Sudheer's Articles and Reviews

You had me at array of T

2011-10-14T09:05:00.005-04:00

Dennis Ritchie passed away yesterday. All the obituaries mention the contribution he and his colleagues made to computer science, namely the C language and the UNIX operating system that they invented at Bell Labs in the early seventies. You can read all about how Google and Apple stand on their shoulders today. And an incalculable contribution it was, too. But to me, his contribution goes beyond C and UNIX.

Let me explain: when I first read Ritchie and Thompson's 1974 paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System, I already knew how UNIX worked, but I was still thrilled to read the paper. It was remarkably concise and well written. See the second consideration that influenced the design of UNIX:

There have always been fairly severe size constraints on the system and its software. Given the partially antagonistic desires for reasonable efficiency and expressive power, the size constraint has encouraged not only economy, but also a certain elegance of design. This may be a thinly disguised version of the ``salvation through suffering'' philosophy, but in our case it worked.

This was writing of the highest caliber, by self-aware master craftsmen who appreciated the bigger picture well enough to insert self-deprecating jokes about it, all without disturbing the main point.

The same kind of writing takes you through the famous K&R book (The C Programming Language). Not only is the information authoritative and explained well, from philosophy to style; it is so excellently put that it is the standard against which other technical writing will forever be judged. Growing up in India long after his era, I can still say that Dennis Ritchie influenced and inspired thousands like me. And this, I believe, will prove to be his greatest contribution.

So, here's to Dennis: may the source be with you.

Book Review: The Sea Hawk, By Manohar Malgonkar

2010-08-29T19:44:00.012-04:00

The Sea Hawk: Life and Battles of Kanhoji Angrey

by Manohar Malgonkar

I originally wrote a short review of this book for desijournal.com on January 25, 2003. But Malgonkar passed away in June 2010 (see obituary in The Hindu). I was sad to hear this. My father had collected many of his books, including his short story collection A Toast in Warm Wine, and I recall many hours spent enjoying these stories in high school. Here is the review again, expanded with a jacket cover and an illustration from the book. --Sudheer.

Orient Paperbacks, New Delhi
ISBN: 0-86578-069-2
Paperback; 293 pages

Manohar Malgonkar is well known for his novels and short fiction. His book The Sea Hawk is a biographical account of a real person in early eighteenth century India, the Maratha admiral Kanhoji Angrey.

British historians have dismissed Angrey (AHN-gray, today spelled Angre) as a "pirate", but this is a mischaracterization. He was in fact appointed by the Maratha king to patrol the Konkan coast that faces the Arabian sea. He administered villages and forts within his area and maintained a naval force that followed the common practice of issuing papers ("dastak") authorizing vessels to ply his waters. Today's Indian navy honors Angrey by naming the Western Naval Command headquarters after him.

Angrey lived during the early phase of British involvement in India, represented by the East India Company. On the Konkan coast, the major naval powers were the British in the north between their trading posts at Surat and Bombay, and the Portuguese around Goa in the south. The Muslim Siddys controlled a few islands near Bombay on behalf of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. The emperor himself was encamped in the Deccan in an ill-fated campaign, where the scattered Maratha successors of Shivaji harassed his Mughal army in guerilla warfare. Sea Hawk is an account of these powers' struggles for supremacy, and of Kanhoji Angrey's role in it.

Using the example of Angrey, this book offers a simple explanation of how a loose confederation of Maratha chieftains grew out of this chaos into a powerful empire, which was to stretch its flag beyond the Deccan as far north as Attock in the Punjab. The reason was loyalty. Local Maratha potentates like Kanhoji Angrey, even when they wielded unchallenged power, always acknowledged that they were merely caretakers ruling on behalf of their sovereign the Maratha King, and later the Chief Minister (peshwa).

The arc of the story is the growing up of Kanhoji Angrey in a warlike Maratha family who sent him to study and work with a guru, his boyhood friendship with a gray-eyed Brahmin bookworm named Balaji Vishwanath who was to later become the powerful peshwa, and his early successes in military campaigns that gave him command of his own fleet and forts at a very young age.

The author, Manohar Malgonkar, himself served in the Indian Army, in the Maratha Light Infantry during World War II, and he writes in detail about several of the battles: the preparation, the types of ships and weapons used, and the military tactics. Delightful illustrations by Dinkar "Cracker" Kerkar annotate sketched maps to show thrusts, parries, and timelines as harbors are blockaded, forts stormed, and fighting ships sunk. The language is crisp and eminently readable, with suspenseful build-ups in the usual Malgonkar style.

Many times, the author refutes historians' claims regarding British conduct in India and that of their enemies, many of them based on dispatches filed by the East India Company. Malgonkar uses much original research to expose the dishonesty of John Company and the incompetence and greed of many of its officials. He often quotes from letters exchanged between Kanhoji Angrey and various British officials to prove his point. His case is convincing because of the thoroughness of his sources, and this fact is important. Shivaji in particular, and the Marathas in general, have acquired a mythical status in Maharashtra, especially among Hindu nationalist politicians. While there is much in this book that will satisfy the Shivaji lover, this is no ideologically motivated tract.

The book lacks a bibliography or an ISBN. I was able to obtain one from Periplus Line LLC, East Glastonbury, CT, which is reproduced above. There isn't even a date. I estimate that Sea Hawk was published circa 1984.

Article: Hemant Karkare: Man of the Year

2009-11-27T13:56:00.005-05:00

Article Copyright Sudheer Apte
Originally published in Khabar magazine, January 2009

Hemant Karkare: Man of the Year
By Sudheer Apte

Looking back at the year 2008, I’d like to nominate as “man of the year” Mr. Hemant Karkare, Additional Commissioner of Police, Mumbai, who in January took over as the commander of the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS).

What was special about ACP Karkare was not just his bravery and sacrifice, both of which were evident in plenty in the November Mumbai attacks, in which he lost his life along with a dozen other policemen. But in addition, Karkare represents an important force, a key factor that’s often missed in everyday analysis. He represents the system of law, order, and accountability that underlies every successful society. It’s the infrastructure that makes the world go round.

Many people are used to saying that Mumbai is a city unlike any other in India. What makes it work? Now, writers like Suketu Mehta (Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found) and Vikram Chandra (Sacred Games) would rather write about criminal gangs and the underworld. The way they tell it, Bombay policemen are all corrupt or villainous, and the entire city is a lawless realm of gangsters, pimps, and con artists. The only reason Mumbai is successful, according to Mehta, is the gumption of smart entrepreneurs engaged in dhanda, or business—from the humble dabba-walla to the fancy film producer or the super-rich businessman.

But in fact, all romantic notions of Mumbaikar spirit aside, what makes the dhanda work are the people whose job it is to keep the city running. From the humblest rat catchers to the forty thousand policemen and women, they are all under-equipped, understaffed, and under-appreciated. And yet, they do their jobs as well as they can.

This is not a new lesson for us, who live in a nation of laws. Our first-rate law and order apparatus is a key reason why the United States is a world power. Enterprises and people can safely flourish in a reliable environment of rules whose enforcement is swift and certain.

And this magic ingredient is what’s missing, to some degree, in the rest of India. In Bihar, if you’re poor or of the wrong caste, you’re by and large out of luck; the system doesn’t work for you. Delhi is much better, but even there, if you’re in trouble, what counts most often is your connections or your wealth.

