Sandip Roy

A Modern Great Gatsby: Rajat Gupta vs. Raj Rajaratnam and the Great Wall Street Scandal

2013-05-22T11:48:10-04:00

Leo DiCaprio will never portray him on the screen, but the disgraced Sri Lankan American moneyman Raj Rajaratnam could well be the Jay Gatsby of our times.

The story of Raj Rajaratnam versus Rajat Gupta is playing out in the media like F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous novel -- about old money East Egg, new money West Egg and rotten eggs all around.

In our real-life 21st century version, on one side we have Rajat Gupta, patrician, mover and shaker, philanthropist with all the correct credentials for today's blue blood -- IIT, Harvard Business School, McKinsey -- and a Rolodex that includes the likes of Bill Clinton. He might not be exactly old money like the Rockefellers or India's Birlas but it's close enough.

On the other side you have the grubbier Raj Rajaratnam, despite his English public school education -- the player with a gap-toothed smile and "gorilla moods" who threw blowout bashes headlined by the disco queen Donna Summer.

"How could (Gupta) get into business with a trader who was known for giving Super Bowl parties filled with scantily clad women?" wonders Anita Raghavan in an upcoming book, The Billionaire's Apprentice, excerpted recently by the New York Times.

The tone, aghast and incredulous, sounds just one sneer away from Fitzgerald's Tom Buchanan telling the nouveaux riche Jay Gatsby he doesn't stand a chance with Daisy.

"She's not leaving me! Certainly not for a common swindler who'd have to steal the ring he put on her finger."

In Baz Luhrmann's cinematic version The Great Gatsby becomes all about orgiastic parties filmed in eye-popping 3D. But the book itself was a scathing observation about the false differentiation between class and money or the lack thereof. Gatsby, a man of great charm but mysterious wealth, throws his money around like there's no tomorrow, while Tom Buchanan, polo-playing Mr. Old Money and garden-variety adulterer rues, "Civilization's going to pieces." Rajat Gupta also viewed the Johnny-come-latelies striking it mega rich during the heady boom years on Wall Street with lofty disdain.

As Raghavan writes:

Offers were flowing into Gupta's office too, but his wife, Anita, told a colleague he enjoyed the stature that came with his job. He could trade places with these young Wall Street guys and 20-something tech millionaires any day, but they could never trade places with him.

Just as Tom Buchanan scoffed that, for all his ill-gotten fortunes, Gatsby, "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere," could never hope to be one of them. What stings most is both Gatsby and Rajaratnam are fabulously, vulgarly wealthy. Rajaratnam is the one who loaned Rajat Gupta $5 million at one point.

But while Fitzgerald didn't sugarcoat Gatsby's corruption, he was withering about the Buchanans. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy, they smashed up things and retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Unlike Fitzgerald, we cannot let go of our giddy enchantment with the likes of Rajat Gupta. Before Gupta's conviction, R. K. Raghavan, a former CBI director gushed about his "unsullied record":

The fact that he was elected thrice to lead McKinsey, one of world's leading consulting firms, by its partners and the first non-American to be so chosen is proof enough that he is a professional to the core who will not commit the indiscretions of the kind attributed to him.

In Anita Raghavan's telling of the story, at least as evident from the excerpt, Gupta comes across as more sinned against than sinning. "What if Gupta, the adviser to presidents and executives, simply got played?" she wonders. Even if his conviction is overturned, he will be remembered as "the dignified McKinsey managing director who fell down the money trap, and under the spell of a boorish hedge fund trader, a reality which in his world is almost as damning as the crime he stands accused of committing."

Raghavan is not calling Gupta innocent or dismissing the evidence against him as circumstantial the way his lawyers are. But she points out that after his stellar run on Wall Street he wanted to "burnish his legacy as a philanthropist." If he had a "lust for zeros" as the story is headlined, it was for a higher cause.

If Gupta wanted to compete on the same level as Stephen A. Schwarzman, who would go on to give $100 million to the New York Public Library, or Sandy Weill, whom he knew from the Weill Cornell Medical College board, he had to be a billionaire.

Gupta's greed is thus ennobled in a way Rajaratnam's will never be. Rajaratnam is the man who treats 70 of his closest friends and family to a lavish Kenyan safari for his 50th birthday. Gupta, pointedly, is not on that guest list. One is class. The other is crass.

But Fitzgerald knew that while the two worlds did not want to be seen socializing together the borders between them were infinitely permeable. "He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That's one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn't far wrong," says Tom about Gatsby.

"What about it?" replies Gatsby. "I guess your friend (Wall Street tycoon) Walter Chase wasn't too proud to come in on it." In fact, even Tom shows up at his secret speakeasy as do senators.

The Rajaratnam-Gupta affair unfolds on exactly the same lines. While his associates and friends now try to underscore the social gulf between the two, the fact is, it didn't stop Gupta from picking up the phone and calling Rajaratnam after a Goldman board meeting.

It's just the ending that is a little different, but only a little. The "careless" Buchanans just shrug and walk away, letting all the blame and opprobrium fall on Gatsby, leaving him to be the fall guy for their crimes. Rajat Gupta, on the other hand, has been convicted by a jury. But as he sits in his Westport, Conn. estate working on his appeal, he hopes he will at least walk free, if not unscathed.

The abandoned Rajaratnam meanwhile complains bitterly, "Every bloody Indian cooperated (to nail me)." And then says piously, "They wanted me to plea bargain. They wanted to get Rajat. I am not going to do what people did to me. Rajat has four daughters." This is not to say our modern Gatsby is the "man of sensitivity" that Jay was. Or a modern day chronicler should say to him, "They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."

But our belief in the intrinsic nobility of the Rajat Guptas remains our blind spot. The Raj Rajaratnams and Rajat Guptas are more connected that we'd care to admit. Both believed in the green light at the end of the dock (though theirs was of the dollar kind) and "the orgiastic future" that has now eluded them both. But that's no matter, for as Fitzgerald observed, tomorrow the rest of us will continue to "run faster, stretch out our arms farther -- so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The Great Gatsby reminds us the more things change, the faultline of class remains unalterably the same.

Another version of this blog first appeared on Firstpost.com.

America's Newest Public Enemy Number 1: The Humble Pressure Cooker

2013-05-14T14:09:16-04:00

When I went to the United States for the first time, long before 9/11, I wondered if immigration officials would harass me, a single young man from a turbulent part of the world. I didn't have to worry. Customs officials and their formidable sniffing dogs were much more interested in middle-aged Indian women. They rifled through the contents of the bursting-at-the-seams suitcase of a lady who could have been my aunt. In those days the "illegal immigrant" America was most nervous about a forbidden mango or a sneaky gourd.

September 11 changed everything. Soon shoes were suspect. Cosmetic bags were viewed as booby traps. Even the clearest liquids and gels signalled danger in an America that was permanently colour-coded threat level orange. And men with beards and brown complexions and Muslim names found themselves regularly pulled aside for questioning.

Now after the Boston bombings we enter confront the newest marker of the dangerous other -- beware the pressure cooker.

Talal al Rouki, a Saudi student in Michigan found the FBI suddenly surrounding his house. Officers said a woman had called them because she had seen him carrying a "bullet colored" pressure cooker out of his apartment.

The young man told the FBI he was cooking a traditional rice dish called the kabsah which he was taking to a friend's house.

"You need to be more careful moving around with such things, sir," an FBI agent told al Rouki.

Indian mothers need to be more careful too, in a jittery America. A Hawkins or Prestige brand pressure cooker has long been part of the must-have go-to-America-kit for any self-respecting desi student. The only question was how many liters -- 2, 3, 5? I never took one with me when I went there, not because my mother was extraordinarily foresighted but because she was sure I'd make an absent-minded mess of it without her on-the-spot supervision.

However, the hiss and whistle of a pressure cooker has always been the signature sound of apartment complexes filled with H1B families. "The whistle is not working" is a domestic crisis on par with a lost green card. In Kolkata, my abiding memory of Sunday morning, is the pressure cooker whistling in kitchens around the neighbourhood -- promising a Sunday lunch of goat curry and rice. In a country where it is hard for grown children to tell their mothers "I love you" and vice versa, we make do by asking "How many whistles?" the sharing of that pressure cooker wisdom as sure a sign of love as any Hallmark card.

The South Asian love affair with the pressure cooker is legendary though it was invented by a Frenchman. The blog TiffinCarrierAntiques hails the stainless steel workhorse of the Indian kitchen for being mother's little helper in managing the "patriarchal expectations of a 'complete Indian meal'" -- a fairly impossible task which "would have been Herculean without the humble pressure cooker."

Now, thanks to the brothers Tsarnaev, the workhorse of the Indian kitchen is being viewed as the Trojan horse of America, its hiss more ominous than comforting. Swati on the blog WhistlingPressureCooker.com remembers how the pressure cooker saved her during Hurricane Irene in 2011.

(W)hen the electricity failed and the shiny, contemporary convection stove and oven beneath it at my in-laws' house in Rhode Island were rendered useless, I cooked chicken tikka masala and rice in my pressure cooker over our tiny gas camping stove. Instead of ripening deli meat sandwiches made with stale bread, my in-laws and I ate a fresh, piping hot curry.

