Last day in Mumbai
Tag: india
Mumbai (cont’d)
Coexisting with India’s bureaucracy, as every Indian would surely agree, is not an easy thing. For foreigners this is compounded by the country’s paranoia over security issues. This time I have been working with two problems: the online purchase of train tickets and of an Indian SIM card, both of which proved tiresome and ended in failure though I’ve managed many times in the past. Yet from year to year the rules grow more complicated, and procedures that with infinite time and patience could be expected to work ultimately end in failure. For now I have given up on both counts. I am using a SIM from home, and there are other ways to buy train tickets, of course.
More photos
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India
I arrived in India on December 26, after buying a flight on Kiwi.com that transferred me through Dubai. As far as I checked, only they offered this connection, because it was not formally a connection, but two separate and distinct flights. I had to go through Dubai’s passport control. But this was fairly easy, and the 3.5 hour layover proved to be plenty of time to get through immigration and change terminals. Still, if the airport had been busier, perhaps the process would not have been quite so relaxed.
Entering Mumbai was also easy to negotiate. G had given me precise instructions on reaching his friend’s apartment and a black-and-yellow taxi (the cheapest kind – avoid the expensive alternatives) took me there, over the new Sea Link route (for which you must pay the toll). The apartment is in one of the old houses on a side street not far from the Taj Mahal hotel and the Regal Cinema. It is high-ceilinged and graced by old-style or antique furniture – it’s been a while since I have slept in a semi poster bed.
Walking around the next day, it took me a couple of hours to get used again to the comparative squalor of Indian city streets. But I quickly got over that, so that it seems normal again.
My flights required me to travel light this time. Kiwi said that I was formally limited to one 5 kg bag, though I had realized that was probably not true. Spicejet’s limit for cabin luggage is 7 kg, and I made sure to stay within that. Actually it was borderline, but I placed some of the heavier items in my travel vest, which wasn’t weighed, and they also did not weigh the laptop bag. So my backpack registered as 5 kg and the man said “perfect”. However, due to the need to travel light, I left my camera at home and will rely upon my cellphone. Still, looking at my travel vest, the Indian airport immigration officer asked if I was a photographer. They are so so afraid of journalists in this country. I laughed at his suggestion that this was a photographer’s vest and said I was actually here for meditation. If he had pressed, I could have pointed out that I wasn’t even carrying a camera.
I have been walking around the area of the old Fort district, after reading a couple of books I found in my room on walking tours of Bombay’s historical area. Basically, there are many old buildings, most in a sad state of disrepair. But still a lot of history. I was particularly fascinated by St. Thomas Cathedral, with its many markers and plaques concerning British colonial officers cut down by attacks, overexposure to the sun, and probably disease, though the latter isn’t mentioned so often. One of the plaques even commemorates a member of the Scott expedition to Antarctica.
National self-harm
I watched the 2nd part of the BBC’s The Modi Question, heard a discussion with a historian of modern India, on The Wire, and watched the Israeli TV news.
Israel’s turn to the right has many of the same characteristics as India’s. In both cases, rightwing politics are causing ongoing national self-harm. This is not unlike the self-harm caused by Brexit in the UK.
The item in the Israeli TV news spoke about how the uncertainties created about Israeli “democracy” and the independence of its judicial system is likely to damage its economy by discouraging investment in its all-important high-tech industry.
The articles about India showed how the policies of Modi and the BJP have destabilized the delicate structure that keeps the (soon to be) world’s largest nation together and undermined its democracy while failing to address core issues of concern to every Indian no matter what caste or community they belong to, such as the dead rivers and poisoned air, disease and poverty.
The articles about Britain speak of the reversal in public opinion regarding Brexit, as people gradually realise that they were mislead: the broken promises regarding the public health system that is now in crisis; the so-called economic opportunities that have come to naught, and the prospect of a shrinking economy.
It seems to be an almost universal paradox that right-wing political parties, while championing nationalism, only harm the nations where they come to power. It should be obvious really that the only way to advance a country is to bring benefit to all citizens, rather than promoting some and leaving others behind. Otherwise, the structure you are building is a house of cards.
