What Not to Wear...to a South Delhi Club

A friend of mine recently posted a woeful column on FB about how he has been refused entry at so-called "fashionable establishments" because he showed up in Indian wear.  Now, I have a few male friends who really rock Indian clothes.  And when I say Indian clothes, I mean the full white kurta-pajama set.  And yes, upon occasion, I have mocked them for looking slightly neta-esque. (Particularly once wintertime arrives and those delightful wool vests emerge.)  Interestingly, many of them at one point secretly aspired to neta-hood; that's probably why we're friends, and probably also why I like that look.  It suggests a latent and septuagenarian type of political power, much like an ill-fitting Brooks Brothers suit once did in the secret corridors beneath the US Capitol.

However, the real Indian-wear prize for men probably goes to a former colleague of mine, who used to wear slightly rumpled kurtas with the careless finesse of a Frenchman tossing a scarf over his shoulder (do Frenchmen do this? Probably not. Sorry, France).  My colleague was very thin, very young, very well-read, and a real Jacobin. I hope my fondness for his whole aura derives from genuine liking, and not (despite the many long hours that I, like any well-meaning post-colonial PIO, logged with the collected works of Ed Said) some holdover Orientalist fetish. I should add, for those who need any further explanation, that he gradated from JNU.

When it comes to ethnic-wear, the decision "To wear or not to wear" is fraught, and if I were to be honest, I am no stranger to this internal debate. Growing up, I wore Indian clothes to my very American but very post-racial middle and high schools, on every Diwali.  Some people dislike the attention of being a cultural ambassador, my philosophy was to run with it.  All day long people would come up to me and ask me what I was wearing and why I was wearing it, and I would regale them with stories of how special I was. I probably enjoyed the pomp more than the circumstance.  I also enjoyed the pseudo-political implications of wearing Indian clothes in white men's country, although keep in mind that the tiny, overeducated oddity that is Montgomery County is officially 15% Asian and unofficially 18% Jewish. So really, it was more of a gesture.

In Delhi, I've opted for Westerns, but somewhat grudgingly.  I am no stranger to the Orientalist allure. The pages of Indian Vogue abound with photos of tall, styled, bronzed women wearing blouse-less gossamer and gold saris, looking like they just got up from a tryst with James Bond's Mediterranean avatar. (The reality is less "tryst with James Bond" and more "screaming match with the driver" but anyway.) Seeing these pictures, I aspired to the notion of an effortless and seemingly unattainable beauty, and the lifestyle that beauty implied.  Effortless beauty, of course, is one of the Grand Myths mixed into young women's breakfast cereal, along with milk and guilt. Unattainable beauty, meanwhile, is an enormous commercial reality, the peddling of which brings in billions and billions of dollars a year around the world.  I wore a formal sari on one occasion and was surprised to note that unlike the saris of my personal myth, this sari had heft and weight.  The blouse kept gapping oddly, the pleats threatened to diverge.  I felt less like the lovely swan and more like the unfortunate cygnet.

When I wore a lighter and less formal sari to an event in South Delhi, people kept coming up to me and asking if I was one of the organizers.  Never one to decline a position of authority, I replied in the affirmative. My co-workers, meanwhile, displayed all the rapturous wonder of Americans hearing Armstrong's first words from the moon.  The attention I got for my sari is sad and perhaps instructive, because let's be honest - every ragpicker woman in this country manages to put on her sari in the morning and gets no thanks for it.  Meanwhile, the auto drivers kept calling me "didi," which is almost the female version of neta.  I can't pretend I didn't like it.

I could go on and tell you the stories of Delhi's many tailors, who in their spare time - and they have much of it - double as guardians of public morality.  One time, I copied a "daring" blouse pattern from one of my magazines and took it to a neighborhood tailor.  Used to the white pajama suits and high-necked blouses of this particular retirement community, he raised his eyebrows when I told him how low I wanted the scoop in the back.  When I arrived to pick up the garment, I found that he had tailored something entirely different - sort of like a T-shirt.  When called upon for explanation, he smiled gravely at my mother and replied, "our girls don't dress like that."

The "posh" tailors of South Delhi, meanwhile, are terrifyingly libertine. One afternoon, sandwiched between gold ruching and padded bra cups at Eve's, near my house, I had a tailor sketch me a pattern.  I picked it up and squinted.  In the end, I couldn't see any difference between wearing his design and wearing two halves of a coconut.  If I were effortlessly beautiful, I told myself then, I would have airily waved my hand and told him to go ahead with it.  But I was not - and at the end of the day, the goal of any flattering garment is to overwhelm nature with more intelligent design.

