On Being Jolted

Earlier this week, an emaciated  60-ft finback whale was found on the shores of Breezy Point in the Rockaways.  Rescuers and local residents of this area recently ravaged by Hurricane Sandy  kept pouring water on this sick animal.

There was just so much devastation this year,” said Diane Bassolino after using a water bucket to keep the creature hydrated. “We just wanted to see something survive.”

The whale, however, did not make it.  We don’t know much about her (even her gender ), why there was no food in her stomach, why she washed onshore, or where her pack was. One report estimates she lived 90 years.  There are many things she must have seen, so many changes she must have witnessed.  She  was buried  in the sand dunes near where she beached herself.  I wanted to witness the burial,  but learned  it was already over.  I, however, was not done mourning, for her and so many others this year…

Our hearts are still aching for the people of Newtown, Oakcreek, Aurora and all the ones that came before.

Earlier this year, I saw The Island President, and the inspiring Mohammed Nasheed reminded  us that Male, the capital of the Maldives, is no higher than Manhattan. He warned, “What happens to the Maldives today is going to happen to everyone else tomorrow.”     And it did.   We witnessed destruction in the Rockaways, Coney Island, Staten Island and lower Manhattan.  It was an awakening. A struggle is emerging.

The gifts you’ve already been given in 2012 include a struggle over the fate of the Earth. This is probably not exactly what you asked for, and I wish it were otherwise — but to do good work, to be necessary, to have something to give: these are the true gifts. And at least there’s still a struggle ahead of us, not just doom and despair.

And as this year comes to an end, among the many losses we mourn is a young Indian woman,  a physiotherapy student  who was the victim of a brutal gang rape.  We don’t know much about her either. Nilalanjana Roy writes a powerful tribute to this anonymous woman:

 Let there be an end to this epidemic of violence, this culture where if we can’t kill off our girls before they are born, we ensure that they live these lives of constant fear…Don’t tell me her name; I don’t need to know it, to cry for her.

In all the stories about the 23-year-old rape victim as India’s Braveheart, it’s worth remembering this. She had no intention to be a braveheart. She didn’t want to become a flickering candle on some dark street corner. She didn’t want to become a symbol. Of sorrow. Of hope. Of our shame. Of anything really. Those are all identities we have given her. She just wanted to go home. Perhaps tell a friend what she thought of the movie she had just seen.

There  was something in her story that shook  all of us.  S. Roy continues:

“Let’s not question why this jolted us more than other rapes now. Let’s be thankful we are capable of being jolted.”

This is a year that we have collectively  been jolted by single events that were not singular in nature—acts that have been or may become too common.  Though, we are still trembling from the aftershocks,  S.Roy reminds us,  “We learned that it is possible to shake a country out of its apathy.”

ABC Dosa

Poster by Anil Gupta

On Columbus Day, I had a chance to see Amrit Singh’s new film Dosa Hunt: The Greatest Hunt for South Indian Food in NYC ever Committed to Film.  Singh compiles an all-star cast of indie musicians who seek out the best dosai the city has to offer.   For Singh, the film is about more than just dosa— it serves as a “cultural artifact.” In a discussion after the film during its opening weekend, Singh said Dosa Hunt was “a device to get a pretty remarkable group of guys together, a group of guys who couldn’t have been imaginable ten years ago, at least not to me as a 15-year-old kid, loving music.” Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil and No Doubt’s Tony Kanal, “were the only guys who had a face that looked anything like mine in the arts,” Singh said. Just as dosa, historically the lesser-known Indian food in America, is starting to make its mark, the film is a testament to the arrival and success of its multicultural cast in the music scene.

Check out my piece at Open City,  where this Dosa Hunt continues. Singh, and a couple of the other film stars, Ashok Kondabolu and Vijay Iyer discuss their favorite dosa spots and more.  As for me, my favorite dosa is from Thiru Kumar at NY Dosas.  What about you?

