love, the mystery unsolved

Abandon by Pico Iyer, Viking, January 2003. ISBN 037541505. Price Rs 450 (US$9.50), 354 pages.

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By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in May 2003).

Even before Islam supplanted communism as the mysterious enemy of western civilization, novels that blurred the boundaries between religion and politics had become commonplace. Most of these books, of course, were thrillers. None were about faith. Communism may be dead, but Belief still scares us. Abandon, the latest book from Pico Iyer, may be the first novel since the end of the cold war to take on the task. The result is a remarkable book, though its attempt at translating religious ecstasy is cryptic and, finally, unsuccessful.

Iyer, a writer of Indian extraction who was raised in Britain and now lives in California and Japan, is one of globalization’s first writers. Better known for his nonfiction writing--which has appeared in Time, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books and other top magazines—than for his fiction, Iyer nearly always writes from a perspective of displacement, seeking, perhaps, to explain the unfamiliar by knocking down all the usual borders. The titles of some of his books hint at what drives him: Falling Off the Map, The Global Soul, Video Nights in Kathmandu.

Abandon is thus, in some paradoxical way, familiar territory. Moving from California to Syria to Spain to England to India and to Iran as though these places were no more remote than Canada or Mexico, the novel traces the quest for understanding of John MacMillan, a British scholar of Sufism and Sufi poetry. Like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Abandon blurs the line between the detective story and literary investigation. Or, perhaps, between the mystery and the Mystery.

Sufism, or the mystical dimension of Islam, focuses on the surrender to the love of God. Unlike other Muslims, the Sufis believe that through this surrender—abandon in both senses of the word—it is possible to come close to God and experience his love while one is alive. The Sufi poets produced an immense body of literature to express the rapture of this state and guide others to achieving it. In Abandon, Iyer’s protagonist believes he has stumbled upon a lost manuscript penned by the most famous of these poets, Rumi, who wrote hundreds of poems in the 13th century and founded the Mevlevi Order of dervishes, better known as the Whirling Dervishes of Sufism. MacMillan’s detective work is both literal and literary, therefore, for he must discover not only whether the manuscript is genuine but also endeavor to understand what the poems mean.

The novel’s backdrop is intriguing. Though Iyer’s characters are scholars, this is a field where danger lurks and hidden treasures promise to resurface. Discussions of colleagues trail off into this realm… with professors who write articles under assumed names to protect their families in Iran, or students of Scientology who enter the witness protection program, an event explained dramatically (and with some unintentional comedy): “They found out about his thesis, I gather.” But the evocation of the fear and wonder that belief evokes in us is not without nuance. One professor confesses of his attraction to the study of Islam, “But I do have a regular person’s interest. It was the sixties, there was all this stuff in the air—Malcom X, Marcus Garvey, Muhammad Ali, all of that. And the Moslems were always the big bad wolf in every story. I guess I just figured we were so busy making all these jokes about how they called us ‘the Great Satan,’ we didn’t stop to think we were calling them ‘the Great Satan’ ourselves. Except we didn’t have the balls to use words like ‘Satan’ and ‘infidel.’”

In this strange academy, the engaging voice of Iyer’s nonfiction writing serves him well. “The Sufis,” MacMillan scrawls for his postgraduate seminar, “so-called for the rough woolen gown they wear, or suf—emblem of their austerity, their voluntary poverty, their anonymity—were a small group of Moslems who began to gather in groups, often secretly, at the beginning of the eighth century, soon after the Prophet’s death. Their aim, quite simply, was to find a direct path to the divine…. Their goal was not to conquer the world, but to conquer themselves.” The message is clear: Although his characters are the victims of the Iranian revolution, Iyer’s subject is not the fanaticism of persecution, torture and destruction, but the fanaticism of ecstasy, of faith. It is an almost impossible subject.

Iyer turns to the metaphor that countless poets have used to link the divine to the mundane: love. “The Sufi ideal is one of love, but it is not the love of the compassionate mother, or of Jesus, he speaks of; it is the ravenous, consuming eros of the lover inflamed,” MacMillan explains to his class. Likewise, floundering with Rumi’s poems, MacMillan discovers himself falling in love with Camilla, a woman with her own mysteries. Seemingly damaged beyond repair, Camilla cannot allow herself to plunge into love. Instead of surrendering, she does what she can to sabotage her own chances for happiness, even though (a Californian through and through) she has a psychologist’s awareness of her self-destructive impulses. Struggling to convince her to let herself go, MacMillan comes to realize the extent to which he has manacled himself against happiness.

Metaphors resonate, and instruct, by showing us in a flash how two unlike things are alike. Their lessons burn like an instant revelation. But the comparison of love and faith, neither of which we know for sure, don’t strike with the same clarity. Perhaps that is why somewhere along the way, the love story of Abandon fails. There is too little of the familiar here. MacMillan’s love for Camilla is inexplicable. She has few charms, it is all too apparent, and her capacity to repel is infinite. What could be more unattractive than someone who cannot complete a conversation without uttering something as banal as, “I disappoint myself every day, every moment. You’re the first person in a long time who’s given me a chance to show I might not be completely worthless.” That’s a line that could only be delivered by someone who owns three or four cats, and Camilla keeps serving up the same swill. That MacMillan keeps asking for more is, to be frank, more difficult to believe in than God, not less. Only the investigation of the lost Rumi manuscript and MacMillan’s engaging thoughts on the nature of Islam—which Iyer valiantly resists reducing to the specter of terrorism--can keep this battered engine clunking along.

an insider's view of india

India in Slow Motion, by Mark Tully, Gillian Wright. Viking. £17.99

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in May 2003).

IN INDIA IN SLOW MOTION, long-time BBC correspondent Mark Tully argues that the primary force holding India back is neither its history of invasions and foreign domination nor its religious fatalism and divisive caste system. The fundamental problem is "a peculiarly Indian form of bad governance.

"That observation will not come as a revelation to anyone--certainly not to Indians. But, fortunately, Tully does not waste pages cataloguing the endless train of governmental malfeasance that comprises India's recent political history. Instead, he examines a few choice examples of crusades--grass-roots or personal--to provide the safety from economic exploitation, access to water and freedom from religious persecution that are the promises of "good governance."

Although the book jacket lists Tully's partner, Gillian Wright, as co-author, Wright's role is not clear as all the essays are written in the first person from Tully's perspective. The old India hand brings an infectious love for India to the task, but his is not a blind love. Born in Calcutta and educated in England, he spent 25 years as South Asia correspondent for the BBC--getting a journalist's tour of the region's grimmest catastrophes. These experiences colour all the chapters of Slow Motion, and some of the finest writing is essentially memoir of a life covering Indian politics; of strong friendships forged with complex politicians.

The scope of the book is wide. In a chapter titled "The Water Harvesters" Tully examines how government corruption has exacerbated drought problems in Gujarat. At least one village has eliminated the drought problem with a network of water barriers that the villagers built themselves. But the government remains focused on a large infrastructure project to dam the Narmada River. The money the government has allotted to small-scale irrigation projects is often directed to contractors who build dams of mud, with a thin plating of concrete, or who don't build dams at all, except on paper.

In "Creating Cyberabad," Tully addresses an innovative programme undertaken by the chief minister of Andra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu. Naidu, who turned Hyderabad, the state capital, into an information technology centre second only to Bangalore, now seeks to bring the IT revolution to the common man by creating a system of "e-governance." The pilot programme eliminated much of the waste and frustration endemic in India's bureaucracy. Now, instead of needing six clerks, six counters and six queues to renew their driving licences, pay bills or register a birth, constituents can accomplish 18 formerly onerous tasks at one counter, with one clerk equipped with a computer. But this obvious improvement won Naidu as many enemies as friends, the writers say, because bureaucrats know that good governance is bad news for them and the Indian democracy is addicted to "leg pulling"--dragging down people doing good things.

While these two chapters (and several others) relate directly to the book's central theme, in other chapters the connections are more tenuous. Some of the essays do not seem related to bad governance at all. "Altered Altars," for example, touches on the Catholic Church of Goa's role in fighting corruption, but it is less about graft than about India's religious pluralism, a subject that Tully picks up again in "The Sufis and a Plain Faith." Certainly Indian politicians have exploited caste and religion to gain and hold power despite failing to improve the lot of their constituents--as Tully argues in his introduction and conclusion. But these essays do not advance that argument; rather they reinforce the already well-established view that India is a mix of cultures and not a Hindu state.

Unfortunately, the book's appealing discursiveness also prevents its authors from exploring either the central argument or his intriguing stories in their full complexity. For instance, a chapter that recounts a sting on the Defence Ministry conducted by the dotcom company Tehelka, relies wholly on an interview with the reporter who orchestrated the coup. Tully and Wright fail to advance the story or to investigate the reasons why the defence minister caught taking a bribe was ushered back into power less than a year after the scandal.