Now she writes of her dismay at the end of innocence as she sets her caramel custard in her trusty pressure cooker: "(T)hat a pressure cooker could be used for anything other than cooking tasty food fast had never crossed my mind. I now feel nervous professing my love for my pressure cookers, and pressure cookers in general, openly."

Swati might be well-advised to change the name of her blog before the FBI comes knocking at her door. But one could also argue the Swatis of the world have been in blissful denial. As Praveen Swami points out in Firstpost, the pressure cooker has been cooking terror for a long time:

In India, the Indian Mujahideen's urban terror networks have used pressure cookers on several occasions -- starting with the attack on Delhi's Sarojini Nagar market in 2005. Pressure cookers were also used in the 2006 attacks on a temple in Varanasi and the Mumbai's train system; again, they were used to in the recent Dilsukh Nagar bombing in Hyderabad. On other occasions, though, the group has used steel milk cans and flour-boxes.

But Indians take the pressure cooker's dark side in their stride. You can still get onto a bus or a train with your pressure cooker without everyone clearing the compartment.

In America it's a different story. But it should not come as a surprise. Soon after 9/11, the Shaikh family of Pennsylvania found secret agents in moon suits and gas masks going through the spice cabinets in their kitchen after neighbours spotted them carrying a large pot of biryani into their friend's home.

At that time I had written:

Multiculturalism was supposed to take care of this fear of the other. But despite Diwali greetings to Hindus from the White House and International Day at school, in the end, multiculturalism has proven to be just a cute, fancy dress party. If it has really made a dent on how we conceive what it means to be American, it hasn't trickled down to the Shaikh family's biryani... Multiculturalism might have made the foreign a little more familiar. It certainly did not make it any more American.

Now we find the pressure cooker has remained resolutely un-American as well -- the shining symbol of diversity that needs to be hidden at home, not carried out into the yard. Perhaps some enterprising pressure cooking enthusiast will embark on a Take Back the Pressure Cooker whistlestop tour of America to restore its lost shine.

Until then you have to careful moving around pressure cookers in America these days. Guns, not so much.

Another version of this blog first appeared on Firstpost.com.

Boston Marathon: A Runner Remembers

2013-04-16T11:35:10-04:00

Devesh Khatu ran the Boston Marathon twice -- once in 2009 and once in 2010.

This year he was not running it. But ever since the bombs went off at America's oldest and most iconic marathon, his phone and Facebook wall have been flooded with anxious messages.

Khatu once set himself a goal of 12 marathons in 12 months. His marathons have taken him all over the world -- London, Berlin, New York, Mumbai. But Boston, he says, is special.

"You have to qualify to be able to run in it," says Khatu, who lives in San Francisco. "Running it is considered an accomplishment. It's like, say, getting into Harvard Business School. Even non-runners know about it."

That's what makes the attack on the marathon so heartrending. That's what exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen does not get when she sneers on Twitter "Hey Americans! Don't cry like 9/11, #BostonMarathon is not like 9/11. Come live in South Asia, bombs are like everyday fireworks."

There's no point getting into a race-to-the-bottom competition of death tolls. The fact that many more were killed in Iraq on the same day as the bombs went off in Boston (and indeed on the day before and probably the day after) does not mitigate the tragedy of what happened in Boston any more than the daily gun violence in America's inner cities diminishes the horror of the Newtown elementary school shooting. A story about 30 members of an Afghan wedding party being killed by a U.S. bomb is making the rounds of social media as if it happened at the same time as the Boston attack. People forwarding it assume that, though it is actually from 2002. It does not excuse it. It's just this is not the time to discuss blowback, what America deserves or does not deserve or speculate about who might have done it. "People shouldn't jump to conclusions before we have all the facts," Obama rightly said. "But, make no mistake, we will get to the bottom of this."

Leave aside the iconic nature of the Boston Marathon, that it happens on a state holiday known as Patriots Day marking the battles of Lexington and Concord and is thus imbued with a sense of American-ness despite the runners who come from all over the world. There is just something "particularly devastating" about an attack on a marathon, writes Nicholas Thompson in the New Yorker:

It's an epic event in which men and women appear almost superhuman. The winning men run for hours at a pace even normal fit people can only hold in a sprint. But it's also so ordinary. It's not held in a stadium or on a track. It's held in the same streets everyone drives on and walks down. An attack on a marathon is, in some ways, more devastating than an attack on a stadium; you're hitting something special but also something very quotidian.

That's why the choice of a marathon as a bomber's target is so baffling. It's not a symbol of a country's pomp, military might or financial wealth. It's always been about the endurance of the human spirit. And it's been open to all in a way few sports are.

Khatu says he started running marathons in 2005 because he was very unathletic during school and college in India. His focus had always been on excelling in academia. But marathons seemed like a challenge he could take on. So many different kinds of people, many who had shown no aptitude for other sports, run the marathon.

"Few things compare to the sense of accomplishment that you feel after running the 26.2 miles to finish a marathon," he says.

That's pretty much what Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, said about it as well.

"If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon," she said.

Dave Zirin tells her story in a moving blog for The Nation about the Boston marathon. He mourns that now "(l)ike a scar across someone's face, the bombing will now be a part of the Boston Marathon."

But he writes that while you cannot ignore the scar, you have to remember it's "only a part" of the whole. Kathrine Switzer is also a part of that same story, disfigured as it might be now. In 1967 she snuck into the marathon by registering under the gender-neutral name of KV Switzer. But five miles into the race, an irate marathon director jumped off a truck and tried to force her to "get the hell out of (his) race." The men running with her fought him off.

That story is moving because it shows that race does not belong to anyone. It was not the marathon director's property and it's not the bombers' who tried to put their deadly stamp on it.

Zirin writes the bombing now "marks us" like a scar. "But like a scar, we may need to wear it proudly."

Khatu has changed his profile picture on Facebook to his runner's tag from the 2009 Boston marathon -- runner number 8130. "I vow to requalify and run Boston again," he says. Otherwise, as Switzer implies, you might as well lose faith in human nature.

A 5-Step Guide on How Not to Be a Sexist Politician

2013-04-08T15:26:53-04:00

Barack Obama has apologized for calling Kamala Harris "by far the best-looking attorney general in the country." This was AFTER he had already praised her as "tough," "fair," "brilliant" and "dedicated."

Political commentator Joan Walsh said the comment made her stomach turn.

Ms. Walsh must have a delicate stomach. Kamala Harris, who once said Obama "looked like a million bucks" is not complaining about his compliment. This is a storm in a very small teacup. Obama and Kamala Harris go back a long time. He was at an event where he was good-humoredly talking not just about Harris' looks but also how baseball great Jackie Robinson's widow looked "gorgeous" at 90. And face it, Harris, like Obama, is a very good-looking politician and cameras love both of them. Obama's compliment was NOT sexism and it's important to acknowledge that. The Indian newspaper the Telegraph bemoans in an editorial "This mix of political correctness and fantastical over-interpretation" which leads to a tendency "to miss the spirit of a certain manner of putting things because of misplaced earnestness about matters pertaining to gender, sexuality and race."

This isn't just political correctness run amok. It perpetuates every unfair stereotype of feminists as dour and humourless, trigger-happy about screaming "sexism" at the slightest opportunity.

That's not to say sexism cannot come dressed up in a compliment. This just wasn't one of those moments, but here are five simple commandments on how to avoid the sexism trap when you are a male politician who feels the need to charm a woman in public.

Thou shalt not call her "sweetie". Obama has, as one headline quipped, "an executive sweet" problem. In 2008, a female reporter from Detroit asked him a question about auto-workers. "Hold on one second there, sweetie," he replied. She was clearly not amused, especially when he didn't even answer the question. "This sweetie never did get an answer to the question," she said later. He also told a fan at a campaign stop, "Sweetie, if I start with a picture, I will never get out of here." Obama habitually calls Michelle "sweetie" which itself is slightly sickeningly sweet PDA. But that's between the president and his wife. General rule of thumb: The only person always allowed to say sweetie in public is a bored older waitress with a dyed bouffant at an all-night American diner who says, "And do you want coffee or orange juice with that, sweetie?"

Thou shalt not leap to her looks. This one seems very tricky for politicos to understand. It's one thing to tell your female friend, "Oh you are looking lovely tonight," at a social event. It's another thing to say the same to a colleague or, worse, a complete stranger who is just trying to do her job. When a journalist asks a question, she is expecting an answer, not a compliment about her wardrobe, her looks or her hairdo. Indian politician Sharad Yadav was once asked by a woman which state was doing better, Madhya Pradesh or Bihar. Yadav, trying to smartly duck the question, said, "Whole country is good." Then unable to stop himself, he added, "Even you are very beautiful." No wonder the man waxes eloquently in Parliament about the romance of stalking while his colleague complains about "painted and dented ladies."

Thou shalt not gush over her cooking first. Douglas Martin of the New York Times landed himself in hot water by leading his obituary of rocket scientist Yvonne Brill with the words, "She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from her work to raise three children. 'The world's best mom,' her son Matthew said." Brill was also the only woman doing rocket science in the 1940s and that was the reason why she even merited a New York Times obituary. Martin thought he was building up the drama, but he just needed to have asked himself if he would have ever begun the obit of a male nuclear scientist thus: "He grilled the perfect steak, always remembered his wife's birthday and made it a point to go to his son's football games." It's not rocket science.

