‘Every day, each one of us

goes out on the Jericho road…’

– Mother Teresa (Oslo, 1979 – Nobel acceptance speech)

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Noah’s Ark was patched together by volunteers. The Titanic was built by professionals (Anonymous)

It’s been a busy life. You’re a first generation immigrant. Canada has taken a while longer getting to know you, than you had expected. But you have made your bones, started from scratch, working hard at building your career, balancing your family obligations, trying to stay in shape and finding time to pursue the stuff you really love doing – reading and writing.

After ten years in your new home, your life has finally attained a little stability. Financial freedom, cars, kid through private school, his university nest egg building up, vacations, a manageable mortgage, beer and neighbors who no longer look quizzically at the way you are dressed on weekends, in your kurta-pyjamas. And beer.

Did I say beer twice? Must have been an echo.

Yet, there is this emptiness. The years are rolling by and soon you’ll be 65, an age when interesting things stop happening to you when you would like them to go on happening to you. The feeling, that you have amounted to very little and that you have made no impact whatsoever on the community at large, that feeling has acquired a studio apartment at the back of your mind.

One day you open the letter box and there is nothing in there except for this little bland pamphlet, from an organization called Volunteer West Island. Emblazoned over it are the words, ‘The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself, in the service of others’ – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Usually you gather up all the pamphlets with an annoyed sweep and grumble,’I wish those m—er f—ers would stop dumpin’ this shit in my letterbox’ and you proceed to chuck them in the blue recycle bin in your driveway. North America is pamphlet country.

Not this time. This time you pause and you take the pamphlet home, flipping it over and over between your fingers. You fling it on your desk in the den downstairs and there it stays for a month give or take, during which time it gets pushed around the desk by the mouse and the keyboard.

Soon the pamphlet begins to age, acquiring a coffee stain here and a beer stain there (lots of beer stains actually), a few quick scribbles, a couple of phone numbers and some hasty interest calculations. North America isn’t just pamphlet country. It is also credit line, credit card debt, balance transfer and overdue interest country.

You peer at Gandhi’s words from time to time. You are an agnostic, steadily tilting toward atheism. One day, your elder bro sends you a short piece that the Indian journalist, Mukul Sharma, had posted in his column, The Spiritual Atheist, in the Economic Times. The title of the post is ‘A caring universe’. Here is an excerpt from it…..

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“Does the universe care about what we do or what happens to us or whether we live or die?

If we were to believe hard-core amoral nihilists who say that the universe is just a physical phenomenon with no spiritual component, that events are random and have no deeper meaning or purpose and that there are no consequences to our actions, then the answer is obviously no.

Yet, even if that were true, it certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t care about the universe because, unlike it, we have evolved into sapient creatures that are capable of wonder and love. Meaning, we can infuse it with the same whether it cares or not. In fact, with that kind of involvement on our part, who cares whether it cares or not?

If we were to do that, we could begin living in a basically spiritual universe, ordered by feelings of good and bad; a cosmic order that would in turn, underpin and motivate all our actions. It would be like a moral force where our actions have definite effects that we carry with us. In this respect, its meaning would then be close to the Hindu concept of Karma.

The notion of a moral universe would also buttress spirituality and form the basis for kindness, compassion, altruism and caring for others. This is because it places a value on human life and living things that goes beyond what seems suitable if we regard people and living things merely as a collection of atoms, and essentially no different from any other unfeeling, non-sentient structures such as rocks soil, mountains or planets”.

Like Mukul Sharma, you have chosen to believe in a moral, caring universe, though somehow you do not believe that there is a connection between religion and morality. One can be good and caring without having to lean on the crutch of religious fervor. Why, it is now well on its way to be scientifically proven that goodness and caring are actually the work of certain identified neurons in the brain and can actually be tweaked and fiddled with, through a fast emerging science known as neuroscience. It is a matter of time before a sociopath can actually be converted into a deeply caring individual (and vice versa of course), through treatment.

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Back to you now and one day, pre-Christmas, on your way to work, there is this radio program calling for volunteers at St Anne’s, the Military Veterans’ hospital, a long-term end-of-life care facility, to help the 90+ year old war veterans through the especially crushing loneliness of the Christmas holidays. Numerous activities are planned for the seniors in order to keep them occupied and not dwell upon why even their own don’t find the time to visit them.

‘I have nothing special planned this Christmas’, you say to yourself. You get to your den and look around for that pamphlet. It has gotten so badly crumpled that you can barely read it. You call the number and a Ms Grenville, head of Volunteer Services at St. Anne’s, answers.

The 50% discount at the cafeteria makes up your mind.

You fill out a form and the RCMP checks you out. It takes another week for you to become a volunteer, with your own volunteer’s badge and ID. You are now one of the 12.5 million registered Canadians (that is 1 in 3 Canadians), the second largest volunteer population density after the Dutch.

The words of a 69 year old Albanian nun, standing in front of the world and accepting it’s highest honor, the Nobel Peace Price, Oslo 1979, are at the back of your mind – ‘everyday, each of us goes for a  walk on the Jericho road.’

You are a registered traveler on the Jericho road now and you are scheduled to travel that road for two hours every Wednesday.

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“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your redemption is tied up with mine, then let us work together.”

— Lill Watson, American aboriginal activist  – to all wannabe volunteers

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Six months have slipped by at St. Anne’s and that anguish that you constantly felt before, at a meaningless wasted life, has vanished. In these six months, you have been around a good deal of illness and even death. Witnessing the challenges residents face on a daily basis has helped you appreciate your own life all the more. You have spent time with terminally ill and senile war veterans for whom a long life is now no longer a blessing but a curse. You have been amazed at how gratefully a hug can been returned.

Besides that, volunteering in a hospital has connected you with many like-minded people, volunteers like you, men and women trying to find fulfillment. You have formed personal bonds with nurses, doctors and of course, the residents and it has been gratifying. You have been treated with a different kind of respect that is reserved for those who offer a helping hand.

Here’s what you do at St.Anne’s. You come in straight from work around 6pm. It is a sprawling complex which is easy to get lost in. You did get lost trying to find the employees’ entrance the first time, but only that one time.

You swipe your card through and get straight to Volunteer Services, which is this tiny room with a closet where volunteers hang their coats and store their backpacks and stuff. You stoop and fill in your attendance in the file that is always lying open on this table.

After you sign in you straighten and on the wall right in front are these two white boards, both having names scribbled on them. One is always full of names with numbers written next to them. Like ‘Bernard Bonneville (805) – Bingo’ or ‘Martin Beauregard (904) – Cribbage’ and so on.

If the name is crossed out it means another volunteer has come in ahead of you and taken charge of that resident. The number beside the name is the room number, 805 – Room 5 in the 8th floor. If it is Mr. Bonneville, it is his Bingo evening and you have to proceed to his room, take charge of him, wheel him down on his wheelchair, to the Bingo hall and take him back to his room, after. That’s the way it works.

Your conduct with the resident in your charge is governed by a few very strict ground rules and taboos that Ms Grenville warned you about, right at the start. Here are some of them…..

‘Almost all the residents are veterans of WW2 or the Korean War. Never talk about the war unless the resident opens the subject. ‘Latent’ PTSD is a real issue and many of these 90+ year olds are actually afflicted with it and have never known it. So, please, don’t be a shmuck and rekindle painful memories. If you plan to blog on war stories, it shall have to wait till the resident opens up on his own.’

– ‘Do not ask about a resident’s personal life unless he starts talking about it first. Most times he has no family. I mean family that cares. Wife long gone, siblings probably long dead too, children grown, with no time to visit, the desire to catch just a glimpse of them and the grand kids, all that yearning and the abandonment – it can be crippling.’

– ‘Smile and be positive, sunny and cheerful when talking to them. They crave that. Most have been enlisted men and then, after the war, blue collar workers. They love to listen to raunchy humor, no matter how old they get. Bring along a stock of dirty jokes if you want to brighten up their evenings.’

– ‘Do not get emotionally attached to a resident. Most likely he will not live long and the separation can be very painful. Do not take a resident home or out on a drive with you, even if he begs you to. If anything happens, you will be held responsible. The hospital does not cover the costs and neither does your own auto insurance.’

– ‘Some of the residents, especially the lonelier ones, will try to show their gratitude because you chose to spend time with them. It’s understandable. Aren’t we all overwhelmed when perfect strangers step forward to help us? But in your case, they might offer money as a tip or reward. Do not accept it. Remember that you are a volunteer and you are here because you want to find meaning in your own life.’

– ‘If you promised a resident you would visit him on a particular day, make damned sure that you keep that date. You have no idea how much they look forward to your visit and how despondent a resident can get if you don’t turn up. Besides it may be the last you see of him or her.’

– ‘Do not try to contact the resident’s family under any circumstances, even if the resident implores you to. His family may not welcome the contact. Call the nurse in charge of the floor and let her deal with it.’

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“When we feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean and won’t make any difference at all, we must remember that the ocean would be less if that drop was missing.”

– Mother Theresa

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I told you about 2 white boards and I explained about one, if you have been paying attention.

Now let’s get to the other white board.

The other board has a shorter list, with two, maybe three names on it. It has reddish orange poppies and lilies all around it. Sometimes there are real flowers, roses and cards stuck behind it. On top is written “Décédé la semaine dernière”.

Once in a while, you recognize a name. Like, today. Today there is one name on the second board that you immediately recognize and stare at in disbelief – Ron Nimitz, Corporal, RCN (Retd).

Once in a while, the no-emotional-attachment rule is fated to be broken, as in the case of Ron, a 96-year old ex-sapper. He was a dear dear little man whom you loved spending time with. You looked forward to seeing him more than he did, seeing you. Full of mischief, Ron raised hell at Bingo. “Sonuva bitch! I’ll never get the numbers! What the f—k am I doon here?” “Hey, get lost, chump, that’s my seat.” “Oh baby, come n light mah fayah.” The last one to Rosy, a 91-year old WW2 radio operator who screams back,” You shut your foul mouth, you dirty old man! Sally (**Rosy’s volunteer minder**), come here! Move me to another table, will you?”

You haven’t finished reading Ron’s name on the second board and you are racing through the corridor toward the elevator banks. You dive into an elevator that is about to go up. You get off at the 6^th floor and hurry down the short distance past the nurses’ station, to Ron Nimitz’s door.

It is open. The room is empty, completely sanitized, ready to take in the next vet. The wall above his bed is bare. His beloved war photos, of his regiment and his buddies, grinning, legs dangling over the mud skirt of an M4 Sherman tank and all those family photo collages – they are all gone.

It is almost as if Ron Nimitz had been just a figment of your imagination.

There had been a short memorial service the previous evening, the nurse on the floor tells you. There had been no visitors, except for a younger sister who had flown in from Halifax. Your eyes are brimming with tears and the nurse, a plump matronly woman, holds you in her arms till you whisper, “Its okay I’m fine”.

You stumble down to Volunteer Services. You are empty. Devoid. You just want to skip and just go home.

You pick up your stuff from your locker and on the way out the door, your glance falls on the first white board. No one has picked up David Boucherville yet and you know how much he loves his Bingo. Your eyes light up and you chuckle. Dave Boucherville and his Alzheimers makes friends with you all over again, every time. Every ten minutes or so, Dave asks the same question as he sizes you up suspiciously,” You’re not Cheryl? Where’s Cheryl? Has she come home yet?” You have been taught by the nurses to answer with a cheerful tone, as if you heard him ask that question for the very first time,” Oh she’ll be here in a half hour’.

You stash your stuff back into your locker and you head for the elevators to fetch Dave.

There is a spring in your step.

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Ps:This piece was written in 2019

At 9.45am, the waiting hall at the Brunswick Family Clinic was filling up quick.

I was here for my annual check-up. The tests were done and I was waiting to see the doc. Everything seemed in prefect order. Various body parts humming along normally. Like the PW800 turbofan. If you’re getting a business jet, insist on Pratt and Whitney engines. The other guys distribute bibles free, with their engines.

There was an old couple sitting across, a low hum of conversation coming from their direction…”Did you hear from Caroline?”…..”No, she hasn’t written in years, ever since she moved to Burnaby. I wrote about my prostrate. She never replied.”….

A plump black woman brought in a stroller and, from it she picked up a frail child, a curly haired white girl. She deposited the kid gently right next to me and sat down next to her on the other side.

“Do you wanna peepee, Katie, it’ll take a while”, said the woman. The girl’s head constantly jerked about in a frenzied, panicky sort of manner. Her eyes blazing, she tried hard to hold their focus on the woman, as they rolled around. And all the while, her face twitched and her whole upper torso swayed back and forth.

I went back to my paperback.

Now, let me tell you something about reading in a doctor’s waiting room. I try to bring with me a page turner. But here’s the thing – never bring anything that’s too racy, or else you won’t hear your name being called and you’ll find yourself being escorted out, late in the evening by the janitor. This time I had with me a John Le Carre paperback, ‘The spy who came in from the cold’. The last time, I had with me a Jackie Collins and the doctor said I had BP. Nevil Shute and he told me I needed more nutrition.

I had just gotten into the main plot around page 50, when I felt a rhythmic nudge on my right arm. The girl, head lolling around, was now trying to concentrate on what I was reading, swaying back and forth. When she saw me take notice, her face broke into a smile. A smile which was on one hand the most beautiful and on another, the most pathetic. And on a purely superficial level, hideous.

