Tag Archives: India

A conversation with my parents about India

March 8, 2010

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As part of our continuing world travel plans, Mr. B and I are planning to go to India this spring because we’re bored of Europe (see: Prague) and ready for a little bit of third-world excitement. Little did we know that the excitement would start before we even bought our tickets.

This weekend, we were in Philadelphia with my parents and my mother-in-law and the conversation came around to our travel plans.

“I don’t like this idea at all,” said my dad surlily as we sat eating breakfast. My dad doesn’t like the idea of most things that are not Russian or American, and this makes him surly in general.

“Why not,” I prepared for a debate which wouldn’t even be a debate since, no matter what my parents think, we are going to India. Ah, the pleasures of balling on one’s own budget.

“You’ll catch a million diseases,” my dad said. My dad is a hypochondriac, a germophobe, and a neat freak, who has hated New York City since 1989 with a vile aversion because the streets are not clean and orderly enough for him. He has also refused to eat at a restaurant once because he thought the color of their plates was unsanitary. I have no idea how he lived the first 30 years of his life in Russia, and the first 10 without real toilet paper.

Oddly enough, I inherited this hypochondria from him, because two weeks ago, I felt a bump on the back of my head that wouldn’t go away, and I was having some issues swallowing. Immediately, I pictured Mr. B at my funeral, solemn but strong, all the Russian ladies around him whispering about what a great wife I had been and bringing him borscht in cans. “So young,” they would say, “They could have had children together, just like their mothers wanted them to,” and I teared up. I would be ok with death. I pictured Mr. B returning to live at home and watching anime in  his basement, a shattered wreck of a man.   But then I went to the doctor and it turned out that I did not have throat cancer or even strep throat, and I was ok again.

“We’re getting shots and malaria pills,” I told my dad merrily.

“That’s not going to be enough,” he said, concerned. “And besides, who knows what you could get in India.  You could become infertile.”   My mom nodded worryingly.

“Are you serious,” I asked.

“I was talking to your aunt and she stopped dead in her tracks when she found out you were going to India,” my dad said.  “She was right to point out that you haven’t given birth yet.”

This medical analysis of Southeast Asia would be all well and good if my aunt were a doctor or experienced in Southeast Asia epidemiology.  However, my aunt lives in Yaroslavl, Russia, has never been further than Moscow up until five years ago when she came to visit America, and has no more knowledge of the medical profession than I have of neck ailments.  Additionally, last I checked, my uterus was not communal property.

Wolf Blitzer, live with the update from my uterus

“Another real Medicin sans frontieres,” Mr. B said caustically from the corner, where my  parents couldn’t hear him.

My parents, more specifically my dad, spurred by this sage advice from my aunt, finally had a solid objection to me going to India as opposed to the general discontent they had been channeling over the past couple of weeks.  It was their rook to my pawn.  Or whatever.

“You really believe that I can catch something that will make me infertile?”  I asked them logically, which is not the best way to approach my parents.

“Yes.”

“Do you want us to be like Grandpa?” I asked.   My Grandpa’s been through some crazy stuff in his life, but currently he doesn’t go further than his local grocery store.  He complains every time he has to go to a restaurant for birthdays or other special occasions.  Last time he ordered butternut squash soup at a restaurant, he told my mom, for half an hour, that it felt like someone was plastering on wallpaper in his kidney.

That ended the current round of arguments. Checkmate for now.

My mother-in-law wisely said nothing during this whole debate.  She’s very tactful and never butts in the way my parents do.   Although, a couple weeks ago when I told her about our Boykis World Tour, she said quietly, “You know, there are lots of countries you can take little kids to.  My parents always traveled with me when I was little without problems.”

My parents throw all their pawns and rooks at us.   She brings just the queen.

Dr. Maina Singh and the Indian Jews of Israel

November 30, 2009

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c 2009 Me! I took this picture :)

Every time I find out about another ethnic Jewish minority, it blows my mind.  How many permutations of us are there? Of course you have your garden variety North American Jews, then you have us Russian Jews who are apprently invading everything, and then there are the Ethiopians, the cool kids of the 1990s.  But Indian Jews?  Really?

A couple weeks ago, at American University, Dr. Maina Chawla Singh delivered a lecture on Being Indian, Being Israeli. Dr. Singh  is originally from the University of Delhi but relocated to Israel for three years beginning in 2005 when her husband, Arun Singh, was the Ambassador to Israel.  She began her research on Jews who had made aliyah to Israel from India.

In India, Dr. Singh said, there were three main areas of Jewish settlement: Maharashtra, where the Bene Israel lived (the Indian Jews the West is most familiar with through Sadia Shepard’s book and movie), the Cochinese Jews in Kerala who speak not Hindi but Malayalam, and the “Baghdadi” Jews of Calcutta who are more Bengali in culture and come from an amalgamation of places such as Singapore and Shanghai.

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These groups mostly didn’t intermingle in Israel and mostly kept to the culture of their area as opposed to marrying “Jewish” across the country.  They were all also relatively wealthy and cultured  in relation to their neighbors.  This all made it all the more surprising when the first wave of them left in 1949, 70,000 people, to Israel.  What is most interesting is that Dr. Singh emphasized that the Jews made aliyah for antionalist reasons-Zionism.  The Jews in India have never been persecuted and therefore did not form the shtetl and protectionist mentality that Eastern European Jews had.

What was ist like for them to leave one young country (with thousands of years of culture) and move to another young country with its identity yet to be established?  What was it like to leave behind solid economic foundations and move to the frontier desert towns of Dimona and Kiryat Shmona in the North?  What was it like to be marginalized by both the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews and fall into a third category of “Other?”

