Thoughts on New Year

So the year 2010 draws to an end and here we go again, looking starry-eyedly at a brand new year as if it is going to be dramatically different from the outgoing one, and all for the better, of course.
I’ve never been big on celebrating New Years Eve (I even play down my birthday except for some extra prayers thrown in). So this year it isn’t going to be different unless I’m dragged out of the house. I do wish Happy New Year to everyone I bump into at least in the first week of Jan, but it is more after fashion than anything else.
Now don’t brand me a pessimist or a wet blanket. Because I am not. I really marvel at the enthusiasm people can muster on such occasions, but I wonder if they wake up and find the first morning of January any different from the night before. Not that I begrudge their joy or optimism, it’s just that I seem to find nothing momentous attached to one particular day of the year.
As for resolutions, well, when I used to be a naive young thing, I used to make them every year about various self-improvement “projects” like being regular with exercise, getting more organised and so on, until I realised the foolishness of it. Nowadays I believe firmly in the cliché -- ‘no resolution is the best resolution’. If you badly want to do/start something you wouldn’t wait for the New Year.
Having said that, 2011 promises to be different. I do feel that it’s bringing a lot of good things my way. Only time will tell whether I am right or not.
So here’s wishing you all a great New Year. May all of you be peaceful and happy.
So long.

Hesse’s Siddhartha

Hermen Hesse’s Siddhartha is supposed to be one of the most read novels in the 20th century, but I had never spotted it on the bookshops in Dubai or India. So I leapt at it when I saw it in the classics section of Barnes & Noble in Pennsylvania during my recent trip there. I had picked it up for my daughter though, not for myself. I had read the book years ago and for some reason I had always thought that I remembered it too well.
But I was mistaken. Back in Dubai when I started flipping through the pages I realised what a remarkable book it was. All the more because it was written much before Indian philosophy became fashionable and familiar in the West.
Published in the 1920s in German and translated into English in the early 50s, Siddhartha became intensely popular in the West during the Swinging Sixties and afterwards. At the heart of the novel lies the spiritual quest of a young man named Siddhartha, a Brahmin boy who is dissatisfied with the ritualistic life led by his father and other elders. He leaves home and spends months with wandering ascetics who have attained extraordinary mental and physical powers, some of which are now imbibed by him. But the true seeker that he is, it means nothing. What he wants is the annihilation of the “I”, the ego.
At this point he hears about Gautam Buddha, who he hopes will be the answer to his quest. But when Siddhartha comes face to face with Buddha, he realises even the great master can’t lead him to enlightenment and that he had to find his own path.
In the period that follows, Siddhartha falls in love, earns money and becomes a typical householder. Only when old age creeps on him does he again feel the urge to seek the Truth. What Hesse tries to show is that self-denial and instruction alone don’t lead to enlightenment. What matters is learning through one’s own experience.
If you can plough through the awkward translation and keep yourself focused on the narrative then Siddhartha is illuminating. The author’s grasp of Hindu philosophy and its ultimate quest – the destruction of ego and self-realisation – is impressive.
Ironically, Hesse himself never set foot in India. His love for India was derived in his childhood through his father and grandfather, who worked in India as missionaries. Later he read the German philosopher Schopenhauer (who maintained that the world is a mere reflection of our consciousness), and the Gita is said to have made a lasting impression on him. At the same time he was also deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy. The cumulative effect of all this can be seen in a highly nuanced but instructive Siddhartha.