Tully's and Wright's characterizations are acute, their knowledge of the subject is exhaustive and their writing taut and unpretentious. The real reason to read this book, though, is for the unique insider's perspective that Tully's long tenure as the BBC's top man provides. Few writers could match nostalgia for once-peaceful Kashmir with a cogent analysis of where Farooq Abdullah's government went wrong, as Tully does in "Paradise Lost."

And no other writer could have produced "A Tale of Two Brothers," an article about the relationship of former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh and his gossip-addicted, politically doomed brother. The chapter captures the machinations of Indian politics and the enduring, complex loyalty of Indian families. That is the Mark Tully readers have come to adore.

want to get involved? call youthreach

A catalyst NGO, Youthreach connects young professionals with organizations that need their help. Cleaning up the environment, teaching disadvantaged children, helping the disabled--you name it, Youthreach has a project in mind.

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in Span in May 2003.)

If their offices were more swank, the fourteen attractive young women who staff Youthreach could easily be mistaken for the editorial board of a fashion magazine instead of the staff of an innovative service organization. But these women are not only young and upwardly mobile, they are also women who live their lives with a sense of purpose. That’s the combination that makes Youthreach—a non-governmental organization founded to mobilize the skills and enthusiasm of New Delhi’s young middle class—a winning proposition.

In 1997, three young people came together with a common desire to contribute to the community. Uday Khemka, a non-resident Indian who splits time between London and New York, provided the seed funding for the project. But he needed dedicated partners to manage and build the organization. He teamed up with Nanni Singh, who’d started an NGO in Chandigarh when she was just 18 years old but was then working with her husband in the export business, and Nandita Kathpalia Baig, another young woman with an entrepreneurial spirit. For inspiration, they went to the wellspring of most good ideas: they thought not only about the needs of those people they wanted to help, but about what they themselves wanted to get out of the experience. They set two goals. They wanted to create a shift in consciousness, instilling a sense of responsibility in Delhi’s young, and they wanted to build a bridge that would allow other NGOs to leverage the skills of young professionals—doctors, lawyers, accountants, even CEOs.

“We founded Youthreach essentially as an organization that would look at giving young people like ourselves, who had a lot to be thankful for, a chance to really address the sense of disconnection and disempowerment from the larger reality that is India, the very immediate gaps that exist at the traffic light between [us and] a child who comes up asking for some generosity.” explains Nanni Singh, the 33-year-old director of the NGO. “Mostly, how we react to these things is a sense of apathy or disempowerment: ‘Oh God, what is it that I can do? Surely it is somebody else’s problem.’ We wanted an organization that could create a link between this sensitivity--this wanting to do something more or wanting to know more--and organizations on the ground that were really handling these issues at the grass roots.”

Today, Youthreach seeks to get people directly involved with NGOs working for children and the environment. It has partnered with around 25 groups in Delhi and 10-odd organizations outside the city that are working to protect children from exploitation and provide basic services. Youthreach also works with around 15 NGOs working to protect the environment. Youthreach interacts with the leadership of each of its partner organizations to ascertain their human resource needs and creates a master list of projects for prospective volunteers. The list can be daunting. Salaam Baalak Trust needs doctors and dentists to treat street children. The Association for Cricket for the Blind needs editors and copywriters for its publications. The children’s rights group Butterflies needs a web designer. The Hope Foundation needs gynecologists and psychologists for leprosy patients. But though Youthreach seeks to provide its partners with hard-to-find, skilled staff, not all the positions require advanced degrees. There is plenty of room for dedicated people whose hearts are in the right place to teach English or Mathematics, to read stories, to play sports and organize games, or to participate in letter-writing or poster campaigns.

“We have two categories of volunteers, and we deal with each one differently,” says Singh. “We have volunteers…like bankers who don’t want to bank and look at your financial books but who want to work directly with children, reading stories or whatever. We call them direct volunteers, persons with direct contact. Then there are volunteers who want to give inputs, professional inputs…help an organization build the east wing of a small health center, help another organization look at using their office space more effectively. Doctors, health care workers, etc.”

One volunteer who provides that professional input is Monica Kumar, one of the founders of Manas, a registered trust that provides mental health services. Already operating a clinic providing psychotherapy and special education services to individual clients and working with a dozen of Delhi’s top schools, Kumar and her associates decided after three years it was time to reach out to the community. But they didn’t know how, and they were too strapped for time themselves to do the legwork necessary to find out. That’s where Youthreach came in.

“It was always in the back of our minds that we needed to do it,” said Kumar. “Youthreach gave us that backup [of resources] without which we wouldn’t have been able to have done it. We would have had to make a fresh start, but there were already communities existing, where all we had to do was go and work.”

Manas has provided counseling services to teachers and students at three Youthreach affiliates: the Delhi chapter of the National Association for the Blind (NAB); Karm Marg, a shelter for street children; and Navjyoti, an NGO that provides education for slum children.

Neha Malik, the young woman who acts as the counselor, explained how the program works. “I conduct workshops with the children and with the teachers, basically talking about mental health issues: how to handle problematic behaviors of children, be that either emotional, behavioral or academic issues. We have a workshop once a month – we’ve had three so far. Other than that I go once a week and interact with the children over there. Basically, they have cases lined up for me, and I provide counseling.” She has already seen the benefits, and, perhaps more importantly, so have the organizations she works with. “I’ve got a very good response from NAB. They’ve really seen a lot of improvement. In fact they kept saying they want a full-time psychologist. They keep asking me, ‘Can you come twice in a week, can you come thrice in a week?’ But unfortunately because I’m also going other places, and I’m doing clinical work here, once a week is the best I can do.”

Youthreach has mobilized professionals from fields ranging from engineering to architecture to the arts. Dancer Ashley Lobo conducted a dance program for 50 street children, with the idea that he could not only give these kids a chance to earn a livelihood in the arts one day, but also give a serious boost to their self-esteem. David Mansfield, then Food and Beverage Manager at the Grand Hyatt, conducted a workshop on resume-building for 12 children from the National Association for the Blind, and he held a capacity-building workshop for the staff of Deepalaya and Salaam Baalak Trust, which work with slum children and street kids, to explain what the hotel looks for in a job applicant.

For other volunteers, Youthreach has provided a route back into working world. Gitanjali Krishnan had been a professional teacher for 18 years in Bombay, but she was a full-time homemaker when she came to Youthreach and said she wanted to volunteer three years ago. She was soon teaching class four students at the Deepalaya Ramditti School and teaching English to students of the National Open School at the Deepalaya Kalkaji School. Six months later, when the principal of the Ramditti School fell ill, Krishnan took over. She never left. Today, in addition to managing the day-to-day operations of the school, Krishnan handles all the volunteers Youthreach sends to the Deepalaya schools.
***
A key partner in the Youthreach mission is the U.S.-based International Youth Foundation, which has selected the Delhi-based NGO to manage and administer its grants locally. Established in 1990, the IYF operates in nearly 50 countries and territories and is one of the world’s largest public foundations. IYF works with hundreds of partner organizations like Youthreach to strengthen and expand programs that are helping young people. Over the last decade, IYF and its in-country partners have helped more than 26 million people gain access to life skills, education, job training and other opportunities.

Youthreach has distributed nearly Rs. 30 lakhs in IYF grants, funding the expansion of a Chandigarh-based education program for slum children, a computer training center in New Delhi, a school for 150 child beggars and casual laborers in Bangalore, and a program that provides basic services including education, healthcare and nutrition for 190 children in New Delhi.

One of these programs, New Delhi-based Ankur, provides alternative education for underprivileged children living in Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Basti. “The school doesn’t teach the regular ABCDs, it teaches children to think for themselves,” explained Shabnam Sahni Arora, who administers Youthreach’s grant-making activities. For the talented, motivated children of parents who work as daily wage laborers, vegetable sellers and housemaids, the school presents a “very different avenue” from those available to them at government schools. With seed money from Youthreach and the International Youth Foundation, Ankur was able to set up a computer lab called Compughar—complete with PCs, a digital camera, and tape recorders--that the students use to create a monthly “wall magazine” covering their community, which they post on the walls of neighborhood buildings. Student reporters and designers produce the entire publication, developing story ideas, interviewing members of their community and writing the stories themselves. The idea is part of a larger agenda to create a community archive, according to Ankur’s program coordinator, Prabhat K. Jha. “We want to redefine history,” he said, explaining that the lives of the people in India’s slum communities are virtually undocumented. “This is not a computer center. They’re using the computer as a creative tool, not to learn the skills to provide cheap labor.” For the young people of this low-income community, this was the first time anyone encouraged them to be creative or to think about what their lives mean.

