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A Long, Strange Trip: The First Days

Posted on February 8, 2011
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I woke up suddenly with a heightened sense of alertness. There was a strange sensation in my ears. I raised myself to look at the clock and a wave of  dizziness swept over me. I felt nauseous. The clock said 1 am. I’d been sniffling all day, had little sleep due to the long journey from SFO to Bangalore. I was a little worried about Maya. She had been throwing up since the morning, unable to keep even a glass of water down.

I lay awake considering possible actions should the nausea and dizziness increase. Would I be able to call for help (my friends were sleeping downstairs) ? Would I puke on the floor and make a mess or would I be able to crawl to the bathroom ? Was the bathroom door shut and if so could I reach the handle ? And why was I dizzy and nauseous ? A couple of friends and some other associates had been diagnosed with cancer in the past few months. Was I next ? Was something malignant lurking beneath my dizziness ?

I tried to focus on calming myself and feeling less dizzy. I tried to slow my breathing and be more even than normal. I double checked that my mental acuity was normal. But my mind continued to wander. I wondered if I should wave a white flag, declare that I was foolish to have attempted the trip alone and head back home right away ? Before I left the US, I had learnt that tickets were not available till the 19th or so. What if Maya fell badly ill ? Shanthala was the calm one in the family. Without her by my side, my fears mushroomed. My mind returned to more immediate predicaments. I pictured myself falling on the floor as I tried to go to the bathroom, hitting my head and knocking myself out, Maya waking up wanting to vomit or crap and not finding me, crying and shaking me as I lay on the floor and then puking and cramping all over me and around me. I pictured my friends coming up at daylight to find the mess.

Enough already! I screamed to myself. Stop this nonsense.

Some time had passed, I decided to slowly get up and see how I felt. I felt unsteady, weak. I sat back down wondering if sudden, large movements might make me dizzier. I debated if I should walk to the door and switch on the room light so that I could read the “The Indian Clerk” or if I should stay on the bed and read something on the iPhone. What was happening with my ear ? It was not ringing, it was not any sharp clear sound. So what was it ? I struggled to fond the word to describe my condition. It was a low, almost like white noise. Buzzing. Finally! I had the word.

I switched on the iPhone and googled for “buzzing in ear and dizziness” and read through the entries that spoke of various illnesses from the more common ones such as tinnitus and inner ear damage to stranger beasts such as Meniere’s Disease, dormant herpes virus and so on. What would it be like to be afflicted with a disease named Meniere’s Disease ? And who was this guy Meniere ? As I read through the articles, Maya lay by my side breathing loudly. I wondered if she was getting a cold.

As I sat there reading, realization dawned on me about how difficult the life of a single parent might be, especially one with a small child. The precautions they had to take, the planning they had to make if something should happen, to get help if something happened in the middle of the night, the difficulties in caring for a small child when they fell ill, the pressure and loneliness without a backup right next to them. I sat there on the bed with all these thoughts swirling through my jet-lagged, sleep-addled brain. Some more time passed. I began to feel better, the dizziness seemed fainter as did the nausea. I got up and felt sufficiently steady. I walked over to the end of the room and switched on the light. The worst part of that night was over.


We had landed in Bangalore the previous day at 2 am. The flight had been surprisingly easy. Maya had been an impeccable traveller. She took off her shoes at the security checkpoint before I even said anything to her. She loves the escalator. As we waited to board the plane at San Francisco, she spent almost a half hour walking the same long escalator over and over again. All that exercise coupled with the flight being well underway as her nap time approached, helped her sleep well on the way to Hong Kong. She ate well on board, chowing down the better parts of the airplane meal and filling the rest of her belly with food that I had carried from home. She hardly watched any TV, spending most of the time reading to herself or asking me to read to her or playing with some paint and paper that she got on the plane. She didn’t exhibit even a single sign of frustration despite sitting in the plane for almost 15 hours. I felt like I was travelling with an adult.

At Hong Kong, she insisted on hauling one of the cabin baggages. I was travelling light and so with her help, the transit was a piece of cake. As we walked to our boarding gate for the final leg to Bangalore, Maya spotted a play area and took off. She let loose all her pent-up energy after sitting for so long by running around like crazy. Tired, she slept most of the way to Bangalore. When we landed, she seemed well rested. She even pushed the luggage cart with all our baggage all the way to the car, causing heads to turn and passers-by to express their delight at her energy and strength, even more impressed when told that she was not even three.

I had arranged to stay with some close friends for a day or two since my parents had moved houses well beyond the outskirts of the city to a remote gated community, about a three hour drive from the airport. After travelling for almost 24 hours, I didn’t want to tax Maya’s patience by asking her to sit for another three hours. Also, I was going to my parents’ new house for the first time and didn’t want to risk travelling to an unknown, remote place in the middle of the night. Furthermore, with the remoteness of the location, I worried about easy access to doctors should Maya fall ill as she acclimatised to India. Our old driver, who ran a taxi service now, was there to pick us up and drop us off to our friends’ place (his taxi service license wouldn’t let him cross the state lines, as my parents’ house was in another state).

I was excited to see our friends again and Maya was thrilled that she was finally on firm ground, out of cars and planes. Our friends’ daughter, who had been eagerly waiting for Maya, was awake at 4 am, waiting for us. Maya ate a little, hugged everyone and we all went to bed. The next morning, my friends’ daughter fed her a good breakfast and bathed her. Everyone was having a good time and I looked forward to an enjoyable vacation, one that matched my expectations. And then god said ha!

After her bath, Maya wanted to pee. As she was sitting on the toilet seat, she suddenly threw up. Within a few seconds, she had emptied her belly of all the food she had consumed the past eight hours or so. She seemed a little surprised and upset at vomiting, but otherwise seemed OK. I spent the next twenty minutes cleaning up the bathroom and washing her up.

