My Very Own But Not Quite

To all those choices you will make,
In those moments of closed eyes and clenched fists
which will overwhelm you,
steady you or trip you over,

My daughter; you who is my very own

And yet not quite;
This ache in my heart, is for all that and more

I remember the day I saw you first

Through an enchanted lens of science and faith
We peered into my womb
And caught you sucking your thumb

That sterile room came alive

A sweeping vision of awe, fear and bliss
I wondered then, if I had ever known love
Before I stepped into that room

I bowed then to life, to death and rebirth

To my mother who had foreseen this for me
And to your daughter that will too.
But from that moment, my daughter;
You who is my very own, but not quite;

This ache in my heart, is for those choices you will make,

All those moments of closed eyes and clenched fists
Which will overwhelm you, steady you or trip you over,
For all that and much more

How do you recognize an Indian?

Yes, it was yet another of those e-mails that claim to have comprehensively captured the essence of an Indian. But the check list (36 items on that list, mind you, so the guy who came up with it did have a sense of the relative complexity of the task) that got passed around in this morning’s e-mail irked me big time. And it didn’t help that this was a Monday morning. And that I ran out of milk and cereal and that the ATM machine was kaput and that all horrible things happen on Monday. So, I wrote this rebuttal. Let me know if any of you agree.

“…

Let me do this, if only because this is a soporific Monday afternoon and I can’t seem to be motivated to think about this week’s experiments. For every generalisation about India/Indians, there are a million exceptions (or more –remember although the Indians invented the concept of zero, algebra and geometry, they aren’t that keen on statistics).

Shashi Tharoor (former undersecretary general to the United Nations and a very well renowned author on India) said "India is more than a sum of its contradictions, any truism about India can be contradicted with another truism. There is no fixed stereotype”.

So let’s see how many of the following will hold true if we look not at the stereotyped immigrant Indian but at the cross section of Indians from across the country/globe.

1. Everything you eat is savored in garlic, onion and tomatoes – There are at least 40-50 million Jains and Brahmins in India for whom garlic and onions are forbidden. Most south Indian preparations have no tomatoes. But I swear that I will die if I have three consecutive meals without either one of them.

2. You try and reuse gift wrappers, gift boxes, and of course aluminum foil- I am trying to think of a exception beyond me but then, that’s tough. Besides, that’s what the entire world is doing at the moment – recycling. We were just doing it when it was terribly unfashionable too.

3. You are Always standing next to the two largest size suitcases at the Airport- It is true that Indians have a penchant for good things in life that includes food and dress in general. But there are 313 nomadic tribes in India that translates to about 60 million people who roam around with their entire set of belongings in a bag.

4. You arrive one or two hours late to a party - and think it's normal –It is imperative to arrive late to a party in most Asian cultures. Don’t mistake a Philippine for Indian based on this one!

5. You peel the stamps off letters that the Postal Service missed to stamp -This is the land of e-mails and web chats. Postal stamps? Lets see – that was ten years ago! See point 2

6. You recycle Wedding Gifts , Birthday Gifts and Anniversary Gifts- Wedding gifts, I agree -what do you do with 20 coffee flasks and 50 pressure cookers? But Birthday gifts? Is someone smoking grass?

7. You name your children in rhythms (example, Sita & Gita, Ram & Shyam, Kamini & Shamini.) - In bollywood films. Yes. In real life? Come on! You have to be a poet to name all 8 of your kids in words that rhyme. Remember 1 billion?

8. All your children have pet names, which sound nowhere close to their real names- this is true of Punjabis and Bengalis and suburban Americans-(firangs not the Indian immigrants) -honey, darling, sweetie etc!- as far as I know.

9. You take Indian snacks anywhere it says 'No Food Allowed' – most of us would love to. Which person who has grown up with at least a thousand choices for snacks wouldn’t when the only snacks you can buy at the movies is popcorn and taco and the rest that smell and taste of nothing but MSG?

10. You talk for an hour at the front door when leaving someone's house- Time goes around in cycles for most of us. This means that I can be standing at your door after lunch and who knows I might be invited back for dinner if I hang around long enough?

11. You load up the family car with as many people as possible - There was an ad for ambassador car in India. “Adjust kar le yaar”. The idea being -What’s a car for if it is not for people? You don’t pay to carry air do you?

12.You use plastic to cover anything new in your house whether it's the remote control, VCR, carpet or new couch – I cannot think of a single person I know who does this. Yet every novel written by/about immigrant Indians speaks of this. I wish I could sneak into Jhumpa Lahiri’s home to see if it is true.