People's balladeer

So music maestro Bhupen Hazarika has bequeathed all his property to Kalpana Lajmi. I read the report with great interest.
I don’t know much about Hazarika’s family life; his career was at its peak in the pre-internet, pre-tabloid days. But I know he and Lajmi have both been living together for more than three decades now, despite a whopping age gap of 28 years. His ex-wife, Priyamvada (a Gujarati woman of Ugandan origin he met while in Columbia University) is settled in Canada and son Tej, a writer, is an American citizen. I don’t know how they took the news, but going by the interviews of Hazarika and Lajmi, they all seem to be on good terms.
Lajmi was 17 when she fell in love with him and ever since she has stuck with him through thick and thin, despite his mercurial temper and drinking problem, and is credited with revamping his career and nursing him in his old age. She seems to be incredibly in love with “Bhupso”, as she fondly calls him, despite folks on both sides not having accepted their relationship.
Here in Dubai I don’t get to read much about him. Last time when I had visited Assam, I was told that he had collapsed on stage during a function. Well, he is 84. What can you expect?
Bollywood buffs know him for the music of Aarop, Rudali, Ek Pal, Saaz and Gajagamini. But, like me, if you grew up in Assam (or Bengal) in the early 80s you’d know what a prodigious talent he is. In his velvety, crisp, baritone voice he has sung about love, personal tragedies, integration and social justice. At times his songs are like parables -- the famous O Ganga behti ho kyon? was addressed to Indira Gandhi. His style varies effortlessly from folksy to tribal to modern.
And that’s just his music. He is a poet, actor, journalist, author and film-maker of the first order. Take just one segment of his career and you can compare it with the best in the field.
He is a PhD in Mass Communication from Columbia University and a recipient of the Lisle Fellowship from Chicago University. It was during his stay in the US, he met Paul Robson, whose influence proved to be everlasting.
Just listen to some of his Assamese or Bengali songs on YouTube and you will be hooked. The saying that music transcends language was invented for Bhupen Hazarika.
I fervently wish he is awarded Bharat Ratna, and while he is still alive.

Filial bond

I don’t normally have more than a passing interest in what’s happening in the UK politics. But this time, the Labour Party leader’s election was different. With two good-looking brothers in the fray, it was an unusual battle and one difficult to ignore. David Miliband (45), former foreign secretary, and his brother Ed (40), ex-energy and climate change secretary, were the two favourites to succeed Gordon Brown.

The world has seen brothers in politics before, such as the Kennedy brothers in the US and the Kaczynski twins in Poland. But the Miliband brothers’ story makes a great copy for journalists nonetheless. Born to Polish migrants, they went to the same school, took the same degree in the same year and joined the cabinet at the same time. David became Tony Blair’s policy chief and Ed was a speechwriter for Brown.

But the negative energy that dominated the Blair-Brown rivalry is conspicuous by absence here. “David is my best friend in the world. I love him dearly,” Ed said during his campaign. “There is no way I’m going to take lumps out of him either on the record, off the record or behind the scenes.”

Yesterday it emerged that Ed had beaten his elder brother by a wafer thin margin of 1 per cent. I was watching BBC news and saw an emotional Ed bear-hugging a visibly happy David.

Perhaps a lesson here for our Ambani brothers? It's possible to be business or career rivals without sacrificing the filial bond.

Art of giving

40 American businessmen, led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, have pledged to give away half of their fortune to charity. Who says the rich are spoilt, self-centered and want to grow only richer?

And we may dislike many things that stand for America, but when it comes to philanthropy I feel they win hands down. From the time of Benjamin Franklin, Americans have always displayed a philanthropic trait. It has been pointed out that American “voluntary associations” have their roots in the colonial era when people got together to solve their own problems or raise funds rather than rely on a government based in far-off England.

In comparison, India glaringly lacks such a tradition. Whatever charity work the rich undertake is slapdash and whimsical. Correct me if I am wrong, Mukesh Ambani is building the world’s most expensive private residence in Mumbai, where the mushrooming slums stick out like an ugly reminder of the rich and poor divide, but I haven’t heard his name being associated with charity and philanthropy, in a way the names of Bill Gates’ is. India’s charity contributions apparently account for only 0.6 per cent of the GDP, as compared to 2.2 per cent in the US.

The reason, I feel, is that we Indians not only want to secure our future and our children’s, but also the next few generations’! Compare this attitude with Warren Buffet’s saying, “I want to give my kids enough so that they could feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.”

How do I look?

