Tomorrow marks the beginning (for most Muslims) of the holy month of Ramadan. Considered sacred by Muslims primarily because it is the month in which the Quran was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed, Ramada is also a time of austerity and self-discipline for Muslim people. Fasting from dawn to dusk in Ramadan is regarded by most as one of the cornerstones of Islam. While they fast, as prescribed by the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet, Muslims also experience a sense of joy and elation, aware as they are of the spiritual significance of the month (and of the drawing closer of Eid!). Of course, many also live it up, with delicacies served for the Iftaar (the breaking of the fast). In fact, I have even heard the mock-complaint “saare saal ki kamai, Ramzan mein gawai!”

What’s a little ironic is that while my devout Muslim friends would be wilting in the Mumbai heat while observing the fast, the non-Muslims and the not-so-Muslim among us would be quite chirpy and chummy with them, hoping to get invited to their houses for the Iftaar! And what a regal treat the Iftaar used be! Few Mumbaikars (who are not vegetarian) must be unaware of parts of the city in Ramadan. Parts of Mahim and the entire area bounded by Nagpada, Do Taanki and Palton Road came alive at night. A friend of mine who did his medical residency at JJ Hospital would wait eagerly for Ramadan each year. A hard rationalist, he had little time or patience for anything religious. This did not deter him from informally joining his Muslim colleagues in fasting through the day only to work up the monstrous appetite he’d need to gorge himself at Mohammedali Road at night. Barah handi, boti kabab, tangdi kabab, kiri-kaleji, murg musallam, shammi kabab, and scores of other carnivorous delights, rounded off with a maalpua and a falooda!

In the Arab, Persian and Pakistani quarters of many Western cities, too, the nights of Ramadan are magical. In London, for instance, Edgware Road and Green Street become completely nocturnal. And the food is superb. A Swiss friend who was with me at university in London would declare himself an honorary Muslim for a month and shamelessly queue outside an East End mosque to partake of the communal feast served by the worshippers. Generous to a fault, they always fed him till he could eat no more.

I was told of something called Les Belles Nuits du Ramadan in Paris (website in French) and have heard that in several parts of the USA too, Ramadan is popular among many who are not Muslim. I just noticed a poster announcing an all-you-can-eat Iftaar buffet at a Montreal restaurant. So if you’re abroad and homesick and on a tight budget, find a Muslim friend and get real chummy. An Iftaar spread is not to be missed. The Islamic societies of many universities too serve free food. And it’s almost invariably the good stuff. Of course, all this is possible only if you are carnivorous. If you are vegetarian, some might opine that, you are already fasting every day and Ramadan is no different! And all you Muslim brethren out there…. Guys, it’s Ramadan. Be generous. Invite us to your Iftaars!

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Montreal is easily among the most happening cities I have lived in. Sure, London is has cool clubs and matchless museums and New York is where most things are at. But in those better-known, better-celebrated cities, you needed to be loaded to make the best of what the city has to offer (barring London’s museums, which are free). A lot happens on the artistic and cultural scenes in many other celebrated cities of the world. But for accessible, public (in every sense of the word) cultural events, Montreal has no peer. For instance, about two-thirds of the performances at the world-famous Montreal International Jazz Festival are free public events. And then there are the street sales. Every year, key streets are closed off, vendors set up stalls and pedestrians rule the road. Music, street food, stylish clothing and bargains galore, mean that everyone is happy and as local businesses, often small ones, get a much need sales boost.

This joie de vivre, the savoir faire, is very much a contribution of the French Quebecers to Canadian culture. The French are stylish, laid back and have their priorities right. They know how to live and how to live it up. And because they are so stylish, the stuff they peddle is very stylish too. Today, this panache was on display on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, Montreal’s Main street. Hundreds of stalls sold everything from Quebec-made underwear (a distinction in itself, for not much remains that is not made in China) and artisanal jewellery to Portuguese delicacies and Montreal’s matchless smoked meat sandwiches.