I was not worried. A simple one-time vomit, I expected. It had happened before, when we first came to India and on returning to the US the last time. Both times, it had happened a few hours after the long flight. But this time, by the afternoon, she had vomited several times, about 20 minutes or so after she consumed anything, including water. So we decided to call my friend’s daughter’s pediatrician. He recommended a non-antibiotic anti-emetic. That helped stop the vomit, but she didn’t eat anything after the first episode of vomiting. Her energy level and spirits seemed normal however. With the jet lag, we both fell asleep by 7 pm. And then I awoke at 1 am to the dizziness and nausea.

The second day was just plain miserable. Maya’s travails continued as did mine. The misery began, just like the first day, soon after her bath.

I had decided to return a few days before the originally scheduled date. Shanthala was leaving for Houston to attend a conference the day of our original return. I didn’t want to miss her for another three days. I was on the phone with Cathay Pacific looking for an earlier return when Maya began to protest and demand that I put the phone down. I told her that it was important that I speak on the phone and went away. She was quiet for an instant or so it seemed to me, before she started calling for me again. I ignored her. A few minutes later, she came bawling. When I looked at her, she said that she had peed in her pants. Worse still, she had also defecated, unable to control her motion due to the severe diarrhea. I immediately whisked her to the nearest bathroom hoping no feces had dropped anywhere. I tried to complete the call as I tried to clean her up, making her wait by herself in the bathroom a few times. She was wailing her unhappiness and at being left alone, but what could I do ? I don’t know why I didn’t drop the call and pick it up later. Was I desperate to head back home sooner ?

I had to clean the bathroom, Maya and her clothes. I bathed her again and dressed her up again. She seemed in a better mood, but I was drained. To make matters worse, Maya was clingy and in a bad mood throughout the day, fussing over the smallest thing and uncooperative. She didn’t play well with my friends’ daughter or her friends. They all seemed quite understanding and willing to accommodate her, but she didn’t want to share toys, she didn’t want to take turns, and on and on. And each such episode started a crying jag that must’ve lasted a couple of minutes. With my own fatigue and illness, I was really frustrated and tired.

In the afternoon, I also had chills, sore throat and a headache. I gargled and got rid of the sore throat rather quickly. Two doses of Ibuprofen controlled the fever. But I was miserable and weak. I spoke to Shanthala’s mom and she asked us to start antibiotics to control our nausea and diarrhea. We both took our first dose and went to bed early again. I woke up around 1 am again, but this time with severe diarrhea. I couldn’t sleep much. Maya at least slept till about 4 am or so.

The next day seemed only a slight improvement over the first two days. Maya’s vomiting and loose motion had both stopped and her appetite seemed better. But my stomach still hurt and felt distended. I had no appetite. Another small blessing was that the cold and cough seemed a distant memory. We found that the cause of our misery might be a tiny leak in the water filter, causing a minuscule amount of unfiltered water to get mixed with the filtered water.

Finally, on the fourth day, we headed to my parents’ house. My father had sent a rather friendly gentleman named Elango to pick us up. He ran a concierge service in Hosur (the town nearest to my parents’ place), part of which was providing a taxi service. My father had requested him to come pick us up personally rather than have his regular taxi driver come pick us up. My father wanted to assuage any fears I might have had about going to a remote, unknown place with a stranger. And Elango proved to be an excellent choice.

We drove close to an hour along the highways that skirted the city now. The drive was smooth and almost congestion free. My spirits began to lift. This was such a difference from the constant stop-and-go traffic endemic to Bangalore now. But, as we approached Hosur, I asked Elango how much farther we had to go. He said we’d make the turn to my father’s place beyond Hosur. I was shocked. I was under the impression, the fault largely mine, that my father’s place was between Bangalore and Hosur, not beyond Hosur. I had hardly digested this information when we turned onto a narrow, rutted road. Its about 6 kms from here, Elango said. My heart sank. The road was untarred in places, a real village road in India. And we traveled for what seemed an interminable time before we arrived at my parents’ place.

The place felt desolate, far removed from civilization and its comforts. There was not a house in sight. I felt like I was on the moon. My parents were thrilled to see us, but I doubt my happiness showed. We ate lunch, with Maya chowing down my mom’s food with as much gusto as she normally did back in the US. I didn’t eat much. I tried to sleep a little. Maya had already slept on the way to my parents’ house and was not sleepy. But she was very cooperative and sat on the bed next to me, reading her books. I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned. How would I keep Maya occupied here ? How would I meet my friends ? How would I, how would I ? The questions strangled any sleep I had. For the first time in my life, coming to Bangalore didn’t feel like coming home. Hardly four days had passed since we had arrived in India and the trip already felt long. A long, strange trip.

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A Long, Strange Trip: The Start

Posted on January 31, 2011
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Like swallows flying south in winter, we fly to India as the year end approaches. Each year for the past three years, we’ve marked the end of one year and the start of another this way. If we mark this phase as India, the grandparents mark this time of the year as Maya.

We book the tickets well in advance, usually by June or July. The time can’t seem to pass fast enough and then we’re on the plane, filled with equal parts of thrill and dread. The dread is mostly about how Maya will fare during the long flight and how we’ll cope if she gets unhappy. The first year we went with Maya, she was not even one and I was a tad apprehensive about how she would react to the air and the not-so-sterile environment of the land of her parents (she did fine). Traveling with infants in their first year is the easiest, we heard parents say. They’re too small and will sleep most of the time. The second isn’t too bad, but the third and fourth are the worst, the kids seized by the restlessness of their age and the long time in cramped quarters making for a parentally lethal mid-air combination.