As I went back to Le Carre, she broke into a burbling hum. The black woman looked up from her knitting, her deep eyes as loving as I had ever seen.

“She’s singin'”, the woman said, “She likes you.”

“Do you want me to read to you?” I asked the little girl and she immediately became a mass of wobbles, nods and shakes, her face pushing up against my arm as she shifted her frail weight closer. After a while, it seemed not to matter, that her saliva had soaked through my sleeve completely.

I started reading where I’d left off, this time the words loud enough for the little girl to hear, “A black cab goes past but it has its lights on. Not a spy cab then. A normal cab. Driven by a brutish man, with Slavic features. I say to myself, ‘What are you waiting for, Leamas, this is your last chance….’

I read on and on, my voice practiced and well-modulated. And as my words settled into a steady drone, I realized that her movements had gradually ceased and her little curly head was now resting on my arm, completely still. I turned carefully just a fraction, to look. She’d fallen asleep. The overworked muscles had fallen silent. The face was angelic, at peace.

The nurse called out my name and I gently lifted the kid’s head from my arm. The black woman put her knitting back in her bag and carefully rested the little head on her lap. Her huge ebony black fingers ran gently through the flaxen hair.

I rose, to follow the nurse in.

She was cute, I’ll hand you that.

Slightly built, she sat at the edge of the bed, her hands clasped on her lap, like they had nowhere to go. She slipped her ghunghat (veil) off, reached up and carefully undid the pins holding up her slightly messed up hair. It cascaded down in curls, over her shoulders.

Her gaze went back toward the floor, unsure of what she must do next. The bed covers were strewn with rose petals but she seemed oblivious to them.

For the moment, she was trying not to pass out, under all that bridal finery and the oppressive heat. Slim jhumkas (traditional Hindu ear rings) peeked out from under the curls. She had on, the bridal ‘mangal sutra’ that I’d tied round her neck an hour or so back, at the ceremony – a yellow braided string, coated with turmeric, with a tiny gold pendant, flanked on either side by black beads.

I recalled the wedding. The mangal sutra had been handed to me open ended, with knots on both ends, so the beads wouldn’t escape. As I had slipped my fingers behind her neck to tie the two ends together, she repeated after the priest, in a soft but distinct whisper, “You are the reason of my existence. With this thread around my neck, I shall pray that may you live long.”

As her lips formed the words, for a brief moment, she lifted her eyes to search into mine, “Who are you, Robindranath Dey?” they seemed to enquire.

The 3-day ceremony was now over and here I was, my butt on the opposite edge of the bed, still in my sherwani, kurta and churidar, the air conditioning hardly able to drive away my discomfort at the May humidity. Goddamn, why the heck does May have to be the auspicious month for marriages. Wish I had my bermuda shorts on.

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Bermuda shorts reminded me of the last time I wore them, the Saturday before I left for India. It was at the ball game, NY State vs Ohio. Vicky Tannenbaum had come along and as she sat next, her left arm loosely draped over my bare thigh, her hand had snuck further in, unnoticed. While 10000 guys cheered the NYS team on, she’d suddenly dug her nails in playfully.

“Ouch, watch it, will you? I only have two of those” I’d shouted out, with pain mixed with sudden pleasure. She’d giggled, nuzzling her red head against my chest.

“Take me to your dorm, Robby” she’d whispered into my ear. Back in my room, we’d torn at each other for the rest of the day. That night had been our last together and Vicky knew it. It didn’t bother her even a bit. She was attractive, on her way through med school with a straight-A average. Her parents had an already well established medical practice which she would simply walk into, after she got her MD. And she was cute as a button. There were lots of other fish in her pond.

When we were finally done, she lay across my chest, her red curls tickling my nose and me on my back. And as she slowly wrapped her legs round my thigh and lazily rocked herself back and forth, her wetness rubbing up against me, she mused, “You’re off to be married, to a Bengali country girl in a saree and my Dad will probably like to see me wed one of those orthodox toads in a Yarmulke, with those payots hanging from either side of his head. Well, I’ll teach Mr. Yarmulke a thing or two about putting those two side locks where they tickle,” she’d giggled.

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And now once again back in the present, the thought of Vicky started up a stirring within, as I found myself facing that almirah with mirrored doors, by the wall. From where I sat, perched on the opposite edge of the bed, I could see my bride in the mirror clearly, facing away, at an angle.

Her anchal (the end of the saree that’s slung over the left shoulder) had fallen and lay like a wreath round her, on the bed. She had a ‘nath’ (nose ring) on one nostril and a bala (wrist band) on each soft hand. They looked like they’d been handed down, from her mother . Her hair was still flecked with all that sprinkly, shiny stuff they chuck at you in a wedding. Her feet were beautiful. Pink, bordered by ‘alta’, a vermillion dye that Hindu women have on, after marriage. Pretty toes, some with rings on them, peeped through her slippers. Payals, probably of imitation silver, transformed her ankles into the loveliest I’d seen. Yellowish-brown mehndi lines adorned both feet as well as her hands.

Don’t know how long we just sat there, facing away from each other, on either side of the bed but it was she who broke the ice first. She brought her gaze up to me, “Shunoon, ei biye ki aapnar moter birudhdhey hoyeche?” (Did this marriage happen without your acquiescence?)

I straightened and walked to the barred window that looked out on Hazra Rd. An ice-cream wallah was pushing his cart down the sun baked lane, his head covered by a wet gamcha (wash cloth made from a thin cotton fabric), knarled feet in torn flip-flops. “Kwaliteee!” he cried plaintively.

I turned back toward her and lifted my eyes to hers’, in a slow and excruciatingly painful effort. “No,” I replied and I quickly turned back to stare out the window. The ice-cream wallah was gone, but I could still hear his cries faintly in the distance, “Kwaliteee!” By now a bunch of stray mongrel dogs had decided to give him harmony. Every time he cried out, they barked and bayed at him, shuffling a few paces behind.

Just a minute had passed, when I felt her soft hands on my shoulders. She’d risen and come round the bed, to stand by my side, a little behind, away from the window. I shivered at her touch. I didn’t turn but continued to stare blindly at the scorching pavement below.

“Then why don’t you speak with me?” she reached up and held my cheeks in her palms and turned it so I was looking down at her beautiful face, “I left my home, my parents, my sisters and my little brother. And I have made this my home…..” her voice caught and I noticed that those long eyelashes were brimming with tears.

I gently grasped her two wrists and lowered her palms from my cheeks, till her hands were by her side. And I moved away just a bit. Don’t know why, but her touch was electric. I felt safer a couple of inches away. I was more comfortable with English. But she didn’t know a word of it. So Bengali it had to be, “And you? Was this with your approval?”

She nodded, dabbing her eyes with her anchal. “My father’s decision is my decision,” she said simply, “And now, your wish is mine. Forever”. QED- Theorem and corollary, I thought. With that simple statement, she leaned against me, and broke down into silent sobs.

I reached out and pulled her to me, gently holding her fragile body in my arms. After a while her sobbing subsided and I could feel her even breath on my chest, when all of a sudden, she wriggled out of my grasp, saying, “Wait, I’ll show you something.” She went up to the whatnot in the far corner and took out an ornate box made of brass. It was a ‘paaner dibey’, a small container normally used for betel leaves, nuts and zarda (chewing tobacco).

She ran her fingers lightly over the box. “My grandma used it when she was alive. Now, it’s mine.” She opened it carefully. Inside was just one photo. It was me, striking a pose in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The one I’d sent through Baren when he came to India on his match-making expedition. “I spoke with you every day, ever since Barenda left it with us. I said to God, “Dear God, keep him safe”.

She left the box standing on the whatnot and turned, her young breasts squeezed up against my chest. An incredible warmth spread through us like wild fire, as I gently tilted her face up by her chin and said in mock severity, “My wish is yours. hmmmm. Do you have any idea what my first wish is?”

She smiled at that, feeling me harden against the pit of her stomach. With mock helplessness, her breath on my nostrils, she whispered, “No, why don’t you show me?”

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It is 48 years now, since that first magical night. Madhu still has that box. She likes to call it her ‘treasure chest’. It has a few additions in it. Pictures of a young man, his American wife, Betty and daughter, Sona. And a young woman, with her banker husband, Tod and journalist son Michael.

And one more picture, at the very bottom, a photo, frayed with age, of a young man, much slimmer then but still recognizable now, posing in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

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“Trust Allah, but tie your camel.” – ancient Arab proverb

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When a Bedouin, visiting Prophet Mohammad at Medina, left his camel untethered outside the mosque, the Prophet noticed and asked him why he didn’t tie the animal. The Bedouin replied that he had placed his trust on Allah and therefore it was not necessary to secure the animal.

Mohammad famously replied,” Trust Allah, but tie your camel.”

Interesting quote. It is not an either-or……it’s not either you trust Allah or you tie your camel, which implies that if you tie your camel, you don’t really trust Allah enough. It is more of a diplomatic do-it-anyway statement.

On the face of it, Mohammed’s advice is very empowering. It exhorts us to look at our situation dispassionately and take the necessary steps to address it. But don’t his words actually caution us against relying too heavily on faith? To me they seem like they do.

You and I have a certain level of intelligence, an ability to reason and make sense and we must utilize it. We are responsible for our own destiny. It is our ass on the line. Hard science tells us today in the face of the corona virus that we have to shut down sermons and communions at churches, anjali and bhog ceremonies at temples, namaz at mosques and even restrict the number of people that can gather at funerals.

But organized religion is the only thing that has not issued any upgrades. It still peddles the same old “as you sow, so you reap” crap, which it has been hustling for the last three millennia, during which time history has proved exactly the opposite – that you don’t reap as you sow and that many have reaped without bothering to sow at all.

The world has seen plagues galore, since the beginning of recorded history. If there is one singular fact that we have learnt from them it is that religion has not, cannot and will not save us from them. But that goes against a fundamental tenet in all religions – that there is an all-powerful God (Or Gods) who can make anything happen and stop anything from happening.

Thankfully, the human race has never actually waited for any divine intervention. We have found out the hard way that we are on our own and thanks to our ingenuity, we have survived. The fundamentalist kooks and their dumb believers might say, “but it was God who gave us the ingenuity to develop ways out of every jam. He encouraged us to find our own solutions to our problems”.

So here we have a mind-fuck of a lifetime. Our God is all-powerful, can get anything done, prevent any catastrophe from befalling us………. but he won’t. He’ll let us solve our own problems while he sits up there and just watches. Innocents, believers and little babies who aren’t old enough to develop the means to live a virtuous life, they will all die horrible deaths, painful sores covering their bodies, high fever turning them delirious. But God will just stare back, he’ll do a Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse now”.

That Bedouin at Medina had the right to feel confident he could leave his camel untied. His own religion had taught him that if he had been virtuous, it was okay to leave everything up to God and everything meant literally everything, even a fucking camel on the loose. But then here was God’s sales rep – his prophet, telling the Bedouin, “ummm, nyet, buddy. That’s not a good idea. You had better be safe than sorry. Just tie the bleeping camel up.”

Within the mafia there is an unwritten contract between the Capo and his crew – that if they do strictly as they are told to do, the Capo will have their backs. It is a covenant that is set firmly in stone and the single most important reason why the organized crime gangs like the N’Drangheta remain a deadly force. It is why a made wise guy can put a bullet into anyone’s head in broad daylight and still get away with it. He is invincible as long as he has that covenant.

A man of faith must expect a similar covenant with God, no? Why is it unreasonable for him to believe that if he remains virtuous, God will protect him and his family from misery, prevent robbers from stealing his camel? Is it too much to ask of God to hold up his end of the bargain? Alas, history shows it is. History tells us that when needed most, God has been the “absentee landlord”.

It’s all very simple actually. There never has been any “my virtue for your protection” quid-pro-quo covenant with God. It was our desperation to cling to beliefs.

When the Roman Empire was at the height of it’s power (250AD), an ebola-like plague ravaged it, killing over 5000 a day, causing crippling manpower shortages, severely weakening Rome’s defenses, nearly bringing the empire to it’s knees. It is known as the “Plague of Cyprian”, after the guy who wrote a treatise on it. Over a period of 14 long years, the virus spread all across the Italian peninsula and into the adjacent regions of Gaul, Hispania and Sicilia, ending up killing 27 million. It took the life of even the Emperor at the time, Hostilian.

The Plague of Cyprian had a consequence – Romans believed the plague to be a “lack of performance“ by their existing pagan deities. Hadn’t they prayed to them constantly, offered sacrifices in their honour? And yet..??? It was not long before Romans began to see the hollowness of their pagan beliefs. Waiting in the wings for over two centuries was a new, yet untested alternative – one that preached a single, omnipotent God of all things, who had the power to heal the worst of plagues – Christianity.

The conversion to and rise of Christianity in Rome is commonly credited solely to Constantine the Great, whose reign began in 306AD. The actual fact is that by the time he came to power, fifty years had passed since the Plague of Cyprian. Fifty years of excruciatingly painful recovery from the plague. Fifty years of softening toward Christianity. Constantine merely made it official.

Unfortunately, the Christianity upgrade from paganism remains a “Beta” version till this day. There have been 20 major plagues since the one in Rome and they have killed a billion people so far. Religious adherence could not prevent them.

Christianity has managed to cling on, but there have been hiccups. When the 14th Century “Black Death” killed 100 million in Europe, Christians felt they weren’t getting the bang for their buck and Catholicism splintered, giving way to Protestant Reformism.