“Some of them are really amazing writers,” said Shabnam. “[And] they’ve learned an incredible amount about computers.” Compughar also teaches students about responsibility. The students themselves select the writers they believe are capable of participating in the project, and now five students earn a small stipend in exchange for training eight others in the computer skills needed to produce the wall magazine and archive content. In 2002, the team produced a slick paperbound book about their neighborhood called By Lanes. More than a hundred pages long in English and Hindi, the book comprises samples of their writing and photography. The arresting passages written by these young writers are proof enough of the program’s impact:

The sound of vehicles coming and going.
The sound of someone selling something.
Peanuts. Buy peanuts. Hot and crisp peanuts. Almonds of the poor are peanuts. Buy! Buy!
After some time I was standing outside my lane, when the earring seller came. Earrings of gold for the price of pebbles, he said. The women surrounded him. Arre bhaiya, show us this one. How much is it for?
…
An elderly man is our neighbour. He is from Pakistan. His name is Mirajo. But we call him chacha… Once the boy I was just telling you about brought some more boys with him. They had two eggs in each hand. Bhai Mirajo …was sitting down to eat when those boys started pelting eggs at him and his house. Poor bhai Mirajo didn’t do anything. Yesterday, when he came to our house, he was weeping as he was saying, ‘If I do something wrong, you can all hit me. But I haven’t done anything. Why do all of you needlessly bother me?’ He had tears in his eyes. Seeing him, we also wanted to howl.

Another IYF grant helped Anubhav, an organization that works to help child ragpickers make the transition from the streets to the classroom, double its staff of outreach workers. Most of the children of New Delhi’s grim Mayapuri Industrial Estate supplement their families’ meager incomes by collecting scrap metal. All day long, they scramble through the battered landscape of junk cars, automobile parts and garbage, using magnets to attract stray bits of scrap metal to sell. Black with soot and living on the bare edge of survival, these children have no motivation to go to school and nobody to motivate them to go to school. Anubhav therefore has to go out into the community and convince children to come to the local education program—which provides a recreation center, nutritious food and medical care as an incentive to encourage attendance. “It’s a nonformal education system,” said Shabnam. “But after they get them up to a certain level and used to going to a center and sitting and listening to someone, they try to get them into a formal system of education in government schools.” Before receiving a Youthreach-IYF grant, Anubhav had two teachers canvassing the community to draw in students, neither of whom had been paid in more than eight months. The grant allowed the organization to pay those teachers and hire two more, as well as begin a nutrition program that is a major incentive for children to turn up at the school. Subhash Bose, the head of Anubhav, has also established links with local dispensaries and medical professionals to monitor the health status of the children. In 2002, Bose had more 142 children enrolled in his informal education program, and he regularly provides food for 120 kids.

For Mobile Creches, an organization that provides daycare for the children of day laborers on Delhi construction sites, a Youthreach-IYF grant made it possible to hire a fulltime person to focus on building awareness about the program, which started in 1969. She has reached out to schools, targeting class eleven students, as a way of forging a link between affluent communities and the workers who build their homes. Class eleven students volunteer to work with the Mobile Creches program, either as daycare workers or in back-office jobs. The young volunteers inject a vital dose of enthusiasm, and the stories they take home to their parents are a terrific aid to the organizations fundraising efforts.

Youthreach volunteers are vital to making these programs work. Jyoti Gupta, a freelance advertising designer, volunteered to design a brochure and fundraising bulletin for Mobile Creches. Tanisha Sangha, who writes profiles of inspiring women for Cosmopolitan and India Today, helped the NGO develop case studies to use in their newsletter and annual report. Montessori teachers Bhavna Ledlie and Pincha Singh conducted capacity-building workshops to train Mobile Creches teachers to introduce primary-level English into their curriculum, and volunteers like Amrita Bhandari and Gemma Wall signed on as teachers. Because English is a requirement for admission into Municipal Corporation of Delhi schools, the program was important for the NGO’s mission. Likewise, Martin Auer, a German writer visiting India, taught creative writing skills to the students and teachers of Ankur. Vikrant Rathore, a disc jockey, helped Anubhav with communication projects and administrative work. Another volunteer helped the organization balance its books.
***
This March, Youthreach confirmed a grant from the Ford Foundation that will allow it to expand its awareness-building activities.
Youthreach developed a three-year expansion plan that will see the organization publish pamphlets on environmental protection, conduct an outdoor advertising campaign on hoardings at bus shelters, as well as create radio spots and short promotional films to be screened in Delhi’s theaters along with the trailers aired before the feature films. The organization will also increase the scope of its workshops, which include films and discussion groups, ramping up to reach out to all of its NGO coordinators and to 20 corporations and their coordinators, volunteers and staff once every six months. The Ford Foundation will also help Youthreach improve its information technology package, enhancing tracking and communication with donors and volunteers. The NGO will link its web site with partner organizations with similar mandates and increase its e-mail database, seeking to link up with 15 partner sites and build an e-mail database of 8,000 addresses in three years.

“The Ford Foundation has really come on board with a very open mind,” said Singh. “They came to us and basically told us, whatever it is that you think is important and where you’d like to put this money. It was for us to put together a proposal.”

We’ve heard of you and are interested in what you’re doing, the Ford Foundation said. Why haven’t you ever approached us for funding? For the five-year-old NGO devoted to building bridges, this might be the longest bridge of all.

lacking an expected political bite

Tiger by the River, by Ravi Shankar Etteth. Doubleday. £12.99 ($20.45)

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in April 2003).

Fans of Ravi Shankar Etteth's biting political cartoons will be disappointed to find that the India Today satirist's first novel, Tiger by the River, contains no illustrations and little of the author's signature wit. Etteth, who is also deputy editor of India Today, has instead chosen to write a historical romance.

Tiger by the River tells the story of the parallel homecomings of long-lost cousins, both heirs to the title Raja of Panayur. When Swati Varma's pregnant wife dies in a traffic accident, he decides to scatter her ashes in the sacred Papanasini river. His journey home becomes a search for the past, as he recalls the history of his ancestors and the legendary tiger that protected them. At the same time, another heir to the now powerless throne of Panayur, Vel Kramer, discovers with the death of his surrogate grandfather that he must trace his lineage first to Berlin, where his biological grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, and then to his ancestral kingdom.

Both of these rather static stories often seem to be merely frames for the tales of the two rajas' progenitors, whose lives were packed with incident. Swati's desultory musings along the sacred river shift swiftly to the 16th century and the tale of a cruel king and his tortured queen. Vel's search for his past also works as a set-up for the story of his grandparents in Germany. Unfortunately, the complicated structure causes the book to meander along in fits and starts, interrupting itself just as it becomes interesting.

There are hints of something better to come from Etteth. The multiple stories and settings evince a fertile imagination, and he has a gift for dialogue. If he can marry his poetic impulse with the hard heart he shows in his work as a cartoonist, we could look forward to rich future work from him.

why now?

Twelve years ago, Burmese activist Soe Myint hijacked an aircraft. He was never prosecuted . . . until now.

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in April 2003).

ONE APRIL MORNING last year, police stormed the home of Soe Myint--a Burmese exile living in India--and arrested him for hijacking a flight, a charge that could lead to a life sentence.

Myint, who looks more like the president of Harvard's young Asian-Republicans' club than a terrorist, has spent the last 12 years peacefully working as a journalist in India. But it is true that in 1990, at the age of 21, he hijacked a Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Rangoon. He was "armed" with a Laughing Buddha statue, which he claimed was a bomb. En route to Calcutta, Soe Myint and his accomplice told the passengers about what had driven them to seize the aircraft.

"We wanted to explain what was really happening in Burma, because at that time all the media attention was focused on the Gulf War," Soe Myint recalls nearly 12 years later over a lunch of pizza and fried chicken in New Delhi.

Two years before the hijacking, Soe Myint had witnessed the brutality of the military at firsthand when it seized back control of Burma, killing an estimated 3,000 protesters and supporters of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. "I saw soldiers shoot down people indiscriminately." Outside Burma, the deaths were quickly forgotten.

By the time Soe Myint hijacked the flight in 1990, the situation had deteriorated. Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest, but her party had still swept that year's general election. The junta refused to hand over power. "The international community was silent," says Soe Myint. And so he hijacked an aircraft.

It's hard today to recall a time when hijackers might have been thought of as anything other than terrorists. But this was the age of Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall, not of September 11. Soe Myint believed that people might sympathize with them. "We thought: Either we will be killed, or we will be cheered."

The young men were cheered. India allowed the hijackers to hold the press conferences they requested. Charges were framed, but the men were freed on bail. More than 30 members of parliament--including the current defence minister, George Fernandes--signed petitions requesting that the charges be dropped. "We were put in jail for three months only," says Soe Myint.

DISSIDENT REPORTERS

Then, last April, the police came for Soe Myint. "It's still a mystery," he says. Fernandes has assured him that the order didn't come from the central government, and West Bengal officials say the state has no interest in prosecuting him. "Nobody is taking responsibility," Soe Myint says. At his trial, his lawyer will argue that he innocent of the charge of hijacking, because he used no weapons and the pilots willingly "diverted" the aircraft to Calcutta.

So why now? Soe Myint believes it's because of his work as a journalist for stations like Radio Free Asia and for his role in an Internet news service that allows dissident reporters within Burma to make their voices heard. "We have reporters who are exposing human-rights violations in Burma," he says. "Many of them are also close to the opposition movement, the resistance movement."