Thou shalt not use ma-behen like a salt and pepper shaker. Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the state of Gujarat who wants to be India's next prime minister, lays on the ma-behen (mother-sister) thick when he talks about women, though he also once disparaged a cabinet minister's Rs 50 crore girlfriend. Talking to the businesswomen at a business summit, Modi even asked them to bless him because they were all mothers out there. During the rape debate, we heard over and over again from politicians oozing sincerity about how women were our mothers and sisters. "I find it offensive, because as citizens of this country or any other country, we are entitled to fundamental human rights that have bloody nothing to do with whether I am your sister or your mother or anybody," retorted Mallika Dutt, the executive director of the NGO Breakthrough at that time. Not to mention the fact, she pointed out, that "the home is often the most unsafe space for women."

Thou shalt not put women in binders. Mitt Romney, trying hard to put forth his pro-women credentials, put his foot in his mouth in the presidential debates by touting how as governor of Massachusetts he had "binders full of women." Poor Romney wanted to show off his outreach to women's groups but all he ended up doing was launch a thousand mocking Internet memes. Romney obviously meant to show off his interest in gender parity but as the Shortcuts blog on the Guardian pointed out, "He managed to conjure an image confirming every feminist's worst fears about a Romney presidency; that he views women's rights in the workplace as so much business admin, to be punched and filed and popped on a shelf."

By the way, in that same speech where he praised Kamala Harris' looks, Obama also singled out Asian-American congressman Mike Honda for a little friendly ribbing.

First of all, somebody who works tirelessly on behalf of California every day, but also works on behalf of working people and makes sure that we've got a more inclusive America -- a good friend of mine, somebody who you guys should be very proud of, Congressman Mike Honda is here. Where is Mike? (Applause.) He is around here somewhere. There he is. Yes, I mean, he's not like a real tall guy, but he's a great guy.

Now that is the president of the United States literally looking down on an Asian American man. At least he was complimenting Kamala Harris. Poor Honda just got the short end of the stick. Where is the Society of Height-Challenged Asian Men and Friends when you need them?

Another version of this blog originally appeared on Firstpost.com.

Hillary's Same-Sex Marriage Video: Too Late to the Party?

2013-03-20T13:53:17-04:00

In 1996 Bill Clinton signed the Defence of Marriage Act which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman, a signature that gay rights activist Michelangelo Signorile called "an indelible stain" on his presidency. Earlier this month, Bill recanted in an op-ed in the Washington Post. He said his motives had been noble. He actually wanted to protect lesbians and gays from a "constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which would have ended the debate for a generation or more." But he admitted the law itself had ended up being "discriminatory" and he urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn it.

Barely a week later, his wife Hillary came out in full-throated support of same-sex marriage via video. Gays and lesbians are "full and equal citizens and deserve the rights of citizenship. That includes marriage," she said in a five-plus minute video for the Human Rights Campaign.

This announcement was not regarded as a stroke of political hara kiri. Instead it's being interpreted as the opening salvo of a possible 2016 presidential bid. Democrats had once gone to their traditional constituencies -- unions, black churches and the NAACP, Latino groups -- to make the big speech that signaled higher political ambitions. Or they had made a foreign policy speech to give themselves some presidential gravitas.

Now wooing the LGBT community has emerged as the takeoff point for a presidential campaign. "I'm sure she's been there for awhile now, and politically it's imperative for a Democratic Presidential aspirant," Democratic consultant Steve Murphy told the Washington Post blog, The Fix.

This was not true, even four years ago.

When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, Proposition 8 was on the ballot in California. Candidate Obama walked a fine line. He opposed that proposition as "divisive and discriminatory" but didn't come out in favour of marriage equality. It was the classic Democrat gay dodge -- their version of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. If you asked them about marriage, they told you about civil unions. Obama didn't make any production out of his announcement either. He just stated his support for gay rights in a letter to the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club in San Francisco. That letter was simply read out at the club's annual breakfast meeting.

Hillary's splashy video shows that just as four years ago no American politician serious about running for high office could afford to publicly support same-sex marriage, now for a Democrat it has become a requirement. The video is, indisputably, a sign of how far America has come and how quickly. Yet it's also telling that the reaction to what once would have been seen as a landmark statement of moral courage, has ranged from a yawn -- "I kinda forgot that Hillary Clinton wasn't already for gay marriage," tweeted Josh Barro -- to outright snarky. "Outside the annual Christmas messages from Queen Elizabeth to the Commonwealth, you will struggle to see a more regal broadcast than the video of Hillary Clinton released today, announcing her conversion to the cause of gay marriage," sneered the blog Lexington's notebook on The Economist.

The problem isn't what Bill Clinton faced during the Don't Ask Don't Tell debacle when he tried to end the ban on gays in the military -- breast beating about the end of civilization and cultural wars. At the rate we are going, same-sex marriage might well become part of the "family values" platform soon. Hillary's problems lie elsewhere.

Timing, timing timing She has, as The Economist puts it, arrived "late to the wedding party." Several potential contenders for the Democratic ticket in 2016 have long been out about their support for same-sex marriage. Her successor as Secretary of State, John Kerry, is open about his support, and it was not an issue in his nomination. Her support is welcome but the video makes a big production out of something her supporters take for granted by now. Now even a conservative Republican senator, Rob Portman, has done a U-turn on the issue after his own son came out. The Republican National Committee has said his decision will not affect his financial support from the committee "at all."

Hiding in a video By issuing a video, rather than doing an interview, she sounds as if she doesn't want to deal with tricky questions like what she had meant in 2000 when she said "Marriage has got historic, religious, and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman." Hillary said, like many others, that her views have "evolved" on this issue. But a Rob Portman can point to a gay son for his change of heart. Barack Obama can say watching gay parents of his daughters' friends have changed his mind. Politicians look charmingly human and personable when they admit to learning from their children. But Hillary can hardly hide behind the long-supportive Chelsea. So she pointed vaguely (and rather self-importantly) instead to "people I have known and loved, by my experience representing our nation on the world stage, my devotion to law and human rights and the guiding principles of my faith."

The numbers game Her announcement now just feeds into the notion that she's being opportunistic because the numbers have changed. A Washington Post/ABC News poll shows support for marriage equality at a record 58 percent among Americans, up five points from even last year. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, that support climbs to 81 percent. As the Supreme Court weighs the issue, Signorile writes on The Huffington Post that with "mainstream America embracing gay rights," many in the Republican Party secretly hope that the Supreme Court will just "take the issue off the table entirely" by just "giving gays full equality."

Whatever happens with the court, two things are clear. The day of gays as whipping boys to rally the conservative vote is increasingly a strategy of diminishing returns. It also means that the fight against antiquated sodomy laws, whether in Washington, D.C. or in New Delhi, is inevitably the first step in a long journey towards equality in all spheres. And when that happens we can stop talking about gay marriage as if it was some special sub-species of marriage. It will just all be about marriage, as it should always have been.

Eat, Pray, Rape: The Swiss tourist and India's "unfortunate" image problem

2013-03-18T13:49:48-04:00

The gang-rape of the Swiss tourist in Orchha, Madhya Pradesh was front page news in newspapers across India. The reverberations of the shocking story were felt well outside India's borders. Even friends from as far away as California, emailed me the story.

But while going through the newspaper, it was an inside page that shocked me even more.

Under the headline of news about the Nation, there were eight stories. Six of them were about violence against women.

Apart from the rape of the Swiss tourist in Madhya Pradesh, a two-year-old girl was raped by a ward boy in Shajapur district in Madhya Pradesh while her mother was delivering another child. A villager heard the child's screams and rescued her.

A 16-year-old girl from Moradabad set herself on fire after being allegedly molested by three boys. She died on Saturday at Delhi's Safdarjung Hospital.

A 37-year-old woman who worked as a labourer got on a bus near Indore on Friday and was raped by the bus conductor, the driver and a passenger when it reached the terminal point. The passenger was allegedly drunk.

A 24-year-old researcher pursuing a Ph. D. in nanotechnology was found murdered in her lab in Agra with multiple stab wounds. Police said she had been tortured for about 30 minutes and are not ruling out sexual assault.

A 20-year-old girl died in Katni district in Madhya Pradesh when a youth whose marriage proposal had been rejected by her parents set her on fire. That was a sidebar to a story where Chief Justice of India Altamas Kabir warned against the "baying for blood" that is the "knee-jerk" reaction to these gangrapes.

Whether the media now has an unofficial "rape beat" or whether the December 16 Delhi gangrape has forced it to suddenly pay more attention to stories that were always there, one thing is tragically clear from this collection - rape is not an exceptional crime in this country. Nor is the harassment of women in public places.

"I feel like I'm living in a human zoo, a wandering attraction that invites attention, all of it unwanted," writes Sarah Elizabeth Webb in The Hindu. "I can't get up and move to a separate part of my cage to escape the negative attention because in my cage, there are no bars and the men simply follow." That column was written before the Swiss woman's rape, when the issue at hand was more about gaping and groping. But even Webb admits that for all the Hollywood stereotypes about the promiscuous Western woman "sexual harassment and sexual assault are not a unique experience to Western women in India." It happens "across the board."