But the point my friend was making - and that can't be denied - is not about Indian-ness as a fun experiment to be engaged in once a year or even at the occasional society party.  He was talking about the reality of Indian-ness, and the ways in which, through sartorial bans, Indian-ness is sidelined or seen as somehow less, particularly in the working world.  And I can't pretend I disagree with him.  If, as a girl, the goal of my dressing was to reclaim and display Indian-ness as a source of pride (and it was) then the disparagement of an Indian ensemble is no laughing matter.  Nor is it a uniquely Indian phenomenon.  In the United States, ethnic-wear of any type is not seen as "professional" - regardless of tailoring or cleanliness.  Our preferences are so deeply ingrained that they are seen as unquestionable.  Just look at stories of women who are asked to leave their jobs because their natural hair is curly, or male business students who are told in college that in order to succeed, they have to mimic a slicked-back ideal.  I have a lovely and beautiful Jewish friend with wildly curly hair who would spend hours straightening it; she once confessed that it's because she just sees straight hair as "more professional."

Clean, tidy hair is professional.  But straight?  Why don't we just put a sign out front, "White Christians Only"?  There was great uproar over this a while back in the US, and several fashion magazines went out of their way to showcase women with natural hair.  But at the end of the day, things probably went back to what they were before - and there are a million more prejudices that we never question.

The moment we see a particular attire as more "professional," it's because we associate that attire with access to opportunity.  There is no denying that in India, Westernization is seen as that access.  And this perception holds true across all levels of society, from the young guy who signs up for an English class to get a better job to the rich woman who returns from abroad with an inexplicable and pointless foreign twang.  If we are being honest with ourselves - which, despite being Delhi-ites, we sometimes should be - these choices have little to do with comfort or familiarity.  There is a glamour, youth and edginess attributed to western clothes.  It is a matter of branding.  Much like sexual objectification, there are things that on an individual level may not be bad, but when elevated to a normative social standard (ie, practiced unthinkingly by many people in a particular demographic) can have harmful implications.

I remember an American friend who once told me that her office in DC included saris on its list of forbidden clothing, and the reason cited was that a bare midriff was immodest.  Which would be one thing, except that sleeveless tops and knee-length skirts showcase the exact same square acreage of skin. And even in a sari, a bare midriff is not a guarantee, merely one of many styling options.

At the end of the day, professional advancement has always been a game in which a privileged few attempt - as best they can - to exclude others, often for spurious reasons.  Saying an afro is unprofessional is the same thing as saying that women are too risk-averse for certain jobs.  I know plenty of women who, as a professional prerequisite, reject their own femininity - they have to choose between being "women" (whatever that means) and being "professionals."  I have felt this pressure myself - we associate womanhood with emotion, with sexiness, with maternal desire, with fluffy and un-mathematical thinking - with everything except for professional success.

The United States has evolved its prejudices over years, and to an extent is aware of them and attempts to provide legal redress (useless, in the main, but at least the option is there.)  It's sad that we in India are still in so much denial about mindlessly imbibing the prejudices of others.  (And before you start, I'll add that those who most vociferously protest the denial of Indian-ness are the same ones who would hesitate to wear Indian clothes to work, and then give all kinds of half-baked reasons as to why.)

Choosing Optimism

The other day, a friend of mine posted the following question on her FB: "activists and social change-driven people: do you use negative personal experiences and anger and channel these to make change? how?"

In answering her question, I realized something incredibly important: being optimistic is very hard, but it's also very important.

In my life, pessimism manifests in many forms, but the most insidious is the subtle and self-serving belief that people are bad, and that they cannot change.  I first adopted this belief in elementary school, and throughout adolescence I wore it like a shield. If someone disappointed me, they were out of the club.  Fini. Kaput. Etc. I was an island, happy being alone.

Except that I wasn't.  And the older I get, the less I can maintain that illusion to myself or anyone else.

When you believe that people are bad, you certainly save yourself some heartache. You save yourself the incredibly humiliating experience of rejection, of asking for more and being denied. But you miss a great deal more.

The same is true of general optimism.  In the face of a world that is disappointing and unfair, it is easy to say: Forget it. This will never change.  Let me do what I can for myself and forget about everyone else.

But negativity, anger, and hurt are not emotions that change the world for the better.  They are isolating, and in my experience, people who indulge them too much end up lonely, angry and scared.  On the other hand, when I tell myself that people are good - that examples of goodness and courage also exist around me - I find that I want to reach out and improve the world.  Every positively impactful action I've ever taken - whether it's starting a nonprofit or teaching in a slum school - has been an act of faith and an act of optimism.  A belief that things can improve, and that one person's bad decisions - or even a thousand people's bad decisions - are not a global destiny.