Today Christianity stands further divided into scores of different denominations – Lutherans, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Pentacostals, Baptists, Anglicans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Coptics and on and on and on. Oh and the largest, most evil, most corrupt denomination of them all – Catholicism. The christianity practiced today is unrecognizable from the one Jesus Christ envisaged. Just like the Islam of today – the prophet Mohammad would have great difficulty recognizing it.

There is no question that pandemics (and other natural disasters) shake people’s faith in religion. The fastest growing new religion today is actually – No Religion. As secularism grows, the influence of atheism and agnosticism is expanding. Driven by growing apathy and disenchantment, churches all over the western world are going bankrupt. Extreme fundamentalists like Mennonites and Amish and their faith are succumbing to the relentless onslaught of technology and vanishing. In North America, the religiously unaffiliated (atheists and agnostics) now form over 30% of the population, while across the Atlantic, one in two Europeans think religion is senseless and irrelevant. I look at pandemics not so much as the scourge of humanity but much more as nails in the coffin of organized religion.

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Okay, so pandemics affect religious belief, but does religion influence the way we look at pandemics? Are you kidding me? Of course it does.

The concept of a higher power that controls everything began to crystallize around 11000 BC in a little settlement called Jericho, in present day Israel. Since then as more settlements grew, humanity acquired a new travelling companion that has stayed with us ever since – pandemics. Viral infectious diseases have regularly wiped out two-thirds of a population.

With the growth of settlements came self-appointed holy men and belief systems, some of which advocated staying put and just sitting out the scourge, while others said run, head for the open spaces.

And then came Christianity and Jesus’s reputation as a healer. His followers listened rapt as Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love your neighbour as yourself. Greater love has no man than this, that he should lay down his life for others.”

Jesus healed a number of ailments, such as blindness, leprosy, lameness and demonic possession. He didn’t (or maybe couldn’t) heal plagues or any sort of viral infection. It is a known fact that viruses do not survive extreme heat and the Levant being an exceedingly hot and dry region for most of the year, maybe the opportunity simply didn’t arise for Jesus to try his hand at curing viral infections.

Be that as it may, Christianity encouraged tending to the sick and risking death as that was a sure path to heaven. When the 1527 bubonic plague hit, Martin Luther – the father of Protestant Reformism – refused calls to flee the city and stayed back to minister to the sick. Martin Luther articulated the Christian response to pandemics clearly. He proclaimed that “the plague has turned the sick into crucifixes, on which we must be prepared to impale ourselves and die…” As a consequence, his daughter Elizabeth fell victim to the plague.

Christianity’s brother religions, Islam and Judaism however didn’t buy into all that altruism. They simply said,”Hey it’s all God’s will. We can do jack-shit about it. Only God can handle pandemics, so let God take care of the scourge. We should just sit tight, remain faithful and finger our prayer beads.” You don’t see many Jewish or Muslim missionaries running charitable hospitals, do you?

If that Bedouin in Medina had come to me instead of Mohammed, I would have told him, “Tether your camel, Allah is taking a long vacation.”

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“Simba, being brave doesn’t mean you go looking for trouble…” – Mufassa (The Lion King)

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You must have seen it in the news. For a week in March 2013, it merited page-1 on most digital news sites….“Swiss female tourist, 39, gang-raped by six men in dense Indian forest while her husband was beaten and made to watch…”

Here’s how it went down. The woman and her husband were on a “cycling tour” of India somewhere in the vast province of Madhya Pradesh. Let’s take a deep breath here and pinch ourselves to ensure we are actually reading about someone, a foreigner and a woman, biking through India for fun. There, I just pinched myself and felt it. So, unless I am in a Matrix-like state, this must be happening.

So there they were, the Swiss woman and her husband, all charged up, adrenalin pumping when they decided, why not just turn north and keep cycling for another 250kms and go see the Taj Mahal? Hey, these are just pitiful little illiterate coloured people, what harm can they possibly do to us?

And besides, why the fuck not? Miss Swiss and her hubby liked to be known as adventure tourists, brave folk who liked living on the edge, whose idea of a fun vacation was attempting something potentially life-threatening, in only those places on earth from which they might not make it out alive, places they have never been to before.

As it turned out, it was a decision that they would live to regret.

At the end of the first day, they decided to stop and spend the night near a village that was surrounded by dense forest. Around 9:30 pm a group of men popped out of nowhere and broke into their tent. First, they beat up the husband real good and tied him to a tree. Then the men made him watch while they gang raped the woman repeatedly through the night. When they had had enough, they robbed the couple of everything they had and melted into the night. The couple were lucky to be alive and except for bruises, physically undamaged.

The route the Swiss couple had chosen took them through a region that is acknowledged as one of the ten most lawless places on earth – Chambal, in Central India, an arid and underdeveloped stretch of land as large as Quebec, that is riddled with poverty, corruption and patronage. It has a regional legislature where the line between the law-makers and the law-breakers is so blurred that you’ll think you have cataract when you look at them. The rich landowners rig elections and rule like feudal lords. Geographically, Chambal is as remote as Timbuktoo, in 1700AD.

The lawlessness has bred a certain demographic that is found in abundance at Chambal – dacoits. Bollywood has made movies on them. “Mujhe jeene do(1963), Mera gaon mera desh(1971), Pathar aur payal(1974), Dacait(1987), Bandit Queen(1994), Paan Singh Tomar(2012), Sonchoriya(2019)…. need I list some more? Should I be biking along tra la la la, in joints bandit movies are made about????

Trust me, if Donald Trump wanted to find a true example of a “shit-hole” region, Chambal would be numero uno, no question about it. If you are a tourist, you would have to be an imbecile with an IQ less than 2 to attempt a bike trip without checking out Chambal as a route to cycle through, even if you happen to be male. There are folk over there who would bugger you just as soon. Just to confirm, I cursorily googled Chambal lawlessness before I began writing this post. The first article that popped up was “The curse of Chambal” – The Telegraph, April 07, 2013. There was enough material there to make the hair at the nape of my neck stand up in horror.

If I listed all 195 countries of the world according to “bike-for-fun” security in descending order, India would be very near the bottom of it, rubbing shoulders perhaps with Mali or Chad. The hazards that I am likely to face biking in India are very real. No one has ever heard of separate bike paths. If I am female, specifically female and white, there will be creepy local males stripping me naked with their stares. The exhaust pollution from decades old ramshackle lorries overtaking me will be choking. The potholes are so deep that if my bike and I hit the bottom, a Mexican farmer on the other side might hear the thud and cry out “Hola!!” And there’s of course the free-for-all traffic ethos among both, the educated and the illiterate.

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Mathematical genius and philosopher, René Descartes (1596-1650) wrote in his “Discourse on Method of Rightly Conducting Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences” began by saying…..

“The power of judgement, which is called ‘reason’ or ‘good sense’, is of all things among men, the most equally distributed, for everyone thinks he is so abundantly provided with it, that those who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already have. The diversity is in the way we utilize the reason we possess.”

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I always thought that the Swiss were really smart folks, not only possessing in abundance René Descartes’s ‘good sense’ and ‘reason’ but utilizing them to their maximum. Stealing millions in cash, gold and art that had been originally confiscated from Jews by the Nazis and left in Swiss bank vaults at the end of the Second World War, that took real smarts. Pioneering the concept of a repository for no-questions-asked ill-gotten gains from around the world, stashed away in numbered accounts, that was brilliant. Switzerland is not a rogue criminal state. It is just a bunch of poor white guys being resourceful.

What takes the Swiss into the realm of pure genius beyond anything that even Descartes could have imagined is the way they project themselves as a pink-cheeked, cute and cuddly nation with it’s picture-perfect hills, it’s Bollywood film song and dance locales, it’s chalets, it’s cheeses, it’s pastries, it’s chocolates and all those other innocent things that we associate with only the Swiss. Man, that requires brains, oh yeah, real brains.

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I am wondering what Miss Swiss’s next adventure ‘project’ is going to be. Maybe she’ll want to cycle from Pakistan, across the Hindu Kush into Taliban-controlled Kunar in Afghanistan where she’ll strip down, discard her bike and streak across downtown Kunar in the nude. My eyelids promise to remain unbattable in her honour.

Am I being insensitive? Yes I am, but not to the general plight of women who are victimized in spite of trying their best to be safe. I am being heartless toward the stupidity of some thrill-seeking alpha folks.

The gang rape was unfortunate and nothing can justify it, not even stupidity. But it was entirely avoidable and in that, she does not deserve my heart-bleed. After all, wasn’t it the thrill of a lifetime that she had been after? Yes it was. The sensation of getting out there into the great wide unknown and inadvertently having her pussy stretched was an acid trip that she had chosen to have and she got what was coming to her, period.

There are many others like the Swiss woman and her husband – like those inexperienced, untrained accountants, gym instructors, librarians and ex-policemen, all of them trying desperately to prove they are worth something when they doubt it, those who liken themselves to real alpinists and throng the slopes of the Everest in May each year, only to die of either pulmonary edema or from being squashed under crashing seracs or simply disappearing into a crevasse, never to be found again, left behind as permanent frozen monuments to stupidity.

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Okay, that’s enough about dumb Swiss tourists. Let’s go to dumb Hollywood stars.

In 2014, hackers, aware of an iCloud security issue found in the Find My iPhone app used it to access the phones of hundreds of celebrities. A Python script, posted on the net, allowed bad guys to target any iCloud account with a brute force attack – a hacker jargon for a rapid barrage of attempts at endless combinations to guess the password of an iTunes account until the right one is found.

Apple has apparently patched this security issue since then. Now the brute force attack will stop after the fifth unsuccessful login attempt, leaving the owner of the iTunes account unharmed as long as the password isn’t discovered in the first five tries.

As to those celebs, here’s how they reacted when images of their private parts that they had willingly posted and texted were plastered all over the internet  –

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“It is a sexual violation. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. That’s why these Web sites are responsible. Just the fact that somebody can be sexually exploited and violated, and the first thought that crosses somebody’s mind is to make a profit from it.

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“It’s so beyond me. I just can’t imagine being that detached from humanity. I can’t imagine being that thoughtless and careless and so empty inside.”

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“To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves.”

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“This is obviously an outrageous violation of our client’s privacy. We intend to pursue anyone disseminating or duplicating these illegally obtained images to the fullest extent possible.”

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“It has come to our attention that our private moments, that were shared and deleted solely between my husband and myself, have been leaked by some vultures. I can’t help but be reminded that since the dawn of time women and children, specifically women of color, have been victimized…..”

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Sure, my heart bleeds for them. What kind of imbecile would text her nude photos through an internet that is known to leak like a sieve? We now know the kind.

Or are they really being dumb? Maybe they want to be discovered. Celebs thrive on discovery and sensation, no matter how shrill their complaints may be about their privacy being intruded upon. Narcissistic and insecure, they enjoy taking sexy pictures and showing themselves off.

In the entertainment industry, any publicity is good publicity. Celebs repeatedly barter their nudity on hundreds of movie screens in front of total strangers and that does not bother them even a bit since it is art and their looks and their other physical assets are commodities in a lascivious marketplace.

Before all this broke I knew not a single one of these stars, except maybe Jennifer Lawrence who is a middling star at best. Now I’ll remember most of them. They are now guaranteed at least face recognition, if not by name. If I see a movie poster that has one of them, I am not likely to turn away. I am likely to buy the ticket and walk in. They have achieved what they all aspire for. We are the dumb-asses feeling sorry for them.

Non-celebs do the same thing but here lies the difference – they are mostly teenagers who haven’t gotten to know any better. Peer pressure, combined with some kind of brazen and rebellious innocence drives them to show themselves nude online. And if they are not teenagers but older, invariably they bare themselves with a clear intention to titillate. Here are some of their reactions……

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“I like the feeling of knowing I’m desired, by strangers even. It’s empowering. When I post naked pictures of myself, I rather enjoy the thought of my boyfriend or fuck-friend jerking off looking at my photos. Ha! The best is when they admit to it”.

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“Wanna know why I do it? Because it gives me confidence in myself and it makes me feel good and it does not always lead to a difficult situation.”

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“I don’t know what religion you are, but if you’re Christian you should be willing to share. Asked over and over again, Jesus said that our primary objective was to “love one another”.”

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Yeah right. A celeb veers off toward racism and victimization and a non-celeb sees Jesus in all this. If I try hard enough maybe I can connect all this to Higgs Bosons.

Sometimes I am tempted to let it all hang out myself. You know, post nude pics of me on the internet. If I wasn’t 65, with a weatherbeaten richard, I probably would have. No, I’m kidding actually. I’m a bit too straight-laced for that sort of thing.

“Meanwhile, Jennifer, I loved your photos though I don’t go for your kind of baobabs. They resemble pyrus communi (European pears). Melopepo are my favorite fruit. Oops that was Latin again, for melons. I break into Latin when I am turned on. Your nudity hasn’t changed the way I see you and your other celeb pals – as nothing but a bunch of “amentes mulieres”

It is Labour Day, 2016. I am driving to the Hudson ferry when it comes over the car radio – Mother Teresa has been canonized a saint, after a second miracle has been authenticated – that of a Brazilian man who has been completely cured, after he was diagnosed with malignant brain tumors and given little chance by his doctors, of making it.