The Swiss woman's rape, which made frontpage headlines, was remarkable only because the victim was a Swiss woman. Her story is nightmarish but not so rare. The Madhya Pradesh home minister Uma Shankar Gupta's bland bureaucratic response is predictable, pushing the blame, yet again, towards the victim.

She didn't follow the laws he said. As foreign tourists they were supposed to inform the police about their whereabouts. And he trotted out that same worn banal platitude that Manish Tewari of the Congress party had managed to come up with after the Delhi gangrape - "unfortunate".

"What happened is unfortunate for our nation," said Gupta.

The subtext is it is "unfortunate" for our nation because now our Eat, Pray, Love image abroad is turning into Eat, Pray, Rape. It is truly "unfortunate" because that crime is so unexceptional. The real shocker here is that this keeps happening over and over again, that even two-year-olds aren't safe in a hospital. It is unfortunate that even after all the outrage over the Delhi gangrape in a bus what looks like a copycat rape happens in another bus.

At least when it comes to follow-up, the Swiss woman is a little luckier than most. Her story became front-page news unlike the labourer in the Indore bus. An English-speaking academic was found to translate for the Swiss couple in the little town on whose outskirts she was raped. Six culprits have been quickly nabbed and the police say they have confessed to the crime.

Kader Khan, the main accused in a rape case from February 2012 in Kolkata is still missing though that trial is underway. No one has yet been arrested in the case of the three young sisters who were allegedly raped and thrown into the well in Bhandara.

Now a forensic report is contradicting the post-mortem report and saying the girls were not raped. Either way they are dead. And no one has been arrested. "The first day when we filed the complaint, the police didn't act on it," their mother told the media. "Had they looked for the girls, my girls would have been found."

It's not that the outrage over December 16 or the law the Indian cabinet is trying to thrash out in an all-party meeting will be a magic wand that will suddenly turn rape into a rare and exceptional crime. But if the reaction from the authorities to an allegation of rape is quick, decisive and stops blaming the victim, that will be more than a step forward.

We should not be ashamed about what happened to the Swiss woman because she was a foreigner. The real shame is that an entire page in the newspaper is filled with stories about violence against women, stories from across the board, from a 2-year-old to a labourer to a Ph. D. student. And those were only the ones that were reported over one weekend.

A version of this blog first appeared on Firstpost.com.

Diamonds Are Forever... British: Why Cameron Can't Give India Its Koh-i-noor

2013-02-22T12:50:23-05:00

Diamonds are forever, and they are for your EYES only.

So India, you can look but don't even dream about getting the Koh-i-noor back.

Instead David Cameron has given India a parting gift -- a post-colonial word -- returnism.

"I certainly don't believe in returnism, as it were," he said. "I don't think that's sensible."

The ever-helpful Cameron had a suggestion for what might be sensible.

"The right answer is for the British museum and other cultural institutions to do exactly what they do, which is to link up with other institutions around the world to make sure that the things which we have and look after so well are properly shared with people around the world."

One is not quite sure how they intend to "properly share" the Koh-i-noor with Indians. Could the Indian president wear it when he opens the next session of Parliament?

Anyway I don't think anyone is planning to ever loan the crown jewels to the erstwhile Jewel in the Crown.

But this "returnism," the misbegotten lovechild of colonialism, is interesting.

Returnism, as far as I can make out, translates into something like this. I steal your laptop. Then I get it a spiffy cover and upgrade your anti-virus protection. Then when you ask for it back, I say, "Sorry, I am keeping it. I just have too many files on it now. And look how well I maintained. I even ran a disk defragmenter on it. But hey, if you are in the neighbourhood, stop by any time and take a look for old times sake. "

Cameron, of course, has his own logic. He could not apologize for Jallianwala because he fears that once he goes down that route, the apology list would take up the rest of his term as prime minister. Similarly once he returns the Koh-i-noor, other countries might want bits of their heritage back.

"It is the same question with the Elgin Marbles," said Cameron as if that was a piece of unassailable British logic.

Whoa. It needs a certain chutzpah to justify one bit of imperial thievery with another bit of colonial skullduggery.

It's true that if Britain really did start giving everything that it acquired questionably back to the rightful claimants, that would leave it with very little of its own other than some John Constable paintings of the English countryside.

It does, however beg the question: how much of the British Museum is really British?

The list of things affected by "returnism" would be long -- Koh-i-noor, Elgin Marbles, Benin bronzes, Ashanti regalia, the Rosetta Stone.

The Brits are not alone of course. There's the Nefertiti bust in Berlin, Priam's treasure in Russia, large chunks of the Louvre.

But that does not mean "returnism" does not happen. The Louvre returned frescoes to Egypt. The Musee de l'Homme in Paris returned the Hottentot Venus to South Africa. The Kankaria mosaics were returned to the Orthodox Church in Cyprus after a court case in Indianopolis. The Met returned the Euphronius Krater to Italy in exchange for the right to display some comparable artifacts. And of course, all the art plundered during the Holocaust is supposed to be returned to the original owners. The Nazis, infamously, had special departments to seize and secure objects of cultural value. But it's worth remembering that the Germans weren't the only ones doing the looting. The Allies did their bit as well.

Of course, Britain's problem is, it cannot even do a cultural swap. What could it claim from its old colonies in lieu of the Koh-i-noor? It's not like it could take back cricket.

Cameron might like to pretend that the United Kingdom is the guardian of the world's treasures. The fact is colonizers took them because that was a way they could project their power over their subjects. As Napoleon boasted after pillaging Italy, "We now have all that is beautiful in Italy except for a few objects in Turin and Naples."

And how much these guardians of the world's heritage truly guard them was clear to all when the Americans and British stood by after the toppling of Saddam Hussein and allowed the National Museum of Iraq to be looted. However they showed far more alacrity about securing the building of the Ministry of Oil.

As far as the Koh-i-noor goes, the diamond does have a checkered history and there are many claimants to it. In fact, "there could be other claimants besides the government of India if the 'it-belonged-to-me-before-you' principle is taken to its logical conclusion," says an editorial in the Economic Times. It suggests, however, that if the economic downturn in Britain gets worse, they may have to resort to selling "the family silver, not to mention the crown jewels." So India may yet get back the Koh-i-noor.

But India also would need to get its act together. After all, Vishwa Bharati managed to lose Rabindranath Tagore's Nobel medal because the security personnel were busy watching an Indo-Pak cricket match on television while thieves broke into the museum.

Until then, however we could come up with our own term to match Cameron's returnism. How does Kohinoorism sound, Mr. Cameron?

Another version of this blog originally appeared on Firstpost.com.

A Sorry Apology: David Cameron at Jallianwala Bagh

2013-02-20T14:34:30-05:00

David Cameron thinks that the massacre that happened at Jallianwala Bagh in India was a "deeply shameful event in British history."

In my condolence book, that's as close to a ringing apology as you can expect from a sitting British Prime Minister for the massacre of 1919.

Certainly Cameron sounds a lot more diplomatic than Prince Philip who claimed that he'd heard the death toll had been exaggerated. And he even sounds a little more contrite than Queen Elizabeth who called it a "difficult episode" but then briskly moved on saying "history cannot be rewritten".

Cameron, by contrast, came perilously close to an actual apology. Andrew Buncombe, Asia correspondent for The Independent tweeted out a photograph of what Cameron actually wrote in the condolence book.

This was a deeply shameful event in British history - one that Winston Churchill rightly described at the time as "monstrous".
We must never forget what happened here. And in remembering we must ensure that the United Kingdom stands up for the right of peaceful protest around the world.

It almost sounds like an apology until you realize there is many a slip between mea culpa and stiff upper lip.

Most Indians remember that massacre through its depiction on screen by another Britisher - Richard Attenborough in Gandhi. While Attenborough didn't flinch from depicting the horror of the massacre, he also gave his British audiences some face-saving cover. General Dyer's toughest questions come from another British official.

"General, how does a child shot with a 303 Lee-Enfield 'apply' for help?" the government advocate cuttingly asks the unrepentant Dyer.

Cameron, in effect, did an Attenborough. He shielded his country from the shame of Jallianwalah Bagh with a little help from another Britisher. This time, that old warhorse, Winston Churchill rode to his country's rescue almost half a century after his own death. By bringing up Churchill, then the Secretary of War, and the most pugnacious British prime minister ever, Cameron was actually saying, don't judge us by Jallianwalah Bagh. Right-thinking Britishers were just as horrified.

It is true that General Dyer was asked to step down and he did face an inquiry. But Cameron, while happy to single out his fellow Tory Winston Churchill who incidentally also vehemently opposed India's independence, didn't condemn or even mention the huge support Dyer enjoyed among other British who thought of him as Rudyard Kipling did as "the man who saved India." They raised 26,000 pounds sterling for his benefit. A women's committee presented him a sword of honour as the "Saviour of the Punjab." Brigadier-General Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab called Dyer's use of force "justified."

Bringing up any of that would have disturbed the convenient narrative that makes Dyer the rotten apple and neatly sidesteps the far more unpalatable truth. As Gandhi said after Jallianwalah Bagh " We think it is time that you recognised that you are masters in someone else's home. Despite the best intentions of the best of you, you must, in the nature of things, humiliate us to control us. General Dyer is but an extreme example of the principle."

