ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Opinion category.

Islam in America

It’s funny that before the recent controversy about the Cordoba House in NY city a block away from the former World Trade Centre buildings, my imagination never successfully pictured a mosque in the United States. Of course it’s a no-brainer, there has to have been a mosque somewhere. Or where did Malcolm X, Mohammed Ali, and other countless immigrants from the Middle East do their Friday prayers. Somehow I must have always thought that they prayed in designated places in their homes. Of course, now I know different. Even Wikipedia has a list of all the mosques in the country. So when I had to drive one of the current Arabic teachers on the Fulbright program to a place to pray on Friday, wiki was there to help.

The problem was, it wasn’t called a mosque even though that was what it was. It was called an Islamic Community Centre. What on earth is that? When we went to a Cathedral, it was called a cathedral. When we visited a Synagogue, it was called as such. But when we went to the mosque, it was called something else. It was not just a place for socialization. It was a Mosque – a praying ground. When did it become a crime to call something by its own name? Only in America, perhaps. The only consolation is that, by any other name, the building remained visible for all to see with a minaret pointing to heaven. On the one hand, I am proud of the country living up to its creed of freedom for all (including freedom from discrimination on the basis of religion, and the freedom of worship). This is beyond impressive and it speaks to diversity, courage and maturity. On the other hand, I’m disgusted by the hypocrisy that would make a mosque be called by any other name for any reason in order to adjust to the discomfort of a needlessly frightened society.

(Click image to enlarge)

Believing, at the Synagogue

On Friday, I found myself in a Synagogue, wearing a yarmulke, holding a siddur, browsing a Talmud, and reading the Torah in original Hebrew. This doesn’t happen to me every day. It has in fact never happened before. A few minutes earlier, I had just concluded a tour of the city’s biggest Cathedral, and hours earlier had driven the current Fulbright scholar, teacher of Arabic to a mosque for his Friday prayers. All I knew about the Jewish faith was from the few books I’d read, the few movies I’d seen, and the few conversations I’ve had with people who should know and those who shouldn’t, and the Bible.

The bible tells more, of course, and then less. The bible has Jesus, the apostles, the miracles, the disciples and the revelation. But, as I’ve learnt, one can’t be a good practitioner of Judaism by just reading the Bible. It just doesn’t say as much as necessary. That’s where the Talmud comes in. It’s the Torah explained, and this comes in handy especially since people of the Jewish faith don’t believe in Jesus, his divinity or his impending return. He’s just one guy that passed through the world like any other person. The Torah is just another word for the five books of Moses, “the entirety of Judaism’s founding legal and ethicalreligious texts.” And oh, the Torah is not a book. It’s a scroll, a large one, and everything on it is hand-written, in Hebrew (and I think in Aramaic as well). Whoever wrote this one I saw has a very good and regulated handwriting.

It was equally fortuitous that the synagogue visited was not an orthodox one, because, as I found out, the beautiful singing and instrumentation that got me most impressed by the Shabbat service is not a common part of Jewish Shabbats. It’s found only in liberal synagogues. What’s more, it had a woman lead. I didn’t verify if she was the woman rabbi or just the choir/singing leader. All I remember was being transported into realms of believing as she sang, and strummed the guitar to accompaniment of another guitar and a fiddle. The whole service itself was half singing and half reciting, much like a Catholic mass (minus the singing and instrumentation).

The Shabbat (sabbath) starts at Friday evenings and ends about 25 hours later. During this period – commanded by God to be kept holy by all believers – Jews are not expected to use fire, go to work or use electricity. It is for this reason that the only picture I took while in the service was of the siddur, and was my last while in the premises, in respect of the preference of the worshipers. While we were in the Synagogue library, I had to put on the light, and put it off later too. Those laws are strictly respected. If I would ever return to another one of those Shabbat services, it would most likely be because of the music, and the whole attitude of homeliness that one feels while there, even though – amidst a room full of people of a different race and skin colour, it is not hard to be spotted as a wandering stranger. What made up for that were the smiles and warmth of the people who all wanted to know about us and where we came from.

It was surely a fun time, definitely enlightening, as the five other students I went with confirmed. “Shabbat Shalom,” we said.