Part of this philosophy means surrounding myself with optimistic and positive people - those who open themselves up to change, who take risks, who embrace opportunity, and who treat others with dignity.  People like that are rare, and frankly, possibly a bit demented.  The history of the world is one of extreme injustice and continuing disparity, and fighting that tide is a noble and exhausting endeavor.  But these are also people who have courage, empathy and energy.

Increasingly, I find myself at personal crossroads: moments when I can choose not my destiny, but the way I choose to view the world.  Choosing optimism is scary because it means accepting that your life can be better - but that you have to take responsibility for getting there.  And getting there will probably suck really hard.  It will not be easy.

The same is true of the world.  It is hard to be optimistic about the future because it means that suddenly we bear responsibility for getting there.  But I believe - and I think evidence supports - the contention that people who change the world for the better (and whom we remember) are people who choose optimism, and who choose not to live in fear.

The Subtle Sexism of "Understanding Huma"

There's this thinky little essay-let out in "The New Yorker" titled "Understanding Huma Abedin," in which author Emily Greenhouse attempts to place the Anthony Weiner/Huma Abedin drama in the context of the great political tradition of "marriages of convenience."  From Eleanor Roosevelt - whose husband was in love with her secretary - through Hill, plenty of intelligent women have chosen to stand by their men for reasons that may have been more real politik than real love.  According to Emily, we should accept these marriages as absolutely fine.

On the surface, I don't disagree.  Everyone is entitled to their own expectations.  What bothers me, however, is holding up Abedin's marriage as an example of necessary or even desirable compromise, when in fact we have no evidence to support that theory.  In making her point about political marriages, Greenhouse cites a historical tradition in which women, pretty much universally, enjoyed less power than men when it came to setting terms in their relationships.  Even today, among equally successful men and women, it quickly becomes apparent that men still have more leeway, and women - particularly those who are ambitious and who want to be involved with equally ambitious mates - have more trouble.

"What would be so wrong with addressing the possibility of different kinds of marriage, and different sexual mores?," asks author Emily Greenhouse.  There's nothing wrong with that!  Plenty of couples might have marriages where one or the other sexts randoms on the Internet, and no one really cares.  (On a sliding scale of the great sexual behaviors of history, with 1 being Paul Newman's absolute fidelity and 10 being Catherine the Great & her horse, Anthony Weiner's inability to sort his DMs from his Tweets, or to download Snapchat, is barely a tepid 2.)

But the weakness in Greenhouse's argument - and its inherent (and possibly unintended) sexist implications appear in her chief example: Eleanor and FDR.  Greenhouse writes that when confronted with her husband's infidelity with her social secretary, Eleanor was shattered but she made the best of it.

This is not a couple navigating new sexual mores - it is a couple in which one and/or both partners did not feel empowered enough to end the marriage (indeed, Eleanor considered divorce but FDR convinced her otherwise).  In Eleanor's case, she chose to stay married - but what were her options? Divorce would have ended her husband's career, but would it really have had a less stigmatizing effect on hers?  She told FDR that their physical relationship was over and became an activist.  Her marriage sounds less like a happy decision and more like a very constrained optimization.

Even in the case of modern women like Hillary and Huma - do they prefer marriages in which their husbands embarrass them with these infidelities? Or do they accept the infidelities because they want to "marry a politician...a partner whose livelihood depends on courtship"?  In every one of the couples Greenhouse mentions, the woman is the one who accepts her husband's extramarital affairs.  He never accepts hers (although this reverse situation happens plenty in real life, esp among couples who are actually "addressing the possibility of different kinds of marriage.")  In these political marriages, women suffer the constraints, but men enjoy the optimization.

At the end of the day, unless Huma is willing to speak up about her open marriage, I find Greenhouse's  parallel self-serving and unconvincing.  Accepting infidelity in powerful men - and politicians - as part of the "deal" only reinforces the idea that men and women can be held to different standards of behavior.  Arguing that men like Weiner must be unfaithful because their careers "depend on courtship" may address a sad pattern of behavior, but from a normative perspective, it's a bit of a dodge.

Accepting a man's infidelities, covering up his lies, defending him in print and on the road, and giving a weak and tragic press conference about your "family" are justifiably hard sells as acts of feminism, and seem much more like the same raw deal that the wives of (flawed, but) powerful men have accepted since time immemorial.  If this is the marriage that Huma wants, she has every right to it.  I wish her a long life.  But let's not hold up this couple as an example of new "sexual mores" - especially when they themselves have offered no such defense.

