Accidental Blogger

A Return Journey

Readers may remember this book review about the Crypto Jews of Spain and Portugal. Their stories were a complicated maze of religious faith, persecution and conversion under duress. Above all, their history was also about tenaciously and secretly holding on to a personal identity despite considerable external threats. Christian persecution of Jews is now mostly a matter of the past and the Crypto Jews, several generations removed from their ancestors, have mostly assimilated into the larger Christian population. Puzzled by some odd family traditions, some Hispanic Catholics in the southwestern states of the US (mostly immigrants from Mexico) are eagerly investigating possible Judaic roots, including genetic testing, to establish Sephardic Jewish descent. Their clues come from certain seemingly non-Christian practices amidst their Christian lives which they believe hark back to a Jewish past. One such story of a Catholic woman from Houston who believes she has found her way back to the faith of her Sephardic ancestors.

At an East Galveston beach, Mari Barkhausen is waist-deep in the cool, brown water. After repeating Hebrew blessings, she is immersed once, twice. When she emerges from the water a third time, she is a Jew.

She hugs her rabbi, looking to the shoreline at her husband and two sons who are waiting for their mikveh, the ritual immersion for Jewish converts.

“Mazel tov, everyone,” declares Rabbi Stuart Federow. “This day begins the rest of your education. Jewish learning never stops.”

Barkhausen’s journey began decades ago as she watched her maternal grandmother’s peculiar ways. Her Mexican-American abuela would light candles on Fridays and draw the curtains before sundown, cover mirrors at home when a relative died and examine eggs for blood spots.

No one questioned her ways, and no explanation was ever offered to little Mari or her siblings.

Years later, Barkhausen would realize those customs were not one woman’s idiosyncrasies. They were Jewish customs.

Lighting of candles marked the beginning of the Sabbath. Many cover mirrors when someone dies to avoid concentrating on their grief-stricken appearances. And the Old Testament teaches that life is in the blood.

Grandma did all these things, Barkhausen remembered. But Grandma wasn’t Jewish. She was Catholic.

Saved From The Savages

Nearly three years ago I addressed the issue of looted, neglected or destroyed treasures of the world - whether the value of rare, ancient art and artifacts should be measured in regional and nationalistic terms or do they represent the foot prints of history pertinent to all humankind and therefore qualify as global treasures? I wrote:

Those of us born in antique lands with long and continuously evolving histories spanning several centuries and millennia, will identify with the question I am about to pose. It pertains to the theft and sale of ancient artifacts that leave the countries of their origin and find new homes in the museums and private collections elsewhere in distant lands. Trafficking in art and artifacts flows exclusively in one direction - from the poorer nations to the more prosperous ones.  India, China, Egypt and much of the middle and far east have seen ancient religious and cultural artifacts leave native shores and surface in Europe and America.  The fact that much of the art was "taken" by occupiers and colonizers often without even an unscrupulous middleman making money from the sales, is a particularly touchy and often painful aspect of this transfer.

But the story is not as simple as it would appear on considerations of ownership alone.  Many valuable objects were taken or stolen during colonial times.  In the modern era after independence of the host nations, some were acquired legally while others changed hands illegally on the black market. Most countries now ban the sale or transfer of antiquities but rare and ancient artifacts continue to find their way into public and private collections beyond the borders. It is difficult to speculate on the possible fate of the artifacts had they been left where they originally belonged. Would the local governments and museums have had the will or the wherewithal to offer them the wide exposure and  pride of place they have come to enjoy in western museums?  Or would they have crumbled, gathered dust and disappeared altogether? Do poorer nations have the capability to care for their priceless ancient heritage?  Given the immediate economic concerns of more pressing nature, should that even be their priority? There is even a question about how much value locals assign to ancient stone piles and crumbling edifices from a long forgotten era. Can those who are embattled by today's precarious existence, worry about yesterday's fine art?  While "creating" art is the prerogative of the poor and the rich alike, is "preserving" art a luxury afforded only by the wealthy?   The dilemma is indeed a wrenching one - place of origin or centers of preservation and greater visibility?  This is a bit like asking, "Are endangered species better off in their threatened and disappearing habitat or in a well kept zoo?" Should destitute and incapable parents give up their children for adoption or let them struggle and languish in a desperate family milieu? Difficult to answer.

There is another disconcerting factor to consider here other than the priority and capability of less prosperous nations to preserve their heritage. The political tensions that can often overrun the national psyche in developing nations can put historical treasures at risk. Changing ideologies can make monuments and artifacts belonging to opposing political or religious camps vulnerable to vindictive abuse. Think the rampage of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Think Babri Masjid in India. Think the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. 

Ah, the Bamiyan Buddhas! I am not overly sentimental about the disappearance of antique treasures, especially those that are lost to the usual ravages of time. But I find their deliberate destruction for political or religious extremist causes repulsive. The demolition of the nearly 1500 year old colossi of Buddha, in the Bamiyan region of Afghanistan in 2001 by Taliban zealots was unforgivably barbaric, in my angry opinion. The images built in the Greco-Indian style that the local Muslim villagers had peacefully co-existed with for centuries, calling them by the endearing names of Big Neighbor and Small Neighbor, dated back to the Gandhara period when Buddhism flourished in Afghanistan. Ignorant religious fanatics thought nothing of reducing them to rubble for the sake of ideological purity, depriving the world of an awesome ancient record of inspired artistic tribute.   

Yesterday a friend and I went to see the exhibition Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The exhibit comprises ancient treasures of art, worship and craftsmanship, some archaeological finds dating back to the Bronze Age. The mostly pre-Islamic relics hark back to Afghanistan's  mercurial early history influenced in turn by early Greek and Indian conquerors as well as the central Asian nomads who passed through its rugged terrain. The art treasures were rescued and kept hidden by Afghan museum curators and art lovers from the rage filled eyes of the Taliban lest they too became prey to the same fate that befell the Bamiyan Buddhas.

My friend and I found the well designed exhibition admirable and the efforts of those who saved the treasures of their ravaged nation from disappearing, even more so. An excerpt from the museum brochure:

Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul explores the rich cultural heritage of ancient Afghanistan from the Bronze Age (2500 B.C.) through the rise of trade along the Silk Road in the first century A.D.

