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How English Keeps India Together

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Given his complex parentage (Indian Sikh and Pakistani Muslim) and his own career as a writer in English, both fiction and non-fiction, the latter for British or American publications, it’s hard to understand how Aatish Taseer could have written “How English Ruined Indian Literature,” which appeared as an oped in this Sunday’s New York Times.  It’s also hard to understand how the Times could have published this ignorant rant, which shows Taseer to be totally oblivious to the complexity of language politics  in India.  Taseer, of all people, even seems to be in thrall to Hindu-nationalist Narendra Modi.  He was captivated by Modi’s U.N. speech, for instance, and now he’s joining the chorus of Modi followers who wish to impose Hindi as the sole national language of the entire country.  These, by the way, are the same people who want to reclaim the country for Hindus alone, odd company for a man of his parentage.  

Although Taseer has obviously been exposed to the highest standards of journalism, his lopsided presentation of the issue emerges with perfect clarity when he centers his piece around the thoughts of a Hindi-speaking boatman in Varanasi, a man who is unlikely to be a consumer of literature in any language.  He more briefly tells of two students from Benares Hindu University, one embittered because his “pure and beautiful Hindi” wouldn’t qualify him for a top position in today’s India, the other pragmatically ready to grasp whatever advantage his not-so-hot English will gain him.  What these vignettes prove, so far as I can see, is this: choosing a culturally narrow curriculum isn’t going to propel anyone to the top of the heap in a country with 14 or more major languages, which is probably a good thing, though Taseer clearly doesn't think so.

Taseer also cites a failed aspirant to stardom in Hindi-language Bollywood, unbelievably only because he wasn’t fluent in English (is he, Taseer’s friend, really such a terrific actor?) and the sentimental maunderings of V.S. Naipal, a London-based cosmopolitan born in Trinidad to Indian parents who’d been imported to the Caribbean to work the sugar industry.  Hardly a convincing array of testimony in support of a Hindi-Only policy in India.   Oh yes, Taseer also quotes a 19th century Russian writer who feared the influence of western European civilization. How little has changed in Russia since then.  So much for insular nationalism.

Meanwhile, Taseer fails to mention a word of support from any prominent Indian literary scholar or critic.  Also, oddly enough, he hasn't marshaled quotes from disgruntled major fiction writers in any Indian language to bolster his contention that English is ruining Indian literature. 

Above all, and this is the crux of my argument, Taseer does not cite a single South Indian source in favor of eliminating the use of  English in India.  This oversight (or intentional bias)  reveals the crushing weakness of his argument.  Unlike Hindi, the South Indian languages do not spring from Sanskrit.  They belong to an entirely unrelated language family.  What’s more, even in North India, the Bengalis have no particular love for Hindi, to which their own much beloved  language is related.  Hindi, to hundreds of millions of Indians, is a foreign language.  If it became the sole national language, non-Hindi speakers and their children would be severely disadvantaged in seeking out-of-state jobs and education.  However, so long as all ambitious Indians must be able to handle English effectively, the playing ground is level for the entire population.  It may be a tough hurdle, it may be an odd hurdle that has its origin in the colonial past, but it’s the same hurdle for everyone. 

This is not a small thing—and this is why English has survived in India.  It helps to glue the country together

Getting Out the Lead Still Makes a Difference

By Patricia H Kushlis

Whether or not Beethoven died of lead poisoning remains in dispute but with the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970, the US required all new cars beginning in 1975 to “contain catalytic converters in their exhaust systems to reduce a range of toxic emissions” including lead.  Before then, lead had been added to gasoline to make car engines run more smoothly and avoid “engine knock.”  Here’s how it happened. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had led the no-lead-in-gasoline charge – persuading the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – to remove the lead additive from gasoline but this happened only after lengthy and vicious fights with the lead, petrochemical and automotive industries.  

The goal, according to Dr. Philip J. Landrigan in a recent article in the Boston College Magazine, was to “reduce American children’s exposure to lead and thus prevent silent brain damage.”   The CDC – with which Dr. Landrigan was then affiliated - expected it to take about ten years to get the cars off the road that used leaded gasoline and that, thereafter, the US would witness a modest decline in blood lead-levels in American children.  The result, however, turned out to be a massive drop in those lead levels directly corresponding to the decline of cars using leaded gasoline – a drop of 90% of the lead in blood levels over the past forty years.  