A Note to Women Considering Delhi

I have heard it said that we take good people for granted.  And that's true - a lot of times, we completely underestimate how hard it is to do the right thing.

Recently, there has been yet more bad news out of India where women's rights are concerned.  A young journalist was brutally and horrifyingly gang-raped in Mumbai.  Even worse, she may not have been the attackers' first victim.  Even before the rape occurred, an exchange student published a story on CNN's iReport, talking about how the constant and public sexual harassment she faced in India brought on a mental breakdown.

And recently, in the midst of this incredibly horrific news, I found myself in a very impassioned debate on Facebook with a friend who finally admitted that although he doesn't want to apologize for India's problems, he struggles with the trashing.  And his comment reminded me of a very wise quote I once read: "when you think something goes without saying, it usually doesn't."

So let me offer my perspective, and in doing so, attempt to give people the credit they deserve for doing the right thing (which in my experience is at least 100x harder than doing the wrong thing.)

I have been living in India for nearly 5 years, and almost every one of those days has been a blessing.  I don't know if India is home for me, but certainly, my corner of Delhi is.  People have opened their minds and their hearts to me.  They've invited me to their houses, introduced me their friends and parents, and in a million ways made a very difficult and foreign environment feel like home.  Professionally, I have been given an incredible amount of opportunity.  For every person who has doubted me because I don't know India's soils or its smells or its languages (fluently), there has been another one who has said, "Hey, it doesn't hurt to look at the world through someone else's eyes."  Sometimes, people have made assumptions about my character or background, because I'm American.  And many times, they have been willing to change their minds.

I have known so many, many young men who are deeply passionate about changing this country, and they are a global inspiration.  A friend recently forwarded me a video of Nitin Gupta doing a comedy tour in which he talks about Delhi's rape crisis. When he said "the length of a woman's clothes is not the measure of her character" - I had to write it down.  And when I saw how enthusiastically the young men and women in his audience were applauding, I cannot lie to you, I almost cried.  I know men who have founded organizations dedicated to fighting street harassment.  I know men who are mapping India's safest and most dangerous cities.  I have been in conversations when men have stood up for equality between men and women, and yet, with an incredible amount of grace and chivalry, gone hours out of their way to make sure their female friends get dropped home safely at night.  I have had men - without being asked - interpose their bodies between me and a potential harasser on a public bus.

I'm a journalist, and I've had editors adopt and promote my stories.  I've had bosses give me difficult or out-of-town assignments, without worrying, as some idiots do, about "taking responsibility for a woman's safety."  Some of my friends are male journalists who have written brave, impassioned and frequent articles advocating for women's rights.

I know guys who don't just preach feminism, but who practice it daily.  They treat their mothers, sisters and wives with dignity, equality, openness and respect.  And they do it deliberately, even when they grew up with the examples of fathers and uncles who didn't behave the same way.  They do it because they have chosen to live differently.  And yes, I know a few spoiled, selfish Delhi boys who are too obtuse to question their own privilege - but let's be honest - those guys are a global scourge.

Perhaps because we in India are so deeply aware of India's problems and flaws, we strive to define ourselves in opposition. I don't want to get into cross-country comparisons.  But I do know that there are people who are constantly fighting for their ideals, as well as living them, in this country.

I know what you're thinking.  "But Anika, what about men who aren't, say, on Twitter?"

Well, all I can say is that I interact with hundreds of such men in a year.  From my watchman to grocery delivery boys to garbage pickers.  Not one of them has raped me.  In fact, some of them are as far from home as I am, and have still gone out of their way to be helpful.  Lechery, while it occurs, is really not my dominant impression of India at all.

Now, do some men commit assault? Do they rape their wives?  That is a serious possibility.  Their wives have no legal protection.

Because the biggest problems in Indian society, when it comes to women's rights and safety, don't affect foreign women, or even photojournalists living in Mumbai or Delhi.  Our Parliamentarians are too craven to criminalize marital rape.  Although child marriage is illegal, it is widespread, and so under current laws it is legal to rape a child, provided that child is over fifteen years old and your wife.  One of our so-called leaders, in a now-infamous remark, conflated romance with stalking. Surveys have suggested that marital rape is endemic in India - and occurs at higher rates than in other developing countries. The men who attacked the photojournalist may have raped four rag-pickers in the same spot previously - and if they had gone on raping destitute, ignorant women forever, they might never have been caught.  The rapes in Mumbai, like the one in Delhi, occurred in well-known, public parts of the city.  The police were absent, doing God-knows-what.  In Sonia Faleiro's "Beautiful Thing," most of the bar dancers she profiles - poor, stigmatized women - have been raped and gang-raped repeatedly and brutally, and have no recourse.  When, after the Delhi rape case, the investigative magazine "Tehelka" interviewed dozens of rural and urban men about rape, they found that some men consider it their right to rape ethnic minorities, villagers and tribal women.  Some reports suggest that in the Indian state of Kashmir, rape is regularly used as a weapon of war.

