Dear K,

I am writing another letter because a letter is as good as a literary form to provide some structure these random night time stray thoughts. I had just been given the Sunday Magazine Section of AJC, the local newspaper, as it contained an article about India. And it for some reason appalled me as much as it pleased me.

The subject matter of this said article was the boom that Indian economy had this past year, with a growth rate of 8.4% and the resultant fall out of this. One quick impression that I could gather, even though the writer of this article heavily focused on a suburb of Delhi, Gurgauon, is that India is being mall-ed and has is being rapidly infected by the consumerism virus.

The article described in great detail the number of new malls that had opened (21!), the latest fast food franchises (Barista where a cup of coffee costs Rs. 75, that still would be at least 10% of the Indian population’s daily wage, wouldn’t it?), the power of credit cards and so forth. While I have been superficially aware of these transformations via newly arrived Indians I meet here, for example they told me about the kind of weekend life they enjoy at various clubs, lounges, discos, bars etc, I had dismissed these few people are aberrations or more simply as the nouveau riche who are living it up.

However along with those statements and facts on the dazzling malls and total shopping experiences they provide, there were a few impressions provided on changes to the Indian psyche, this via simple slogans such as, ‘We have begun to live as if there is no tomorrow’, ‘Why should we wait 10 years to have a good time?’, which really appalled me.

I know I shouldn’t be waving banners for the past, the good ol days etc, because by the time I left, if one chose to and could afford to all these vices were available. This as much as how the neighborhood of my parents and my youth changed from a semi rural area of orchards, opens fallow land and rice fields to blocks of grotesque concrete filled with humans and their accoutrements. But what was still noticeably absent was this hedonism, this debutante presentation and gleeful celebration of wealth.

Perhaps some of this stems from my ambivalence towards money and if not that at least the lack of fascination and attraction it holds to me. Another reason why this came as a surprise was because a few months ago, I was reading Frontline, which had documented the suicides of handloom weavers all over AP because of starvation and penury. Perhaps this then is the irony of 21 st century living? While people sip over priced coffee in the glitzy coffee shops in Urban India, very skilled handloom weavers sip insecticide?

But then who am I to complain? After all I used to joke to myself about having escaped all that terrible irony and contrast. And on reading this article, it occurs to me that the joke is finally on me. When I thought I, a doodling old frog, had jumped from that well to this, Time in its merry way changes the flavor of water in that well too! Perhaps it’s all for the better, because thinking selfishly, those who have it and want it, can now easily transfer from one cocoon to another.

This also means that, people like us who even remotely harbor ideas such as those of struggling for self realization, for questing to taste the marrow of life, to come face to face with the mystery and to truly create and enjoy other such creations, would have to struggle harder as this rising tide of triviality even on that continent. I only hope, and this quite desperately, that such wealth, even in some way leads to the improvement of mental capital and make books somewhat more affordable.

But I have to take a pessimistic view point, because this land, which has irrevocably sunk into a shit pool of triviality, doesn’t seem to have any deep intellectual climate left except in isolated islands. But then why discuss such middling issues such as the health of the mind, when the reigning gods of science, technology and industry can deliver us (at least that’s what they promise) from all evil!

I was also shocked to read that billboards for American sitcoms, including one called Friends are now on display in Gurgaoun. There was a lunch I went to here with well meaning entities (all to become Ph.Ds, doctor of ‘philosophy’ if you get the joke) here, where they started discussing the pregnancy of Rachel, one of the characters in this sitcom Friends as revealed by the previous night episode, as if she was their best friend. I could see that it had registered deeply on their minds, as deeply as perhaps that mad & obsessive love of Garcia Marquez’s Dr. Diaz in ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ registered our minds when we sat up all night devouring it, many years ago.

I now wonder if kids, wearing hawaai chappals (flip flops), unwashed jeans and eating a Tinku (perhaps they shall feast on a Big Mac instead?) at that shack we called Cheddi’s (does it still exist?) would also similarly discuss the upcoming pregnancy of Rachel, now that they can get nightly intravenous drip of Friends, instead of discussing the meaning of life, art, lives of Dick Feynman & Van Gogh, your multi dimensional quantum world, which to my ears sounded like poetic hymns?

