A nine year old boy dies
xxxxBlown up
xxxxxxxxTo shreds

Trying to return a plastic bag
xxxxCheerful grin
xxxxxxxxRuffled hair

Containing a detonating bomb
xxxxFull of nails
xxxxxxxxCrucifying nails

Carried by two men on a bike
xxxxBleeding faith
xxxxxxxxHoly Terror

Who fling it aside
xxxxTo explode
xxxxxxxxOn quiet faces

The newspaper lying on the sofa
xxxxHeadlines read
xxxxxxxx‘Deadly Saturday’

Tells me this story
xxxxTiffin bomb

xxxxxxxxKills two

As I hold my child
xxxxWarm and clinging
xxxxxxxxTwo month life

Trying to discover
xxxxShe’s asleep now
xxxxxxxxPalms clutching

My newly found fatherhood
xxxxLove is
xxxxxxxxA verb, an action

After two months
xxxxLove is
xxxxxxxxAn activity

Of my indifference
xxxxLove receives
xxxxxxxxWhen it gives

I rock her to peaceful sleep
xxxxSunlight
xxxxxxxx& Darkness

Tenderness

Tenderness
It is
A bit like early morning sunlight streaks on a crumpled bedspread
A bit like smiling to yourself in solitude
A bit like running your fingers through your lover’s hair
A bit like the glow of your bedside lamp when all other lights are switched off
A bit like the goosebumpy warmth of a nostalgic memory
A bit like a hand holding Rumi’s poetry
A bit like curling up with your favourite TV sitcom about to start
A bit like the first gently steaming cup of morning’s brewed tea
A bit like moonlight spreading dancing silhouettes of tree leaves on your bare chest
A bit like the searing saxophone notes on night drives, on roads lit by sodium lamps
A bit like the texture of Paul Simon’s voice on Kathy’s song
A bit like the methol-peppermint mist of foggy winter breath
A bit like the outline of your lover’s first sleepy smile in the morning
A bit like the pen curling through the letters at the end of a poem and then standing perched on the last full stop.

The Weight of History: Istanbul Musing

History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes so palpable
Like heavy, hairy, signet wearing fingers
Pressing on my arms
Hammering home my insignificance
My being a small link in humanity's chain
Reminding me of humility
Laughing at
The ones that laugh
At history.

History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes like a thick, heavy cloud
Gently draping me with
Its melancholy and depth
Its timelessness and varying incarnations
Guiding me gently to a cafe
To see pigeons atop monuments at sunset
Fly away like the empires gone by
Leaving their monuments behind.

History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes so turgid and full
That it bursts open because it has so much to hold
Filling a thousand books
Greedily inked by the richest of pasts
Running those empires and years
Furiously under my gasping eyes,
So that I, dizzy, under a lamplight with the flooding of empires - of Byzantium and Greece, Athens and Persia, Romans and Christians, crusades and sieges, the Turks, the Ottomans, the faithful and the infidel,
The world wars and their ending
The new republic and me sitting
Silently hearing the unending quaking souls
Under the cobblestones at my feet fly past engraving their ink in my eyes, while I am forced to sit
Because I'm so nauseous
Because I'm so full.

History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes like a silent professor or quiet psychoanalyst or wise saint or philosophical prophet,
Teaching me lessons, showing me patterns
Telling me that I live by the same laws that emperors lived by, that their subjects lived by,
That history's laws seperate none
Not the slave from the king
Nor the BC from the AD
They apply to us all for all time
With us either crashing against them like the Bosphorus waves on castle walls
Or learning and living by them we feel
At peace, full of tranquility, passion, yearning and love
Like the moonlit Bosphorus,
Still,
A quiet lover
A spiritual saint
With messages for both continents
Of Europe and Asia
(Which it connects or divides depending on which history we choose to see)
To be torn up or preserved for peace.

History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Perhaps you and I, together sometime,
Can sit along these cobbled streets,
Sipping our tea, swallowing our wonder
As we sit silent, with earnest awe and righteous amazement
Gazing at
The city of history
At Istanbul, all of a two and a half thousand years old
Giving us some permanence
Some continuity
Something bigger than ourselves
Some slice of immortality
In our brief, eventless lives
Perhaps we should enjoy the weight of history.