The insidious cost of corruption or inefficiencies is not just lost time and GDP. It’s the loss of faith of millions of people in “the system”. And when you don’t trust the system, when you see it being abused by the powerful for political or monetary gain, when you don’t respect your government and its motives, then you become dejected and cynical. You are more likely to take shortcuts or break the law. You are more likely to nurture a deep sense of injustice and to believe conspiracy theories that explain why you are not successful. And once in a while, these conspiracies are in fact true. In Gujarat in 2002, the people in power really did withhold police services and allowed rampaging mobs to kill innocent Muslims in a particular area. Seething anger and resentment can only be expected.

And yet, slowly, almost imperceptibly, things have been changing in most of the country, and mostly for the better. Millions have been pulled out of poverty, political participation and awareness have increased, and more and more people expect the system to work.

When the Mumbai attacks of November 2008 happened, the New York Times interviewed Christine Fair, a RAND Corporation expert, in the initial hours. Fair was asked who the perpetrators probably were, whether they were local disaffected Muslims or foreign militant groups. She said, cautioning that no information was yet available, that she had little doubt these were Indians, Muslims who were "very, very angry." In other words, this was an internal Indian problem. "There is no way you can put lipstick on this pig," she quipped.

Well, it turns out the attacks do seem to be organized by Pakistan-based outfits, so she was wrong about that comment, but she was also wrong at a more profound level. She was wrong about India. It’s not that Muslims or other minorities, or the poor, are not discriminated against. They are. It’s just that they are not as hopeless as the extremists in Pakistan.

Malegaon, a Muslim-majority town in Maharashtra, is a poor town known for its once-prosperous power loom industry, and dogged by a history of terrorist bombings. Mr. Karkare’s team investigated the latest blasts that happened in September this year. While most of the earlier incidents appeared to be the handiwork of extremist Muslim groups, aided sometimes by Pakistani groups, the September blasts in Malegaon seemed strange. The military-grade bombs appeared to have been planned to sow fear in the Muslim community.

When investigation turned up leads to a group of vigilante Hindu nationalists, including a serving army officer, Mr. Karkare’s ATS team arrested the suspects and took them in for questioning. He took a lot of flak from Hindu nationalist politicians for these arrests.

A shopkeeper in Malegaon who was injured in the blasts was interviewed by the press. Looking almost happy, his leg in a cast, he said he was very impressed that Hindus had been arrested by the police. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry at his reaction. To me, it was unremarkable that the police had arrested upper-caste Hindus. But to him, this was obviously a big deal.

What went through his mind when he realized that the police really did want to do their jobs, and get to the truth no matter where it led? The next time he or his neighbors were asked to cooperate with the police, would he be more likely to be helpful? And would his improved attitude extend to other parts of the "system" that surrounded him?

What happens when this experience of a working system is replicated over thousands of people and millions of little incidents? This is what India has been going through for the past sixty years. The contrast with Pakistan, whose people have lost all faith in their system, could not be more stark. Can any Pakistani policeman even imagine arresting a serving army officer?

Here is a way to “fight” terrorism: continue to build the rule of law, and recognize the people who do their jobs and do them well. Hold powerful people accountable: it’s gratifying that heads have rolled both in the Home Ministry at the center and in the Chief Minister’s office in Maharashtra in the wake of the latest Mumbai bombings.

The terrorists can kill people and break things, but they cannot break the system if the people trust in it. Always remember your own principles and who you are; don’t become as hopeless as the terrorists. Once Mr. Karkare is reported to have told his aides, “We should do our jobs, and it is for the courts to decide.”

So, here’s a toast to someone who personified the lessons we need in these difficult times, and who is a hope and an example to all of us.

Cheers!

Movie Review: Flavors

2009-10-13T09:23:00.007-04:00

An offbeat, independent film charms with unique flavors

Text Copyright Sudheer Apte; movie stills Copyright Dreams2Reality Films
Originally published in INDIA New England on January 17, 2005

Although the independent film "Flavors" was made in 2003 and shown in a few minor film festivals, it made it to theaters in the United States only in July 2004, and that too only for a single weekend. A pity, because it is an enjoyable, light comedy that's bang on target.

Model Jicky Schnee (left) plays the future daughter-in-law of veteran stage actress Bharati Achrekar in "Flavors."

The target audience is Indians in the U.S. high tech industry, especially information technology. This movie has a very high self-recognition factor. Show it to anyone who works in or around the IT area, and they will probably find themselves laughing out loud, as they see themes familiar in life, if not much seen in movies. The story, written and directed by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, two engineers in the United States, follows an assortment of desi characters through their separate lives until they meet toward the end. All throughout, it pokes gentle fun at them. We see the plight of three young "benchers," temporary visa contractors who are hit by the industry slowdown and find themselves out of work. We meet them playing cards in their shared apartment at two in the morning, fighting over who mixed the peanut shells with the peanuts they are eating with their beer. The lines are crisp: Ashok (Punit Jasuja) refers to incompetent desi body shops as "soggy samosas." Vivek (Mohit Shah) obsessively calls a girl's home in India and says, "Hello, can I talk to Gita?" in a way that is zanily immature yet instantly recognizable. Then there is lonely Nikhil (Gaurang Vyas) who gets laid off but doesn't tell his own wife. His only heartfelt expressions are about his ex-boss, and those are so strong that they get bleeped out. The wife Sangita (Sireesha Katragadda), meanwhile, is even lonelier, trapped in her suburban cookie-cutter home away from family and friends, with her only contact with people a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses who come knocking.

There is the long-distance ambiguous relationship between the gorgeous West-coast chemical engineer Rachna (played by Pooja Kumar, who got the Screen Actors Guild Emerging Actress award for her role, and who also starred in the Broadway musical Bombay Dreams) and her pal in New Jersey (Reef Karim), another IT guy, whom she talks to every day on the phone and shares the minutest details with. Their conversation, always intimate in a prickly way, stays in the friends-not-lovers zone, until their relationship suffers a crisis when Rachna finds herself being set up by her aunt with yet another IT guy with a long Telugu last name. Finally, there is Rad (Anupam Mittal, who also produced) who is getting married to the slender blonde Jenni (model Jicky Schnee), and whose parents are coming to the wedding.

The parents, played by Bharati Achrekar and Anjan Srivastava (well known actors in India, most recently from Wagle Ki Duniya on TV), have some of the best lines: funny cliches like, "your accent is different, you see; we speak with a British accent," (Dad to Jenni); the lost-in-translation "See, I am elder to you, no? That's why I am saying these things," (Mom to Jenni); and the impossible-to-translate "Kya kar rahe ho, maang bharni hai kya?" (Mom to Dad).

There are a few more characters, many laughs, and some truths. The dialogue is mostly in English, with English subtitles when lines are in Hindi or Telugu. The soundtrack has original songs by Leslie Lewis (of Colonial Cousins) and Mahesh Shankar. Hard to classify, this movie is definitely not Bollywood, and it's not typical American indie fare, either. While I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, it's certainly no soggy samosa.

I'd say for its perceptive take on the desi experience, this clever little movie is a landmark in cinema. Now that it's available on DVD, it may well become a cult hit among the "in" crowd.

Flavors (2003), written and directed by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K. Anjaan Srivastav, Bharati Achrekar, Reef Karim, Pooja Kumar, Rishma Malik, Anupam Mittal, Jicky Schnee, Sireesha Katragadda, Gaurang Vyas, Mohit Shah, Punit Jasuja. English, 118 minutes. Not rated.

Article: Modern Moscow, Much Like Delhi

2009-10-05T06:35:00.018-04:00

Modern Moscow, Much Like Delhi
By Sudheer Apte

Article and photographs Copyright 2009 by Sudheer Apte
Originally appeared in "Khabar" magazine, October 2009
(Online version has no photographs)

St. Basil's Cathedral in the Red Square.