In his second presidential campaign Obama had to defend himself against charges that he went on "an apology tour" of the Middle East. That was not true as CNN pointed out. Obama never did actually apologize for anything. But he did say in a 2009 speech in Strasbourg, that "there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." Obama, at least, was taking a certain amount of national responsibility. Cameron, on the other hand, is effectively saying "Dyer bad. Britain good."

Though he underlines that we must never forget what happened here, he also presents the United Kingdom as the kind of country that "stands up for the right of peaceful protest around the world." Even here he adroitly shifts the language from Britain which carries all the baggage of empire to United Kingdom, a far more neutral entity that can stay at arms length from the more inconvenient burdens of history.

Jallianwalah Bagh actually exposed the brutal face of colonialism at its most naked. David Cameron with his "apology" has clothed it once again with a sense of basic British decency.

Cameron didn't have to come to Amritsar. India is not holding its breath for a British apology nor does it hold Cameron personally accountable for 94-year-old atrocities. Cameron has come to India to do sell the new Britain and its arms. But once he actually took the trouble to go to the memorial he might have found time to say something, meet with the descendants of the survivors. Instead all we have is his comment in the condolence book at Amritsar that is cleverly making a pitch for Britain the Good even as he was apparently expressing his condolences for those who were its historic victims.

At the same time, pictures of Cameron with his head covered at the Golden Temple and his head bowed at Jallianwala Bagh cannot but go down well with ethnic audiences back at home. Buncombe writes in The Independent that "Mr. Cameron is known to be keen to attract more potential voters for the Conservatives from Britain's ethnic minorities, of whom 300,000 to 700,000 are British Sikhs."

Cameron might think of his act as a statesman-like win-win but if one reads between the lines of the British prime minister's message in the condolence book, one realises it was all a slick sleight-of-hand - a sales pitch dressed as a condolence message.

The original version of this blog appeared on Firstpost.com.

Goodbye Wrestling: How the IOC Betrayed Its Olympic Soul

2013-02-13T09:27:19-05:00

Let me admit off the bat that I am not the world's biggest wrestling fan. Nor do I stay up till odd hours of the night to watch the Olympics live. But even I can tell that tossing wrestling out of the Olympics program is terribly unjust.

Wrestling deserves a place in the Olympics because it is truly an Olympic sport.

That is why it has been part of the games from the very beginning. It did not have to get a "modern" avatar the way pentathlon did. It's primal. It's physical. It's about real person-to-person contact. As a friend put it, it is about how humanity grapples with itself. "The art of living is more like that of wrestling than dancing," Marcus Aurelius once said. "The main thing is to stand firm and be ready for unseen attack."

Who would have thought the "unseen attack" on the sport itself would come from the very body that's charged with preserving the Olympic spirit?

Wrestling got booted out of the Olympics programme after four rounds of voting.

In the end, eight members voted against wrestling. Three voted against field hockey. Three against the modern pentathlon. One of those board members was Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., the son of the imperious former IOC president and incidentally the current vice president of the international governing body of the modern pentathlon. "There's a stench of something unsavory here," writes Reid Redgrave on Fox Sports. "It feels like another politically motivated decision by the most political organization in sports."

"It's a black day for Indian as well as world wrestling," said Mahabali Satpal, the coach of Indian wrestlers Sushil Kumar and Yogeshwar Dutt.

Actually it's a black day for the Olympic games. The Olympics symbol is of five interlocking rings. When Baron Pierre de Coubertin designed it he said those colours, along with the white background, reproduced the colours of the flags of all the nations that took part in the games at that time. "Here is truly an international symbol," he said.

Wrestling, unlike wushu or the modern pentathlon, actually lives up to that symbol. It's represented in 180 countries. In 2012, 29 countries won medals in 11 wrestling medal events. The medal roll call reads like the United Nations -- Russian Federation, Japan, Iran, Azerbaijan, India, Armenia, Hungary, Cuba etc.

The modern pentathlon's six medals went largely to Europe -- Czech Republic, Lithuania, Great Britain, Hungary. China and Brazil stood in for the rest of the world. Incidentally, nine of the board members of the IOC are from Europe, though none are from Russia.

The modern pentathlon might have been modern when it was invented a century ago. No longer. It still remains a sport that is all about the skills you need to be a 19th-century European cavalry officer. You don't hear about a child who dreams of being a modern pentathlete. But they do dream about becoming a wrestler and winning an Olympic gold.

"Lot of youngsters were taking up the sport, especially after our success at the London Games," Sushil Kumar told the Times of India. "But now the blow will take the sport backward in India." "We are targeting the 2016 Rio Olympics but there are other young wrestlers who are preparing for the next edition. What about them?" asked Yogeshwar Dutt, who won a bronze at London. There is no cavalry riding to their rescue.

The decision to drop wrestling as an Olympic sport is about a committee snubbing its nose at a sport that has drawn young people of less than privileged backgrounds, from small towns and villages, with little fancy equipment. "Buy a singlet and start rolling. Sure, there's training involved, yet that's true of any sport. Compare the costs and availability to yachting, which again somehow remains a core event," writes Filip Bondy in the New York Daily News.

Depriving those young men (and women) from almost two hundred countries of a shot at the Olympic dream to save the not-so-modern pentathlon reeks of snobbery and opens the IOC to charges of racism. Talking about vote politics between Fila, the international wrestling federation and the IOC, a senior official at the Wrestling Federation of India added darkly, "Also Asians were winning medals in Olympics, especially in the lower weights."

The Olympic Committee weighs all kinds of factors when it makes the difficult decision about what to axe and what to keep. That includes ticket sales, anti-doping policy and television ratings. "The IOC should seek sports that care about the Olympics, not just jamming popular TV sports into the Olympic system and pretending it's the same thing," writes Dan Wetzel on Yahoo. He is correct. Leave aside the modern pentathlon. Golf should never have made it into the 2016 Olympics in the first place. No golfer's, or for that matter tennis player's, ultimate career dream is winning an Olympic gold.

In wrestling, an Olympic medal actually matters. That is the ultimate dream of some young man from some dusty village like Baprola. That's his ticket to a Mountain Dew endorsement. That propels him to being the flag bearer for his nation at the Games.

But the elimination of wrestling hurts not just wrestlers but the spirit of the Games itself. When American Jordan Burroughs won the men's 74 Kg wrestling gold in 2012, the man he defeated was Iran's Sadegh Goudarzi. It was supposed to be the great America-Iran showdown on the mat. After his victory Burroughs tweeted out a picture of himself with Goudarzi with their arms around each other. "Who says Iran and America don't get along? Maybe I should be president," he joked.

Don't hold your breath for that Olympic moment on the modern pentathlon medal podium.

"It's not a case of what's wrong with wrestling," said IOC spokesman Mark Adams soothingly. "It's what's right with the 25 core sports."

He is right in a way. It is not a case of what is wrong with wrestling. It's a case of what is terribly wrong with the International Olympic Committee.

There is petition to save wrestling as an Olympic sport you can sign here.

Another version of this blog originally appeared on Firstpost.com.

The Not-So-Unbearable Loneliness of Being Jodie Foster

2013-01-15T10:03:17-05:00

At the Golden Globe awards, lifetime honoree Jodie Foster revealed something a Bollywood celebrity would never, ever 'fess up to.

She came out.

Not as a lesbian. I mean she did come out as a lesbian. Well, sort of, without saying those actual words. It was a "I am not necessarily lesbian but my (ex)girl friend is" kind of coming out.

What really moved me was that she came out as "lonely." On her big night, in front of a cheering crowd, on the day all the stars of Hollywood were embracing her.

It was not a sort of lonely-at-the-top bravado. Or even a poor little rich kid self pity. It was just plain darn run-of-the-mill lonely.

"Jodie Foster was here, I still am, and I want to be seen, to be understood deeply and to not be so very lonely."

That, to me, was a much truer expression of vulnerability than the actual coming out which was laced with nervous start-stop humor, teasing the audience, letting them in on the joke, all wink wink nudge nudge.

But I'm just going to put it out there, right? Loud and proud, right? So I'm going to need your support on this.

I am single. Yes I am, I am single. No, I'm kidding -- but I mean I'm not really kidding, but I'm kind of kidding. I mean, thank you for the enthusiasm.

As many columnists have already said, at one time it would have really mattered if Jodie Foster had come out. That's when Absolutely Queer activists were plastering her picture all over town in order to push her out of the closet. That was in the 1980s. She was a big star, young, Oscar-worthy, going places. Chances are, few people have thought much about Jodie Foster's sexuality in the last five years.

In fact, this was not her coming out party. She acknowledged her then-partner Cydney Bernard back in 2007 at an industry breakfast. It made no waves in the mainstream. Foster's part of a new breed of gay celebs who live in what's called the "glass closet." They say they need to never officially come out because they were never in the closet per se.

Advocate magazine pooh poohs that as a cop out, plain and simple. Editor Matthew Breen wrote back in 2011 that just being out to family and friends is not enough:

"(I)f you are a person in the public eye and you refuse to say you're LGBT in a public forum, you're unequivocally not out. Yes, you have a different standard than the nonfamous."