Aung San Suu Kyi in Queens

Just after dawn on Saturday Morning, my brother and I arrived at the gates of the Colden Center at Queens College, where Aung San Suu Kyi was schedule to speak later in the morning. A crowd had already started to form. Burmese Americans traveled from near and far to greet her. Some camped overnight with picnic blankets and lawn chairs. The queue was colorful, dotted with vibrant sarongs and longyis matched with sandals and sneakers.   I spotted a tote bag bearing Aung San Suu Kyi’s face on one side, and her father, Aung San on the other.  Some came carrying red flags with the golden peacock, the symbol of the National League for Democracy. A few hundred had arrived and a few thousand were expected  to fill the hall during her Burmese address at 10:30 Am.

Prior to this, there was an event in English at 9 am, organized by Queens College at their Lefrak Concert Hall. Congressman Joseph Crowley, a Queens College graduate, hosted the program. Crowley, wearing a Saffron colored tie for the occasion, noted he, like Aung San Suu Kyi, was currently in the minority party in our legislature, and that maybe he and Daw Suu, the leader of Burma’s opposition party, should exchange notes. Crowley acknowledged both Secretary Clinton and former first Lady Laura Bush’s support for Burma, and hoped for more bipartisanship on this issue.

When Crowley  learned of Suu’s visit to the U.S. to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, he told her the people of New York wanted to see her. “We want to give you a very warm, a very Queens, New York City welcome.” Actress Angelica Huston read from Suu Kyi’s seminal essay “Freedom from Fear.” Christine Quinn, the first female speaker of NYC’s City Council, offered her gratitude to the newly elected Burmese MP.  The city council has been active on fighting repression in Burma, and  Quinn acknowledged comptroller John Liu in the audience who has been addressing this issue with respect to the city’s pension funds.

Quinn went on to tell Daw Suu the ways in which she has helped the city of New York. “To see what you have been through with an unbelievable amount of grace and dignity…It gives all of us strength and courage… and reminds all of us that faith and perseverance are always rewarded, ” Quinn said.  “I hope you know what you have done for the 8.4 million people living in New York City…Reminding us that we have power. Reminding us that our voice maters and we are citizens of the world… we are in your debt every day.”

Aung San Suu Kyi received a standing ovation and assumed her place at the podium. Dressed in dark green and black Burmese dress, with flowers in her hair, she addressed the crowd unscripted, giving a glimpse into the way her mind worked.

She began talking about her love of New York when she had lived here many decades ago. “I loved the city at a time when people thought it was terrible. It was the only city in the world where I never got lost.” When she first arrived in 1968, she remembered her surprise to see that New York, a city of skyscrapers, did in fact look exactly like the post cards. She had a similar feeling when she was brought to Insein Prison for the first time. She was surprised that prison was just like the places with iron bars she read about in books. She recognized the similarity in these two moments, not to say that prison reminded her of New York (it did not), but to note that we can be surprised when we discover first hand that things are just like what we have been told. This applies too to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma.

“Many young Americans take it [democracy] for granted,” she said. “I always say to my friends who live in democratic countries: ‘Don’t take it for granted.’” She felt that those who didn’t vote showed “a lack of respect for a right you should guard with your life.” Democracy requires practice and we must practice our duty as a citizen. “Duty may sound like a boring word,” she said, “but duty is very stimulating if you really think about what duty is.” She argued challenges are exciting, and “the greatest challenges are the ones where you have to struggle with yourself.

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The Dancing Peacock

“As a child I would stand on the veranda of the house where I was born and watch the sky darken and listen to the grownups wax sentimental over smoky banks of massed rain clouds… When bathing in the rain was no longer one of the great pleasures of my existence, I knew I had left my childhood behind.”- Aung San Suu Kyi

Peter Popham’s recent biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, The Lady and the Peacock, touches briefly upon this childhood. Daw Suu lost her father, the venerable Burmese General, Aung San, in 1947 when she was only two years old, “too young to remember him.” Some of what she does remember, she no longer trusts as her own memories. “I think this may be a memory that was reinforced by people repeating it all the time. In other words, I was not allowed to forget.” As she would be constantly reminded in the many decades that came after, she was her father’s daughter, but it would not be until her mother’s death in 1988 , that she would come to realize the duty and responsibility of this role.