In a society that regularly fails to protect its weakest citizens, women and children suffer the most.

So.  In sum.  We in India have a serious problem and it requires an urgent solution.  We cannot keep neglecting half the population and still move forward as a society.  We cannot continue to effectively ignore the poor and the marginalized, and expect to reap growth eternally (growth, at least, appears as distant as a fever-dream right now).

When I decided to move to India five years ago, my mother warned me about the gropers.  She sighed and said (almost dismissively) that every Indian girl had at some point been groped, grabbed and/or attacked.  A female relative who was present at the time agreed.  And honestly - I refused to believe them, and I'm glad I did.  Because that, while hideous, is not the only reality. And although she told me about the many brilliant, amazing and compassionate men she'd met in India, she didn't tell me about those who are speaking out against sexism, racism and assault.  Daily.  It is a difficult task.  It is a mission we could all support far more vocally - men and women alike.

To foreign women planning to visit Delhi - be prepared for the fact that anything might happen. Assault is not by any measure a guarantee, but it is a possibility.  If you live in a major American city, you're probably already prepared for this reality.  For men, the world is an oyster.  For women, too often a warzone.  But it is wrong of me not to point out that for all of its ills, there are people - many of them men - who are willing to sacrifice their time, effort and comfort in the selfless hope of a better world for their mothers, friends and daughters. Those kinds of men exist everywhere, and Delhi is no exception to that rule, either.  You can have a beautiful time here, and it can be home to you also.

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This post was republished in the September 6, 2013 edition of "India Abroad" magazine.

The Joy of Writing (or, the Tragedy of Learning to Write in America)

Very few subjects have suffered as much at the hands of the American educational system as writing.  With the possible exception of math, writing is probably our generation's greatest intellectual sorrow.

Reading, writing and arithmetic.  As dreary in their rhythm as one footfall after another.  Learning these subjects is a necessary slog, a long-suffering trudge.  A lot has been done to reclaim the joy of reading.  But the thing I bemoan, the thing I regret, is that we have completely lost - if we ever found - the joy of writing.

As a child, cycled like recycled air through one magnet and IB program after another, I learned a great many things about writing: that is is purposeful, that it is possibly a superpower, that those who practice it effectively are geniuses and savants, that it must be learned, that most people are bad at it.  I learned that we should be "functional" writers, and our highest aspiration as writers is to construct essays that were likened by our teachers to hamburgers - five paragraphs exactly - essays that were about as exciting as the white sesame buns they were metaphorically constructed upon.

I learned a great deal about logic and argument from the five-paragraph essay.  But I didn't learn a damn thing about writing.

In a letter printed in the Washington Post, a high school Government teacher from Maryland (my home state) writes: "My students did well...because we practiced bad writing."  She goes a step further than I would.  I wouldn't say that the basic, barely leavened prose of the five paragraph essay is bad writing.  But it isn't good. It isn't nourishment.  And there's nothing joyful about producing or consuming it.

The most powerful writers in history disturb, arouse, inform and disarm their readers -  all without touching them, all without speaking aloud.  And most of these writers would have failed the average high school functional writing test.  (Can you imagine the way a grader, rubric in hand, would behave if a student responded to "What were the primary disadvantages of life in the 1960s?" with "Rabbit, Run"?  The grader would savage it.  Perhaps not deliberately - their hideous rubric, insensate yet all-powerful - would leave them no choice.  Or perhaps the grader would call Child Protective Services.  Either way, not the desired outcome.)

Writers - great writers - were able to do what they did because they embraced the joy of writing.  They embraced writing at its most creative, cathartic, lovely and insensible.  They knew that sometimes a sentence is an ordered march, but sometimes it is a trackless wilderness.  That writing is a place to explore, to be surprised, and to be forgotten.  It is Narnia and Middle Earth at once.

I have a friend who was dyslexic as a kid. Like a lot of dyslexic kids do, she embraced photography and painting to express herself in images.  But one day when I read one of the poems she'd written - one of the few, I'm sorry to say - I saw something I still haven't forgotten.  I saw how she'd combined words in ways I could not have imagined, into pictures as beautiful as those created with paint and lens.  And this is someone who has spent her entire academic life thinking of writing as her greatest weakness.