Flocks

FLOCKS

They fly everywhere
Like a succession of musical notes
Octaves, minors, majors and melody
From the top of searing minarets
Emaciated with purity, tall with austerity
Like a gliding cannon shot
When the muezzin calls for prayer
Flocks of pigeons in flight
Flying with the wailing ney of Sadreddin
Flying from the warnings of the blazing fire
Flying to the different minarets of the world
Flying on quarternotes of melody
Flying by clouds of conjecture
Storms of certainty
Draughts of opinion

Starlight on emeralds
Sunlight on aquamarine
Daylight on marble
Moonlight on silk

They fly with the prophet
Nightbound to Jerusalem
Sharing his revelation
In his cloak
Shuddering ominously
Shaking off the terror
Of the thudding blocks of cool marble
Containing the slabs of scripture
The bashing of brains
The dulling of imagination

Delhi, Baghdad, Istanbul, Mecca
Tabriz, Bokhara, Alexandria, Marrakesh
They fly everywhere from every religion to every freedom in every land
Flying from minarets when the muezzin calls for prayer.

‘Spiritual Gin’ and The Tangled Web That Weber Un-weaved

According to Lenin religion was ‘spiritual gin’. He quite obviously inhabited a world of more drinkers than people who smoked up. Marx believed it was the opium of the masses so perhaps Karl’s era had more of the latter or perhaps he read with fury as a journalist of the way the English were forcing millions of Chinese to smoke up. Either ways his theory didn’t really hold in England, the capitalistic paradise he landed up in after being expelled from his Germanic homeland.

This post is about three sociological giants and their theories about religion and why Max Weber seemed to have rocked the religion theory towards the truth much better than the other two; it’s also about the British working class’s ability (god bless their honest, hard-working souls) to put many theorists and theories in their place with in their earthy commonsensical practice.

Emile Durkheim believed religion was the creation of the ‘sacred’ by society. Social acts were divided into the sacred (religion) and the profane (day-to-day life). Durkheim meant by profane something quite different than what is in common usage, profane in its Latin meaning is nothing but ‘outside the temple’ or day-to-day life that is lived outside the temple. He also added that religion in the final analysis was nothing but a worship of society itself. Society symbolized its values, beliefs, customs and integrating and uniting forces into God (s), rituals, symbols and signs – basically religion. Society then developed structures to support this – churches, divinely ordained rulers, laws and codes. Religion provided the status quo, security and stability needed by society.

Marx pretty much agreed with this, except the fact that religion did so pissed him off. For Marx’s opiatic views of religion we need to see how it fitted into his basic view of society itself. According to him, as we all know, history was nothing but an endless yin-yang of a class that owned the means of production exploiting another class that slogged it out by providing its labour. According to him religion was nothing but a tool for the privileged, exploiting class to maintain their supremacy. This is because religion either soothed the exploited classes or promised them a better life after death or simply justified their present condition as being God’s will. All this according to Marx completely suited the ruling classes and established an eternal status quo of supremacy, subjugation and exploitation. The exploited classes – soothed and acquiescent – never united to take up arms against their oppressors.

My heartfelt commendation to the British working classes at the top of this chapter was because the proles in London, the British proletariat in general in fact, quite disproved both Marx and Lenin by much preferring real gin to the spiritual one. Around the time of Lennin’s comments the working class in London were merrily getting sloshed on gin and not attending the spiritual gin offered by the Church of England. This has happened so much in the course of England’s history that I remember sitting in a quaint pub in the Lake District in England where there were, hung on the wall, copies of the proclamations banning gin in England down the ages. It seemed their preference was neither to form a unified, revolting (pun intended) class, that revolted against the means-of-production owning capitalist nor was it to devoutly believe the angelic after-life of the church and accept their status in life as a divine deal with earthly zeal. They instead went to pubs and got blown in a revolting fashion. God bless their souls!

And that leads me to Weber. According to me Max Weber hit the nail on the head by stating that no one clear theory explains the sociology of religion, instead, each society has to be looked at as a unique entity, with a history and social structure that has developed due to a special set of circumstances.