I am wondering how Mama T could figure in this ‘miraculous intervention’ given that she died in 1997 but I am afraid to ask. Maybe she bumped into him and blessed him when visiting Rio while she was alive and it took 20 years for the man to recover completely. Or maybe she enrolled in Johns Hopkins University after her Brazil visit, got herself an advanced doctorate in neuro-oncology, completed a gruelling internship, did her Masters and wrote a PhD thesis and rushed back to save the guy. As a ghost. She was dead by then, remember?

In case you are confused, Canonization is the process that ends in bestowing sainthood on a mortal, a recognition by the Catholic Church that is the spiritual equivalent of receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor or the Param Vir Chakra or the Victoria Cross.

There’s another recognition that the Catholic Church likes to dole out – beatification. It’s like Canonization-lite. It is the recognition by the church that a guy has entered heaven. Until the mid-1600s, just about anyone, even local bishops, had the power to beatify but in time the Catholic Church realized that complete jerks were being beatified, so much so that soon there were more assholes in heaven than in hell.

Not that one cannot be a saint and an asshole at the same time. In September 2015, Pope Francis canonized Junipero Serra, a Spanish missionary who first brought Catholicism to the natives of California in the early 18th century. “Brought” would be a very charitable use of the word actually. ”Rammed in“ would be more appropriate. Junipero Serra achieved the catholicization by brutally suppressing the native American culture and banning native rituals under pain of torture and even death.

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Here’s a few things you need to know in case you fancy the idea of being canonized a saint. The number one requirement is that you need to be dead before the procedure can even begin. Of course there is an oxymoron here – if you are dead, would you give a fuck if you became a saint or you didn’t? It is like winning a posthumous medal. Would it have mattered to Capt. Vikram Batra that he won a Param Vir Chakra at Kargil? Or Navy Seal Michael A Monsoor for his Medal of Honor at Ramadi? Of course it wouldn’t.

The other thing is that you will be among the 900+ canonized guys and gals and you’ll be in haloed company.

The first three Abrahamic saints were male – the archangels Raphael, Michael and Gabriel. While Raphael and Michael were low-key (except when they were required to slaughter sundry non-believers and assorted barbarians), the rock star was definitely Gabriel. He was the one who came down to earth and conveyed God’s messages to Mohammad on a mountaintop cave near Mecca, where he went, evenings, to reflect in peace and quiet. When I did Trichy grass in college and listened to Emerson, Lake and Palmer, I too heard apparitions with wings lecturing me. If only I had been crazy enough to compile those monologues into a best-selling book, I too would be a messiah by now.

Raphy, Mike and Gaby were the only ones who didn’t have to earn their sainthood. They were born with it (somewhat like the Dalai Llama or Nepal’s Living Goddesses). They were God’s way of advertising limited editions, I guess. They were God’s Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Don Rumsfeld.

Last but not the least, in order to be a saint, you have got to perform at least two verifiable miracles. The most popular way to get to sainthood has been through curing someone of a terminal illness. If you think you’ll be made a saint just because you won a Presidential election, forget it. This is not the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s not the way it works.

Here lies another oxymoron – if one of the basic tenets of Christianity is the principle of ‘as you sow, so you reap’, ie: if Christianity says that we ultimately get what we deserve, then why should someone be miraculously saved without having to complete his suffering? Maybe sainthoods are God’s way of correcting errors he made?… ‘Oops, wrong guy. Mama Terry, go fix the Brazilian guy’s tumor problem, will ya?’

Doesn’t a miracle set a wrong example, send the wrong message? You got tumors protruding out everywhere, tough shit, man, you musta done something wrong and so you had it coming. Isn’t that what Christianity preaches – that we must suffer for our sins, even when we do not always know what they are? There must be millions on earth, suffering the way that the Brazilian was. Why should a few chosen ones be miraculously benefited?

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Don’t get me wrong. I hold nothing against Mother Teresa being canonized. It wasn’t her idea, I am certain of that. Left to her I am sure she wouldn’t wouldn’t give a flying fuck if she was made a saint or she wasn’t. She was a great human being and the world already knows it. Does her sainthood change anything, make us revere her more, turn us into better human beings? No, it doesn’t, not one bit.

Or is it just one of those last-ditch efforts by a failing faith that is in it’s death throes, trying to prop itself up by petty self-aggrandizement? One of the things that Hitler started doing at the fag end of the Second World War was to award every (Tom)as, von (Dick)en and (Harry)hausen the Knight’s Cross with the Oak Leaves, to raise flagging morale. If I look hard enough, I am sure I’ll find that Nixon did pretty much the same thing, throwing around Medals of Honor like confetti, after sensing the failing gasps of the American military during the closing days of the Vietnam War.

I believe that if one has done something exceptional, it shall be automatically registered and recognized up above, if at all there exists an all-knowing supreme being. Attaining true spirituality means that one doesn’t care about earthly recognition, like canonization.

True spirituality does not require me to sit up and say, “Wow! Look what a great faith Christianity is! It has so many saints”! Instead, true spirituality shows me the distinction between loving choir boys and the loving fellow human beings.

Today, we have a world virtually on fire, consumed on all sides by racism, bigotry and hate and here we have a church that is totally out of sync with reality, busy making someone who died two decades back, a saint.

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At this point I am on the beautiful strip of asphalt that winds along the southern shore of the Lac Deux Montagne. It’s 11am and time for “Wait wait, don’t tell me”. I punch the preset on the FM button to 107.9 NPR.

The absurd madness, a.k.a canonization, is hopefully behind me.

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Overheard…..

“Sometimes, when I grab a coffee cup from my cabinet, I will pick one that’s in the back and never gets used because I think the cup feels depressed that it isn’t fulfilling it’s mission of holding coffee.”

“I used to work at a toy store and if anyone ever bought a stuffed animal I would leave its head sticking out of the bag.. so it could breathe.”

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A friend once told me, “I feel bad for inanimate objects, all the time.” I confessed to her that I did too. I have an old heavily scratched water bottle I am unable to discard. Even though I have replaced it with a newer one, it lies at the back of a kitchen cupboard.

Why is this? Why do some of us sometimes sense a pang of guilt while throwing a pair of worn-out shoes in the garbage bin or neglecting to wear an old shirt with a frayed collar that’s been with us a long time? We know these things do not feel joy or loneliness and yet, every now and then our emotions inform us otherwise. Perhaps this is the result of all those Disney films featuring a motherly teapot or brave little toaster.

History however suggests this behavior predates any cartoon depiction of household items with people-like personalities. From the worship of idols to an animistic worldview, various cultures from around the world have long believed that material objects either contain spirits or possess some kind of special connection to us.

Take Galileo for example. The spacecraft “Galileo”, that is……

Galileo had been aptly named. Carried into space by the shuttle Atlantis, in 1989, Galileo performed a finely choreographed series of loops – one around Venus and two around the earth – maneuvers that in Nasa parlance are known as ‘Gravity Assist’. Gravity Assist is like a slingshot, meant to increase velocity – necessary to enable the two and a half ton, schoolbus-sized spacecraft to reach its goal – Jupiter.

Six years later, Galileo arrived over Jupiter and fired it’s thrusters to slow it down and it parked itself into an orbit half a million miles above the stratospheric storm clouds of the gas giant. There had been life threatening glitches on the way but this artificially intelligent robot had listened to the commands from it’s rapidly receding masters and it had come through unscathed.

Like the astronomer whose illustrious name it bore, Galileo scored many firsts. The first flyby of the irregularly shaped asteroid named ‘243Ida’ and the discovery that it had it’s own moon. Gravity-Assist flybys of the Jovian moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The discovery of liquid water bubbling and frothing under the icy crust of Europa and the realization that Europa might harbor life in some form. (Arthur C Clarke had seen water under Europa two decades prior in his “2001 – A space odyssey” but that’s another story.)

Galileo sent back grotesquely dramatic video of active volcanoes on another Jovian moon, Io, erupting and ejecting plumes of basalt and sulfur hundreds of miles into space, the pictures having much greater resolution than the ones that Voyagers I and II had sent back more than a decade earlier. Then came the unbelievable real time video of the comet Shoemaker-Levy, slamming into Jupiter’s 90% hydrogen atmosphere and breaking up into multiple fireballs, leaving huge vortex-like holes in Jupiter’s clouds.

And many more. Galileo was designed to last 8-10 years and the scientists at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory would have been satisfied if it had conked out by 1997, the year that the mission was officially scheduled to end.

But Galileo was just getting warmed up. July, 1995, right after it had injected itself into Jupiter orbit, Galileo released a probe, which plunged into Jupiter’s thick atmosphere and by the time it’s parachute had slowed it down, it had transmitted to Galileo 58 minutes of invaluable data on why Jupiter is what it is, for onward transmission to earth, before succumbing to the punishing heat and atmospheric pressure.

By early 2003, Galileo itself had completed all its mission goals (and some) and now it was time to put it down. On September 21, 2003, it was commanded to fire a ‘de-orbiting burn’ and once again it faithfully obeyed. The de-orbit burn caused it to slow down to the point where centripetal force overcame centrifugal force, drawing it inward, into Jupiter. It hit the upper atmosphere at 174000 mph and disappeared into the thick soup forever. 26 years after construction had first begun, the talkative robot finally fell silent. The Galileo-Jovian Project was over.

Immediately following Galileo’s demise, a funny thing happened. Let me back up a bit.

The engineers and scientists dedicated to the mission had been young, in their late twenties and thirties, when Galileo had been first conceived and started being built. Trials and tribulations, marriages, breakups, deaths, disease – they had gone through it all, buoyed by the intensity of their commitment to Galileo’s success. They had cheered at each milestone – delirious with awe at the Shoemaker-Levy spectacle, stunned at the evidence of liquid water sloshing around underneath Europa’s icy crust, laughing hysterically at the oddity of watching a piddly asteroid with it’s own moon and the many other firsts that Galileo had achieved.

Now here they were, three decades later, in their middle age, 365 million miles from their ‘baby’. And they were watching it die. Scientists and engineers – from a dozen nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, men and women – stood up from their consoles and hugged each other, sobbing openly, overcome by a sense of loss that comes with bidding farewell to a loved one, as Galileo – for one last time, faithfully on command – plunged into Jupiter.

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Ever since we have existed, we humans have always attempted to form attachments toward everyday objects that have become a part of our lives, in part because we are loving creatures and affection is in our nature. Love is a fixed part of our species needs. When we are small, it is the teddy bear or the security blanket we couldn’t live without. Remember Linus, in ‘Peanuts’, clinging on to his blanket and sucking his thumb?

As we grow, we fall in love with all sorts of objects in our daily lives. In my case, it’s the old beige corduroy jacket that always seems to lift my spirits the moment I slip it on. Or my first car in Canada, a 1998 Corolla that had to be constantly coaxed into taking me where I wanted to go, but still came through when desperately needed – like in a snow storm on Highway 20 in the middle of a February night. The car was so dear to me that I had even given it a name – Bertha.

Or even the house I grew up in…..

I remember deciding to make a trip to Durgapur, while on a visit to India in 2010, just to see with my own eyes the two-storied bungalow that we had lived in, six decades back around 1964. It was here that my life had changed. It was in this house that, as a 10-year old, I had watched helplessly as my father picked up an old leather slipper that everyone used to go out into the slush during the rains and then proceeded to slap my mother’s face repeatedly with it. The repeated ‘thwap thwap’ has remained a never ending audio gif inside my head.

The bungalow had a run-down look. A middle-aged woman opened the door. She appeared to be alone, except for a maid who was sweeping the passage floor. When I told her I that as a child I had spent many years in this house, she let me in.

I wandered from room to room, touching the windows, the walls, while the memories flooded in. For a while, the woman followed me room to room but when she sensed me begin to cry, she paused and silently went back into the hall.

I found myself in the bedroom that my two brothers and I had slept in. I walked to the window and stared down at the grassy patch outside and I felt I could hear my Ma calling from the kitchen window…”Jobbu, that’s enough of playing, now come on inside and go over your school bag and see if you have everything. School starts tomorrow”.

The window sill over which I had flung Ma’s treasured Ganesha out in rage (because I was caught bullying the neighbor’s daughter and had been made to sit in the corner), that window sill appeared not to have changed one bit, though I could barely see over it then, even on my tippy toes. Later on, Ma told me she would never have guessed where the marble idol had landed (in the bushes outside), had it not been for the Krishna figurine teetering on the ledge. I had taken out my anger on multiple gods, but the fact that I have grown into a well-adjusted adult proves that Hindu gods don’t hold grudges.

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For the men and women who had nurtured Galileo, seeing it plummet into Jupiter must have felt like they were euthanizing a family member. For three decades, Galileo had been a part of their daily lives.

Without doubt, inanimate objects are just that – inanimate. Or are they? After all, we haven’t yet fully grasped what reality really is, have we?

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is an unabashed schloop-me-tight-goober. Here he is seen schlooping various assorted bigshots, including the Obamas.

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What? Haven’t you heard of schlooping? It is a close, squishing, cheek-rubbing embrace, so tight and so close that it can get a bit embarrassing if you are at receiving end of it.

By the way, “Schloop-me-tight-Goober” is an authentic copyrighted Spunkybong term. I’ll sue you if you use it without my permission.

The Indian Prime minister, Narendra Modi, holds a PhD in schlooping, he is such a hell of a touchy schloopy guy. Give him half a chance and he’ll schloop you. If you happen ta be a head of state, film star, CEO or celebrity and you see Modi bearing down on you from across the room, you’re going ta get schlooped whether you like it or not.

