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Eating Mud

Posted on July 31, 2008
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Newspapers yesterday heralded the collapse of the latest round of WTO talks due to the impasse between India and the US over tariffs and farming subsidies. The US agreed to reduce its farming subsidies, government money that helps farmers sell food at lower-than-cost-of-production prices the world over. However, it did not agree to India’s (and China’s among other developing nations) proposal that the developing nations be able to impose a temporary tariff on imported food if they determine that a glut of imported food was making its way into their countries. Farmers in countries from India and China to Ireland and Japan heaved a sigh of relief.

The Guardian carried a story two days ago about Haitians eating mud cakes to stave off hunger. Haiti, the first country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, has languished in the bottom of UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) for years. Earlier this year, Haiti featured in the news, this time due to food riots over the increasing cost of food and the inability of the vast majority of the country’s population to afford even basic food items. Mud cakes cost 1.3 pence and are the only inflation protected item in the country. Mixed with traces of margarine and salt, these cakes are made of clay and water baked together in the sun. For years, poor pregnant women in Haiti consumed these cakes for calcium and now the rest of the country is increasingly turning to this so called food. It is reported that Haiti’s food bill will leap by 80%, the largest for any country.

One big factor for the impoverishment comes from the collapse of agriculture, specifically rice, when Haiti liberalized it’s economy and allowed foreign food with the lowest tariffs of any country in the Americas. American rice flooded the country and destroyed farming in Artibonite valley, the country’s breadbasket. Farming sugarcane (as a cash crop for export) was another factor fueling the dependence on food imports, along with destroying the topsoil. Topsoil is a scarce commodity, virtually non-renewable as it grows only an inch or two over hundreds of years. In the Green History of the Earth, Clive Ponting writes: “Countries that had been largely self-sufficient in food and which grew crops mainly for local markets had become part of the world economy dominated by Europe, its white colonies and the United States. … A diverse agriculture was increasingly displaced over large areas by a monoculture, with harmful environmental effects, particularly in terms of damage to the soil and loss of biodiversity.” He writes that food production for local consumption grew slower than the rise in population and the rise in cash crop production causing the countries to rely increasingly on food imports to feed the local population. He further writes that there is hardly any quality topsoil left in Haiti.

About three weeks ago, the Guardian carried another story, this one a leaked report from the WTO that biofuels have been a major contributor to the global rise in the cost of food. The Bush government blamed increased demand from India and China as the cause for the increase in food prices and that biofuels were not the cause. The main reason that this report was suppressed was allegedly to avoid embarrassing the Bush government. While there has been much back and forth about whether the report was leaked or a work in progress, another report, this time by OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) arrived at the same conclusion.

I’m outraged. We suppress reports to avoid embarrassing people in power who hold false ideas and ignore contrarian facts to push their ideologies while people die of starvation or are forced to eat mud! We want to push policies in the name of “liberalization” and how this benefits everyone everywhere while evidence after evidence indicates that the only people it benefits are the agrobusinesses in developed countries. This worship of ideologies over evidence has caused so much damage in the world, whether the ideologies be religion, nation state or economics. Yet, we continue to believe in them, nay even trumpet their illusory success.

Well alas we’ve seen it all before
Knights in armour, days of yore
The same old fears and the same old crimes
We haven’t changed since ancient times – Mark Knopfler

Update: Thw WTO report has been officially published and if anything, it appears to be worse than what Guardian reported. See also this opinion by Devinder Sharma on the collapse of the WTO talks.

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On Parenting: The Initial Months

Posted on July 20, 2008
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July 17, 2008. I feel her stirring beside me. I’m still groggy, it’s 6:15 am. It’s the second day that Maya has woken up an hour earlier than usual. Yesterday, I had protested this change, pretending to ignore her stirring, trying to fall back to sleep. But she had played with herself for a few minutes and then started pawing my face. That brought back memories of Kitty waking me up and I had gotten out of bed, grumpily. Today, I’m prepared to deal with the new reality. I pick her up with a smile and she coos happily. After taking her to pee, I put her back in bed while I prepare her milk.