Popham captures the young Suu, searching for purpose in her early years in exile, first in school in Delhi, where her mother was appointed as Ambassador to Burma by the ruling leader Ne Win (presumably to get Aung San’s widow out of his way) and later at college in Oxford and working for the UN in New York. Popam notes that it was on a visit to Algiers while still at Oxford that Suu got her first exposure to struggle:

“Here was the politics of liberation, being enacted before her eyes in all its passion and difficulty. For the first time in her life her sympathies and energies were fully engaged, however briefly, as a participant in the sort of struggle that she was to find waiting for her in Burma twenty three years later.”

Before marrying Tibetan scholar Michael Aris in 1972, she warned him that one day she may need to serve her country.

“I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.”

It would not be for many years that she would come to realize that need. Reflecting on her domestic life in England prior to her return to Burma in 1988, Suu said:

“We called someone vicious in a review for the Times Literary Supplement. We didn’t know what vicious was.”

When Suu returned to Burma at the age of forty-two to the bedside of her dying mother, she witnessed her homeland in the midst of a revolution. Some of the most engaging parts of Popham’s narrative are from what comes after: Suu’s beginning days in politics on the campaign trail with the newly formed National League of Democracy. Aris was unable to join his wife on this journey as he left for England to take care of their two sons, but encouraged Suu’s companion and assistant Ma Thanegi to keep a diary to keep him in the loop. Popham included large excerpts from these diaries, and they are filled with charm. Thanegi kept a record of the details of daily life, what they ate, where there was a proper bathroom (Suu told Thanegi she should write a book about the loos of Burma), and the silliness that emerged when two people spent a long time together in close quarters on the road. Thanegi observed subtle moments of Suu remembering the family she left to serve her country. We witness both Thanegi’s and Suu’s refreshing honesty and sense of humor in these pages.

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Pyeongchang 2018: What’s on the Menu

I’m currently in S. Korea and wrote a post over at Brighter Green about the preparations underway for the Winter Olympics in 2018, and promotions, like this highway billboard sign, for Korean Beef during the games. The post also touches upon some other issues related to animal agriculture and climate change:

The strains of industrial animal agriculture continue to show. In Anheung in Gangwon-do, where tens of thousands of pigs were buried alive, water supplies have become contaminated. The government is currently installing tunnels and pipes to transport water from a different region to each home in this area.

In the summer of 2012, the heat wave has led to the death of over 830,000 farm animals in Korea, mostly chickens. The recent drought in the U.S. has also affected Korea. With decrease in production of U.S. crops used in animal feed, there has been less available for export, and prices for animal feed are soaring in Korea. The cost of beef in Korea, interestingly though, has been going down because farmers can no longer afford to feed their animals, so they are selling them off. There’s currently a surplus on the market, driving the price of beef down.

What will the next few years leading up to 2018 bring in terms of climate and agriculture?  Read more.

The Street Dogs of India

Gardiner Harris, the South Asia Correspondent for the New York Times, recently offended many Indian Animal activists with his story ” Where the Streets are Thronged with Strays Bearing Fangs.”  A multimedia slideshow “A Snarling Menace in India,” accompanies the piece with portraits of seemingly threatening and vicious stray dogs in India

I subscribe to a listserv of Indian Animal Protection groups, and this week, my inbox was filled with comments of criticism and dissapointment in Harris’ article.   The consensus was that the reporting was sloppy and the language sensational.  Many wondered the source for Harris’s estimates of bites per year. (“Free-roaming dogs number in the tens of millions and bite millions of people annually, including vast numbers of children.”).   The overall tone of the piece was one that instilled fear:

“Packs of strays lurk in public parks, guard alleyways and street corners and howl nightly in neighborhoods and villages. Joggers carry bamboo rods to beat them away, and bicyclists fill their pockets with stones to throw at chasers. Walking a pet dog here can be akin to swimming with sharks.”

Many of the Indian Animal advocates who have been in the trenches working on this issue, felt the  threatening portrayal of the dogs to be a gross exaggeration. The article was perhaps  also a missed opportunity to acknowledge the progress that has been made with Animal Birth Control (ABC), Animal Rabies Vaccination (ARV), and spay/neuter return programs. Cities all over the country are exploring humane methods of population control and peaceful coexistence.

