By Namit Arora

Returning home from China in 1292 CE, Marco Polo arrives on the Coromandel Coast of India in a typical merchant ship with over sixty cabins and up to 300 crewmen. He enters the kingdom of the Tamil Pandyas near modern day Tanjore, where, according to custom, ‘the king and his barons and everyone else all sit on the earth.’ He asks the king why they ‘do not seat themselves more honorably.’ The king replies, ‘To sit on the earth is honorable enough, because we were made from the earth and to the earth we must return.’ Marco Polo documented this episode in his famous book, The Travels, along with a rich social portrait of India that still resonates with us today:

The climate is so hot that all men and women wear nothing but a loincloth, including the king—except his is studded with rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other gems. Merchants and traders abound, the king takes pride in not holding himself above the law of the land, and people travel the highways safely with their valuables in the cool of the night. Marco Polo calls this ‘the richest and most splendid province in the world,’ one that, together with Ceylon, produces ‘most of the pearls and gems that are to be found in the world.’

The sole local grain produced here is rice. People use only their right hand for eating, saving the left for sundry ‘unclean’ tasks. Most do not consume any alcohol, and drink fluids ‘out of flasks, each from his own; for no one would drink out of another’s flask.’ Nor do they set the flask to their lips, preferring to ‘hold it above and pour the fluid into their mouths.’ They are addicted to chewing a leaf called tambur, sometimes mixing it with ‘camphor and other spices and lime’ and go about spitting freely, using it also to express serious offense by targeting the spittle at another’s face, which can sometimes provoke violent clan fights.

They ‘pay more attention to augury than any other people in the world and are skilled in distinguishing good omens from bad.’ They rely on the counsel of astrologers and have enchanters called Brahmans, who are ‘expert in incantations against all sorts of beasts and birds.’ For instance, they protect the oyster divers ‘against predatory fish by means of incantations’ and for this service they receive one in twenty pearls. The people ‘worship the ox,’ do not eat beef (except for a group with low social status), and daub their houses with cow-dung. In battle they use lance and shield and, according to Marco, are ‘not men of any valor.’ They say that ‘a man who goes to sea must be a man in despair.’ Marco draws attention to the fact that they ‘do not regard any form of sexual indulgence as a sin.’

Their temple monasteries have both male and female deities, prone to being cross with each other. And since estranged deities spell nothing but trouble in the human realm, bevies of spinsters gather there several times each month with ‘tasty dishes of meat and other food’ and ‘sing and dance and afford the merriest sport in the world,’ leaping and tumbling and raising their legs to their necks and pirouetting to delight the deities. After the ‘spirit of the idols has eaten the substance of the food,’ they ‘eat together with great mirth and jollity.’ Pleasantly disposed by the evening entertainment, the gods and goddesses descend from the temple walls at night and ‘consort’ with each other—or so the priest announces the next morning—bringing great joy and relief to all. ‘The flesh of these maidens,’ adds Messer Marco, ‘is so hard that no one could grasp or pinch them in any place. … their breasts do not hang down, but remain upstanding and erect.’ For a penny, however, ‘they will allow a man to pinch [their bodies] as hard as he can.’

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For his birthday, my father asks me to hypnotize him.

“Just tell my body to tell itself to heal me,” he says.

This sounds too complex a method to be undertaken by someone like me. I imagine that when I tell his body to heal itself, Dad’s insides will play a game of telephone, his brain passing instruction to his bones, bones to blood, blood to cells, and so on, and so anatomically forth, until the original message garbles and wends its way stomach-ward, where it beds down beside the remains of my father’s most recent meal. I’m bad with telephones. This isn’t a call I want to make.

But for nearly a year now, my father’s been dealing with a condition that doctors will classify one day as morbidly urgent, and as a simple but mysterious allergy the next. All we know, all we see, is that his skin is overwhelmed by sores of parable proportions, and if he’s allergic, then he’s allergic to the world, because touching just about anything sets his skin to shudder and flash with heat. In response, he restricts his diet, handles dyed objects with gloves, and institutes a uniform of billowy white clothing. I can never decide if he looks like he’s about to go on safari, or be baptized, but this indecision hardly matters, as I’m not certain either would be of any use.

—-

I’m not a good candidate for a hypnotist, as inopportune laughter is a specialty of my personality, and while the practice no longer ranks as a pseudoscience, I’m still uncomfortable with being placed in a position of authority over Dad’s brain, and given the opportunity to do so, would prefer to take him for a dip in the Dead Sea, or a skeptic’s tour of Lourdes.