A few minutes later, milk consumed, we’re downstairs. She’s playing with a spoon that I’ve given her, content to let me go prepare that wake-up elixir, coffee. I awaken the laptop from its sleep and sit down beside Maya, talking to her (more like muttering, since I’m not really awake yet). The coffee machine gurgles as the last drops of water filter down. When I return with the cup of coffee, I find that Maya has thrown away the spoon and has that “I need your attention” look. I pick her up thinking she wants to pee and find that her dress is soaked. She’s gagged herself with the narrow end of the spoon and thrown up a lot of the milk. I put the coffee down and pick her up to clean her.

An hour later, I’m rocking her to sleep. I try playing soothing sounds, slow, gentle melodies that reflect the morning mood for me. But Maya will have none of that. Since she’s discovered Sade, it’s nothing but her fast uptempo songs. So, at 7:30 in the morning, I’m playing “Paradise” and moving vigorously to the beat. Maya is asleep in a few minutes. Sade croons “Ooh, what a life !”

I’ve been meaning to write what about our approach to parenting in the initial months. I’ve written about my thoughts about watching her grow and the major (and minor) transformations of each month. But I’ve wanted to write about our perspective and our ideas. This entry is an attempt at that.

There is the famous adage, “Before I became a parent, I had three theories about parenting. Now I have three children and no theories”. Since we have only Maya, I guess I have two more theories left. In reality, our ideas about how we wanted to parent have so far largely borne out and we hope in some sense contributed to how easy and how happy Maya has been. These decisions were largely driven by our intuition, by Meredith Small’s incisive analysis and examination of parenting from an evolutionary perspective and across cultures in her book “Our Babies, Ourselves” and by having seen the results of a close friend who parented that way. The goal was single and fairly simple, to make Maya feel as secure, loved and accepted as possible. Our reading of various infant studies indicate that more than anything else, making them feel secure and loved was the bedrock to a happy and healthy individual.

Margaret Mead said that parenting was a reflection of the culture, that the general structure of any culture could be understood at a fundamental level by following the treatment of children. More recently, anthropologist Robert LeVine has said parental goals have little to do with the immediate situation of the child, and more to do with the entire social system and its institutional goals – especially in the areas of interpersonal relationships, the level of personal achievements expected, and the degree and manner of social solidarity that is favored in that particular society. For example, “independence” permeates the American child rearing lexicon. When I called the pediatrican’s office the first time because Maya was crying inconsolably for fifteen minutes (she was a month old), I was advised to put her down and walk away. “She needs to learn that you won’t be there all her life. She needs to learn to be independent”. I hung up in disgust.

LeVine says there are two kinds of cultures: agrarian and urban-industrial, and in both, parents want some things ”from” their children and some things ”for” their children. This translates to (in the words of Steven Pinker): “In contemporary middle-class American culture, parenting is seen as an awesome responsibility, an unforgiving vigil to keep the helpless infant from falling behind in the great race of life. And that race goes to the smartest, the most competitive, the most independent”. We didn’t want that. We wanted to deconstruct parenting as much as possible and choose consciously what we thought was best for Maya to feel loved and secure. We also told ourselves several times that we had no experience parenting and so we’d not assume that we know, but would be willing to learn, not hold on steadfastly to any idea save ensuring that she felt loved and secure. Dr. Spock and the associated mainstream American child rearing practices were out, ethnopediatrics was in.


We felt that the basic attitudes that we needed as parents was captured best by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn in “Everyday Blessings”: sovereignty, empathy and acceptance. Sovereignty implies that the child has a perspective, and that it maybe different from mine. Empathy implies that I can commiserate with her perspective. Acceptance means that I accept the conditions for what they are even if they’re not what I want them to be. For example, if I want her to sleep because I’m sleepy, I have to consider that she may not want to sleep because she’s not sleepy, and knowing how difficult it is to sleep when you’re not sleepy, that I accept her not being sleepy and play with her even though I fervently wish that she would sleep and allow me to. An alternate way of being, which we rejected, is to think that she’s deliberately manipulating us, or that she’s a “difficult child” or “hyperactive child”.

