Desicritics Author: Amodini Sharma

A State With No Teeth - The Gujjar Protests

Amodini Sharma — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:25:29 EDT

In an email from my Dad yesterday, he mentioned that they weren’t venturing to the markets in Delhi, because of the Gujjar protest in the NCR. His remarks were wry, in that he said that people are protesting to be declared backward! Indeed the reservation policy has taken on a twist with these protests when the Gujjars are actually protesting for such “privileged” status.

The pictures online tell the story. There were photos of Gujjars mobilizing, vandalizing train tracks and then there were photos of burnt buses. First off, the issue seems ridiculous – protesting for Scheduled Tribe status. Is this what reservations have come to mean? A crutch to ensure educations/jobs/opportunities? Could the early politicians of nascent India who thought up the reservation policies ever have imagined such a scenario?

Secondly, consider the violent protests and vandalism. Anytime you start disrupting traffic and burning buses, you protest violently. It’s against the law. Anytime your activities cause the common man to think twice about venturing out of the house for fear of safety, you are breaking the law. The state deployed policemen and appealed for calm. But people were wary anyway.

Now in the media you read about the effect of the rasta-roko, you see the pictures. I, half-way across the world, see them. And although it is about the physical inconvenience of having a bunch of goons putting you and yours at risk, for THEIR demands, it is also about the damage it does to the image of the state. It is about the image of the Indian state, a state with no teeth.

Because when you think about it, what do these images convey? A bunch of protesters vandalising the rail-tracks? Just that? What does it say about the maintenance of law and order? How much confidence does it give the common man about the state being able to protect its people? Or its property? My Mom, when I spoke to her, definitely didn't give the impression that the state would come to her aid, if she were to be confronted/hurt by the Gujjar protests.

How much really do you respect someone who doen't stand up for himself/herself? Someone who "appeals for calm" to people who violate it? Someone who promises no retribution to people who threaten to break it down?

It's not just this protest, it's one protest after another. India might aspire to be free and fair, but fairness does have to be enforced. For one community or a group of people to run roughshod over other people's rights to ensure that they get some advantage is unfair. And besides "appealing" for calm, the state must crack down hard on such offenders. HARD. Hard enough to make other people think twice about disrupting life again.

Protesters must be punished. And politicians like Vasundhara Raje who carelessly make promises to the community about granting "Scheduled Tribe" status like it was candy. Throw them all in jail and keep them there. The common man would applaud.

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Amodini Sharma — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:37:19 EDT

This film is doing good business. I attribute that to all the hype generated prior to it’s release. It can’t possibly be the film. And I say this, after nodding off to sleep a couple of times during it. Between “Indiana Jones” and “National Treasure 2” (which I watched on DVD during the same weekend) it’s been too much of a bad thing.

Indy reappears on the screen after a gap of 19 years – too long, some would say – but let’s give the (old) man a fair chance. We have him going off on another one of his spur-of-the-moment adventures, jauntily doffing his hat, smiling that lopsided smile, this time to Peru, because really that country seems a perfect hunting ground for skulls and finding exotic looking tribal natives. Thick, uncut forests increase the appeal of the locale. The objective is to find Professor Oxley (John Hurt) who’s on a hunt which involves crystal skulls and the “City of Gold”.

Accompanying Indy are a varied group of people. To start with there’s a young guy called Mutt (Shia LeBeouf) and then his Mum drops in (Karen Allen). They then find Professor Oxley as well as the bad guys – who else but the KGB itself ? Cate Blanchett plays Irina Spalko, who along with her Soviet comrades is on a hunt for the crystal skull as well.

There’s no accounting for tastes of course, but this feels a little jaded. Oh, and when before have I heard the “City of Gold” theme ? Hmmm, not so long ago - National Treasure 2 had the same thing going on. Hidden levers, big stone entrances which close and open mysteriously on large gears, make rumbling sounds, water flooding, endless treasure which you’d be a fool to take (guess what happens to the greedy ?) you name it, and we have the clichéd thing already. Been there done that. Why do it again ?

