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October 24, 2009

CURRENTS

An Economy in Need of Holistic Medicine

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — The American economy is having what doctors call an acute episode.

Employment won’t throb. The circulation of capital remains weak. Industry is breathing, but barely. And if we can agree on anything one year into this mess, it is that there is little we can do when the patient arrives already this bad.

That is why the talk now is so often of prevention. Prevent the next crisis through health insurance and a green-energy sector, the American president says. Prevent it by cutting spending and nurturing personal responsibility, American conservatives retort.

But the truth is that politicians, and not just in the United States, are rarely willing to invest in a problem that hasn’t occurred. Consensus and action are easier to come by after a 9/11 or a Lehman Brothers than before. Problems in the embryonic, soluble phase don’t interest us; and those that do interest us are often too big to solve.

Which is where acupuncture comes in.

Western medical practices have attracted similar criticisms in recent years, for an emphasis on intervening in disease rather than preventing it beforehand and promoting quotidian well-being. But in health, unlike politics, an alternative approach called wellness has emerged, focused on investing in health before it breaks down.

What can wellness tell us about our present economic malady? As it moves from fringe to mainstream — with wellness programs in the health care reform proposals now in Congress, wellness manifestos on the best-seller lists and a U.S. Army wellness program that asks soldiers to introspect and meditate — I asked experts about the approach’s core tenets and how they might be applied to the body politic.

Nip it in the bud. Wellness argues for cultivating health a little every day, not just restoring it during calamities. We increasingly accept that it is better to monitor a diabetic’s blood sugar with regular clinic visits than to amputate her limbs. We accept that businesses can avoid costly cancer treatments by encouraging workers to stop smoking. But in our political life, we prefer to wait until things reach the emergency room.

We barely regulate financial markets for years, thinking regulation oppressive, until we are compelled to nationalize private firms. We avoid expensive investments and controversial new methods in public education, then pay the price in lower social mobility and vast prison populations. We neglect building roads and bridges and Internet highways, fearing the cost, and then reap the much greater costs of whole regions falling off the economic grid.

“With a lot of social problems, we’re not sure how to prevent it, and therefore we don’t spend money on it, because we always have a lot of other priorities,” said David Cutler, a Harvard economist who has advised both the Clinton and Obama White Houses on health care.

Go to the roots. Western medicine tends to fight symptoms, whether suppressing coughs or flooding the brains of the depressed with serotonin. Wellness is interested in underlying causes. It is inclined to see an infertile woman, for example, as a stressed woman rather than a woman with defunct ovaries, and may suggest that she eat and work differently rather than take ovary-manipulating pills.

In public policy, a symptom bias rules. A housing crisis? Enact a tax credit! Bank failures? Bail them out!

There is nothing wrong with such steps — except for what they leave out, as most economists will tell you.

Even amid all this action, we have virtually ignored the complex weave of issues beneath the issues: meager savings, a debt addiction, a congenitally spendthrift political system, an almost pathological craving for stuff. And, with our topical cures, we should not be surprised to see new symptoms of the old maladies appearing: insurance again being packaged into derivatives, bonuses again soaring on Wall Street.

“We treat symptoms, and we do not look at the causes of the symptoms,” Deepak Chopra, the famed alternative-medicine and wellness guru, said when asked to extend the wellness metaphor to the economy. “We are totally at this moment looking at it in a reductionist manner. The reductionist manner is a bailout. And somehow that’s supposed to solve the problem, whereas the problem occurred because we were thinking reductively.”

Look within. Wellness sees the causes of and remedies for ailments as lying within us. Avoid infection by building immunity. Defeat disease by eating foods that help the body heal itself.

With the economy, we look everywhere but within. It’s the fault of greedy Wall Street bankers. It’s Washington’s fault. Bush’s fault. Obama’s fault. Greenspan’s fault. Somebody fix it!

But what about us? Why can’t we acknowledge that it was us who bought all those unaffordable houses, us who listened to that zero-gravity financial “advice,” us who bought and bought and never kept a rainy-day fund? And why, in solving the problem, do we expect the state to create substitute dynamism instead of renewing the culture of decentralized dynamism that made the U.S. economy so vital to begin with?

“Conventional medicine is very unbalanced in placing all its emphasis on external interventions rather than looking to advance that internal capacity to maintain healing,” said Andrew Weil, founder of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the author of several books on wellness. Likewise with the economy, he said: “Instead of simply identifying external threats and developing weapons and strategies against them, we should instead identify and strengthen immunity and resistance.”