Quite admittedly, the act of one human hugging another is a heartwarming image. What with the rise of hate everywhere, the world does face a love-deficit at the moment. There is nothing wrong with the gesture as far as I am concerned. Politicians schlooping each other in India is du jour.

But what is striking about Modi’s schlooping is the look of pure maniacal bliss on his face when he schloops someone. He won’t let go – he’ll just keep on schlooping you with that Alfred E. Newman grin on his face. Just google Narendra Modi and you’ll see a zillion Modi schlooping photos. He makes it look like he is in multiple same sex marriages, each photo appearing as though it was taken right after the ring exchange and the vows. When he is deep into schlooping, he looks slightly off into the distance and seems to be saying,” What? Me worry?”

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After two decades in the west and being near white folk, I have realized that schlooping is not a very appropriate gesture in the western world. The warmth that a schloop tries to convey, is lost on most world leaders, especially if they happen to be white folks from affluent nations. Take a look at Mark Zuckerberg or Tony Scott in the collage above. I can just sense the inadvertent cringe they must feel, being schlooped by Modi.

Would you find a Boris Johnson schlooping an Emanuel Macron? Or an Anglea Merkel getting schlooped by a Matteo Salvini? Modi thought nothing of schlooping his erstwhile arch-rival, Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif. Would you have dreamed of seeing Barack Obama schlooping Vladimir Putin? Donald Trump has professed undying love for Kim Jong Un, but have you ever seen him schlooping the guy? Why does it become so necessary for an Indian Prime Minister to slobber all over another dignitary? During his last meeting with Obama, Modi schlooped him no less than six times in the space of 24 hours.

In the west, physical space is an important concept. Usually it is a two-foot deep envelope all around a person. Western men take breaching that envelope as an annoyance, even as an act of aggression. Between straight men in the west, the only acceptable way to breach the envelope is through a handshake or a high five. Otherwise, schlooping is frowned upon in general.

Hugs are quite normal in India and like hugs, holding hands is common between two male friends in India. Just walk out into the street and you’ll see at least one pair of males walking along, holding hands. But if you try to hold another man’s hand here in the west, he’ll recoil from you, convinced you are a raving perverted homo.

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There could be a number of  reasons for this aversion to touching between men in the west – one is a perception that any overt show of warmth or affection is by default a sign of a lack of manliness. After all, the Caucasian male is essentially a war-like sub-species of human beings, immensely proud of his masculinity.

Another reason could be the way that a western individual is taught to practice his faith. Take a look at pictures of Christian, Jewish or Islamic prophets and even artistic depictions of God – invariably he is shown as old, bearded, stern and humorless , austere, severe and martial and generally inspiring fear and respect. If you looked at a picture of Moses, would it make you feel like giving him a hug?

All three Abrahamic religions teach believers to ‘fear’ God or else. The term “an honest god-fearing man” is an oft-repeated one in the west, meant to describe a devout person. Being God-fearing is like a badge, a qualification here in the west. Brutal retribution is just one tiny sin away, if one following the Bible, the Tora or the Quran doesn’t fear God. It may be this either my way or the highway implicit ultimatum in these three religions that somehow makes a majority of believers cold and impersonal.

This is not to say that I haven’t met warm Christians or Muslims. The lack of warmth that I am referring to is just alluded to the physical space concerns and therefore the straight western man’s aversion to schlooping. Besides, I am not expressing an opinion on whether that is desirable or undesirable.

In comparison, look at Hinduism and all it’s many gods and goddesses (we Hindus don’t have prophets or any other divine sales reps). All Hindu deities have one thing invariably in common – our Gods have this beatific, mushy, serene smile. Fearing god is not a requirement at all in Hinduism, not in the way that the Abrahamic religions make it mandatory. There is no threat of hell fire in Hinduism. The explanation is simple and profound – how can you love someone you are told you should fear?

Schlooping, like any other pursuit, has it’s variations. Let me show you a few………..

Hey, how you bin?

Take it easy, Volodya may be watchin’ and if he gets pissed, he’ll release the golden shower video.

Now cut it out, dumbass. I told you no schlooping and no begging!!!

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‘Schleep’ is when a schloop ends in a kiss on the cheek. You could go further – like you could think of doing a schloop-a-doo-dee. For that, you might have to check into a motel room in a remote part of town, under a false name, with a blonde.

There are goobers other than the schloop-me-tight-goobers of course. Let me introduce you to another kind of goober that inhabits the world – suck-my-face-goober – another Spunkybong copyrighted term. Suck-my-face-Goobers are annoying folks who like to kiss wet slobbering open-mouthed kisses that women say are so yucky. Their kisses have a ridiculous slurpy sound, leaving half the woman’s face wet and sloppy, while their tongues slurp around the palate like eels. Yechh!

Suck-my-face-goobers are usually men but once in a while one gets a female – like this married landlady twice my age in India, when I was twennie-two. She just couldn’t get enough of me and would slobber over my face. I indicated to her that she might find schleeping my richard more fulfilling and I am happy ta report to you that she acceded with zest.

But let’s stick to just schlooping, okay? I am too straight-laced to write about the others, though there was a time I even went schlapee-doo-shaa. Please, don’t make me tell you what that is.

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Getting back to Narendra Modi, if I were the Indian PM, I would stop being a schloop-me-tight-goober forthwith and maintain a certain aloofness. In international politics, it is more prudent to command respect than to look for some facile affection.

The following was narrated to me over a period of a week the summer of 2012, by an Indian man from Kolkata who had settled in Montreal in the early 60s. For a brief while, we lived at the same apartment block. He spoke these words as we found ourselves on a bench in the Westmount Park. Its not verbatim and I did embellish it a bit, the way I rig almost all my posts. It is my blog and if I want to embellish, I will.

So here is Gaur Ghosh’s story…..

A month or so after Shanta passed on, in May of 1969, I began going out with the Culvers for breakfast every morning at the Tim Hortons, the one down by the ESSO pump, on Sherbrooke West and Grand.

I’m referring to Irv and Sally Culver, recent retirees like me, living on the same floor, down the corridor, by the fire escape.

At first they felt I was lonesome and needed company and that’s why they invited me to join them at Tim Horton’s for turkey bacon sandwiches one morning, early July 1969. They must have liked the experience because they insisted on having me around everyday thereafter. I felt comfortable with them and came to enjoy those outings.

There was a certain freshness to the early morning hubbub and the rustle of newspapers inside a Tim Hortons. Bright young counter girls, steaming hot coffee, the muffins and of course, those awesome toasted sandwiches. Breakfast in a cafe could be a bit expensive, if one wanted to do it every day. But at that point in time, I guess I needed to be out. Besides, once you’re over 65, your pension can allow daily cafe jaunts like this, no problem, if you stick to those 3-in-one combos.

And if you had planned your retirement in advance and put away some money when you were in the workforce, then maybe you could take a cruise. Or you could visit your native land once in three or four years, as I used to do, when Shanta was alive. Not anymore. The travel is quite tiring, 25-30 hours in a plane or at airports, with my knees acting up. Besides, there just isn’t anybody there I know, anymore.

Irv and Sally, they follow the Canada geese down to Florida in October, every two or three years.

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I was telling you about our breakfast outings. I remember the morning of July 20th, 1969. Irv, Sally and I were talking animatedly about the moon landing the day before. In fact I am sure that everyone else in the cafe was wrapped up in it too.

“Did you watch Neil Armstrong’s little speech? One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind?” That was Irv.

“Of course. Apt, wasn’t it?” My interest perked up.

“Sally says Armstrong actually said ‘one small step for a man’ but I clearly remember him saying ‘one small step for man’.  Sally rolled her eyes at that and I couldn’t help thinking how lovely she still looked, even at 52.

“Interesting, how a common article can twist the whole meaning of a sentence. Did you know him, Irv? Neil Armstrong?” Almost all his working life, Irv had been at Lockheed’s Skunk Works, as a part of the team that developed what would come to be known as the SR-71 Blackbird. (In later years, the Skunk Works developed such legendary flying machines like the freakily angular F117 Nighthawk, the F22 Raptor and the F35 Lightning).

Irv perked up, “Not personally, but I’d seen Armstrong a few times over the years. The first time was when he was visiting the Skunk Works, this must have been around 1962, maybe ‘63.  He was a member of the ‘new nine’ group of astronauts, invited to take a look at the new YF-12A prototype, the fore-runner of the SR-71 Blackbird. We had tested out the TEB igniter on the JP-7 fuel inside the lab and were going to have a test flight that day.  Things were pretty antsy around the huge shed. JP-7 burns only at elevated temperatures and is therefore quite safe to have lying around, but TEB ignites on contact with air. And without TEB injected into it, JP-7 wasn’t going to light up.”

Sally and I exchanged glances and smiled. Irv was in his elements and unstoppable now, “While the others in the group spoke only with our Chief Engineer, Kelly Johnson, Armstrong made it a point to go around, stopping by every member of the Skunkworks team and even the Pratt and Whitney guys working on the J-58 power plant. He listened attentively to each one of us. My last glimpse was of him shaking hands with a contractor’s man who was holding a ladder while another changed a light bulb.”

I was primed by now and bristling with questions. “Wait, don’t move, I’m going to get us some more coffee and you’re going to tell me more.” I hurried back holding three mugs and I was firing away as I placed them on the table,” How did the Skunk Works get that name?”

“Well, when we started, back in ’43, it was in a converted circus tent as there was no other space within the Lockheed facility. And we happened to be right next to a plant producing manure, its odor permeating our tent. When my phone rang one day, I jokingly said,” Skunk Works inside man, Culver speaking.” The name caught on right away. Since then, the term “skunk works” has been widely used to describe a group, within an organization, given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.”

Irv and Sally had an engagement that day and had to leave and so my curiosity had to wait till the next breakfast at Tim Hortons.

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A year slipped by, 365 blissful days of walks, breakfasts and stimulating conversation with the Culvers. Shanta would have loved these two.

I reckon it was around that time that Irv began fading away. Gradually. Right before our eyes. It began with him not being able to locate the car keys. Another time, he got lost coming back from the pharmacy and someone saw him wandering listlessly around and called the cops and a cop arrived and drove him home.

Alzheimer’s crept up on Irvin Culver steadily for the next nine years. Until one particularly frigid December night in 1980, when he quietly died in his sleep at the Montreal General. Of course, one doesn’t die of Alzheimer’s. One just fades away. Irv actually succumbed to colon cancer. Sally had always pestered him to eat more greens but he never listened. Anyway, for Sally, Irv’s passing was more like the grand finale of a painful nine year long goodbye.

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After Irv, Sally and I would see each other at least once a day. We’d accompany one another to our doctors’ appointments. I had a painful knee condition that got aggravated in the cold. Sally was trying to keep her cholesterol and BP down. I had no living relatives in Canada and Sally’s only daughter, Cora, lived somewhere on the west coast.  Therefore, for the most part, we had just each other. While we couldn’t bring ourselves to enter the Tim Hortons again, we had our daily walks down Sherbrooke.

Some days we took the pedestrian path up to the Westmount Library where we sat for an hour catching our breath and browsing through the journals. I loved the National Geographic and I loved watching Sally peer through her bifocals into the People Magazine or Vanity Fair.

Sometimes we ambled west, toward the Montreal West train station. We’d flop down on the benches by the tracks and watch the ebb and flow of the commuters. Once in a while, a long distance freight train thundered by. We’d sit a while and then make our way back, stopping at the Pharmaprix, right across from our apartment block, to pick up a prescription or maybe a toilet paper roll or something. We would then trudge back. To our separate little worlds. 

I don’t know when it first happened but it gradually seemed natural that we held hands as we walked.

I don’t remember too good these days but I think it was the Christmas Eve of 1985. For Sally and me, it was like any other day. Except for the daily Christmas carol bombardment on TV and radio. She didn’t want to go for the mass at the St Joseph’s this time. Said she was tired. So we went for a walk, a shorter one, up Cavendish and back. And as I said before, my knees didn’t like the Canadian winter. Sally too had grown gaunter, with all her food restrictions. And so, while the whole city seemed to explode in merriment, we were back, waiting, while the elevator took us up to the 14th floor.

The ritual thereafter began predictably. Like hundreds of other evenings. Me, giving Sally a quick peck on the cheek at her door and walking down the length of the hallway to my apartment. And her, waiting till I reached my doorstep and giving me a tiny wave.

Only this time, she wouldn’t let go of my hand. She slid her arms through mine and pressed up against me. “Don’t go…stay….please.” Her voice was a whisper.  Afterwards, we lay in the dark, our faces inches away, lazily giving each other tiny kisses all over. My head felt heavy, like all this was a dream.

The Christmas eve excitement was ramping up outside our tiny oasis as we lay back and listened to the sounds coming from the hallway. Squeals of delight, hurrying footsteps, the pitter patter of kids running ahead, to catch the elevator. Across from us, a mother was shutting her front door with,” Nicholas, did you remember to take your mittens?” A door opened somewhere, with sudden slurred shouts of welcome and then muted as it was shut.

When I turned to look at Sally, she was fast asleep, a smile still playing on her face, like some supernova remnant. “Goodnight, darling,” I whispered and held her close till I drifted off.

Sally surrendered her lease and moved in with me on Christmas day. It seemed only natural. We might follow the Canada geese next fall. If my knees can take it.

Some things from that evening seem faded, so faded that they could very well have just been dreams. Dreams of how I’d have liked things to have turned out, rather than actual events. It takes a lot of effort now, remembering each detail.