Strategically located on the commercial routes between China and India in the East and Europe in the West, Afghanistan was at the crossroads of civilizations in Central Asia. This unique blend of cultures and artistic styles is seen in nearly 230 artworks: Bronze Age incised gold vases; bronze and stone sculptures of Greek heroes; graceful ivory apsaras, the beautiful women of Indian tradition; Roman type glass vessels and plaster reliefs; magnificent Persian and Scythian style gold jewelry; as well as distinctively local works. Gold ornaments from the famed Bactrian hoard, a 2,000-year-old treasure cache discovered in 1978 but hidden from view until 2003, are included. Visitors also will gain insight into how the artifacts survived the recent decades of war and chaos and will learn the stories of heroic Afghans who risked their lives to save these and other national cultural treasures from destruction during Soviet occupation and Taliban rule.

More, including slide shows, on the Hidden Tresures exhibits in the National Geographic.

Cracking a 4000 year old linguistic mystery?

Are scientists on the path to deciphering the Indus Valley script?  The story here and here.

An ancient script that's defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.

Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures.

"The underlying grammatical structure seems similar to what's found in many languages," said University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao.

The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long.

In 1877, British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham hypothesized that the Indus script was a forerunner of modern-day Brahmic scripts, used from Central to Southeast Asia. Other researchers disagreed. Fueled by scores of competing and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to decipher the script, that contentious state of affairs has persisted to the present.

Among the languages linked to the mysterious script are Chinese Lolo, Sumerian, Egyptian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Old Slavic, even Easter Island — and, finally, no language at all. In 2004, linguist Steve Farmer published a paper asserting that the Indus script was nothing more than political and religious symbols. It was a controversial notion, but not an unpopular one.

Who are the real pirates?

Why become a pirate? Perhaps because other "honest" means of livelihood have been destroyed? Lawlessness is a menace whether perpetrated by pirates or "civilized" governments. So reveals Johann Hari in the Independent. (via 3 QD) Hari also reflects on the rebellious and brutal history of pirates, some of whom were mercenaries for legitimate European regimes.

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

Ruining the Pirate Myth

I didn't know grown men play make-believe pirate games. Apparently, it is a popular pastime for some who are beguiled by the tales of high jinks on high seas popularized in books, theme parks and movies. Those daredevil outlaws of the past occupy a romanticized place in the hearts of some modern day men with sedate lives. In their spare time, they like to put on eye patches, dress up in tight pants, fancy hats, assume flamboyant names and play at being swashbuckling buccaneers.  But the recent real life crack down on scruffy Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean who prey on merchant ships that has shone the light on the unglamorous aspects of piracy may have put a damper on the  playful spirits of the fantasy pirates on land.

America’s pirate subculture is a peculiar world where grown men strap on eye patches, sing pirate chanteys and take on names like, in Clayton Jackson’s case, Morick Towain.

Once a month, Jackson dresses up in pirate garb — such as a head wrap, pair of pointy boots and special piratey pants. Then he hits the bars for some drinks with a few similarly dressed friends.

“Being a pirate is about freedom, it’s the lifestyle of that old-time period that catches my attention,” said Jackson of Dallas, who runs a social group for Texas pirates. Spurred by popular movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, interest in pirates of centuries past has skyrocketed in recent years.

But the recent worldwide furor over real-life Somali pirates raises a pressing question: Should people really be romanticizing murderous pirates — even old ones?

In the tightknit pirate subculture, the issue is a touchy subject and rarely discussed. Leaders of the movement say they’ve recently begun fielding more pointed, occasionally uncomfortable questions.

“If we had been thinking ahead we would have called it `Talk Like a Buccaneer Day,' ” said John Baur, speaking of the now famous Talk Like a Pirate Day he co-founded with friend Mark Summers in 1995.

Summers became so concerned with the issue of modern-day piracy, he recently wrote an open letter to the Somali pirates in a trade magazine.

The Last Jew in Afghanistan

Here. Passover begins tomorrow. I wonder what Zablon Simantov will be celebrating.

The Little Known Gateway to America

When we think of immigration to the US, Ellis Island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty comes to mind. But there have been other historic points of entry for foreigners wishing to seek their fortunes in the land of opportunity. Angel Island in northern California was the main processing station for far east Asian immigrants arriving via the Pacific (see the story of immigrant poetry on the walls of Angel Island). Texas too had its own gateway. Galveston Island near Houston saw some 200,000 foreigners from many different countries come through its port from the late 19th to the mid 20th century.

A.I. Schepps, his mother and seven siblings left Russia in 1913 on the steamship Chemnitz, bound for a new life in the United States.

But they never sailed through the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and never set foot on storied Ellis Island. Their immigrant journey took them farther south, through the Gulf of Mexico and into an island community still recovering from a devastating hurricane a decade earlier.

From there, the family traveled more than 250 miles north to Dallas, where Schepps’ father and three other siblings were preparing to start the farm that would become one of the largest dairies in the nation.

Theirs is the quintessential immigrant success story — they arrived tired and poor, and their brood was likely a huddled mass — but it has a Texas twist: They were among an estimated 200,000 immigrants who came to America via the port of Galveston between 1865 and 1924.

That number, considered by some scholars a conservative estimate, puts Galveston among the 10 biggest immigrant ports of 19th- and 20th-century America.

“People do not think much about Galveston as a national port of entry to the United States,” said Suzanne Seriff, curator of the Forgotten Gateway, a new exhibit that chronicles Galveston as a major port of entry for U.S. immigrants.

On display at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, the exhibit will come to Galveston’s Moody Gardens in November.

“We are trying to add to our national history about a port that has largely been forgotten,” Seriff said.

Like those who arrived via other ports of the time, those who came through Galveston were overwhelmingly European. During the late 19th century, they arrived from countries such as Germany and what was then Czechoslovakia. Later, they increasingly were from Italy or Greece.

As Galveston became more developed, some settled there as tailors and merchants. Others moved on to different states. Many branched out to other communities in Texas, establishing ethnic enclaves such as Fredericksburg and New Braunfels.

The rest of the story here.

Boneheads

George W. Bush's aristocratic family boasted several dedicated Yalies, many of whom were members of Yale University's ultra secret Skull and Bones Society, home to a number of movers and shakers of America's establishment ruling class. A decades old adventure of one Bonesman Bush is now the basis for a modern day lawsuit. George Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush is said to have robbed the grave of the famous Apache leader Geronimo, for his "skull and bones" as a treasured prize for the  eponymous secretive fraternity. It is tempting to speculate that the same arrogance that plagued the grave-robbing Bush ancestor, may have manifested itself as an atavistic trait in his frat boy grandson whose monumental prank as president nearly turned the nation of Iraq into a graveyard. Geronimo  the warrior, who spent his life fighting against occupiers, can't even turn over in his own grave.  