After my mostly successful flight and first week with Maya last year, I dreaded this year’s travel even less. I figured that with her age, she had better ability to  reason and understand the situation than before. We started prepping her in advance, telling her that she couldn’t get upset on the plane, that the stewards  and stewardesses on the plane would get upset with her and we couldn’t travel any more after that, that she had to listen to her pop during the flight. For all  that, she’d be rewarded with good times with grandparents, our friends’ kids and magical India. She nodded and started chanting this mantra every time she  saw a plane.

I travel alone with Maya a week before Shanthala joins us and the lack of a backup adds to my concern. My difficulties would begin once we landed. I knew that I had to synchronize my jet lag with hers, sleep when she did and be awake when she was. The first week is also when the long flight with recirculated air and lack of sleep leaves us more vulnerable to upper respiratory infections and gives cause for our stomachs to be upset with us. The first year, Maya puked a few hours after we landed, throwing up everything she had consumed during the past 24 hours or so. Shanthala’s mom put it down to stomach distension due to the long flight. This year, I was more worried about how to keep her occupied. There are no cousins she interacts with, no children near my parents’ house that we know. Here in the US, she goes to a park practically everyday leaving us with only a few hours of dark to keep her occupied. In India, there are no parks for her to play in near my parents house. The two parks nearby are closed during the day and the playgrounds are in a sad state of repair. I only worried about that first week, for after that, the ever-practical Shanthala would be there to help. Also, Maya clings more ferociously to me during that first week, when the foreignness of her ancestral lands and jet lag confound her.

For every such part of dread, I’m filled with equal parts of thrill. Bangalore has always held a special place in my mind. From my childhood days, my mind would fill with anticipation of new toys, watching the latest English movies (for years I watched the newest adventures of James Bond in Bangalore) and eating at fantastic restautants. And now, my mind is excited with thoughts of good food and good times, and the excitement over new toys has yielded to an eagerness to visit the book stores (Strand, Blossom, Gangarams and more). Walking down the MG Road promenade always made me feel grand, like a kid in a toy store, even though so many things have changed there. My mouth watered at the prospect of eating the excellent Dosas and other South Indian delicacies at select restaurants. While the Bay Area has a surfeit of Indian eateries, none can do justice to the South Indian eats, especially the quality of Dosa, Sambar and Chutney that I’m used to at Bangalore. Even the most mediocre of restaurants in Bangalore produced better South Indian fare than what we get in the Bay Area. I wanted to drink Sugar Cane jiuce, coconut water. I hallucinated on the quality of the Indian desserts that I would be able to feast on, my sweet tongue lolling in anticipation. And the thrill of seeing family and some of our closest friends, of nights spent talking about everything and anything.

At a friends’ place here in the US where there are twin girls about 10 years of age and a boy of seven, Maya has a glorious time. She vanishes with the kids once we arrive, leaving me time to chat with the adults. I thought that she’d be the same with our friends’ kids. One of them emailed me regularly about eagerly she was waiting to play with Maya. The last two times, she hadn’t bonded too well with all the grandparents. With her being almost three, I thought that this would fare better too. So, overall I predicted that this trip would be even better than the previous two that we had taken with her.

So, what could possibly go wrong ?

An Irish Perspective On The Journey

Our winter escapade to India is not unusual among Indians, at least amongst those without children or their school-going variety. I think Indians of my generation and socio-economic class are blessed amongst the immigrants. We were welcomed with mostly open arms in the US, provided an excellent path to make this place our permanent home and respected in the community because we were in the computer industry. Unlike immigrants of the past who landed here and started at the bottom of the unskilled job market, we arrived as skilled immigrants, starting fairly high in the socio-economic totem pole and usually heading upwards that ladder. We arrive in a place that has a surfeit of Indian restaurants and Indian grocery stores. Movie halls play the latest Bollywood flick, Holi and Deepavali are major organized events in several places nearby and we even have a choice of temples (for the observing Hindus) to visit. That is not to say we don’t have our share of existential angst, but compared to other immigrants, past and current, we’re fortunate in a myriad ways.

The striking contrast between us and other immigrants of the past is brought home every time I hear the Irish ditty, “Kilkelly, Ireland“. The Irish fled their homeland in droves, somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million leaving during the worst period of the infamous Irish Potato Famine, between 1845 to 1855. Unlike the independent India we came from, they were still subjugated by the monarchy in Britain at that time, with the Irish famine probably analogous to the horrific Bengal famines. They set sail, usually from the harbour of Cobh, on a journey mostly to North America, that took 45 days or more and cost anywhere between 55 shillings and 5 pounds. The cramped, insanitary conditions killed so many people, that these ships carrying Irish immigrants were dubbed “coffin shps”. One description of the conditions on board such ships reads:
“Hundreds of poor people, men, women and children of all ages huddled together without light, without air, wallowing in filth and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart; the fevered patients lying beside the sound, by their agonised ravings disturbing those around. The food is generally ill-selected and seldom sufficiently cooked in consequences of the insufficiency and bad construction of the cooking places. The supply of water, hardly enough for cooking and drinking, does not allow for washing. No moral restraint is attempted; the voice of prayer is never heard; drunkenness, with all its consequent train of ruffianly debasement, is not discouraged because it is found profitable by the captain who traffics in grog [watered-down Rum] [2]“.