Throughout the 1990s, India supported the pro-democracy movement. But lately relations have warmed with Burma, culminating in the visit of then-Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh to Rangoon in 2002. A week later, Soe Myint was arrested. "The people who arrested me were not interested in the hijacking," he says. "They were interested in my news sources. But I cannot reveal the names of my reporters, or they will definitely be jailed." The Indian authorities have not commented officially on the timing of Soe Myint's arrest.

Calm before his trial begins on April 2, Soe Myint has few regrets. "Whatever I do, I do for a political cause. So even if India decides to put me in jail I will be ready to face it. I am proud of what I did 12 years ago, and I'm proud of what I'm doing now. I had many chances to leave India . . . but I didn't choose that way."

a cynical, idealistic melange

Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land, by Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in March 2003).

Honesty, they say, is its own reward. And it's a good thing, too, because it rarely wins many friends. In his latest book on India, Out of God's Oven, poet and journalist Dom Moraes wields candor like a bludgeon, confessing at the outset: "In 1980, [my return to India] had sounded like a prison sentence ... I sympathized with the poor, but too many of them existed. India had the most brutally stupid middle class in the world."

Critics from that disparaged group have responded in kind, taking Moraes to task for his pessimism, his anglophilia and, generally, for writing like a foreigner. The small praise given Out of God's Oven has been parceled out to his co-writer Sarayu Srivatsa, a woman whose relationship with "home" is less ambivalent. But it is a mistake to accept either writer's pose - charitable ingenue or cantankerous snob - too readily. These are devices, and terrific ones, for examining what the writers refer to as "terrible landmarks in Indian history". The pairing of the cynic and the optimist gives these "travels in a fractured land" a dramatic urgency, as grim event after grim event threatens, by education, to make the lark more and more like the owl.

The book's title, which derives from a story Srivatsa's grandmother told her to explain India's oppressive caste system, captures the essence of that struggle between innocence and experience. The first men the gods made were burned dark brown in the gods' hot clay oven, grandmother says. They became the Shudra, the pariah. Once the gods perfected the recipe, they made the beautiful, fair Brahmin. If I am a Brahmin, the young Srivatsa asks her grandmother, then why am I so dark? Just as Moraes' brutal sincerity is a mask for a great love, as emerges in his portraits of his many friends, Srivatsa's sunny optimism is a terrific foil, also, for cutting sarcasm.

Based on six years of nearly constant travel, Out of God's Oven captures the issues gripping contemporary India more completely than recent books with comparable agendas (Mark Tully's India in Slow Motion and William Dalrymple's Age of Kali come to mind). The book neither panders to the foreigner's obsessions nor caters to his ignorance. At the same time, Moraes and Srivatsa both "write like foreigners" to the extent that - unlike too many Indian journalists - they never neglect to provide the background necessary to understand the events they describe. But where a foreign correspondent like myself might be content muckraking (India is corrupt! Hindus kill Muslims!), they have the luxury of being able to go beyond sanctimonious outrage to more complex analysis.

In a book of remarkable scope, the two writers address many of the seminal events of Indian history of the past three decades, ranging from riots by Dalits (formerly untouchables) in Bombay, to the cooperative movement that empowered village women by granting them control over the marketing of the fruit of their labors, to the battle of communist Naxalites with Bihar's upper-caste landlords, to the various tragedies caused by an enduring religious mania. Though the timing of its release prompted publishers to market Out of God's Oven as a prelude to the deadly Gujarat riots, it is far more than an investigation of the persecution of Indian Muslims or Hindu fundamentalism.

Despite those numerous strengths, however, the book suffers from an over-reliance on informants who share the sensibilities and background of the authors. These interviews - spirited exchanges between the like-minded, to be sure - generate some terrific lines: "An Indian was not part of a team; he was part of a mob"; "The greatest freedom we have received from Independence [was the] freedom to talk"; "Corruption is an offshoot of hypocrisy, the habit of lying to oneself"; "Politics is the only profession where you do not need any qualifications." But the eloquent expression of consensus does not result in many new insights about the others: the fundamentalist thugs, the devoutly religious, the desperately poor.

Nevertheless, though it's peopled with too many talkers and not enough actors, Out of God's Oven is not completely without heroes: a teacher at a convent school combating the messages of religious hatred her students absorb from their parents; a 72-year-old writer who has lived among the poorest villagers of North Bengal, fighting their causes for 25 years; a man who takes in illegitimate children, mad and destitute women. But the overall feeling is that India has just too many tragedies. "I am tired, so tired," says one of these good souls. "If I had an alternative, do you think I would be doing this? Can I just leave everything and run away? They have no one else. So I continue. I have no choice. And I am so tired."

This is not the familiar quirky, mystical India that churns along, in chaos, yes, but never in collapse. It's a vision of a lighted bomb, the fuse sputtering fast. And the writers offer no solution, which means that in its darkest moments, the book seems to echo the novelist who tells Moraes: "I couldn't help you much. I think as you ask questions about India, you will find many people like me, who will point out what is wrong. That is, of course, glaringly clear. But I don't think anybody will be able to point out a way to make it right. If he could, he would be a leader, and India's tragedy is that it has none."

the untouchables

Last October, police in India's most-populous state arrested legislator Raghuraj Pratap Singh. Was it justice at last, or just politics Uttar Pradesh-style?

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in March 2003).

"HE SHOULD BE HANGED," says Vanita Mishra. She's talking about the man she believes murdered her husband. Eighteen months ago, the 24-year-old widow first approached the police in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and told them she knew a witness who had seen the man she suspected brutally beating her husband on the day he disappeared. Not only that, the alleged killer had 30 previous criminal charges against him.

The only problem was that the man she suspected was not only an alleged gangster, but also a state legislator: Raghuraj Pratap Singh, better known as "Raja Bhaiya," or Big Brother Raja. The police refused to register a case against him, Mishra believes, because they were too frightened.

For years, the handsome young legislator and his father, Udai Pratap Singh, ruled their rural district of Kunda with absolute authority. Members of the high Rajput caste, they behaved as though they still owned the land and as if the people were still their feudal subjects. Raja Bhaiya made no apologies for his ancestry, once explaining his supposed popularity by saying simply: "I am their raja." And when he drew fire from the press for holding a weekly meeting to settle the disputes of villagers, he said the people came to him because they couldn't afford to go to court.

But in October, Raja Bhaiya's freedom to rule over Kunda came to a sudden end. He was arrested on a relatively minor charge--allegedly threatening a one-time political crony--and then, some months later, amid a spiralling list of fresh police accusations, charged under India's toughest law, the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act. So why, after failing for years to arrest Raja Bhaiya, did the police suddenly move?

Many believe it's because Raja Bhaiya made the mistake of tangling with an iron-willed woman: Mayawati, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state. A former schoolteacher born into the shoemaker caste--one of the Dalit, or "untouchables"--Mayawati made her political career by showing her low-caste supporters that she could bring their erstwhile Rajput rulers and the high-caste Brahmins alike to heel.

The clash between the high-caste legislator and the low-caste chief minister is symptomatic of politics and power in India's most populous state, whose voters play a key role in deciding the make-up of the national government.

"When this nasty game of politics is played, all the social and moral norms are kept aside," says Shriv Narayan Singh, a senior lawyer in the state and long-time political observer. Those entering politics have two objectives, he says: Either they want to do something for the country, or they want to do something for themselves. "The majority," he adds, "is interested in the game of power."

When Raja Bhaiya was on the election trail, his chosen symbol was a chair. According to local journalists, the chair implied that he would back whoever occupied the chief minister's seat. But when Mayawati became chief minister for the third time last year, Raja Bhaiya eschewed that pragmatism. Denied a ministerial position, in October 2002 he led a group of assembly members in a revolt intended to bring down Mayawati. Less than a week later, he was in jail.

That was just the beginning. In a raid on January 25, police claimed to have discovered Raja Bhaiya's father in possession of a high-powered rifle, making him liable to prosecution under the tough new Prevention of Terrorism Act. Conveniently for the police, Udai Pratap then "hinted" that he and his son had conspired to assassinate Mayawati, according to District Magistrate Mohammed Mustafa. (Both father and son are being held incommunicado and have not been able to comment publicly.) After a brief search, the police say they also discovered a skull and partial skeleton that they suspect are the remains of Vanita Mishra's missing husband in a 400-hectare lake next to Raja Bhaiya's estate. Before long, father and son were jailed under the anti-terrorism law, which shifts the burden of proof onto the accused and denies defendants bail for at least a year.

It was a remarkable reversal of fortunes. Despite the list of charges against him, Raja Bhaiya has never been convicted of a crime. And for nearly 10 years, he maintained an unshakeable hold on his state-assembly seat. In 1993, he defeated his nearest opponent by the largest margin ever. Three years later, in 1996, he did even better. Critics say he forced his constituents to vote for him with an army of thugs known as the Raja Bhaiya Youth Brigade. During elections, not a single opposing campaign poster could be found in Kunda. "It could be because the other parties realize it is a lost cause, campaigning against me here," Raja Bhaiya suggested at the time.