Tucked away in one corner, was a riot of colour – a stall selling Indian stuff. And this one had it all, from moksha yoga lessons and rudraksh beads to ‘authentic’ teas and très chic chiffons d’Inde. On item particularly caught my eye. It was beautiful, bright silk skirt. Behind it were more skirts. Bandhni, banarsi, kanjeevaram, kota, dhakai, the works. All erstwhile saris, recast as skirts. Shimmering, sizzling, striking and skimpy, these were skirts were the perfect marriage of French style ad Indian motifs. They were gorgeous. And boy, were they selling! It’s not just the English who love India so. “C’est magnifique! Tres jolie,” we overheard an excited woman exclaim. “Hmm,” my companion (also desi), remarked, “I didn’t know India was in fashion in Canada,” adding that she knew the Brits loved desi stuff. “India is in fashion in India, too!” I was unable to resist retorting.

And it is too. Just check out any fancy mall in any Indian city. It’s cool to go ethnic, now. And expensive, too. Because while desi baubles are cool in des, the people who traditionally sold them are not. So while I marvel at street vendors in Montreal’s public spaces, their counterparts in Mumbai are being evicted, ostensibly to clean the city up. Perhaps when there will be little left of it, we will begin to value street culture in India.

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We did it! Three medals, including one gold at the Beijing Olympics. That’s a lot more than we have had in a while and a good deal greater than what we had come to expect. India’s hauls of medals, modest as it is in the overall rankings, is very significant indeed. It offers a glimmer of hope to athletes all over the country who do not happen to be cricketers.

The question is how will India treat her Olympian heroes? Will they come home to the laurels they deserve? Will their success bring about a significant improvement in their personal conditions? Will all, except the Narottam Puris among us, forget their names in a few months’ time? Will they inspire our children to take up sports? Will they instil faith in the prospects of sporting careers among parents who steer talented kids away from sport and toward academic careers they have no talent for or interest in? Will we now see more investment in public sporting infrastructure? Will our stadia and gymnasia now be crammed with sweaty youngsters at play instead of bedecked people attending the parties and events that these places are mostly let out for? Will we see committed sportspersons and coaches manage our sports nationally, or will corrupt political appointees continue to rule the roost? Will these heroes have to sell us shampoo on TV for a living? Will we be weaned away from our obsession with cricket? Will our parents take a day off work to watch our children play a hockey or football match? Will we recognise and develop the potential champion swimmers, rowers, archers, weight-lifters and martial artists who go about their daily lives as fisher folk, boatmen, tribal hunters, dock loaders and Kalari practitioners?

Questions, questions, questions. Methinks me asks too many questions. Let the morrow answer them. For now, let’s raise a cheer for Abhinav Bindra, Sushil Kumar and Vijender Kumar. Jai ho, jawaanon!

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Here’s wishing a Happy Independence Day and Yaum-e-Azadi Mubarak to all Indians and Pakistanis around the world. And here’s hoping that, as two countries in their 60s, India and Pakistan can run their affairs with the wisdom and sagacity that should come with age.

We, who come from these great countries, are justly proud of our millennia-old culture – music, cuisine, art, architecture and literature. But we cannot, on the birth anniversaries of our nations, ignore what ails our societies. On either side of the border, inequity, poverty and violence are still prevalent. So what can we wish for our countries today? Rabindranath Tagore, in the Gitanjali, expressed his wishes thus:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action….
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

And while we hark back to Tagore, who penned India’s national anthem, let’s not forget another great poet of the subcontinent, Mohammed Iqbal. Indians know and love his poem Saare jahaan se achha Hindustan humara. And while it is true that Iqbal passed away well before 1947, his legacy is so much a part of Pakistan’s cultural, philosophical and intellectual history that he is the National Poet of Pakistan. If every Pakistani could embody even a fraction of Iqbal’s idea of khudi, Pakistan would be a better place. Just as India would be a better place if Indians went beyond paying lip service to India’s heroes.

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I have written in the past of how, in many things, we desis remain unabashedly Anglophilic. Of course, the fascination is mutual, even if it is unequal. From the days of Richard Burton (who introduced straight-laced Victorians to Vatsyayana) and Rudyard Kipling (whose Mowgli and Kim remain the gold standards of impish boyhood) to the days of the Beatles (and their discovery of the ‘wisdom of the East’) and Big Brother (in the wake of which Shilpa Shetty became a yoga guru), India has enchanted, mystified, bewitched and bemused many a Britannic mind.