A politics of wellness would transcend party. It would emphasize the up-front investments that Democrats like in order to achieve the long-run fiscal solvency on which Republicans insist. It would fulfill the liberal belief in a positive role for government in maintaining well-being but would honor the conservative conviction that government’s chief role is to help the social organism heal itself. It would acknowledge, with the left, the complex lattice of cultural and institutional influences that govern a society’s well-being, while emphasizing, with the right, the limits of what any external healer can do.

Think wellness in these hard times. The most urgent problems, after all, may be the ones we haven’t had yet.

My Q and A with Arun Shourie of the BJP at Harvard

[ From Tuesday, October 6, 2009 ]

Arun Shourie is an Indian author, thinker and politician and a principal voice of the country’s political right. As a high official in the Bharatiya Janata Party and a former cabinet minister, he has ridden the ascendency of the Hindutva – or Hindu nationalist – agenda in recent decades and ridden its apparent decline with the BJP’s defeats in 2004 and 2009. As a former investigative journalist and editor and the author of several books, Mr. Shourie is also a sharp observer of old surrendering to new in modern India.

In an intimate question-and-answer session at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Mr. Shourie discussed with me the role of the right in a churning India, including such questions as these: How committed is the party to the vision of genuine Indian pluralism? Does the future of the party belong to those who emphasize the Hindutva agenda or to those more interested in the free-market, pro-business, pro-American policies that the party has also pressed? After two successive electoral defeats, is the Hindu right dead? And how might it be reborn?

FULL AUDIO HERE:

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October 11, 2009

Boycotts Minus the Pain

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Craigie on Main here is one of those socially conscious restaurants where the food is as moral as it is tasty. The chicken had roamed freely. The vegetables had sprouted locally. I could only assume that the tuna, before being sashimied, enjoyed a massage and that the fennel had signed consent forms to be crushed into ice cream.

When the steak arrived, the chef himself appeared to announce that the cow had been well tended.

“You mean, before they killed him?” I thought to myself.

It has many names: “buycotting,” ethical consumerism, moral economics, latte activism, critical consumption. Whatever you call it, buying is getting ever more political across the affluent world.

A car is no longer just a car, nor a cup of coffee just a cup of coffee. In the age of hybrids and fair trade, the mall is a forum to express convictions and hopes.

Today one can buy not just carbon offsets, organic fruit and recycled paper, but also a iPod whose purchase combats mother-to-child H.I.V. transmission in Africa; a sneaker from Timberland made of biodegradable wool and organically tanned leather; “green weapons” like reduced-lead bullets from BAE Systems, the British armaments maker; and fair-trade condoms, made with sustainable latex (marketing pitch: “for guilt-free lovers who want to feel good in every way”).

On the surface, all seems well. But, as the trend has gathered stream, a debate has begun over the political meaning of buycotting: is consumption an exciting new form of citizenship? Or is it a sign of how corroded citizenship has become that shopping is the closest many of us are willing to come to worrying about labor laws, trade agreements, agriculture policy — about good old-fashioned politics?

Political consumption is not new; its history streaks through the civil-rights movement, the campaign against apartheid and other causes. What is new is that boycotting is surrendering to buycotting, the sending of positive, not just negative, signals; and that it is practiced increasingly by mainstream shoppers, not just die-hard activists.

Political consumption also perhaps supports a new-age behavioral theory: that human beings, long imagined by traditional economists to be rational, utilitarian creatures, in fact have more complex longings, and often are willing to sacrifice economically for an idea or feeling.

A study published this fall in the Political Science Quarterly found that 62 percent of Americans were willing to pay $5 extra for a $20 sweater produced more ethically, and three-quarters would spend 50 cents a pound more for fair-trade coffee.

Proponents of buycotting see these premiums as pure political expression: citizens’ parting with money to refine the world. Some even argue that cash-voting goes further than ballot-casting: we buy, and thereby incentivize producers, every day; but we vote far less often.

“We are convinced that how people buy can be more effective than how they vote,” said Francesco Galante, a director of Comitato Addiopizzo, a civic group in Palermo, Sicily, that has taken on the mafia using an analogue of fair-trade labeling. In 2004, some volunteers in Palermo decided to bypass politicians: they approached local businesses, many of which paid the mafia “pizzo,” or bribes, and asked them to certify that they paid pizzo no longer; in exchange, the Comitato brought them business from pizzo-averse Sicilians.