In the 2002 assembly elections, when the Election Commission halted the counting of votes because of alleged irregularities and ordered the poll to be repeated--this time with extra security--Raja Bhaiya took an even greater share, 85%, of the vote.

Police claim Raja Bhaiya also used his youth brigade to frighten other traders out of the local liquor trade--which the government estimates is worth about 50 million rupees ($1 million) a year. And, police add, by taking over government land and flooding it to form the lake by his estate, he built a fisheries business that generated as much as 100,000 rupees a day, tax-free.

The charges registered with the police against the legislator over the years comprise a litany of heinous crimes: rioting, extortion, robbery, assault, kidnapping, attempted murder and murder. But according to a lawyer who represents the family, in 12 of the 20 cases registered before he alienated Mayawati, Raja Bhaiya was either acquitted or the charges were dropped. In the eight others, as well as the dozen or so brought against him since he squared off with Mayawati, Raja Bhaiya's family maintains he is innocent, slandered by his political opponents. The new district magistrate of Kunda has another explanation. "People have been frightened to testify against him," says Mustafa. "He terrorized the people."

Few claim Raja Bhaiya and his father are choirboys. But, equally, few believe his arrest represents a sincere effort to rid the government of known criminals. A number of high-caste politicians--most from Mayawati's coalition partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)--vocally opposed his arrest under the anti-terrorism act, accusing Mayawati of misusing the law to dispose of her enemies. Not only was the timing of the most serious charge against Raja Bhaiya suspect, but some of Mayawati's own ministers have long charge sheets of their own, her critics say.

Crime and politics have long been locked in an unhealthy embrace in Uttar Pradesh. Criminals once relied on political patrons, says Ashish Nandi of New Delhi's Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. "Now they themselves have entered politics." Criminals can help politicians gain and retain power, Nandi explains, by capturing poll booths, organizing demonstrations or stirring up violence. In exchange, politicians can help them avoid prosecution. Criminals became even more involved in politics when they began to realize the nature of the immunity that political power granted them. In the 2002 state assembly elections, more than a sixth of the 5,539 candidates had police records.

Despite the attacks on her cabinet colleagues, Mayawati has turned the row over Raja Bhaiya's arrest to her advantage. In an official statement, she denied it had been motivated by political expediency or by caste conflict. But her more spirited remarks to the press were couched in the rhetoric of a champion of the oppressed against the oppressor. "These people have been spreading terror since ages," she told reporters. "The people of Kunda were leading a life of slavery. They did not feel they were living in a free country."

She called on the central leadership of the BJP to rein in their local representatives, whose opposition to Raja Bhaiya's arrest threatened the state's coalition government. Recognizing the importance of the Dalit chief minister as an ally in next year's general elections, the BJP's national leaders ordered their local representatives to toe the line. That made Mayawati even more popular with her supporters. Even when a video surfaced allegedly showing Mayawati exhorting party members to divert money intended for development projects to party coffers, she weathered the storm.

Vanita Mishra, a Brahmin, might be the chief minister's biggest fan. In December, she finally persuaded the police to lodge her case. "Only when I read in the paper that Mayawati was going after him did I go back to the police," she says, fighting back tears. "I only want justice for myself and my two children for what we have suffered on account of this man."

But justice is not easy to find in India's courts. A few weeks after police found the skull they say is that of Vanita Mishra's husband, the man who allegedly led them to it, their chief witness in the case, was killed. The police say the killers must have wanted to keep him from testifying; others says the police killed him to stop him from changing his story in court. The skull isn't talking.

booker choice all at sea

Life of Pi, By Yann Martel.

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared the Far Eastern Economic Review in November 2002).

LIFE OF PI, the winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize, is a delightful little book--and I mean that in the worst possible way. Author Yann Martel and the British-based committee that chose the winning book made much of the novel's supposed religious overtones. But Martel's claim that this is a book that will make you believe in God, or at least question why you don't, is a gross exaggeration.

Life of Pi is no Moby Dick. By choosing to award the Commonwealth and Ireland's highest literary prize to Life of Pi, the Man Booker committee has rewarded the most irritating characteristic of contemporary literary writing: whimsy.

The plot summary is itself discouraging. A young Indian boy, Piscine Molitor Patel--named after a Parisian swimming pool--cutely adopts Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. A shipwreck strands him on a lifeboat in the Pacific with a 205-kilogram Bengal tiger. Relying on nothing but his wits and an amusingly frank survival guidebook, "Pi" must find a way to collect water and catch fish. Pi must also tame the tiger, which has its own name to inspire a collective groan, Richard Parker (which was also the name of a victim in a notorious case of cannibalism at sea in the 1870s).

Reviewers and publicists have described this story as a boys' adventure for grown-ups and as a fable of magical realism. But it lacks the seriousness to rank among either. Because the tale is told tongue in cheek--precluding readers' suspension of disbelief--it fails as a boys' adventure story. Nor does the novel have the historical sweep and philosophical depth on which magical realism depends. Life of Pi gives you the feeling the author is just fooling around. Moreover, and this is its worst failing, Pi's sojourn in the lifeboat--with no speaking companions--feels about 50 days too long.

Nevertheless, the Booker judges' choice of a light novel was not altogether surprising. Before meeting to choose a winner from among the short-listed novels, one of the judges, comedian David Baddiel, touched off a row in literary London by bemoaning the preponderance of "pompous, portentous and pretentious fiction." Although fellow judge and critic Erica Wagner immediately came out in support of the "longer, denser read," rightly saying that "after all, it is a prize for literature," Baddiel was obviously not alone on the panel. In choosing Life of Pi, the committee awarded the Booker to perhaps the most frivolous novel ever to receive the coveted prize, which comes with a cash award of £50,000 ($79,000).

Still more disconcerting is the apparent moral blindness of the judges. In its determination to look on the bright side, Life of Pi presents us--with a wink and a nudge--the fantasy of an Indian boy who believes simultaneously in God, Allah and Vishnu. There is value in acknowledging the possibility of goodness, but a novel that turns three of India's religions into an amusing foible--not for black comedy, but for vaudeville--obscures rather than enlightens.

No murderous riots here; the reactions to Pi's trinity of religions are trivial, summed up by his brother's teasing: "So, Swami Jesus, will you go on the haj this year?" When the narrator takes on religious absolutists, he descends into platitudes. "These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart." This banality amounts to a refusal to look for the truth--surely the greatest failure for any writer. These are the homilies of Forrest Gump, not the wisdom of Ishmael.

art and desire in urban india

Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence, by Amit Chaudhuri. Farrar Straus & Giroux. $21

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in October 2002).

THE SPARE, elusive tales that make up Indian author Amit Chaudhuri's first collection of short stories, Real Time, manage to capture both the sudden beauty and the crushing stuffiness of domestic life. As in his four well-regarded novels, A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, Freedom Song and A New World, Chaudhuri's primary interest in this collection is not in the twists and turns of plot, but in evoking the emotion and atmosphere of upper middle-class India.

Chaudhuri writes literature, in both the most complimentary and the pejorative sense of the word. The 15 tales that comprise Real Time take on serious subjects, identity, love, loss. But these stories are not titillating, though they are resonant with meaning. This is art, not entertainment; moving, but also depressing. Most of the stories of Real Time seem to end prematurely, unfinished, while an infinity of possibilities still remains for his reader and protagonist. But something in these quiet, circumscribed tales communicates an air of inevitability, too, an atmosphere of possibilities squashed by circumstance.

In "White Lies," for example, a middle-aged housewife and dilettante fantasizes that she can become a singer, eventually performing at one of the corporate parties held by her executive husband. The noose that is ordinariness is always around her neck, however, and unerring sentences like this one draw it ever tighter: "She wasn't really missed; one was missed at other people's parties, but not at one's own; one was not so much the centre of attention at one's own as a behind-the-scenes worker." A grim prelude to one's first musical performance. After the party, Mrs. Chatterjee comes to a frightening realization about her husband, who has a charming love for her inexpert singing. She observes: "To her surprise, he began to hum a tune himself, not very melodiously . . . He seemed unaware that anyone else was listening. Seeing him happy in this way--it couldn't be anything else--she felt sorry for him, and smiled inwardly, because no one, as he was so successful, ever felt sorry for him, or thought of his happiness." Mrs. Chatterjee's second epiphany, which comes only after some sharp words from her guru, is even more disheartening: "For the following two days, Mrs. Chatterjee, going around in her chauffeur-driven car from the club to the shops in the mornings, couldn't bring herself to hum or sing even once; the driver noted her silence. She'd suddenly realized that her need to sing had been a minor delusion, that she and her husband and the world could get by without it."