They claim his body was taken by members of Skull and Bones, a secret student society, and are hidden at Yale University.

George W Bush's grandfather and two other members of the group are said to have taken the remains of the Apache warrior Geronimo during the First World War.

However, the society's repeated refusal to comment on the story, or on rumours that new members have to kiss the chief's skull, have prompted the extraordinary lawsuit.

In a court action that names not only Yale and the society, but also Barack Obama and Robert Gates, his defence secretary, 20 descendants of the famous American Indian leader are seeking to recover his remains so his spirit can be laid to rest in his tribal homeland.

Their legal action, filed this week in a federal-district court in Washington DC on the 100th anniversary of his death, will seek to determine the truth of rumours that Geronimo's burial at Fort Sill in Oklahoma was not his final resting place.

Three Bonesmen, including Prescott Bush, served at Fort Sill during the First World War.

The trio were rumoured to have dug up Geronimo's remains in 1918 and took some of them back to Yale where they are supposedly still kept in the society's hall – known as the "Tomb" – on the university campus.

The Skull and Bones, whose illustrious membership has numbered three US presidents including both Bushes, supposedly makes new members kiss the Chiricahua Apache's skull.

Then there is Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania whose right wing blather no longer reverberates on the senate floor but is unfortunately still to be heard on the speaking circuit where he continues to spread fear and misinformation about war and peace. On a recent tour of college campuses to "present his idea that Americans do not truly understand why the United States is at war," Santorum tried to explain the conflict in the middle east to students at the University of Nebraska. Mixing politics and religion to make his case, the senator proved that he is ignorant on both fronts.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum visited the auditorium of the Nebraska Union on Tuesday to present his idea that Americans do not truly understand why the United States is at war.

Santorum is passing through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as a part of his college campus tour on which he describes to students what he believes are the dangers in not knowing what is going on in the Middle East.

“I talk to college students because I can have an intellectual conversation, and they usually don’t agree with me,” Santorum said. “I like to state my case (to students) and let them decide who to believe.”

Santorum was a member of the United States Senate from 1994-2007. He believes that the Bush administration made a huge mistake in not informing Americans exactly what’s happening with the wars and who America is fighting. He said the Obama administration is making the same mistake.

“America has little information and Bush went out of his way to mystify who the enemy really is,” Santorum said. “Is that true, are we really fighting ‘terrorists?’”

Santorum also gave the audience a lecture on Islam. When he asked the audience who knew the difference between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, three audience members raised their hands. Santorum said this proved his point – America has been at war with Islam for seven years and doesn’t know the two branches.

Santorum said he supported the war when it was unpopular because he thinks not fighting could destroy western civilization. He said he believes that Muslims are America’s enemy because they read their religion literally and apply it to real life, instead of in historical context.

The lecture continued when Santorum pointed out what he thought were the main differences between Christians and Muslims. Santorum said Christians, who believe in Jesus Christ, never governed or conquered anyone, but Mohammed was a warrior and killed people.

Santorum said he believes Muslims’ religious views cannot be changed or altered, so Middle Easterners reject American, democratic ideals.

“A democracy could not exist because Mohammed already made the perfect law,” Santorum said. “The Quran is perfect just the way it is, that’s why it is only written in Islamic.” (emphasis mine)

Someone needs to inform the senator that the Quran is NOT written in Islamic. Just as the New Testament is not written in the Christian language, the Torah in Jewish, the Gita in Hindu ... nor by the way, the US Constitution in American. And also, Santorum conveniently forgot Christianity's messy Crusades, Inquistion and colonialism.  

Still Overrated

Just in time for Presidents Day, C-Span has surveyed 65 historians for their opinion of American presidents.  Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt top the list at  #1, 2 and 3 respectively. James Buchanan ranks last. Predictably enough, George W. Bush is among the ten worst, coming in at # 36. That makes him the seventh worst president to date. But I feel that it is  still too high a position for such a dangerous and clueless man. I am convinced that Bush will slide down the list as his misdeeds and missteps are evaluated more objectively in the proper historical perspective of time and distance from his disastrous reign.

Further analysis of the survey here.

An Indian Revolutionary in Mexico

I guess to be perfectly accurate, in Mexico he was more of a "green" revolutionary - a Norman Borlaug of sorts.

This is the first time I have heard of Pandurang Khankhoje, an Indian nationalist who traveled the world seeking support for India's freedom from British rule. For a while Khankhoje settled in Mexico where he applied his training as an agricultural scientist to help Mexican farmers successfully grow sturdier varieties of corn. For his efforts and his popularity, Mexican artist Diego Rivera painted a picture of the revolutionary scientist at the head of a dinner table, sharing bread with others. Although I have seen numerous paintings by Diego Rivera, I was unaware of the painting of Khankhoje, just as I was of his life story.  (Thanks to my sister Mandira for the link to the story)

Pandurang Sadashiv Khankhoje, born in Wardha in 1886, was an angry young man who wanted freedom for India and dignity for Indians. He was raised on stirring tales of 1857 and was in constant trouble with the British police who had a long history sheet on him. The fiery young revolutionary had to flee India when the British spread a dragnet for him.

He became a founder-member of the Ghadar Party in America (many of whose members were executed by the British) and worked unrelentingly to gain international sympathy for the cause of India’s freedom.  Khankhoje’s adventures took him to Japan, Russia, Persia, the US and finally to Mexico, where he settled with his devoted Belgian wife, Jeanne, and had two daughters, Savitri and Maya. A stauch believer in the tenets of the Holy Gita, he started free agricultural colleges for the Mexicans, successfully experimented with varieties of corn, pioneering Mexico's ‘Green Revolution’ and was part of the country’s vibrant artistic and intellectual circle. The image (right) is of a mural by the great  Mexican artist Diego Rivera showing Khankhoje distributing bread to the nations of the world.

However, despite his busy, useful life in Mexico where he felt safe and welcome, Khankhoje pined deeply for his homeland. He saw her gain freedom and came home for good, settling in Pune, re-reading his beloved Gita and the Upanishads. He passed away in 1967. His pediatrician daughter, Savitri Sawhney, who married into the Indian Army, has written a wonderful account of her father's life, called I Shall Never Ask Pardon (Penguin India, 2008, Rs 399). This inspiring and moving Indian life story is truly worth celebrating. Here's a taste:

From frumpy to foxy - reincarnating the first First Lady

A second post on the same day about altered images - or at least an extrapolated one. This one does not involve plagiarism or copyright infringement. Rather it is an exercise in the restoration of national vanity.