13. Your parents tell you not to care what your friends think, but they won't let you do certain things because of what the other 'Uncles and Aunties' will think– See point number 12

14. You buy and display crockery, which is never used, as it is for special occasions, which never happen – See point number 12

15. You have a vinyl tablecloth on your kitchen table – See point number 12

16. You use grocery bags to hold garbage – Again a single great truism about India is its inability to throw things away. This is why we attracted over centuries muck of all sorts from the Turks to the Hans to the firangs. We simply are unable to throw them away and so we “recycle” them- see where the English language got us for example. The best of the bookers belongs to an Indian-born who had simply recycled the language!

17. You keep leftover food in your fridge in as many numbers of bowls as possible – Another great truism but for the fact that about half of the billion odd people don’t own a refrigerator.

18. Your kitchen shelf is full of jars, varieties of bowls and plastic utensils (got free with purchase of other stuff) – because whoever has a kitchen, should use it to cook. And Indians in general don’t like to keep stuff in the condition in which it is bought. It is a great assault on our creativity you see.

19. You carry a stash of your own food whenever you travel (and travel means any car ride longer than 15 minutes) – see point number 9

20. You own a rice cooker or a pressure cooker -See point number 12

21. You fight over who pays the dinner bil-It is wrong. You see most people simply don’t understand the internal rules of an Indian society. You pretend to fight over the bill but ultimately, you know that the one with the loudest voice pays. So the fight is just to explore the aural and vocal capabilities of each other

22. You live with your parents and you are 40 years old. (And they prefer it that way) –All of us prefer to be spanked once in a while and who better to do it than your folks?

23. You don't use measuring cups when cooking- Measuring cups are for amateur cooks. Not for all those who a) don’t own a cup b) never cook in their lives c) know how to cook

24. You never learnt how to stand in a queue – One must know the spelling of a Q to be able to stand in it. It is absolutely imperative. One simply won’t stand in a Q if one doesn’t know how to spell it. Got it?

25. You can only travel if there are 5 persons at least to see you off or receive you whether you are traveling by bus, train or plane- Apart from the fact that about half of the billion odd among us have never taken the bus/train or the plane, this is absolutely true.

26. If she is NOT your daughter, you always take interest in knowing whose daughter has run with whose son and feel proud to spread it at the velocity of more than the speed of light –Makes me wonder if the one who has written this watches desperate housewives at all? Or any of the thousand other American soaps? Because, if one does, one needn’t even ask if this tendency of middle-aged women is limited to the subcontinent.

27. You only make long distance calls after 11 p.m – The era of STD/ISD booths was history some five years ago what with the boom in current operators. Last heard, India is the third largest market of tele-communications next to the USA and China. It costs –get this- one rupee per minute to make calls across India today. Incoming calls are no longer charged in India (they still are in the USA). 11 PM? Wake up!

28. If you don't live at home, when your parents call, they ask if you've eaten, even if it's midnight – Yes this is true in most cases unless 1) your mother never cooked when you lived with your parents 2) your parents are vegetarians and you don’t mind relishing all parts of either the sacred cow/forbidden pork or both 3) you have married outside your region/state/country

29. You call an older person you never met before Uncle or Aunty' – And so do Singaporeans, Japanese, Thai, and Chinese…

30. When your parents meet strangers and talk for a few minutes, you discover you're talking to a distant cousin – We all came out of Africa remember? And so we all are cousins –welcome to the universal cousin-hood!

31. Your parents don't realize phone connections to foreign countries have improved in the last two decades, and still scream at the top of their lungs when making foreign calls – You are talking of our great-grandfathers sir? Most Indian parents are comfortable using a cell phone/computer/google talk and skype too. I think you missed a point here. In general, Indians don’t believe in whispering. We are loud- now that would have been a truism, if there was one. Not “being loud on the phone”.

32. You have bed sheets on your sofas so as to keep them from getting dirty – This is bang on. Also, we don’t use the same shoes that we walk on the roads, cafes, bars, toilets and whatever else with in our home and on our sofas and beds. Plus, Jhumpa Lahiri’s parents must have suffered from Xenophobia of firangs who don’t wash their hands after visiting the loo.

33. It's embarrassing if your wedding has less than 600 people – Get this straight. Most Indians are weak hearted and only get married once. Plus, how will you manage all those rituals by yourself? So, yes, this too is bang on.