After all it was more than half a century back – Diwali, 1965. But it’s a Diwali that still shimmers, in the haze, except that the haze – it grows denser as the years roll by and the lines, once sharply etched, now seem blurred.

Sukhoranjan, our Jeeves, lit the oil lamps and arranged them along the terrace parapet, the balcony balustrade and even on the window ledges – of employees’ quarters, Type-E, No.34, MAMC Colony, Town: Durgapur, Province: West Bengal, Eastern India.

The October breeze was mild, but the lamps flickered and inevitably some went off after a sudden gust, making Sukhoranjan scurry around, relighting them. “Oof! Aaj eto hawa hobar ki dorkar chilo ? **”of all the days, did it have to be so windy today?”***he fussed.

Meanwhile right after the first fire crackers went off in the neighborhood, our dog, Shepherd, took refuge under the bed – my bed, our bed, mine and my two elder bro’s. Shepherd made frightened, whiny noises as he slinked in, tail well between his legs. He didn’t emerge till it was dinnertime, the festivities were over and the neighborhood had fallen silent.

My father had his arm round my mother’s shoulders, with her head tilted and resting on his, while they stood back and watched their three kids waving crackling fuljhari sticks wildly around. My favorite was the thubri, a firecracker crammed inside an onion-shaped clay pot with a hole on top like the caldera of a volcano, through which it kept spewing stuff out high in the air like a fountain.

The thubri was a dazzling display of colors that lasted around 30 seconds and then the pot lay spent but smoldering, with a tiny flame still licking up from within. I loved giving it a hard kick then. Who lit the first thubri – Chorda? No, perhaps Dada. Heck, I just can’t seem to remember that clearly anymore.

What I do remember is that the war with Pakistan had just ended in a ceasefire and while the mood was upbeat on the one hand, there was also some grieving at the sudden death of the revered Indian Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri. The Gnat fighters from the nearby Panagarh airbase had finally stopped screeching past at treetop level, by the time Diwali came around.

The squeals of excitement of that Diwali, the laughter – it all comes back in snatches, like when you are turning the knob of an old radio and the music from a short wave station keeps swooshing in and out.

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Some other moments are still etched. Like the fact that the stash of firecrackers that our father could reasonably afford happened to be far smaller than those of all the other Joneses in the neighborhood. And we didn’t want to finish before the others. A dark and silent house in the midst of bursting crackers would be an embarrassment.

My father had an ingenious way to address that. He took us for a long walk round the neighborhood, ostensibly to admire the Diwali pradeep lighting on the houses and the crackers others were bursting. It killed time till it became unbearable and the three of us raced back to our individual fire cracker stashes, to begin.

Afterwards, there were heaped plates of mutton pulao for dinner. This was a big deal because we had meat on the table only once every fifteen days or so. We usually ate mutton – chicken being prohibitively expensive in those days. Though there had never been any discussion on it, beef was never an option, even though it was the least expensive. (I’m not sure if in fact were even any beef stalls where I grew up).

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As always, my mother busied herself laying the table and waiting on her four men while they ate. By the time she took her seat, all the mutton was gone and only a bit of the pulao (the rice) was left, stuck to the walls of the pan like a thick plaster. When Dada protested that she didn’t have enough, she smiled and gave him a hug,” If you kids are full, I’m full.” I can still see her scraping the bottom of the pan with her thumb and licking it appreciatively,” You missed the tastiest part, you know.”

I remember Sukhoranjan well. How can you not remember someone you grew up with? Sukhoranjan was a 16 yr old guy from Orissa who had found work as a chaprasi (gopher) in my father’s office. In return for free lodging and board in the servants’ quarters attached to our house, he became our odd-job man, getting the groceries, fixing things around the house, mopping and sweeping, a job that he took as gospel..

Sukhoranjan had left his native Baleshwar with his uncle when he was 6, at the peak of the 1955 famine and the cholera out-break that had claimed both his parents and his younger sister.

After a brief stay with abusive relatives in Chakradharpur, Sukhoranjan ran away and boarded a train to Durgapur, alone, as a frightened 8 yr old. Years of toil in tea shops and grocery stores followed and it was when he was 14, working as a door-to-door fruit seller, that one day his shadow fell across our doorstep.

It had been a blisteringly hot day and Sukhoranjan struggled to lift the fruit basket back on his head, when my mother persuaded him to lay it back down on the ground and asked him to rest a while in the shade of our front porch. Soon a sumptuous lunch followed, which he wolfed down in seconds.

My mother took him in that day and he had been with us ever since. A bright and cheerfully illiterate country boy, a year older than Dada, Sukhoranjan still called him ‘Borda’ (big brother). And he was especially invaluable in my leisure-time pursuits, having taught me the intricacies of gulli-danda, marbles and how to make a gulti (sling) out of a forked wooden twig and rubber strips cut from bicycle tubes.

It was only when you tried to ask Sukhoranjan about his parents or sister that he clammed up. My mother had once seen a photo inside that tiny steel trunk of his that held all his worldly possessions. It was a picture of a couple in front of a hut. He had simply nodded and looked away when my mother had asked him if they were his parents.

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And Shepherd. He was a good looking, unusually large, dirty white mongrel pup when he found us. India is teeming with dogs without a home, that loiter around every street, scrawny and emaciated, with open sores and wounds from fights over scraps, with other dogs.

But Shepherd was different. With a dark grey stripe through the middle of his forehead, from between his eyes to the tip of his nose, he was unnaturally fluffy and plump. As he grew, Shepherd got this bushy white tail and when he confronted another dog, it rolled up tight and went into a high frequency, low amplitude quiver, while his bright aggressive unwavering eyes stayed on the other guy and a low growl escaped from his slightly parted lips. Most dogs quickly figured out that the odds against having a ear torn or a shoulder gashed were very little and made a whining exit which sounded to me more like, “Fuck it, tennis anyone?”

I have a hunch that Shepherd’s father was one of those Siberian huskies that the Soviet experts brought over with them. This was 1965 – at the apex of Indo-Soviet cooperation. We were living inside a township that had technical experts from the Soviet Union helping us build coal mining machinery. The husky must have fallen for a local babe somewhere along and one thing had lead to another. We never got acquainted with his mother. Guess she’d passed on by the time Shepherd, the pup, found us.

Shepherd truly was a Soviet dog. The KGB couldn’t have done any better, penetrating a third world country. Shepherd eased himself into our house gradually in strategically planned moves. He was first spotted sunning himself occasionally on our garden wall parapet and then we noticed he had promoted himself to the top of one of the two concrete garden gate posts. It was not long before he drew my mother’s attention,”Dakh re, kukur ta ki mishti dekhte” (look guys, isn’t that a cute pup?).

Soon Ma was flinging leftovers to him after our meals. One day, when Sukhoranjan was about to garbage an old frying pan, Ma decided to keep it and use it as Shepherd’s dinner plate. She had Sukhoranjan remove the handle and clean it out and began having one of us kids go out and leave it filled with scraps, on his favorite gate post.

As Shepherd grew however, that gate post proved to be too small and he kept inadvertently knocking the pan off it in his eager enthusiasm. Soon we started leaving the pan on our doorstep instead.

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The monsoon of 1965 was particularly severe and I remember this one late night. Ma and Baba were asleep, their bedroom door shut. I suddenly woke to see Dada and Chorda standing by our bedroom window, holding the grills and looking out, talking in a low tone. I jumped out of bed and went up behind them. My eyes were at the level of their waists and I had to push my little head through to see what was grabbing their attention. In the blinding sheets of rain, I saw Shepherd, bedraggled, on top of his gate post, trying to find a comfortable position to settle himself in.

Dada looked at Chorda, got a nod and turned to me,”Sshh. Mukh theke ekta shobdo jeno na shuni. Noito gatta khabi, bujhli?” (Ssh. One sound from you and you’ll get one of my bare knuckle raps on your head). He was obviously worried about my parents waking up.

Dada was tough and I never took his words lightly. If he said he was going to beat me up, he was going to beat me up. You couldn’t reason with him. You couldn’t placate him. You couldn’t seek refuge under the law. He was the law. He might easily have been born in the turn of the century in the town of Corleone or Palermo.

So, here we were, by the bedroom window,  me held by the ears, slowly being shaken but not stirred, by Dada. He continued, “Teen shotti bol, shatti, shatti, shatti” and I repeated after him in a hushed, awed voice, “Shatti, shatti, shatti”. Repeating ‘shatti’ thrice meant giving your word to the other guy that you wouldn’t rat out on him. This was the first time they were going to trust me not go blab to our parents the first chance I got. It was awesome. I was in! I’d suddenly grown up. I was now being taken as a man by my peers.  Laga Chaka Baga Chaka! (relax, that’s Bengali for Yippee!).

My euphoria was short-lived, for Dada hit me with a gatta anyway. I started, “What the…!!%^*” and he swiftly clamped his palm on my mouth, “That was just for taste. There’s more from where that came, remember that.” Jesus Christ, they should have named this guy Joey Gallo.

The gatta was painful and unprovoked and when it became evident that I was going to burst out crying, Kissinger (Chorda) stepped in,” Now relax, take it easy, ok? You are now one of us. We gotta stick together, right?” I nodded hurriedly, gulping back my tears.

Dada took charge immediately, “All right, here’s what we’ll do” he jabbed a finger painfully into my chest sending me reeling back,” you get that spare mat from the prayer room and meet us at the front door.” With that curt command, he and Chorda swung on their heels and slinked down the stairs, while I made my way in the dark, to the prayer room, to retrieve the spare mat, making sure I kept a safe distance from that pashbalish (round cushion) on the whatnot that scared the bejesus out of me every time I was made to enter the prayer room alone in the dark. I grabbed hold of the mat and raced downstairs to where my elder brothers were waiting.

They already had the front door open and Shepherd was standing there, dripping and forlorn, his wet fluff now sticking to his body making him look half his size. There was this cove under the stairs next to the front door which housed the family bicycle (my father went to work on it when he didn’t manage to get a lift).

Shepherd came in and proceeded to the cove where he shook himself dry vigorously, soaking us all in the process. I hugged him. He was cold. Chorda had brought a bowl of milk which he placed next to the mat. Shepherd curled himself up on the mat and lapped at the milk gratefully. He was done in a microsecond and lay stretched out, eyes half closed, bushy tail wagging lazily in appreciation. In another minute he breathed a deep sigh and was out like a light. The next morning we were taken aback to note that our parents didn’t mind Shepherd’s new lodgings at all.

The penetration of the household was now complete, the culmination of a totally successful ‘hearts and minds’ exercise – the only casualty being my forehead – from Dada’s gattas.

Sukhoranjan got a permanent unionised job at MAMC, married soon after and moved away in ’68.

Shepherd passed on in the summer of ’69 around the time of the first moon landing. He failed to recover from a tonsil operation. I had just turned 14.

The typically American concept of the ‘gold star parents’ is an interesting one. For those who don’t have a clue as to who they are, these folks have something in common – they are the parents of American soldiers who have lost their lives on active duty.

There are other monikers – Gold Star Families – Gold Star Fathers – Gold Star Mothers(image above) – Gold Star Wives and husbands, you get the hang. There might be Gold Star Pooches or Bedbugs even.  Why leave them out in this farce?

There is even a Gold Star Mothers’ Day – the last Sunday in September each year. Today is that day. The American President, Donald Trump, routinely derides American soldiers who have given their lives in the line of duty – ‘suckers’. For once I agree and I’ll explain why in a moment.

I am not sure whether Gold Star status applies to even service personnel who died accidentally during a conflict, like maybe while the dude was handling explosives in a military base or while on a training flight. It probably doesn’t. But I have decided not to lose sleep worrying over that.

You must think I am being really really insensitive. Just hear me out.

When I watched Khizr Khan and his wife on TV at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, proudly announcing their Gold Star status, it struck me that my country of birth, India, has no such exclusive club of parents. Thousands of Indian Army soldiers die every year trying to secure their motherland’s borders against Pakistani and Chinese infiltrators, but you don’t get to see either the Indian Government or the public going overboard and forming cult-like fraternities of Gold Star families. They honor the sacrifices of their martyrs and they move on with their lives.

I am sure its the same on the Pakistani and Chinese sides. Neither do the Europeans nor even the Russians have anything close to ‘Gold Star parents’. America is the only nation which raises the parents of dead soldiers to a kind of God-like status. An even bigger irony is that those American soldiers that do survive and manage to get back home, are shunned and treated like crap by a corrupt Veterans’ Affairs Department. But more about that later.

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The ancient Spartans had moms who handed their 6-year old male children over to the state, to be groomed to do battle and die as heroes. When they did inevitably die, the parents were honored – if only symbolically – pretty much like the American Gold Star parents of today.

There is however a difference between the Spartan parents and the American parents. In the case of the Spartans, that was the law and the parents had little say in the matter. It was either give up your child to go get trained to be a soldier and die in battle or let him remain at home and have the authorities snatch him when he is an adolescent, to go work in the hazardous arsenic-laced gold and silver mines and die there. Spartan parents had little choice.

There is another huge difference – the Spartans drew their soldiers from all strata of the society, the elite as well as the hoi-polloi finding equal representation. In fact, the Spartan elite led the way. In sharp contrast, the American elite do everything in their power to avoid serving in the military. Remember Donald Trump’s bone spurs?