Today 400 businesses and 9,000 customers have joined, even though products from law-abiding companies often cost more.

But, like all apparently wonderful things, ethical consumption has begun to attract critics.

One set are free-enterprise champions who argue that politicizing consumption distorts prices and spurs overproduction while imposing arbitrary conditions on producers — like insisting that developing-world farmers enroll their children in school — that might sound good to Westerners but ignore complex local realities.

Insisting on the noblest production methods conflicts, these critics say, with the very function of markets: to bring the most goods to the most people as cheaply as possible.

Another group of critics doesn’t deny political consumption’s power. Rather, they bemoan that citizenship has come to this.

Citizenship, for them, is about voting, marching, writing — about being involved. In the modern age, they say, we have begun to turn inward, bowl alone, shirk our public duties. And now comes this cheap (in the moral, if not economic, sense) way to participate just a little, assuage guilt just a little, involve ourselves just a little in AIDS and trade, feel just a little of activism’s thrill.

In an article last year in The Lancet, the British medical journal, the scholars Colleen O’Manique and Ronald Labonte strongly condemned RED, the marketing campaign for iPods and other products whose purchase helps to finance the battle against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa.

“Be wary of the 21st century’s new noblesse oblige that replaces the efficiency of tax-funded programs and transfers in improving health equity with a consumption-driven ‘charitainment’ model,” they wrote.

Market citizenship, as critics call it, lets the state off easy, they say. Public goods like health systems should be publicly provided, they say. If organic vegetables are better, then we should all eat them, instead of just the elite. And privatizing compassion may tempt the state to neglect problems; then, when a recession slows shopping, AIDS orphans languish waiting for you to buy sunglasses.

It is worth asking which problems demand politics and which the mall. Child labor in Vietnam and unscrupulous intermediaries in the coffee trade lent themselves to buycotting. What can the market do about Darfur or health care in the United States?

The question, at bottom, is this: have we, with our ethical cars and condoms and carrots, found a way to make markets humane? Or have we rather found a way to make politics bearable to us by turning it into shopping?

Anand Giridharadas writes the column “Currents,” on ideas, for The International Herald Tribune and nytimes.com.

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September 26, 2009

CURRENTS

Edging Out Congress and the Public

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — It took just eight months for the joy that filled the Washington Mall at the chilly January inauguration of Barack Obama to give way to the sign-waving that filled it at a recent rally: the president depicted as the Joker and taunted by the declaration that “Hitler gave good speeches too.”

Memories of hearing even some Republicans back then speak of a “historic moment” of healing and of turning a page were drowned out in the summer heat by the shrill debate about health care, and by the vitriolic questioning of President Obama from left and right.

Among the most strident criticisms was that he is overreaching, abusing his mandate, tucking too many ideological priorities into his purportedly neutral response to the Great Recession. And, though such criticisms simmer mostly on the right, they play into a lively debate among some liberal thinkers who spent years bemoaning the “imperial” Bush presidency and have recently become concerned that this new president, whom they admire, may change the use of presidential power less than they had hoped.

In a recent essay in the magazine Dissent, Sanford Levinson, a legal scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, argued that “constitutional dictators” have become the American norm. The Constitution created carefully calibrated checks and balances and gave tightly limited powers to the federal government. Because those powers have not expanded to keep up with the increasingly complex economic and security challenges that government faces, presidents “have an incentive to declare emergencies” and assume “quasi-dictatorial powers,” Mr. Levinson writes.

The criticism is, in a sense, that American democracy functions more and more the way democracy sometimes does in Europe, where parties that win large majorities in countries like Britain or France can do virtually as they please.

Mr. Levinson is among those who regard former President George W. Bush as possibly the “absolutely worst president.” But in his essay, published this summer, he suggested, as do others of his peers, that Mr. Obama may be no different in his vision of presidential authority. He cites, for example, the words of one of the legal architects of Mr. Bush’s war on terror, Jack Goldsmith, who has written that “for generations the Terror Presidency will be characterized by an unremitting fear of devastating attack, an obsession with preventing the next attack, and a proclivity to act aggressively and pre-emptively to do so.”