The preoccupation with love and art and their power--or incapacity--to break through the constrictive dullness of domestic life runs through most of the stories of Real Time. "A Portrait of an Artist" describes a Calcutta tutor who is desperately clinging to poetry and the city's tiny literary world in an effort to give his life meaning. "Prelude to an Autobiography: A Fragment" evokes through imitation a housewife's overpowering desire to write. None of these reflections on the allure of art ends happily. The everyday always descends to snuff out inspiration. But with the spirit of Calcutta--a city that is home to a million amateur poets and a healthy proportion of the world's tiniest literary magazines--Chaudhuri suggests there is nobility in the effort.

If it is not uplifting, Real Time is an invigorating contrast to the volumes of Indian literature produced in English with a Western publisher in mind--too often with a Salman Rushdie or a Gabriel Garcia-Marquez weighing on the author.

One of the characters poses a question, "Whom does one write for?" Real Time suggests a number of answers. Chaudhuri steers clear of the Raj and eschews exotic India, writing instead of the executives of his country's larger companies and their wives, children and servants. Is he writing, then, for Indians? From his oblique references to obscure regions and personalities--clearly meant to resonate with significance--one might assume so. But there is also evidence Chaudhuri wants the West to read about an India where high-school bands also covered Deep Purple in the 1970s, and where kids exhorted mothers and tailors to create thigh-hugging hippie jeans.

One of his characters opines, "Although so many people write these days . . . you feel the world you know, the India you know, is still to be written about."

closet drama

Caught between harsh laws and cultural conservativeness, Indias gay men often lead lives of frightened secrecy. But now hopes are high they may be on the brink of a legal breakthrough.

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in October 2002).

"HOW DO I LOOK?" asks Prafulla, a 24-year-old Bengali man. He is wearing a red skirt garlanded with purple nasturtiums and a gold silk shirt, beneath which a black bra is clearly visible. He has wrapped a black headscarf around his head in a turban unlike any Sikh's, and around that he has tied a fluorescent print headband. Doubt furrows his brow. "Are you sure you are comfortable with this?" he asks me.

Tonight's underground party on the outskirts of New Delhi is one of the rare places where it is safe for Prafulla (who asked not to be identified by his real name) and his three friends to dress in drag. Spraying himself liberally with perfume in a beauty parlour in one of city's poorer districts, he explains that the four homosexual men always wear dresses when they go to Delhi's gay parties. "It is our only opportunity," he shrugs.

Homosexuals are still liable to prosecution under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which prohibits "unnatural offences" or "carnal intercourse against the order of nature." The penalty for the offence is a prison term of between 10 years and life. Consenting adults are almost never taken to court; there have been fewer than half a dozen cases, and most of those were before India won independence. But the threat of prosecution and exposure makes for rampant police abuse, say activists. That not only causes India's estimated 50 million gay men to live in fear, it also hampers the fight against Aids. Nearly 4 million Indians were HIV-positive as of 2001, and Aids still claims more than 100,000 new victims a year, according to India's National Aids Control Organization.

"We noticed . . . that there was a lot of harassment . . . by goondas--that's professional hoodlums--as well as by the police," says Shaleen Rakesh of the Naz Foundation, a group that has been working with gay men to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids since 1994. "That was a problem for us, because when we're talking of HIV/Aids work, then we need spaces where we can talk about these issues without fear, spaces where the community does not feel vulnerable." Documented cases of harassment include not only extortion but also illegal detentions and physical and verbal abuse by police. Naz, which means "pride" in Hindi, also found that police and hoodlums were harassing their own outreach workers: In one case police even jailed workers from another organization for promoting so-called unnatural sex.

"The law is the law," says Dr. Kiran Bedi, joint commissioner of training for the Delhi police. "The police do not have discretion." On the other hand, she adds, "The police have no business asking for money."

But culpable or not, officers have little reason to fear disciplinary action as long as the men they target remain afraid to lodge complaints. Which is why Naz last year petitioned the government to amend Section 377 to legalize consensual homosexual sex between adults, arguing that the law violates articles of the Indian constitution that guarantee the right to life, privacy and free speech. The government has been stonewalling, but the court has proven to be encouragingly sensitive on the matter, says Rakesh, coordinator of the division of Naz that brought the petition. On August 26, India's High Court refused to accept the state's argument that changing the law is inappropriate because homosexuality goes against "the morality in society as a whole." Saying that the issue "could not just be brushed aside," the bench instructed the government to file its response to the petition by November 27, the third and last such deadline.

Those comments from the judiciary had "an enormous impact on morale" in the gay community, says Rakesh, and made Naz hopeful that it could get a final ruling by as early as next year. That would be lightning speed for India's slow-moving courts. Legal experts warn, though, that the court is unlikely to rule on the petition before it receives a response from the state, even if that means extending its supposedly final deadline. Still, all acknowledge the importance of this incremental step, which demonstrates the court's commitment to a resolution and which gay activists see as a hint of sympathy with their cause.

India owes its anti-sodomy law to the British. Indeed, many other former British colonies in the region--Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka--still have pre-independence anti-sodomy laws in place. In India, though, Hinduism's treatment of sexuality was traditionally more nuanced. The friezes on some of the country's important old monuments are homoerotic, and though there are proscriptions against homosexuality in the Hindu texts, "they are much milder than those against inter-caste marriage," says Saleem Kidwai, who co-edited Same Sex Love in India, an anthology of homosexual writing.

But modern Hindu fundamentalists and Indian society at large vehemently oppose homosexuality. Until that changes, gay men and women who are persecuted will have little recourse to redress. The Naz Foundation has already lodged a formal complaint on behalf of one member of the community with the National Human Rights Commission, only to be told it is impossible for one body of the government to guarantee rights to individuals whom another body considers criminals.

The effects of the repressive atmosphere are evident at the party that Prafulla and his friends are attending on New Delhi's outskirts. The group of 20 or so organizers are used to dealing with the authorities, but tonight they are especially worried. To hold a party for as many as 200 guests takes a serious investment, in this case an outlay of 60,000 rupees ($1,250) to hire a venue and buy food and drink. Normally the police are satisfied with a nominal bribe, sometimes as little as a bottle or two of booze. But tonight someone has spread the word via anonymous text-messages that there is to be a raid by the media and police. Local journalists have already arrived unexpectedly, carrying press-release-style invitations that were mysteriously faxed to them.

Inside the iron gates, drag queens greet each other with enthusiastic air-kisses and younger men at relative ease with their sexual nature chat casually around the swimming pool and dance floor. But 40-year-old men with the moustaches, paunches and polo shirts that distinguish India's conservative middle class stand awkwardly on the party's fringes. It is a future that few of the younger set wish to contemplate. The older men represent the reality of life for the vast majority of Indian homosexuals: Only a tiny minority of Indian gays express their sexual nature openly, say activists, and most are compelled by their families to marry and raise children.

For gays living in the countryside or in impoverished communities, life is still harder. There is little access to information about homosexuality and few opportunities to establish even a furtive gay lifestyle. Many turn to prostitution or join forces with bands of eunuchs. Some even submit to castration. Lesbians face as great or greater obstacles.

Prafulla's experience indicates the impact that access to information can have. "Until I joined Naz, I thought I might have some disease. I didn't know what I was. Now [the meaning of] gay is very clear to me," he says.

"But still my family doesn't know. The day my parents decided I had to get married, I sat up all night worrying, thinking I should run away." Naturally, he had serious reservations, but in his case marriage turned out to be less difficult to manage than he'd feared. "I had the misconception that I wouldn't be able to keep my wife happy, both physically and mentally. But I am finding it quite easy. My wife doesn't know about me, either. I want to tell her. She's my life partner."

By 2 a.m., the party is jumping and the police have arrived. This time, perhaps because of the unknown saboteur's faxed publicity campaign, it is impossible to put them off. Someone overhears a policeman discussing a false report of shots fired. One of the organizers gives the order to cut the generator, so that the revellers can slip away in the dark. Some of the men who have stripped down to their underwear and jumped in the swimming pool now scramble over the walls half-naked, running and hiding like the criminals that they are under India's law.

sirrh! master! sahib! boy!

From zero to hero in the eyes of India's masses

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Asian Wall Street Journal in October 2002).

Ali, my guide, and I lolled in a camel cart somewhere in the Thar desert in Rajasthan, India. I had given up on camel riding after having my own hump tenderized by the wooden saddle for several hours. Our two camel drivers played cards next to us, letting the camel plod along as it wanted.

"Do you think youll ever see the sea?" I asked Ali.

"No," said 19-year-old Ali, a clever and outspoken Muslim boy. "It's too far. It would take me three days traveling, so I would have to stay fifteen days."

Bikaner, Alis smallish hometown, lies smack in the middle of the Thar, perhaps 150 kilometers from the border with Pakistan and 800 kilometers from the Arabian Sea. On this unforgiving plain of baked sand virtually nothing grows except giant milkweed and the khejri tree, a dark hardwood that manages to survive by dint of exceptionally deep roots. In the summer, temperatures routinely top 50 degrees Celsiushot enough to burst your can of shaving foam. It is a desolate place, but also a beautiful one.