The president of the United States is widely perceived to be the most powerful person in the world. So far only males of the species have occupied the august office. Their mates, the first ladies, have played public roles that have ranged from ceremonially ornamental to activist partners. Apparently, it irks some folks that any consort of a US president should be perceived as "frumpy," even if the woman in question has been dead for more than two hundred years. The very first First Lady, Martha Washington is the lady in question.  Her likeness in existing portraits, most of them painted in middle age, are as one historian describes it, of the double-chinned Old Mother Hubbard variety. So, armed with ultra modern technology, a few historians and museum curators embarked upon a mission to revise or rather, photo shop history. With the help of forensic anthropologists at the Lousiana State University's special project known as Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services, or FACES, a new image of a twenty five year old Martha Washington was created by working backwards from her middle aged visage. This painstaking Benjamin Buttoning of the first lady has yielded a satisfactorily attractive and lissome young woman and revamped her "dumpy" reputation.  

  This just in: Martha Washington was hot. Or at least hotter than we thought.

Our image of the mother of our country, vague and insubstantial as it is, is drawn from portraits painted after her death showing a frumpy, dumpy, plump old lady, a fussy jumble of needlework in her lap, wearing what could pass for a shower cap with pink sponge rollers rolled too tight underneath.

But today, 250 years after Martha and George tied the knot, a handful of historians are seeking to revamp the former first lady's fusty image, using the few surviving records of things she wrote, asking forensic anthropologists to do a computerized age-regression portrait of her in her mid-20s and, perhaps most importantly, displaying for the first time in decades the avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that she wore on her wedding day.

Take that, Sally Fairfax.

History is about to be revised.

"We always see Martha with a withered face in her old age. But she was quite a beautiful woman in her younger years, and Washington loved her deeply," said Edward Lengel, senior editor at the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia. "What's happening now is revisionist. But I think it's a whole lot closer to the reality of what she was."

The full story in the Washington Post here.

The Dreamer ... And Now, The Doer?

The juxtaposition of Martin Luther King Jr's birthday today and Barack Obama's presidential inauguration tomorrow has not escaped the notice of Americans. Many see the two events as book ends of America's troubled and often violent racial history. Obama's election to the most powerful position in world politics is widely perceived as the successful culmination of King's dream -that America has indeed taken the first significant step towards becoming a nation where its citizens will be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.

The editorial in today's Houston Chronicle takes note of the historic significance of the two dates:

Text, Book, Matter (Dean)

The latest Chronicle of Higher Education (January 9, 2009) includes a brief article (sub'n req'd) about an English professor and his biologist brother, who together are developing a way to use DNA to determine the local origins of medieval manuscripts.

While in Europe researching the origins of a poem, Timothy L. Stinson, an assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University, became frustrated with the limited methods available for determining where the original text came from and when it was produced.

"And then there was sort of this light bulb," Mr. Stinson recalled. "Wait a minute, they're on animal skin. Why can't we look at DNA?"

Indeed, in the age before paper was widely available and affordable, the written word was recorded on the hides of sheep, goats, and cattle. Shortly after Mr. Stinson had his epiphany, he began putting his idea into practice. Working with his brother, a biologist who has performed DNA extraction and analysis, Mr. Stinson is developing a method of using DNA to determine when and where medieval manuscripts were written. The approach will significantly improve the accuracy of the standard identification process, which typically relies on analysis of the author's handwriting and dialect — approaches that are "notoriously unreliable," Mr. Stinson says.

Here is where the disciplines of art and science (and history and sociology...) perfectly complement one another. There is some precedent for this partnership. In the mid-'80s, Paul Needham, currently rare books librarian at Princeton, but then at the Pierpont Morgan Library, worked with physicists at (if memory serves me well) UC Davis to conduct cyclotron analysis of the ink used by Gutenberg in the production of his Bible. Their work (see the articles cited at the end of the the foregoing link) produced fascinating conjectures about the details of work in Gutenberg's atelier, tied to findings about the physical substance comprising his books.

But before Needham, there was Allan Stevenson. I read Stevenson's monumental Problem of the Missale Speciale (London: Bibliographical Society, 1967) in one sitting at UCLA's library school shortly after the Needham cyclotron articles appeared. Obviously, Stevenson worked with cruder technology than Needham and Stinson: a microscope, photography, his unaided vision, the historical tools of papermaking. Watermarks are formed by wires shaped and anchored to the wire mesh of a papermold, the bed on which paper was made. Naturally, the shaped wires began to lose their shape as more paper was produced on the mold. Observing the gradual deformation of watermarks in the paper used to print the eponymous missal, Stevenson, like Needham, was able to suggest how the work proceeded from copy to copy.

"And then there was sort of this light bulb..." Perhaps it's not at all ironic for Stinson to resort to a not quite antiquated figure to reflect the moment of his discovery.

Happy Holidays And A Blogging Hiatus

Season's Greetings to our readers and my co-bloggers. Hope everyone returns to A.B. refreshed and cheered after the holiday festivities are over and done with for the year. I am going on a short trip and won't be blogging for some time. Unless someone else finds the time to post, the front page will remain static for a few days. I will leave you with a potpourri of unrelated but interesting links to muse over if you find time to visit during the holiday rush.

Two thoughtful essays about the recent bombings in Mumbai and the tensions that tug at the national fabric of India - Ramachandra Guha in the WSJ and Badri Raina in ZNet.

TS Eliot on The Naming Of Cats.

An insect crime buster in Finland!

Enjoy the holidays!

When Hindus mourned a Muslim martyr

Today or tomorrow, depending on the sighting of the moon, is Eid al-Adha, a day of celebration for Muslims worldwide. This year, December is also the month of Muharram, a religious event of lament and mourning observed by the Shia Muslim sect.

I recently finished reading The Girl From Foreign by American documentary film maker Sadia Shepard which I had previewed here a few months ago. Shepard's journey in search of her Indian born Jewish/ Muslim grandmother's roots crisscrosses through western India and the Pakistani city of Karachi. It is a fascinating story which I plan to describe at a later date. Today however, I wish to bring up a little known fragment of Indian history that had laid buried in my memory for decades and which an anecdote in Shepard's book helped shake loose. 