An infant’s needs are fairly primal: food, sleep and poop. Initially, an infant uses her cry to communicate everything, be it hunger, sleep or attachment. Studies that I’ve come across indicate that an infant doesn’t have the machinery to manipulate parents until they’re much older, six months at least, much later according to one of our close friends. So our first decision was to to respond to her cry immediately and do what was necessary to soothe her. I’d like to think that this is a reason why Maya never cries much. In the initial weeks she cried a little more as we struggled to figure out what she was trying to say. She probably also cried because the whole thing was so alien to her, she who was comfortably ensconced in Shanthala’s womb, her every need automatically taken care of, not needing to breathe, eat or poop. Past her sixth week, when we began to read each other better, she became a very easy and happy child. Everyone who sees her remarks on how happy she seems. That and what beautiful eyes and long eyelashes she has.


Research by James McKenna, a medical anthropologist and sleep researcher, has shown that when infant and mother sleep together, the two function as a dyad, their sleep, arousal, breathing and heart rate synchronizing with each other. There is a significant push by pediatricians in this country to have the baby sleep separately. The American Association of Pediatrics strongly recommends against sleeping with the baby because of increased risk of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), of suffocating the child by rolling over it and because of possible psychosexual problems. There aren’t studies that back these claims. The psychosexual babble is a holdover from an 18th century church edict. Among African and Asian societies where cosleeping is common, there are hardly any reports of these problems. James McKenna postulates that a possible cause for SIDS is that infants with their immature nervous system have not yet learnt how to breathe and go into deep sleep at the same time. He says that cosleeping helps them learn how to breathe and go into deep sleep. In the US, Dr. Richard Ferber’s method of putting infants to sleep is the most common practice. The method involves leaving the infant alone in their crib and letting them go to sleep on their own and not responding to their cries. When Shanthala and I first heard about it, we cringed. There is an interesting article in the New Yorker from 1999 about one person’s attempt to put his son to sleep the American way that includes an interview with Dr. Ferber in which the doctor recants his method, somewhat. So another decision that we made was to have Maya sleep with us, in our bed.

An infant also loves being held, being enveloped in the warmth of our body. Reading books about the real life experiences of parents, I found that so many speak of difficult sleep times, of crying insistently on being put down, of suffering from that fearful word, colic. Meredith Small says that studies have found that incidences of colic are very small in Asian and African countries where traditionally infants tend to be carried more compared to the Western societies. So we decided that we’d hold her as much as possible, even carrying her in a sling as a new born while she slept. I found that she slept longer when she either slept in the sling or when she slept on me.


No disposable diapers was another major decision. We have both tried to keep as small a footprint as possible given the current environmental conditions on Earth. It’s been a modest attempt compared to some others I’ve known, but we try. Disposable diapers are the third largest item in this country’s landfill and we didn’t want to add to it. There were other positive consequences of this decision, but more on that later. Shanthala researched a lot and stocked cloth diapers before Maya was born, buying good quality, some used and some unused diapers, from eBay and other outlets for throwaway prices. She also decided that we’d wash our own diapers rather than use a diaper service. The whole thing has turned out to be fairly easy.

In an essay titled “Negotiating Violence”, the author, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah writes: “A native of Ghana, I have lived in the US since I was six years old.. My family strongly believed in traditional African values and principles such as prerequisite respect of elders, the unspoken second class citizenship of children, and the collective endorsement of corporal punishment.” The traditional African values don’t sound very different from traditional Indian values or at least different from the way I was raised. Even in America today, spanking a child is a divisive subject, with quite a few considering it acceptable, even though it is illegal. That is not how we want to raise Maya. Corporal punishment is out. As Danquah writes: “.. to understand that love and violence do not go together and should not be accepted when given hand-in-hand by the same person – be that person a lover, a friend or a parent.” I still remember vividly the terror of being beaten by my father, the indignity and humiliation from feeling violated, being subject to what seemed to me as a child, the mood of my caregiver. Just as we reject an abusive husband’s excuse “she made me do it”, we must reject a parent’s twin excuses of “the child’s actions made me do it” and “it’s only for his good”. If we use violence to teach something, the evidence indicates that the lesson will not be learnt. We don’t even want to threaten her. No “or else”.