Mr. Levinson writes, “It might be morning in America for many of us still enthralled by the Obama presidency, but it should be equally clear that Obama has done nothing to challenge Goldsmith’s observation.” Mr. Obama, he added, has talked of expanding the war in Afghanistan without renewed congressional authorization for a battle launched eight years ago (although it now seems Washington may hesitate to send many or any more troops).

Likewise, in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, the writer Garry Wills complains that Mr. Obama has failed to break free of “the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the Cold War and the Cold War with the ‘war on terror,”’ citing the new administration’s continued secrecy in security matters and its “extraordinary rendition” of terrorism suspects.

One reason that his supporters placed so much faith in Mr. Obama was the hope that he would break with everything that they had come to loathe about the Bush administration. But it is becoming clear that politics as conducted by the Obama White House, on domestic as well as foreign policy, can be every bit as aggressive and hard-nosed.

Through this prism, the rage that has erupted over Mr. Obama’s health care reform plans can perhaps be seen as a revolt against what some perceive as a deepening tendency in American life to wring from emergencies political victories that would be impossible in calmer times.

There are, of course, profound differences between the uses of emergency under the current and former administrations. Mr. Bush’s war against Iraq and tightening of American civil liberties after Sept. 11, 2001, is of a different nature than Mr. Obama’s pressing for health care reform and renewable energy and other liberal priorities in the wake of the Great Recession.

But what worries Bush critics like Peter Alexander Meyers, a political theorist affiliated with Princeton and the Sorbonne in Paris, about Mr. Obama’s presidency is precisely that Mr. Bush, whatever his faults, was merely “acting out and through much larger historical forces.”

In his recent book “Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen,” the first installment in a trilogy about post-9/11 American democracy, Mr. Meyers argues that Mr. Bush’s response to those attacks only accelerated a concentration of power in the presidency that had been steadily accruing since the nineteenth century, edging both Congress and the public out of decision-making during anything claimed to be a crisis.

Beginning arguably with President Grover Cleveland’s clampdown on the railroad strikes using emergency authority, which paved the way for broader regulation of the railroads and eventually of national commerce under subsequent presidents, Mr. Meyers contends that the boundary between foreign war and domestic crisis has slowly blurred in the public mind.

Mr. Meyers is particularly alert to the role of culture in bolstering this trend. As it is, the federal government has limited constitutional authority and ever more intricate problems to manage.

The effect of television and the Internet in an event like 9/11 or the Great Recession, is, he shows, to amplify and rerun and spread the sense of alarm. The result is that citizens have effectively acquiesced over time to two propositions that he believes to be dangerous when held in tandem: that, in crisis, the president knows best; and that a crisis is whatever the president says it is.

Mr. Meyers, also politically sympathetic to Mr. Obama, believes that Mr. Bush did not create on his own the culture of emergency for which his presidency is often blamed, and that Mr. Obama, as a consequence, will not reverse what is not merely one administration’s doing.

“It was a monumental mistake to think that ‘everything changed on 9/11,”’ Mr. Meyers said in an e-mail message. But, he added, “I, with great regret but without surprise, would say that those who think that ‘everything changed on November 4’ are fooling themselves again.”

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September 12, 2009

Currents

Democracy 2.0 Awaits an Upgrade

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Perhaps the biggest big idea that gathered speed during the last millennium was that we humans might govern ourselves. But no one really meant it.

What was really meant in most places was that we would elect people to govern us and sporadically renew or revoke their contracts. It was enough. There was no practicable way to involve all of us, all the time.

The headlines from Washington today blare of bailouts, stimulus, clunkers, Afpak, health care. But it is possible that future historians, looking back, will fixate on a quieter project of Barack Obama’s White House: its exploration of how government might be opened to greater public participation in the digital age, of how to make self-government more than a metaphor.

President Obama declared during the campaign that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” That messianic phrase held the promise of a new style of politics in this time of tweets and pokes. But it was vague, a paradigm slipped casually into our drinks. To date, the taste has proven bittersweet.

Federal agencies have been directed to release online information that was once sealed; reporters from Web-only publications have been called on at press conferences; the new portal Data.gov is asking citizens to create their own applications using government datasets. But the most revealing efforts have been in “crowdsourcing” — in soliciting citizens’ policy ideas on the Internet and allowing them to vote on one another’s proposals.

