Indian Writing

Have been reading about the devastating impact of the floods in Bihar, eastern UP and elsewhere. Much of the newspaper coverage seems to have gone into the inside pages while the front pages were taken up with news of Sunjay Dutt’s prison term. Here is an online diary by an Oxfam aid worker. The page also provides links to the sites of some relief organisations. Here’s a Unicef report about their mobile medical camps in the region. Also see Goonj for their work in flood-hit areas.

Like Guru, I don’t quite understand what Ramachandra Guha is on about when he writes, in the NYT, of how he “came to understand (though not support) why so many Indians had favored building a Ram temple in Ayodhya.” He writes:

Once a center of Islamic civilization, later the center of a white man’s Raj, after 1947 Delhi had become a city of the Hindu and Sikh victims of partition. These Punjabi migrants had lost homes and businesses in that bloody summer of 1947. Starting from scratch, they had come to dominate Delhi’s commerce and social life. Yet they remained insecure; who knew when catastrophe might come again? And so they hoarded diamonds and maintained Swiss bank accounts.

They also cheated their tenants. In six years in Delhi, my wife and I had four landlords, all refugees from the Pakistani part of Punjab. All four hooked their appliances to our electricity meter, and all kept our deposits when we left.

Why does Guha generalise that all Punjabi migrants were a bunch of cheats? Why does he forget that the Ram temple project also received support from quarters that were unaffected by Partition? And finally, what does it mean to “understand (though not support)”?

The rest of the piece is also rather strange, especially some stuff about a dream…

…a family member has cancer. You learn to be organised. You plan your time. You learn new skills. You become more self-aware than you ever were… Pankaj Mehra describes the many ways in which one learns to cope.

In a year’s time I have learnt to be more practical or, at any rate, more street-smart. I know where I can get cheaper medicines, and how and when to bargain while shopping. I am also learning how to save because now every penny counts for us. And we have to be very careful that Sadhika doesn’t get hurt. “Save Infection, Save Life,” the doctors have told us many times. It means she can’t play as hard as other children her age do, but she seems to accept it. In fact, she is quite used to her medical regimen, the painful injections and the bitter medicines. Sometimes she plays ‘Blood Test’ and tries to take her brother’s blood samples, her eyes twinkling mischievously. She doesn’t complain when we take her for a check-up and injections every Monday. Her medicines are expensive, costing as much as Rs 300 per dose. Sometimes she vomits it all out. I don’t want to admit it, but though I hate it, I do find myself tallying up the monetary loss.

Does she really understand what she is going through? This angel of mine doesn’t know how fragile her life is — that anything can happen to her anytime. But we are determined to fight till the end, and we know that we will emerge victorious. I will leave no stone unturned for my little girl.

I am trying these days to learn how to use the Internet as I want to find out about the Bone Marrow Bank in Australia. I did finally manage to create an email-id for Sadhika…