Street Corner India

==========================================================


****************************************************************************

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Chinthal Basthi

Sandwiched between the posh localities of Khairatabad and Banjara Hills, Chinthal Basthi is a wee lower middle class super-mall, a melting pot of cultures, languages; and Sunday Fairs. An island of rural culture in a Metropolis.


When the heart is in susthi
And the mind needs masthi
For a riot of colors
Sounds and flavors
Take a stroll in Chinthal Basthi


Note: For me, susthi is 'melancholia', masthi is 'feeling one's oats', chintal is 'tamarind grove', basthi is 'pell-mell'.

Posted by G P Sastry (gps1943@yahoo.com)

************************************************************************

Towards the end of my stay at IIT KGP, I was living alone for a year in our Qrs B-140 and pining to join my wife and son who had already shifted to Hyderabad. I was managing by cooking some rice and alu curry for both lunch and dinner. Too lazy to cook a lavish meal for a singleton.

My pen- & then e-friend of 25 years, Edwin Taylor at Autocrat's Boston wrote to me one day that he was going to a popular public lecture by the famous physicist Hawking, paying $ 200 for a front-row seat.

I told him jokingly that it is my food bill for an entire year.

He was shocked.

And he requested me to never set foot on the US soil: because he was afraid I will collapse watching the amount of food that is wasted there!

Edwin is the most perfect gentleman I saw; well I didn't see him ever. Last year when my son and Kapil visited him in his house at Boston, my son gave Edwin his cell-phone so I can talk to him for the first time. Before handing over the phone to him my son cautioned me to speak slowly and deliberately....which I did for the first 3 seconds. Then on I was roaring like Niagara. ET was trying to butt in to thank me for writing up the Printed Solution Manual of his Black Holes Book with JAW. I told him that I will pass on the thanks to Saswat & Manish.

Saswat was planning to visit him at Boston...after all Boston is just a moon-rock's throw from NY. My itinerant salesman son is now in Maryland under the Protection of Parag and maybe visiting Texas next week where I guess many of my students are settled. I rarely say 'ex'-students; once you are a student you are gone! Arjun Malhotra wrote to me something along these lines, responding to my Article: 'First Class Encounters' in KGPian which I passed on to him:

http://www.alumni.iitkgp.ernet.in/october07/encounter.shtml

******************************************************************************

Reverting to Edwin: these generational friendships have a quaint charm of their own.

He was once wondering how India, a land one-fifth the size of the US, is supporting a population five times larger.

I replied quoting the truism: "Geography decides History, Culture and Economics. England became the most powerful Sea-Power and held a world-wide Empire because she is an Island unlike land-locked Switzerland".

Geography decides climate and that is how India is an Out-Doors Country: we are Children of Sunshine (with tanned or swarthy skins).

We South Indians have to dress light (if at all) to withstand the rigors of a hot and humid climate. We don't spend much money on heating or even cooling for most part of the year. Hot weather unlike cold weather does not demand much food either. The Himalayas in the North and sea on three sides give us two spells of monsoon and if they don't cheat us we have enough water in our numerous rivers and, given the fertility of the soil, we can have a couple of crops in the fields fed by rivers and rainfall.

These factors are behind the enormous growth as well as bare sustenance of the swelling population.

And we are now a famous Democracy (ask Obama). Amartya Sen says again and again that Democracy prevents famine deaths which were routine during the Colonial Rule. And if (a Big If) it turns out that we get surrounded by flourishing Democracies, we won't have to spend much on our Military either, since it is said that no two Democracies have ever gone to War, so far at least.

Lastly the Open Society we have had for millennia absorbs alien ideas and technologies quickly and make them our own (like this English language I am writing in and the keyboard on which I do it) much to the discomfort of Obama who wants his country to go behind a Protectionist Wall against Poor India.