“Kilkelly, Ireland” one of the most moving songs I’ve heard, captures the longing for the absent faces in the form of letters sent by a father, living in Kilkelly, to his son who has immigrated to the US. Each stanza of the 5 stanza song marks ten years. The song, written by the Americans Steven and Peter Jones, is based on the letters sent by their great-great-grandfather Bryan Hunt to their great-grandfather Bryan Hunt.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 60, my dear and loving son John
Your good friend the schoolmaster Pat McNamara's so good
  as to write these words down.
Your brothers have all gone to find work in England,
   the house is so empty and sad
The crop of potatoes is sorely infected,
   a third to a half of them bad.
And your sister Brigid and Patrick O'Donnell
  are going to be married in June.
Your mother says not to work on the railroad
  and be sure to come on home soon.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 70, dear and loving son John
Hello to your Mrs and to your 4 children,
  may they grow healthy and strong.
Michael has got in a wee bit of trouble,
  I guess that he never will learn.
Because of the dampness there's no turf to speak of
  and now we have nothing to burn.
And Brigid is happy, you named a child for her
  and now she's got six of her own.
You say you found work, but you don't say
  what kind or when you will be coming home.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 80, dear Michael and John, my sons
I'm sorry to give you the very sad news
  that your dear old mother has gone.
We buried her down at the church in Kilkelly,
  your brothers and Brigid were there.
You don't have to worry, she died very quickly,
  remember her in your prayers.
And it's so good to hear that Michael's returning,
  with money he's sure to buy land
For the crop has been poor and the people
  are selling at any price that they can.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 90, my dear and loving son John
I guess that I must be close on to eighty,
  it's thirty years since you're gone.
Because of all of the money you send me,
  I'm still living out on my own.
Michael has built himself a fine house
  and Brigid's daughters have grown.
Thank you for sending your family picture,
  they're lovely young women and men.
You say that you might even come for a visit,
  what joy to see you again.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 92, my dear brother John
I'm sorry that I didn't write sooner to tell you that father passed on.
He was living with Brigid, she says he was cheerful
  and healthy right down to the end.
Ah, you should have seen him play with
  the grandchildren of Pat McNamara, your friend.
And we buried him alongside of mother,
  down at the Kilkelly churchyard.
He was a strong and a feisty old man,
  considering his life was so hard.
And it's funny the way he kept talking about you,
  he called for you in the end.
Oh, why don't you think about coming to visit,
  we'd all love to see you again.

The money sent home, a family taking root so far away, a family seen only in one or two probably blurry photographs and the longing, oh! the longing, expressed with such eloquence in just “what joy to see you again”, does violence to my heart each time I listen to the song. I hear my father’s voice when I read the lines: “You say you found work, but you don’t say what kind”. He always wants to know more about my job than I find the patience to explain.

Now you see why I think we’re blessed. With cheap telephone and the advent of video chats, families separated by many oceans can still see each other and a journey is not just affordable, but far more comfortable and short.

Back To Our Adventure

So, what could go wrong ?

The first shoe dropped two weeks before we were to leave, Shanthala’s backup was diagnosed with cancer. So, she had to cancel her trip. I pondered for an instant if I should cancel the trip too, but coupled with my fantasies of Maya playing with older kids here and my desire to not rob this time from the grandparents, I decided to journey alone with Maya. I secretly realized that I may have to give up visiting any bookstore. I like to spend an hour or so at each store and I knew that wasn’t possible with Maya in tow. She’d probably be patient for about 15-20 minutes. But I hadn’t given up hope completely.

The second shoe dropped a few days after that when my parents informed me that they had moved houses, from their current location in a fairly central part of the city to a remote hamlet, far from the city. Their move took me by complete surprise. It is considered a rural area, my father said, so the landline is a via something the local telephone company calls wireless local loop. Do you have any Internet connection, I asked. We have something, he said and my heart sank. Go to a place where there is not even an Internet connection ? That was so last century, I thought.

From Bangalore Airport, it took about 2.5-3 hours to travel to my parents’ new place. Not wanting to risk traveling in the middle of the night to a place I hadn’t even seen, I scrambled to make arrangements to stay with a friend immediately after we landed. How was I going to meet my friends and relatives ? I flinched at the thought of sitting for a couple of hours each way in the car with Maya. Travelling in a car in Bangalore’s congested roads was like chinese water torture, who knew when the car would stall ? What about eating at all those places that I had been fantasizing ? Could I even walk down M.G. Road ?

With a steely heart and iron resolve (which I hoped wouldn’t rust), I boarded the plane with Maya. The only one facing the whole thing as a real adventure was Maya.

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Death of A Language

Posted on July 29, 2010
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“Last speaker of ancient language dies”.

Flashback to February this year. I was on my way back to the US from India. Seating myself in the plane, the above headline scrolled past on the display in front of my seat. The article refered to a language, Bo, spoken by some tribals on India’s Andaman Islands. The languages spoken on the islands are considered to be almost 70,000 years old and are theorized to have African roots. Professor Anvita Abbi, a leading linguist is quoted as saying: “(her death was) a loss for intellectuals wanting to study more about the origins of ancient languages, because they had lost ‘a vital piece of the jigsaw’. It is generally believed that all Andamanese languages might be the last representatives of those languages which go back to pre-Neolithic times.”

The last speaker was a 85 year old woman, a survivor of the recent Tsunami that ravaged the islands. The BBC story says: “”She was often very lonely and had to learn an Andamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people. But throughout her life she had a very good sense of humour and her smile and full-throated laughter were infectious”. What might’ve gone through her mind as she lived those years knowing that with her would die the language. Only last week, I read a short story by the acclaimed Australian author, David Malouf, titled “The Only Speaker of His Tongue”. He writes:

“Now to the remotest dark, far back in each ordinary moment of our speaking, even in gossip and the rigamarole of love words and children’s games, into the lives of our fathers, to share with them the single instant of all our seeing and making, all our long history of doing and being. When I think of of my tongue being no longer alive in the mouths of men a chill goes over me that is deeper than my own death, since it is the gathered death of all my kind.”