Here I hoped finally to shed my sahib skin. When I moved to India with my girlfriend four months ago, I was prepared to plunge into the street life, munch samosas with the sadhus and blab with the babus. But somewhere over the Pacific, I became a sahib--a sir. The transformation was no fault of my own. I am happy to scramble into third-class compartments, eat street food fried in suspect oil, and haggle over a dimes worth of Rupees. Its the Indians who made me into a big shot.

Being royalty isn't so bad. The trouble is that I have no control over when Im a sahib and when Im a sap. The Indians define me as it suits them. When they want money from me, I'm a sahib. In exchange for groveling sycophancy I am expected--required--to pay ten times market value for goods and services. The patter of a dubious guide near my girlfriends hometown of Madras drove the point home. "Sirrh, you take one guide, sirrh? You no take guide you no look see anyting." When I ignored him, he called out to me with increasing deference, until, giving up in disgust, he called me by my right name. "Sirrh! Masterrh! Sahib! Boy!"

I've attracted a string of pavement artisans to our posh South Delhi neighborhood. Hearing of the sahib's arrival through the network of housemaids, chowkidars and press wallahs, the trinket sellers have trooped up to our rooftop apartment, cap in hand, to see if the sahib was at home. You're not to buy anything, was my standing order from my foreign-returned Indian girlfriend. Arms akimbo, she barred the door to the woodcarving wallah whod buttonholed me in the street. He produced a pencil holder and tried to show it to me by thrusting it underneath my girlfriend's arm. But sahib told me he wouldn't be busy at six oclock, he insisted. After that, even my partner got into the act. Sahib is not at home, she now tells visitors when it suits her purposes--that is, when they call her Madam.

The desert would be different, I thought. There was nothing to buy, not even a packet of paan masala. Ali's aspirations, if not his experiences, were probably closer to mine than to those of our tribal camel drivers. With only the occasional goatherd as witness, we could define our own roles.

When the sun had reached its meridian, we veered off the camel track to stop under a khejri tree. The boys prepared a potato and chickpea masala for lunch, and after we had eaten, Ali declared that we would wait out the heat of the afternoon there.

"What other places in India have you visited?" I asked Ali.

"Jaipur, Jodphur, Udaipur, Ajmer," he said, rattling off a list of cities in Rajasthan. Hed never been far from the searing plains of North India. "And Delhi. I've been to Delhi several times."

"Don't you want to go to the Himalayas one day?" I asked. "Himachal Pradesh isn't too far away."

"Do you want to eat beef?" Ali asked before we sacked out.

I cast a sidelong glance at our Bishnoi camel drivers, a teenager and a boy not much older. Beef has the illicit romance of contraband everywhere in India, but the Bishnoi are more strict vegetarians, even, than the Hindu Brahmins.

"Not here," said Ali. " These are Bishnoi people. You can eat beef at my home, with my family." Was this Ali the procurer, or was this an opportunity to return as a genuine guest, our seller-buyer relationship concluded?

"Maybe," I said. "I might be leaving. It depends on whether I can get a train tomorrow or not."

That night the four of us slept on a sand dune under the stars. The camel drivers chattered in Rajasthani, laughing loudly every so often. Ali and I watched for streaking planets. He invited me to his brothers wedding in another month, he told me about his girlfriend and about his plans for the camel safari business he would open for himself one day.

"Someday you should visit the sea," I said. I suppose I was proselytizing.

That was the closest the two of us came to an understanding. I never made it to Ali's house to eat beef. In Bikaner the next afternoon, he warned me: "Don't tell anyone in the hotel that I told you where to get cheaper beer. And don't say see you later or make any plans in front of them. If they know I am taking you for eating in other places and telling you those things the owner may be angry."

By the time we reached reception, I'd become a sahib again. Ali stood outside my room deferentially while we tried to plan a time to meet for those cheap beers he'd told me about. But we both knew he was just waiting for his tip. I gave him one hundred Rupees, slipped into my old skin, and said goodbye.

waiting for no one

Nepal once welcomed a steady stream of visitors, but the long-running Maoist uprising and a series of other events have brought the tourism trade to its knees

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in September 2002)

THIS IS A TOWN that tourism built. Along Kathmandu's streets and alleyways, rows of travel agencies, postcard kiosks, souvenir stands and budget hotels stand patiently waiting for customers. Alongside, hawkers sit with piles of curved kukri knives and Buddhist tanka paintings. But instead of wearing the sunny grins that once endeared Nepalese to travellers, the hawkers' faces look glum and tired. Business is bad.

Six years of a simmering Maoist uprising have taken their toll, as has a government state of emergency, not to mention continuing travel warnings from the governments in Washington and London and the global downturn in travel following the September 11 attacks. Against such a background, many travellers have decided this isn't the year to make the pilgrimage to the Mount Everest base camp or take in the famed Annapurna mountain range. Up to the end of July, tourist arrivals were down 37% on the same period in 2001, already a bad year, when arrivals dropped 17% over the full year. For a country in which tourism was expected to contribute three percentage points of GDP this year and where the travel industry accounts for nearly one in 15 jobs, this is close to a disaster.

Hoteliers will admit that more than half their rooms are sitting empty. But if the deserted streets of Thamel -- Kathmandu's tourist ghetto -- are a fair indicator, the city has more guesthouses than it has guests. At night, Kathmandu takes on the eerie aspect of a ghost town. Soldiers man checkpoints set up to discourage saboteurs. A curfew ensures bars are closed by 11 p.m.

The industry is feeling the pain from top to bottom. One of Kathmandu's countless walk-in travel-services companies, World Touch Tour & Travels, has had nary a customer in six months. "We are all worried we'll have to close down," says one staffer. "All day I have to wait for the guests, but nobody comes. Sometimes 10 days go by without seeing anybody." A nine-year-old girl selling embroidered handbags had adjusted her usual patter: "Please sir, 100 rupees [$1.30] for two, 100 rupees for two. Please sir, I have no business. Please sir, 100 rupees for five."

The trekking industry has perhaps been the hardest hit. Malla Treks, a respected high-end outfitter that sells most of its trips abroad, has already received cancellations for 50%-60% of the trips scheduled for the October-November trekking season, says General Manager Rajendra Shrestha. Likewise, at the other end of the spectrum, a guide-turned-tout for Himalayan Glacier Trekking, seeming desperate for someone to talk to in Thamel, confesses he hasn't landed a client in three months.

The crisis is the result of a chain of events over the past few years, according to Pradeep Raj Pandey, chief executive of the Nepal Tourism Board. First, a Kashmiri militant group hijacked an Indian Airlines flight at Kathmandu airport in December 1999. Then, in a bizarre incident at the royal palace in June 2001, King Birendra and eight other members of the royal family were gunned down, apparently by Crown Prince Dipendra, who then shot and fatally wounded himself. In the wake of the killings, the Maoists stepped up their activities. Not long afterward came the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington -- events that devastated the tourism business worldwide. Finally, last November, after a series of deadly attacks, Nepal's government declared a state of emergency, which for the first time allowed the mobilization of the army against the rebels. (The state of emergency, which also limits free speech, was revoked in late August, primarily so candidates can campaign without restrictions ahead of November's scheduled elections.) "So the whole world has been focused on violence, emergency and insurgency, an impression that couldn't be further from the truth," Pandey says.
"The board's challenge today," he adds, "is to take the help of or convince the media to help us clear the air: to say, 'Yes, as news media you must present the facts,' but to seek a way to put the facts in perspective, to say, 'Yes, there has been trouble in certain areas, but, yes, there is no risk to the tourist'."

It's not an enviable task. Although the tourism board has launched an ambitious public-relations drive, dubbed Destination Nepal Campaign 2002/2003, to reposition the country "as a reliable, safe and attractive destination," it has a budget of only 20 million Nepalese rupees. That won't do much to counter the impression of the country created by the media over the past six years: The Maoist uprising has led to a steady stream of press reports on the daily death toll (fuelled by the security forces' take-no-prisoners approach) that has probably made the fight seem larger and bloodier than it actually is.

At the same time, it's not clear just how safe tourists are in Nepal. The tourism board and Pandey maintain that the Maoists have not targeted foreign travellers or tourist-related sites. But the accidental explosion of a bomb at a hotel that was being used as a base by Maoist saboteurs and an attack on Lukla airport, which is used by tourists travelling to Mount Everest, are ominous reminders that it's always possible to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nor can there be any guarantees that the Maoists will not adopt more radical tactics in response to the government's relentless efforts to stamp them out. Already, walkers making the journey through the Maoist-controlled western areas from Simikot to the Tibetan border have reported being asked to make "donations" to the revolutionary cause. Once, a box of cigarettes was enough; now it's about $100 per person.

Perhaps ironically, Pandey points to the insurgents' own words in his efforts to reassure visitors. "Not only has no one been injured or threatened or physically harmed," he says, "the insurgents themselves have issued their own statements saying that they recognize the importance of tourism to Nepal and have said they won't harm visitors."