*****************************************************************************

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Lace Curtain

"Obama says NO to foreign nurses": Report


Gone is the Iron Curtain
Goner is the Bamboo Curtain
Busy are the Obamas
Behind their hungamas
Knitting a see-through Lace Curtain!

Posted by G P Sastry (gps1943@yahoo.com)

***************************************************************************

Yes, we are poor. But by and large not that poor that most of our billion are unhappy most of the time (and wherever they are meanly exploited, they are making their resentment felt one way or the other).

Our Out-Doors culture ensures that we are not obsessed with Privacy.

Most of our leisure hours are spent in street-corner gregariousness. We mix a lot among our neighborhood. That makes for a robust security basket both physically and psychologically.

When we were younger there was a very popular TV Serial titled Nukkad (Street Corner). Folks our age get rather nostalgic about it and watch repeats on obscure TV channels.

**********************************************************************

In our sea-side Village there was no Power, no good Radio (forget TV) and few could afford newspapers: they just visited the Free Reading Room where there was a Common Battery-operated Croaking Radio Set of sorts and shared comments freely.

We kids had to invent our own entertainment and wherever there is a call for invention of any kind, it makes for absorbing leisure.

Adults who had to earn their livelihood and run the family had very little spare time; and that was spent strolling down to the nukkad, sharing cups of Tea in wayside bunks, and in Wholesome Gossiping.

In our small towns every nukkad has a tiny temple which makes it more colorful.

In our University town everyone who had time on their hands walked down to the Sea-Beach. Most evenings were warm and made for good impromptu picnicking round the year.

At IIT KGP, Harry's was the nukkad. A cup of Tea was dirt-cheap and all students loved to sprawl on the lawns and teachers on make-shift cement benches.

Climate again.

Hyderabad is blessed with a kind climate. None feels like wearing a sweater, forget suit.

Barring a couple of posh areas, the Twin Cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad are made up of tiny townships contiguous to one another: each almost self-sufficient. There is a nukkad everywhere.

A widowed lady, wife of a retired Professor, owning an apartment with a balcony prefers living alone here than with her kids settled in the US: she says that just sitting in a chair on her balcony, watching the swirling autonomous humanity going about recklessly in cycles, scooters, autos, cars and buses, and kids returning boisterously from school dumping their uniforms and school bags and running around the area is a hundred times pleasanter for her than getting shut up in a wonderfully heated luxury home alone most of the time most days.

Folks of my generation settled in the US apparently spend their weekends among their old Indian friends in their superheated luxury rooms pining for the nukkads of their Indian Home Towns.

For them sadly it is like:

" For all sad words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are these,
'it might have been'."

..........John Greenleaf Whittier.

**************************************************************************************************

Not so for their grandkids born and brought up in say Boston again. They are terrified and paralyzed when they are asked to cross the road leading to our nukkad in Hyderabad which I do with closed eyes.

They prefer to stay indoors and relish the 108 varieties of dishes cooked by their Granny and listen day in and day out to the Tall Tales told by their Granpa:

***************************************************************************

"...Indians are past masters at recounting tales, and my friend's tale of his escape from the clutches of a mad Englishman would have been worth listening to. Bahadur had witnessed the whole occurrence from his perch on the tree and when he rejoined me he said, 'That man will be very popular at camp-fires for many years to come, but no one will believe his story'....."

.......Jim Corbett in Jungle Lore

****************************************************************************

And after a month when it is time to leave India, they would like to bind their Granny and Granpa with steel chains and airlift them to their Boston.

But how many Indians live in the US compared to the ones staying here? Just a speck of sand on sea-shore.

And they just take a stroll in Chinthal Basthi, return home inspired to blog their hearts away and :

"Belabor on this, that and sundry
As Varun puts it charmingly"

*******************************************************************************

"The Fifth Book of our Golden Treasury to which Pratik Looks Forward to Write his Foreword" (post-Diwali) is tentatively titled:

Between

You & Me

and

Little Ishani

My wife tells me that a wee hike in Pension has been announced.

Party Time!



============================================================