During the transition, the administration created an online “Citizens’ Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas to the president. “The best-rated ones will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, we’ll print them out and gather them into a binder like the ones the President receives every day from experts and advisors,” Valerie Jarrett, Mr. Obama’s friend and adviser, wrote to supporters.

They received 44,000 proposals and 1.4 million votes for those proposals. The results were quietly published, but they were embarrassing — not so much to the administration as to us, the ones we’ve been waiting for.

In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Legalizing online poker topped the technology ideas, twice as popular as nationwide Wi-Fi. Revoking the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status garnered three times more votes than raising funding for childhood cancer.

Once in power, the White House crowdsourced again. In March, its Office of Science and Technology Policy hosted an online brainstorm about making government more transparent. Good ideas came, but a stunning number had no connection to transparency, with many calls for marijuana legalization and a raging (and groundless) debate about the authenticity of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate.

If the Internet needed a further nudge from its pedestal, the health care debate obliged. From the administration’s point of view, the Web arguably proved better at spreading deceptions about “death panels” than at spreading truth, and at turning town halls into brawls than at nurturing the unfettered deliberation that some imagine to be the hallmark of the Internet.

There is a lively debate in progress about what some call Gov 2.0. One camp sees in the Internet an unprecedented opportunity to bring back Athenian-style direct democracy. The vision is captured in a recent British documentary, “Us Now,” which paints a future in which every citizen is connected to the state as easily as to Facebook, choosing policies, questioning politicians, collaborating with neighbors.

“Can we all govern?” the movie asks at the outset. (It can, of course, be viewed on the Web.)

The people in this camp point to information technology’s aid to grassroots movements from Moldova to Iran. They look at India, where voters can now access, via text message, information on the criminal records of parliamentary candidates, and Africa, where cellphones are improving election monitoring. They note the new ease of extending reliable scientific and scholarly knowledge to a broad audience. They observe how the Internet, in democratizing access to facts and figures, encourages politician and citizen alike to base decisions on more than hunches.

But their vision of Internet democracy is part of a larger cultural evolution toward the expectation that we be consulted about everything, all the time. Increasingly, the best articles to read are the most e-mailed ones, the music worth buying belongs to singers we have just text-voted into stardom, the next book to read is one bought by other people who bought the last book you did, and media that once reported to us now publish whatever we tweet.

In this new age, our consent is gathered every few minutes, not every few years.

Another camp sees the Internet less rosily. Its members tend to be enthusiastic about the Web and enthusiastic about civic participation; they are skeptical of the Internet as a panacea for politics. They worry that it creates a falsely reassuring illusion of equality, openness, universality.

“We live in an age of democratic experimentation — both in our official institutions and in the many informal ways in which the public is consulted,” James Fishkin, a Stanford political scientist, writes in his new book, “When the People Speak.” “Many methods and technologies can be used to give voice to the public will. But some give a picture of public opinion as if through a fun house mirror.”

Because it is so easy to filter one’s reading online, extreme views dominate the discussion. Moderates are underrepresented, so citizens seeking better health care may seem less numerous than poker fans. The Internet’s image of openness and equality belies its inequities of race, geography and age.

Lies spread like wildfire on the Web; Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, no Luddite, warned last October that if the great brands of trusted journalism died, the Internet would become a “cesspool” of bad information. Wikipedia has added a layer of editing — remember editing? — for articles on living people.

Perhaps most menacingly, the Internet’s openness allows well-organized groups to simulate support, to “capture and impersonate the public voice,” as Mr. Fishkin said in an e-mail exchange.

There is no turning back the clock. We now have more public opinion exerting pressure on politics than ever before. The question is how it may be channeled and filtered to create freer, more successful societies, because simply putting things online is no cure-all.

“At this moment, the conversation is not whether the Internet is important and is going to be widespread,” said Clay Shirky, an Internet theorist and the author of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.” He added, in a telephone interview: “Now that it is so important, it’s actually too important not to think through the constitutional and governance issues involved.”

A search is on for the right metaphor. What is the new role for government: A platform? A vending machine, into which we put money to extract services? A facilitator? And what, indeed, is the new role for us — the ones we’ve been waiting for?

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July 5, 2009

THE WORLD

Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI, India — The first thing I ever learned about India was that my parents had chosen to leave it.

The country was lost to us in America, where I was born. It had to be assembled in my mind, from the fragments of anecdotes and regular journeys east.

Now, six years after returning to the country my parents left, as I prepare to depart it myself, the mind goes back to the beginning, to my earliest pictures of it.