Of Lost Things

I’ve been thinking about lost things. Where do they go? When I lost my bunch of keys a few weeks ago, and I exhausted my patience in searching for them in the most unlikely of places, I pondered what Carlin, my favourite comedian had said on lost things: “where exactly do they go?” It didn’t help that when the police finally traced it to me and gave me a call, they didn’t say where they found it either. They just took it to where they felt it belonged, and then gave me a call to come pick it up in its mangled state. At least one car had run over it… Sometime last year in one miraculous instance of divine intervention, I lost my $10 leather gloves along with sunshades I had got to make myself look a little more sophisticated in the sun. In any case, not only could I not find it, I also never figured out where it went, especially since I had gone to only one place that evening, and I’d gone back there to check many times, and it wasn’t there anymore, nor had anyone found it afterwards. Where did it go? And more importantly, what else did I lose with it that evening. That has always been my bigger worry.

Since the incident of the key, I have lost a few more things still: a Nokia phone (which I got back a week later), and my new sunshades. I’m almost fed up with myself. Now, what prompted this musing is not even a desire for those material things, but the thought of losing even bigger things. There was a short play I wrote in 2002 titled The Sculptor. It was once performed in the University theatre by a handful of actors in a private production but I lost the manuscript of that play a few months after then and I’ve not come across it since then. Occasionally when I sit in silence, I can recall the lines long enough to write them down, but not in the right sequence. It was a three-man satire on the state of the nation’s politics and intolerance at the time when a religious law was introduced to some parts of the country. Some day, I know that I will come across it while rummaging through stacks of papers in a locked up suitcase, yet the thought of it totally disappearing unnerves me. Of course I’ve not written another play of its kind since then. It’s one of those consequences of movement, and changing seasons.

Today I discovered online an one old article about language, non-literary translation and computer based language technology which I wrote for a literary journal in 2005, and it brought back memories of an earlier even more fascinating experience. It was one of those writings of mine that I remember vividly because of the events around the time I’d written it. I was in a spiral limbo and needed to move forward, desperately. Writing it provided that avenue, unexpectedly, and I was set free. But it was the last paragraph of the piece that surprised me, because as far back as then, I had never even considered the possibility of finding myself as I do now at Uncle Sam’s neighbourhood. Lessons learnt: times also change. Fast.

I still keep that lesson in mind, everyday, as I search around for all my lost things.

On the Nobel Week

With announcements of the winners in Economics, Medicine, and Physics earlier in the week and the winner in Literature to be announced tomorrow morning, the Nobel Week has lived up to its promises of secrecy, surprises and newsworthiness. Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is one of the favourites to win the prize for literature. I hope he wins.

In this age of electronic books, blogs, e-readers and e-lives, I am hoping that the Nobel prize will one day catch up and give a nod in that direction. Nobel Prize for peace to Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook would not be out of place for instance perhaps if shared with the founders of twitter, blogger and Youtube as well. They have brought the world together and provided new means of understanding and expressing ourselves to each other.

Monday at the Institute

Yesterday I returned to the Institute at St. Louis to continue my work as a volunteer in adult literacy teaching. Getting to the place was a little easier this time, and the music from the radio helped. Oh, there was this awesome show on the NPR about how the economy of Brazil was turned around by two young men who introduced a new (first virtual, and later real) currency, the URV, and helped to turn the tide of the country’s spiral inflation.

My student on Monday was a man from Bhutan of between sixty and sixty-five years old. He had never learnt to read or write in his life and was just beginning. I don’t know his condition of coming into the United States and I’m not interested in asking (nor am I even allowed/supposed to, I think), but I was impressed by his interest and a physical joy he expresses in his attitude to learning. Much of what we did on Monday were reading through images, repetition and demonstration. Then later we moved to dictation, crossword puzzles and word scrambles. The most interesting thing about each experience is that even when the students are not performing well in class exercises, there is a certain pride that come across in the faces of each tutor because of the efforts students have put in and the excitement on their faces for even having tried.

The students all come to the Institute everyday and will, after a while, learn sufficient literacy to conduct the business of daily living in the language of the society without help. Maybe not enough to read Dante, Shakespeare or Cervantes, but to do what they must to get through every day. If I could go there everyday of the week, I probably would.

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