Even before Maya was born, Shanthala had started campaigning for Maya to speak Kannada. She insisted that we speak as much Kannada as possible when we’re with Maya. I, a self-proclaimed global denizen, was a little skeptical of this goal. After all, Shanthala and I spoke to each other mostly in English, especially when we had to discuss something complicated. I thought in English. Having been raised in different linguistic lands during my childhood and adolescence, I was barely conversant in Kannada, my mother tongue. I read it with difficulty and my vocabulary was limited to the few words needed to get by on the street. Why should we insist on Maya speaking or learning Kannada when we didn’t ? I asked. She’d imitate us anyway and thereby speak mostly a mixture of Kannada and English, more English than Kannada. Duh! That is why I want us to speak Kannada more, said Shanthala.

To me, the primary purpose of language seemed to be about getting past our separateness, to communicate. Here in the US, Shanthala and I have not sought out Kannada-speaking friends, we’ve not joined groups for Kannada speakers or done anything to sustain the language part of our upbringing. It seemed impractical to insist that Maya learn a language that she’d not hear outside the house (and even that, only when her parents discussed simple subjects). We have friends in India whose kids, despite living in Bngalore and having Kannada spoken almost exclusively in the house, have switched to speaking only in English. It all seemed a losing battle to me. With so many battles to pick from, why pick a sure-fire loser ? But, as Maya grew, so did my fluency in Kannada. Maya’s first word, “Agua”, was that of a Californian, in Spanish. But, Maya came up with her own Creole, constructing sentences that are a mixture of English, Kannada and Spanish, picking the words that were easiest for her to say in each language. “Leche beka”, she says (Leche is Spanish for milk and beka is “want” in Kannada. In Kannada, “beka” is actually a question, “do you want”, for which the answer is “beku”, I want. But having only heard the questioning form of the verb, Maya uses beka to mean I want).

The end of Bo has stayed with me all this time. The main reason may have had something to do with my (then recent) experience in India. It began with my purchases of the English translations of some major local literary works. I purchased House of Kanooru by the popular and acclaimed Kuvempu. The blurb at the back said that the book documented the life of a group of people in the highlands of Coorg, a famous and distinctive part of Southern Karnataka, a life that was fast disappearing, if not already extinct. The foreword by the distinguished playwright, Girish Karnad, lent the translation some heft, I thought. The other book that I purchased was the translation of an autobiography in Gujrati by a Dalit, titled The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth: A Dalit’s Life by N. Kesharshivam. The introduction by the author was written in simple English that I felt (in my patronising way, I suppose) had the right voice and tone for such a tome. I thought that these would help fill the gaping hole in my awareness of India.

Alas! The translations were awful, to say the least. The House of Kanooru seemed transliterated rather than translated. Some of the phrasing and sentences that might have read well in Kannada read horribly in English, with awkward, anachronistic phrasing and choice of words. I can’t recall the exact phrases, but I remember something like “When the beautiful damsel saw her consort, she felt like she was cavorting in the heavens”. Somewhere within the first 20 pages, my goodwill died and I gave up on the book. No wonder, Kuvempu is virtually unknown outside the pages of Kannada (even though he’s a recipient of India’s prestigious Jnanapith Award). The autobiography was equally bad. One particularly unskilled sentence stood out: “So, at the fag end of my life, at the end of my youth, I became a Class 1 Officer”. When I packed for my return, I was happy to leave these books behind.

Over the years, as I watched writers in various languages other than English win the Nobel Prize, I wondered at the paucity of Indians in that list. Prizes for works in English such as the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer Prize have had their share of Indians recently, but we didn’t figure in the Nobel Prize (yes, I know that awards are an opinion and Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize while Kissinger did). I had wondered if poor translations were the primary reason why they haven’t become more universally known. Not all translations are this bad, I suppose. When I read Rabindranath Tagore’s Short Stories or even his famous Gitanjali, the work which won him the Nobel Prize, I was struck by how beautiful the English translation was. They had been translated by Englishmen in the early years of the past century.

Back to book purchases. I wanted to buy books in Kannada for Maya. Maya was not yet two and if the books were made of regular, adult book paper, she rent them into the waste paper basket in short order. In the US, many infant and toddler books (called board books) are made of thick cardboard making it difficult for the toddlers to damage them. In Bangalore, I could hardly find board books in Kannada. A search for even basic Kannada alphabet books was surprising in its paucity. In the US, there are a million books on the English alphabet, presenting the information in entertaining, eye-catching ways. The only toddler-proof books that I encountered in India were in English. In India, usually only the not so well healed read non-English books to their infants. They cannot afford to buy board books, which are more expensive to make, thereby forming a vicious cycle from which only the loss of the language is the winner.

This is how a language dies, I thought to myself. And was reminded of this again as the headline chronicling the extinction scrolled up the display screen in front of my seat.

There are about 6800 known languages in the world remaining (as of 1999), 96% of which are spoken by only 4% of the world’s population. 51 languages have only one speaker left and 5,000 languages have less than 100,000 speakers.

In “How Language Works” by David Crystal (a link to the chapter is here), writes that there are many reasons why a language dies, from the violence of natural calamities and genocides to the seeming benevolence of cultural assimilation. The most potent force for the past 500 years however has been cultural assimilation.

The author speaks of three stages in the death of a language by cultural assimilation. The first is the enormous pressure – economic, social and political – to speak the dominant language. Crystal writes: “‘To achieve a better quality of life’ is a commonly stated reason why someone decides to learn the dominant language”. The second stage is the ascent of bilingualism as people build a bridge between the old and the new languages, crossing back and forth between them. The final stage is when a new generation increasingly adept in the new language uses less and less of the old one, until at last the bridge to the old falls down in disrepair. Crystal writes: “This is often accompanied by a feeling of shame about using the old language, on the part of the parents as well as their children. Parents use the old language less and less to their children, or in front of their children.”

I’ve lived these stages. Growing up, my father looked down upon speaking in Kannada, listening to Kannada or Hindi songs or watching movies in the vernacular. He was not unusual in this regard. He only wanted his son to grow up with as many opportunities as possible, opportunities that shrank dramatically if I wasn’t fluent in English. And now, if Maya grows up in the US, her children, if not her, will surely know next to nothing of Kannada.