Until this year, if someone had asked me what comes to mind about Russia, I would have first thought of its famous writers and artists, the Kremlin, the KGB, and Sputnik. Then I would have remembered Mir Publishers, Moscow. In the '70s and '80s, when I was growing up in India, you could pick up their beautifully printed Soviet-funded books quite cheaply, mostly in English but also in several Indian languages. I remember reading a story book about Kolyachi Aai (Kolya’s Mother) in Marathi, with watercolor landscapes of tall grasses, and I think I still have tattered copies of Yakov Perelman’s Physics for Entertainment and Mathematics Can Be Fun.

Things have changed since the Soviet era, but what I knew about daily life in modern Russia came almost entirely from a few scenes in The Bourne Supremacy. So when my employers wanted to send a few of us to Moscow for a week to work with a software outsourcing company, I wasted no time packing.

The H1N1 flu scare gave us some excitement when we landed in Moscow: before we could get off the plane, the attendants announced that we should keep sitting for a while. Some Moscow officials would first board the aircraft to inspect us. Two uniformed women soon came on board, handguns drawn and pointed at our heads. Their "guns" turned out to be only laser-guided infrared thermometers, which they used to scan the passengers’ ears one by one. Once this inspection was done, we were free to disembark. As a Russian colleague mischievously said to us later, "Welcome to the Russian Federation!"

The city of Moscow reminds me of Delhi: the same wide boulevards, the same energy, and, though it scarcely seems possible, even more aggressive driving. On our first day, we saw four separate fender benders. And this was in the summer, with clear weather and dry roads. Traffic jams are legendary.

Unlike Delhi, Moscow presents a language barrier to non-native speakers. The staff in our fancy hotel spoke English, but once you left that bubble, it was all Russian, all the time. One Russian speaker among us, and one English speaker in the Russian party, were key to our communication system. They were like Amitabh in a double role—no scene was complete without one of them in it! The engineers there could speak technical English, but they struggled if pulled out of that comfort zone into small talk about the weather or about what they did on the weekend. For the longest time, their office manager, Petra, wanted to tell me something funny but had to wait until we got one of the translators involved. It turned out that when she went to college in the '70s, all her girlfriends had crushes on Raj Kapoor and watched his movies multiple times.

It seems very few people, either from India or America, have been to Russia recently, but there’s no shortage of rumors about the country. Some people had warned me that my passport would be confiscated and there would be “minders” assigned to follow me everywhere. None of this turned out to be true. There is a requirement for all foreigners to register their passports with the authorities; our hotel staff did this for us quickly, and we kept our passports with us at all times.

The channels on television were completely in Russian. So were the business and traffic signs. And unlike in Western Europe, the letters are not written in Roman script, so you can’t just sound them out and try to guess. The smartest thing I did before my Moscow visit was to spend a few hours familiarizing myself with the Cyrillic script. This modest investment paid off handsomely when we went out into the city.

I would peek out of the car, wide-eyed like a kindergartner, trying to pronounce every sign that went by.

"Tsveti?" I would say, and Alexei would answer, "Flowers."

"Prodookti?" — vegetables.

"Dinamo?" — the name of a train station.

Alexei, a father of three, was patient with me. In many cases I didn’t need his help, because the signs were simply English words, pronounced with a Russian accent and spelled out in Cyrillic, the way signage in Maharashtra spells out ordinary English terms like "Pinge’s Classes" or "Lakshmi Transport" in Devanagari. Some Russian words are very similar to their English equivalents: "tooalet" is toilet, and "stop" is stop. The most common such sign is what looks like "pectopah," which is simply "restoran"-—restaurant.

The famous Mayakovskaya metro station, showing arched niches, mosaics, and marble floors.

If you are a strict vegetarian in Moscow, you will have to play the usual snakes and ladders with the menus, because animal parts lurk in the most innocuous of places: soup stock and salads are not necessarily safe from pork pieces or mutton. It is possible, though, to eat well if you stick to certain cuisines.

Every evening we would sample one of Moscow’s excellent restaurants. There appear to be very few Indians (I never saw a single person who looked like they could be from the subcontinent), and when I asked our hosts about that, they said foreigners were more likely to live in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-biggest city. They asked me if I would like to visit an Indian restaurant, thinking I was missing home food, but I quickly nipped that idea in the bud. I wasn’t about to waste a meal on some Muscovite’s idea of Mughlai food.

No, what Moscow has to offer in spades is a tremendous variety of foods from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. We ate at a Georgian restaurant, which does have vegetarian options: various types of tandoori-like bread called "puri," vegetarian versions of a delicious herbed and spiced soup called "kharcho," containing plum puree and grated walnuts, and a kidney bean-stuffed bread called "lobiani."

The massive, Art Deco styled, main building of the Moscow State University.

Besides Georgian and Russian, the other distinctive cuisines represented in Moscow’s restaurants are Ukrainian and Uzbek. All of these cuisines are related, and all have outstanding selections of fish, pork and mutton dishes, as well as a variety of soups, including the famous borscht. If you have not tried borscht, you owe it to yourself to find or make some. Made from beets, cabbage and a whole lot of other things, it requires no meat and can be so hearty as to make an entire meal by itself with a little bread. The Ukrainian restaurants, in particular, have dark rye breads so soft and delicious that you can make a whole meal out of them, too. They also serve "pelmeni," which are dumplings similar to momos.

These restaurants, of course, also serve drinks—a lot of drinks. There is no tradition of beer; the few beers served in restaurants are imports from Germany or Belgium, but the harder alcoholic beverages are mostly indigenous. The Russian reputation for drinking vodka is well-deserved: I had no idea there were so many types of vodka. Russian restaurant menus will often separate "non-vodka liquors" into their own section, leaving the vodkas sprawled across multiple pages. I was regaled with stories of visiting foreigners who imbibed a bit too much and had to be carried back to their hotels.

Novodevichy Convent—a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

But the under-reported gems of the Russian table are their traditional soft drinks. The one I liked most is called "kvass." It is a brewed amber liquid that looks like beer and is served in pitchers, but it is mild and sweet, suitable for children as well as adults. The most common variety is made from dark bread and fruits. It has a refreshing, frothy goodness that reminds me of the mildly fermented palm drink neera sold throughout the Deccan. I have been searching for kvass in the United States ever since I got back.

Moscow is a giant city, flat as a pancake, with a tiny hill in the center. This hill used to house a small hamlet, which is now the Moscow Kremlin, a fortress behind a tall, red wall overlooking the Moskva river. When we visited in May, the city was surprisingly green. Its architecture is very clearly European; its two distinctive features are the famous brightly colored, onion-domed churches, and the Soviet-era concrete buildings. I didn’t see any stand-alone houses in Moscow; many buildings are over ten stories high. Just like in Indian cities, residential, commercial, and industrial uses are often mixed together in the same neighborhoods. Right in downtown Moscow, on the bank of the Moskva, sits a huge set of smokestacks of a power plant, now defunct.

The Moscow underground Metro, the busiest in the world after Tokyo’s, serves seven million passengers daily. This system is a historical treasure and a living object of pride. We took the opportunity to travel downtown using one of the spoke lines, the Zamoskvoretskaya. Much of Soviet-commissioned art was ponderous and empty, but these railway stations are marvels of engineering, architecture, and art. We got off at the famous Mayakovskaya station just to admire its beauty. It not only shows the peculiar arches and columns common to most of these stations, but also bright Art Deco mosaics in the ceiling whose light reflects off marble and tile on the walls.