Only one modern-day parallel to the American Gold Star moms and dads exists and that is in North Korea. I am told that the North Koreans have a well established system of badges of honor doled out to the parents of dead soldiers. The parents walk around with those badges proudly displayed on their drab tunics and total strangers walk up to them to shake their hands.

But then, there is a distinction even in the North Korean analogy – those strangers are mandated by law to shake a Gold Star parent’s hands, unless they want to find themselves eating rotten potatoes inside a gulag.

I guess any nation which places greater value on putting on a show, rather than actually behaving honorably, will have inane institutions such as ‘gold star families’.

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For America, it is a perfect win-win situation – the nation starts a war, invades another nation that was simply minding its own business half a world away and just when the body bags begin coming home and morale begins flagging, it is artificially boosted with organizations like ‘Gold Star Mothers Inc.’ and ‘Gold Star Fathers Inc.’

“Always give ’em something to look forward to, even in death”, seems to be the dictum. So what if the real hero is dead. Make his parents the heroes by giving them fancy titles like ‘Gold Star Mother’ or ‘Gold Star Father’. They’ll be thrilled when total strangers walk up to them and shake their hands and repeat the same inane BS…. ‘thank you for your son’s service’. It will make them forget the fact that their son or daughter died fighting a war that in all probability was cruel and unjust, very likely having been active participants in some kind of atrocity or the other, against the innocent citizens of another sovereign nation whom they loved calling ‘gooks’ and ‘barbarians’. Remember Mai Lai? Remember Abu Ghraib?

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Do the alleged ‘mothers’ in the above photo look grief stricken to you? I think they seem a little too smug and definitely tickled to have their pictures taken. I wonder what they must be thinking – perhaps something along these lines……’I wish I had a couple more sons to let The White House send to their deaths. Then maybe I could get to be Gold Star Mom of the Month’.

Perhaps those Gold Star Moms just can’t wait to be on the receiving end of those flag folding ceremonies, where three or four soldiers, members of the coffin bearing platoon, begin folding the flag that had been draped over the coffin, in an excruciatingly slow and painstaking process that takes several minutes and is designed to make you grit your teeth. At the end of it, the flag turns into a tightly wrapped triangular bundle that resembles a slightly harder sofa cushion. The bundle is then handed over to the Gold Star Mom, who receives it with an expression that looks like she is the one who should be grateful.

The amount of ceremony that goes into a military funeral in the US is unbelievable, though for what purpose escapes me. No one bothers to remember the fallen anyway. Before Mr. Khizr Khan spoke up about his son Humayun at the DNC, did Americans even know that there existed on earth a dead American soldier named Capt Humayun Khan? The day after that morning in 2004 when Captain Khan ordered his platoon members to stand back and single-handed blocked a bomb-loaded car from entering the Baghdad Green Zone, did even a single American civilian on a single American street hear about his sacrifice?

We know the answers to those questions, don’t we? And then, let’s look at the other side in the so-called ‘war on terror’. Are the mothers in Raqqa, Molenbeek or Mosul also aspiring to be Gold Star Moms, I wonder. Maybe they’ll call themselves ‘All Star Moms’? (All, short for Allah). And why the hell not? Though, I suspect there won’t be any bagpipes waiting there.

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Perhaps the biggest irony is the fact that in America, while the dead are honored with grand ceremony and their parents given gold star status, veterans who are still alive and barely able to adapt to civilian life, ridden with alcoholism and drug addiction brought on by PTSD and/or Moral Injury – their plight is pathetic, administered by an institution called “Department of Veterans’ Affairs” which is universally known to be one of the most corrupt, inept and apathetic public sector organizations on the planet.

The ‘Gold Star’ status is a ludicrous farce, especially for a nation that does not have to worry about an invasion, since it is bound by two vast oceans on either side and friendly neighbors in the north and the south.  Therefore, for an American GI mom, alas, Gold Stars can only be won when her Li’l Billy catches a bullet between his eyes, while engaged in an act of naked aggression, against a country half a world away that never did America any harm.

My God, this has got to be the perfect jerk-off. I know what I want to be – just a father, not a Gold Star Sucker.

Parents of a fallen Pakistani-American US Army Captain, Mr. Khizr Khan and his wife, speaking at the DNC Convention, July 2016, waving a pamphlet version of the US Constitution at Donald Trump

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With his grieving wife at his side, Khizr Khan delivered a moving stump speech at the national convention of the Democratic Party of the US during the pantomime that the world knows as the 2016 Presidential Elections.

It is amazing how the man held it together and remained stoic all the while that he spoke, his wife looking up at him from time to time, a mixture of concern and devotion in her eyes. I believe that their dignity added to the impact of his address.

After he had said what he had come to say, all hell broke loose. The talk shows united on one thing – that Mr Khan struck a chord, even among many Republicans and in a ratings-driven nation, Trump’s standing took a brief nose dive. I am certain that the volume of tears shed by Americans during Mr Khan’s amazing address would be enough to fill up a football stadium.

First, here’s what their son, Capt. Humayun Saqib Muazzam Khan, did for America, as per the citation that his parents received from the US Army…..

In 2004, Khan was assigned to the 201st Forward Support Battalion, 1st Infantry Division in Vilseck, Germany, when he was deputed to Iraq.

Three months into his tour of duty in Iraq, on June 8 near Baqubah, Khan was inspecting a guard post when they observed a taxicab approaching too quickly, raising concerns that it was going to ram the guard rails and detonate an explosive device. Ordering his subordinates away from the vehicle, Khan ran forward 10–15 steps to the taxi to caution it to slow down.

His suspicions turned out to be well founded. At the wheel was a suicide bomber and the car had been rigged with a powerful remote-controlled explosive device that went off the moment Khan came close. He caught the blast before it could reach the gates or the nearby mess hall where hundreds of soldiers were eating breakfast.

By that single act of bravery, Capt. Humayun Khan probably saved 100-200 Americans that day. He rests at the Arlington National Cemetery, in Virginia, USA. That he has not been cited for the Medal of Honor for his heroic act of sacrifice is inexplicable. (Not that it matters to someone who is dead).

For those interested to lay flowers there, the location of his grave is identified below….

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KHAN, HUMAYUN SAQIB MUAZZAM
CPT US ARMY
DATE OF BIRTH: 09/09/1976
DATE OF DEATH: 06/08/2004
BURIED AT: SECTION 60 SITE 7986
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

Fresh flowers around Capt. Humayun Khan’s gravestone at the Arlington National Cemetery.’

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It does not matter that no one in America paused a moment to consider that Capt. Humayun Khan died fighting a war that is now universally recognized as an insanely unjust and unnecessary war. It is a war which has left the Middle-East in tatters, a war whose incomprehensibility shocks us and makes us wonder why those leaders who started it have not only not been convicted of war crimes and horrendous human rights abuses, but how it is possible that they are today walking freely among us – proud strutting puffed up men – holding forth on the lecture circuit on how they brought democracy to the Muslim world.

Instead of a prison cell at The Hague, George W. Bush drives around his Texas ranch when he isn’t appearing in TV talk shows with the Kimmels, the Fallons and the  DeGenerreses of America, greeted as he steps on the stage with deafening cheers and standing ovations. (At the moment even a baboon will seem like a savior to liberal America)

But then I had been naive to believe that those cells at The Hague were ever meant for folks like Bush and not for black African heads of state. After all, look at the sterling pedigree he sports – his dad, George H W Bush, the one who pardoned all those thugs in the Iran-Contra affair and prior to that, took it upon himself to persuade a US Attorney to go easy in the prosecution of one of America’s most corrupt politicians, Spiro T. Agnew.

It does not matter that Capt. Khan voluntarily took part in an invasion of a sovereign country, on the side of the invaders, for reasons as blatantly and ludicrously facile as what the invasion’s military code name suggested – ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’.

I am confused – ultimately what does Mr. Khizr Khan’s speech at the DNC Convention tell us about America? That this is a Muslim whose son was willing to martyr himself for America? That he is not the kind that Donald Trump demonizes?

Or does it show America up as a nation that repeatedly and needlessly sends its young into the jaws of death, training them to kill on its orders thousands of innocents, a majority of whom have never lifted a finger to hurt it? And then return home – broken plastic fighting figures, ticking time bombs, riddled with PTSD and Moral Injury?

I wonder how Capt. Khan’s father’s speech has been received by Muslims, within America and without – the one’s that Mr Khan Sr. appears to want to represent? Some will surely tear up like the rest of us, but there will be many in the Muslim world who will dismiss the death of Capt Humayun Khan as something that he had coming to him. After all, Capt. Khan was not forcibly drafted – he chose to enlist.

I don’t know, help me out here – if the parents of a foot soldier in Genghiz Khan’s western divisions or Attila the Hun’s hordes made a speech about how their son gave up his life while actively engaged in the effort to subjugate and annihilate thousands in the overrun territories, were their audience then supposed to tear up?

After all, if we look closely, there is no difference between a Hun Chieftain in Attila’s legions and Capt Humayun Khan. One died securing the fig orchards in overrun Anatolia and the other gave his life securing those billion dollar no-bid reconstruction contracts for the Bechtels and the Haliburtons of America.

Or is the message hidden inside Mr Khan’s address telling us that sacrifice, any sacrifice, is noble? That war, any war and dying in that war is a heroic thing and must be honored, regardless of whether the hero fought for the invaders or the invaded?

“You have made no sacrifice, you have lost no one,” said the bereaved Mr. Khan, addressing Donald Trump in his speech, making it seem like there is no difference between a just and an unjust war, as if sacrifice and being martyred is all that matters. In a sense Mr Khan was being true to form. The Abrahamic faiths do place sacrifice and martyrdon at the very top of their to-do lists.

But then, what is the difference between the Capt. Khan who fought with the Americans and those other Khans who fight with the Taliban? When will America start seeing the bigger picture, instead of playing to the gallery every time?

Am I the only one who refuses to tear up at PR exercises?

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“To air-dry clothes by choice is counter-cultural.

And who, more than any other group in twenty-first-century America, is counter-cultural?

Who have intact families, healthy communities, home-cooked meals and uncluttered homes?

Who are restrained in the use of technology, have strong local economies and no debt?

Most of all, what group has kept simplicity, service and faith at the center of all that they say and do?

The Amish!

Few of us can become Amish, but all of us can try to be…… almost Amish.”

― Nancy Sleeth, in Almost Amish: One Woman’s Quest for a Slower, Simpler, More Sustainable Life

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Giving his Dad a hand (Photo courtesy: Amishphoto.com)

Close-knit, in a world of their own, an Amish family on the way to church (Photo courtesy: efoodsdirect.com)

A road sign alerts drivers to an Amish community ahead (Photo courtesy: Wikimedia)

October the 3rd, 2006, was just like any other day for me. We had bought our first car in Canada just the previous day. Albeit, it was 8 years old but it was our first car and the feeling of suddenly being able to just take off any which way we could, was exhilarating.

We named her Bertha, tanked her up, flipped a coin and took off west on the Trans-Canadian. Just like the Grant Trunk Road does in India, the Trans-Canadian cuts right across Canada. Bertha is no longer with us, having long been sold off to a college student for $500.

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For pretty 13-year old Marian Fisher of the Amish community of Nickel Mines, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and her little sister, Barbie, October 3rd 2006 was a vastly different day. It was the day when the two girls unhesitatingly put into practice what had been preached to them all their young lives – sacrifice.

At 10 am, 32-year old Charles Carl Roberts IV, a non-Amish milkman from the nearby Bart Township, entered the one-room Old Order School where the two girls were taking lessons along with other little children like them. With him, Roberts had a 9 mm handgun, a 12 gauge shotgun, a rifle, a bag of black powder, two knives, tools, a stun gun, 600 rounds of ammunition, wire, and plastic tie-wraps. Aiming to stay there a while, he had also brought with him, change of clothing and a toothbrush.

He first let the boys go, all 15 of them, and then he ushered all the adult women with infants out of the school unharmed. The remaining 11 students, all girls, aged from 6 to 15, he bound their hands with plastic tie wraps and began to load his guns.

Suddenly, in an attempt to buy time for the rest of the girls, Marian Fisher stepped forward and asked that she may please be shot first. Her younger sister, 7 year-old Barbie, then fell in behind her and asked Roberts to ‘shoot her second’. He acquiesced. He shot them both and the other 9 girls. Only five survived, maimed for life. Marian and Barbie were not among them.

The deranged Roberts turned his gun on himself when the police stormed the school.

In the immediate aftermath the horrendous deed, the first announcement that went out from the community leaders to the international press was, “We do not think that there is anybody among us who wants to do anything but forgive and not only be there for those who have suffered a loss but also to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts…”

Accepting. And grieving. An Amish family after the massacre (Photo courtesy: Ibelieveinlove.com)

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Members of the press reported that neighbors of the deceased girls met the father of Charles Carl Roberts and embraced him. Roberts’ widow was even invited to attend the funerals. It is not known if she went. Here are some excerpts of blog posts from journalists and writers…..

Columnist Rod Dreher wrote:

“Yesterday on NBC News, I saw an Amish midwife who had helped birth several of the girls murdered by the killer, say that they were planning to take food over to his family’s house.”

Journalist Tom Shachtman, author of the book Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish, said:

“This is a stark imitation of Christ. If anybody is going to turn the other cheek in our society, it’s going to be the Amish. I don’t want to denigrate anybody else who says they’re imitating Christ, but the Amish walk the walk as much as they talk the talk.”

