links_
THE GREAT FLOOD AND INDIA ABROAD
LONDON LETTER
BY: T.R.KIt is the last week of January and the Great Flood is here. Most of
Northern Europe is under several metres of water. It is an unbelievable
sight :archetypal German cities like Cologne and Bonn are set adrift
in a landscape of water, although they always appeared as if born fully-formed
in Gothic stone-cladding, solidly bulwarked against even the great
Noye's Fludde. It is not inconceivable to imagine the Ark on the flooded
horizon wending its way through German, Dutch, Belgian and French towns
and villages with just the church spires showing above water, collecting
all living species for Noah's great genetic bank.
Europe was unprepared for this sudden
downpour, this Biblical deluge. In Holland, a generation of engineers
had transformed these lowlands lying well below sea-level in to a relatively
safe haven, by building a skilful labyrinth of dykes and dams and gentle
coaxing away of the direction of its rivers. A newer generation of
environmentalists put a stop to all that, persuading the authorities
that these man-made defences were environmentally intrusive, and ecologically
damaging and unfriendly, and that they disfigured the land. They accused
the grandfathers of dam builders of over-zealousness. Now the dykes
have been found to be insufficient and giving way all over Netherlands.
In one night on the 30th of January, some 100,000 people had to be
evacuated from town and villages to the relative safety of high ground.
Environmental moralists seem to have lost their high ground, at least
for the time being.
France is in the throes of a similar downpour, with 40,000 homes destroyed
in the Ardenne alone.
It is worth speculating, ensconced in the safety of an
imaginary Mount Ararat, how the Western world was so readily pejorative
in their pronouncements about the great earthquake of Kobe in Japan.
Tens of thousands of citizens of the most prosperous and advanced country
on the planet, it was alleged, were left to cope for themselves, without
food or shelter in a bitter Japanese winter. The rescue efforts were
derisory and arrived too late. This would never happen in the West.
The Californian earthquake, exactly a year earlier to the date was
a perfect example of the speedy mobilization of rescue and re-housing
and re-construction. What the West conveniently forgot to notice was
the exemplary patience of the Japanese, a total absence of looting,
a civic sense of mutual responsibility that drove even the much-feared
Japanese Mafia to forge a remarkable link and provide aid on a significant
scale. I am by now used to the well-meaning derision from our experts
about floods and typhoons in Bangladesh, the Philippines and China.
And yet a night of heavy snowfall in Northern England grounded half
the country in a helpless gridlock of ice and resulted in several associated
deaths. An internationally important city like London is wholly
unprepared for sustained snowfall. Its basic services are pared down
to the bone, and chaos ensues within a day.
As a columnist I have to read a whole lot of British,
American and European newspapers and periodicals. I find it amazing
that so very little is written about India, the largest democracy on
earth, still experimenting with its reforms and tinkering with its
democratic institutions in what often appears to be a free-for-all.
My one week's news-watch during late January yielded just a few items:
several of them were not about India at all, but about Indian
affairs in England.
The Taj Mahal, if a report in the Sunday Times is to be
believed is about to be the "centre-piece of a tourist theme-park,
complete with fake moonlight, cable cars, fast food restaurants and
a boating lake. "Arguably the discolouring and erosion caused
to this magical monument by industrial pollution has caused deep dismay
worldwide. An Indian "environmentalist lawyer" Mahesh Chandra
Mehta (obviously of a new legion of combative foot-soldiers of the
movement) says that he has found greater support abroad for his Save
the Taj Campaign than in India. The Sunday Times reports that vested
interests at all levels seem to be saying that a "perfect Taj
Mahal is a luxury they cannot afford". They want to squeeze the
last ounce of its tourist potential to create a micro-economic boom
in Agra.