The student population of my school in New Delhi was composed of girls from practically every part of India belonging to several different linguistic groups and religions. Nearly fifty percent of the Punjabi and Bengali students came from families who had lost their ancestral homes in the partition of India in 1947, my own being among them. In middle school, a class mate whose folks had moved to India from the Pakistani city of Lahore, once casually commented that her father's family used to observe Muharram in their hometown before the partition. At the time I didn't think much of what my friend had said. We were young and many of us had heard interesting pre-partition tales from our parents. It is only now, on thinking back, that her story acquires a special meaning and given the subsequent deterioration in Hindu-Muslim relations in general and between India and Pakistan in particular, also a certain amount of poignancy. You see, the remarkable thing about my friend's Muharram story was that she was not a Muslim, but a Hindu Brahmin. 

My class mate belonged to the Punjabi community of Dutts, in more communally harmonious times also known as the Hussaini Brahmins. They, along with their Shia Muslim friends and neighbors, used to commemorate and grieve the deaths of Imam Hussain and his disciples in the bloody battle of Karbala during the 7th century power struggle among early Muslims. Of the Dutts was said the following:

Wah Dutt Sultan,
Hindu ka Dharam
Musalman ka Iman,

Wah Dutt Sultan
Adha Hindu Adha Musalman

[Oh, Dutt the king,
follows the religion of the Hindu
And the faith of the Muslim.

Oh, Dutt the king,
He is half Hindu, half Muslim.]

I do not bring up my friend's story in any specially sentimental way. Looking back on her simply told tale with the political events of today as the backdrop, evokes more wonder than sorrow.  I was born a few years after the tumultous partition of India. The political and psychological wounds of that cataclysmic event were raw on both sides of the divide during my childhood. Yet amazingly enough, there probably was more mutual understanding between the two battling communities then than there is today. After decades of mistrust and alienation, the line in the sand that was drawn across Hindu and Muslim identities around 1947, has now hardened and appears set in concrete. As one of the linked articles explains in its somewhat flowery text:  

The Hussaini Brahmins, along with other Hindu devotees of the Muslim Imam, are today a rapidly vanishing community. Younger generation Hussaini Brahmins are said to be abandoning their ancestral heritage, some seeing it as embarrassingly deviant. No longer, it seems, can an ambiguous, yet comfortable, liminality be sustained, fuzzy communal identities giving way under the relentless pressure to conform to the logic of neatly demarcated ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities. And so, these and scores of other religious communities that once straddled the frontier between Hinduism and Islam seem destined for perdition, or else to folkloric curiosities that tell of a bygone age, when it was truly possible to be both Hindu as well as Muslim at the same time.

I am not a starry eyed optimist. I harbor no illusions that the complicated politics of the Indian subcontinent are going to be solved simply by harping on the feel-good history of shared culture - of food, music, language, ethnicities and sometimes even religious celebrations. Nonetheless, those who have turned the region into a powder keg of hostilities and have fueled communal fires with lies and revisionist history, need to be reminded perhaps, that if the present mayhem is always the consequence of past injustices, there are also many examples of peaceful co-existence that could serve as the model for reconciliation between south Asian Muslims and Hindus.  

Eid Mubarak  to our Muslim readers and to any one else who may wish to rejoice with their Muslim friends on this day.   

A "Pardesi" Life in "Desi" Land

In Hindi / Urdu, pardesi means foreign or foreigner - as opposed to desi which stands for native Indian or south Asian.

Ever since I read Nathan Katz's detailed and interesting account of Indian Jews, I have wanted, whenever the opportunity presents itself during my trips back to India, to seek out the markers that chronicle the history of the once thriving but now drastically dwindling Jewish community of India. Historic evidence of a Jewish presence in the form of people and edifices are few and far between on the vast Indian landscape. A handful of synagogues that once served as centers of religious as well as social lives of Indian Jews are scattered in different corners of India. They remain a scant reminder of the now almost disappeared community which was once a tiny part of India's colorful and diverse social fabric. For details of the ethnicities and dates of arrival of the different diasporic Jewish communities of India, please see the review of Katz's book that I have linked to at the beginning of the post.

During my last trip to India, my sister and I took a short vacation in the city of Cochin in Kerala, on the southwestern coast of the Indian peninsula along the Arabian Sea.  There we visited the oldest standing Indian synagogue built by Sephardic Jews who first arrived on the Kerala coast in the 16th century, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Well before their arrival, a small but established Jewish community was already living in peace and prosperity on the Malabar Coast of Kerala, believed to have settled there since the 10th century. The immigrants from Spain expected (correctly) and found safe haven among fellow co-religionists of India. Although the Spanish Jews were warmly welcomed by their Indian hosts, the two Jewish communities, distinguished by the color of their skins, remained socially apart. The original group of Malabari Jews had become racially integrated within the larger Keralite community and were therefore dark complected like others of the region. The new comers from Europe who chose not to intermarry with the Indian Jews retained their relatively light complexions. The synagogue in Cochin built by the newly arrived Sephardic Jews in 1567-68, is called the Pardesi Synagogue - "the synagogue of foreigners."

Located at the end of an alley backing up to a Hindu temple on the compound of the Mattancheri Palace (or the Dutch Palace), the abode of the former kings of Cochin, the Pardesi Synagogue is a quaint little reminder of Kerala's past. It remains a functional synagogue to this day and attracts numerous tourists, many of them from Israel. Arts/ crafts / antique shops and spice markets lining the Synagogue Lane thrive on tourist trade although most of the artifacts sold are not  related to Judaism. The Mattencheri post office located on the same street will post mark your mail, upon request, with the Star of David. The post master claimed that it is the only post office in the world with that unique postal facility. I don't know if that is true.

The Pardesi Synagogue is currently under the supervision of eleven (yes eleven persons, not families) Cochin Jews who must be rather formidable folks because the shopkeepers seemed quite terrified of them.  They took care to speak with us in whispers on the street during the afternoon siesta hours for fear of disturbing the mostly senior Jewish residents who occupy the lovely old homes lining the alley. "Do Not Disturb Between 1-4 PM" signs hang on several front doors. I don't know what will happen to the synagogue after the current proprietors are gone or become enfeebled by old age. I expect the Indian Archaeological Society or the state government of Kerala will take over and maintain it as a historic public monument. The World Heritage Foundation already contributes to its upkeep. As of now, visitors' access to the interior of the synagogue is controlled solely by its crusty custodians. The story of the remaining eleven Cochin Jews has recently been recorded in a book by author Edna Fernandes.