In Israel, this means creating a nation where Jews and Palestinians from every ethnic, religious, geographical and economic sector can live as equal citizens.
In Britain, the Brexit referendum was determined by the country’s longstanding inequalities; huge parts of the population that felt left behind, and a large segment of older people who were willing to betray the hopes and dreams of the young.
In India, the BJP came to power for a host of reasons, including the lingering after-effects of colonial rule, but the result has been to deepen the country’s divisions and to damage, perhaps irreparably, the secular democratic framework that made India so unique among South Asian nations.
India’s Taken a Dangerous, Divisive And Self-Destructive Direction Under Modi: Ramchandra Guha https://yewtu.be/3SjZNXIDibQ
Indian students watch banned BBC documentary critical of PM Modi https://www.france24.com/en/video/20230126-india
Truss and Brexit have sunk Britain’s economy – and the right is in deep denial about both
Hundreds of economists warn on gov’t judicial system reform https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-hundreds-of-economists-warn-on-govt-judicial-system-reform-1001436443
Bank of Israel governor says judicial reform could hurt economy – reports https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/25/bank-of-israel-governor-warns-netanyahu-that-judicial-overhaul-could-hurt-economy-reports
Earl Grey tea
I was making Earl Grey with the quantity needed for milk tea, so it came out too bitter. Just a flat teaspoon, then three or four minutes brewing time, is enough. I still add half a teaspoon of sugar. But I’m happy to get rid of the milk (anyway it’s always milk substitute in our case).
Mastodon
” decentralisation begins at decentring yourself”
A good article, though it doesn’t touch on the fact that concentrating so much of Mastodon in the servers of Masto.host, which hosts Balkan’s (and this) instance, is also a danger to the decentralization of the Fediverse.
It also doesn’t mention the energy that all this distribution must require. This could be an issue with decentralization, as it is with blockchain technology (though to a much lesser extent).
While it is evident that part of the problem is a result of the way the protocols work and interact with servers, it doesn’t suggest a solution.
From the perspective of resource and energy usage, I have no doubt that the old methods of blogging + RSS news feed make more sense, though I tend to be more attentive to my Fediverse timeline than to my newsfeed subscriptions.
Exodus continues at Twitter as Elon Musk hints at possible bankruptcy | Twitter | The Guardian
“Messages seeking comment were left with Twitter, but it is unlikely someone will respond as the communications department has been laid off.”
Energy use of a home server vs paying for a VPS
A person in my time-line had tried to estimate the cost of running a Raspberry server from his home. It came out to something like €1.10 per month. Running a server from an old laptop, as I was doing till recently, must cost quite a bit more; maybe as much as the VPS I now pay for.
Since some hosting companies use renewable energy, maybe it makes greater sense to use one of those. But there too there is a calculation involved. For example, if the VPS server with the green energy is at a location that is geographically distant from oneself or one’s potential audience, is it more energy efficient to use such a server? Does it depend upon whether CDNs are employed by the hosting company?
At a certain level, without lots of research, the way the internet works and its environmental costs are still very opaque for most of us.
Kerala
There’s apparently zero evidence. But it’s not surprising that the film industry would seek to ride the wave of right-wing populism sweeping the country.
Freedom of speech
Was reading about what happened when Stephen Fry offended Poland, and it made me think that there’s an advantage to being a nobody – with few followers you can be yourself and say whatever you want, at least more so than when you are a celebrity figure.
Telegram
“Telegram has launched the ability to buy and sell short recognizable @ usernames for personal accounts, public groups and channels.” I need to get rid of this centralized service, but a messaging platform, even more than a social networking service, depends upon obtaining a critical mass of people that use it. Some of my contacts don’t even have Telegram or, if they do, use it only in order to send messages. They can’t be depended upon to see mine.
Saturday
On Saturday morning I fixed a few broken items with epoxy glue, but not a pair of shoes, whose sole has become partly detached. From watching a couple of YouTube videos, it looks like it will be better to buy a specialized glue for that – one that’s waterproof and flexible.