Also in common with Delhi is the ostentatious display of wealth and privilege. Until I went to Moscow, I didn’t even know what a Mercedes Maybach was, but when we were coming out of a Ukrainian restaurant off Leningradsky Prospekt, my colleagues started pointing and talking excitedly. There stood four or five of these black cars, together costing at least a million dollars. Each car had a uniformed chauffeur sitting inside, waiting for the owners to return from a nightclub on the very expensive Tverskaya Street. The wealthy may also shop at Gucci and Prada, anchor stores in the GUM, a swank mall in the Red Square that was once an old government market building.

This open show of money is one aspect of today’s Russia. It is easy to get the sense of a country and a people on the move. Making fun of Soviet times is a common sport today, but when the system was opening up in the '90s, there was much anxiety about the chaos and criminality that followed it. Today, people seem relieved to have "strong" leaders who will impose and enforce limits.

One of their frustrations is that Western Europeans and Americans don’t appreciate either their scientific achievements or the sacrifices made by the Russian people during World War II. The eastern front between the Nazi Axis war machine and the Soviet Union is not often covered in PBS newsreels. It is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, which claimed the lives of 30 million people, many of them civilians. This war and its effects occupy a central place in the country’s narrative. When we saw the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Kremlin, there was always a crowd. Russian newlyweds often lay flowers there in gratitude.

What occupies today’s Russia is a newfound appreciation of pre-Soviet history. The Tsars’ treasures of gold, horse carriages, and Fabergé eggs take up entire rooms in the Kremlin Palace museum. Similarly reinvigorated is the Eastern Orthodox Church, which, suppressed under Stalin, is undergoing something of a revival, a rarity in modern Europe. As Shakespeare said, there’s a tide in the affairs of men.

Cathedral of the Ascension, inside the Kremlin.

As for my beloved Mir Publishers, they are much smaller now and no longer publishing the kinds of translations they used to. With Soviet propaganda no longer creating a demand, there's simply no money in it. Instead of bringing home some books, I stopped at a cart on Tverskaya and picked up a set of "matryoshka" dolls for our kolu.

The author, inside the Red Square. To the left is St. Basil’s Church, and to the right is the corner of the Kremlin Wall.

Film review: I for India

2009-09-27T21:14:00.006-04:00

Originally published in INDIA New England, April 16, 2006

I for India

After garnering praise at Sundance, film narrating an immigrant's story forms lineup at Boston's Indie film fest

By Sudheer Apte

SOMERVILLE, Mass. — Dr. Yash Pal Suri's voice can barely contain his anger. "They can't even be bothered to properly pronounce my name," he says in Hindi. "Is it Fury with a Y, or with an I?' they ask me. If I mispronounce one of their names, I will be immediately corrected."

This is one of the darker moments in "I for India," a new documentary that will play in the Somerville Theater in Somerville, Mass. on April 21 and 22 as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston.

In the mid-sixties, Yash Pal Suri, then a recent medical graduate, migrated to the United Kingdom in search of better opportunities. To keep in touch with his family in India, he exchanged home movies on Super8 film, similar to today's camcorders, and also audiotape "letters."

"I for India," a film nominated for the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival will play in Somerville, Mass. as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston. The film is made by British film-maker Sandhya Suri.

Suri had a successful career in a hospital in London. As his own children grew up in England, he became more and more ambivalent about moving back to India. He did try moving back once in 1982, but his medical practice did not do as well in India as he had hoped, and the family returned to England after a few months.

Last year his daughter Sandhya Suri, a graduate of the National Film and Television School near London, created a documentary film based partly on this film footage shot over the years. The film, "I for India," tells the story of separation from his family in Meerut, of bringing up his second-generation daughters in his new home country, and of the ups and downs in their lives.

The mood of the film is one of nostalgia and separation. Besides the subject matter, the feeling comes from the grainy film stock, and also from Sandhya Suri's background score, which includes a small selection of old Hindi movie songs. "It is a strange thing," she told INDIA New England in an interview from the United Kingdom, "but as a second generation immigrant, I seem to have inherited my father's nostalgia for a certain period of India. I actually stopped watching Indian movies after 1982 and never watch the new movies now. The magic disappeared for me after this date. For me, the link is with Geeta Dutt, Talat (Mahmood), Mukesh etc."

Suri's earlier short film, "Safar," was her graduation project from film school. That film was awarded a cash prize for the Best British Asian Short Film at the ImagineAsia short film competition in 2002. "I for India" starts from some of the same source material, but treats it in a much more substantial way. "I realized there was much more to explore," Suri says.

Things have changed a lot in Britain since Yash Pal Suri first moved there in the mid-sixties. The BBC in those days produced a special television program called "Make Yourself at Home." Targeted at the Indian and Pakistani immigrant community, who are known as "Asians" there, it tried to teach English in a simplified way.

Sandhya Suri (above) created 'I for India' from old audiotape letters by her father (below).

"My father told me about this program, which I had never seen," Suri says, "and he insisted I look at it. He had thought it was rather patronizing, actually. Today no one can believe it, since England is now such a multicultural place." She found footage from this program from the BBC archives and incorporated it at the beginning of "I for India." In the segment, a narrator slowly explains to the audience what a light switch is and how it turns on a light.

Adam Roffman, Program Director for the Independent Film Festival of Boston, had travelled to Utah in January for this year's Sundance Film Festival. "I saw 28 feature films while I was there," Roffman says. Sandhya Suri's "I for India" had its premiere screening there, and he says it stood out as his favorite film by far. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize under World Cinema Documentary at Sundance.

"I thought it was beautiful and expertly crafted and I wanted to make sure that Boston-area audiences had a chance to see the film," Roffman says.

"So I looked all over the town for Sandhya and eventually ran into her at a party and invited the film to our festival on the spot and she happily accepted our invitation."

Among the source material available from Yash Pal Suri's recordings were audiotape letters that he exchanged with his family. These audio recordings are used for voiceover throughout the first half of the film.

The film's editor, Cinzia Baldessari, also collaborated on Suri's earlier film. She explains the importance of the audio recordings: "A lot of people made Super8 movies in the seventies and still have them today. I'm quite sure not as many people made such amazing audio recordings though. The pauses, the tone, the content of Dr. Suri's recordings are really quite unique and helped towards structuring the film." Indeed, in the earliest recordings, one can hear Yash Pal Suri speak Hindi fluently, but after many years go by, he finds himself hunting for the right words for what he wants to say to his mother, and, frustrated, resorts to English.

Baldessari herself is an expatriate Italian who moved to the United Kingdom to learn film editing at the National Film and Television School on a scholarship. "Like Dr. Suri, I left my country to further my education," she says, "in many ways I can relate to his experience."

Suri says she would have liked to have been present at the screening of her film in Boston. "It's a real shame I'm not there to hear if it resonates with the Boston area audience," she says. "Many non-Indians have seen it now, and it was also screened in India, which was kind of strange. But I'm curious to see how Indian expatriates in the Boston area see this particular family's experience. Do they agree with it?" Suri says.

'I for India' will play at the Somerville Theater in Davis Square on April 21 and 22. For more information on the film and the Independent Film Festival of Boston, please visit www.iffboston.org.

Endangered: UMass biology professor explores biodiversity in the Sahyadri range

2009-09-08T22:11:00.014-04:00

This article first appeared in INDIA New England 16-Mar-2006.
Article Copyright 2006 Sudheer Apte
Photographs Copyright 2006 Sandesh Kadur, reproduced with permission

Birds help a gaur (Bos gaurus) keep clean at the Kabini reservoir.

BOSTON — When Kamaljit Bawa did his doctorate in botany in the 1960s, he did a lot of field work in the foothills of the Himalayas. "During this field work, studying complex forest ecosystems and beautiful plants and animals that have evolved over millions of years, I saw how as humans we can and do destroy in days what was created over millions of years," Bawa, professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Boston says.