India, reflected from afar, was late-night phone calls with the news of death. It was calling back relatives who could not afford to call you. It was Hindu ceremonies with saffron and Kit Kat bars on a silver platter.

India, consumed on our visits back, was being fetched from the airport and cooked a meal even in the dead of night. It was sideways hugs that strove to avoid breast contact. It was the chauvinism of uncles who asked about my dreams and ignored my sister’s.

It was wrong, yet easy, to feel that we did India a favor by coming home. We packed our suitcases with things they couldn’t get for themselves: Jif peanut butter, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Gap khakis. These imports sketched a subtle hierarchy in which they were the wanting relatives and we their benefactors.

My cousins in India would sometimes ask if I was Indian or American. I saw that their self-esteem depended on my answer. “American,” I would say, because it was the truth, and because I felt that to say otherwise would be to accept a lower berth in the world.

What it meant to be American was to be free to invent yourself, to belong to a family and a society in which destiny was believed to be human-made.

I looked around in India and saw everyone in their boxes, not coming fully into their own, replicating lives lived before. If only they came to America, I told myself, so-and-so would be a millionaire entrepreneur; so-and-so would be as confident in her opinions as her husband; so-and-sos’ marriage would be more like my parents’, with verve and swing-dancing lessons and bedtime crossword puzzles; so-and-so would study history and literature, not just bankable practicalities.

I moved to India six years ago in an effort to understand it on my own terms, to render mine what had until then only belonged to my parents.

India was changing when I arrived and has changed dramatically, viscerally, improbably in these 2,000 days: farms giving way to factories; ultra-cheap cars being built; companies buying out rivals abroad. But the greatest change I have witnessed is elsewhere. It is in the mind: Indians now know that they don’t have to leave, as my parents left, to have their personal revolutions.

It took me time to see. At first, my old lenses were still in place — India the frustrating, difficult country — and so I saw only the things I had ever seen.

But as I traveled the land, the data did not fit the framework. The children of the lower castes were hoisting themselves up one diploma and training program at a time. The women were becoming breadwinners through microcredit and decentralized manufacturing. The young people were finding in their cellphones a first zone of individual identity. The couples were ending marriages no matter what “society” thinks, then finding love again. The vegetarians were embracing meat and meat-eaters were turning vegetarian, defining themselves by taste and faith, not caste.

Indians from languorous villages to pulsating cities were making difficult new choices to die other than where they were born, to pursue vocations not their father’s, to live lives imagined within their own skulls. And it was addictive, this improbable rush of hope.

The shift is only just beginning. Most Indians still live impossibly grim lives. Trickle down, here more than most places, is slow. But it is a shift in psychologies, and you rarely meet an Indian untouched by it.

Grabbing hold of their destinies, these Indians became the unlikely cousins of my own immigrant parents in America: restless, ambitious, with dreams vivid only to themselves. But my parents had sought to beat the odds in a bad system, to be statistical flukes that got away.

What has changed since they left is a systemic lifting of the odds for those who stay. It is a milestone in any nation’s life when leaving becomes a choice, not a necessity.

My parents watch me from their perch outside Washington, D.C., and marvel at history’s sense of irony: a son who ended up inventing himself in the country they left, who has written of the self-inventing swagger of a rising generation of Indians, in a country where “self” was once a vulgar word.

At times, my mother wonders if they should have remained, should have waited for their own country’s revolution instead of crashing another’s. And as I leave India now I can only wonder how history would have turned out if the ocean of change had come a generation earlier.

Because it came between their generation and mine, the premise of our family story has been pulled out from beneath us. We are American citizens now, my family, and proudly so. But we must face that we are Americans because of a choice prompted by truths that history has undone. They were true at the choice’s making; in India, I saw their truth boil slowly away.

They don’t crave our mayonnaise and khakis anymore. They no longer angrily berate America, because they are too busy building their own country. Indian accents are now cooler than British ones. No one asks if I feel Indian or American. How delicious to see that unconcern. How fortunate to live in a land you needn’t leave to become your fullest possible self.

And how wondrous, in this time of revolutions, to have had my own here.

I grew up in America defining myself by the soil under my feet, not by the blood in my veins. The soil I shared with everyone else; the blood made me unbearably different. Before I loved India, I loathed it. But that feeling seems now like a relic from a buried past.

