The Little Zoo

Last Weekend I went to see a zoo.

I knew it was a very small zoo – not a large affair with fancy expensive animals. It was just a few enclosures within a children’s park. But even I wasn’t prepared for the star attraction of the zoo – the animal enclosure that had drawn a huge crowd of children and their parents around it.

An enclosure for billy-goats. Yes – simple, bearded goats that roam the streets in India.

The kids were hysterical with enthusiasm – they were trying to feed the goats through the fence. Back home, the goats ate up our garden through the fence and we had to struggle to keep them away.

They seemed undeterred by the typical billy-goat smell emanating from the animals. Back home in India, when we have to describe someone with the strongest of body odours, we compare him to a billy-goat. I agree that animals will have a bit of body odour and zoo goers have no option but to stand it, but we are looking at goats, for heaven’s sake, not tigers that we have to hold our breath and ogle!

Some children were teasing the goats by tempting them with food, and then running along the fence while the goats ran after them greedily. Alas, these children have never had the experience of being chased down the road by a billy-goat as large as a calf that really meant business. Oh, the joys of growing up in Allahabad! On one hand, it prepares you for all kinds of situations you may find yourself in later in your life. On the other hand, your mind forms certain rather unfavourable and inflexible generalizations about the behaviours of certain species which you may find difficult to change later in life. I, for example, have learnt to adore goats, but only when they are on my plate.

The next enclosure held roosters and hens. The only difference that I noticed between these birds and the ones that are found around our house in Hooghly is their increased self-confidence. These chickens were trying to fly. Every now and then they flapped their wings frantically and made a glorified jump of a couple of feet or so. Or it may have been due to their heightened stupidity. I could not tell which, so I moved on.

The next in line was a fox. The raised ears, the bushy tail and the clever eyes reminded me of the little fox that I had nearly tamed back in Hooghly five years ago. He was a wild creature who lived in an overgrown plot of land close to our house. I had not read Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” back then, but my interactions with that doglike yet vastly different creature went just as described in that book.

"What must I do, to tame you?" asked the little prince.

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me – like that – in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day..."

The next day the little prince came back.

"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If, for example, you come at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you... One must observe the proper rites..."

I had observed the proper rites. I fed him bread every evening at six, until I had to leave for Chennai to join my first job. Now all these incidents seem as if they are from a previous birth. My fox was a free creature. This one was in a small cage. It made me sad, so I moved on.

There were raccoons, coyotes, a sleeping boa constrictor and some birds (geese, doves, pheasants) in the next few pens. There was one marked “pot bellied pig” and I was almost thankful that it was empty. I have seen enough free pigs since my childhood, pot-bellied or otherwise, to want to see one in a zoo. Why, there was this gigantic pig that lived right next to our gate in Allahabad, and whom we jokingly called our guard. The glum faces of the children around me told a different story though – they wanted to see what a real pig looked like, I mean outside the cartoons, and they were disappointed.

I was also thankful that the donkey enclosure was empty. I think a donkey is one of the most thoughtful and serious of God’s creatures. We used to see the free donkeys (probably not really free – they were just out grazing while their masters washed clothes) near the Allahabad University while returning home from school. They were always so deeply engrossed in thought that it seemed the busy street had ceased to exist around them. Running and jumping are for frivolous creatures like horses – a donkey enjoys a life of procrastination. In fact the only creature that I have seen enjoying procrastination more than a donkey is a Ph.D. student, but I’d rather not get into that right now. The donkeys in this zoo were absent and I preferred absent donkeys to absent-minded ones behind bars.

As we approached the next plot of land, we saw something that can be described as a dwarf horse. Horses are, of course, quite abundant even here in the US. I have seen police horses all over Newark and New York City. Horses were even more abundant in Allahabad where I grew up. In fact there was an old one that was kept tied to a park railing in front of our house. The black horse in the zoo was, however, very different from the horses that I had seen before. This one was about as big as the billy-goat that had chased me in Allahabad and had really long hair on its neck and tail. It seemed too bored to even walk around inside its enclosure. Or it may have learnt a lesson or two in philosophy from the donkeys next door.

Next there was a llama, a couple of emus and a deer. They were pretty interesting creatures on paper, but were quite boring in reality. The emus chose the corner farthest from us to engage in their domestic conversation, the deer behaved like the goats next door (yes, there were more goats next door – they could have supplied a banquet) and the llama was the most shabby looking creature I have ever seen. It may have been unfair of me to expect it to come close to me and spit on my face like the ones in “Prisoners of the Sun” did, but at least it could have given some indication that it acknowledged my existence. Nothing. Quite insulting, really!

But the question that comes to the mind after this zoo visit is: which is a better environment to grow up? One where you have to dodge buffaloes while stepping over cow dung every time you step out on the street, or the one where you have to visit the zoo to see goats and pigs? I don’t know the correct answer to that question, but I definitely know which one I prefer.