He decided to become a tropical biologist, "to explore the mysteries of tropical nature and to find ways to save it." Ecologists today identify 34 "biodiversity hotspots" in the world, where the largest numbers of species are threatened. Of these, India has two, both of which are mountain ranges: the Himalayas and the Sahyadris.

The latter was the inspiration for a book by Sandesh Kadur and Bawa titled, "Sahyadris: India's Western Ghats — A Vanishing Heritage." The book is a large, 240-page coffee table book, with hundreds of color photographs.

An Indian Cobra (Naja naja) strikes a classic pose in the Sahyadris.

On Feb. 28, UMass Boston organized a photo exhibit and a presentation of the book by authors Bawa and Sandesh Kadur, who photographed the ranges extensively for the book.

The Sahyadris, also known as the Western Ghats, are an ancient mountain range running roughly north-south along the western edge of India's Deccan plateau. Less famous than the younger, higher Himalayas, the Sahyadris are nevertheless teeming with an enormous variety of flora and fauna.

Nine years ago, Bawa established a non-profit private research institute in India, called the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE).

The trust is devoted to conservation of biological diversity, with a focus on the Western Ghats and the Himalayas.

In 2003, on one of his fund-raising expeditions for conservation research, Bawa met Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys Technologies in Bangalore. Nilekani asked him whether there were any popular books he could read about the ecology of the Western Ghats, but Bawa could not suggest any.

Later that year, at a convention called the Western Ghats Forum, Bawa saw an award-winning documentary film called "Sahyadris — Mountains of the Monsoon." The filmmaker, Kadur, was in his twenties and at the Gorgas Science Foundation in Texas. He had grown up in India and loved to photograph forests and wildlife.

One of the over 300 species of orchids in the Western Ghats, of which 135 are found nowhere else on earth.

"My father, a photography enthusiast, got me my first camera when I was 15," says Kadur. "It was an old Nikkormat, a decade older than I was. It had no working light meter. I was lucky to get one good shot out of a film roll."

Bawa knew he had found a collaborator for the book about the Sahyadris that needed to be written. Kadur knew that presenting his material in book form would be much more powerful.

With funding from the Gorgas Science Foundation, ATREE, the University of Texas at Brownsville, and sources in India, Kadur and Bawa were able to realize their vision of the book.

The result of eight intense months of photography, four months of editing and layout, and four months of print planning and production in India, the book covers regions from the length and breadth of the Sahyadris, and shows the landscape, plants, wildlife, and people of the Western Ghats.

A macaque holds her offspring as she warily eyes a visitor.

The Feb. 28 event was hosted by Chancellor Michael Collins, and was a chance to get the book some exposure as an important product of work done by the university.

Kadur and Bawa presented a slide show, and spoke to the audience afterwards. Kadur already had built up a library of photographs from his earlier trips, and he undertook additional trips for the book.

Kadur described how, at one point, his laptop's disk drive failed, costing him a month's worth of digital photographs. Fortunately a few had been backed up earlier, and these provided some of the best pictures in the book. Much later, he was able to recover the hard drive, but the book had already been printed.

What concerned Bawa during his early field work, he says, was the loss of biodiversity. "Since many tropical forest tree species are unique and occur over relatively small areas," he says, "once they are lost, they are lost for ever." For example, of the 88 species of impatiens found in the Western Ghats, 84 are exclusive to the area.

Basking in the afternoon sun, a group of Little Green Bee-eaters show off their bright plumage against the red soil.

"The biggest challenge," says Bawa, "is to integrate conservation goals with the livelihood needs of the communities that live in and around the forests and depend on local ecosystems to fulfill their subsistence needs."

Sharad Lele, senior fellow and coordinator at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development in Bangalore, agrees. Lele says he got to know Bawa when they were planning a conservation project with the Soliga community in the Biligirirangan hills of Karnataka.

The project, which Bawa led, involved not just research, but also trying to help the forest-dwelling Soliga people by processing and marketing their forest produce. It tried to empower the Soligas to have a greater say in the management of the forest.

Sign warns succinctly of two possible consequences of human encroachment. Old elephant paths have been paved over for roads.

"We all learned a lot," Lele says, "and I saw Kamal (Bawa) making the transition from a socially sensitive biologist to a committed action-researcher, truly interested in exploring ways of meeting local livelihood needs along with biodiversity conservation goals."

The traditional heavy, tightly-knit woolen poncho is now increasingly replaced by plastic.

Bawa has held Harvard University fellowships and has been named a Guggenheim Fellow as well as a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment. He continues to spend a lot of time doing field work on location in the Sahyadris.

Professor Richard B. Primack, now at Boston University, wrote "Essentials of Conservation Biology," which is the first textbook in this field and continues to be widely used in undergraduate courses. Primack says he had wanted Bawa to co-author the book. But Bawa was busy trying to do something to help his country of birth.

The mugger or marsh crocodile leaves its mouth open to regulate its temperature.

"Lots of Indians are successful," Primack says, "and especially in the Boston area, there are lots of academics. Kamal has risen to the top of his field. But he is not just an academic; he wants to apply his knowledge and help people."

"Kamal has not just done work himself," Primack says, "he has built institutions that can continue the work after him. They employ over a hundred researchers. He writes grants for them and helps them get funding. He is a doer, an inspirer."

Authors Sandesh Kadur (left) and Kamaljit Bawa present a copy of their book to Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India, at his residence in New Delhi, September 2005.

Book review: The Idea of Pakistan

2009-08-31T12:10:00.002-04:00

The Idea of Pakistan
By Philip P. Cohen
Publisher: The Brookings Institution
ISBN: 0-8157-1502-1
Reviewed by Sudheer Apte
Review copyright 2005 Sudheer Apte
Review originally published 03-Apr-2005 in desijournal.com.

Professor Stephen P. Cohen's knowledge of Pakistan is deep and long, and he uses it to prescribe effective American policies in his latest book, "The Idea of Pakistan".

This book superficially resembles "India: Emerging Power" that Cohen wrote in 2001. But while that earlier book dealt primarily with foreign policy, ``The Idea of Pakistan'' is a much more comprehensive look at the internal history, political dynamics, and external strategic affairs of Pakistan.

Cohen's association with Pakistan started many decades ago with studies of its armed forces. His classic book "The Pakistan Army", first published during General Zia-ul Haq's time in the mid-eighties, has been updated and reissued several times since.

In Pakistan, the army controls the levers of power. Thus, Cohen's work over the years has given him access to many key policymakers in Pakistan, as well as with fellow academics and journalists; the preface of "The Idea of Pakistan" thanks a list of names that is a who's-who of Pakistani politics and journalism, including Benazir Bhutto, Husain Haqqani, Najam Sethi, and Ahmed Rashid. And the hundreds of bibliographic notes themselves read like an unbroken trail of first-hand information and scholarship that Cohen builds upon.

The book starts with the "idea" of Pakistan, how the state was visualized and founded by M.A. Jinnah as an Islamic home for Indian Muslims. It then systematically examines aspects of the Pakistani state and society that contribute to the various evolving definitions of this idea: the Army's Pakistan, political Pakistan, Islamic Pakistan.

Jinnah turned secular as soon as the new Pakistani state was founded, wishing for all Pakistanis to live together without discord. But this "mainstream" idea (Cohen points out how the word "secular", like the word "liberal", has come to have unfortunate connotations in Pakistan) of Pakistan was converted into something else, particularly in General Zia's Islamization drive in the mid-eighties.