Moreover, acute lead poisoning among American children became a rarity because lead was removed from paint at about the same time thus reducing cumulative exposure even further. 

And what were the other effects of eliminating lead in gasoline?  Several, all good and some surprises, according to Dr. Landrigan. They included a rise in children’s IQ scores by five percentage points since the mid-1980s – not just in the US but in the other countries that eliminated lead from gasoline.  The increases in children’s IQ scores have directly corresponded with the years those countries eliminated lead in gasoline.

But there has also been an uncannily close parallel between the drop in blood lead levels and the decline in murder rates in countries that have eliminated lead in gasoline (“allowing for a 20 year lag because it’s 20 year olds who commit murder, not babies”) likely because the reduction of lead has improved attention spans and increased the ability to control impulses.

Partnerships and Coalitions

The story, however, of getting the lead out of American gasoline is as much political and economic as scientific and health related. In essence, it required building partnerships or coalitions among people in the medical community, parents, public health officials and teachers.  This didn’t happen overnight.  Although neither the article by Dr. Landrigan nor another by Susan Vorkper don’t mention this as a factor, in reality to do so would also have required a coordinated public information campaign using mounting scientific data.

Moving from research to every day practice to policy takes an average of 17 years according to Susan Vorkoper, a global health researcher and policy analyst at the National Institutes of Health, in an interview in St. John’s College’s 2015 winter magazine due in part, as in the case of lead poisoning, to the need to overcome strong industry resistance.       

In this case, the corporate opposition was ultimately overcome for basically economic reasons as a result of the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act which required that all new cars have catalytic converters to reduce a number of different toxic emissions.  Catalytic converters contain platinum, an expensive metal, and lead ruins platinum.  This then caused the auto manufacturers to rethink their support for leaded gasoline and to split from the lead and petroleum producers thereby fracturing a previously united industry-based opposition. 

As this story suggests it takes time, timing, research, political and public affairs skills to build a case and accomplish fundamental change.  Even then, success is not always a foregone conclusion. In this case, however, getting the lead out of gasoline has made a difference.       

Deadly Delhi: Stay Away—Cough! Cough!—If You Can

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The Chief Minister of Delhi state has asthma and a perpetual cough.  Recently he received some advice from the Prime Minister of India, who belongs to a rival party.  He should consult a well-known yoga therapist from PM Modi’s home state of Gujarat.  Such counsel would sound good to many residents of my home state of New Mexico, where modern medicine isn’t universally appreciated and many practice one or another form of yoga.  

But, having just come back from Delhi myself—coughing all the way, in fact—I have a better idea for both CM and PM:  Get together and clean up the air in Delhi.  It’s toxic, as you can see from the photo above.  I took it from my hotel window.

I have a touch of asthma, too, so I started coughing within hours of my arrival in Delhi on February 11th, with plans to stay a month.  After ten miserable days (complicated by catching a very nasty virus, though not the deadly dreadful H1N1, which was also floating around), I paid a disgusting flight change penalty to Air France and came home early.  Came home to Santa Fe,  the clean air capital of the USA.  Among cities, anyway.  My coughing stopped.   

I didn’t need the news stories that appeared in the New York Times a week or so before my departure to know that Delhi has air pollution issues.  As long as I’ve been traveling to (and sometimes  living in) Delhi, it’s been a problem, especially in the winter, when the phenomenon that’s known as an inversion occurs.  In such cases, the air over the city just sits there, getting dirtier and dirtier.   

Early on, before a sleepy post-colonial city became a global megalopolis, it was mainly smoke from cow dung fires that fouled the air.  As time passed, the culprit was dung plus particulate matter from the ever-multiplying, never-inspected exhaust-belching trucks and buses.  At a certain point, Delhi invested in buses fueled by natural gas.  The air got cleaner, for awhile.  What a wonderful inerlude that was!  

But road transport grew and grew and grew, a sign of economic success.  Exhaust-maximizing traffic jams, naturally, multiplied.  There was also another huge environmental cost to economic success: India relies on coal to feed an increasingly ravenous appetite for power.  Maybe the old puff-puff, chuff-chuff trains are electrified now, but they still run on coal, with which India (like China) is all too well supplied.