34. All your Tupperware is stained with food color-It’s the fault of the Chinese. Can they not make steel Tupperware for heaven’s sake?

35. You have drinking glasses made of steel- So did the rest of the world when steel was a rage. And try breaking an Indian’s habit. Btw, it is fashionable to have wine glasses made of pewter, so please!

36. You have mastered the art of bargaining in shopping- I would have held on to this belief that Indians are great at bargaining had I never visited the south-east Asia. Now, I know, we are not the best. But admittedly, we are better than most. That is given that almost half of the one billion among us exist hand to mouth.

You needn’t look at all this to identify an Indian at all. There are two unifying qualities of all Indians – irrespective of which strata of the society we belong to which easily betray us in any company.

We are a bunch of nonconformists. And we love to argue.

So, there!

Taking Umbrage, yet again

The terrorists struck again, the states blamed the centre again, ope-ds have been written on relooking at the "root" of terrorism again and as ever, and there have been articles on how life goes on in these two cities. Being as we are in alien lands, whenever the news of a bomb blast in an Indian city is aired, thousands of us are gripped with anxiety. And then relief: thank God, it wasn’t my city. And then anger: but why Bangalore? Why Ahmedabad? Why Jaipur? Why India? There are discussions and ruminations as I am sure there are in India. There are explanations to be given to concerned colleagues who want to understand if the Muslims in India are as “bad” as they are elsewhere.

How can I answer this? I who went to a catholic school where more than half of us were Muslims? I who grew up in a Muslim majority city and would look forward to the Id as eagerly as to Diwali? I, who had always had friends that were not colored Muslim or Christian or Sikh by my parents? All I know is that those who flew those planes into the towers were not born and brought up in the US. That however, is not true in case of many behind the bomb blasts in India, Muslim or otherwise. And what causes them to erupt once in a while in demonic anger that compels them to burn, blast and destroy living, walking, normal people like you and me on the street who have nothing to do with their angst? I don’t know.

All I know is that when that happens as regularly as it has been happening nowadays, one part of me is desensitized. One part of me is depressed. Another part of me just wants to ignore it. But an overwhelming part of my being roars in anger. Anger at the mockery of the government that we have elected. Anger at the world at large for largely ignoring this (remember how many days we were subjected to images and discussions on the London bombings in July?). Anger that there is no one who would issue a war cry on behalf of all us against this putrid form of human emotion. Anger at my own helplessness and that of our useless wimp of a prime minister who has sacrificed his spine at the altar of the lady in a cotton sari so-far-away in her attitude and outlook to the murk that has befallen us all. Anger that the so called moderates among us just play the blame game. And that the world seems to fall in darker and deeper despair. This independence day, when the PM talks of sovereignty, I will be angry again, I know.

What does sovereignty mean if we cannot take any action against the very people who inflict this upon us?

Of truth and fiction and of love

Yesterday morning, over a sleepless, “don’t-want-to-go-to work” Monday morning’s coffee, I was reading a story written by P.S Narayana in a telugu magazine. Once in a while on my grocery shopping forays into Little India, I induce myself into buying this magazine as a much deserved nostalgic trip to the world that I was born into but invariably, I end up feeling abysmal about the quality of the reading material in it. I do know about the abundance of telugu sites on the www but I don’t enjoy reading online so much as I enjoy reading a book or a magazine or even a desperate printout. V laughs at my quotidian bouts of enthusiasm about the language and dismay about the current trends in my homeland but that doesn’t stop me from buying this magazine. I also doubt that one of the reasons I cannot afford to not buy it is because of the fear that I might miss speaking to the one telugu speaking person I know in Singapore- the magazine store guy!