Kashmir and the mission of "liberating" it from Hindu oppression has been a recurrent theme in the narrative of the idea of Pakistan by first-generation Pakistanis like Z.A. Bhutto and Z.A. Suleri. The army has incorporated this theme into Pakistan's military doctrine as a guerrilla movement sponsored to bleed India. As a cause, this movement serves to channel extremists and the victims of domestic oppression, but its strategic consequences have not been thought through.

The elite oligarchy that rules Pakistan has a peculiar world view. It sees itself as the rightful heir of a glorious Islamic past, a past that came under attack as the Raj supplanted the Muslim rulers in the subcontinent and, at independence, the more numerous Hindus advocated majority rule through the ballot. On top of this, the army imposes its own siege mentality where the predatory Hindus next door are untrustworthy and out to get Pakistan; the only defence is a good offence, and the national interest is understood only by the army, not by civilian politicians.

The country's almost continuous domination by the army, including a series of military coups that overthrew constitutionally elected governments, and which were later rationalized by modifying the constitution, have drained the country of all other institutions. The army's idea of Pakistan, and its distorted view of the origin of Pakistan, and of other states, especially India, is amplified through state-sponsored books and propaganda, along with pressure on the mainstream press, which must toe the line. Eventually, "one regime after another found itself at the mercy of years of auto-indoctrination."

Cohen talks about the various ethnic groups, including the Urdu- speaking Mohajir refugees from India as well as the Sindhis, Punjabis, Pashtuns, and Baluch. He traces the history of their struggles and their economic and political aspirations, including regionalism, separatist tendencies, and the role of the Army as the only efficiently functioning institution.

The book does not shirk from discussing the long and troubled relationship, off and on, with the United States. In the sixties, General Ayub Khan was hailed as a military savior of the mismanaged country. Aid was stopped following the 1971 civil war that broke up the country, to be resumed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when covert money and weapons were sent to the Afghan resistance through a leaky pipeline in General Zia's Pakistan. After the nuclear tests in 1998 following India's, sanctions were imposed by the Clinton administration, and Pakistan remained a pariah until the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States three years later, when she again became a key front-line state, this time in the Bush Administration's war against terrorism.

These cycles of aid and abandonment, and the way the aid was misused and siphoned off, had disastrous consequences. They also contributed to the common Pakistani perception of the United States as an unreliable ally. It did not help that any friendship of the United States with India was viewed with suspicion as inimical to Pakistani interests.

Pakistan's economic health (a robust agricultural sector and good foreign remittances from diaspora, but not much else) and its demographic and educational trends (a population explosion, with a very low median age in the late teens, enormous disparities in opportunities, and large-scale unemployment) are treated in depth. Pakistan compares unfavorably on key indices with comparable countries.

The sponsorship of Islamist extremists to serve the causes of Kashmir and Afghanistan, and also to serve the army's internal political purposes, has made Pakistan a dangerous place. An effective change of course is the main focus of the United States in its new relationship with General Musharraf's Pakistan. But there are other major concerns, including educational reforms to reduce the influence of religious schools or madaris, and a move toward genuine democracy.

Cohen puts forth his guesses on where the country is headed in the future. He examines several broad scenarios over the next five to eight years, including the most extreme, a catastrophic war with India, and the most benign, an enlightened democracy at peace with its neighbors, as well as other scenarios and sub-scenarios in between. For each, he examines its key drivers and likelihoods.

Cohen says that the view of Pakistan as a radical, nuclear-armed Islamist state, sponsoring terrorism, prone to Islamic revolution, while held widely in India and increasingly in America, is not accurate. The army as an institution views itself as Pakistan's last hope. It may continue to use militants to its own ends, but it will never allow itself to be supplanted by civilians. The only way this might happen is if army leaders themselves embraced radical Islamist ideas, which seems unlikely with the current crop of senior officers.

The final chapter talks about recommendations on what America should do to prevent Pakistan from sliding into one of the worse scenarios.

Among his prescriptions is making aid contingent on investment by the government in primary education, thus robbing the religious madaris of their market. Other prescriptions are a "staged" withdrawal of the army back to the barracks and a return to democracy.

An unusual recommendation is to continue the present joint military training program, which brings Pakistanis to the United States and allows Americans to visit Pakistan. Cohen believes that this relatively inexpensive program should be preserved and expanded to other non-military subjects, because it allows the United States access to the Pakistan army and its young upcoming officers.

On how to bring India and Pakistan together on Kashmir and other outstanding issues, the Indian government has the greatest stake:

"From Delhi's perspective, Pakistan could be a Canada, but it could also be more threatening than a nuclear-armed Cuba: a radical, armed state, bent on fostering an Islamic revolution within India."

A key requirement, then, is to obtain the kind of concessions from India on Kashmir that Musharraf can use to get the military and others to "bite the bitter pill" of a status quo settlement on Kashmir.

On current American "pragmatic" perspectives such as those from Robert Kaplan and General Anthony Zinni, who say that Musharraf must be supported because what could succeed him could be far worse, Cohen rejects this argument, saying that the army has a grace period of a few years until the possibility of Islamist takeover becomes large enough.

Instead, the administration must push Musharraf and his successors very hard on the political, economic, and ideological changes Cohen recommends. Cohen says any backsliding on progress should be taken as a "danger sign", on which American support should be withdrawn and more punitive measures taken against Pakistan.

"The Idea of Pakistan" is so full of comprehensive, fact-based analysis, and its recommendations so persuasively argued, that it must be required reading for policymakers both in the United States and in India.

In Cohen's list of "danger signs", the first one is whether the rulers adopt a political timetable. President General Musharraf had promised to quit the post of army chief by the end of 2004. Cohen writes that, like Ayub Khan and Zia-ul Haq before him, Pervez Musharraf might "slip into personalized rule and will not know when or how to give up power."

Developments since the book was published have shown that Musharraf broke his promise "in the interests of Pakistan," confirming what Cohen had presciently written. Furthermore, Cohen warns that Washington would be put in the position of supporting an individual as opposed to institutions. This prediction has come to pass, with the Bush administration accepting this breach of promise quietly: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continued to praise Musharraf during her visit in March 2005.

Book review: Graphicswallah

2009-08-29T22:25:00.000-04:00

Graphicswallah: Graphics in India
Keith Lovegrove
Harper Design International
Softcover, 160 pages
Review Copyright 2003 by Sudheer Apte
Originally published 25-Aug-2003 on desijournal.com.

Three years ago, Keith Lovegrove sampled the history of graphics and design used in airlines over the years in another coffee table book, "Airline: Identity, Design and Culture". His new book, "Graphicswallah: Graphics in India," is a similar treatment of commercial graphics in India today.

With photographer Andrew Hasson, the author visited Mumbai and did some traveling in and around Chennai. On their travels they captured hand-painted signs on vehicles, homes, and shops, and large hoardings from commercial, film, and political advertisements. The book has a little text, but most of its real estate is devoted to a hundred and eighty photographs.

Blood red fold-in covers and an unusual, almost square shape of nine-and-half by eleven inches lend a catchy look to this softcover. Originally published in the U.K. by Laurence King Publishing (formerly known as Calmann and King Limited), Graphicswallah is distributed in North America by a division of HarperCollins.

The two regions Lovegrove visits have obviously distinct styles. In Tamil Nadu, the graphics are more colorful and all-encompassing, and film hoardings often include elaborate storyboards and outsize cutouts of stars. Close-ups illustrate embossed tin logos on bicycle mudguards (Atlas! Avon!) and the Enfield Bullet motorcycle logo. The author knows that there is a rich variety of letterforms artists can choose from. He explains that the four Dravidian languages' scripts have shapes that are together distinct from the other Indian languages, and that Urdu uses the Farsi script.