There is a time and place for functional writing.  Powerpoints. Inventories. Memos.  But writing doesn't live in memos, even if memos are what we are taught about writing.  (We are not taught to love writing, because honestly, how could we, under those circumstances?)  The worst disservice we do to writing is reduce it to rote, and then pretend that rote is all there is to it.

One of the highest compliments I can ever pay a written work is that it inspires me to write.  Not because I think I can do better than the author, but because I want to start trying.  Because I see how vast the power of words, and their perfect ability to say what is in fact inexpressible.  There is no right way to say what can't be said, and there, in that acknowledgment, you have the joy of writing.  The joy arises from trying, as Anais Nin famously said, "to taste life" (once, twice, or an infinite number of times.)

I shudder to think what most students would produce nowadays if allowed to roam free in their writing.  If I saw the word "Lolz" in an essay I might not consider it art, I might consider it blasphemy. But that's my right as a reader.  The right of a writer is to create.  And sometimes, more often than now, it would be nice if students in American public schools were encouraged to taste that pleasure.  And if the results of those efforts were treated as important and valid, rather than as some kind of concession.

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Note that I'm not talking about individual teachers, but rather about a system that devalues any writing that falls outside the scope of the mundane and conventional.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, & The Morality of Corruption

At first read, and perhaps on second, there's not a great deal that distinguishes Katherine Boo's "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" from "Slumdog Millionaire."  Both are stories of individual strife and optimism, set among people so poor they warrant no notice from their wider society.  That Boo's book is nonfiction makes her story a masterclass in investigative reporting.  That it became wildly successful isn't much of a surprise: not only is it rivetingly told, but there is a tendency among well-read audiences in the West to reward books that present poverty as a problem belonging to other countries.

Boo, who has logged years in the trenches covering poor American communities, isn't part of that audience. She is deeply aware that poverty belongs to all of us; we create it almost at the same time that we create opportunity.  Success may be a good thing, but suffering is a powerful (and too often silent) externality.  

But that's not why I read "Forevers" - if anything, the fact that it was set in a slum made me wary. Recently, I find myself as tired of "Occupy Wall Street" as I am of Wall Street.  Tired of the clueless libertarians who insist that the school system would do just fine with no government oversight, tired of the socialists who claim that the highest goal of society is to finance everything for everybody (especially in election years). Tired of people who claim that the poor deserve their fate, tired of those who deny the doctrine of individual responsibility.  But mostly, I am tired of everyone everywhere scrambling for some sort of constant high ground in the moral debate over emerging global capitalism.  From what I can tell, there is no great divide between the high ground and the low ground; it's more an unmarked territory that most of us are traversing without even knowing exactly where we are in it.  

But from the moment I first opened it, "Forevers" sank its fierce narrative hooks into me, and I read it out of the oldest impulse there is - I wanted to know how it ended.  There were moments along the way when I marveled at Boo's craft - her ability to turn a perfect sentence, her talent at translating obscene Hindi into an English that still retained the cadence of the original (allowing me to reverse-engineer a few choice profanities), the way she seamlessly introduced news and numbers into her story, her gift for illustrating broad realities through a single painstaking example.

But mostly, I just wanted to know - would Asha become a slumlord? Would Manju ever graduate college? Would Meena's parents stop beating her? Would Abdul ever catch a break, poor guy?  (Abdul, a teenaged garbage sorter, is the book's almost-hero, and the outlines of his character could have been lifted straight out of Dickens.)

There are definitely some fictions that the book explodes, among them the notion that unceasing individual enterprise leads to prosperity.  Money doesn't change the reality of work, just the nature of it, the toll it takes on the mind and the body.  Abdul works without respite in a dirty profession, living in an unregulated slum so filthy that it is literally killing its residents one by one.  All the characters in the slum hunger for a "better" life - which to them means more money.  But Abdul is one of the few who still hungers for a better self.  His minor protests against Mumbai's rampant corruption include a steadfast honesty, a refusal to pick fights, a willingness to forgo the profit that comes from buying stolen goods.  But these small acts of morality make no dent at all in the broad scheme of things.  Abdul is taken into custody when he is falsely accused of a crime by a jealous and unhappy neighbor.  What should have been an open-and-shut case drags on for years and beggars his family in bribes.