Those statements, though, have proved to be a mixed blessing for the government. In a letter faxed to the media early this year, Dr. Baburam Bhattarai -- deputy to Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the Maoist leader commonly known as Prachanda or "the Fierce" -- wrote that foreign tourists are "most welcome into the revolutionary base areas." But the letter also warned travellers against patronizing the "anti-people and anti-national monopolistic structure" that comprises "all the five-star hotels and travel businesses" in Nepal. Bhattarai also "kindly advised" travellers not to venture into areas where fighting is active because of the risk of being caught in the crossfire.

Not the most reassuring invitation, and it hasn't resulted in a huge surge in tourists. But the tactfully worded message has spawned a boutique trekking industry of a new kind. A stream of intrepid journalists are walking into the hills to meet the revolutionaries and generate dispatches that, to at least one local newspaper editor, read like a new kind of travelogue: "My trip to meet the Maoists." And from the tourism board's perspective, more accounts of reporters' derring-do can only mean one thing: more frightened tourists.

white man's burden

The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, By David Gilmour. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in August 2002).

LIKE MANY one-time giants of Western literature, Rudyard Kipling has suffered a sharp fall in his reputation in recent decades. He's been reviled as a racist, exposed as a closet homosexual, and dismissed as a man of little talent; a propagandist for the elite. It wasn't always so: In 1907, Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature at the age of just 41.

Kipling was born of English parents in Bombay in 1865, at the height of the Raj. Throughout his career he recorded his wonder at the empire Britain built. In his work, he contributed more phrases to the English language than anyone since Shakespeare and described an India that, for many, is more real than any contemporary depiction.
A half-dozen of Kipling's books -- Plain Tales From the Hills, Kim, The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Captains Courageous and Gunga Din -- are still regarded as classics, and for all the attacks on his reputation his defenders remain staunch: Many start off apologizing for his politics, as if excusing the behaviour of an outspoken, ill-mannered
but much-loved uncle. Others go further, suggesting that the great writer was neither a Tory nor an imperialist.

But to sustain such arguments, sympathetic biographers have tended to ignore at least half of Kipling's literary output -- poems like The White Man's Burden -- and have focused instead on his prose: Kim and The Jungle Book, for instance. Ironically, according to the laureate's latest biographer, David Gilmour, they have ended up doing as much damage to our understanding of Kipling's work as his detractors.

In The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, Gilmour sets out to re-establish the author as the unofficial bard of the British Empire. He does not seek to pass judgment, but the portrait that emerges is not flattering. Kipling was not as skilled a political thinker as he was a dramatist. Moreover, though one finds occasional
brilliance in his prolific poetry, in cataloguing his political writing Gilmour draws attention to Kipling's immense output of doggerel. The best of Kipling's poetry and prose champions the achievements of Britain with light nostalgia; the worst with outsize sentimentality.

But, Gilmour says, Kipling "was not a reverential songsmith of national valour . . . [His] panoramic view of the Empire was closely followed by a realization of the perils that threatened it, so that in the mid-1890s Kipling added the role of national prophet to that of imperial laureate." In Gilmour's view, Kipling foresaw Britain's decline and sought to raise the alarm. His poem Recessional, for instance, warns the British against complacency:

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law --
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget -- lest we forget!

The phrase "lesser breeds without the Law" has been viewed by many as incontrovertible evidence of Kipling's racism. It is difficult to defend the author from accusations of bigotry, but Gilmour argues that it is a misreading to assume that "lesser breeds" refers to non-white, colonized peoples. The Gentiles of the poem represent the Germans, Americans and Boers, whom Kipling "considered guilty of boastful lawlessness."

Gilmour's defence of Recessional is not entirely unconvincing, but his other efforts to excuse Kipling from charges of jingoism sometimes make the biographer sound absurd. In his eyes the "white" in The White Man's Burden, for instance, "plainly refers to civilizations and character more than to the colour of men's skins." Plainly? This is the poem that refers to America's new Filipino subjects as "Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/Half-devil and half-child" and warns against their "Sloth and heathen Folly." Gilmour's argument that Kipling meant America to pick up the civilized man's burden is laughable when set alongside the text of the poem. Gilmour himself seems to recognize he has gone too far with this reading as he eventually acknowledges that The White Man's Burden is "profoundly racist in sentiment."

This turn-around illustrates the trouble with this biography. Gilmour does not explain Kipling's contradictions -- here identifying with Britain's colonial subjects, there with their rulers. Gilmour struggles with the puzzle, introducing and examining the pieces, but fails to fit them together. The book's weakness is not its defence of Kipling, but
rather that, in seeking to catalogue Kipling's political writing, Gilmour has generated a survey that although comprehensive is rarely illuminating.

coming to a terrible end

The Road to Maridur, By Christopher New. Asia 2000, Hong Kong, HK$195 ($25)

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in July 2002).

CHRISTOPHER NEW'S fifth novel, The Road to Maridur, tells the story of a young Englishman who travels to India in the late 1970s to recapture the memories of his grandmother, who was the governess for a princely Indian family in the last days of the British Raj.

Staying in the fading ancestral palace of the former raja, Jonathan Kelley discovers that the family, caught between the pressures of modernization and the legacy of ritual and caste, faces financial ruin. Because the raja's eldest daughter married a man from a lower caste, the labourers have refused to work the family lands, their only source of income. To appease them, the raja's family has disowned the daughter who married outside the clan and intends to ensure second daughter, Sakuntala, marries within the caste -- to the feeble-minded son of backward fundamentalists. Though Kelley believes he loves Sakuntala, he cannot prevent her from sacrificing herself. Unwilling to marry the man chosen for her, Sakuntala commits sati, burning herself alive.

It is difficult to imagine why New -- whose China Coast trilogy is justly regarded to be among the best post-colonial novels written about Asia -- has devoted his considerable talents to this melodrama. The fat, juicy book has some of the pleasures of the first book of the trilogy, Shanghai, which remained on The New York Times' best-seller list for eight weeks. But in his latest novel the understated beauty of the writing and the evocative portrait of India only camouflages the overblown romance. While Shanghai also trafficked on the stereotypes of the exotic Orient, its setting was far enough removed in time that its focus on devious opium dealers and sing-song girls did not seem like the selective obsessions of the West. The Road to Maridur's catalogue of inscrutable sadhus, deposed princes and distressed damsels is more problematic, given the contemporary setting and Western writers' reputation for noticing the snake charmer pulling tourists instead of the automobile factory behind him.

Those concerns aside, and doubtless some will dismiss them as the tyranny of the politically correct, it cannot be denied that The Road to Maridur is a fun summer read. New also deserves credit for an evocative portrait of India. But fans of his more literary work will wonder why he chose this melodrama, when with the book's final ritual suicide a week of guilty pleasure ends with a cringe.

method in madness

Red Poppies, By Alai (translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin). Houghton Mifflin, $25

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in April 2002).

PUBLISHED THIS YEAR for the first time in English, Alai's Red Poppies -- winner in 2000 of China's highest literary accolade, the Mao Dun Prize -- is the story of the rise to power of the "idiot" son of a Tibetan warlord.

Narrated by its idiot-hero, the novel's portrait of a warlike, feudal society ravaged by internal strife and Machiavellian intrigue explodes the myth of a mystical, pacifist Tibet. Still, it is the Chinese who supply the warlords' weapons and direct their battles, always with an eye to the outcome. And while this is not a novel of destroyed temples and rebellious monks, few if any Tibetans welcome the arrival of their Communist "liberators" at its close.

It is a tale told by an idiot, but what does it signify?

Alai, an ethnic Tibetan living in what is now Sichuan province, has said that the model for his idiot-hero and narrator is a legendary wise man who "represents the Tibetans' aspirations and oral traditions." Not interested in accolades, the sage "preferred the wisdom masked by stupidity."

Not surprisingly, therefore, there is an unmistakable method to the madness of Alai's narrator, the second son of the chieftain of the powerful Maiqi clan.

Only the idiot-sage understands his time, foreseeing the end of the reign of the Tibetan warlords as the Han begin to exert more and more of a destabilizing influence in the region. And though he does not dispute his own stupidity, he knows full well that his mental defect is all that protects him from death at the hand of his older half-brother -- who would otherwise consider him a threat to his birthright.

By choosing as his narrator an idiot whose stupidity keeps him alive, Alai invites readers to see the author, too, as one who knows more than he can safely reveal. The world of this novel, after all, is one in which a monk's tongue must be cut out before he can become an historian, in which "you must hurry if you have something you feel you must say about the present, or about the future, because you won't be able to say it after you lose your tongue."

The translation is another fine effort by veteran translator Howard Goldblatt and his wife Sylvia Li-Chun Lin, whose collaborative rendering of Tien-wen's Notes of a Desolate Man was named Translation of the Year (1999) by the American Literary Translators Association. In Red Poppies, the unmannered prose is deceptively simple. Reminiscent of the language of parable, it captures the enigmatic wisdom of the idiot-narrator perfectly.