Judgment

Judgment

~Rabindranath Tagore

(Original Bengali version here)

My little child has a lot of faults

I know them every bit,

Though to others that I may not admit.

Sometimes I can’t check his

Mischief maybe,

But that’s the deal of good and bad

Between him and me.

You strangers can judge him

Or blame him with ease

As much as you please,

That verdict why should I heed?

I love him because he’s my child

And not for his good deeds.

.

How much my child means to me

Will never dawn on you.

His flaws are all that you can view.

I punish him if I need to

But I hold him near,

If I have to make him cry

I must shed a tear.

I judge him, or punish him,

Or blame him with ease

As much as I please.

Your censures we don’t value.

The right to censure only rests

With the one who loves too.

(Translated by Sugata Banerji)

One of the best things to have happened in the past year is the availability of Tagore's works on the Web at the two sites here and here. Now I can translate poems more often, and also get more poems to choose from. And can someone please tell me how to insert tabs in poems on blogger? I go crazy maintaining the format each time I post a translation!

Haircuts

In my childhood, I was afraid of three things: gorillas, spiders and haircuts.

Gorillas were pretty hard to come by where I lived, and although I was scared to death lest one managed to slip under my bed at night, I never came face to face with a gorilla until I came to the city of King Kong.

In comparison, spiders were much more common. From the black hairy wild ones of near-tarantula size that haunted our bathroom in Hooghly to the thin wispy ones with stick-like legs that rained around me when my mom cleaned the cobwebs from our ceiling in Allahabad, they were too omnipresent to avoid completely. But the chances of my actually coming in physical contact with a spider were pretty slim as I was always careful to put the maximum distance possible between me and the nearest specimen.

Haircuts, on the other hand, were not so easy to avoid.

It may not be easy to fathom the reason for my dread of a haircut which is probably the most regular and inevitable ritual in a man's life. Let me elaborate a little. My earliest memory of a haircut isn't bad actually. In fact, it isn't much of a memory at all - just a vague recollection that a gentleman called Ananda came to cut my grandfather's hair at our house in Hooghly and he cut mine as well. At the time he seemed to me as old as my grandfather, but the accuracy of that estimate is highly dubious because I still see him around in Hooghly sometimes and he still looks as old as my grandfather. The fear of haircuts, as far as I can remember, started on the occasions when I had to have my hair cut while in my maternal grandparents' house in Salt Lake.

The BD market had two hair-cutting salons (or saloons, as we called them) run by Bihari hair-dressers and I would be taken to one of them to have my hair cut. Usually there was a queue and the wait there was infinitely boring as I didn't understand a word of what they were saying (I didn't know Hindi at the time). And when my spirit was thus broken by the long and boring wait came the scary part. I was made to sit on a wooden plank placed across the armrests of the chair so that my head would not be too low, and they would put a sheet around me covering my body completely, hands and all. The sheet would be full of bits of hair sticking out like thorns which pricked my neck. The sheet also prevented me from scratching any part of my face.

Not being able to scratch one's face does not seem too big a restriction when you think of it, but wrap a sheet around your hands, and a thousand itches develop simultaneously all over your face, nose and eyes. And then the problem compounded when the cut hair started falling on my face. In those days, for some strange reason, they used to switch off the fan when they cut my hair. The explanation was that the cut off hair blows about and messes up the room. Later, in Allahabad, I found that the salons kept their fans on and now the salons in West Bengal do that as well. So this turning-off the fan in my childhood could have been one of two things: either "may the customer go to hell" attitude of all businessmen in West Bengal, or taking advantage of my innocent little mind so that the hairdresser could have a little less hair to clean. I never bothered to check whether they kept the fan off when they cut other people's hair too. But in summer, sitting in a fan-less room with the temperature close to 40 and the humidity over 90%, and a prickly sheet wrapped around your body seemed to me the last word in torture. And all this happened even before he started to cut the hair.

After this preparation, an indeterminate amount of time was spent in a whirlwind of scissors and combs as my head was reduced to a ball of fuzz and the white sheet turned black with my beloved hair. It sure seemed like a couple of hours at the time but now I don't see any reason why it should have taken any more than the 20 minutes it takes to cut my hair now, even if you compensate for the abnormally large size of my head. The adult accompanying me apparently left instructions to cut my hair as short as possible and so this physical torture invariably ended with the mental agony of looking at myself in the mirror while my torturer applied liberal amounts of talcum powder on my neck using a prickly powder puff. Also, I usually got nicked by the razor somewhere in the region of my ear and the torture continued after coming home when I had to put Dettol on the cut. By then my whole body would be itching due to the tiny bits of hair in my clothes (the white sheet was hardly worth the trouble) and those clothes would continue to prick me until they had been washed a couple of times.