In spite of all this, I still think there is hope for us. This month’s issue of National Geographic featured an article on the southern most tip of South America, a wild, windy, sparsely populated and elemental land called Patagonia. Looking at those pictures I could understand how Pablo Neruda, who came out of that slice, could produce such fresh and brilliant poetry. I have also been reading an excellent book by Bruce Chatwin on the same subject - ‘In Patagonia’.

Perhaps there shall come a Moses who would part the Red Sea of distraction and lead us to such a fantastic place like Patagonia. Perhaps it will be me? Perhaps it will be you?

One of the Merry Band of Happy Few, S

I am finally working hard to finish up with the Ph.D. The deadline I set for myself is the end of this year. I don’t know what I will be doing after that, anything would suffice as long as I can write. After long days of wrestling with math stuff, for which I have a reasonable talent but towards which I feel no real ‘heartland’ affinity, when I get to the Cave, I closet myself in the bathroom and wrestle with at least 100 pages of a book every night.

While one has to read very attentively to be able to write, I am usually too tired and perhaps not self-motivated to sit down and do the writing. And then muses, external to myself, to provide me that starting spark, as always are in short supply. I should use those last few hours of a day before the calendar changes, more furiously. Anyway last night I was wrestling with Saul Bellow and his collection of non-fiction pieces ‘It All Adds Up’. The broad theme, if there is a broad theme, in that book was to observe America and then take a measure of its depth.

Bellow makes many points about how in a world filled with ‘distractions’, it becomes harder and harder to pay attention to the essentials which include beauty and truth. This bears out in my personal experiences and then those ‘kaput’ relationships. In those useless transactions what really happened was the attention was fixed on superficial questions such as ‘is she going to dump me?’, ‘is she bored with me?’, ‘is he the knight in shining armor?’, ‘do we have great sex?’ and so forth.

One clear symptom is that very few seem to want to absorb anything of value, be it great books, great music or great art deeply, as well as want to create anything of great value out of their own selves. Instead as Bellow puts it, here we have our ‘voodoo’ music, various intoxicants (TV included), purveyors of ‘cool’ ideas and various amusing sexual sampling schemes.

Also this well called USA, which to young people as we were once four or five years ago, peering over the edge seems to be the route to dreamland and so forth, on arrival morphs into Disneyland. Surrealism and irony seems to the governing principle. I used to wonder why I couldn’t stop laughing during the period of time I used to read the Wall Street Journal. Was it the absurdity of the world? Or was it the absurdity of the world, which is also embodied in me? Of course one can escape from it all by not paying any attention to it, by sticking to one’s own kind, living and interacting in a limited ethnic ghetto, with limited excursions into the other world. This is what I sometime call living ‘Desi Lite’, i.e., pretending to live as if US has everything ‘Desh’ has and thus is not any different.

Another idea I had of US that is slowly turning into an illusion, was that of the ‘melting pot’. In real life very rarely does this melting pot happen. The fresh arrivals stick to their already present substantial groups. What I have, only very lately, been observing is that some of those who were already here, and thus descended from people who had arrived perhaps 200 to 300 years ago, still hold on to their ethnic ‘roots’. My guess is this is that tribal affiliations run deep in men. I am going to explore this idea further in my writing.

Evening. I monitor the sun’s descent by how the colors change on the buildings faces. The blink of a radio tower, a white blue glittering eye. My face on the window, raked by contrails of jets landing due south. Why has it been so hard to live silently, following the arc of days, faithful to the tasks given and the tasks realized? A compact mass of black wings, birds that look like bees. Silence here, silence over the wires, on the rooftops, waving in the branches, silence knocking on the unquiet heart and Joni sings ‘I wish I had a river, I could skate away on/ But it don’t snow here/ Stays pretty green…’

The sky is now a wash of blue blacks and crimson. Downtown skyscrapers take on a sharper definition as lights come on and as night falls. And lines of Reinaldo Arenas run through my head like stock tape ticker, ‘I run my hands over her keyboard and suddenly it all starts up. / With a tinkling the music begins, and then speeds up more and more.’

And I realize it is time for me to write too.