And where’s the excitement ? What’s making me getting me out of my seat yelling “Go, Indy” ? Nothing, really. I sat pretty quietly though-out the film, except the parts in which I dozed. This film does not work at the very basic level. It might have all the elements of an action-adventure-drama, but lacks the most important ingredient of all – the excitement, the zest, the nail-biting thrill that’d keep me on the edge of my seat, rooting for Indy.

“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (IJATKOTCS) is a throw-back to the 80s (it’s set in 1957). In some parts of the film I could detect an aging affect. The clothes and the makeup is old-style. The forgotten KGB is back again. The internet is a thing of the future, and technology ? Unheard of. We are back to the basics.

Except the basics don’t work anymore. Not when we have contenders like “The Bourne Ultimatum” and the “Die Hard 4.0”. This Indy installment is very down-to-earth, they use their hands, fists, guns and tanks. Un-sophistication is it’s middle name. The stunts are very, very average. You might not guess that technology existed. Speilberg and Co. might want to go all purist on me, and not use techno-gizmos for the stunts, but that also means I’d rather go with Bourne.

“IJATKOTCS” is hyped up as the next big adventure, but in parts this feels like a kiddie film. I’m OK with goofy – I draw the line at stupid. Granted that Jones is pretty goofy and fairly awkward (that’s his character really), but in this film, sequences seem a little too contrived to draw out those laughs. It’s inspired slapstick, and while I cringed, my kids laughed at the silliness.

Yes, anything goes in this film. I’m all for theatrical liberties; after all many were taken in the previous Indy installments. But however many genial allowances I might make for a film, I do make distinctions between “fuzzy” and “retarded”. One stoops . . . to conquer. And Indy stoops all right, ( at 65, I bet his arthritic knees don’t quake), but he does not conquer.

It’s time, Indy, to hang up that fedora.

The Spice of Life

Amodini Sharma — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:14:57 EDT

As I travel to India nowadays, I find that I get “softer” with each visit. Food gets to me sooner. I love roadside food, the pani-puri, the chola-bhatura, the aloo-tikki frying tantalizingly in all that glorious oil. It’s hard though to enjoy all that without falling sick at least once – especially with water-based products like pani-puri. Which is quite a bummer because it can be said that I aspire to eat spicy foods. What is food without the spice? What is food which doesn’t fuel the fire in your mouth?

Here in the US, finding spicy food outside the house is a difficult task. You think Thai is spicy, I go Thai. And then when the waitress asks me what spice “number” I want, I go for the max – 5. She halts writing, peers at me, and mouths ungrammatical English, “Are you sure ? 5 very spicy”. Number 5 is not exactly tepid, but it’s not going to blow my socks off either. Still, it’s not a pretty sight; I’m not very girlie in these things. My eyes and my nose water; a tissue remains close at hand. As I spoon the food into my mouth I hardly ever break for water; it dilutes the zest. Needless to say, spicy food is always ingested only in the company of close friends and family; the others somehow don’t seem to appreciate a dripping female in the vicinity.

Really spicy foods are so few and far between that I want to list all the sources. The easiest source is the Chinese red pepper sauce. It’s available in the grocery aisles and at most Chinese restaurants. Made of red pepper (seeds and all) this is pretty potent if eaten in large enough quantities.

Another source, probably the fieriest of them all, is the jabanero pepper. This is a yellowish looking pepper (as compared to the desi green Serrano pepper) but the mild color is misleading. At my grocery store which lists the peppers along with their “hot” rating, this is at the max – a 10. The milder jalapeno comes in at a 7. The first time I ever had a taste of the jabanero was when I was at this Mexican restaurant, and we asked the server for something spicy. He wanted to know whether we wanted real spicy, and when we replied in the affirmative, went back into the kitchen and brought us a bowl of yellow looking sauce. He told us that it was not on the menu, as most patrons couldn’t tolerate it; it was made solely for the consumption of the mostly Mexican staff. He told us that it was called “mendiga”, that it was made of uncooked jabaneros (cooking a pepper takes the edge off), that it was dangerous. We were like babes in the woods; we had no idea. And it looked like mango chutney.