In Mumbai, the highlight for me was a visit to Balkrishna Arts, the tiny galli studio of the world-famous Bollywood poster artist Balkrishna Vaidya, who still hand-paints oil on canvas. The author explains how the master works. First, a rectilinear and diagonal grid is laid out. "In bricklayer fashion, a taut string has been immersed in a tin of blue chalk dust, stretched across the canvas and plucked to make its mark." Using this venerable grid-laying technique, the artist reproduces a postcard-size still of Madhuri Dixit to at least three times life-size for a Devdas poster. Lovegrove is in heaven. "The rendering of Dixit's classically beautiful face is exceptional," he says, and we don't have to take his word for it. There are three gorgeous full-page blow-ups from Vaidya's posters, one each of Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai, and the third of Nargis in Mother India.

Lovegrove's observations are often startlingly accurate: he mentions the high rate of recycling materials in India, and notes that billboard hoardings are often created from pieces of earlier advertisements, so that on their backs can be seen pieces of the older signage. Thus, one can forgive him a few minor mistakes: he includes "Konkani in Goa" instead of Kannada in Karnataka among the "Dravidian languages", and he assumes a Devanagari line under a huge English-language AIDS statutory warning is a translation, but it's not (it just says Greater Mumbai Corporation).

As Lovegrove states in the foreword, Graphicswallah is a celebration "of the unique creativity of commercial art in India." This is by no means an exhaustive study of hand-painted Indian art, even in the limited regions that it does cover, but it uncovers a delightful trove of consumer advertising, commercial logos and local signage. If you have never seen it before, the book will open your eyes to a whole new world of commercial art growing in an exciting, happening part of the world. If you have, it will take you back down memory lane, and it might point out a few things you probably hadn't noticed before.

Book review: Ghost Wars

2009-08-29T22:17:00.000-04:00

"Ghost Wars" by Steve Coll
Book review by Sudheer Apte
ISBN: 0143034669
Originally published 17 Jul 2005 on desijournal.com.
Review copyright 2005 Sudheer Apte

Full title: Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001.

Steve Coll’s latest book, "Ghost Wars," won him the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2005. Coll was South Asia bureau chief for the Washington Post between 1989 and 1992. He has written extensively about the region, and he has been honored in 2002 by the South Asian Journalist Association with their highest honor, the SAJA Journalism Leader Award.

If, like most Americans, you think of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a singular event, Coll has a surprise for you. He puts the attacks in the context of the history of Afghanistan. The attacks are usefully thought of as part of a pair of important, tragic historical events. The other event in this pair took place two days earlier, on September 9th, 2001: the suicide assassination by Arab terrorists, posing as journalists, of the northern Afghan leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. When Hamid Karzai learned of Massoud’s death, he exclaimed, "what an unlucky country."

Who this Massoud was, and why his life and death were so significant, becomes clearer as you grasp this story. Steve Coll, who knows the answers well, ends the book with an account of Massoud’s assassination.

Coll weaves together a coherent narrative from a large mass of prior published knowledge and much new, original research from primary sources. How al Qaeda and its affiliates grew in Afghanistan is explained elsewhere by many other observers. But Coll shows clearly the extent and nature of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan’s civil wars.

For two decades following the Soviet invasion in 1979, the United States, along with allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, created the jihad in Afghanistan to bleed the Soviets. After the Soviets withdrew in 1988, the three allies continued to feed the Islamist monster in order to overthrow the communist government left behind.

The victims of these civil wars were the people of Afghanistan. For the foreign powers, Afghanistan was part of a "great game." But for the Afghan people, this was no game: it was played with their lives. During these decades of fighting, over a million Afghans died, mostly civilians. Over six million fled to refugee camps beyond the border.

There were a few Afghans with the stature, popularity, and strategic vision to lead their people toward peace. Ahmed Shah Massoud, called by his people the Lion of Panjshir, was the most famous. But the Pakistan army, which controlled the pipeline of money and technology coming from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, chose who among the mujahideen would receive the help. For its own reasons, the Pakistan army preferred extremist Islamists: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, and later the Taliban. These radical elements seemed more pliable than the independent-minded Massoud, and unlike him they were ethnic Pashtuns. They would produce a friendlier government in Kabul. They also came in handy for cheaply fanning the insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir with terrorism.

Incredibly, the United States had no Afghanistan policy. Under four presidents, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, the U.S. essentially outsourced to Islamabad key foreign policy decisions about Afghanistan. Sometimes, U.S. inaction was due to ignorance and dysfunctional internal dynamics between the State Department, the CIA, and the White House. At other times, U.S. policymakers were misled by their Pakistani friends. But ultimately, the U.S. failure was due to a lack of high-level interest in Afghanistan.

A few knowledgeable individuals within the State Department and the CIA, over several periods, did make independent attempts to create an Afghan policy and to strike a relationship with Massoud and other leaders, but they did not have enough power to make a difference. Considering that these same administrations were covertly colluding with Saudi Arabia to pump billions of dollars in weapons and cash into desperately poor Afghanistan, this disinterest was irresponsible. By the time the people in power woke up, it was too little, too late.

Because most of the players during these decades worked secretly, the underlying causes of the misery of the Afghan people went mostly unrecorded. In his acknowledgements, Coll writes that one of the book’s purposes is "to provide Afghans with reliable, transparent access to hidden strands of their own history." At this he has succeeded admirably.

Not counting the extensive notes, long bibliography, and excellent index, the book still weighs in at nearly 600 pages. Many of Coll’s sources are interviews with primary actors and extracts from documents never before available to the public. Written in an objective style, this is the definitive work on the subject and should be required reading for anyone interested in this period.

Coll does permit himself to make a few observations toward the end about the U.S. approach to terrorism during this period:

The Afghan government the United States eventually chose to support beginning in the late autumn of 2001—a federation of Massoud’s organization, exiled intellectuals, and royalist Pashtuns—was available for sponsorship a decade before, but the United States could not see a reason then to challenge the alternative, radical Islamist vision promoted by Pakistani and Saudi intelligence.

He says the 9/11 commission report is too soft on the role of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in aiding terrorism. Both governments were penetrated by al Qaeda and were questionable allies. He cites the failure of the United States in the late 1990’s to form an effective anti-terrorism partnership with India, its "most natural American ally in the region against al Qaeda."

It remains to be seen, post 9/11, whether policymakers pay any heed to scholarly analyses like these. Thus far the record of the U.S. administration in this area has been disappointing.

Book review: Train to Pakistan

2009-08-29T08:25:00.000-04:00

Train to Pakistan
By Khushwant Singh
ISBN: 81 7530 033 7
Reviewed by Sudheer Apte
Originally published 27-Sep-2003 on DesiJournal.com.
Review copyright 2003 Sudheer Apte

One of the most brutal episodes in the planet's history, in which a million men, women, and children were killed and ten million were displaced from their homes and belongings, is now over half a century old.

Partition, a euphemism for the bloody violence that preceded the birth of India and Pakistan as the British hurriedly handed over power in 1947, is becoming a fading word in the history books. First-hand accounts will soon vanish. Khushwant Singh, who was over thirty at the time, later wrote Train to Pakistan and got it published in 1956. Reprinted since then, reissued in hardcover, and translated into many languages, the novel is now known as a classic, one of the finest and best-known treatments of the subject.

Khushwant Singh recreates a tiny village in the Punjabi countryside and its people in that fateful summer. When the flood of refugees and the inter-communal bloodletting from Bengal to the Northwest Frontier at last touches them, many ordinary men and women are bewildered, victimized, and torn apart.

