Gandhi in NY: Peace, Social Activist, and World Leader

June 8, 2009February 5, 2018 devayanitirthali1 Comment

The first time I came across a mention of Mahatma Gandhi and a visual was in the sculpture garden of Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in the Fall of 2005. The sculptures were created by school children. I was actually pleasantly surprised. It (the surprised reaction) might have been because of the stereotype about Americans who have no general knowledge and no interest in the history, politics and happenings in the rest of the world. I try not to have such generalized notions of people. But this one is hard to get rid of. It also came from a feeling (at that time) of being culturally invisible. I was equally surprised for the same reason when I saw a picture of Indira Gandhi on a book cover about Women leaders in the classroom library of a Harlem school.

Anyway, continuing about Gandhi….I was so surprised that I decided to come back to take a photo, almost to prove to myself that ‘these people know about our Gandhi’. hahaha.

This photo of the sculpture was recently taken when I visited the sculpture garden again with my sister. (She was not suitably surprised to see Gandhi etched in a Cathedral garden. What a disappointment.) The sculpture is created by a school aged kid. It is a message of peace from Mahatma Gandhi.

In the same week we came across the sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi tucked away in a corner of Union square park. Wikipedia says that the newer addition of Gandhi’s sculpture in 1986 was to mark Union Square’s history of social activism.

The statue is quite well made. You can see the detail of his watch tucked in his Dhoti. Though I was quite disappointed to see him tucked in a corner like that.

The following photo is from Madam Tussad’s on 42nd street. I thought the placement was very interesting – social leader, religious leader, spiritual leader.

India Outside India

Indian in US TV series

March 27, 2009February 5, 2018 devayanitirthaliLeave a comment

CSI – NY’s latest episode showed the festival of colors – holi being celebrated somewhere in Queens. I captured a couple of stills. As you can see the girls dancing are wearing a belly dancing costume. Is that a CSI version of Indian? CSI now-a-days is overly dramatizing scenes towards phony anyways.

Here is another one from the same scene. My first reaction was that this is another example of the ‘exotic east’ syndrome. But then again this might be the expression of Indian by the community in queens that I am discarding as not authentic enough. Me being the ‘real’ Indian and all. 😉

Musings

My brush with emergency services in NYC

March 12, 2009December 17, 2018 devayanitirthali1 Comment

One fine day instead of going to my class in the afternoon I decided to go home. I was feeling very weak. I walked as fast as I could like a true NewYorker. If only I can reach home in time and lie down, I will be fine, I kept telling myself. The train took forever to come. When it reached 157th street station, it stopped and people were asked to vacate the train. There was an emergency in the previous train so the trains behind were all stuck too. By this time I was feeling pretty sick and couldn’t get up and leave. A lady asked me if I was feeling ok, and called some train personnel. He called 911.

It felt like it was forever before the FDNY guys came down. The first thing they did was whip out a form and start asking questions … demographic questions not medical ones. If I was well enough to answer such questions would I need the emergency service in the first place?

Suddenly they decided to take me out to the ambulance, probably because the train needed to move. At last, I thought, they are going to take me to the hospital and I might not die after all. The ambulance was parked just outside the station and it remained there for next 10-15 minutes. The question answer session resumed. I never realized how long my first and last name are before that day. Believe me it is beyond frustrating to talk when you are fainting, then to repeat the name because your’s is an Indian name and worse … one of the most difficult last name in India and one of the longest Indian first name. I gave them my wallet that had the college id card hoping it would satisfy basic questions like name, affiliation, insurance info etc. I then gave them my phone with my boss’s phone number on it. Hoping that they would ask him the questions and I could continue fainting in peace.

When my boss picked up the phone, the FDNY guy asked, ‘is this person your employee?’. John, being a good boss he is thought it was an information mining call and refused to say anything unless told why they needed the information. The FDNY guys did not tell them it was an emergency, probably in some convoluted way an effort not to invade my privacy.

All this time the second FDNY guy was trying to put an oxygen mask on my face. The mask didn’t work and it made me nautious so I was trying to remove it. This was going on parallely to the Q&A and fainting. I startd to question why we were still parked and not moving towards the hospital. The answer was totally baffling. The FDNY guy who was filing out the questionaire was the person who would drive the ambulance so unless I ‘co-operated’ I wasn’t going anywhere.

By this time, the second person in the ambulance, the one with the oxygen mask, started interjecting every few minutes, saying “I can’t get her pulse. hurry.” It is a miracle I survived those 15 minutes in the ambulance in spite of his constant reminder that I might be dying.