Needless to say that a little pin-prick of that stuff, caused minor explosions in the mouth, and later in the digestive tract. It was that good. And it is because of that mendiga, that I now buy jabaneros, and not jalapenos in my weekly grocery shopping. Where you had to use 5 jalapenos, 1 jabanero will suffice. And that’s less work, no?

Another good place to obtain your fix of the “hot” stuff is “Wingstop”. This, as the name suggests specializes in buffalo wings and chicken tenders, cooked in their special sauces. Essentially they fry the chicken and dip it in a particular sauce of your choice. The first time I went in there, I looked at the menu and the people coming into the shop. Most of them ordered the “mild” (more people) or the “hot” (less people) version of their sauce. Other than that Wingstop also offered the “Cajun” and the “Atomic” sauces, in ascending order of spiciness, and nobody was ordering either. I ordered the “Atomic” wings, and the guy goes into the back room, and comes back with this tin of sauce, which he spoons out into a bowl, and into which he dips the buffalo wings. I’m assuming they don’t use this sauce very often.

“Atomic” describes the sauce very well. One morsel of that thing blew a hole in my mouth, and I consider myself a pretty well-seasoned (can’t help the pun) spice-eater. Eating 5 Atomic buffalo wings in quick succession required an emergency trip to the restroom, but I was eating all the way there. I must add that on my most recent tryst with Atomicity, 2 doses of Imodium A-D were required to recover from the wing-eating frenzy. I’ve been on milder food since.

So, denied most of the foods that threaten to rip to shreds the lining of my stomach, I go to my other favorite place – Taco Bell. And when the lady at the drive-by window enquires about the kind of sauce I’d like - Mild or Hot, I just smile up at her and say “Fire”.

My (Mis)Adventures with Clutter

Amodini Sharma — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 00:20:27 EDT

I need my car keys. I delve inside my handbag. No go. Not there? I open the handbag, along its length, and look inside. Which is kind of awkward because I’m in the middle of a crowded theater lobby, crowds swilling around me, and I’m sort of balancing on one knee, the other bent so I can place my handbag on it. The Yoga “Tree” pose – only more artistic. The whole balance pose thingy is further jeopardized because my son is clutching a handful of my voluminous skirt, and is tugging in the opposite direction; he has to go the bathroom NOW.

Inside my handbag I see a pen or two. There is even a snack-bar (when did I put that in there?). There are various bits of paper floating around in there, some small, some big. Then there is a wad of tissues, my wallet, my phone and a little note-pad, a small comb, and 2 pairs of sun-glasses (quite pointless really – I can’t possibly wear them both at once). At such moments I wish I could just squat down wherever I am, dump the contents of the bag out, there, down on the ground, find what I’m looking, pick it up, and just walk away.

At one point in my life, I carried quite a large bag. It looked like a nice, curvy, leather sack. And it was (became) heavy. Since it was such a large, voluminous bag – it seemed to have oodles of space; things fairly leapt inside of their own accord. Need hairbrush? In the bag it goes. List of groceries? Should be in there somewhere. Paperback novel I was supposed to return to the library last week? Yup, in there. Several expired checkbooks? Half-eaten bag of popcorn? That blobby toy the kids love? Bag of jelly beans? Store receipts from the past year, of things I might possibly return? If you couldn’t find it anywhere else, it was quite possibly in my handbag. That thing was a store-all.

Then I graduated to a really small bag, a mini-bag really. Life got simpler. All it held (could hold) were the essentials – keys, wallet, phone. And little pieces of paper, yeah? How much space do they take? Every time I fill up the car, I ask for a receipt. But where to put all these receipts? I dream of the day when for a pack-rat like me, cars will be equipped with built in scanners that will scan your receipts in a second, leaving you free to trash them (or we could have built-in shredders).