I began musing on this with the constant accompaniment of a steaming cup of coffee perched in my barsaati in Delhi. Began merging Durkheim’s basic thought of religion being an integrating force for an other-wise unruly bunch of homo sapiens. And the making of things sacred that would keep social stability and status quo going.

I then thought of Weber’s theory of unique responses for each unique society. I remembered reading Toynbee’s theory that each society’s history is its own unique reaction to the challenges posed by its environment.

I started thinking of two sets of religion – the desert religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and the Indian religion of Hinduism (I’m side-stepping Buddhism and Jainism for now as they were later responses to Hinduism’s excesses).

Let’s look at the way the religions have evolved; the sparse, harsh environment of scarcity in the desert must have lead to extreme infighting and bickering over very scarce resources. Let’s look at the response – all desert religions have one harsh God, who jealously allows his followers to follow no other (scarcity) and has very strict commandments and punishments (harsh laws to prevent the incessant in-fighting).

Now let’s look at Hinduism – the gangetic plains and endless rivers, the fertile soil and easy climate, the profusion of vegetation, the environment of plenty. Many gods, a god for knowledge another for wealth, another embodying fire another wind – plenty, abundance. The laws were harsh in some ways but also very flexible – harsh when it came to inter-marriage and mixing with the dark-skinned natives and therefore preserving their Aryan identity (therefore untouchability) harsh in terms of inter-mixing period – the caste system. Yet easy and overflowing with abundance - a profusion of paths and Gods. The path of bhakti (devotion), karma (work), Jnana (knowledge) and many more. In fact one could be accepted and affirmed as a naastik (atheist) as well.

Perhaps Weber hit the nail on the head by accepting the basic fact, that like many other things, religion too was very varied and its characteristics varied with different societies and their environments.

Both Weber and the English working classes basically proved the point that it’s not easy nor commendable to pigeon-hole the infinite variety of human social life and its manifestations like religion into three line summaries.

Sadly I’m a teetotaler these days, other-wise I could happily ended this post saying – now that the spiritual gin is dealt with, how about the real thing. Cheers!

Pappu can't dance, but Pappu sure can feed

Much to my wife's dismay I've started calling our new born daughter Pappu. Riya, my wife, had beautifully named her Shaayari, after which my Pappu would ruffle even the most ebullient of spirits.

There are many reasons for this spontaneous bit of labelling on my part. Firstly the name is in the air, Pappu pass ho gaya, Pappu can't dance etc. Then there's her quizzical expression for starters. Her eyes expand like the universe and then gape wondrously at nothing at all. Only a Pappu would do that I reasoned. My wife says she's got my eyes vengefully and she may be right, but that may only prove that the world comprises many Pappus. Then, of course is her arbitrary clucking, a bit like a high pitched hapless stammering Shahrukh Khan in reverse to paint you a sonic description. Who else but a Pappu would do that. And then there's the clincher, her voluminous, guzzling, appetite, a veritable suckling, bottomless pit. One look at the heavenly peace that her satiated palate gives her confirms that she's most certainly a Pappu.

I hope she proves me wrong soon and develops beautifully into the poetic name she's been given. I hope she soars in her imagination feeding on the best this world has to offer but for now Pappu can't dance but Pappu sure can feed....saala!

The Empire Strikes Back

Finally the penny has dropped. One can now sit steadfastly on ones haunches or lie luxuriously on one’s sofa or anxiously bite one’s nails watching the time run out or miss a goal because you had gone to the fridge to get another beer; whatever be your soccer watching situation, one reality has finally been chiseled and carved out in stone this year, on 1st September 2008 to be specific, the English Premier League has TRULY become the BEST football league in the world.

Truly – Because the final un-colonised EPL continent is now added to its football empire. Best because this continent had the world’s best players in terms of style, skill, flair, substance. The one continent which used to get me furiously quizzical – why the hell was it absent? Why weren’t they there? I google searched in vain. Asked football groups on yahoo in despair. Called my soccer fanatic friends only to get lost in fruitless digressions.

For two years I have wondered why the South American countries have not been a big part of the EPL. In particular Brazil and Argentina and then the others Colombia, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador etc. Why not? It was indecipherably, imponderable-y inexplicable.