Despite all this, it has been surprisingly easy for me to get frustrated and angry. Between Shanthala and I, I’m more patient except when it comes to Maya. Shanthala wins hands down in that category. Many times, I’d put Maya down and go to the next room to scream my anger or frustration, I’ve picked her up a little less gently sometimes. Eventually, I figured out that most of my anger came from lacking control, control as I know it. Once I realized that my anger or frustration was a consequence of counter-factual thinking, of wanting things to be what they’re not, I calmed down considerably. I realized that with an infant, you don’t set the agenda. She does. It’s still hard to accept on days I’m tired or sleep deprived, when I’m upset with something at work or I feel overwhelmed.

Food turned out to have been decided for us. Shanthala couldn’t produce enough breast milk to satisfy Maya’s needs right from the start. At best, she gave her fifty percent. At the end of her second month, we gave up and continued to feed her only formula. The decision was not easy, but we had little choice after trying everything possible from finger feeding her and using the breast pump to Shanthala taking pills and herbal supplements to produce more milk. The positive benefit of this has been that I’ve been involved intimately in feeding Maya which delighted me (the flip side was that I had to share the load of waking up in the middle of the night to feed her).

We hardly watch TV, using the set only to watch movies. Just before she was born, we gave away the TV and DVD player. We didn’t want her to grow up watching TV. We now watch movies on our laptops, maybe once a week at most. We also consciously avoid having Maya see us in front of the computer, though not always successfully. I attend to work email in the morning as I sip my coffee while she’s next to me, babbling away happily.

I came across a study the other day with the headline: “Sociologists are discovering that children may not make parents happier and that childless adults, contrary to popular stereotypes, may often be more contented than people with kids. Parents ‘definitely experienced more depression,’ says Robin Simon, a sociologist at Florida State University who has studied data on parenting.” What is interesting is that Robin Simon also states: “People ought to understand where this unhappiness comes from. I would say it’s not from their kids per se, I would say that it comes from the social conditions in which contemporary parents parent.” The headline could’ve been: “Parenting needs stronger support from society”, but that’s not as catchy. One of the earliest decisions of our marriage was that we’d have a child when we could devote all the time that was needed to raise her/him. I didn’t want having a child to be just a milepost that we cross in this journey we call life. Or even a tourist spot where we checked out the highlights. We wanted it to be a place where we stopped. For a long time. Where we checked out the terrain intimately, got to know the locals, understood what it meant to be a native of that place.


It’s 6:30 PM. Maya has woken up again. We head out for our evening walk with Maya comfortably ensconced in a sling. As we walk by a house with people sitting out, enjoying the chilly summer evening, we greet each other. They notice the baby and ask the usual questions. An older man comes out of the house and seeing Maya asks “How old is she ?”. “Five months”, we reply. “She’s so alert. She looks ready to do calculus”, he says.

It’s 10:30 by the time Maya falls asleep. I was so sleepy at 8′o clock and now I’m wide awake. My brain is too exhausted to do anything much.

What has caught me unprepared and still struggling with has been the lack of solitude, of time for myself and in my control. I want to run, to write more, to read, to reflect. When I switched to working part time, one of the things that I enjoyed most was the expanded time I had. I didn’t do anything different, but just having it and knowing that there was the potential to do anything I wanted was liberating. I had come to dislike the schedules set by the alarm clocks and daily grind at work, even though it was work that I enjoyed and was good at. I yearned to march to a different drummer. And now I am, to Maya’s.

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Girls in India: An All Time Low

Posted on June 21, 2008
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This was the horror that visited me with today morning’s coffee. The ratio of girls to boys has hit an all time low in five north and northwestern states in India, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana. While I knew about this problem from before, I was shocked to read that the conditions have gotten worse. In one site in Punjab, there are only 300 girls to 1000 boys !

The problems are not just in rural India. The ratio of girls to boys was declining the fastest in prosperous, educated, economic powerhouse, urban India. Shanthala and I know of a couple who aborted their fetus because they found out that it was to be a girl. Laws passed to prevent parents from determining the sex of the fetus using ultrasound go unenforced, like so much else in India. If ultrasound and abortion are the tools used by the rich, the well heeled and well connected, letting the umbilical cord get infected, stuffing rice and tobacco down the infant’s throat and denying medical services is how the poor deal with their “fate” of birthing a girl. The report is available here.