All these are stories about slums, about poverty, about corruption and about Mumbai that we have heard before.  Residents of Delhi and Mumbai - the more fortunate ones, anyway - will read this book and say "yes of course, that's how it is."  Nothing at all will surprise.

But in a too-brief author's note at the end, Boo makes the point that stood out to me most strongly.  She writes, "The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility, but of our moral universe."  I've alluded to this before, but for me, the past 4.5 years in Delhi have been marked by constant and daily compromises.  There are many times, trying to decide what is "right" and whether another person has behaved "wrongly" - that the rules I've learned in the US just don't apply.  People under-perform in a million ways and then offer careless and infuriating excuses - but who is right when the system is so skewed? Is my taxi driver at fault for being late, or his company for assigning him a fare he would never be able to take on time, or the Indian govt for permitting our roads to exist in such a pathetic and worthless state that we have become a country of latecomers?  I am often angry, but it's an anger that struggles to find a clear target.  When I complain about a broken system, the blame always finds a convenient scapegoat, never the person who is actually guilty.

These compromises are easily made, easily forgotten, but they can have a corrosive effect on the moral spirit when they accumulate over time.  Delhi excels in changing us, not always positively.  One of the little-celebrated facts of Delhi expat life is that most people, in this country, assume a persona very different from the one they put on back home.  It is rarely a nicer one.  And it's not restricted to expats (who are privileged in India merely by virtue of being foreign).  Even among the most well-meaning privileged elites of Delhi society - people who might once have aspired to fix this country's problems - too many seem to have decided that it's better to just go with the flow.  In a corrupt system, the absence of privilege is an affliction, but so is the surfeit of it.  To an extent, these conditions hold true in the US as well, but less strongly, and there's a lot more space in the middle where people can make choices that are broadly moral and that have predictable moral consequences.

At the end of her author's note, Boo asks, "If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?"  It may sound melodramatic, but she's not far off.  When justice is an ephemeral and unrealistic concept, impossible to determine, it becomes too easy to do what's easy, for everyone.

On Reading Ayn Rand

I recently finished reading Ayn Rand's "The Romantic Manifesto."  It was my first encounter with Rand's writing, and I would recommend it to everyone.

I always distantly admired her as an impassioned thinker, a fierce debater, and a self-made immigrant. Years ago my Mom told me that Ayn Rand was one of the reasons she left India for the United States, which only made me fonder of her.

When I got to college I learned that Ayn Rand is, in America, a political writer, and one who has been squarely claimed by the Republican party (never mind whether they align with her views or not).

I'm not about to defend and/or excoriate her philosophy (particularly her ethical or political philosophy, in which she seems to take her ideas to illogical and extreme conclusions) because I haven't read enough of her writing, but I suspect that some of the disdain heaped on Rand's writing comes from people who either deliberately misunderstand her work, or who are looking for a talking point.  Also, people often judge Ayn by her adherents, and being admired by a confused oatmeal-y non-entity like Paul Ryan can't be good for anyone.

For what it's worth, the generations of spoiled rich boys on Ivy League campuses who have adopted Rand as their mascot (although they would never have, say, dated her) are people for whom I suspect Ayn - who idolized the unique and individual mind as much as she did individual behavior - would not have had much admiration.

"The Romantic Manifesto" isn't a fully-defined aesthetic philosophy, but it makes for a fascinating read on the role and purpose of art in life.

Quotes:

Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal (10).
A sense of life...sets the nature of a man's emotional responses and the essence of his character. (14).
A man whose mind and emotions are in harmony, whose sense of life matches his conscious convictions [describing the rational man]. (19)
When love is a conscious integration of reason and emotion, of mind and values, then - and only then - it is the greatest reward of man's life. (22)

Eventually, Ayn realizes that no ideal man exists and she'll have to invent one entirely, from her imagination, much like Pygmalion invented his ideal lover (in Ovid, of course, Pygmalion comes off as the worst kind of misogynist, but that's not really relevant).  Ayn suggests that the purpose of art should be to create and celebrate the ideal.

The concept I liked most was that of a "sense of life" - our normative outlook on existence, on what is worth striving for and on how life should be lived.  She suggests that the profound and almost spiritual sense of identification that a viewer feels with certain artwork - artwork which might seem on the surface to be no different from its peers - arises when the viewer and the artist share a similar sense of life.  (I wonder to what extent this notion - so irrevocably true in art - applies to real life.  In my experience, unfortunately, it's a mixed bag)  Also, and perhaps controversially, I agree with Ayn that there is a right way to live, and that right way includes an almost-obsessive dedication to principles that might always remain slightly out of reach.  I agree with her that to compromise our ideals is to become tragic.