But for all my snivels about the current trends, this story was one of those little gems which make life seem beautiful. Remember literature of the yore? Where beauty is extolled without drama? Where leisurely descriptions of the place, people and the events are more important than the “plot”? Where the grammar of the language does not matter as much as its lyrical cadence? This story was truly one of those although I doubt it will be perceived as “literature of the yore” by many. I was so thrilled that I tried searching online for this author in vain. Here is how the story goes - A tamilian by birth, Tambivelu came to a small town in Andhra Pradesh with his mother when he was five and lived there for the rest of his life as a lorry driver. When informed of the death of someone by a friend, he goes all out to ensure that she gets a decent funeral. He being a married man, one is almost deliberately made to believe that this certain someone might at one point have a romantic connection of some sort with him, given the intensity of his feelings for her which were very perceptively portrayed by the author. He remembers the little things that she had said – that he shouldn’t consume “zarda pan”, that she craved for an azure saree with white dots (which he buys for her as a final gift before the funeral), that she had at one point remarked on the piety in being cremated near the Krishna river ( he dutifully ensures that). It is only to the end when his aide, who cannot keep his curiosity to himself, probe him that he blurts out the fact that he was married to her. And that they had spent five beautiful years together after which, she had chosen to be lured by someone else into a life that eventually turned out to be in dregs. The story has hues of almost all human emotions that you can conceive of but all painted ever so carefully that they don’t over whelm you –magnanimity of human sprit, affection, gratitude and the lack of it, lust, friendship, spiritual belief and above all, a love that has no boundaries. I don’t know where you could find it, but if you do come across it and if you happen to be able to read telugu, read it. You might just fall in love with love once again.

Was it then just a coincidence that the very day I had come across a story of yet another facet of human emotions? Only that this time it wasn’t fiction- but real life. A software guy working in Bangalore had murdered his wife because he had supposedly “spied” on her PC and found her to be having an affair with a colleague. After this, he committed suicide. It might sound morbid but I couldn’t help thinking of the similarity in situation between the protagonist in the story above and that of the latter. One chose to forgive and move on and yet with the same tenderness of heart that had loved her in days past, bid her a final farewell. The other chose to wipe her memories out literally. Who knows what went on in the mind of this guy when he was smothering his wife to death?

But could it be the same love? Or have we all finally reached this stage where instant gratifications have taken over every other parameter of our existence? Love- now, Justice-now, everything- now? Or is fiction, as always, an idealization of the human situation? One that we aspire for and truly yearn for: but it eludes us because we are not made for it?

Science and us

What is the aim of science? It might sound odd coming from someone who makes a living out of it but sometimes I do wonder what the aim of science after all. No, this is not a “science versus religion” sort of question that has popped into my brain. I am trying to look back on my modest experience in this field. I just am trying to make sense of what I have been unable to make sense of yet.

Take for example, the 1000 genome project which will eventually sequence a small proportion of about 1000 human genomes with high accuracy. Among the populations whose DNA will be sequenced are Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigerian, Japanese in Tokyo, Chinese in Beijing, Utah residents with ancestry from Northern and Western Europe, Luhya in Webuye, Kenyan, Maasai in Kinyawa, Toscani in Italy, Gujarati Indians in Houston, Chinese in metropolitan Denver, people of Mexican ancestry in Los Angeles, and people of African ancestry in southwestern U.S. It sounds fantastic and there is obviously a wealth of information that we can as scientists garner from such a study.

But wait- before you consider the ethics of this study -let me assure you that these people will be anonymous and will not have any medical information collected on them. In fact, “the scientific goals of the 1000 Genomes Project are to produce a catalog of variants that are present at 1% or greater frequency in the human population across most of the genome and down to 0.5% or lower within genes”. In lay man terms it means, by the end of this study we will have a capacity to look at variations in a particular stretch of DNA across different populations. So what will that information mean? If I know which sequence variation is associated with say diabetes in a certain population, I would be able to better predict your risk of getting diabetes if you happen to have that sequence variation AND if you happen to belong to that particular population. I know the smarter ones among you have already figured there is a missing piece here. If you collect no medical information, what inferences can you make about the variations apart from say frequency of these variations in a given population? None in this study. So what’s the point? - It is a pilot study. This will give us the opportunity to build capacity to do cool stuff that I just mentioned. But wait, the reason they won’t be collecting medical information is because they haven’t figured out the ethical issues yet (I think).

Ethical issues such as: should I be charged a zillion dollars more by my insurance company because I happen to be an African with a particular variation which has been shown to be associated with (say) diabetes in 80% of that population? Or worse, will I never get insurance? More than that, will the doctor be required to tell me even though I am asymptomatic that I can develop this at one point in my life? If he does, how will I survive? If he doesn’t, is he being fair to his profession? You get the picture. We don’t know at this time whether such problems will manifest in future. What we do know is we don’t know how to deal with them if they arise. And don’t get me wrong here; I think it will really be invaluable in understanding and hopefully finding treatments for a number of diseases. But here we have a group that is equipped to open this pandora’s box. Is the very essence of science this impartial observation? One that doesn’t look at the consequences of the observation? Let me know if any of you have a clue. In the meanwhile, I am praying that Gujarati Indians in Houston are genetically far removed from other NRIs.