(from left to right : the interior of Pardesi synagogue; the Star of David post mark at Mattancheri post office;Synagogue Lane ending at Pardesi Synagogue;

The Softer Side of Orwell

No one speaks the language of politics as thoughtfully, accurately and dispassionately as Orwell did. The contrast with the heedless conversation witnessed in our recent political campaign about patriotism, honor, "real" America, socialists, terrorists, pigs, pitbulls and barracudas is painfully stark.

Here is an interesting blog - Orwell's journal entries published daily on the same date as Orwell wrote them seventy years ago. (the dates appear in the non-American style - day / month /year) Most are pastorial musings about the weather, gardening and farm animals alongside some simple sketches. No political language here but fun to read nonetheless.

Mavericks: The cattle and the men

John McCain never tires of reminding us that he is a "maverick," a dissenter "who marches to his own drum," he said in his acceptance speech. We know the common dictionary meaning of the word that referred originally to wayward cattle and later to a public figure with an independent mind. The owner of the maverick cattle herd who gave us the word in its current form was Sam Maverick, a South Carolinian turned Texan. Maverick fought in the Texas Revolution, spent time in a Mexican prison, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, served as a state legislator and the mayor of San Antonio.

Columnist Rick Casey writes in the Houston Chronicle that there were other Mavericks before and after Sam, the lousy Texas cattleman and some of them too were mavericks.

Water management in Dholavira - 5000 years ago

Namit Arora at Shunya's Notes describes his journey through Dholavira, the remains of a 5000 years old metropolis in the Rann of Kutch, an environmentally inhospitable region in western India. Excavation has uncovered a sophisticated urban development whose inhabitants, it is clear, were very much obsessed with channeling and preserving fresh water within their city. That precious commodity of human survival and civilization is in short supply in the desert region of the Rann of Kutch. Namit found an ancient bangle among the ruins. Did he keep it? He doesn't say. 

The road to Dholavira goes through a dazzling white landscape of salty mudflats. It is close to noon in early April and the mercury is already past 100F. The desert monotones are interrupted only by the striking attire worn by the women of the nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoral tribes that still inhabit this land: Ahir, Rabari, Jat, Meghwal, and others. When I ask the driver of my hired car to stop for a photo, they receive me with curious stares, hoots, and giggles.

This is the Rann of Kutch, an area about the size of Kuwait, almost entirely within Gujarat and along the border with Pakistan. Once an extension of the Arabian Sea, the Rann ("salt marsh") has been closed off by centuries of silting. During the monsoons, parts of the Rann fill up with seasonal brackish water, enough for many locals to even harvest shrimp in it. Some abandon their boats on the drying mudflats, presenting a surreal scene for the dry season visitor. Heat mirages abound. Settlement is limited to a few "island" plateaus, one of which, Khadir, hosts the remains of the ancient city of Dholavira, discovered in 1967 and excavated only since 1989.

Entering Khadir, we pass a village and find the only tourist bungalow in town. It hasn't seen a visitor in three days; I check in and head over to the ruins. I've planned this for months; even the hottest hour of the day cannot temper my excitement for the ruins of this 5,000 year-old metropolis of the Indus Valley Civilization. While hundreds of sites have been identified in Gujarat alone, this is among the five biggest known to us in the entire subcontinent, alongside Harappa, Mohanjo-daro, and Ganeriwala in Pakistan, and Rakhigarhi in India.

The Girl From Foreign

The reviews on Amazon and in the Washington Post of The Girl from Foreign, Sadia Shepard's journey into the past to resurrect her Jewish Indian grandmother's lost identity, has left me curious enough to put the book in my Amazon shopping cart. I plan to check it out in the near future. The story is common enough - a member of an obscure and tiny religious minority community getting absorbed into a larger religious group on account of marriage and in the midst of great political upheaval losing touch with the home on whose shores she believed her shipwrecked ancestors had landed two thousand years ago. Shepard's book recounts a family story which is a patchwork of all three Abrahamic faiths and hopscotches across three nations in search of roots.

From the Washington Post:

Besides being a personal memoir and a portrait of a family that includes the world's three major monotheistic religions, "The Girl From Foreign" is a meditation on how our individual memories inevitably slip away, either into oblivion or into that dull collective consciousness we call history.

The main, organizing event here occurred in 1947, when India at once gained its independence from Britain and split into two countries -- Hindus remaining primarily in the main body of the subcontinent; Muslims peeling off to the west and east, to form Pakistan. (Decades later, East Pakistan became Bangladesh.) The average American, if there is such a thing, might remember 1947 as part of the beginning of the Cold War. But Indians have the nerve to be fascinated by the events that occurred in their own country that year, the public history that overlaps, vividly, with their personal memories.

Little Sadia Shepard and her younger brother, Cassim, grew up first in Denver, then Chestnut Hill, Mass., in what she considered to be a wonderful and normal life with three terrific adults: her American dad, a tall, rangy, white Protestant; her beautiful Muslim mother, who was born and raised in an affluent home in Karachi, the first capital of Pakistan; and her sweet maternal grandmother, who raised the kids and kept the house while the adult couple ran an architectural firm. This grandma has a set of slightly dissonant memories: "A very long time ago," she tells young Sadia, "your ancestors left Israel in a ship . . . and they were shipwrecked, in India. They were Jews, but they settled in India. In the shipwreck they lost their Torahs, and they forgot their religion." Sadia's nana had spent her early adult years as a Muslim wife in a beautiful beach house in Bombay. But she was neither Hindu nor Muslim. Her prayers, years later, are Muslim, but in her childhood she was a Jew.

For those who are curious about the history of Judaism in India, please see my review of Who Are the Jews of India? by Nathan Katz.

Contagious Art

Before there was television or the Internet, in the days of pamphleteering, public health announcements were often made available through posters. Dangers of malaria, dog bite, bad dental hygiene, poor sanitation and STDs were advertised through eye catching imagery and pithy messages. Some of these posters are now on display at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C.  The title of the exhibit is "An Iconography of Contagion."

More about the exhibition in Newsweek here. Also check out the photo gallery.

It is art. It is medicine. It is politics and history, too. Born in the world of commercial advertising, health posters like this one emerged in the 20th century as a powerful new way to educate the public about infectious disease. Dramatic images incited fear; headlines alerted the public that coughing, mosquitoes and sex could spread tuberculosis, malaria and VD. Now 22 of these posters from the United States and abroad appear in "An Iconography of Contagion," a new exhibit at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Curator Michael Sappol, who culled the finalists from hundreds of posters housed at the National Library of Medicine, says the exhibit reflects a time when people believed that the creation of visually compelling images was going to be "the scientific and modern way to conquer disease and build a better society."