Add a third person in the mix now. The person from the MTNY. He came with his own questionaire and started asking me the same questions. They had to cover their behinds too since it happened while I was travelling in their train. I had to answer the same questions all over again. I guess the FDNY couldn’t share that information for fear of breaching confidentiality. 😉

Finally we reached the hospital….. ER hallway more like it. Somebody put a pulse monitor on my finger. I was relieved that somebody was monitoring me even if I was in the hallway. Nothing happened for a long time and then somebody came and ‘borrowed’ the pulse monitor. Never came back.
After lying down in the hallway for a long time I automatically started feeling better. (I was amazed at my capacity to survive in the face of adversity 😉 ) But now ER doctor wouldn’t let me go. She needed to check if I had internal bleeding. Another long wait, in a room this time, after which I left for home at 10 pm with an unreadable pink paper and without any diagnosis.
After 15 months and 3 hefty medical bills I still don’t know what happened that evening and why I am still alive 🙂
Though the experience was traumatic, the whole story seems like a funny episode in a comedy movie script. Anybody wants the movie rights?

Musings

Houses and Homes

November 28, 2007February 5, 2018 devayanitirthaliLeave a comment

I like living in New York, especially in comparison to Storrs. The obvious reasons you might think of are that I like fast paced life and the infinite possibilities offered by a metro like New York. Those reasons are not entirely off the mark but the most attractive aspect of living in New York for me is that the building I live in is made of bricks.

The worst thing about living in Storrs is the wooden houses. In my mind it has a sense of impermanence. A wooden house does not seem like a secure structure I can call home. It has nothing to do with fire hazard. My Indian mind does not think about risk to life so much.

A house made of wood for me is either a cabin in the woods you would visit once in a while or a temporary structure created till the actual home, office is built. More often than not, wooden house means a shack built by a family that comes to the city to find a living and does not have enough for two meals.

When Parag and I were talking about development index and how it is measured, we realized that, in India, an important aspect of development index is houses and roads being ‘Kaccha’ or ‘Pakka’. Kaccha (literally half baked/ uncooked) w.r.t. a road is a dirt road in contrast to a pakka (literally, well made, well baked) which is a tar road. Kaccha houses are the ones which do not use stone, brick and or morter. They are supposed to be lower in index to the Pakka houses using stone, brick and morter. So judging with that ruler, Storrs, or for that matter any suburb in US, would be one of the developmentally challenged neigborhoods. 😉

Musings

Houses and Homes

November 28, 2007February 5, 2018 devayanitirthaliLeave a comment

I like living in New York, especially in comparison to Storrs. The obvious reasons you might think of are – I like fast paced life and the infinite possibilities offered by a metro like New York. Those reasons are not entirely off the mark but the most attractive aspect of living in New York for me is that the building I live in is made of bricks.

India Outside India · Musings

Swastika Part II

November 20, 2007February 9, 2019 devayanitirthali1 Comment

As mentioned in the previous post, I have been trying to spread the word offline and online. A few of those efforts were met with encouraging reactions from some american students. For example, a TC student was happy to receive information about the Indian Swastika and the way we use it in daily life. She also volunteered to talk about it with a friend in the student senate so that it can be handled at a macro level. I also wrote a comment on the public scribbling board made available during the unrest in TC in the main lobby.

I asked a question regarding spreading information about Swastika on Yahoo Answers. It received mixed responce. Here is the link to the QA:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Ate.S03nXLZHNxWLaKSoIxnsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20071109171936AAsU3xV

I will keep updating this post as and when I get more feedback

India Outside India · Musings

Indian Swastika and Hitler’s Hakenkreuz

November 15, 2007February 5, 2018 devayanitirthali2 Comments

(Imported from Musings)
The Swastika controversy is another issue that has been a huge part of my discussions, fact finding missions and such for the last couple of weeks. The controversy in my mind started with an image of a swastika in a brochure about hate crimes on campus and how to react to them. Unfortunately, the image of swastika they published was the straight faced Indian Swastika and not the tilted swastika of hitler showing 2 intelocked ‘S’. It was a photo of the sign painted on an African American House sign so judgimg by the reference it was definately meant as a hate symbol. My first reaction was to laugh at it ‘The haters didn’t even know which swastika showed hate’. But what about the creaters of the brochure? Did they think twice before choosing this image as an example of hate crime?
The brochure was a 10 point ‘to do’ list. The first point was ‘Rise Up’. A sentence in that section caught my attention “I didn’t mean to hurt doesn’t remove the hurt” “Rise up. The world won’t change if people don’t change it.”