But why should we care if a language dies ? Is it important ? Surely, if the language were useful, it’d have survived.

One utilitarian argument is that each language is a repository of vast, accumulated knowledge. In a recently published article, “In Defense of Difference”, the authors, Maywa Montenegro & Terry Glavin, write:

“The way Maffi (Luisa Maffi is a linguist and anthropologist) tells the story, she was interviewing Tzeltal Mayan people waiting in line at a medical clinic in the village of Tenejapa when she met a man who had walked for hours, carrying his two-year-old daughter, who was suffering from diarrhea. It turned out that the man had only a dim memory of the “grasshopper leg herb” that was once well known as a perfectly effective diarrhea remedy in the Tzeltal ethnomedical pharmacopeia. Because he’d nearly forgotten the words for the herb, he’d lost almost any trace of the herb’s utility, or even of its existence.”

Besides loss of knowledge, there is also the loss of ways of thinking and being. Malouf writes that each language is: “a whole alternative universe, since the world as we know it is in the last resort the words through which we imagine and name it”. Imagine if you will the following scenario. As the world moves increasingly towards nuclear families, imagine that we will lose all the Asian languages. With that loss, it’s possible that we’d lose the knowledge that once, societies existed that valued the social web so much that they had specific words to express the relationship between two human beings instead of everyone being an uncle, auntie or a cousin.

Another reason, the basic premise of the article “In Defense of Difference”, is that with increasing homogeneity and a loss in diversity comes a reduction in resilience. After all, it is diversity that accounts for much beauty and resilience in the natural world. Complex systems and ecologies thrive in the presence of diversity and homogeneous systems vanish when catastrophic events occur. I haven’t encountered this idea as applied to language before and so can only speculate that it rings true because of the analogy with the natural world.

Yet another reason it seems to me has nothing to do with utility, but is similar to preservation of Van Goghs and Mona Lisa and the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are precious heirlooms. And the people who speak those languages are often interested in preserving their language, if they can be supported in their efforts. The preservation of art and culture that we take for granted come at a pretty high price, one that we discount easily when it comes to Mona Lisa, but object when it comes to something like the Bo language.

The face of the last speaker of the Bo language has stayed with me since February. I wanted to write it up, but for some reason or the other, couldn’t find the words. Then yesterday, I ran across a buzz in the online world over articles written opposing the viewpoints of “In Defense of Difference”. I learnt of the buzz and the article via the excellent blog, Neuroanthropology. In “Language Extinction Ain’t No Big Thing ?”, the author is furious at an entry by another blogger, Razib Khan, who writes the blog, The Gene Expression, hosted at the Discover science magazine. Khan wrote “Linguistic Diversity = Poverty”. In slightly longer words, rich Western intellectuals and liberals like to keep alive things like exotic languages like Bo while the people who speak those languages want to escape them because it is a cause for poverty.

In one way, I suppose Khan’s argument is not very different from what David Crystal said. But Khan makes other false arguments (some which have the malodor of social darwinism (eg: “First, we’re not talking about the extinction of English, French, or Cantonese. We’re talking about the extinction of languages with a few thousand to a dozen or so speakers”) and overall, makes a specious case according to Neuroanthropology. I haven’t read Khan’s original posts, primarily because I had been put off by his writing earlier on some other topics that now elude me. The article on Neuroanthropology is long (almost 10,000 words), but fascinating and comprehensive in its coverage of why preservation of language is important, what is being done and why arguments such as Khan’s are incorrect. I highly recommend putting aside some time to read it.

As any reader of my blog will know by now, these are weighty matters and I don’t dwell on them for the sake of intellectual stimulation. These are matters which have a bearing on the world we leave behind for our children.

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say

but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

many of the things the words were about
no longer exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I

the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak

somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently

so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away

where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other

we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners

the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers

this is what the words were made
to prophesy

here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw – Losing A Language, W.S. Merwin

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Bangalore Impressions, Part 2: Yin and Yang

Posted on March 27, 2010
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In India, I find the yin and yang of life constantly in my face: the ancient squalor amongst the new, shining, tall apartments; the garish movie posters that celebrate sentimental love and outrageous violence side by side; the intricate twining of the wild and the tamed; the weak infrastructure and the strong economy; the hunger and yearning in the eyes of most and the satiated look of the wealthy few. The difference between being a beggar and driving a Mercedes, between pushing a cart all day when you’re 60 to survive and blowing up Rs.10,000 for your son’s birthday when you’re only 30, between starving for a morsel and having all you can eat for Rs.100, between living amongst filth and ramshackle structures and in mansions that rival the West, between being a monk and a free market enthusiast, between being a rat in the jaws of a hawk and being the hawk, all seems so arbitrary that believing in god seems logical. There but for the grace of you, go I. Fate and destiny seem more powerful than free will and conscious action in India.

In the US, I find it easy to turn a blind eye to the way we live and the way most Indians live. In our suburban neighborhoods, I find it easy to think 4 bedroom single family homes with 2 cars is not an aspiration, some lofty goal, but just the basic human right, to be denied it is unthinkable; easy to lose perspective and vent over some trifle like the cell phone coverage of AT&T; easy to dismiss as aberrations the men I see every now and then holding a sign that says “Broke Nam Vet” or “Hungry Vet, Will Work for Food” with labels such as “alcoholic” or “drug addict”. Instead of thinking how millions of us executing the same life choices that I make leads to such broken men, I think how right Gordon Lightfoot was when he sang “See the soldier with his gun, who must be dead to be admired”. One of the haunting images from Lisbon that I still bear is the sight of a street musician whose dog sat on its haunches holding a small bowl in its mouth labeled “alms”. My first thought was about the plight of the dog, not the man. Am I a misanthrope, I still wonder.