When you do eventually wander out of the glass closet, as Jodie Foster did at the Golden Globes, you open yourself up to eye-rolling ridicule, writes Michelangelo Signorile on The Huffington Post:

"It was another example of the new way celebrities are coming out, embarrassed in 2013 to have ever been in the closet and claiming that they have always been out."

Indeed it is 2013 and as Foster herself said, change, you gotta love it.

A British prime minister from the Conservative Party, tells his party "I don't support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I'm a Conservative." Meanwhile in the sanctum sanctorum of liberal America, a ballroom full of Hollywood types at the Beverly Hilton is moved to tears by the "courage" of a 50-year-old Oscar-winning actress sort of announcing her sexual orientation to the world (alongside her retirement.)

Foster's version of coming out seems almost anachronistic, a sort of misty-eyed valentine to the way things were.

But it was a different kind of coming out, ground-breaking in its own way. When people choose to come out, as opposed to being outed, it's usually to present some kind of a Norman Rockwell picture of well-adjusted normative happiness -- perhaps a lovely partner, twins on the way, a Golden Retriever. Or they do it as a noble act of social service -- being out there for depressed teens being gay-bashed in school.

There was nothing particularly out and proud about Foster's coming out. That was what seemed puzzling. She didn't seem relieved to not have a deep dark secret anymore. She didn't want to show off a lovely wife, though she extolled the ex as BFF and soul-sister. She just looked rather lonely, standing there in the middle of a very supportive audience. It was a postscript more than a statement. There was a certain ache in her confession.

Yeah, she's gay and she's 50 and she's lonely. Like a lot of other people out there, gay or not. And in 2013, that's just the way it is.

If there's one lesson from that Golden Globes speech for other celebs who live in glass closets, it's this -- it's OK not to come out as shiny happy gay or flag-waving activist gay. You can just come out as Jodie Foster gay.

Another version of this blog first appeared on the Indian news portal Firstpost.com.

What One 23-year-old Gang Rape Victim Taught Us

2012-12-29T09:59:59-05:00

She was 23. She came from Ballia from Eastern Uttar Pradesh in India. She was a paramedical student. On December 16, she thought she was boarding a bus in Delhi. But in fact, she was boarding a nightmare. That nightmare has ended in a hospital in Singapore.

That is all we really know about her. And out of that much we have to construct an obituary for her. The media gave her names. Nirbhay. Damini. Amanat. But as Nilanjana Roy writes on her blog, "Don't tell me her name; I don't need to know it to cry for her."

In all the stories about the 23-year-old rape victim as India's Braveheart, it's worth remembering this. She had no intention to be a braveheart. She didn't want to become a flickering candle on some dark street corner. She didn't want to become a symbol. Of sorrow. Of hope. Of our shame. Of anything really. Those are all identities we have given her. She just wanted to go home. Perhaps tell a friend what she thought of the movie she had just seen.

Doctors will argue whether it was wise to have shifted such a critically ill patient to another country. Stories have already been doing the rounds that the move was prompted more by politics than by medical needs.

I have no patience with those who say we must do this or we must do that so that she will have not died in vain.

Because she did die in vain.

It was a pointless, brutal, terrible death. She should never have been on death's door just because she boarded a bus to go home. But in death she left us with some lessons about ourselves. These were lessons she did not teach us, but we learned them anyway. Hopefully.

We learned that it's an exercise in futility to try and assign a hierarchy to rape as if one rape is more deserving of attention than the other. It's a recipe for doing nothing. Let's not question why this jolted us more than other rapes now. Let's be thankful we are capable of being jolted.

We learned that it is possible to shake a country out of its apathy. The tragedy was that it took an assault as gut-wrenchingly brutal as this one. We found out that young people do care, that compassion has not just been outsourced to NGOs.

We learned that if enough people raise their voices a government cannot ignore them. Whether they are effective or not, the flurry of measures announced by the government counts for something.

We learned that safety is not about what women do, wear or when they go out. It's about what men around them do. It's no point making up rules that circumscribe women's movement in order to keep them safe. Because rape can happen at home as well.

We also learned that there will be no miracle solution even if we are hungry for one. Even as the nation was rocked by protests over her gangrape, other women were raped. A journalist in Delhi reporting on this very story was "eve-teased" by a group of young men in a car. Another young woman in Patiala hanged herself because the police had not acted on her complaint. An MP dismissed the protesters as "painted and dented women."

Last night at a book launch in Kolkata, film critic Samik Bandyopadhyay was talking about his experience of being on a board that advised the censor board in the seventies. He said one of the most horrific parts of that job was seeing a three-hour reel of censored clips from all kinds of films, all strung together without any context. He said over 50 percent of them, perhaps more, showed a woman lying on the ground and a group of men surrounding her. The scenes were all shot from very low. You could just see the lower halves of the bodies of the men, thrusting and advancing, and the woman on the ground. They were not necessarily touching her. Yet. But they kept moving towards her, in a group, in a pack, in a sort of horrifying menacing war dance.

The larger question that must haunt us is this: what is it about us that makes us so prone not just to rape but to gangrape? Why has that become the weapon of choice for men to exert power whether its over a woman in bus or a boy in a hostel?

There will be many articles, seminars, panels to address all this in days to come.

But for now let's just remember this: The young woman who died just wanted to live. She wanted to go home after seeing The Life of Pi.

In that film, one learns that there can be two versions of one story. And it is up to us to choose the better one. It is not necessarily the one with the happier ending. It does not have to be the truer one. But we choose it because it is the one that allows us to go on.

The 23-year-old rape victim's life ended at a Singapore hospital yesterday. It's up to us now to choose how her story will end.

It could end in a hail of stones and water cannons. It could end in lynching mobs and rapists who are stoned to death. It could end in recriminations about how we care because this is a middle class girl and not a lower caste woman gathering firewood.

Or it could end in a push for justice which one hopes will have a far more long-lasting impact than vengeance.

She is gone. She fought hard. And now she can rest in peace. She has earned that right many times over. But we have not.

Another version of this blog originally appeared on the Indian news portal Firstpost.com.

Ravi Shankar Was India's Columbus (And a Damn Good-Looking One)

2012-12-12T15:40:10-05:00

Ravi Shankar was our Columbus. While one explorer came looking for India, the other took India to the world. Perhaps that's why it's only fitting, that though I grew up in India, the first time I saw him perform was not in India, but at the Kremlin in Moscow.

I was no classical music connoisseur, just a callow student, part of an Indian youth delegation and he was performing with a Russian folk ensemble and the Moscow chamber orchestra. I remember the draughty, rather dreary hotel dining room, the cold windy Red Square and the rickety Aeroflot airplanes. But most of all I remember the Kremlin vibrating with Ravi Shankar's Shanti Mantra.

For my generation, growing up with Ravi Shankar was a given. Even when we were not aware of it, he was part of a musical score of our lives. You didn't have to be a classical music enthusiast to encounter the man. He was the Discovery of India in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. He was the sound of Apu and Durga skipping through fields of waving grass in Satyajit Ray's classic film Pather Panchali. He was the theme music that signalled our televisions coming to life every morning at a time when we only had one channel.

It was only while putting together a 90th birthday tribute for the man for India Abroad magazine that I actually had to stop and think about how unique this man was in a country blessed with so many masterful musicians. Now with his death many will remember his musical legacy. But at that time speaking with friends and colleagues and collaborators from around the world, I was able to get a glimpse of the amazing man behind the music.

He was truly a musician's hero. "I remember as small children we would play a game where I would say 'I am Ravi Shankar,' another fellow would say 'I am Allah Rakha (the famous tabla player)' and then we would pretend to go on stage and have people clap," chuckled Grammy-winning mohan veena master Vishwa Mohan Bhatt.

Most artistes at the pinnacle of their careers become a sort of hologram of themselves, playing it safe, collecting their honorary degrees and setting up schools. Ravi Shankar somehow retained a child's twinkle and curiosity for the world outside. "I remember he finished a concert 15 minutes early to rush back to watch the final episode of Mod Squad. That's the child in him that keeps his music fresh," said tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, the son of Allah Rakha. "You become younger when you are with him," laughed dancer Tanusree Shankar who was married to Shankar's musician nephew Ananda. "I can just hear him say 'Tell me some gossip.'" Conductor David Murphy, founder of Sinfonia Verdi, joked he was called Pundit because of his propensity for bad puns. Cellist Barry Philips who assisted Ravi Shankar in the composition of pieces for Mstislav Rostropovich agreed. "He would ask me what voice I sang in," he recalled. "The answer was of course, barry-tone." Once when Philips and he were traveling to France for a performance with Rostropovich, Ravi Shankar asked him to get a sandwich but the bread was really hard."And he started singing like Bob Dylan -- 'it's hard, hard..'" laughed Philips.

The anecdotes sound cute - the musical giant as a playful pixie. But that was the genius of Ravi Shankar beyond the raw talent. His music could speak to laypersons or westerners who had little knowledge of laya and taal. And his puckish charm allowed him to connect in ways others could not.

Also it didn't hurt that he was so damn good-looking.