Khushwant Singh sketches his characters with a sure and steady hand. In barely over two hundred pages, we come to know quite a cast: the powerful district magistrate-cum-deputy commissioner Hukum Chand, a sad but practical minded realist, and his minion the sub-inspector of police at district headquarters. The village roughneck Juggut Singh "Jugga", a giant Sikh always in and out of prison, who secretly meets the daughter of the village mullah. The simple priest at the Sikh temple. A Western-educated visitor who is a worker for the Communist party, with the ambiguous name of Iqbal (ambiguous because it doesn't reveal his religion).

The village, Mano Majra, is on the railway line near where it crosses the swelling Sutlej. Its inhabitants, mostly Sikh farmers and their Muslim tenants, have remained relatively untouched by the violence of the previous months. When the village money-lender, a Hindu, is murdered, Jugga and the clean-shaven visitor are rounded up, and things change for the worse when an east-bound train makes an unscheduled stop at Mano Majra, the cars full of corpses. There have been many stories of Hindu and Sikh refugees being killed as they fled their homes from what was now Pakistan, but this train was the first such incident witnessed by the villagers.

Khushwant Singh's eye for detail and his love of the people shine through in his descriptions: the District Magistrate's "style of smoking betrayed his lower middle-class origin. He sucked noisily, his mouth glued to his clenched fist."

The most heart-rending passage in the book is when the government makes the decision to transport all the Muslim families from Mano Majra to Pakistan. The dumbstruck villagers are overtaken by events. A small joint army convoy, containing one unit of Sikh soldiers and one of Baluch and Pathans, arrives in the village and orders the Muslims to board within ten minutes. They do so with the barest minimum of their meager belongings. The Muslim officer politely shakes hands with his Sikh colleague, and sets off with his caravan to Pakistan. The non-Muslim families don't get a chance to say goodbye. This entire scene takes place after we are familiar with the characters, and it is painful at many levels: the poverty in which these people live; the terrible uncertainty they are suddenly cast into; the renting asunder of the attitudes and loyalties of the British Indian Army; and at least temporarily, the eclipse of people's humanity.

In Train to Pakistan, Khushwant Singh succeeds in showing the human dimension of the momentous event of Partition, through ordinary characters we can identify with. In the final climactic scene, the village *badmash* Jagga takes it upon himself to try to save a trainload of refugees, even at the cost of his own life.

Khushwant Singh went on to become a famously truculent, humorous, and eccentric columnist and editor, but this is one book infused with his compassion and humanity. It is as if the author were trying to save the memory of a tragedy too horrible to forget, even at the cost of his own future reputation.

Monsoons in Satara

2009-08-29T08:21:00.000-04:00

Monsoons in Satara

Originally published 17-Jun-2002 on DesiJournal.com.

Copyright 2002 Sudheer M. Apte

This summer the Boston area has been surprised by rain almost daily. It reaches eighty degrees or so in the afternoon, and the kids like to wear bathing suits and play in the jets from our lawn sprinklers, but before sundown it often rains. Last night there was another thunderstorm. Even though all the high-insulation windows in our ultramodern heated "McMansion" were secured shut, our startled four-year-old daughter ran downstairs and jumped onto my lap.

I tried telling her that, during my childhood in India, the best part of summer was the torrential downpours of the monsoon season. She settled down on my lap, smelling of sunblock lotion. I decided to let her fall asleep and let my own thoughts wander.

When I was in elementary school, my dad's three brothers often spent summer vacations in my grandfather's ancestral "waadaa" in the old city of Satara. The four families, who all lived in different towns, would pack their belongings and kids in trains or buses and converge upon the Mangalwar Tale ("Lake Tuesday") neighborhood where the old mansion still stands. From the dusty Satara bus stand to the Ramacha Got ("Lord Rama's Monastery") was a clip-clop ride in a tonga. I would usually get to sit with my brother out front next to the footman, where the view of the roadside was better and where sometimes I got to hold the horse's reins.

The "waadaa" was an old, three-story quadrangle with an open space in the middle. When you approached it through the front driveway, you were greeted by two massive oak doors with pointed brass studs and elaborate woodwork. Inside, there were dozens of rooms on the three floors, and in most of them the floors and ceilings were swabbed with a special cool paste made from dried cowdung (no, it didn't smell of cowdung).

As soon as we had washed our faces and feet in the back with the brackish yet refreshing cold water from the well, all of us boys would run by the kitchen store room, grab as many handfuls of peanut shells from the gunny sacks as we could to stuff into our pockets, and bound up the dark staircases to the second floor.

The second floor had a series of arched windows with no bars or glass panes---just heavy, wooden shutters that opened out on to the corrugated iron roof.

We kids would slam open the shutters and walk right onto the roof. Since we didn't wear slippers in the house, we had to walk very quickly on the iron sheeting if it was a sunny afternoon. A few tamarind and aamlaa trees stretched out tantalizingly close to the edge were our prize, and we had to fight for the fruits against visiting gangs of red-faced langur monkeys. We were little better than monkeys ourselves, and we engaged in dangerous contests on that roof that I wouldn't even permit my children today to watch, let alone participate in. These contests involved weapons such as the poles that were used to hang up clothes on the line, and they got broken up by a shout from an annoyed uncle or aunt whose siesta was getting disturbed by two gangs of monkeys on the roof.

Inevitably, dark clouds would gather late in the afternoon. My mother or one of my aunts would hear the rumble and suddenly remember having put out platters of masalas, papads or pickling foods to dry on the roof in the morning. The nearest kids were commandeered into service in a last-minute scramble to carry the stuff indoors. It was important to act quickly on the first rumble or smell of the damp soil, because with hardly any warning, the sky would suddenly explode and unleash great sheets of water.

Starting with a pitter-patter of raindrops, the corrugated iron sheeting would erupt into a continuous roar. You couldn't hear yourself think; it was like sitting underneath a waterfall. Like clockwork, in a couple of minutes the electricity would get cut off. Not that it mattered, since there weren't that many electric things in the house that you needed. The fans you didn't need once the rain started; for light there was really only the one lightbulb in the living room; and every room had at least one arched cubby in the wall where there was a filled oil lamp, wicked and ready to light.

If it was the first rainfall of the season, it was party time! We children stripped down to our waists (even the bottoms were optional for the littlest ones) and danced in the open courtyard. The grownups shouted instructions to a wayward kid, but otherwise stayed indoors and watched us enviously. The summer was so hot that the first rain would sizzle and steam from the kadappa tiles. We would stretch our arms out and let the rain fall directly on our tongues.

Behind the waadaa there was an open rain gutter. During most of the year the gutter was only a nuisance or a sink for rubbish, but in the monsoon it became a great, angry river on a mission. And all the kids in the neighborhood became shipping magnates, making boats out of newspapers and sending them on their way for hours of fun.

Pretty soon it got dark, and it was time to wash up and sit down on wooden "paat" in the kitchen to be served hot pithale-bhaat on brass plates, after which we sat in the outer verandah, hands folded, and said our Shubhan-karoti with lids getting heavy. Finally, lying on a mattress on the floor with six other kids, I would never remember falling to sleep to the deafening roar still going on outside.

My aching limbs brought me back to the present, with a little child of my own gently snoring in my lap. I picked her up, taking care to support her neck, and eased her on to her bunk bed. Oblivious to the gentle hum of the polite New England rainstorm outside, she was probably dreaming about dancing on the lawn amid the sprinklers.

Creating Sudheer's Articles and Reviews

2009-08-29T08:17:00.001-04:00

This is a home for Sudheer's articles and book reviews published over the years. All content is copyrighted by Sudheer Apte.