What's with makeup anyways..
Its part of the heart.. the removal of sins..
the undoing of darkness,
the cleansing of the heart..
the face automatically shines through.
Why is it so hard to fight the nafs..
the ego which pulls you to look good for the world and not look good for the One
who made me in the first place?

Dekhoon tujhe to..

Tere aane se pehle

tere jaane ke baad

teri hi yaad sataye..

saawariya..the madness

What else is left to say?
A review.
http://saawariyafilm.com/

"Saawariya" is a timeless story of two young star-crossed lovers whose passions almost consume their will to the brink of self-destruction.
In this eternal tale of an ode to romance, stand two lonely souls whose childlike innocence and candour only obscures their inner turmoil, anger, anxiety and desperate wait for love.
An artist, a free spirit, an idealist and dreamer, Raj, is certain that he has found his ultimate dream when he arrives at a quaint picturesque town. A place surrounded by mountains, shrouded in mist and enveloped in beauty, mythical enough to be a painter’s vision or a poet’s memory.However, destiny paints a different picture for Raj…
One silent bright and starry night, he spots a mysterious girl draped in black, standing alone at a bridge.This chance encounter introduces him to Sakina, a shy and quiet, melancholic and enigmatic girl who continues to intrigue him.
Thus follows the beginning of a new friendship, where Raj with his most charming ways and an undying spirit tries to win Sakina’s heart.
Raj is unable to accept her haunting past and their friendship pulls him into a whirlwind of desire, madness and romance.Through Raj and Sakina’s journey together, we are reminded of the fragility of the human heart. In the couple’s anguish and test of faith, is revealed the power of unconditional love through a thousand layers of tumultuous emotions.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=stmKeMVN804&feature=related

The Truth

"I want the Truth!"

"You cant handle the Truth."

- Dialogue between Tom Cruise and Jack Nicolson, A few Good Men.

So finally we are here.

Ashish Khetan is not real.

I feel ashamed.

That I was afraid.

What else?

They would have killed me max.

No probs.

Its better than living like a coward and dying every day, like a Jew in Nazi germany.

Better to die like a Sikh Bole so Nihal or like Hussain the Shaheed in Karbala.

Read it and Weep.

http://tehelka.com/story_main35.asp?filename=Ne031107gujrat_sec.asp

Do Bigha Zameen

Dharti Kahe Pukar ke..

Its seems like its happening.
the rumbles are running throught the cracks and waking up the peasants.
Tillers of the Indian earth who feed the Brahmins who feed the poor.
Who feed the baniyas
who feed the tijoris
who feed the World Bank.

I looove Do Bigha Zameen.
everytime Dharti Kahe Pukar ke came on, I cried.
Even as a child, living in Delhi in a cool house..
Dharti Kahe Pukar ke
geet sunale pyaar ke..
Mausam beeta Jayeee..
Mausam beeta jayee....

The faces of thos pure ones, looking up at the rising rain, waiting for the monsoon in the debt parched soil.
My father instilled socialism and Islam in me on one breath when he said:
'The interest of the moneylender swallowed Mother India".

And now she is waking up..to the rumbles through the rising soil.

Chunari vs. Topi

So whats the deal with the 'chunari mein daag' bit...Cant they find a better way to humiliate Woman?
The hatted parasoled beauty becomes a liability in a culture which makes her into a potentially 'daagable' commodity.
No man ever had a daag in his topi or sherwani, regadless of how many women he impregnated.

Colonised

How can people who cannot even chose their own soulmates, expect not to get colonised?

Rive Gauche!/The Left Bank

Aah!
to be at the Left bank of Paris..tres tres bien!
The soul of all leftists cries out to be here..

La Rive Gauche (The Left Bank) is the left bank of the Seine River in Paris. Here the river flows roughly westwards, cutting the city into two halves: the Right Bank, to the north; and the Left Bank, to the south.
The Left Bank is one of the city's most romantic districts. This is the Paris of another era; the Paris of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and dozens of other members of the great artistic community at Montparnasse.

Ashkenazi! Aah!

How that word gives ecstasy is amazing.
I was reading this about these beautiful exquisite people.
From Wikipedia:
When the Ashkenazi community first began to develop in the Early Middle Ages and until the 9th century, the centers of Jewish religious authority were in the Islamic world, at Baghdad and in Islamic Spain. Ashkenaz (Germany) was so distant geographically that it developed a minhag of its own.
How ironic!

And then this..
" By tradition, Jewish status is inherited and follows the maternal lineage. Therefore, someone who is maternally descended from a Jew, even if totally unaware of their Jewish heritage, or even if a practitioner of another religion, is from a traditional Jewish legal perspective still a Jew."
How beautiful.
And then this: Felix mendelsohn, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein Kafka.. all Ashkenazi Jews. That explains the angst! sigh.
This sounds like a Troika from Lieutenant Kije!

"The Ashkenazi Jews developed a distinct culture and liturgy influenced, to varying degrees, by interaction with surrounding peoples, predominantly Germans, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Kashubians, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Letts, Belarusians, and Russians."

and finally..
"Furthermore, a person who no longer wishes to be a Jew is still considered to be Jewish."

What beautiful beautiful people!
Like a string quartet or Russian accordion player with a tilted cap.
Yusuf/ Joseph was a Jew. The most beautiful man ever made.
Remember what happened to the women who cut their fingers?
Sigh.