In her book and subsequently the lecutre, Dr. Singh lays out case studies of hundreds of interviews that she had conducted from Eilat to Metula, with Indian Jewish communities in Israel.  Here are a few of the points I found most fascinating

  • Indian Jews, unlike American Jews, had to give up dual citizenship when they left for Israel, leaving them to continuously grapple with their identity
  • Since the women of Indian households had never worked before, it was frustrating and awakward for them to work side-by-side with Moroccan women and others on kibbutzim, doing work outside the home
  • Indian Jews born in Israel, sabras, still heavily maintain Indian culture.  At one point, Dr. Singh showed a clip of Israeli girls that have been through the army, may not even speak their native language (Hindi, Malayalam, and Marathi) anymore, but still vigorously perform dances to Bollywood music
  • Many Indians she talked to told her, “India is my motherland, and Israel is my fatherland.”

To end with, here’s a trailer for Sof HaOlam Smola (Left at the End of the World) that portrays the immigration of such a family to Israel. It’s only in Hebrew (sorry,) but you can see the gist of the culture of Indians in Israel in the 1950s-1960s.

Indian Classical Dance: Bharatan-what??

September 14, 2009

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This weekend, I went to see Ritu Samharam, presented by the Nrityanjali dance Company.  It was my first time ever seeing Indian classical dance live, and it was pretty exciting.

It turns out that Indian classical dance is nothing like Bollywood, as I had assumed.  It takes a lot more concentration to both watch and perform it. The style that I went to see was called Bharatanatyam, from South India.  There are three key elements of classical Indian dancing irrespective to origin, and these are the hand positions, facial expressions, and narrative dances, all of which blend together to tell a story, usually from a work such as the Ramayana or the Mahabharata.

I enjoyed the performance, but wasn’t patient enough to sit through all of it, unfortunately. Plus, the music (called a raga), which is usually chanting accompanied by an instrument, such as the tala, totally put me to sleep.    Here’s a little clip from the second part of the program, based on Ritu Samharam, or a garland of seasons, a poem in Sanskrit by Kalidasa.  This season shows varsha, or the monsoon, and how the dancers play frightening frogs and peacocks spreading their wings in joy of the rains to feed the crops (sadly without sound, for some reason):

The dance did remind me a little bit of this clip from Lagaan:

The things I got a kick out of most were not the actual performance but my observations of Indian immigrant culture in the United States.

First, I was the only white person at this performance:

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Second, I was the only white single woman at this performance.  Single, as in, without a man.  All the aunties were totally checking me out and talking trash about me in front of my back in 100+ regional Indian dialects.

Third, I was the only white single woman not wearing a sari at this performance:

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Fourth, the best part was the program.  It had a little biographical information about each of the dancers, like the time they completed their training.  Initially, I thought the dancers were professional Indian classical dancers.  However, each person also had something like, “X completed her Rangapravesham (debut performance) in 2005.  She is currently a senior at Georgetown University in the pre-med program.” Or “X completed her Rangapravesham in 2003.  She is an analyst with the Corporate Executive Board.”  Because Indians, like Russians, would never be content to have their kids be just dancers.

Pictures from Bangladesh

August 10, 2009

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I have a friend named Shehzeen who is Bangladeshi, who I met through another Bangladeshi friend. Because, once you have one Bangladeshi friend,  you have at least five or six.

Since I’ve become friends with Bangladeshis, my knowledge about the country has gone from zero to sixty in three seconds.  I’m sure their knowledge of drunk Yeltsin has also been enriched.   One of the things I didn’t know, for example, is that Bangladesh has about 150 million people, the same as Russia, in an area slightly smaller than Iowa, making it the most densely populated country outside of my freshman dorm room in college. How do 150 million people live in a country that constantly keeps getting flooded due to the fact that it is on a river delta, and one that was once a part of Pakistan, over 1,000 miles away?   Not as bad as you would think, because it’s been identified as one of the Next Eleven, countries that have the potential to become the world’s largest economies after the BRICs. Still, the majority of Bangladesh is poor.

I’ve found that most immigrants that came to their new country when they were children, not just former Eastern Europeans, have an intense longing for their homeland and, ultimately, many go back for at least a couple weeks to rediscover what, up to this point, has just been a country in their memories and that of their relatives.    Shehzeen, who is a Writer (with a capital W because she has a Master’s in Creative Writing,)  also went back last month to reunite with family and to gather some inspiration for her book.  She and her sister took these pictures, and, graciously agreed to let me post some.

Just looking at them makes me feel homesick for Bangladesh, a place I’ve never been, and all of its third-world, grimy, earthy, ethereal beauty.  Bangladesh, to me, as reflected by the memories and personal beliefs of my friends, is a place of extreme, extreme poverty, of mud, of bad healthcare.  Of colorful saris, of sauces mixed with basmati rice and eaten with a cupped hand, of fresh fish, and of endless rivers.

Shehzeen, if you don’t write a book after lounging around and taking these beautiful pictures, I’m going to MAKE you.  Because, damn, girl.  Enjoy.

On the way to her native town of Sylhet, Bangladesh:

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After a rain in Dhaka:

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In the water:

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On the way to Gulistan, Dhaka:

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Making flowers for passers-by:

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With relatives:

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Mosque in Sylhet:

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Going home after work in Sylhet:

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Mother tongue:

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Just another day:

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The country from above, the airplane shot that makes your heart leap (I had one like this when we were flying over Russia), the one where you feel your country:

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Portrait of the Author as a Young Lady:

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