We wouldn’t go to the faith healer I once saw on a painful whim of an experiment, with a woman willing to be paid for her services in exchange for the tutoring session of her son. Beyond the cold I came down with soon after my visit, this experience was notable only for two items:

1. Outside the home, there was a garden with a statue, and a dog affectionately licking its stone hand, obviously convinced of realities unobservable to myself.

2. In tutoring the healer's son, I assisted in the writing of a paper that demanded the use of many synonyms for fakery. False. Forgery. Ersatz.

—-

I'm still not sure how to feel about that particular waste of time. I never expected to benefit, and some would say that this was precisely the problem. But that lack of expectation, truthfully, is something of an effort, as I’m vulnerable to the guilty pleasures of superstition and the colorful terrain of the paranormal, and have to occasionally remind myself of the dangers that come with believing too much. So while reading reports about financial experts flocking to psychics in record numbers, and avoiding the magical thinking that often slips in with the New Year, I also have to note just a few elements that usually accompany such preoccupations: hysteria, distraction, a willingness to exploit the exploitable. Better than to note might be to watch the British documentary, Dispatches: Saving Africa's Witch Children.

Tell-tale signs of a dark servant under the age of two, according to a popular book in Nigeria written by supposed prophetess Helen Ukapbio of Liberty Gospel Church, are high fevers, declining health, and disrupted sleep. She herself is a mother of three, and her own offspring have unsurprisingly avoided this diagnosis.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

As long as I have lived and thought about it, Delhi has been metastasizing, growing like a cancer outwards, drawing more and more people inwards, cutting its trees, widening its avenues, adding more and more floors per plot and cars per family. It may boast an imperial legacy stretching back a thousand years, it may once have been home to Khusro and Ghalib, and to styles of thumri singing and kathak dance, but for much of the later half of the 20^th century, Delhi has been preoccupied with building itself into the massive and global city that it is now still becoming.

The walled city of Old Delhi, the one with the Red Fort from which generations of Mughals ruled, and which was eventually sacked by British troops in 1857, is but a kernel of the whole today. By 1911 its walls were being dismantled by the imperial architects Lutyens and Baker, the better to be integrated into the New Delhi they were creating. At partition about a million people were freighted into the city from all parts of what had become Pakistan, and they were allotted plots in new neighborhoods to the west and south of Lutyens’ Delhi. By the 1950s, different kinds of urban elites were pooling their resources to invest in housing societies, which bought up agricultural land along a southern ring, stretching from the Army Cantonment in the west through to the Yamuna River to the east. They swallowed whole farming settlements into the south Delhi that they built, creating newly urbanized villages that sometimes suddenly irrupt its urban fabric today. Seventeen million people now live in the National Capital Region, which encompasses the informational suburb of Gurgaon to the far south, as well as the unhappily named New Okhla Industrial Development Area, NOIDA, the city’s more intellectual Left Bank, which is accessed via multiple utilitarian bridges across dispiriting stretches of the shriveled and fetid sludge that is the Yamuna.

What kind of art should be associated with this great and emerging city today? This difficult, pressing, and largely unasked question has found a bold new answer in the form of its first public arts festival, named 48°C.

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by Katherine McNamara

the tragic vision

“No ideas but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams; and about Lincoln: “the walking up and down in Springfield on the narrow walk between the two houses, day after day, with a neighbor's baby, borrowed for the occasion, sleeping inside his cape upon his shoulder to give him stability while thinking and composing his coming speeches….”

Here is Obama, for three years a community organizer in Chicago, during the mayoralty of the great Harold Washington, the hope of black people. Suddenly, Washington dies. The young man goes to the wake and sees the skull beneath the skin.

“There was no political organization in place, no clearly defined principles to follow. The entire of black politics had centered on one man who radiated like a sun. Now that he was gone, no one could agree on what that presence had meant.

“The loyalists squabbled. Factions emerged. Rumors flew. By Monday, the day the city council was to select a new mayor to serve until the special election, the coalition that had first put Harold in office was all but extinguished. I went down to City Hall that evening to watch this second death. . . .

“But power was patient and knew what it wanted; power could out-wait slogans and prayers and candlelight vigils. Around midnight, just before the council got around to taking a vote, the door to the chambers opened briefly and I saw two of the aldermen off in a huddle. One, black, had been Harold's man; the other, white, Vrdolyak's. They were whispering now, smiling briefly, then looking out at the still-chanting crowd and quickly suppressing their smiles, large, fleshy men in double-breasted suits with the same look of hunger to their eyes — men who knew the score.