I hope that would explain why I was scared of having haircuts even long after I left Kolkata.

After I went to Allahabad and grew up a little, things turned slightly better. Firstly, as I mentioned earlier, the salons had fans that turned. Secondly, my tolerance to the discomforts associated with this procedure increased. For instance, I could now pass away the time in a long queue by reading the Hindi newspaper inside out or even carry my own book sometimes. Gradually I outgrew the wooden plank and was finally allowed to sit on the chair like adult men did. Another significant change was that I was now allowed to determine the length of my residual hair as long as it wasn’t left too long. Old style razors had been replaced by shaving blades fitted with a razor-like handle by this time, and the ugly fear of HIV had appeared, so one of the standard instructions was to use a new blade on me. But in spite of these changes, having a haircut remained one of the most uncomfortable experiences for me. I was (and still am) very fond of my hair and the way it curves down over my forehead (like my father’s and Superman’s) when it is long, and to see that hair lying in a heap around me pained my heart. The fact that I sometimes had to miss my favourite TV shows on a Sunday morning to get my hair cut didn’t help matters. My school, however, was very strict about the proper length of hair and so I had to endure this ordeal at least once a month.

Gradually months changed to years, and many, many haircuts passed. I passed out of school and into college and came to stay in Salt Lake. The same salons in BD market didn’t seem so scary anymore. I sometimes cut my hair in Hooghly and sometimes in Allahabad when I was visiting my family during the holidays. The experiences were more or less similar now. One marked difference was that I needed a shave these days along with my haircut. After the shave I would be asked to choose one out of two options: either be assaulted by a jagged block of alum as big as a brick or be anointed with a nameless after shave lotion that announced my imminent arrival to people a mile away. No matter whichever I chose the miniscule cuts on my cheek and neck didn’t like it. When I moved to Chennai and then to Hyderabad in 2005, one of the many problems that I faced was explaining my desired hairstyle to the South Indian hairdressers. I usually carried a small photo in my wallet when I went for a haircut so that I could show them my desired cut instead of trying to explain in Hindi and broken Tamil/Telugu. I always got decent haircuts but some of my friends often failed at their explanations and it showed in their hair. Of course, by this time I was doing a job, so there was nobody to tell me how long my hair should be. I had it cut only if I felt too hot or uncomfortable with my hair.

These memories came flocking to me as I sat waiting for my turn at a barbershop in Jersey City yesterday. Here they take less than ten minutes to cut my hair. Here they put tissues inside my collar to prevent my neck from itching when they wrap the sheet around me. They don’t use a razor – they use electric shavers and they have minimal use for scissors and combs as they use a clipper to cut the hair. A haircut is a rather enjoyable experience here, except for the cost. They charge 50 times more for a haircut here than they do in India, and then expect tips at the end. But somehow I feel that these men and women lack the skill and the care that the men used while cutting my hair back home. It is true that I am the one benefitting from it – I don’t have to endure scissors snipping around my head for 15 minutes, hair getting pulled from all directions, my scalp getting ploughed by sharp combs and then neck getting nicked by a shaving blade. But I also miss the way all parts of my head were tended to separately, with different combings before every snip, and then the way each hair was carefully brought to the same size. I don’t want to split hairs here, but I still think an Indian haircut looks much better.

So I am no longer afraid of haircuts, especially since I have reduced the frequency to 3-4 times a year. The nearest gorillas are in their enclosure in the Bronx zoo, and my bed doesn’t have enough room underneath anyway. Spiders, however, are still as ugly and creepy as before, and I think that is one fear I’ll have to live with.

Rich Nation Poor Nation

Look at the picture here. Believe it or not, it is a real gem. This 172-faceted topaz weighs 4.5 kg and was cut from a single crystal weighing nearly 12 kg. I saw it at the Smithsonian Institution (this photo wasn't taken by me though - they don't let anyone touch it) in DC last month. But that is not the fact that I want to emphasize about this stone. The fact that I want to talk about here is that it is called "The American Golden Topaz" although it was found in Brazil.

But then this was, as they say, only the tip of the iceberg.

As I walked past the rows of bullet-proof cases holding gems from the National Gem Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, I came face to face with some of the most valuable stones in the world - some shining alone and some set in ornaments equally famous. Marie Antoinette's earrings. Napoleon's crown and necklace. Somebody's ring, somebody else's bracelet - the list is simply too long to remember or write here. All priceless. All thickly encrusted with diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires.

All coming from "poor" nations.

Take the 45.52 carat Hope Diamond for instance. This deep blue diamond with a turbulent past and owners like King Louis XVI and King George IV was gifted to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958 by New York diamond merchant Harry Winston. But if you manage to push past the crowd permanently assembled in front of its case, you will see a board that says this diamond is originally from India. Not only the Hope, but almost every diamond on display at the museum comes from India. Most of the rubies, emeralds and sapphires come from Burma and Sri Lanka. Some stones are from Brazil, some from Colombia and some from African nations. All had "belonged" to European monarchs or American millionaires who donated them to the Smithsonian. Now they are part of the National Gem Collection. Just like the Koh-i-noor is part of the British Crown Jewels.