I leave now on the journey’s next stretch, with sadness and with joy, humbled by India, grateful to have been at the revolution and to have known the revolutions within.

Some happy news...

http://saja.org/articles/saja-celebrates-15th-anniversary-announces-award-winners

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June 19, 2009

LETTER FROM INDIA

Once-Clear Thoughts Are Clouded

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI — There has always been a lush, adjectival richness to foreign correspondence from India. We write of creaking bullock carts, curled moustaches, stinking latrines, sallow-cheeked farmers, smoky air, sweltering megalopolises and aching villages. We relentlessly describe.

We write about India this way because India is beautiful — not beautiful like Paris, sumptuous and elegant, but beautiful in its distillation of the extremes of human experience. To go into a Mumbai slum or a rain-starved Rajasthani village is to know how beautiful ugliness can be.

But description tempts us, too, because India is mystifying. Correspondents send home answers. India withholds reliable answers. Correspondents schematize reality. India waits for the schema, then cruelly disproves it. The temptation to write 1,000-word tone poems is fierce in a country easier to describe than to explain, and easier to explain than to understand.

I will leave India soon for America, from where I came. I have spent six years seeking to understand. Before going, I wanted to write a column saying something conclusive about India, why it matters, what it means.

But India is a place for seeking, not concluding, and here the chasm between what I wonder and know has widened with time. So I decided instead to write down the questions that still haunt me after 2,000 days here, about justice, love, culture, power, freedom — questions I hope someone abler will answer someday.

The first thing you see in India is indignity: filthy slums, boulevard defecation, puffed-out bellies. You feel shocked but also noble in your compassion. Then it becomes normal. You see that the true degradation is in human relationships, in the belief that people come in different levels of humanness. The idea is so pervasive and tempting of your vanity that, in time, it infects you, too.

And so I wonder: At what moment does a child learn her level of humanness? How did so many in this generation suddenly defy those destinies, as their parents never dreamed? How can callousness to poverty mingle so closely with the warmth that Indians rain on family? Which will change India first, the trickle-down of compassion or the trickle-up of rage?

Some of what I wonder was clear to me until India clouded it.

Indian love — family love, romantic love — once felt alien. It was not easy to spend time in giant, multigenerational households. Love meant scolding, meddling, judging, people obsessing about your eating, telling each other why their skin is too dark or their frame too thin. In romance, too, love was understated and assumed, given through sacrifice. It never aimed to fascinate, exhilarate.

Then I began to see the power of love in which it’s not about you.

Now I wonder: does love mean never taking another for granted, as it often does in the West, or is it the serene liberty to do so? Which is more of a gamble, marriage by arrangement or by love? Is love more durable when it is just the two of us or when it weaves together tribes?

Then there is the question of what you keep.

In the Davos Age, there is a formula for developing nations: low tariffs, privatization, sushi, English fluency, jazz bars, Bellinis, fashion weeks, consumptiveness, thinness, the purging of superstitions. These nations must in a decade Xerox a way of life that rich countries built over centuries.

But India is an ancient, continuous civilization, and Indians feel excitement but also pain in the dueling pressures to be someone else and be themselves: to subscribe to their astrology charts, schedule things on “auspicious days,” dance to the beats of Punjab’s plains, drink lentil soup.

Can one be “global” without being a mimic? Does the English language obliterate or liberate, disguising the caste and class of those who master it? Why is more culture flowing into India today than flowing out?

I wonder, too, about Indian power. This week, at a summit meeting in Russia, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, stood shoulder to shoulder with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the dubiously re-elected president of Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad might have listened to Mr. Singh: India and Iran are cultural cousins, sharing elements of language and culture. Millions of Indians claim Persian descent. India buys Iranian oil.

But this week, as Iran trampled on the values that Indians hold so dear, Mr. Singh found nothing meaningful to say.

Why, when the world sees India as a great power, does India see itself as Burundi? Beyond its own affluence, what kind of world does India want? What will it do to build it?

And what can the world’s Irans learn from Indian democracy?

I once asked Mufti Shabbir Alam Sidiqi, an important Islamic cleric, whether disenfranchised Muslims were losing faith in India and taking solace in fundamentalist ideas.

“What you have in India you have in no other country,” he replied. “In this republic there are rights. We can demand our rights, speak out. In other countries: eat, drink and shut up. Go to Saudi Arabia: you can’t speak. There is Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai, Iraq, Iran. These things are nowhere. They are all dictatorships.”