Why did the world’s best league contain the mechanical force, speed and organization of the Western European countries, the physical force, stamina and speed of Africa, the quick dexterous moves of Korea and the odd flashes of brilliance from the Middle East, the new world flair of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US. All of this, the world as its oyster but not the samba dancing, life-is-beautiful, football-is-an art surges, thrusts and turns of Braz-entina?

Let’s look at the ascendancy of various regions on the football globe: Europe and South America have dominated the game since its inception. Africa (with the stunning display that Cameroon gave the world in 1990 and the Nigerian super eagles in the ’94 World Cup) joined the other two continents as a force to be reckoned with. North America, Oceania and Asia have also begun to flaunt their wares on the footballing map. From being non-entities, Australia, New Zealand, USA, South Korea and Japan have made giant strides towards the apex of the footballing pyramid which seems to be getting broader and broader. The middle-east and North Africa (Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran) East Asia (Japan, South Korea and a rapidly improving China), Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) North America (a hugely improved USA and a rapidly improving Canada). In a short span 1990-2008 (a mere 18 years) the footballing map has rapidly changed.

The EPL, ever since its inception in 1992 has colonized the world’s football players. From just 11 foreign players named in the starting line-ups of the league’s teams in 1992 to over 260 foreign players in 2006 the league got the eyeballs of the globe stuck to its mouth watering line-ups every Saturday and Sunday. Very often EPL matches resembled World XI A vs World XI B, Arsenal and Chelsea began to play all foreign line-ups. And that’s where the puzzle began. In the 2000s the league had the best of Western Europe and Eastern Europe, the top players of North America, Africa, Asia and Oceania playing their leagues. The only ones who hadn’t joined the party were the samba dancers.

This was not written about much. But there were whispers of the speed of the English game being completely unsuited to the slower, skillful, dribbling of the South Americans (something which I found ludicrous after watching Messi and Tevez play for Argentina in the 2006 World Cup. They were like a Ballet Blitzkrieg - grace, beauty and amazing pace). Then there was the theory of South American players feeling culturally alien in England, preferring to play in Spain’s La Liga and Italiy’s Serie A, where a similar language, culture and fellow players were to be found in abundance.

None of this made sense. How could the world’s best footballing continent along with Europe be left out of what had become the world’s best (certainly most lucrative) league.
And then the myths were busted, the floodgates opened and the torrent of dribbling demons arrived.

The most plausible theory according to me for their absence was the myth of the South American’s being ineffective in the English style. And this myth for me was not broken by South Americans but players similar to them from Spain and Portugal. I think no one broke the Speed vs Style myth more than Cristiano Ronaldo. Cristiano, the Portugese Prince, showed that speed, skill and style could be combined into a lethal combination. He literally altered Manchester United. The entire club played differently with him and without him. His influence was amazing. The English Wayne Rooney was made to look like a dull, monotonous 800 metres athlete on a football pitch. He was Neanderthal when compared to the grace and dexterity of Ronaldo. He scored a mere 18 goals to Ronaldo’s 42 last season. Another man who helped the Latin American cause was the Spaniard Frances Fabregas for Arsenal, his still, beautiful, play-making, sometimes reminiscent of Carlos Valderrama, the Colombian playmaker with the Tina Turner hair, the same still, slow, touch football. Where other mid-fielders went for speed and surprise, Cesc paused, examined and chess-player like landed the ball at the feet of his best chess piece. This dexterity also forced Anglo-Saxon coaches of the Machine Age to realize how individuality, flair and sheer dexterity counted towards the goal tallies that they dreamt of. Later on in the 06-07 season, Carlos Tevez brilliantly fought the case for Latin Americans as he single-handedly helped West Ham United avoid relegation with his genius.

Last year the Spaniard Fernando Torres made his fellow Liverpool forwards, the short, mechanical Dirk Kuyt and the lanky Peter Crouch look like clumsy schoolboys. Also last year the Portugese Nani and the Brazilian Anderson were added to the Manchester United line-up to great effect. With the skill of Anderson, Nani and Ronaldo added to the experience of Scholes and Giggs and the odd flashes from Rooney, Man U did the double, winning both the Premiership and the Champion’s League.