Often voyeuristic, nearly always simplistic, almost never nuanced, frequently over-romanticised and at times tinged with nostalgia (for the days of the Raj), the British passion for all things Indian is, fallacies notwithstanding, genuine, sincere, deep and durable. And in some ways, it is even more egalitarian the Indian passion for all things British. While it is only Indians of a certain class (and aspirants thereto) who are obsessed with gingham tablecloths, Wedgwood china, tweed jackets and other accoutrements of what they imagine to be ‘the English way’, there is no class barrier to Indophilia in England. It is an affliction that strikes the classes and the masses without discrimination. The extent to which fondness for India and Indian things pervades mainstream British consciousness is revealed by a story in the Hindustan Times.

It seems quite likely that one of the country’s top brands of potato chips (or crisps, as they are known in those parts) will issue a special edition chicken tikka masala flavour! The snack food company recently announced a competition in which participants are invited to contribute ideas for innovative potato chip flavours. And chicken tikka masala (already declared Britain’s national dish by no less than the late foreign secretary, Robin Cook) seems to be the country’s favourite new flavour. The campaign in support of the tikka masala flavour is being led by the Sun newspaper, Britain’s largest-circulating daily. With such powerful backing, it is very likely that an all-time favourite snack will soon come in a now-staple flavour!

The Sun even gives readers a potted history of chicken tikka masala, proffering the view that it was invented by Punjabi chefs at Emperor Babur’s behest. Here is a classic example of British romanticism. Whether or not there is any academic merit to the Sun’s version of the history of the dish is quite immaterial. What is important is that the UK’s favourite newspaper is lobbying to have one of the country’s favourite snacks produced in a flavour based on the people’s favourite dish and that dish happens to be Indian (or is it really a British invention?). It is a rather touching example of Indophilia. One wonders when an enterprising chef in India might come up with a shepherd’s samosa or a Lancashire garam-degchi. Perhaps we are not such Anglophiles after all!

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Aficionados of the Queen’s English (does Her Maj qualify any longer?) might balk at the news that an Englishman opines that English is now spoken better by ‘foreigners’ than by the English! Poor spelling and grammar are, according to a university lecturer, all too common among native British students. It has been claimed in the past that foreign students, especially those from the Commonwealth, often outperform their British counterparts when it comes to a basic command of the English language.

Perhaps the haughty folk at the Home Office and the admissions offices of the many overpriced British universities might be better off devising some sort of Test of English as a Native Language, rather than subjecting ‘foreigners’ to their ridiculous tests of a language many of their compatriots have forgotten. On second thoughts, though, this is refreshing news. It means that English in England is losing its old colonial stiltedness. That process had long been underway in the streets of Hackney and Stepney and the many Northern towns and cities that always had a healthy disregard for the pretensions of the South. Now, the groves of academe have become natural extensions of the High Street.

One only wishes that some of the street wisdom (with its hang-loose grammar) would find its way to Indian shores. Our English language schoolteachers, with their colonial hangover, continue to teach the sort of English that, anywhere in England, would be considered archaic. It does make some of us better than the English at English and it does do its bit for the BPO economy. But it is quite tiresome. Imagine a world without the ‘Wren and Martin’, the OED, figures of speech or any of the dreaded tortures we endured in the English period. That would be nang, innit?

PS: Apologies to readers in America, a country that, the British say, it is divided from the UK by common language!

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The new ‘resurgence’ of India and the burgeoning of the ‘great Indian middle class’ are phenomena that are written about ad nauseum. The gushing ‘India-is-so-cool’ and the alarmist ‘beware-India-is-arriving’ sections of the media, have both written about how the Indian consumer is fast becoming a force to reckon with. The more outlandish of these excited observations on India (such as the concern that wealthy, hungry Indians are eating the world into a food crisis) can be dismissed as just what they are – nonsense upon stilts (to use Jeremy Bentham’s words).

Yet, the fact remains that the Indian middle class are a huge force to be reckoned with and one ignores such a force at one’s peril. Most of the world’s top corporations are smart enough to not do so. Their scramble for the Indian pie is quite unseemly and successive governments have been happy to let everybody and his uncle have a slice. However, some entities use subtler methods. The Swiss tourism industry is one such example.