The piece  made me reflect on my own experiences with the street dogs of India.  Outside my grandmother’s home in Bangalore, a sweet brown and white dog  took comfort in finding a spot in the shade to rest and was grateful for the plates of rice neighbors often fed him.  On his ear was a U-shapep notch, indicating that he had been neutered.  I had the chance to visit Compassion Unlimited Plus Action, the local shelter,  which also ran a program for sterilizing and vaccinating such street dogs.

Any newcomer to India will take notice of the  street dogs–they are  everywhere.  (Here’s a slideshow of some of the street dogs I’ve encountered, in Bangalore, Varanasi, Gaya, Delhi and Solapur.)

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You can find them sleeping on the steps of train stations, curled up under a flower walla’s table, or waiting for prasadam outside a temple. Their street smarts are sharp  and they can weave in and out of traffic and have learned to cross the street.   What I had noticed,was that while they were in close proximity, most never directly approached humans, but rather found a way to subsist and survive among them.

The high population of strays, many sick and undernourished, is one of great concern, but human factors are largely responsible.  Harris does briefly acknowledge these human elements and ways to better manage the population:

“Nonetheless, India’s burgeoning middle class has begun to adopt Western notions of pet ownership, buying pedigreed dogs and bringing animals into their homes. But many pedigreed dogs end up on the street, the castoffs of unsuccessful breeders or owners who tire of the experiment.

…The first thing you need to start doing to reduce the stray population is manage your garbage better,” said Arpan Sharma, chief executive of the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations. “And the second thing is very aggressive spaying, neutering and vaccinating of animals.”

When confronted with the outpouring of comments on this piece,  Harris responded via email to one of his critics, with this  reply:

“Millions of Indians — including untold numbers of children — are mauled every year by stray dogs. I guess I worry more about children than dogs. But that could be an American thing.”

His response only worsened the original offense, leaving the critic to wonder if Harris meant to imply “that Americans love their children more than Indians.”

Harris is a new foreign correspondent for the New York Times. His post in India began in May, and that was the first time he set foot in the subcontinent.  In a blog post on India Ink, the NYT India Blog, Harris indicated that his  “fresh eyes” could be an asset for the job.  But perhaps his vantage point and perspective  limited his reportage on this subject.

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The Situation and the Story- A week in Provincetown

We started Amitava Kumar’s nonfiction workshop at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown with a bottle of Irony and Vivian Gornick:

Every work of literature has a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot;the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

There were six of us- three New Yorkers, two Aussies and our trusted guide, Ami. We sat in Norman Mailer’s living room discussing voice on the page. That was the situation. Feminists in Mailer’s house. Perhaps that was the Irony.

Sometimes the situation changed, the setting changed, the sky changed. We’d walk along the beach and discuss each other’s work. Ami shared with us a practice Ken Chen, head of AAWW, adopted, taking the advice of his writing mentor: “If you run 10 minutes a day, you will become a poet.”

In Provincetown, I opted to swim. A body in motion leads to clarity in thought. In New York, I write on the subway. I’ve previously said, “Who needs a writing retreat, when you have the G train?” But as my feet pressed onto Provincetown sands (where the Pilgrims first did land), another argument could be made.

After a night of reading Janet Malcolm, Edwidge Danticat and James Baldwin, Ami sent us Kurt Vonnegut’s writing rules and asked each of us to write one rule based on something we’ve observed from these writers. Here’s what we came up with:

  1. Notice everything and then apply the crap detector- B.R
  2. Stand Back- E.C.
  3. Life is Messy. Admit contradictions- A.K.
  4. As a writer, remember your role is to entertain-A.K.
  5. Advance the story with not only what you know, but what you do not know-S.I.
  6. Give your readers a story they could hold as if they were in the trenches.-MBK

Our conversations were enriched by the great diversity that exists within nonfiction. As David Shields notes in Reality Hunger: “The roominess of the term nonfiction: an entire dresser labeled nonsocks

So that was the situation. The story was a group of writers learning from each other, discovering their voice, their aesthetic, their lens, the thing they have come to say, and how they will come to say it.

Onwards with gratitude and excitement.

Wag Wag Wag.