In the afternoon I met with a German group, who have been touring NGOs and civil rights groups in the country. They were very interested and asked lots of questions about the village.
In the evening I continued to watch some more video interviews with Gregory David Roberts. Some of them were filmed a few years ago – like the CNN story – he toured around Mumbai with the reporter, visiting some of the places featured in the novel – including the Colaba Slum, where his character – and Roberts – had lived. He says in the interview that this particular slum, near the “World Trade Center” would soon be cleared and the residents relocated. That didn’t happen, however the slum shown in the TV series based Shantaram was not filmed there on location. It was instead filmed near Bangkok, where “Shantaram’s crew rebuilt a shantytown, complete with a river running through the middle.” I guess it’s a lot easier to find money to create a fake slum than to re-house the residents of a real one.
Today’s links
Ethiopian civil war: parties agree on end to hostilities | Ethiopia | The Guardian
Another war you never heard of may be over.
Rishi Sunak scraps plans to move embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem | Foreign policy | The Guardian
Simple proposal to foreign governments: offer to move your embassy from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem but condition that upon building a parallel embassy for Palestine in East Jerusalem.
Big Tech’s Algorithms Are Built With Invisible Labor
“Artificial artificial intelligence.”
UN chief warns ‘we will be doomed’ without historic climate pact | Cop27 | The Guardian
Doomsayer.
Revealed: The Former Israeli Spies Working in Top Jobs at Google, Facebook and Microsoft
Only the best and the brightest.
Kfar Hittim
Went up to the Sea of Galilee with the family, staying in Kfar Hittim, in the large house of an Israeli-Indian couple who seem to spend most of their time in India. We were 12; 8 adults and four kids. Kfar Hittim is near the place where Salah ad-Din’s forces won a decisive battle against the crusadors towards the end of the 12th century. It’s said that they won by cutting the crusadors off from the lake and then starting a wildfire where they were encamped. The battle decimated the crusador forces. Afterwards, more than 200 knights were beheaded, and the ordinary soldiers were enslaved. The king and some of the barons were shown mercy.
In 1948 the Palestinians were forced out of the area; the village of Hittin and others were evacuated or destroyed.
An earlier battle was fought in the time of Herod against rebels that were holding out in difficult to access caves in the cliffs of Arbel. They were defeated when Herod’s forces sent down soldiers in chests, who set fires at the cave entrances and smoked out the rebel fighters and their families.
The same caves must have been an ideal domicile for the paleolithic people who earlier inhabited them, in an area then teeming with wildlife.
The whole area is geologically extreme, a landscape formed by extinct volcanos and earthquakes, the sheer cliffs plunging almost 400 meters – and the lake itself well below sea level. It’s a small part of the Syrian-African rift – a feature that goes all the way down to Africa’s great lake system. A great tear in the earth’s crust, which till today is disturbed by constant tremors, though most of them are too faint to feel. We looked down over the valley from the edge of one of the two “Horns” of Hittim, as these high cliffs at Arbel were known.
The Climate Book
I pre-ordered The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg from Kobobooks, for my ereader and it arrived in time for the weekend. It looks promising: a kind of one-stop-shop climate primer with chapters by more than a hundred experts, thinkers and writers.
Villa Triste
I enjoyed this Patrick Modiano novel as much as another of his that I read last year. His novels are often short, which suits me, as I read very slowly in French and often need to consult my Kobo reader’s French dictionary. I like his particular style of “auto-fiction” and will probably read more of his books.
Lupin
A similar exercise is watching French TV series on Netflix. It’s quite laborious as I need to stop the video often to absorb the subtitles; an hour long show can last a couple of hours, that way. Eventually I will hopefully calm down and stop trying to catch every mumbled throw-away bit of idiom. I tend to approach languages as I did when learning Sanskrit – a mistake, no doubt.
“Lupin” itself is entertaining, though often quite ridiculous. I don’t know if it will continue to hold my interest.
India
During the weekend we were discussing our travels. M said that her impression of India was that, more than in other places, she felt that people were very close to the earth and to the basic realities of life. I know what she means, but I’m not sure that it’s true anymore. It seems to me that many Indians are caught up in illusions and frivolities that have little to do with basic needs.