Religio-Cultural Nationalism & Valentine’s Day in Delhi: Not Really So Funny

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Lodi Garden is not a manicured place.  Its ambient vegetation is Delhi’s scrubby woodland, the scrappy growth that springs back after a dose of over-civilization.  But there are lawns, too, stubbly grassy expanses to play cricket on, to picnic and  lounge on, under a pleasant winter sun.  Picture also meandering pathways bordered here and there with Delhi’s favorite cold season flowers—marigolds, calendulas, dahlias.  Finally, as if to add a bit of fantasy or morbid reality, there are the elegant tombs that give this delicious garden its anchoring in history, one for Muhammad Shah (1434-45) of the Sayyid dynasty, another for the eponymous Sikander Lodi (1489-1570), not to mention intimate little mosques and a stone bridge that once spanned a Moghul irrigation canal and now ornaments a lake.  Very romantic.  

So romantic that young lovers lurk everywhere in the gaze-confounding, identity-obscuring dappled shade.  They cuddle on well-shaded park benches.  They sit side by side, dangling their legs over the lake.  They stroll on path and off path.  One guide book calls Lodi Garden a lover’s lane, an understatement, if anything.  

The system works like this: parents assume their normally well-watched offspring are safely enclosed in classrooms at one of Delhi’s many colleges or universities, but school days are also days of escape from parental control.  India’s future doctors, lawyers and teachers, like most students everywhere, are rabid for experience in—ahem!—life as well as book learning. The educational process is subversive in more than one way.

Many Delhi students are commuters, so the pairing up potential drops drastically on weekends, which did not bode well for the romance industry this year.  Valentine’s Day would be falling on a Saturday.  Sales might be very disappointing.  Still an effort had to be made.   Red, pink, violet—hearts ballooned and blossomed everywhere.  Pasted on windows.  Dangling from ceilings. Iced on cakes.  Adorning heart-shaped boxes of chocolates.  Every stationary store featured I-love-you cards and e-cards were no doubt ready for sweethearts’ in-boxes, though I didn’t actually check that out.  The modern celebration of  St. Valentine’s Day is rooted in Christian tradition, but why shouldn’t the chubby image of Cupid or Eros be welcome in India, and why shouldn’t parks be full of lovers, given the frankly erotic imagery of some Hindu temples?  And surely the stories of Krishna and Radha aren’t cherished purely for their spiritual symbolism.

But every culture has its prudes and purists aka fundamentalists who devote themselves to sucking the romance out of life.  What’s more, Indian cultural nationalists, such as the Hindu Mahasabha, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Shiv Sena  and related groups, refuse to see any agreeable convergences between East and West, which, to their everlasting despair, have indeed met and melded in many ways, bringing yoga and gurus to America, Dominos pizza and Valentine’s Day to India.  This year, emboldened perhaps by the religiosity and Hindu extremist origins of the current Prime Minister, mobs of saffron shirts (or should I say kurtas) were determined to snuff out all manifestations of Western decadence.  Love isn’t just for a day, they sniffed.  It’s for every day, but only for those who are properly married.   

How silly!  Or was it?

And so, they announced, they’d be forming shaadi or marriage squads tasked with swooping down on unwed hand holders come Valentine’s Day to perform the rite that would legalize their impious amorousness.  No kidding!  A self-appointed religious police force—and this wasn’t Saudi Arabia or even Pakistan. I had flashbacks to my years in Karachi, during which salafist-oriented Islamists often threatened violence to eliminate music and dance as well as Valentine’s Day from the lives of the young.  As a result, anything like culture had gone mostly underground.  But in cosmopolitan Delhi these threats seemed quite funny.  Given the need for a sacred fire and spoonfuls of goopy ghee at traditional Hindu marriages, how the deed would be done? With a cigarette lighter, perhaps?    

In fact, the forced marriage threats weren’t  funny.  They’re part of a very dangerous pattern that’s been emerging since the BJP’s huge parliamentary victory somewhat less than a year ago.  The threatened anti-Valentine’s Day brigades in Delhi were one more manifestation of the tolerance for intolerance that has been unleashed since the BJP’s Narendra Modi became Prime Minister.