Even the liveliest posters contain symbols of danger and death. Dark shadows appear routinely. In a 1951 British poster, "Tomorrow's Citizen," a small boy casts an adult-size shadow against a blue backdrop. "He must not be handicapped by venereal disease passed on by parents," the text reads. Skulls appear in other designs. And the anonymous crowd—representing both urbanization and the impact of disease on mass populations—is a familiar sight. A poster produced by the National Tuberculosis Association, a pioneer in health propaganda, shows a father reading the newspaper, surrounded by his family. The backdrop: a mob of "unknown spreaders."

Public-health art exploded during World War II, when the government started pouring money into awareness campaigns, lambasting the enemy and the dreaded contagion at once. STD posters exonerated the soldiers they targeted, blaming the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea on loose women, like the lady with the red beret. The tagline of one poster, produced by the U.S. Public Health Service in the 1940s, reads: "You can't beat the Axis if you get VD."

Presidential Physiognomy

Knowingly or unknowingly, historically Americans have preferred certain physical traits over others in their presidential candidates. Those biases may be even more relevant in the current atmosphere of oversaturation of the media with televised debates and You Tube clips where every facial tic, blink of the eye, sweaty underarms and other physical features of the contenders are visible to voters. Newsweek's Andrew Romano took stock of John McCain and Barack Obama's physical appearances and compared them to winners and losers from the past for their predictive value. The score?  It's a draw. Ah! We may now be called upon to do the unthinkable - make our choices based on where they stand on issues!

There are many ways to predict who'll win the White House in November. The most fun? Physical appearance. A feature-by-feature face-off:

Height: Contrary to the CW, the shorter candidate has actually won four of the last nine elections. But at 5 feet 7, McCain is 6.5 inches shorter than Obama. The last time anyone overcame such a huge height gap was in '52—1852. We haven't elected a shorter-than-average prez since Ben Harrison.
Advantage:Obama

Eye Color: Of our 43 presidents, 38 have had blue, gray or hazel eyes. Two exceptions: disgraced Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon. Sure, light eyes used to be more common. But even as the general incidence fell from 50 to 16 percent over the last century, our presidential peepers stayed 89 percent non-brown.
Advantage:McCain

Handedness: Only two POTUSes before '74 were known to be left-handed—Garfield and Truman. But since then, a full 66 percent—Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton—were born southpaws, compared with only 10 percent of the greater population. And either Obama or McCain would continue the trend. How gauche.
Advantage:None

Baldness: The U.S. has elected only five hairless presidents, and four of them won the White House before 1880, when voters weren't forced to endure the sight of their shiny, uncovered craniums on TV. Ike beat a bald guy (Adlai Stevenson). Ford wasn't elected. And Dick Cheney wasn't technically president.
Advantage:Obama

Melanin: An exclusive NEWSWEEK analysis has determined that precisely 100 percent of our presidents have been white.
Advantage: McCain

The Final Score: A tie. Maybe there's something to that whole "waiting until Nov. 4 for the actual results" thing after all.

What Were They Thinking?

I haven't read the book - only seen a couple of reviews. As Sam Anderson says in the New York Books article, Intercourse, a collection of 50 stories by Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler, is a well written gimmick.  But a fine gimmick no doubt, because public interest in the sex lives of others is insatiable. The author tries to capture in his imagination the solitary thoughts of famous couples while they were ... well, copulating. The stories are not so much an account of physical intercourse or historic pillow talk, as "mental monologues" of the participants during sexual interludes. Given our knowledge of history and current affairs, the idea is at once funny and salacious. To cite a railroad analogy, the author attempts to map the life journeys of well known partners-in-passion through their individual streams of consciousness running on monorail tracks while their bodies coupled at required and prescribed physical junctions.

Robert Olen Butler’s new story collection, Intercourse, is, as its title suggests, totally about doing it. It imagines the thoughts of 50 iconic couples as they knock the proverbial boots, beginning with Adam and Eve copulating on “a patch of earth cleared of thorns and thistles, a little east of Eden,” and ending with Santa Claus blowing off postholiday steam in January 2008 by doing the nasty with an 826-year-old elf in the back room of his workshop. But, as the clinical tone of Butler’s title also suggests, Intercourse is very much not a work of erotica. It tends to ignore messy fluids and crotch-logistics in favor of wordplay and psychological nuance. The book proceeds through twinned vignettes—complementary stream-of-consciousness prose-poems paired across facing pages, with the primal physical act implied in the margins between. (When you close the book, each of the couples gets pressed together.)

Besides Adam and Eve, the storied couples into whose heads Butler tries to take his readers are as disparate as Leda & Zeus of Greek mythology, Mary Magdalene (with a Roman centurion) of Biblical lore, Cleopatra & Mark Anthony of ancient history as well as modern day star crossed couples like Prince Charles & Princess Diana and Robert Kennedy & Marilyn Monroe. Among political couples currently in the news whose bedroom ruminations the author imagines are George W. and Laura Bush. Predictably the former thinks belligerent and ungrammatical thoughts while the latter safely dwells on bland home decorating notions. Yes, yes, Bill and Hillary are there too - circa 1971. While Bill may have heard Coltrane in his head while contemplating the young woman who would be his bride, Hillary, according to Butler was hearing a completely different musical refrain. 

The ballsiest vignette, the “oh, snap” moment that will make you hunch over protectively on the subway and possibly Google the basic legal definition of slander, is Butler’s depiction of Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham as striving twentysomething law students: “this had to be done eventually,” Hillary thinks, and goes on to fantasize about sex on the floor of the Oval Office—“I don’t care if that’s the next time we do this, to be honest with myself, but I choose this time and I will choose some others in between because one day we’ll be fucking on the eagle and there’s a soft knock at the door and the secretary knows not to barge in and she says Madame President, the Soviet premier is on the phone.” Although it’s predictable— perhaps even because it’s predictable—the episode feels convincing, and even, in the dusk of our overheated never-ending primary, poignant. Hillary’s dispassionate scheming is right out of central casting, and recalls all the book’s other political lovers, from Eve to Cleopatra to Henry VIII. Butler seems to be telling us that repetition, above all, is the essence of humankind’s perpetual bump and grind. And, in a world in which all the secrets are out, perhaps the greatest art lies in making us blush anew at what we already know.