They can apparently now afford to forget all about the “realities of life”, and instead promote a toxic blend of nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Here are people trying to trying to persuade the courts that mosques that have been standing for a millenium are actually Hindu temples; or that somewhere in the Taj Mahal is a secret cupboard crammed with the Hindu idols pillaged from an earlier temple. Inspired by the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, They would like to see thousands more mosques either destroyed or converted into temples.
Fanatics there always are; the problem is that in modern India they are increasingly supported by the government, the police, and sometimes by the judiciary. Fanatics are no longer a small minority but the power in the land. They enjoy popular support. The situation has many parallels to Israel, whose government is also increasingly in the hands of rightwing pyromaniacs. But there are differences. The political agenda here is different and more focused. It’s less about religion, more about colonisation. Zionism and Hindutva may both be nationalistic ideologies that seem to hark back to an earlier era, but they are not quite comparable.
India’s independence day
Just as it’s hard to think of Israel’s independence day without remembering the Nakba, it’s impossible to think of India’s independence day without remembering Partition. Although it took place 75 years ago, the news media have still been able to find survivors who remain traumatized. Soon, there will be no one left to remember.
The bloody founding events of India, Pakistan and Israel took place in the same years, after Britain beat a hasty retreat from its colonial failures and responsibilities. There is yet another reminder of the horrors of British colonialism in the news now, this time from Kenya: Police chief quit after abuse by British colonial troops in Kenya covered up. A new documentary titled A Very British Way of Torture, “pieces together many of the worst abuses committed by British colonial forces through survivor testimony and expert analysis from a team of British and Kenyan historians.”
The events took place in the 1950s, when the Mau Mau movement was fighting against colonial rule. Their revelation arrives in the midst of Kenya’s election, the results of which have just been announced. As in India and elsewhere, the British left behind a working functioning democracy but a harsh legacy from colonial rule, the effects of which linger on.
Al Jazeera today has a story on how India has “little to celebrate”. Just as everyone predicted, the country has been growing increasingly less democratic under Modi and the BJP’s rule.
There are some bad dreams from which one does not awaken. Arundhati Roy and now the French scholar Christophe Jaffrelot believe that these authoritarian trends are irreversible.
Roy:
The systematic indoctrination of people on the scale on which it has taken place over decades is hard to reverse. Every institution that is supposed to make up the system of checks and balances has been hollowed out, repurposed and deployed against people as a weapon of Hindu nationalism. In terms of political opposition, there are political parties that have successfully opposed the BJP at the state level in Tamil Nadu, Bengal, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, but opposition is virtually non-existent at the national level.
The whole system of elections has been gamed. You can win a huge majority of seats even without anything close to a majority of actual votes. In India, we have a first-past-the-post, multi-party democracy. This means that even if you get say only 20% of the vote in a constituency, as long as its higher than your closest rival, you win. A rich party can put up spurious candidates to split the votes. But that’s just one trick in a whole bag of tricks.
And, anyway, how do you woo an indoctrinated population? By proving that you are a better, prouder Hindu? Nobody can beat the BJP at that game. And right now, that’s the only game in town. As far as mainstream politics goes.
So, no, I don’t believe the damage is reversible. I believe we will be broken and then reborn. Change will only come when and if at all an accepting, gullible, fatalistic people realize what’s being done to them. And then it will come suddenly, and from the street. Not from the system. Until then… God help us.
Jaffrelot:
Democracy, nowadays, is a notion you need to qualify when applied to India. You may say, like some scholars do, that it is an ‘illiberal democracy’.
I prefer to use the concept of ‘ethnic democracy’ that has been first used in the case of Israel. An ‘ethnic democracy’ is a regime where pillars of democracy are still practised, including elections — something populists across the globe need to retain to acquire legitimacy — but where minorities are second class citizens because of all kinds of discrimination.
You may (also) use the word ‘majoritarianism’, which designates the attempt for transforming a cultural majority into a permanent, political majority.