“I left after that. I pushed through the crowds that overflowed into the streets and began walking across Daley Plaza toward my car. The wind whipped up cold and sharp as a blade, and I watched a hand-made sign tumble past me. HIS SPIRIT LIVES ON, the sign read in heavy block letters. And beneath the words of that picture I had seen so many times while waiting for a chair in Smitty's barbershop: the handsome, grizzled face; the indulgent smile; the twinkling eyes; now blowing across the empty space, as easily as an autumn leaf.”

Amid desolation, beyond irony, the writer has assented to the tragic sense of life. He does not give way to hopelessness; he observes what exists and must be engaged with, not wished away. He will bend his will like the arc of a bow to a higher purpose, which is, he recognizes, as real as, but of a different nature than, worldly power. Shedding only some of his skepticism (he notes wryly), he embraces — is embraced by — a Christian faith carried in traditions of the black church: its embodiment of the Word as agency, and so, its spur to social change.

“Out of necessity,” he would write, “the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation.” His hard-won knowledge, as radiant as his smile, is that “the sins of those who came to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn't, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation.” (He knows they see that he “knew their Book and shared their values and sang their songs,” but that part of him would always remain “removed, detached, an observer among them.”)

What he loved was the thisness of the community. “You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away — because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.”

Obama's beloved community was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Church of Christ, which, for years, he attended every Sunday at 11 a.m. You can imagine his grief at the sacrifice which a media-amplified politics demanded of him, his forced parting from Wright, the man who had given him his beautiful shield against desolation, the audacity of hope.

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by Beth Ann Bovino

This was a record-breaking year, though there was almost no good news. As it came to a close, most welcomed its departure. Unfortunately, we expect more tough times ahead in 2009, with no turn around likely until later next year. The current financial crisis has deeply frightened consumers and businesses, and in response they have sharply pulled back spending, making the recession even more severe. Moreover, the usual recovery tools used by governments, monetary and fiscal stimuli, are relatively ineffective given the circumstances. The economy won’t likely reach bottom till spring of next year, with risk of an even bigger recession more pronounced.

The National Bureau of Economic Research officially declared that the U.S. has been in recession since last December, only surprising those living at the North Pole. The downturn is expected to approach the slump of 1981-82 and be even longer, bottoming out in the spring of next year, which would make this the longest postwar recession. After a strong rebate-check related second quarter, four consecutive quarters of negative growth is expected through the second quarter of 2009, with risk that the fourth quarter will be down 6% based on current data. Employment dropped for the eleventh consecutive month in November, with 2.1 million jobs lost over last year, the biggest 12-month job loss since the 1982 recession. Financial markets remain in distress. Housing is still in recession, with November housing starts falling to the lowest pace since World War II. Not surprisingly, both business and consumer confidence remain weak.

The spendthrift habits of American consumers are a likely casualty of the crisis. Consumers and banks are becoming more cautious, and we expect household debt to decline from record levels, relative to income and to assets. The household saving rate is likely to increase, how much will help determine how quickly the economy revives.

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by Norman Costa

[Part 1 of “My Father: A Veteran's Story” can be found here.]

The Meaning of War

There is nothing about war that is to be celebrated. As an art, a force, or an institution, war is the killing of people and the destruction of property in the name of, and in the service of, a people or a nation state. I recommend Christopher Hedges' “War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.” It is a searing account, of not only the devastation of the acts and scenes of war but, of the disability, suffering, and destruction that follows war. The best book on war is still “The Iliad”, by Homer. Beginning with the first part of “My Father: A Veteran's Story” I wanted to tell a story about one soldier's war that had many facets: heroics, cowardice, sacrifice, selfishness, futility, redemption, atrocity, generosity, suffering, loss, randomness, meaning, and enigma. For my father, it was all of the above in terms of what he experienced and what he observed. For reasons that I can't explain, his first combat experience in the Battle of Graignes (Part 1) was THE defining event of his life. No other vet with whom I spoke had the same transforming experience in Graignes as my father. I am very proud of his military service, and so is he; but it was not without the blurring of the distinction between the light and dark elements of his own human nature. He confided to me an act that I have never disclosed before to anyone. We were talking about the reprisal executions by the Germans following the Battle of Graignes. In particular, he was talking about the execution by bayonet of the wounded paratroopers who were being tended by the local priest and his priest friend. He told me that he and others shot their own German prisoners. I don't know how many, or when in the battle it happened. The GIs had no resources to guard, feed, or give medical assistance to any prisoners. In his mind they had to kill the German prisoners or else they would put their own situation in further jeopardy. However, he allowed no excuse to the Germans for killing the wounded American soldiers. He said, “They had the resources to take and keep prisoners. We didn't.”