Maya sat innocently and happily in her little infant seat while I read this horror. The thought of subjecting Maya to any of these techniques made our blood run cold. I couldn’t stop the tears as I read about the mothers who were forced by social pressures to kill their infant girls. A villager named Meena Tomar became my hero. She resisted having more children and terminating the lives of her two daughters.

And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon – Pink Floyd

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Kill to Get Crimson: A Review

Posted on October 7, 2007
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Kill to Get Crimson is Mark Knopfler’s sixth solo album, his first after 2004′s Shangri-La. I was not sure if I’d like it. His duet with Emmylou Harris was a disaster to me as a studio album. It is the only Knopfler album that didn’t stay on the CD player continuously for weeks after it’s release. This album is a fine return to form.

It is a mostly bleak album, with almost no uplifting songs, with the possible exceptions of True Love Will Never Fade and Punish the Monkey. Clocking in at a little less than an hour with twelve songs, the average length of a song is about four minutes. This implies that there are no searing guitar solos like Speedway at Nazareth. Knopfler was always a songwriter par excellence, whose writing skills were masked by his fluid and lyrical guitar play, especially during his Dire Straits days. From the very first self-titled album that gave “Sultans of Swing”, a song as amazing for its guitar work as its lyrics to his latest release, his song writing has constantly impressed me. Reducing massive tomes such as Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon to a six minute song, “Sailing to Philadelphia”, chronicling the rise of McDonalds in Shangri-La’s “Boom Like That” or capturing the nuances of the lives of black gospel singers in a racially divided south in “Baloney Again” or penning a crime cum social commentary about the lives of coal workers in “5.15 am”, his song writing skills have continued to evolve brilliantly. He writes multi-layered songs that tell an intimate personal story while capturing a social milieu and talk of matters eternal such as the price of success, the results of the choices of a lifetime and of the desire for connection.

The first song off the album, “True Love Will Never Fade” can be read as a straight forward narrative about a tatoo artist and his unrequited love for one of the women who has him tatoo her shoulder. At another level, it’s about hope, of everlasting love. A tatoo is usually considered a permanent mark of a temporary insanity. Knopfler in this song turns that cynicism into hope, hope that it will be a permanent mark of an everlasting insanity. But the way he repeats the line “True Love Will Never Fade” can also be construed as a sign of his lack of belief in that very notion, repeated to reinforce the idea, an attempt to hold cognitive dissonance at bay. At yet another level, it’s about our making a mark in the world (tatoo is making a mark on a body) and the hope that whatever we do with true love, will remain a sign of us. I like the way he phrases “Any which way we’re all shuffling, forward in the queue” to say that every day, we all take a step towards death.

Many fans and critics complain that there are no guitar epics in his later albums. A guitar epic would seem a little out of place in this album. It’s about ordinary people coming to terms with their life, about people whose life never got on the success track, was shunted to a bleak sideyard. A long guitar solo such as in the one in Speedway at Nazareth or Telegraph Road would seem out of place. This is no “Fanfare for the Common Man”. What we get instead are vignettes into people’s lives, words perfectly crafted by this word pecker. These are little gems, wonderfully crafted offbeat short stories instead of an 800 page novel.

I have never liked his folkish songs such as “Donkeytown” in “All The Road Running” or “Stand Up Guy” in Shangri-La. They seemed boring to me. Starting with chords that sound similar to “Stand Up Guy”, Knopfler crafts a brilliant song about the life of a pawn store owner in “Heart Full of Holes”. Knopfler constantly evolves sounds in each album, until he hits the perfect pitch. Similar sounding songs from previous albums seem a preparation for “Heart Full of Holes”. Written like a simple folk song, it is much more. When the narrator talks of his shops filled with belongings of people long dead and gone, the simple ditty turns into a macabre funeral music, reminding me of the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony. I liked his reasoning about going to heaven in this song:

Well, if we go to heaven
And some say we don’t
but if there’s a reckoning day
please God, I’ll see you
and maybe I won’t
I’ve a bag packed to go either way

Secondary Waltz is another strange offbeat song, about a boxer reminiscing of his school days where he was taught the waltz by a strict discplinarian, taught on the gymanasium floor, typically also where one learns to box. The boxer sings:

When you come to my fights
and I’m under the lights
and you see that my footwork is false
don’t count me out
at the start of the bout
I’m just doing the Secondary Waltz

Another example of multi-layered writing, this can be read as a song about ingrained habits, especially those learnt very early.