[The] changes under Modi may be permanent if the Hindutva forces have not only captured power, but also society — at least temporarily — and if this hegemonic position allows them to get deeply entrenched in the State apparatus, then a point of no return will be reached.
Just as countries formerly under British rule inherited that country’s flawed democratic system, they also inherited the ways it found to suspend all pretence of democracy. For example, Israel continues to renew and institute the emergency regulations put in place in the closing years of the British mandate. Administrative detention without trial was one of them and, till today, hundreds of Palestinians are incarcerated in this way.
Website work, thoughts about India
I spent most of the day working on the Israeli Thich Nhat Hanh sangha site, mindfulness-israel.org. It’s completely voluntary but I enjoy it and it feels useful. This is a WordPress site with the flexible Weaver theme, which sometimes frustrates me, but it is at least malleable, unlike many WP themes.
In between, I’ve been reading “Eight Mountains”, which grows more interesting with every chapter. A sensitive writer with a good story to tell.
Al-Jazeera carries an item, in both print and audio, by Arundhati Roy: India is becoming a Hindu-fascist enterprise. Unfortunately I agree with her assessment. India, unlike some other troubled nations, is one that love and care about. I can’t say why, or really what that means. Maybe it means nothing? However that may be, it is possible that I will never go there again. At least not while Modi and the BJP are in power, despite the temptation to do so. Not going there will, in fact, be a painful decision.
Israel is a shocking place too. It has an appalling human rights record, and the entire country is constructed upon an ongoing historical iniquity. On the other hand, it’s the place where I live and for now I have little choice in the matter.
Nations, in terms of their governments, their politics, their actions and group identities, are almost universally repugnant. Some more than others. Ever since I lived there, I felt a distaste for the US, which has gradually grown over the years. And, particularly since Brexit, I feel anguished about the country of my birth and citizenship, the UK.
Of course, countries are more than their repugnant aspects. There is much to love about the culture of the US, the UK and elsewhere. The current or recent attempts to boycott Russian culture, such as music performances, are quite riduculous.
I will continue to love India; it’s part of who I am. But it looks increasingly less likely that I will return there.
There are many instances of people loving a country in exile. Usually, it’s their homeland, and the exile is either voluntary or forced.
There are no doubt similar instances of people loving a country but being unable to visit it. Usually, because they wouldn’t be allowed in or can’t afford to go there.
If we care nothing for a country and feel indifferent to its governance, politics or other forms of national expression, visiting it or otherwise matters little.
It’s when we do care that it becomes a problem.
Still in Kochi
Still enjoying Fort Kochi, a town that is inherently interesting and enjoyable. Perhaps too many tourists, though thanks to them there are so many guest houses, restaurants and cafes. You can’t have it all ways. But the kind of tourists seems to be wealthier and older than in most places in India, which influences somewhat the prices. There are still enough backpackers to ensure that there are also cheaper places to stay and eat. Prices go as low as 250 Rupees or less for accommodation in dormitories. I would not stay in such places. I have a pleasant, though non-A/C room with attached bathroom. It’s clean and in a good location, close to the main tourist area, but on a quiet street.
I’m having trouble sleeping at nights due to the heat. I sleep best in the early morning. Then I wake up refreshed as if I’ve had a full night’s sleep. It’s true that I often have naps in the daytime. It’s always been a puzzle to me why hot weather makes it impossible to sleep at night but is conducive to sleep in the daytime.
When they are open, I have breakfast at the vegan dhaba – just about the same breakfast I have at home: granola (actually muesli) with chopped fruits and coconut milk, together with a cup of coffee. The fruits usually consist of pineapple, papaya, pomegranate and maybe apple. I refill my water bottle there too.
I have lunch in mid afternoon in any one of various restaurants, then have a snack in the evening – a chaat, a sandwich or a dahi puri or something.
In the afternoon to early evening I walk on the promenade by the beach and sometimes sit on the rocks. There’s always a pleasant breeze blowing from the sea. There are cultural activities, but these are of the kind specifically for tourists.
I’ve enjoyed taking many photos, just with my mobile camera, while here.