I remember a quote from the classic history of the 20th century, Eric Hobsbawm’s “The Age of Extremes” that sums up my confusion, my agitation when I visit India. Julio Caro Baroja, a Spanish anthropologist says: “There’s a patent contradiction between one’s own life experience – childhood, youth, old age passed quietly and without major adventures – and the facts of the twentieth century … the terrible events which humanity has lived through”.

And when I feel despair, I remember Derrick Jensen’s quote, from an article about the state of the Earth, published in The Orion magazine, back in 2006: “I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.”

I often wonder, how can I explain to Maya this schism between what her life is like (hopefully our good fortune extends to her) and what she sees around her when she’s in India. And when she asks what have I done to reduce the schism, what will I say ? What will I have done ?

These thoughts resurge powerfully each time I visit India.

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New Year, Old Continent

Posted on January 8, 2010
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The new year found us in an old continent, in the land of our birth, India.

The Emirates Experience

Maya and I boarded an Emirates Airlines flight on the afternoon of December 25th headed for Bangalore (or Bengaluru as it is officially called now) via Dubai. Emirates had been praised a lot as a classy airline, head and shoulders above its competitors, on par with Cathay and Singapore, with even better food.

Maya is too big now to journey on our laps and so we purchased a ticket for her. We chose the final rows of the craft where the 3-4-3 seating switches to a 2-4-2 format. With just two seats between us, we thought that we’d have more flexibility and no immediate neighbor to worry about. Furthermore, with just two seats at the ends, there was marginally additional room on the window side to keep Maya’s things. This had served us well last year when Maya had made her first trip to India. The final advantage of the two seater would be that Maya could stretch out when asleep.

The first thing that struck me when I boarded the craft, a 737-300, was the rather comfortable leg room, much more than Cathay or Singapore. But unlike Cathay, the additional side room we had planned on, didn’t exist; the additional room was on the aisle seat and not on the window seat. What was worse, the armrest on the first row of the 2-4-2 seating couldn’t be raised, providing an inflexible two seater. Neither one of us could stretch when we slept.

There was a single guy in the 2 seater row behind us and I didn’t think he’d be willing to move to a row where he couldn’t take advantage of stretching out. A few minutes later, a couple arrived to occupy the single remaining seat in that row. They had an aisle seat behind us and a window seat in the two seater row on the other side of the aircraft. The woman sweet talked the single guy to changing seats with her husband. Ah-ha! I thought. Having exchanged seats, they cannot deny us our exchange. Knowing guys to be less flexible, I turned to the woman and explaining my predicament, asked her if we could exchange seats. Sure, she said and stood up. I could see the reluctance in the guy’s eyes, but the die had been cast.

Each seat had an individual TV monitor with touch screen controls in addition to the traditional remote control. Each seat also had power sockets for laptops and a USB port. A memory stick with pictures e plugged into the USB port would automatically trigger a slide show of the pictures on the TV monitor.

Some folks told me that the air hostesses on Emirates Airlines were rather brusque and not kid friendly. I was delighted to find that they were wrong. They understood that everyone is happier if the parents are allowed some leeway in managing the kids rather than playing by the book. The staff were friendly to Maya, didn’t insist on her being strapped as soon as we started taxiing, and once during a turbulent stretch, when I was standing in a corner calming a frustrated Maya, told me to be careful but didn’t demand that I return to my seat.

The food that had been raved about wasn’t anything to rave about, being on the same class or a little below that of Cathay or Singapore. The croissant served for breakfast was positively appalling. The snacks between meals however were both healthier and tastier.

The connection at Dubai was a little painful as the security lines were extremely long, and this was flying to India. I dread the lines when we’re returning, especially in light of the increased security after the Christmas near mishap.

Single Parent Traveller

My workplace was closed from Christmas to New Year and I thought that the grandparents might enjoy an extra week with Maya. Maya has no issues being alone with me and I felt confident that I could look after her by myself. But, many friends and family members, including Shanthala, were a little apprehensive about my traveling alone with Maya. The duration, the cramped quarters and the logistics of flying solo with her might prove to be too much for me (and her), was their fear. While I was less apprehensive than them, I worried a little about logistics. I worried about using the loo when she was awake, when she was asleep. How do I manage the hand baggage and her with only a single pair of hands ? Do I take the stroller or do I not ?

I have found the stroller to be unhelpful with Maya. She prefers to push the stroller than be pushed. With the stroller, I’d have two pieces of baggage to push. If she refused to sit in the stroller, I could strap the hand baggage in the stroller, but it’d not be a picnic. So I eschewed the stroller, despite warnings from friends and Shanthala. We sometimes carry Maya in a body sling that I’ve found her to be far more cooperative in. So, I carried the sling hoping to use it only as a final option.

Shanthala smartly insisted that I take a small enough backpack so that I’d have only 2 pieces of hand baggage, a Pullman and a bag with Maya’s food, diapers and such. The backpack with the laptop had to fit in the Pullman.

The first hurdle I faced was how do I carry four pieces of checkin baggage and Maya. Most luggage carts can hold only 2 pieces of luggage. Maya’s nanny had thoughtfully suggested that she drop us to the airport since most taxis don’t carry a toddler car seat. I considered having her watch Maya as I loaded one luggage cart, rushed it to the checkin counter and returned quickly to the curbside to pick Maya up and push the second cart. Luckily for me, a man with a large luggage cart was waiting at the curbside when we arrived. He was a trifle more expensive than two separate luggage carts, but far more convenient. I didn’t bat an eyelid in using his service. I felt pleased that the first hurdle had been crossed so easily.

