The Dancing Peacock

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Sangamithra

“As a child I would stand on the veranda of the house where I was born and watch the sky darken and listen to the grownups wax sentimental over smoky banks of massed rain clouds… When bathing in the rain was no longer one of the great pleasures of my existence, I knew I had left my childhood behind.”- Aung San Suu Kyi

Peter Popham’s recent biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, The Lady and the Peacock, touches briefly upon this childhood. Daw Suu lost her father, the venerable Burmese General, Aung San, in 1947 when she was only two years old, “too young to remember him.” Some of what she does remember, she no longer trusts as her own memories. “I think this may be a memory that was reinforced by people repeating it all the time. In other words, I was not allowed to forget.” As she would be constantly reminded in the many decades that came after, she was her father’s daughter, but it would not be until her mother’s death in 1988 , that she would come to realize the duty and responsibility of this role.

Popham captures the young Suu, searching for purpose in her early years in exile, first in school in Delhi, where her mother was appointed as Ambassador to Burma by the ruling leader Ne Win (presumably to get Aung San’s widow out of his way) and later at college in Oxford and working for the UN in New York. Popam notes that it was on a visit to Algiers while still at Oxford that Suu got her first exposure to struggle:

“Here was the politics of liberation, being enacted before her eyes in all its passion and difficulty. For the first time in her life her sympathies and energies were fully engaged, however briefly, as a participant in the sort of struggle that she was to find waiting for her in Burma twenty three years later.”

Before marrying Tibetan scholar Michael Aris in 1972, she warned him that one day she may need to serve her country.

“I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.”

It would not be for many years that she would come to realize that need. Reflecting on her domestic life in England prior to her return to Burma in 1988, Suu said:

“We called someone vicious in a review for the Times Literary Supplement. We didn’t know what vicious was.”

When Suu returned to Burma at the age of forty-two to the bedside of her dying mother, she witnessed her homeland in the midst of a revolution. Some of the most engaging parts of Popham’s narrative are from what comes after: Suu’s beginning days in politics on the campaign trail with the newly formed National League of Democracy. Aris was unable to join his wife on this journey as he left for England to take care of their two sons, but encouraged Suu’s companion and assistant Ma Thanegi to keep a diary to keep him in the loop. Popham included large excerpts from these diaries, and they are filled with charm. Thanegi kept a record of the details of daily life, what they ate, where there was a proper bathroom (Suu told Thanegi she should write a book about the loos of Burma), and the silliness that emerged when two people spent a long time together in close quarters on the road. Thanegi observed subtle moments of Suu remembering the family she left to serve her country. We witness both Thanegi’s and Suu’s refreshing honesty and sense of humor in these pages.

Continue reading →

The Street Dogs of India

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Sangamithra

Gardiner Harris, the South Asia Correspondent for the New York Times, recently offended many Indian Animal activists with his story ” Where the Streets are Thronged with Strays Bearing Fangs.” A multimedia slideshow “A Snarling Menace in India,” accompanies the piece with portraits of seemingly threatening and vicious stray dogs in India

I subscribe to a listserv of Indian Animal Protection groups, and this week, my inbox was filled with comments of criticism and dissapointment in Harris’ article. The consensus was that the reporting was sloppy and the language sensational. Many wondered the source for Harris’s estimates of bites per year. (“Free-roaming dogs number in the tens of millions and bite millions of people annually, including vast numbers of children.”). The overall tone of the piece was one that instilled fear:

“Packs of strays lurk in public parks, guard alleyways and street corners and howl nightly in neighborhoods and villages. Joggers carry bamboo rods to beat them away, and bicyclists fill their pockets with stones to throw at chasers. Walking a pet dog here can be akin to swimming with sharks.”

Many of the Indian Animal advocates who have been in the trenches working on this issue, felt the threatening portrayal of the dogs to be a gross exaggeration. The article was perhaps also a missed opportunity to acknowledge the progress that has been made with Animal Birth Control (ABC), Animal Rabies Vaccination (ARV), and spay/neuter return programs. Cities all over the country are exploring humane methods of population control and peaceful coexistence.

The piece made me reflect on my own experiences with the street dogs of India. Outside my grandmother’s home in Bangalore, a sweet brown and white dog took comfort in finding a spot in the shade to rest and was grateful for the plates of rice neighbors often fed him. On his ear was a U-shapep notch, indicating that he had been neutered. I had the chance to visit Compassion Unlimited Plus Action, the local shelter, which also ran a program for sterilizing and vaccinating such street dogs.

Any newcomer to India will take notice of the street dogs–they are everywhere. (Here’s a slideshow of some of the street dogs I’ve encountered, in Bangalore, Varanasi, Gaya, Delhi and Solapur.)