So I decided to rethink my approach/reaction to the way the word ‘Swastika’ is used in U.S. As an Indian, swastika to me is a symbol of wellbeing. The word (originating from sanskrit Swasti) literally means that. Swastika is part of an Indian’s everyday life. When repeatedly swastika is mentioned as a hate symbol, how do Indian students react to it? I react by doing nothing or feeling nothing. The underlying thought process is ‘they are not aware of my swastika. They aren’t talking about the Indian swastika so I need not be offended.’ I talked to a few Indian students and they had a similar reaction. ‘we know better, just let it go.’

But is it right/fair to let go. Is it not offensive to hear repeated mentions of a symbol as a hate symbol when it is one of the most used auspicious symbols of a culture? Is it not unfair that an Indian cannot use his/her most auspicious symbol due to fear of being branded as fascist unnecesarily?

Some interesting stories came up when I was talking with the Indian students. The stories were about lack of information about the Indian (real??) swastika by westerners and the problems crreated by it. The stories were exchanged mostly as hilarious incidents. One of it goes like this: “An Indian student was coming to US to study. His father thought that it would be easier for him to find his bags if he had some kind of identifying sticker on it. The easiest available was the rangoli sticker used on the doorways which is very popular in Maharashtra. A rangoli sticker invaribly has a swastika in the center of the design. As I said before, swastika is a omnipresent symbol in India. He was arrested on one of the airports in Europe during the layover.” I shared this story with couple other Indian students. The discussion invariably focused on ‘how people who haven’t travelled outside India do not have a sense of such things’. Why is the burden of knowing and understanding on the shoulders of an Indian? Is it because we believe in ‘let go’?

What have we achieved by not reacting? Did we unknowingly support the abuse of the word/concept of ‘Swastika’ by not reacting? Will it make a difference if we educate people around us? Will it make a differnce if we protest against the use of the word ‘Swastika’ as a hate symbol and insist that the Nazi hate symbol be properly identified as ‘Hitler’s Swastika’ or ‘Hakenkreuz (hook-cross))’?

I am still debating in my mind about these questions. In the meanwhile I have also started talking about the issue with various american freinds offline and online. Resolving these questions for myself is going to take a long time. As they arn’t really about swastika but about changing philosophy of life in a new environment.

Musings

About Bitches and Witches

November 10, 2007May 14, 2020 devayanitirthaliLeave a comment

Last two weeks have been pretty intense for me. I went for this program – screening of the film BEYOND BEATS and RHYMES and a panel discussion afterwards . Quite an experience. The film looked at a lot of aspects of hip hop music but I wanted to note down a few things that struck me the most about portrayal of women.

The movie had a few examples of how women are portrayed in hip hop albums, I have myself read a few songs which talk about bitches and sex with them in horrible details. When the women fans of hip hop music were asked (in the film) about this portrayal and how they feel about it they said something to the effect that ‘They aren’t talking about us so we don’t take it to heart’. But looking at the way the male fans were treating these women I realized that one cannot ignore insults like that because one perceives it as not touching you. The men did take the lyrics and portrayals seriously and they did think the women around them were bitches and were groping them and harassing them.

Another comment that caught my attention was men differentiating between bitches and sisters. Even in India the modern male makes a distinction between ‘female friends’ (good for non-traditional fun and intellectual pursuits) and ‘girls who are wife material’ (traditional girls, submissive). La Bruha, one of the panelists, in this context, also talked about treating women either like a goddess or like a doormat. This also was something that reminded me of India. Indians tell the world that their culture treats women respectfully like a goddess. All that reads well in the subhashitas (sanskrit verses) and is good to show off greatness of our culture but basically putting somebody on the pedestal is like putting them in a cage. One who puts you on a pedestal is ready to strip off the status at the smallest indiscretion. I liked what the poetess La Bruha said, I don’t want to be on the pedestal because that gives you the power to pull me down, so I named myself ‘the witch’.

I liked that attitude. I should think of finding a name for myself that portrays what I feel about me and start writing my blogs under that pen name.

Musings

I need to start somewhere

October 7, 2007February 5, 2018 devayanitirthaliLeave a comment

Every time I am deeply disturbed, surprised or find some ‘profound’ truth about myself or those around me I have this urge to talk about it with my friends/colleagues. Mostly, when I am deeply disturbed and my glorious image of US or academics is shattered. Since talking is not always possible in US without attracting an emotional defensive reaction or branding I thought why not write. Then again there is the question of god knows who reads my blog and thinks what about me. After getting over this fear, for a long time, I have been waiting to start the blog with a good, happy sounding post. It doesn’t seem right to start with my thoughts about how horribly the event of ‘chat’ with Ahmedinejad was handled and how deeply disturbed I was with double standards and hypocrisy of protestors. Or with the general frustrations about academic campus life devoid of healthy intellectual debate.

But then, I have to start somewhere. My mother calls me Dhakka start, without break. Now that I have pushed myself into it I should be using this space more often to vent J