Indian democracy should not work. Indians share no language. They cling to their identities. Most live below that level of middle-classness beyond which democracy supposedly thrives.

But the system holds. The coups, election theft and statecraft-by-murder that afflict much of the developing world don’t happen here. Democracy brings little to the poor, the state is corrupt, politicians lack principles and ideas. Yet those with no reason to believe continue to believe, vote, speak, petition.

And I wonder: Is India reinventing democracy — democracy designed not for colonial Virginia, but for societies like this: poor; inequitable; ethnically, religiously, linguistically balkanized; in the throes of convulsive change? Would India, if it summoned the will, be a more persuasive lecturer on democracy’s merits than America?

Then there is one more question. This one I will seek to answer — not now, but in my next and final letter from here.

Is a land with such beauty and possibility, with these vast questions still to answer in my lifetime, a land whose addiction can ever be escaped?

Happy news!

http://www.sopasia.com/awards/2009/groupa.asp

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June 7, 2009

Love in the Time of Diaspora

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

THE PRAYER ROOM

By Shanthi Sekaran

382 pp. MacAdam/Cage. $25

By now, you recognize the Indian novel. Every week, it seems, there are new additions to the subcontinent’s thriving subgenre of immigrant literature, all of them sharing a few tell-tale elements: lush language; the vitality and musicality of India’s crowded gullies; its ancient spirituality counterpoised against a crass new materialism; its émigrés’ struggles to balance tradition and modernity.

Shanthi Sekaran’s first novel, “The Prayer Room,” contains all of these familiar and sumptuous treats, all the multicultural exotica we have come to expect. But it does not contain — and perhaps doesn’t need to contain — much more.

The tale is this: In 1974, George Armitage, a young Ph.D. student from England, ventures to Madras to work on a dissertation about Indian temples. He does less research and more flirting than he expected, and ends up returning to England “on a Pan Am airliner with his new small wife beside him.”

He has, we are told, a history of regretting his purchases.

George’s new wife is an Indian named Viji, from a traditional family. They have married at the insistence of her mother, who was devastated to learn of Viji’s white lover at a time when even dinner dates were carefully arranged. Now Viji sets off, as so many Indians did in that era, to make a life with George in the West — first in England, then in suburban Sacramento.

George is a frustrated intellectual; Viji is lonely and ill equipped for a bewildering new land. It’s not a promising foundation for romance, and the trouble only deepens when George’s lecherous, tactless father crosses the Atlantic to move in. What emerges is a chronicle of lukewarm love: love that is initially coerced, then becomes a pleasant habit after triplets are born, then sputters into boredom and resentment as time wears on, driving Viji to walk out and leading both of them toward infidelity before their love finally, if tepidly, returns.

The story is simple. But, as with so many novels of the Indian diaspora, the plot matters less than the language.

Sekaran is a master of cadence, and as she displays her intimate knowledge of India, England and America, there’s jazz on nearly every page: the “first striated fumes” of a cigar evoking a British pub, Sacramento’s longing “to be a city other than itself,” a sing-song Indian accent that betrays “affection for the syllables themselves.” In India, a phone booth “keeled into the sari shop, which butted against the sweet shop, which rammed into the grungy teahouse, which crashed into the tailor’s.”

Such observations shine a bright light on the cultural collisions at the heart of this novel. Yet we slowly realize that the book is little more than the sum of its beautiful details. Sekaran’s sentences may be loose gems, but she hasn’t strung them together to make jewelry. While she treats us to descriptions of a “possibly malnourished” lizard and a “small bikini that dripped gray puddles onto the linoleum,” she never convincingly tells us what it’s like for Viji to bear the children of a man who doesn’t love her, or how she reaches the decision to leave George, or what her impressions of America are. Nor does Sekaran compensate for this lack of interior life with a corresponding exterior gaze — we don’t learn who is president at the time, what is happening in the society, what George’s academic interests are.

To be sure, “The Prayer Room” has its pleasures. But because it remains more interested in the colorful cross-cultural manifestations of human motivation than it does in human motivation itself, it goes down like a five-course repast of gelato. No individual bite is unappetizing. But nothing collects; and at the end you fold your napkin with the faint feeling that you have been satisfied but not filled.

Anand Giridharadas, a columnist for The International Herald Tribune, is writing a nonfiction book about modern India.