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You can find them sleeping on the steps of train stations, curled up under a flower walla’s table, or waiting for prasadam outside a temple. Their street smarts are sharp and they can weave in and out of traffic and have learned to cross the street. What I had noticed,was that while they were in close proximity, most never directly approached humans, but rather found a way to subsist and survive among them.

The high population of strays, many sick and undernourished, is one of great concern, but human factors are largely responsible. Harris does briefly acknowledge these human elements and ways to better manage the population:

“Nonetheless, India’s burgeoning middle class has begun to adopt Western notions of pet ownership, buying pedigreed dogs and bringing animals into their homes. But many pedigreed dogs end up on the street, the castoffs of unsuccessful breeders or owners who tire of the experiment.

…The first thing you need to start doing to reduce the stray population is manage your garbage better,” said Arpan Sharma, chief executive of the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations. “And the second thing is very aggressive spaying, neutering and vaccinating of animals.”

When confronted with the outpouring of comments on this piece, Harris responded via email to one of his critics, with this reply:

“Millions of Indians — including untold numbers of children — are mauled every year by stray dogs. I guess I worry more about children than dogs. But that could be an American thing.”

His response only worsened the original offense, leaving the critic to wonder if Harris meant to imply “that Americans love their children more than Indians.”

Harris is a new foreign correspondent for the New York Times. His post in India began in May, and that was the first time he set foot in the subcontinent. In a blog post on India Ink, the NYT India Blog, Harris indicated that his “fresh eyes” could be an asset for the job. But perhaps his vantage point and perspective limited his reportage on this subject.

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The Situation and the Story- A week in Provincetown

Posted on July 1, 2012 by Sangamithra

We started Amitava Kumar’s nonfiction workshop at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown with a bottle of Irony and Vivian Gornick:

Every work of literature has a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot;the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

There were six of us- three New Yorkers, two Aussies and our trusted guide, Ami. We sat in Norman Mailer’s living room discussing voice on the page. That was the situation. Feminists in Mailer’s house. Perhaps that was the Irony.

Sometimes the situation changed, the setting changed, the sky changed. We’d walk along the beach and discuss each other’s work. Ami shared with us a practice Ken Chen, head of AAWW, adopted, taking the advice of his writing mentor: “If you run 10 minutes a day, you will become a poet.”

In Provincetown, I opted to swim. A body in motion leads to clarity in thought. In New York, I write on the subway. I’ve previously said, “Who needs a writing retreat, when you have the G train?” But as my feet pressed onto Provincetown sands (where the Pilgrims first did land), another argument could be made.

After a night of reading Janet Malcolm, Edwidge Danticat and James Baldwin, Ami sent us Kurt Vonnegut’s writing rules and asked each of us to write one rule based on something we’ve observed from these writers. Here’s what we came up with:

Notice everything and then apply the crap detector- B.R
Stand Back- E.C.
Life is Messy. Admit contradictions- A.K.
As a writer, remember your role is to entertain-A.K.
Advance the story with not only what you know, but what you do not know-S.I.
Give your readers a story they could hold as if they were in the trenches.-MBK

Our conversations were enriched by the great diversity that exists within nonfiction. As David Shields notes in Reality Hunger: “The roominess of the term nonfiction: an entire dresser labeled nonsocks”

So that was the situation. The story was a group of writers learning from each other, discovering their voice, their aesthetic, their lens, the thing they have come to say, and how they will come to say it.

Onwards with gratitude and excitement.

Wag Wag Wag.

Videos of TEDx Cooper Union are up!

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Sangamithra

I had the pleasure of presenting at the first TEDx at Cooper Union this April. Thanks to Nina Tandon for hosting and Noemie Charlotte Thieves for producing videos of the event. See all presentations here. My presentation is adapted from my essay Soiled Hands in the anthology Primate People.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CsLlBWEm6o&w=640&h=360]

Open City is Up!

Posted on June 17, 2012 by Sangamithra

Hey there! Asian American Writers Workshop just launched 3 new fantastic online magazines. I’m super excited to be writing about vegan eats and stories about food, culture and community in NYC for Open City. Check out first post here about the Ganesha Temple Canteen in Flushing.

Do also check out The Margins and CultureStrike.

Congrats to AAWW!

Official Launch Party is June 28. Also there’s a Twitter Photo Contest. My entry here.

Tedx at Cooper Union and Primate People Anthology

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Sangamithra

Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary (University of Utah Press) comes out this month. I am very excited to read this anthology edited by Lisa Kemmerer with a forward by Marc Bekoff. My story “Soiled Hands” is the closing essay in the this collection.