He writes about the life of mismatched people who fall in love in “The fish and the bird”:

The fish and the bird
Who fall in love
will find no place to build a home in
The fish and the bird who fall in love
are bound forever to go roam

This is among the most evocative songs he’s penned.

Some critics complain that Knopfler has settled into a comfortable groove, never changing his style or pacing, penning nothing new. Others complain that he’s turned into someone who writes boring music. I see him as a musician who’s digging deep and is peeling the layers of onion away to reveal the hidden core, like the boatman in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha who sees in the unchanging river the lessons of a lifetime. The songs are different enough to be interesting while also remaining unchanged in their unique guitaring and singing style. For example, the music in this album have strange time signatures such as being in 6/8 or 3/4 time. While the album is somewhat reminiscent of The Ragpicker’s Dream, the comparison is justified only in the mood of the songs and the pacing. There are no country music tunes like Quality Shoes or blues tunes such as Marbletown. There is more British music in here and very little American influence. If that album was about the consequences of choosing to wander, this album is about the consequences of choosing to stay.

“We Can Get Wild”, “Punish The Monkey” and “Behind With The Rent” are about as fast as songs get in this album, all mid-tempo at best. Punish The Monkey is the weakest song w.r.t lyrics, but quite catchy and quirky musically. This is the first album since the eponymous debut album of Dire Straits where there is no title track, though the line “Kill to Get Crimson” is in the song “Let It All Go”, about the life of a painter in a foreign land during World War II. The song is slightly reminiscent of “In The Gallery” from the debut album of Dire Straits in its theme. The only song that didn’t work it’s magic on me is the second song, “The Scaffolder’s Wife”, though I don’t always skip it when playing the album.

In an interview a long time ago, Knopfler said that he likes to write blues that wouldn’t be played on a blues station, country that would similarly not be played on a country station. He’s looking for that no man’s land, where boundaries are blurred, musical genres blend, reflecting off each other’s influence instead of the compartmentalized music that we get from most artists. He delivers on that promise again in this album.

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Of Fathers and Dads

Posted on January 14, 2007
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Last week my dad turned 72. Instead of sending a card with words chosen by Hallmark, I thought of celebrating his birthday by writing a few words of my own.

Where do I begin to write about a man in whose shadow I longed to be as a boy and from which I wanted to run as far as possible as a man ? With the simple fact that he loves me and I love him, that he raised me as well as he knew, with more support and encouragement than I ever provided him, that he never stopped me in pursuing my ideas no matter how much they went against everything he knew was good or useful ?

Erich Fromm in his classic work, “The Art of Loving” says that while “mother is the home we come from, she is nature, soil, the ocean”, the father “represents the world of thought, of man-made things, of discipline, of travel and adventure”. It is the father who teaches the child how to get along in the world. If I were to look back on my life from where I stand, I’d say my father has been pretty successful in teaching me to get along in the world, even if sometimes it was by not standing in my way.


My earliest memory of him is of his telling me stories, carrying me on his back as my mom followed us trying to feed me. He was a wonderful storyteller, spinning such fantastical tales that I wanted to eat just so he would continue. Maybe my love for food comes from these nascent memories. Next, I remember my fear of incurring his wrath for all my truancy. I guess I never adapted well to the fact that we moved often as my father was in a transferable job. Since that first move, I’d hate my first days at a new school, even when I was in my last year of high school. I desperately sought reasons to put off the nightmare for one more day. Of having to start all over, impressing teachers, making friends, learning new languages, putting up with the nuances of the new place.