His story was the same as for many Americans who went to war: pride, opportunism, adventure, being 'young and dumb', patriotism, obligation, duty, 'having more balls than brains', breaking the boredom of life, anger, rage, and fight. Let's not forget the absence of a real sense of their own mortality before they experienced combat. After the war, his story was still the same for many veterans, except the American culture after World War II had no tolerance, nor understanding, for the severe costs to the returning GIs that would last them a lifetime. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for the WWII veteran was a sentence to a lifetime of grief, sadness, dissociation, repression, anxiety, self destructive behavior, depression, and a sense of isolation from loved ones and family. For some it ended in suicide. One GI who took his own life was a Medal of Honor winner for extreme heroism as a medic and saving many lives at the risk of his own during the worst of a three hour battle. He was a friend of my father for many years.

There is another reason I am telling his story. I want to be able to understand my own. There's an old Irish saying, “You can't tell your own story until you've told the story of your father and grandfather.” So this telling is also a part of a very personal journey.

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by Shiban Ganju

Jack arrived in the hospital a few minutes after midnight. Next morning he was dead.

Death visits a hospital in sobs, shrieks or stoic silence. It stumbles with stroke, burns with feverish sepsis, crashes in with a fractured torso, stuns a teenager with drug overdose, rams the chest with a heart attack, relieves agonizing cancer, or just sneaks in sleep with stealth. In all its forms, death is a process.

“The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed” (T S Eliot)

But Jack’s death was different.

He was healthy just two weeks back – he did no drugs, he exercised, he worked, he voted and he was in love. And now he was on life support. Plastic tubes and wires connected his body to bottles, monitors and an armory of medical gadgets. With his chiseled nose, calm countenance, eyes shut, long dark black hair sprayed on the white pillow, he looked pristine – even on the ventilator. His face reflected the golden hue of bile seeped into his skin. The feeble pulse, high fever, low blood pressure and delirious thrashing of limbs foretold gloom. The air of death hung heavy over his bed. And he was only thirty-three.

The process of death unravels in the molecules deep inside the cells and shatters emotions on surface. Irrespective of the first cause, the processes have a broad similarity. But all death is not dangerous. Some part of us is dying all the time without any harm to our physique or emotions.

Body cells have a life span: red blood cells live one hundred eighty days, platelets live for a week, intestinal lining rejuvenates in one to seven days. Approximately fifty to seventy billion cells die every day. Even in children under fourteen, twenty to thirty billon cells vanish daily. With this continual destruction and proliferation, in one year, we probably replace cell mass equal to our body weight.

Our cells also disintegrate with a programmed protocol that paradoxically keeps the body in state of health. Scientists call it apoptosis. When something goes wrong inside the cell, cell generates an appropriate biochemical signal, which triggers a sequence of biochemical processes: scaffold collapses, cell shrivels, nucleus condenses, DNA fragments and its membrane blisters. Enzymes dissolve the contents of a cell and break it into small sacks. Roaming scavenger white blood cells mop up the debris.

This process is protective and apoptosis gone wrong can unleash havoc like cancer. Apoptosis does not damage the body, which differentiates it from another form of cell death – the harmful necrosis. Infection, physical injury, poisons and lack of oxygen can provoke a cascade of reactions producing toxins that irreversibly damage the cell and also its surrounding tissue. Examples are: heart attack or paralytic stroke due to lack of oxygen and staphylococcus bacteria grinding normal tissue into an abscess. The sequence of chemical events in necrosis differs from apoptosis.

Necrosis can damage a single organ, which may not cause death unless the organ is life sustaining like heart or brain. Both these organs are extremely vulnerable to oxygen deprivation; a few minutes of anoxia or absence of oxygen damages the heart muscle, which looses it strength to pump oxygenated blood into the brain cells. Neurons deprived of oxygen collapse fast – within four to eleven minutes – causing irreversible brain death. The sequence of anoxia can also initiate from the respiratory center in the brain stem – the part of brain at its junction with the spinal cord, where the neck meets the skull. The center controls the depth and speed of respiration. Any damage to this center- as in head injury or stroke- will depress breathing and cause anoxia, which then damages other parts of the brain, heart and the rest of the body. Irrespective of the initiating event, anoxia seems to be one of the prominent determining events of cell death.