Mark Kidel who directed the documentary, Between Two Worlds, about Ravi Shankar remembered touring the new Ravi Shankar Foundation with him in New Delhi. "He pointed out the building overlooked a girls' school," said Kidel. "(His wife) Sukanya said he would be looking there all the time." His niece, dancer and actress Mamata Shankar said her uncle was "terribly glamorous." She remembered going to visit him at his home in San Diego once. They went down to the farmers market together to buy some vegetables. "Kaka (uncle) was at his peak then. Young people recognized him and it was a crazy scene. People started getting him to sign autographs on whatever they could find - paper plates and cups. They ran out of paper plates, I think."

The glamour and accolades that followed Ravi Shankar made him a rock star among musicians. He has been accused of being a little too much of a showman, not enough of a purist. "The west gave him recognisability, riches, popularity," said Zakir Hussain. "But he also learned to present Indian art from the west, which is the master of presentation. He learned how to break it down without watering it down." "People don't realise the tremendous sacrifice musicians like him and Ali Akbar Khan made to spread our music around the world," said tabla guru Swapan Chaudhuri, the director of percussion at the Ali Akbar College of Music. "Remember he had played for 40 years in India. He did not need to leave. But he made the way smoother for the next generation. We are enjoying their fruits."

There are sportsmen, actors, singers who keep doing what they do, long past their prime, because they are afraid to stop or no one will tell them that their glory days are behind them. But even as Ravi Shankar grew frail, his love for performance felt undimmed. "I always want to do more and cannot rest on my laurels," he said in an email interview when he turned 90. "My mind is still very young. Gradual slowing down of energy level is my only complaint." The last time I saw him he could not sit cross-legged on the stage anymore. He tired a little quicker. The sitar was smaller. Sanjay Sharma built that sitar for him, just as his father Riddhi Ram, and before that his grandfather Rikhi Ram had done. He reduced the size by ten inches, put in guitar tuners instead of pegs. But with his frozen left shoulder, Ravi Shankar still found it hard to hold the sitar. So Sharma went to the Home Depot departmental store and got some things to build him a stand that allowed him to keep his left hand free. "He was so happy. He said, ' Your father was good. You are brilliant,'" said Sharma.

Sharma actually did an MBA and thought of becoming a chartered accountant. Then Ravi Shankar told him a story about a tabla legend who worked for All India Radio. When he went to get his check, he could not sign for it because he was illiterate. The accountant laughed at him and asked how come he had not even learned to write his name. The man replied "How many people are there like you? Millions. How many tabla masters are there like me?" "Panditji said there is only one Riddhi Ram's. This is a fine art. You must learn it from your father. So I did," said Sharma.

There was -- and is -- only one Ravi Shankar. I remember seeing an article in an American newsweekly on the 25th anniversary of Woodstock. Under the heading of Where Are They Now they gave quick updates on what the main players at Woodstock were doing currently. For Ravi Shankar it simply said "whereabouts unknown." I had laughed then at the ignorance and laziness of some editorial intern who didn't know that the maestro was still busy touring the world even if he was not playing at pop concerts.

Now, I'd like to think that the Pandit Ravi Shankar has not really gone. He is still out there somewhere. Whereabouts unknown.

Another version of this blog first appeared on the Indian news portal Firstpost.com.

Royal Hoax: Let's Not Make Scapegoats Out of Pranksters

2012-12-11T13:52:11-05:00

This is shaping up to be one royal mess. Nurse Jacintha Saldanha is dead. The Australian radio hosts behind the prank call to the hospital say they are "shattered, gutted, heartbroken." Apologies are flying all around and the share price of Southern Cross Media, the owner of the radio station, dropped almost 6 percent. What started out as a silly prank by radio hosts to try and call the Duchess of Cambridge's hospital room has unexpectedly become a moment of truth for a media that cares only about ratings and rides roughshod over feelings.

"Where is the line, it keeps moving. I think this is the line," said The Most FM's ex-station manager Dave Haskell.

Except, is this really the prank that crossed the line?

In the long dishonour roll of egregious radio pranks and out-of-line shock jocks, Michael Christian and Mel Greigs's now-infamous hospital call is pretty mild stuff. In fact, they didn't imagine it would go anywhere beyond the hospital reception desk. Mel Greig said, "We thought it was such a silly idea and the accents were terrible, and not for a second did we expect to speak to Kate, let alone have a conversation with anyone at the hospital. We wanted to be hung up on." Honestly, can one really imagine Her Majesty Elizabeth II getting on the phone herself to call a hospital switchboard?

Even when they got through to Kate's ward, the hosts didn't go berserk, make double entendres about the pregnant princess, or mock her morning sickness.

American vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin fared much worse when a Canadian prankster called her up on a radio show pretending to be Nicolas Sarkozy. Poor Palin fell hook line and sinker, leading to memorable exchanges like this one.

FAKE SARKOZY: Exactly, we could go try hunting by helicopter like you did. I never did that. Like we say in France, (says long French-sounding phrase).
GOV. PALIN: Well, I think we could have a lot of fun together as we're getting work done. We could kill two birds with one stone that way.
FAKE SARKOZY: I just love killing those animals, mm mm, taking away life, that is so fun. I would really love to go as long as we don't bring vice president Cheney, haha.
GOV. PALIN: No, I'll be a careful shot, yes.

And then this:

FAKE SARKOZY: I must say, Gov. Palin, I love the documentary they made on your life - you know, Hustler's "Nailin' Palin."
GOV. PALIN: Oh good, thank you.
FAKE SARKOZY: That was really edgy.

The line between humour and obnoxiousness is a fine one. Shock jocks and radio pranksters are constantly stepping over it because they have to keep outdoing each other. Generating outrage is part of the job description.

So Australian radio host Kyle Sandilands felt free to shoot his mouth off about India last year calling it a "shit hole" and taking potshots at the Ganges. That caused the usual flurry of protests, which Sandilands no doubt lapped up. Every time he can get people up in arms about something he spews, he can pat himself on the back for a job well done. Then there was the Kiwi television commentator who had himself in stitches deliberately mispronouncing the name of Indian politician Sheila Dikshit triggering a Ministry of External Affairs protest about his "bigoted views."

But even Sandilands and Henry were bland fare compared to the singing deejays at New York City's Hot 97 (WQHT-FM). After the 2004 Christmas tsunami, the DJs thought it would be very funny to sing this ditty to the tune of "We Are the World":

There were Africans drowning, little Chinamen swept away, you could hear God laughing, 'Swim you bitches, swim.' So now you're screwed, it's the tsunami you better run or kiss your ass away, go find your mommy, I just saw her float by, a tree went through her head and now your children will be sold to child slavery...

There is obviously a certain power and an adrenalin rush that the microphone confers, which is really tempting to abuse. Sometimes it's satire that goes over the edge like a 1926 BBC broadcast about angry jobless workers on a looting rampage through London. The announcer claimed that Big Ben had fallen, leading to immense panic among listeners. Sometimes it's the gullibility of the listening audience, like those who tuned in to a radio dramatization of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds in 1938 and thought the United States had actually been invaded by Martians.

Radio hosts play pranks not because they have not outgrown their sophomoric ways but because audiences take great delight seeing some hapless soul be the butt of the joke that everyone else is in on. Ryan Seacrest in his KIIS-FM radio show has a segment called R"yan's Roses" where a woman (and it's usually a woman) who thinks her partner is cheating on her calls in. The show calls up the man and pretends to be a florist who offers him a dozen roses to be sent to any woman he likes. Then everyone listens to see who the "winner" chooses. Jim Moret, chief correspondent for the Inside Edition writes:

Now that is a gag with a potential for a nightmarish conclusion. Imagine what an enraged man or woman might do during their first encounter with their partner after being caught on the air and publicly humiliated? Luckily, and somewhat amazingly, nothing horrible has happened, yet.

So let's face it. All this holier-than-thou finger-wagging about a prank too far isn't going to change who we are as human beings. "Exploitation and humiliation are the biggest money-makers other than sex. Prank calls are not going to stop," said radio shock jock Iain Stables. It's pointless to try and make Michael Christian and Mel Greig the scapegoats for our secret pleasure in these candid camera moments. They were immature pranksters whose prank royally misfired. That does not make them criminals.

If anything, the fact that someone even conceived of this prank shows the audience's unending appetite for tidbits from the royal table, even if it's about a princess with morning sickness. That's what's really nauseating about the whole joke especially given that this is a family where another princess died in a tunnel in a speeding car trying to get away from the intrusive lens of the paparazzi. Now that was media at its most cruel. Greig and Christian were merely juvenile.

A version of this blog first appeared on Firstpost.com.

The End of the Culture War? The Real Winner of Elections 2012

2012-11-08T08:34:27-05:00

In 1992, I was a fresh-off-the-boat graduate student in the US.

Bill Clinton was running for president against George H.W. Bush. Ross Perot was acting as the third wheel. It was the first presidential campaign I was witnessing and an exciting one. But the person who stopped me in my tracks was a former Nixon speechwriter named Patrick Buchanan. At the Republican National Convention he sounded the clarion call for a cultural war for the "soul of America."

He laid out the battlefields on which that war would be fought.

Abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units.

And he made it clear, in his trademark snarl, what he thought of the other side. The Democrats had just had their convention in New York City.

