Opinions
A modern indenture?
Born in a British colony, I couldn’t help seeing the seamy side of Empire, extolled by British rulers and scholars, even today, and developed a nose for demagoguery and pretence that helped me to identify those who impoverished and defiled places, and corrupted people.
In those days, the names jumped at you; foremost for me was Winston Churchill, whose record I am reminded of by the movie, The Darkest Hour. I recall reading Their Finest Hour in 1951. Churchill was a hero for Britain and I daresay, Europe. But to Indians he showed an inhuman and chauvinistic side: he callously denied food aid to millions of Indians, causing nearly four million deaths from starvation in a single famine in Bengal (see India, under siege, for details of this, and other sins), forgetting the billions of pounds extracted from the country to build Britain, and the millions of its citizens who fought for them locally and in foreign wars, and those exploited others that his predecessors had enslaved in colonial cesspools for over a century. His decision might have been overlooked as an act of war, had his rejection of Indians not been so intemperate. He called Gandhi a naked fakir (pronounced more derogatorily), and declared a hatred for Hindus, whose extinction was prevented only by their intemperate breeding! The famine provided him a tool to contribute to that extinction.
Fast forward to modern Bengaluru, one of the many places in India where the tyranny of Churchill’s progeny, the USA – now entrenched in their own equivalents of British factories, Indian branches of US multinationals – is playing out, with indenture-style exploitation of Indian labour, as venomously as the BEICo and the British Raj. Remember Bhopal and the Union Carbide chemical deaths in December 1984?
The focus now is on Avery Dennison, a Fortune 500 company, known for its labelling and packaging business, that Forbes has called a “best” employer, but whose Indian workers are on a hunger strike for rotten and illegal employment practices: blatant exploitation, unconscionable managers, paying less than minimum wage, employment on short-term contracts, some repeated for ten years, abrupt mass dismissals for union activity etc., which was started to gain a hearing.
Meanwhile, in America the news tell of two egomaniacs at play, aided by Trump’s strident robots operating as Press Secretary and UN ambassador.
On January 4, 2018, Justin McCurry of The Guardian reported North Korea’s Kim’s claim that the nuclear button was “on my desk” prompting Trump to ping-pong that his nuclear button was “bigger” and more effective, like a stud stallion’s, continuing their immature word war.
Simultaneously the presses scream the titles of new books that tell of the steep decline in morals, ethics and plain decency in the USA that commenced its snowball decline since WWII, when it claimed to have rid the world of the maniac Hitler. But it proceeded to spawn a succession of demagogues, now at a low point, with a buffoon at the helm, whose arrogant behaviour recalls the Hitler figure and his nemesis, Churchill, who represents the acme of British chauavinism and anti-Indian racism, of which late 19th century phrenologists would have been proud.
To underline this we’ve seen a shower of condemnatory books: The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy by Brian Klaas; Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win by Luke Harding; Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump by Allen Frances; and many others, equally strident; among them the title that emphasises the scatological decay in public decency and honour in America, Asshole Nation: Trump and the Rise of Scum America by Scott McMurrey; and the latest, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff. The latter has become a target for Trump, his lawyers having failed to stop its release.
So, when you’re frustrated and exhausted by all this grand-standing and chicanery, you can switch to an opposite campaign, for peace and restoration of national dignity: The Dandelion Insurrection by Rivera Sun: "When fear is used to control us, love is how we rebel!"
Visitor returns to aged house on the hill
Romeo Kaseram
It was our exclamations of triumph with each fish we caught that brought him to the window, from where he leaned forward to peer into the dappled shadows. We too were shadows in the small sunlight penetrating the canopy of the bamboos as we sat fishing among the brown, dry leaves littering the river’s bank.
We had hit on a feeding frenzy, the fish “mudding” – with each toss of the line into the current of brown water, the cork became animated with what was at first tentative pecking. To hold the breath was to tune-in to the swirl of the water as it wove through the reeds at
the bend in the river, and an occasional call of inquiry from a hopping parakeet above. Then all sounds faded as the cork dipped, and in a brief half-second of decisiveness, was dragged below the surface of the water. An itchy trigger-finger did not do to catch a hungry fish. The second the cork disappeared was to become one with the fishing line, the forefinger on this umbilical awaiting the moment when its tuning arrived at the correct pitch, so the music of the catch could be played. It took a tug, and then in the moment accompanied by a ululation of triumph, a shouldering of the rod so the flash of silver at the end of the line was heaved out of the deep with a satisfying thud, there to fall flopping and struggling, its pleading eyes coated with specks of dirt and sand, among the dead leaves layering the bank of the river at our feet hopping with joy.
Our cries brought him down from the house on the hill, his curiosity at our fishing expedition on his property getting the better of him as he toured the expanse of the land he owned from the river’s bank up to the peak of the hill, and then for acres and acres behind where the iguanas gazed from their majestic perches among the masts of mahagony trees. Do we know this is his land? That this river ran among the bamboos when his great-grandfather, and his grandfather, and his father, were boys? We shook our heads, mute with the surprise of discovery; amazed that an adult had cracked the code of the interwoven bamboos, and had found a way into the enclave where the river pooled deeply, and where the crabs sat on the opposite banks levering eyes like windshield wipers.
He had parted the bamboos exactly to our secret entrance, crawling in on hands and long-pants as we had discovered after trial and error, so we knew he was a past visitor to our secret location. But now he was older, and taller, so when he stood among our pile of dying fish, his gray hair was inches away from the pillars of thick bamboos interwoven in the thicket above. Where the sunlight found gaps in the canopy, stray light fell on his face, highlighting the lines that told us he was a safe visitor, that he was a grandfather to children like us.
“So your fish does not jump happily back into the water, cut a twig with a ‘V’ on it,” he said. “Now shorten one end, and thread the fish through its mouth and gills. Now you can keep them all together,” he said, picking up a handful of dried leaves and wiping both hands. We eyed each other at his savoir faire, wondering how this stranger had come into our midst knowing so much. Now we became shy the way children do when strangers turn out to be foreigners, our eyes widening over the thrill of being the centre of attention of someone, “Important”. By now we had figured out our visitor was from, “Away”.
He invited us to visit the house on the hill, his former home before he went abroad with his parents as a boy. Now he had returned for a last visit before tearing the house down. It had seen itinerant occupants until the doors and windows were barred and shut years before. To return to where he had grown up as a boy was to confront the hostility of a house unforgiving to its former occupant for its abandonment. Now it was malicious, showing how it had indiscriminately welcomed visitors after recovering from its anguish, tearing open cracks with self-inflicted wounds so spiders crept in to occupy valuable real estate on walls where nighttime embraced nightlife and other lowlifes.
We followed our visitor through the tour of the aging house, its floorboards creaking, windows warped so it would only open with a heave, unwilling after swinging open on reluctant hinges to once more be latched to desuetude. We left the house behind, returning to our fishing, our visitor taking up a pole with an assessing heft, and with a flick of the wrist accurately plopping the cork among roots in the water.
Right away he heaved a memory out, then retrieving it quivering from the hook, returned it into the deep with hands clasped as if in prayer.