Sunday Selections

The weather is hot, blog traffic is down and I am out of ideas. So it's links time again. The stories here range from extra terrestrial thrills to earthly narrow mindedness, with a bit of not so well known history thrown in the mix. Enjoy!

Phoenix Mars Lander unearths (un-Martiates?) Martian polar ice. 

LOS ANGELES — The apparent discovery of ice near Mars' north pole has scientists asking: Did the frozen water melt at some point in the planet's long history to create an environment friendly for life?

The Phoenix spacecraft exposed bright white crumbs at the bottom of a trench while digging near Mars' north pole earlier this week. The bits disappeared in new photos sent back on Thursday, convincing scientists that the magic act was evidence of ice that vaporized after being exposed to the sun.

"The fact that there's ice there doesn't tell you anything about whether it's habitable," chief scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona said Friday during a teleconference from Tucson.

To judge whether the Martian polar environment could be hospitable, scientists are using the spacecraft's instruments to study minerals in the soil and ice for hints of carbonates and sulfates, which are formed by the action of liquid water.

Water is a prerequisite for life, but it's just one piece of the equation. Scientists generally agree that organic carbon and an energy source like the sun are also considered necessary ingredients.

Mars today is arid and dusty, constantly bombarded by radiation and with no apparent trace of water on its surface. But carvings of channels and gullies on the Martian surface suggest a wetter past. Some scientists speculate that water may have evaporated into the atmosphere and the rest trapped beneath the surface in the form of ice.

"The holy grail is to find water near the surface of Mars," said astrobiologist Mitch Sogin of the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, Mass., who is not part of the mission.

Hurt feelings in Houston: Two groups are expressing umbrage over a couple of public events - one a movie ...

The Love Guru tells the story of Maurice Pitka, played by Myers, an American orphan left at the gates of an Indian ashram. He returns to the United States to try and make it in the world of self-help and spirituality.

The film is "rife with stereotyping," Chronicle film critic Amy Biancolli says in her review. "But the target is less Hinduism (the word never pops up) than the saffron-colored accouterments of the faith and its watered-down transference to the self-help industry."

Girish Naik, president of the Hindus of Greater Houston, found the film's depiction of yoga poses vulgar. Vijay Pallod, a Houston Hindu activist, plans to go and see it this weekend – even though he hasn't liked what he has seen in the movie trailers. He wants to have solid examples of portrayals or scenes he feels are disrespectful to his faith.

Some Hindu members in attendance at Thursday's screening worried that audiences might think the movie is targeted at a particular spiritual leader.

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness, popularly known as Hare Krishnas, released a statement Friday rejecting calls to protest the movie. "We find it to be a typical satire that does not intend to hurt religious sentiments," the statement said, encouraging other Hindus "to view the film in its context as a comedy, and to draw on the tolerance and broadmindedness that are hallmarks of our faith."

Deepak Chopra, a friend of Myers and a New Age icon, who has a cameo in the film, thinks the issue has been blown out of proportion. The Hindu community needs a better sense of humor, he said.

But to Pallod and Shukla, it has nothing to do with humor."I have seen many people try to defame Hinduism, and as a Hindu activist, we have to protest and stand up," Pallod said. "In the past we kept quiet about movies, but we believe we have to do it because the media is very powerful."

An Apology and An Exit

It is always gratifying when a powerful entity apologize to a weaker one for past wrongs.  It doesn't happen often. The US government has paid reparations for the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and issued apologies for the infamous Tuskegee Study, but not for the plight of Native Americans or for slavery. Japan refuses to this day, to express regrets for the mistreatment of other Asian nations during its war mongering in the 1930s and 40s. The Norwegian government faced lawsuits and offered limited compensation to its Lebensborn children of Norwegian mothers and German fathers who were mistreated by their own countrymen for their ancestry but it still refused to take the blame. Now the Canadian government has admitted that for a long period of time Canadian Indian children were forcibly separated from their families and deprived of their own culture, making them victims of widespread abuse. The draconian steps were designed in order to assimilate indigenous populations into mainstream (European) Canadian society.  Canada's prime minister has formally apologized to Canadian Indians for the past mistreatment meted out to their children and for tearing apart families. (Recently, a similar apology came from Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd for the emotional, physical and cultural havoc that was wreaked on aboriginal communities of Australia by government sponsored humiliation and abuse disguised as "civilizing measures").

OTTAWA - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized Wednesday to the nation's Indians for "a sad chapter in our history," acknowledging the physical abuses and cultural damage they suffered during a century of forced assimilation at residential schools.

"Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country," he said to applause.

A group of 11 aboriginal leaders and former students sat before Harper in a circle in the House of Commons, some weeping as the prime minister delivered the government's first formal apology to them. In the crowded, expectant chamber, Harper bowed his head as he read a carefully crafted speech, asking for forgiveness for separating children from their families and cultures, exposing the students to abuse, and sowing the seeds for generations of problems.

"The government now recognizes that the consequences of the Indian residential schools policy were profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on aboriginal culture, heritage and language," Harper said.

The apology was billed by the government as a chance to redress a dark chapter in Canadian history and to move forward in reconciliation.

Over more than a century, about 150,000 native Canadian children were sent to boarding schools run by churches and the government to "civilize and Christianize" them. Expressions of native heritage were outlawed, many children suffered sexual and psychological abuse, and grew up with neither traditional roots nor mainstream footing, their ties to family and community unraveled.

Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine, wearing a feather headdress, took the floor to declare that the occasion "testifies nothing less than the accomplishment of the impossible." In 1990, he was one of the first to come forward with his story of abuse and push for an apology. "Finally, we heard Canada say it is sorry."

In another part of the world, the newly elected Maoist government in the tiny nation of Nepal has  abolished the centuries old Nepalese monarchy.  For a poor and backward country where the king enjoyed a status almost on an equal footing with the gods (Nepal is the only "official" Hindu nation in the world), this is indeed a momentous development.  King Gyanendra, who ascended the throne after his elder brother King Birendra lost his life in a palace massacre in 2001, vacated the royal palace (to be converted to a museum) with his wife in a black Mercedes.  The couple, henceforth known as Mr. and Mrs. Shah, has moved into a humbler residence to begin life as regular citizens. The erstwhile monarch surrendered his crown to the government before leaving. It is not known if he also apologized for having led a life of privilege and callous luxury while a large number of his subjects eked out their hardscrabble lives amidst conditions of acute deprivation.