My daughter is coming home for vacation and I have my job cut out for a month. Apart from watching films, eating out, visiting bookshops and art galleries, shopping and socialising, listening to endless prattle about her boarding school, I’ll also have to be the Glamour Girl.

Because in the one month that she’ll spend in Dubai she’ll subject me to scrutiny like “a blue scarf with a blue shirt?”, “Ma, you need to urgently lose 5 kg, you’re looking F-A-T,” “oh God, not pink lipstick at your age!”
At 15, she’s a young woman in her own right, who thinks she can teach her mother a thing or two about fashion. It’s fine by me, all this newfound confidence or sense of fashion or whatever. It’s also a fun way to cement the mother-daughter bond. At her age I remember handing a few tips to my female relatives about the right sari or jewellery.

But there is a difference, isn’t there? While we all took interest in looking good, the present generation seems to be rather preoccupied with it. Mercifully my girl is no airhead and has a lot of meaningful interests to keep her grounded and well-balanced (hopefully), but in general I do see a trend among the young people that is tilted heavily in favour of looking good, whatever it takes. Shopping, primping, gymming, dieting…And if you are older and can afford, it’d be chemical peel, botox, surgery…

There is this young Lebanese girl in the gym I’ve joined. She has an hourglass figure and oozes fitness. She’s also the one who works out the hardest. The other day I asked her casually why she needed to put in so much effort. “My stomach is fat, my arms are fat,” she said. I was like which stomach, which arms? To convince me she lifted her T shirt a bit, pinched her stomach, which was flat and hard like an orthopaedic-mattress, and said, “See? All this has to go.”

What has to go? The skin? Give me a break!

In praise of Rumi

The day I've died, my pall is moving on -
But do not think my heart is still on earth!
Don't weep and pity me: "Oh woe, how awful!"
You fall in devil's snare - woe, that is awful!
Don't cry "Woe, parted!" at my burial -
For me this is the time of joyful meeting!
Don't say "Farewell!" when I'm put in the grave -
A curtain I tis for eternal bliss. _ Rumi

While cleaning out my office drawers the other day I came across an old write-up of mine on Rumi, a personal favourite. I had written it on the occasion of his 800th birth anniversary three years ago. Anybody has read him?
To the uninitiated he’s the best-selling poet in the US, apparently more popular than Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson!! He’s the one who founded the order of the whirling dervish, which is considered a mystical order, despite their song and dance routine, a no-no in Islam.
Jellaluddin Rumi was a 13th century Persian sufi poet, but he was actually a preacher, a Moulânâ to the Persian-speaking communities of Iran, Afghanistan, and parts of India and Pakistan.
Although Rumi had found a captivated audience in the West since many years, thanks to the translation of his poetry by Prof Coleman Barks, his relevance has grown manifold post Sept.11.

It’s because despite being a preacher of Islam, he speaks of universal love. In his own words: "I am not a Jew nor a Christian, not a Zoroastrian nor a Moslem." Writing prolifically in an era savaged by battles and conflict, he spoke of nothing but love in his poetry:
The outcome of my life is no more than these three lines:
I was a raw material;
I was cooked and became mature;
I was burned in love.

He was born in Afghanistan and was a traditional Muslim cleric until he met Shams of Tabriz, a wandering dervish. Shams is said to challenge Rumi's religious perspective. One account says: On an autumn day, Rumi was sitting by a pool along with his disciples and books. Shams, whom Rumi didn’t know till then, came along, interrupted his discourse, and pointing to the books asked: “What are these?” Rumi replied: “This is some knowledge you wouldn’t understand.” Shams threw all the books into the pool and said: “And this is some knowledge you wouldn’t understand.”

A knowledge-proud theologian was challenged by a mystic. Soon, Shams became Rumi’s mentor. The love in Rumi’s poems essentially speaks of his love for God. To him the entire universe is suffused with the spirit of God.
Those who are interested in reading him I recommend Deepak Chopra’s The Love poems of Rumi.