This year, as said before, the floodgates have opened and finally the EPL empire is complete. The myths have been busted and the conspicuously absent samba on the football pitch will be wholeheartedly in evidence. Manchester City has signed up Brazilian stars Robinho and Jo. The Brazil Born Deco is gracing the Chelsea line-up. Manchester United sports 4 Brazilians and 1 Argentinian. Liverpool has 3 Brazilians and 2 Argentinians. Chelsea has grabbed 2 Brazilians and an Argentinian while their London rivals Arsenal have the precocious Denilson in their line-up along with the injured Eduardo (of Brazilian origin, now plays for Croatia) .

The EPL is complete and can now say with a Rolling Stones-like working class swagger that they are without a doubt the best league, if not the greatest league ever, in the world, hosting an array of footballers who would otherwise only be available for the public gaze in the once-in-four-years football world cup.

The empire is back - but this time with a football at its feet.

Going Dutch

In colonial adventures and colonizing dreams, if the 1500s belonged to the Spanish and Portugese then the 1600s were handsomely won by the English, the French and the Dutch.

The Dutch entered the fray around the same time as the other two and like the other two fanned out east and west. To the east they sailed around the Cape of Good Hope laying the foundation for the future Afrikaners of South Africa, their next stop was Ceylon which they wrested from the hapless Portugese who the Dutch now followed to the priceless spice fields of modern day Java and took over that spice infested paradise.

Bathed in pomp, splendour and riches they carried the fragrances of nutmeg, cloves, pepper and cinnamon to the shores of Europe.

A chain of Dutch dots eastward – Cape Town, Ceylon and Indonesia. Leaving behind a heritage of names and signs – Afrikaners and Boers and the consequent history of South Africa, the wealthy burghers in Colombo; even today the Sri Lankan cricket team has a Van Dort and the literary fraternity a booker prize winning writer, Michael Ondaatje.

Westward their fate was impoverished and paltry. Attempting to lay the foundations of a New Netherlands, they just about scraped together the trading outpost of New Amsterdam which they let go of impotently after forty years of rule, to the English who promptly renamed it New York in 1664.

But still when I sat peacefully chugging in a NJ Transit train from Short Hills, New Jersey (where my brother lives) to New York; I passed by stations named Orange and South Orange, smattered remnants of Holland. Getting off at Penn station in New York and roaming the megalopolis there were Dutch remnants everywhere. The Bowery in downtown Manhattan, from the Dutch Bouwerij or farm; in fact the place used to be a stretch of road leading to the last Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant’s farm. Then, of course was the Dutch village of Breukelen – you guessed it – today’s buzzing borough of Brooklyn. The Dutch named Haarlem river is the name of today’s famous African-American area of Harlem. And, of course, Wall Street, the street which earlier had a strong Dutch wall built across the Island to protect the Dutch traders.

Last but not least, from that Dutch stock came a family whose descendants had such a role to play in shaping America’s history – the Roosevelts!

They were a strict Calvinist bunch these Dutchmen. Iron discipline, racism and a belief in divine destiny were marked characteristics in them, even more than the Spaniards and Portugese who mixed merrily with local tribes in their colonies in South and Central America leaving us millions of mixed Aztec, Inca, Spanish hybrids and stunning Brazilian mullatoes. The Dutch too have left us their Cape Coloureds, who now form the majority population in the Western Cape province in South Africa, but they abhorred their half-caste progeny. They kicked them out of their long established homes in Cape Town during the apartheid era and treated them only marginally better than the blacks.


So today if a commentator during a Liverpool football club match talks about the fanatical home support the club get from the Kop (a section of the stadium so named due to its resemblance to the steep Spion Kop literally meaning spy’s hill in Afrikaans, a site where the English were embarrassed by the rustic Boers in the second Anglo-Boer war) or you come across a Sri Lankan batsman with the surname Van Dort or look at a South African map and skim through town names like Pietermaritzburg or Bloemfontein; if you hear Afrikaans spoken at the Cape Town airport or get a call from your boss (an Americanisation of the Dutch ‘baas’) you know that this famous and infamous race has tossed you some souvenirs from its four hundred year old colonial history.