Many of these jewels looked ugly to me, of course, as the Nizam's jewels had looked earlier. I would not care to wear a brooch that had a sapphire a little smaller than a golf ball, but then, I would never have one. The fact that these necklaces, brooches, earrings and pendants are too gaudy for modern tastes does not change the fact that they were all mined in the third world countries and and then brought to the "richer" nations who got richer.

While the poor nations got poorer.

Now don't get me wrong here. I do not have a goblin-like sense of ownership (reference: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) which means a diamond mined in India has to remain in India for eternity. Of course diamonds and other gems can be sold to other countries - in fact they should be sold because otherwise how will countries that don't have diamond mines get them? But the question here is, did all of these gems leave their respective countries by by legal means? Koh-i-noor was forcefully taken away by the British from India, and the Hope Diamond is rumoured to have been stolen. Even when a gem was bought from the producing country, did the buyer pay a fair price for it? I don't think the present owners of these gems could answer these questions easily, and more importantly, they would not want to answer them.

India is often described as a rich country inhabited by poor people. I realized the accuracy of this description anew after visiting the Smithsonian. The only consolation is, we are not the only country fitting this description. Also, it was easy to see how the rest of the world came to be inhabited by rich people.

The woes of the lone tourist

My Washington D.C. trip that started last weekend in the manner described in my previous post came to an end today with me getting caught up in severe metro disruptions and missing my bus. Or should I say I hope it did? I am still in the bus (the next one) and it’s a long way to Newark. However, this post is about woes of a different kind.

Travelling alone, like everything else, has its pros and cons. While the pro side is a clear winner because I never have to worry about convincing others to go where I want to go or worry about others’ reactions before suddenly changing the day’s plans, the con side has one major point that deserves mention. It is something that I call the curse of the photographer - the curse to remain un-photographed.

And as I realized first-hand on this trip, having a more sophisticated camera does not make your chances better. On the contrary, the bigger your camera, the harder this curse hits you.

If you look closely at the photo here that was taken during my Niagara trip in 2008, you will see two people behind me who are grinning at their own cameras trying to capture themselves and the falls in a single frame. Now I usually find such antics extremely funny and I am yet to see an SLR-wielding person doing that, so this time when I desired to have my photo taken in front of something memorable, I approached others and requested them to do the job for me. With everyone owning a digital camera and photographing each moment of their life one would think that photography had become a skill that everyone has. Not so at all. Let’s take a look at some of the results that I obtained by handing over my camera to others.

Case 1: This one was taken in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. I requested a gentleman with an SLR to take my photo in front of the largest elephant that was ever mounted. He took a perfect shot of me – just there is no elephant to be seen in the frame. My bad, of course – I should have explained to him that I am not interested in knowing what I look like.

Case 2: I was at the base of the Washington Monument looking longingly at the Lincoln Memorial. Will somebody take my picture with that building in the background? I handed one gentleman the camera and explained very carefully what composition I wanted. “The Lincoln Memorial in the background and me at one side. Do you understand?” He nodded and took the photo. Isn’t the composition perfect? It is just a minor problem that I am completely out of focus.

Case 3: This time I was cautious. I wanted a photo with the US Capitol in the background and I wanted to make sure I was in focus too. So I put the lens at 18mm and stepped down the aperture to f/16.0 to ensure everything was in focus. If you are not familiar with this jargon, just understand that I put the camera at a setting where nothing could go wrong. Or so I thought until I asked this gentleman with a large DSLR and a National Geographic cap to take my picture. As I took my position, he started moving backwards with my camera and before I could realize whether he had taken a photo or not, he handed it back to me saying “Eight photos.” When I looked, there were indeed eight photos – some were blurry and some were sharp. Here’s one of the sharp ones. Can you see me?

Case 4: This one was taken on the first day itself in front of the Smithsonian castle. This is not too bad actually and can be salvaged if I work at it for some time, but I wonder if the person with the large Nikon DSLR who took this photo shoots all photos tilted like this.

Case 5: I would not let go of the elephant at the Smithsonian. I had first seen that elephant in the 1977 Guinness Book of World Records in our house in my childhood, and have wanted to see it ever since. So I went and posed in front of it again. This is the only shot in this post that was not ruined due to the photographer’s fault – the Asian lady took great pains to kneel down in front of me and click the photo. It was I who had left the flash popped up – I blame the curse for it. Whoever was at fault, the result was that I lost my face.

At times like this, I seem to grasp the full meaning of what Ansel Adams meant when he said, “The most important part of a camera is the 12 inches behind the viewfinder.”