Reconversion and Church Burning

Reconversion efforts, for instance, are underway.  Chalk up the score!  So many Christians recovered for Hinduism.  So many Buddhists.  So many Muslims.  All without duress.  Supposedly.  But no one believes that helpless poor minorities in remote villages are renouncing their deepest religious convictions voluntarily.  Meanwhile, attacks on Christians, sporadic in the past, or localized, as in Odisha for spell in the 1990s, have increased, too.  In Delhi, in particular,  the number of churches looted, vandalized and/or burnt in recent months has been shocking.  Worse, it’s a phenomenon that was for months shockingly ignored by top authorities.  The newspapers did their job.  The incidents were reported.  Photos were published.  Victims were quoted.  But from the office of Prime Minister Narendra Modi: silence.   Modi did not utter a single word condemning the outbreak of dangerous communalism in the nation’s capital.  He did nothing to stop it.  

The Making of a Martyr: Who Killed Boris Nemtsov and Why Did Putin Name Himself to Head the Investigation?

By Patricia H Kushlis

The Blame Game had already begun less than 24 hours after Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot dead on a bridge in the shadow of the Kremlin.  The Russian propaganda machine – well in overdrive for a year – is now pointing the finger at the US and Ukrainians by circulating a fake photograph of US Ambassador John Tefft laying a Ukrainian flag at Nemtsov’s memorial among others. Huh?

Ridiculous, you say?  Cover up you ask? For whom you might ask? Why such quick accusations?  And why was Nemtsov murdered Al Capone-style in a crime befitting of the Sicilian mafia or Mexican drug lords?

Could it be because Russia’s primary senior opposition figure left standing by a crafty and bloodthirsty regime – until the middle of the night of February 27 that is – publicly objected to the Kremlin’s seizure of Crimea, accused it of rampant corruption and Russia’s subsequent illegal actions in Eastern Ukraine?   

Were these the straws that broke the Kremlin’s back?  Who were the culprits? How close were they/are they to Putin? Why would they fear an honest and devoted politician like Boris Nemtsov enough to murder him? Was he really that much of a threat?  And, if history is a predictor of the present, why will they never be charged and we never know? Of course, some poor schmuck is likely to be brought forward to face the music and bow before Russian style justice but the real people behind what was likely a hired killing will continue to operate with impunity just as they have in the past.   If justice hasn’t happened thus far despite a series of unsolved politically motivated murders in Russia since the turn of the 21^st century - not to mention before - how likely is it to happen now?   

Was it because the 55-year old Nemtsov was the last major opposition leader of Putin’s generation still active?  Was it because the protest march he helped to organize had the public support of Mikhail Khordorkovsky, exiled former political prisoner and oligarch who had challenged Putin’s leadership before Putin had him tossed in jail for a decade and who had signed the petition supporting the anti-Kremlin demonstration to be held on February 28? 

Or was it because Nemtsov had simply stepped in for younger opposition leader, lawyer and blogger Aleksei Navalny who the Kremlin had so thoughtfully sent to jail for 15 days  for handing out pamphlets on the Moscow Metro so as to prevent him from "publicizing" the first serious anti-Kremlin demonstration in months?  Or more far-fetched, was it ISIS supporters who murdered Nemtsov because he was Jewish as some of the wilder propaganda accusations suggest? 

It’s not, of course, the first time Putin’s Kremlin has resorted to gangland style killings or Stalin era poisonings to decimate the opposition – no matter how weak that opposition was.  As Andrew Kramer of The New York Times and others have pointed out:  investigative journalist Anna Politovskaya was murdered in an elevator in 2006 after reporting on the Kremlin’s brutal war against the Chechens which had vaulted Putin to power for his tough-guy stance; human rights worker Natalia Estemirova also involved in reporting on the Chechen conflict was abducted from her home in Grozny and killed by unknown assailants in 2009, and Aleksandr Litvinenko, the KGB defector who was poisoned in London by polonium: the trial against the primary suspect – now hiding behind Russian parliamentary immunity -  is finally being allowed to proceed in British Courts.