Gertrude Huntington, a specialist on Amish children, said:

“They know their children are going to heaven. They know their children are innocent and they know that they will join them in death. The hurt is very great, but they don’t balance the hurt with hate.”

Lancaster Online reported:

“During the service, which lasted just over an hour, heads were bowed and tears flowed for the loss of schoolgirls’ tender lives and for their killer, a man described as a loving husband and father of three young children.”

I recall that the beheading of the freelance journalist, James Foley, by the ISIS in Iraq, had made me think of the whole concept of evil one more time and this time, from a new angle. I thought that if I wanted to understand evil, I would have to understand good first, or more appropriately, why there is good at all and to what purpose this good exists. Have the ISIS ever heard about the Amish, I wondered.

Of course they haven’t. The ISIS are an isolationist community of individuals who use terror to the ends that they see as true and just. For the Amish the ends are the same, only the means are the opposite.

The Amish practice what is known as ‘intercessory prayer’, which is pleading with God on behalf of others, not the simplistic bargain or unsaid agreement that we all try to contract with God when we pray. The Amish way is practiced by the Buddhists too…..

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The story goes that after the People’s Republic of China annexed Tibet, there was a mass destruction of Tibetan monasteries, holy libraries and other cultural artifacts. Along with it, whole groups of Buddhist monks too were imprisoned and made to do forced labor.

One such labor group happened to be carrying their prayer beads with them and would chant their mantras from time to time, till it came to the notice of their guards who confiscated the beads. No matter. The monks began praying without them till, once again, they were told not to talk aloud. Unfazed, they then began reciting their chants silently in their minds.

Then one day the order came down for them to be executed by firing squad. Lined up facing the executioners’ rifles, the monks began praying again, which appeared ludicrous to the Chinese since nothing could possibly save them now.

One PLA officer approached the monks and asked what god they were praying to and what they had to gain by praying at this juncture, when death was a certainty. One monk replied, “Actually we are not praying for ourselves. We are praying for you.”

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2000 years prior, there had been another man who believed in intercessory prayer. Beaten and tortured and then impaled to a cross, he had raised his eyes to the heavens and said,” God, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This piece is on folks who follow that man more closely than any other religious group or sect on earth – the Amish.

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The Amish are an orthodox Anabaptist Christian sect that believes in remaining as close to Jesus Christ’s teachings as possible. The more I read about them, the more I love what I am reading…. and the more stark the contrast between the Amish and the rest of us appears.

Let’s get to know them a bit. Very interesting folk they certainly are, sprinkled sparsely over parts of the US, like roses growing inside a cesspool of consumption. (Yes, I said cesspool. Only in America does a father gift his 8-year old son an Uzi automatic assault rifle for Christmas. This actually happened in 2010 in Manchester, Conn. The boy accidentally shot himself in the head and died on the spot).

The Amish were a part of the European Free-Church along with Mennonites, Brethren Quakers and other denominations that first broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the mid-1500s with the German reformist and founder of the protestant church, Martin Luther. They generally hailed from Germany, Switzerland and The Netherlands.

Breaking away from an entrenched and essentially evil institution like the then murderously oppressive Roman Catholic Church, was not easy. What followed were decades of persecution and wholesale murder, as the Catholic Church tried to wipe out ‘emerging competition’.

But the Free Church survived and soon after, one of Martin Luther’s colleagues, Menno Simons, formed his own sect, the Mennonites, a sect that believes in living a simple life, of peace and brotherhood, single-mindedly dedicated to the way Jesus Christ intended life to be led.

As time went by, a group within the Mennonites emerged, that wanted stricter adherence to the Christian faith. Led by a Swiss tailor turned Anabaptist leader, Jacob Amman, the Amish movement was born. The Amish belief is – if you want to live as a true disciple of Christ, you have to do without some of the comforts, pleasures and conveniences that others around you take for granted.

Some Amish and Mennonites migrated to the United States, starting in the early 18th century. They initially settled in Pennsylvania. There they spoke a language that gradually morphed into a guttural tongue that is today known as Pennsylvania Dutch. Other waves of Amish immigrants established themselves in New York, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio. Around the same time, one group traveled north and settled in southern Ontario.

Over the years, the Amish have attempted to preserve the 17th century rural European way of life, consciously avoiding the use of modern technology and developing practices that isolate them from modern American culture. Many ordinary Americans, especially the bible-belt folks, think of the Amish as freaks who belong in the looney bin.

Innocence, bewildered by excess. A group of Amish teenagers in New York’s Times Square (Photo courtesy: nypost.com)

The Amish are more fundamentalist than the Mennonites, the differences being in how they practice their faith. While the overall doctrine followed by both is similar, the Mennonites are generally more tolerant of technology and the outside world than the Amish.

A few Mennonite congregations accept higher education. They believe that it strengthens their religious beliefs. The Amish, on the other hand, feel that the outside world and its ways only corrupt the purity of their faith. They forbid education beyond secondary school, believing that today’s high school curriculum corrupts young minds by introducing moral sciences that teach students to accept alternative lifestyles such as homosexuality and the study of Darwin’s theory of evolution as the accepted origin of mankind.

Amish children are truly angelic. Go through the photos at the website amishphoto.com and you’ll see what I mean. The kids go to Old Order schools that are one-room joints where they learn only the basics. Here are some of pics I took from amishphoto.com, that are especially cute…..

Cuddling must be a major pastime among Amish adults, with angels like these. Amish kids walk around without any footwear (Photos courtesy: Amishphoto.com)

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When the children reach adolescence, they enter a period that the Amish call Rumspringa, in which boys and girls are given greater personal freedom and allowed to form romantic relationships, usually ending with the choice of baptism into the church or leaving the community. Rumspringa is a Pennsylvania German word for ‘running around.’

Amish men keep untrimmed beards and wear jackets and coats that have hooks and eyes instead of buttons. Their women dress in plain 18^th century-style rough cotton clothes with long sleeves and ankle length skirts. In the case of Mennonites, you might find a few dressed the way we do.

The Amish mode of transportation is horse and buggy and the farm lands are tilled with horse-drawn implements that are forged in coal-fired black-smithies. They don’t draw power from the grid and have no electricity, either at homes or at the places of work. Mennonites differ in that while they do not go overboard with the latest gadgetry, they do not believe that using electricity or motorized farm machinery and trucks shakes their faith.

The iconic Amish horse-drawn buggy (Photo courtesy: kidsbritannica.com)

The Mennonites have historically sought to increase their fellowship through missionary activities throughout the world. Today, there are Mennonites churches from Bolivia to Ethiopia and Nigeria to Indonesia. There are 1.7 million Mennonites worldwide.

On the other hand, the Amish have never felt the need for reaching out across the seas and converting others to their faith. Today there are just 290,000 Amish in the world, of whom 250,000 are living in the US and another 2000 in Canadian province of Ontario and the rest in Europe.

Two hours’ drive south-east of Montreal is a tiny Mennonite community of 15 families in a picturesque village called Roxton Falls, population – 1300. These Mennonites are making plans to leave their homes and farms behind and move to neighboring Ontario so that their children will not be forced by the Quebec government to attend government-sanctioned schools.

Provincial Quebec officials have threatened the families with legal action, including the potential loss of their children to the Child Welfare Services, if they do not abide by the mandatory education curriculum taught here.

But leaders of the community have decided that they will leave Quebec before giving up their children to ‘state indoctrination’.

It is sad to see them go, given that there is something refreshing about them. They lead clean healthy lives devoid of alcohol, drugs and crime. They bother no one and in fact, except for their quaint lifestyle which makes them something of a tourist attraction, they enjoy a good rapport with their non-Mennonite neighbors.

A couple of years back we packed a picnic basket and headed to Roxton Falls to see and maybe meet some of the Mennonites but the congregation was at church and while we couldn’t hang around we did love seeing the old-style barns and farm machinery everywhere. And horses, lots of horses and windmills and just about every structure made from wood. Mennonites being not as rigid as the Amish, we did see cars and electric lines.

Amish beliefs are quaint and one would imagine that the Amish would gradually disappear from the face of the earth, overtaken and overwhelmed by the technology and the avarice of the outside world, but quite the opposite has happened. The Amish have grown in numbers. From 165,000 in the US in 2000, they are now 250,000 strong today.

Inside the community, there are no secrets. Grudges or resentment toward others or rivalries over a girl’s attention are normal human emotions and these are discussed and resolved peacefully, without any fallout. As we saw in the Nickel Mines shootings, the Amish’s capacity to collectively forgive and move on is deeply spiritual and moving.

This is not to say however, that violence does not exist at all. In October, 2011, there was an altercation between two religious groups within an Amish community in Holmes County, Ohio, where members of one group used shears to chop off the hair and beards of a 79-year old Amish bishop and his family, accusing them of ‘not living right’.

Inside Amish communities, crimes such as robbery or homicide are practically non-existent, though there has been one case of cocaine trafficking at the Alberta/US border in 2013. There are no locks on doors. Every member is aware of everyone else’s lives and problems and involved in trying to make sure everyone is cared for. Male members call themselves ‘brethren’. Love is expressed as a spiritual kinship within the community. The community provides social and economic support, sheltering its members from cradle to grave.

A bit of ‘Rumspringa’ – Adolescent Amish girls happy in a ball game. Rumspringa, in Pennsylvania German, means running around having a bit of fun and frolic (Photo courtesy: Wikimedia)

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The Amish believe that only within a stable community will individuals find security and satisfaction, not by being individualistic. No one strikes out on his own or refuses to share. It’s a society that is devoid of alcoholism, divorce, alienation and loneliness in old age and this ensures a suicide rate far below the national average in both, Canada and the US.

The Amish foster group activities and there are many things that they do together, besides those related to farming. One is called barn raising, an event that looks more like a social event than hard labor that it really is.

Occasionally, there is a need for a new barn to be built in an Amish community. A new member may be starting up farming. Sometimes disaster strikes and a barn may burn down. The men get together and build a new barn for the member. Even little children help out, running chores, handing tools and stuff to the men. The women gather together and lay out tables full of food and refreshments for the workers.

An Amish community gathers together to construct a barn for a fellow family – an amazing feat that is typically accomplished within a just few days.  (Photo courtesy: Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau / Terry Ross).

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Though women are involved in almost every activity, even the more arduous ones such as tilling, sowing and harvesting, the Amish are still a staunchly patriarchal society, with women playing second fiddle. Amish women are expected to obey the dictates of their men, cook and feed them and bear their children.

There have been exceptions though. Like Katy Stoltz.

Growing up, Katy was forbidden from having her picture taken because of tradition. On top of school work she spent hours in the fields pitching hay as well as cooking, cleaning and looking after her siblings. Before school she would go out and feed the cows. After school she had to take care of the calves and then make dinner for the family. She spent six hours at a time out in the fields raking hay. Her clothes were shapeless dresses and bonnets and she had to cover her head at all times.

But in 2012, Katy’s life changed forever. She appeared in a reality TV show Breaking Amish. Soon afterward, she was signed up by a modelling agency and now she looks gorgeous in saucy lingerie shoots.

Amish model, Katy Stoltz, before and after. Innocence transformed (Photo courtesy: dailymirror.com)

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Amish women are startlingly beautiful, with flawless complexions and direct, guileless eyes. It was just a matter of time before one of them did what Katy did. But Amish elders think modelling is one of the worst things a woman can do. They see it as flaunting your body and being vain. The elders in the community took Katy’s photo spreads with sighs of resignation.

Katy’s parents have forgiven her transgression. They did not engage in honor killing as some other fundamentalist societies would probably have done. They keep urging her to come back home, but Katy has no desire to return to the Amish way of life. She in fact signed up to do a second series, Return to Amish.

Will girls like Katy start an exodus from the Amish way of life? The world is changing faster than the Amish can hold it back. I am afraid she might have set in motion a trend among other Amish girls.

Amish girls are startlingly beautiful, with flawless complexions that are born from eating organic farm fresh foods. The sport direct and guileless stares and ready, innocent smiles. I am considering asking the Lord to make me an Amish man the next time. With a woman like one of these, who needs electricity? (Photos sourced from Google Images)

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The Amish way of life is led by the truths as taught in the Book of James, which exhorts followers to live with simplicity, grace and obedience to elders. Not being very literate, the Amish avoid immersing themselves in any deep theological study. Besides, with all the hard manual labor, farming, tending, fixing and mending, there is very little time for sitting around deep in spiritual reflection.

Constancy is valued above novelty and innovation, qualities that they view with suspicion. The Amish take pleasure in repeated patterns of life, greetings, and rituals. They do not believe in multi-culturism either. You are welcome to visit them as a tourist but you would be discouraged from living among them if you weren’t from the community. For them, other values, practices and beliefs are not legitimate and therefore not to be tolerated.

Marriages outside the community will lead to immediate expulsion. Congregations being small, the ban ensures a limited gene pool and consequently, genetic birth defects are not uncommon. On the other hand the clean living, supported by fresh organic farm produce, endows Amish communities with 60% less incidences of heart disease and cancers than the North American average.

While I look upon the Amish’s quaint lifestyle and isolationist beliefs with amusement, I cannot help but admire their courage in believing in themselves and their faith. I hope to visit one of these ‘islands of sanity’ that are settled in Ontario, some day.

Better still, as Nancy Sleeth dreamed of in the quote at the start of this piece, I dream that some day the world shall turn ‘almost Amish’.

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