Like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball up at Madison Square Garden, where 20,000 liberals and radicals came dressed up as moderates and centrists in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.

Buchanan's war to save America's soul has consumed America's soul over the last two decades. Liberals have been on the defensive, in the political closet about their values. It was just accepted that no matter what you thought about same-sex marriage you couldn't really say it out loud on the campaign trail. That would be political suicide. You said you were for a woman's right to choose and then you hoped no one would push you on it in a debate. You called America a country built by immigrants and then prayed you would not actually have to take a stand on immigration reform.

On November 6, 2012, that cultural war crashed on its face.

It was not just because Obama won re-election. It's because Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor who took on big banks and rapacious lenders won in Massachusetts. It's because Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were trounced because they didn't realize you could actually have pro-life views that would be considered too extreme even by pro-life voters. It's because Washington state voted to legalise and tax marijuana. It's because Tammy Baldwin, openly lesbian, defeated a former governor of Wisconsin and a Bush cabinet member to become a senator.

"Ten years ago, when George W. Bush's storm troopers were going around the country lighting the fires of a lynch mob mentality against gays, lesbians and transgenders, Baldwin had no hope in hell of winning a senate election anywhere in the US," writes K.P. Nayar in The Telegraph. Warren's election, he writes, "was proof that 'liberal' is not a dirty word in America any longer".

In 1993 Clinton administration stumbled badly trying to allow lesbians and gays to serve openly in uniform. They came up with the misbegotten compromise of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Obama repealed it with scarcely a whimper of protest. That repeal was not even an issue in this campaign.

Did Obama quietly put something in the water that turned the country liberal? Not really.

Actually it was not even about Obama. It was about the Malias and Sashas of America. Obama said his children and their friends were the reason he changed his mind about same-sex marriage.

Amy Davidson writes in the New Yorker blog:

Sasha and Malia are part of a generation for whom respect for gay marriage is not an act of rebellion, but a homily--a change reflected in four different ballot initiatives.

Same-sex marriage which had been defeated in California twice triumphed this time in four states - Maine, Minnesota, Maryland and Washington.

Obama didn't spearhead this change. His courage was that he embraced the change, not in the name of politics but in the name of decency and fairness.

As Michelangelo Signorile writes in Huffington Post:

This is a president who ended "don't ask, don't tell", signed a gay-inclusive hate crimes law, urged voters in the states to vote for marriage equality and wrote a letter to a 10-year-old last week offering her support against bullies who might stigmatize her for having two dads. He's a president whose administration helped transgender Americans get full protections in employment under existing laws banning discrimination based on gender and made sure his health care law fosters full access and equality for gay and transgender people.

And he was re-elected.

That does not mean conservatism is on the run. But they can't cry havoc and let slip the usual dogs of war anymore.

Gays were a favorite bogeyman because during the ACT-UP days of the AIDS epidemic they were the quintessential outsiders ambushing the establishment, disrupting meetings, throwing blood and faeces in the face of politicians. The single-minded focus on marriage equality for a decade now has made them very solidly part of the American family. Murdering doctors who provided abortions has backfired badly even among many of those who oppose abortion

The only old-school bogeyman left for the conservatives is the "illegal immigrant." At a convention for ethnic media in the USA I remember an immigration activist worrying that the illegal immigrant was going to become the new gay. States like Arizona cracked down ever harsher on immigrants in the hope of energizing their base and it worked. For a while. But now Republicans are discovering their hardline stance against illegal immigration has driven the party into a Catch-22 - they lose their base if they move on immigration reform, they destroy the future of their party if they don't.

The scorched earth strategy employed by the right's fire-breathing cultural warriors who have demonized the other as treacherously un-American means they have left their own party with very little wiggle room. The Log Cabin Republicans, the LGBT group that was once a symbol of a big tent GOP, has been reduced to endorsing Mitt Romney by saying that at least he will not spend his time on anti-LGBT legislative attacks. Its programs director Casey Pick wrote: "As we said in our endorsement statement, Mitt Romney is not Rick Santorum."

(Translation: Romney does not run around saying children would be better off having a father in prison than being raised by lesbian parents unlike his fellow presidential hopeful Santorum.)

The only gay Republicans out there these days are the ones who have been caught with their pants down.

All the most red-blooded conservatives are left with now are the hurricanes which they routinely dub God's revenge on the decadence of liberals. But now even those hurricanes seem to have abandoned them. Hurricane Sandy, after all, is credited as being the October surprise that helped put Obama back into the White House.

The blog first appeared on Firstpost.com.

Why They Care: A View of the American elections from India

2012-11-06T08:57:00-05:00

I have one indelible memory from election night 2008.

A gay man was standing outside the grand ballroom of the St Francis hotel in San Francisco where the Democratic Party's election result watching jamboree was in full swing in front of giant television screens. He had one finger in his ear to block out the bedlam inside, and an iPhone clamped to the other.

"Honey," he hollered into the phone. "I cried. When Obama spoke I cried."

It was a bittersweet moment for him and many others in the ballroom. As Obama was giving his victory speech in Chicago, voters in California were narrowly rejecting same-sex marriage. But the man on the phone was not crying for that loss. He was moved to tears by the jolt of possibility that rippled through the country when the televisions called the election. When Barack Obama strode onto the stage to give his acceptance speech a friend messaged me from Mumbai. It was as if there was a kind of whoosh heard all over the world -- the sound of millions of people, who had been holding their breath, finally exhaling.

I had not meant to be at that ballroom. I was generally not that interested in being in a political crush whatever its denomination. But this was one election that you just could not watch alone in your living room and then turn off the television and head to bed. If you were in America on election night 2008, you just had to be outside, whether you were a voter or not.

"Let's go to the St Francis," I told a friend. "Even if Obama wins again in 2012 it will never be like this time again."

It was a chilly night. I think it even rained. But as I walked down the streets of downtown San Francisco, there were long lines at the pizza joint. The crowds at Union Square were hollering and shouting though the night was getting cold. People smiled at strangers, giving each other a thumbs up. Everyone was twittering, texting, calling. Next day was a working day but no one cared.

This election I will be watching from thousands of miles away. I set my clock alarm to watch the debates. Now I'll set it again to watch the results, bleary-eyed, in my pajamas. There will be election-watching parties organized by diehard expats, perhaps even with bagels and cream cheese to try and create a little make-believe bubble of Americana. But like the Diwali celebrations of Indian immigrants in American suburbs they will have the feeling of rituals-in-a-box, pre-packaged and trying a little too hard. It will be morning in India and the world outside the bubble will not care.

Obama in 2008 was making history, not just in America but around the world. In 2012 it's just an American election whether Obama wins or Romney pulls a surprise. It is front page news because it's happening in a superpower but the importance the world places on these elections sometimes feels a little misplaced in the post Cold War world. Critics complain that it doesn't matter who wins -- Obama's record on civil liberties is disappointing. The Mideast process has not inched forward. In India the elections are analysed in more mundane terms -- outsourcing, Pakistan, trade deals. Who is better for India -- Democrats or Republicans? Or is India so important now that it doesn't really matter who sits in the White House?

But still Indian political pundit Swapan Dasgupta tweets out "If I was an American my vote would have gone to Mitt Romney in this election." Or take my friend Harsha, a gay activist in San Francisco who wears his preferences on his sleeve, or at least on his Facebook status.

I am 30 years old and in my lifetime I have not had an opportunity to vote. Though I am not a US citizen, I have worked this past weekend, knocking doors in Nevada and calling voters to make sure we re-elect President Obama.

Why do people who have no votes in the election care when barely 50 percent of American voters do?

Having watched the elections up close in America and now from far away in India, I think it's not just about the candidates but also about the institutions. It's about a certain faith in the process even when that faith hangs on a chad. We think of elections as being rigged in Russia, rubber stamped in Africa, bought in India. But it gives some hope that every four years ordinary Americans have the chance to throw the most powerful man in the world out of office and they often do. Or elect a man who came from nowhere, with no dynastic privileges or huge corporate coffers, named Barack Hussein Obama. For many of us, especially middle-class Indians, who grow up thoroughly disengaged from the political process, that's what's eye-opening -- the feeling that the aam aadmi holds the levers.

"It's out of my hands now," Obama said in his final rally in Iowa this week. "It's in yours. All of it depends on what you do." Just reading it gave me goosebumps. In the deep hush that follows weeks of frenzied and rancorous campaigning and the relentless din of TV ads and robo-calls, you could finally hear the ticking heart of democracy.

When I watched the elections from India, I always thought the action was in Washington D.C. in the White House. But in 2008 I realized it was really in little basement garages turned into makeshift polling booths. To be honest, I was a little flummoxed. This didn't feel like history in the making.

I was looking at a sign that said "polling place" stuck on an orange traffic cone. Inside the garage, American democracy was at work alongside two pink little girl bikes, a microwave oven on its side, and a car seat (also in pink). It was 7:30 in the morning and people had brought their kids, grandkids, even a small fluffy white dog.

"Why is this an important election?" asked a little curly-haired boy.

"Because we are electing the president," said his grandmother.

Indeed. That must feel special, I thought. It's a feeling every country aspires to. And some of us outside America understand it better than many Americans do.