A friend once told me that she discarded useless receipts immediately, like tore them into a trash bag right outside the store. Me, a pack-rat – I can’t do that, because what if, what if, what if I need it later? I’m pretty sure I have shopping receipts from 2004 – I just don’t know where I’ve “safely” placed them. And you know Murphy’s golden rule – the moment you discard something as unusable, you need it right after.

For all the talk we have on conserving our resources and reducing the use of paper, it’s almost like once you open the front door, paper (mostly junk) comes flying in. We’ve long since stopped getting the printed newspaper – we just read online now. But the mail brings advertisements and junk mail. The kids bring home tons of paperwork from school. And we seem to be throwing away more and more paper. Some of it ends up in my purse.

Despite my misadventures with space, I’ve stuck to a small handbag; it’s not like tiny, tiny, it’s still average sized. It holds all the essentials, and some “extra” stuff that I’ll put in once in a while. However it’s not a carryall, so when the zipper refuses to close, it’s a pretty clear sign that I need to de-clutter. So I’ll open the bag and throw away the “extras” (mostly junk which should have been discarded two weeks back).

Now if only de-cluttering my life and my home was that easy!

Where Are We From, Really?

Amodini Sharma — Sun, 2 Mar 2008 08:09:30 EST

The recent controversy – that of the "true Mumbaikar", brings to mind the question of belonging. I have no “accent” so to speak, no Haryanvi influence, no UP-ite drawl, no Punjabi ruggedness, no American accent. I am often asked where I am from , now in the US, and many, many times in India. I often want to ask people what they mean when they ask that. Actually I do ask for clarifications from peers – Do you mean where my parents are from? Or do you mean me? They’ll clarify.

However try asking the Unclejis/Auntijis this sort of stuff, and I get these weird looks like they’re thinking I’m an odd girl (Not very docile, is she now?). Do they think that I have remained rooted to the birthplace of my ancestors? Is that what they mean – where were your grand-parents from? Surely not, since they are talking to me? Surely they care about me – the person standing in front of them, more than my great-great-grandfather’s home-town? Are they asking me what my native tongue is? Where I went for my summer holidays? Mussoorie??? Are they asking me where my father’s elder brother lives? Or my Mom’s? Or where I live now?

In the US, sometimes this question is understandable – I ask it, and I couldn’t care about the language you spoke at home, as long as we can communicate somehow. You try to get a feel for the person you just met – where did you go to school? Non-vegetarian? You try to form links and connections – do you know so-and-so etc. But I’ve noticed that there are also other reasons people ask this – you can see their minds work. Reasons such as the reason to classify me as a Northie, or a Southie, to find out my caste and my Gotra, to find out if I am one of them.

To those people I give the whole schpiel :

“My father is from so-and-so, and my grand-father was from so-and-so village. My mother’s side is from this city, but that was because my grand-father moved … And then of-course we never actually lived in my “home-town(s)”, so I don’t if I actually belong there. And then we moved again . . . to the US. Let me tell you where all I’ve lived here . . “

At this point, people’s eyes are glazing over. If I notice, I stop. But, sometimes, I don’t.

The question of “belonging” has always got to me – what really is the correct answer? Do you belong to the land of your ancestors? You may or may not have been brought up there, so how do you profess links? Do you belong to your Dad’s “place” or your Mom’s? Or both? What if they are really far apart? I have lived all over India, and least of all in the states to which my parents/grand-parents profess attachment. If I live anywhere for more than 5 years, can I say I belong there? When I learn a language which is not my mother-tongue, can I say I belong? If I move to another country, and consider it home, do I belong?

Who decides if I belong? Just like who decides if I’m a patriot, a Hindu, or fit to live and speak my mind? Who, really?