My first memories of self start with Gulbarga when I was about five years old. Entrenched deeply in that memory is of his waking me up on holidays singing “Tum Jago, Mohan Pyare”. He was learning to play the tabla and learn Hindustani classical vocal. How I loved to wake up to that song. Lord Krishna is my favorite god, even though I’m an agnostic today. So he sang me to wakening with a song about waking up Lord Krishna. He is a devout man, praying twice a day for at least an hour each time, chanting the hymns and going through the rituals of worship as a brahmin. Entrenched in that too is my anger at not being allowed to play as much as I wanted to, especially in the afternoon. My parents had the habit of resting in the afternoon because it was so hot outside. They forced me to sleep as well, not wanting me to go out and play in the hot sun and become dark. So while other children played, I fumed myself to sleep.

In Kerala, I think it was his encouragement that motivated me to write my first novel at the age of 11. It ran 200 plus pages and it was my first attempt to emulate his fantastic stories. I called it “Terror at Kimtaku” and it terrifies me to read it even as much as it proves an endless well of amusement to my sister and my wife. I had read about kids in America earning something by running errands such as delivering the morning newspaper. My father hired me to write out invoices and fill out entries in the musty account books of the mills he ran. He paid the cashier first and then made it appear that the office was paying me for my services. I was upset when I caught him in the act one day. But as I aged, tears well up at the memory of that act.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold… The ceremony of innocence is drowned” wrote W.B. Yeats. That ceremony began for me in high school when I started thinking, of striking out on my own. In the process, I hurt my father in many ways, especially in my decision to give up praying daily, of rejecting the idea of a god, culminating in my discarding the sacred thread worn by brahmins and not joining my family in the evening prayers. I met my future wife and stayed up long hours chatting on the phone. He was worried at what he thought was teen behavior and a passing fancy, but installed a phone extension in my room so that I could talk to her with some privacy.

It was in my days at college that he bought me a Casio computer that allowed me to program in BASIC. I remember days spent in the back benches of the college classes, programming. That was the start of my career as a software programmer. That was the final fork that started the journey that led to the Bay Area, to a home here and a career working with some of the most brilliant people in my field, of earning their respect, of knowing the pride that my father would feel at knowing how far his kid had come from a provincial second-rate college in a small town in India. Of knowing that he believed that I was capable of it.

Yet in those early years of my software life, when I was in the final year of my college, events at his work were set in motion, which hurt my father more than he’s admitted openly, of events that I think are mostly responsible for turning a man whose laughter filled a party to someone who sits quiet and pensive and shunned company.


In the book “In the Shadow of a Saint”, Ken Wiwa chronicles his relationship with and the life of his father, the famous Nigerian dissident Ken Saro-Wiwa. Ken Wiwa writes: “My father. Where does he end and where do I begin. … Is his story repeating itself through me, or am I the author of my own fate ? Is he my father, or am I his son ? Where does he end and where do I begin ?” When I look in the mirror, I look very much like my father did in his twenties, even my hairstyle his creation. When I stare at my signature, it is his that I see because I have copied his. When I’m listening to music, I know that it is another example of his gift to me. We may listen to different things, but music has the power to move both of us, we both seek comfort in its power. He regretted not having studied much and I did not study as much as so many of my peers have. When I stand up to authority, it is because I saw him do it. When I hold someone’s head and kiss them, I do it like does. Even in the things that I consciously do differently, I’m defined by what he did not do instead of what he did. Somedays, I wonder if he’ll ever understand me and my actions, if I’ll understand him or will I forever define him by what he was to me as a boy. Ken Wiwa writes: “But the simplest and most profound truth I have learned is that you can never truly know who you are until you know your father”.

But whatever happens, I love him and he loves me. I can sleep well knowing that he did the best he knew in raising a child and he can sleep well knowing that his son is forever grateful to him for that. In the popular TV series MASH, there is an episode in which Hawkeye receives a letter about an operation that his father has to undergo. Faraway in Korea, he waits desperately to connect with his dad’s hospital to hear about the outcome of the surgery. He’s kept company by the snobbish but sensitive Winchester and they talk about their fathers. Hawkeye speaks of the closeness that he shared with his dad and Winchester talks about the formality of his relationship with his. Winchester says at the end “Where I had a father, Hawkeye, you had a dad”.

Happy birthday, dad.

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