I am adapting this into a Tedx talk at Cooper Union on April 24, 2012 which is themed “Found in Translation.”

April 24th, 2012 (5pm-9pm)
41 Cooper Square
Third Avenue between 6th & 7th Streets
New York
The Cooper Union, Rose Auditorium

Low Lying Islands on High Moral Ground

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Sangamithra

Over at Brighter Green, I wrote this post on the film, The Island President, former President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, and his defunct political magazine Sangu:

Last week, I had a chance to see The Island President, a film by Jon Shenk about Mohammed Nasheed, the former President of the Maldives, and his fight for climate justice. Shenk followed Nasheed from his election in 2008, which overthrew 30 years of dictatorship under Maumoon Abdul Gayoon, through the COP 15 climate change talks in Copenhagen in 2009. There, he was an impassioned advocate for the future of his country, a low-lying archipelago, vulnerable sea level rise.“What is the point of having a democracy, if you don’t have a country,” Nasheed asked, launching his battle to instill the reality of climate change to his fellow heads of state. Nasheed reminds us that Male, the capital of the Maldives, is no higher Manhattan. “What happens to the Maldives today is going to happen to everyone else tomorrow.” Continue reading →

Peter Cooper and McSorley’s Ale House

Posted on March 17, 2012 by Sangamithra

I was recently reading sections of Up In the Old Hotel, which anthologized Joseph Mitchell’s writings for the New Yorker. It included a 1940 article on “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon“, where Peter Cooper frequented:

“Mr. Cooper in his declining years, spent so many afternoons in the back room philosophizing with the workingmen that he was given a chair of his own; it was equipped with an inflated rubber cushion. (The chair is still there; each April 4th for a number of years after Mr. Cooper’s death, on April 4, 1883, it was draped with black cloth.) Also like other steadfast customers, Mr. Cooper had a pewter mug on which his name had been engraved with an icepick. He gave the saloon, a life-sized portrait of himself, which hangs over the mantel in the back room. It is an appropriate decoration, because, since the beginning of prohibition, McSorley’s has been the official saloon of Cooper Union students. Sometimes a sentimental student will stand beneath the portrait and drink a toast to Mr. Cooper.”

After the visit to Peter Cooper’s Grave on February 12, 2012, some Friends of Cooper Union, gathered for a drink at this watering hole. (FYI: McSorley’s Ale is vegan). Some things have changed since Peter Cooper’s days at McSorley’s. Most notably, the inclusion of women starting in the 1970. (Previous motto was, “Good Ale, Raw Onions and No Ladies.”). Cooper Union, in contrast, opened its doors to women since its inception in 1859, and never discriminated by race, gender, creed or class.

McSorley’s other motto “Be Good or Be Gone,” is still in effect, and Cooper’s table, chair, and portrait are still on display. The lyrics of a song about Peter Cooper’s Table are also mounted on the wall.

For more information about the current situation facing Cooper Union: visit the Friends of Cooper Union website. For additional posts on Cooper Union click here.

Literary Animal:Reading India Blog Series on Brighter Green

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Sangamithra

Coinciding with the release of Brighter Green’s Case Study on India, Veg or NonVeg? India at a Crossroads, I will be writing a series of blogs over at Brighter Green about the intersection of recent writings on India with issues raised in our case study: “Over the past several years, there has been a considerable amount of writing about modern(izing) India. From different angles, writers are witnessing and documenting a subcontinent undergoing significant shifts. The New York Times recently launched their first country specific blog, India Ink. At Brighter Green, we’ve been most interested in the social and environmental issues that are emerging with a changing country, a changing diet, and a changing climate. Our recent paper and our videos on India’s chicken industry [now with over 50,000 views on Youtube!] and dairy and beef industries delve into this further. In this blog series, I hope to highlight writings on India and where they intersect with sustainability, equity, and rights, particularly in the context of food security and climate change.

Read Part I of this series: Red Sorghum and ‘F&B’ which discusses Siddartha Deb’s recent book, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India.

Check out Part II of this series, which discusses AkashKapur’s article in the October 10, 2011 issue of the New Yorker, “The Shandy: The Cost of Being a Cow Broker in Rural India.” The article is an excerpt of his forthincoming book. India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India.

Part III, of this installment of the Literary Animal: Reading India serieswill be a slight foray into linguistics, and discuss the language of violence and Katherine Russell Rich’s Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language.

Part IV of this series explores the prologue of Amitava Kumar’s book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of his Arm a Tiny Bomb, where a poultry farmer provides a glimpse into how both the war on terror and looks and avian flu have impacted the region of Walavati in Maharashtra State.

Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers is the subject of Part V of this series that explores corruption, justice, gender, and animal rights in slum called Annawadi, outside Mumbai’s airport.