What happened?

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My father died four years ago today. At the time, my sister Azra published a shorter version of this obituary in Karachi's leading English newspaper, Dawn:

–S. Abbas Raza

MEMBER OF PAKISTAN CIVIL SERVICE, RESPECTED AUTHOR AND INTELLECTUAL, SYED ALI RAZA DIES AT 91

by Azra Raza

Syed Ali Raza, Retired Director, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pakistan, died peacefully in his sleep at Musa House, Karachi, on Wednesday, January 5^th, 2005 at 2:25 a.m. The youngest of four children of Syed Zamarrud Hussain (1876-1932) and Hashmi Begum (1885-1956), he was born in Bijnor, India, on November 29^th, 1913. His paternal lineage is Rizvi Syed, tracing back to the Prophet Muhammad through Imam Ali Raza whose descendent Shah Syed Hassan Rasoolnuma arrived in Bengal from Sabzwar, Iran, in 1355 AD. Apparently he so impressed the ruling monarch Badshah Ghiassuddin with his charm and intellect that the King gave him the hand of the Royal Princess in marriage. The ruler of Delhi, Mubarak Shah, then invited Shah Syed Hassan to his Court where he served faithfully by overpowering the rebellion mounted by a smaller Principality. He was rewarded by being given the properties of Jarcha and Chols in Bulandsheher, UP. Shah Syed Hassan’s grandson, Syed Shah Jalal distinguished himself even further through his exceptional scholarship, courage, intellect, and leadership such that both Hindus and Muslims viewed him with the respect and awe accorded a spiritual leader or Pir in his lifetime. His mausoleum in Bijnor became a site for worship and elaborate annual rites commemorate his many and varied accomplishments to this day. The maternal side of Syed Ali Raza’s lineage is Zaidi Syed, his maternal great-grandfather Syed Muzaffar Ali was attached to the Oudh court with extensive landholdings in Muzaffar Nagar. Stories of his extraordinary wealth circulated including the reputation of his wife for leaving behind enough gold and silver threads which fell from her exotic dresses, for the servants to fight over each time she left a party. Ali Raza’s parents lost 6 children (ranging in age from 1-16 years, named Zainul Ibad, Ali Murad, Ali Imjad, Ali Ibad, Sadiqa Khatoon and Muhammad Raza) to the epidemics of plague, influenza and typhoid over a decade. The extreme grief affected both parents, but especially disheartened Ali Raza’s father Syed Zamarrud Hussain, who simultaneously lost his 28 year old brother, 26 year old sister-in-law and their only child. Inconsolable and anguished by the deep sorrow of losing practically his entire close family, he left the ancestral home accompanied by his wife, for a more or less nomadic existence, wandering for several years through Dehradoon and smaller villages (Kandhra, Kirana, Shamli) of Muzaffar Nagar. Three more children were born during this period, and the family finally returned to Bijnor where Ali Raza was born in 1913.

Cataclysmic changes in the ancestral home including the untimely loss of family members in the prime of their lives to epidemics with consequential disenchantment and world-weariness, as well as Natural disasters such as repeated droughts resulted in demoralization and neglect of material properties to the extent that living there became unbearable for the Raza clan. Because of the family’s economic independence due to the extensive land-holdings until that time, pursuit of knowledge was mainly confined to a rigorous religious education for male members. A culture of knowledge for the sake of knowledge prevailed. Now, things changed so that education became a necessity for economic reasons as well. With the disastrous turn-around in the family’s financial and personal fortune, and the ascendancy of British control in India, Ali Raza’s parents were pragmatic enough to recognize the need for securing the best available secular education for their four surviving children. This was not possible in the village, so they took the bold step of saying goodbye for the final time to their ancestral home and migrated to the nearest larger city. By the time Ali Raza was 4 years old, his father had relocated the family to Lucknow, a city famous across the subcontinent for its high culture.

Ali Raza recounts in his autobiography, an incidence imprinted on his memory from this traumatic farewell. He had a number of pet geese that could not be moved to Lucknow. A decision was made by the family to leave these behind with his maternal Uncle. Ali Raza cried his heart out upon being forced to give up his beloved geese and for many years thereafter, carried a negative feeling in his heart about this poor Uncle.

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