A PTI report in the Hindustan Times reveals that over 250,000 Indians visit the alpine haven every year. There is an upward trend in these figures and many desis are driven to the Switzerland by the breathtaking backdrops to Shahrukh Khan’s outstretched arms. The Swiss Alps have been a popular setting for syrupy song-and-dance and courtship scenes since the days of Sangam. What is remarkable is that the Swiss tourism authorities are cognizant of the fact that Indian filmmakers and audiences are smitten by their beautiful country and that films have the power to drive Indian vacationers to Switzerland. If the Swiss are as smart as the British (they have to be to keep half the world’s dosh in their vaults!), they will do some courtship of their own and make life easier for Indian film crews shooting in Switzerland. Since the UK has done so (remember Tony Blair’s famous message to the IIFA in Yorkshire?), there has been a sharp upward spike in the numbers of Indian movies being shot in Britain.

This has the dual effect of creating economic activity for British film technicians and ancillary services and of giving British locales free exposure in one of the world’s most powerful mass communication media. That is smart business.

One only wonders though, why some the world’s most picturesque and awe-inspiring vistas that are thickly distributed all over India remain underexposed in Bollywood. There is an excellent adage in Marathi that could explain this curiosity: Jithe piktha, thithe vikath naahi (roughly, nothing sells where it is grown).

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The Times of India reports that Indian-Americans spend 3½ hours a month on the phone to India. If it was any other group instead of Indian-Americans, the preceding sentence should have ended with an exclamation mark. Given that its American desis we are talking about, it’s a pity there is no such thing as a ‘ho-hum mark’.

A recent study concluded that desis in America spend up to seven minutes a day and 3½ hours a month talking on their phones to folk back in India. And surprisingly, they use cell phones more than landlines to do it. More calls originate from Princeton, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City and Dallas than any other American city. The most-called cities in India are Hyderabad, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Bangalore.

Going by my own calling patterns and those of scores of my friends, I can only say that this has to be a very conservative estimate indeed. We call home way more often and for way longer than that! On the streets of London and Montreal, I’ve walked past countless desis excitedly, unabashedly and vociferously discussing everything from the price of shares on the Mumbai Stock Exchange (usually in Gujarati) and the esoterics of tertiary calculus (usually in Tamil) to the travails of the cricket team (usually gloomily) and the gyrations of Mallika Sherawat (usually gushingly)! I’m sure American streets are no different. The point is that we desis don’t need a reason to yammer! As Prof. Amartya Sen has averred, we Indians are interlocutors par excellence.

The finding that we talk so much is therefore not surprising. The report seems to have got one thing wrong, though. Apparently, a UK-based market research company studied several international calling service providers and ranked a Stockholm-based service as the number one provider. Pfft! Or, as the Brits say, Bo****ks! We know who the number one international calling service provider is, don’t we?

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Not long ago, English speaking classes sprouted up all over urban and small-town India. Many promised to teach an impeccable RP or an easy Southern drawl. Others peddled insights into the Western mind, presenting Euro-American culture (cinema, literature, slang, gastronomy, etc.) in encapsulated, easy to assimilate form. The boom still continues. A Canadian friend of mine has just returned from a stint in Bangalore, doing precisely this – teaching Indians about life and living in Canada. The clients of this industry are the now countless BPO sector employees who must greet you with a twang or a drawl or a cut-glass enunciation (depending on where you are) every time you call a helpdesk or information line from nearly anywhere in the West. Inevitably, the person at the other end will, rather unimaginatively and quite unnecessarily, adopt some far-to-common moniker like Jane or John. The idea is to blend into the culture of the people you are servicing.

This well-established trend has been the subject of much debate and discussion in academic, business, media and popular circles. Its upsides and downsides have even been addressed in some of Bollywood’s new-generation movies. But an incipient new trend has gone largely unnoticed. This is the trend of Western expatriates to India having to learn ‘Indian culture’ (see report). Their training, for the time being, seems to be just as superficial and frivolous as what is generally dished out at the many English ‘language and culture’ classes.

Among the things British babus are advised to learn is to say ‘namaste’, to abstain from greeting women with a kiss (Mr. Gere won’t forget that one in a hurry) and to expect unpunctuality. It seems that the boot is on the other foot now. I am reminded here of something Rudyard Kipling (of Jungle Book fame) wrote. A little ditty that is part of a larger poem, this bit of Brit wit goes:

Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late  deceased,
And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

All these decades later, the UK India Business Council’s advice seems remarkably similar. Perhaps the boot is still firmly on the foot it always was on, after all.

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