Of all these essays, "Art and Moral Treason" is the one that spoke to me most powerfully.  It's an essay that links together art and life, and lives up to the title "manifesto." If I could, I would nail it to a church door (or, in our more modern age, share it on Facebook?).

"Art and Moral Treason" hooked me from the get go.  It opens with the story of a spiritually bankrupt (but otherwise successful) man whom Ayn meets when he's 26.  She describes him as being "paralyzed by so extreme a state of indecision that any sort of choice filled him with anxiety - even the question of moving out of an inconvenient apartment."

Because this is an Ayn Rand essay (and not life) there is eventual redemption at the end of Mr. X's sad rainbow.  He manages to beat his purposelessness, and how!  The description of Mr. X's recovery is hopeful, passionate, unmistakable.  She says,  "Ultimately, what saved Mr. X was his commitment to reason; he held reason as an absolute, even if he did not know its full meaning and application; an absolute that survived through the hardest periods he had to endure in his struggle to regain his psychological health-to remark and release the soul he had spent his life negating... Today - after quitting his job and taking many calculated risks - he is a brilliant success, in a career he loves, and on his way up to an ever-increasing range of achievement."

Even though this was an essay, I followed Mr. X's narrative arc with bated breath.  Sadly, I'm pretty sure that he doesn't exist.  I have met a few Mr. X's.  Generally, in my experience, most don't recover - many never even realize that they're sick.  There are people who live their whole lives apologizing for and degrading their own ideals.

In "Basic Principles of Literature," Ayn presents a spirited deconstruction and defense of the ideological novel.  She understands how successful novels work, and she offers what almost amounts to a class in constructing characters and sourcing themes.  For those who write, this essay is invaluable.

If there's one thing about Ayn's essays that stands out, it is her unwavering conviction to this idea that we can overcome ourselves, but only if we struggle.  (I remember a famous line from that apex of romantic tearjerkers, The Way We Were, in which Barbra Streisand says to Robert Redford, "people are their principles."  She's the striving heroine and he's the golden boy next door, and needless to say their romance has an expiration date stamped all over it precisely because - although he enjoys paying lip service to her energy and ideals - deep down he kind of likes the world the way it is.)

I emailed my mother with some of my favorite Rand quotes, to see what she would think.  She's read most of Ayn's work but not this collection, and I suspect (based on some of the vitriol that I see coming Ayn's way) that Ayn's opinions on art may be better than her opinions on other subjects.

My mother wrote:

"Trouble is:  the moment you tell someone you like Ayn Rand, they ‘peg’ you to something, and from there on, it's aloofness and respect and sometimes anger, but never warmth or tenderness. I guess people find her cold because she doesn’t agree with many emotions we have come to think of as warm and human  (not agreeing, merely stating) – generosity, forgiveness, charity, compassion.  They forget she also means passion, fairness, cherishment, faithfulness.  It's almost as if love has to be unearned to be called love in our society."

And this gets to the heart of the debate over Ayn Rand.  I've had plenty of well-read friends tell me that they find her "cold" or "uncaring" - a description that I cannot reconcile with the impassioned rhetoric of these essays.  People's passions can be accessed through different channels, but that doesn't mean that they are lacking.  Intensity and drive are hardly cold or unfeeling conditions, although much of the world may view them that way.  (In one of these essays, Ayn defends our emotional reaction to art, suggesting that this reaction is an important guiding force in our moral development.)

"The Romantic Manifesto" is less a philosophy of art than it is a manifesto on life itself.  Art, after all, was probably what Ayn held dearest to her heart - she was a writer who expressed her ideologies in fiction, and whose ideals were (from a young age) almost certainly informed by the written word.  She suggests that there is little difference between what inspires a man in art and what inspires him in life - but most of us are afraid to admit it.

Sadly, many think Ayn isn't a great fiction writer - and that seems to be a fair critique.  There's a short story at the end of "The Romantic Manifesto" in which the hero - a 'noncommercial' writer - struggles to reconcile his vision of the ideal novel with the types of novels that sell.  Interestingly, the conflict that drives this short story directly contradicts one of Rand's earlier essays,  in which she derides society (convincingly) for looking down on commercially successful art.  The entire short story is a stream-of-consciousness semi-rant, and by the end I remain unconvinced that it has any compelling central thesis.  If her novels are anything like this short story, I would dislike them too.  The main character seems utterly whiny, untalented and self-righteous, and not exactly a standard-bearer for idealism in art or in life.

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In other news, I reviewed L. Annette Binder's "Rise" for the Iowa Review. Read and enjoy!