The next hurdle was navigating past the security checkpoint. Removing my shoes, removing her shoes, separating the laptop from the rest of the cabin baggage, removing my jacket, removing hers, holding our tickets and passports, and pushing six items through the scanner might be tricky. As I stepped past the metal detector column, without a beep, I felt that the second hurdle had been crossed rather easily too. Thats when the TSA chap asked me if I had pushed all my stuff through the scanner. Yes, I said, and looked back at the conveyor belt to see that one piece was stranded. I reached across the barrier and pushed the piece onto the belt.

“Step back, sir”, yelled the TSA guy. “You violated security protocols. Please pass through the detector again”.

I stepped back out and back in again.

“Request thorough check”, he yelled and asked me to go into an enclosed space. Maya who had been unhappy waiting in line and having her stuff taken away, now began wailing. Her nap time had passed and she was a little cranky. I talked to her soothingly, fuming inside at this seemingly ridiculous behavior from the security. She soon calmed down and we waited for a more thorough pat down. Then, a TSA guard called out “Whose baggage is this ?”. I looked to see her gesturing at my Pullman. “Mine”, I said. “I need to open it for a more thorough inspection”, she said.

Maya’s medicines had triggered the thorough inspection of the cabin baggage. After two more runs through the scanner and wipes for explosives, the Pullman was delivered, its contents a disorganized mess. After recovering from that, we had a mostly incident free journey to the gate. We boarded the plane a half hour later. Once on board the plane, Maya decided to take her nap and slept for about a hour or so. She woke up right as they started serving the food.

Mealtime posed another logistical problem. The room was small enough that if Maya got cranky, she could kick the food and make a real mess of our seats and our dress. I had packed spare clothes for her, but I had no extra pants. When we were settling into our seats after boarding, a gentleman across the aisle from us saw that I was traveling alone with Maya. Reaching over, he volunteered to help in any way I could use his help. I took his help in removing the plates immediately after our meal instead of waiting for the cabin crew to clear them. Just knowing that he was there was support enough.

Maya wolfed down quite a bit of the food. She spotted a covered chocolate bar amongst the meal and asked me to unwrap it. She had never tasted chocolate before. She took a small, wary bite and her eyes lit up. “Wow”, she said and proceeded to wolf down both our chocolates. Rested and full, she was ready for some action.

A few days before we left for India, the three of us were finishing some last minute India shopping at a local electronics store when Maya spotted a giant screen TV. She demanded to be taken to it. “Madagascar” was playing and she watched, her eyes never leaving the screen. “There”, Shanthala said, “your airplane journey will go smoothly now. Just turn on whatever cartoon or wildlife movie is playing on her screen and she’ll be a great traveler”.

Alas! On the plane, the small screen didn’t attract her at all. There were no wildlife screenings and so I tried various cartoons including Cars and Finding Nemo. After a minute or so, Maya lost interest in the proceedings. A part of me was relieved that she didn’t care to watch TV. I powered on my laptop and she was happy watching the pictures of our life and a couple of video clips that I had downloaded.

An hour or so had gone by and now she was a little restless. I walked her back and forth along the length of the aircraft. I tried reading her some books. Another hour crept by. Maya became even more restless and demanded to be taken to the front of the aircraft. She seemed to want to know why she couldn’t deplane right away. When I walked upto the first class cabin and told her I had to turn back, she started wailing. She stopped a minute or so later, after I found something to distract her. She tried playing lion with the passengers behind us, but tired quickly.

She fell into a deep sleep another half hour later and proceeded to sleep for the next seven or so hours. After she awoke, a repeat of the proceedings before she went to sleep followed. By then, we arrived in Dubai.

The only moment of terror happened in Dubai airport. Maya loved getting on and off the escalators. A few tries was all it took for her to learn to balance as she got on and off the flat escalators. The departure gate at Dubai however was a steep descent with the escalator only going down. Climbing up meant about 40 or so steps. Maya wanted to descend the escalator, climb back up, come down the escalator again and repeat this ad inifitum. Lugging the cabin baggage up the stairs and balancing them as I got on the escalator with her proved to be a challenge. The third time around, as I got on the escalator ahead of her so that I could break her fall should she lose her balance, Maya got on the escalator and then feeling uncertain, stepped back. Now I was descending the escalator alone leaving her at the top. I scrambled back up the escalator and somehow managed to get her back on. That was the end of that game. Maya let the world know how unhappy she was with this unceremonious end. It was the only time in her life that I felt I could’ve spanked her. I was tired and scared. But I managed to not lose control.

Maya slept the entire duration from Dubai to Bangalore, waking only a few minutes before we landed. The new Bangalore International Airport is a vast improvement over its predecessor. Like we had experienced the last time, getting past immigration, customs and collecting our bags took all of some fifteen minutes. Maya’s grandparents, my parents, were waiting for her, unbounded delight in their eyes, despite the late hour (we landed at 2:45 am).

Maya uses the diaper only at night now. Or when we travel. Maya told me about wanting to pee when we were on the plane. Unwilling to pull out her toilet seat from the cabin baggage, I took her to the toilet and attempted to use the toilet without her seat. She was OK with that, but didn’t care at all for the circus that followed in trying to put the diaper back on in that cramped space. After the first couple of times, she conveniently used the diaper. She held on to her poop through the journey, pooping in the toilet only after we got home.

Maya and I had survived the 16 hour flight from SFO to Dubai, the two and a half hour transit in Dubai and the three hour journey from Dubai to Bangalore. Survived ? I felt that I could repeat this experiment without too much trepidation. Most of the kudos go to Maya for being such an easy child. Luck was also on our side. Had the Nigerian attempted to blow up the plane just a day earlier, our trip might have been less easy, given the ridiculous, draconian measures that were passed in the immediate aftermath of that incident.

Shanthala joined the party a week later.

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