A musical soiree featuring the South Indian classical
violin maestro Lakshminarayana Subramaniam and the jazz legend and
violinist Stephan Grapelli at London's Albert Hall on Wednesday 18
January was the subject of a full page review in the Arts section of
the Daily Telegraph. "Mani" Subramaniam, like Ravi Shankar
before him and a whole generation of Indian musicians since, have astutely
discovered and experimented with a free format of interaction, a musical
chit-chat, generously termed "global fusion" and found themselves
performing on an international stage. Mani Subramaniam, a gifted classical
violinist has improvised in a non-classical free format, linking "melodic
and rhythmic structures" of the Indian music to the "harmony
and counterpoint" of Western music. He has played alongside jazz
greats like Herbie Hancock and Joe Sample; and with Yehudi Menuhin
under the baton of Zubin Mehta. I understand that Subramaniam now lives
in Los Angeles, not Madras.
I recall the 60s and early 70s experimentation in East
Meets West musical formats between Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin.
A climate of enormous goodwill and great musicianship on both sides
enabled them to speak to each other musically, although their languages
remained exclusive of each other. Much more daring and somewhat surrealistic
was the reading of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs des Mal by Yvette Mimieaux,
the golden girl of French Films to Ustad Ali Akbar Khan's Sarod, a
medley that is merely of historical interest now. The great and the
famous musical egg-heads across a cultural and musical divide somehow
felt compelled to perform on a single stage, but in disparate voices.
Often these cross-cultural jam-sessions failed woefully. "Indo-Jazz",
a term that a gifted publicity man invented, has remained the most
enduring of these syncretisms. It is as breath-taking as a headlong
ski-run to hear Joe Harriot on the saxophone, John Meyer on the violin
taking turns with a quintet of Indian instrumentalists on the flute,
Veena and Sitar. They slide effortlessly from what is almost a classical
fugue to haunting trad-jazz, intimations of the big band sounds, with
the percussive tabla syncopating this anarchical but celebratory uproar.
Mid-January also saw international cricketer and playboy
Imran Khan's "public conversion to Islamic fundamentalism",
and reputedly heading for political high office in Pakistan. Wearing
the
"rough woollen cloaks of the Punjab" in place of designer
suits, Imran's conversion began after an epic walk with armed Afghan
tribesman two years ago. In a long article in the Evening Standard
of London on the 13 January, written with considerable sadness and
irony, the British Labour M.P. George Galloway mourns the passing of
Imran the lovable internationalist and the birth of a "holy warrior" who
has repudiated all things Western. Galloway says that Imran has "perhaps
inadvertently walked into this dangerous precinct" and he concludes
that "he might merely be a lipstick on the ugly face of another
dictatorship".
The Independent (a non-partisan broadsheet going through
a fall in circulation and just saved from a certain closure by a Mirror
Group Newspapers investment) has written a leader about the embattled
Hare Krishna temple in the midst of a sleepy English hamlet. The original
planning permission for this temple was obtained for a "theological
college" for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness
in 1973. The temple now attracts thousands of Hindus seasonally six
times a year during religious festivities. The village of Letchmore
Heath is naturally outraged, says the Independent. The local Authority
is considering an extension of planning permission and a proposal by
the temple for an imaginative scheme to build their own road to the
nearest highway, bypassing the village altogether. The leader says
that at best the planning law is an obtuse instrument, but this "very
obtuseness also suits it to the English tradition of compromise and
the Hindu tradition of syncretism." The cautionary conclusion
is that a win for the temple would be a warning to other sleepy villages
of England not to be as tolerant as Letchmore Heath.
I have just missed the "Festival of Films" of
Yavar Abbas organized by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in London. Yavar Abbas
the film maker is riding high on critical approval from the late Satyajit
Ray (who liked "the truth of observation and its sincerity")
and universal praise from the British and European cine-culture aesthetes
who write in influential papers. Abbas's India, My India and Mother
Ganges have been called variously: "beautiful and human";
"ravishingly beautiful" and as "real-life" films
portraying India from within. I also understand that Bharatiya Vidya
Bhavan, once the bastion of K.M.Munshi and Leela Munshi, the legendary
political duo and Hindu revivalists of the Nehru era, has been active
here for decades. I still recall reading Bhavan's Journal alongside
copies of Time and the Reader's Digest in my youth and being strangely
drawn to a much heralded "new dawn" of Vedic and Puranic
Hinduism.
1542 words
TOP▲