Graphic Novels and Culture Klatsch

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Book Lust

Last night at dinner, Pat said, "I put The Elephanta Suite on your night-table. I think you'll like it, and it has big print."

I frowned.

She smiled.

Pat's a super-fast reader. I am a slow reader.

Malgudi Days, which I'm loving, is right up my alley. Simple. Essential. Touching.

I've written here before that I'm a slow reader, but a relatively fast writer. Probably, that's why I prefer to write than to read.

Growing up, I was ashamed of my slow reading speed and I know it's why I majored in Comparative Literature. I needed to prove I could read and comprehend in not one, but two languages (English and Hebrew).

Also, it's probably why I like graphic novels. In our three-plus months here, I've read both of Sarnath Banerjee's, Corridor and The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers.

When I was buying the ...Wondrous Capers book at Blossom Book House in Bangalore, a pretty woman looked at it in my hand and smiled, saying that she appreciated Banerjee's books, too. Pat was right there and enjoyed listening to the exchange, she told me later.

Also, later, Pat and I agreed that while at the bookstore, we felt in the thick of the society, like we did when we were with mostly Indians on that early-Sunday-morning Lal Bagh tour.

"Have you read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel?" I asked the woman, "It's actually a graphic memoir, and amazing!" (I wrote a bit about it previously here.)

"No."

"You'd love it! It's the most literary book of its kind you've ever seen! It's Fun Home, and Fun is short for Funeral, like, Funeral Home."

I like the manga Buddha series, she said, pointing to a daunting stack of titles. Wikipedia's great because now that I've scanned the info. on the Buddha books, I'm interested in going back to the bookstore and trying at least the first one.

Deathly Digression

The bookstore didn't have Fun Home, but said they could order it. I said, "That's OK. I own it already, and it's amazing." Later, it occurred to me that "funeral home" might be a bit of a foreign concept here, since most of the dead are cremated.

I must admit that I'm willing to be ignorant about this for now, as I don't feel like researching the Indian funeral home industry, or lack thereof. Ideally, one of the people who finds his or her way to this blog will know and will educate me.

Digging for Discrimination

The latest Banerjee novel is the closest I've come to meeting a Jewish, Indian immigrant, and the character's fictional(!) as well as multi-century and multi-geographical. The book is stranger than his first, and compelling.

As a non-fiction Jew myself, when I read about how the character is a merchant for the rich, I found myself digging for an anti-Semitic sub-text, mostly without any satisfaction...namely, I didn't really find one.

From experience, though, I became nervous, looking at cartoon depictions of Jews by a cartoon-artist who wasn't Jewish. Historically, and even currently, they were not typically flattering.

Still, even without anything overtly anti-, the character's role reminded me of a conversation I had a month ago with one of the otherwise smarter people in India.

"I wouldn't guess you were Jewish," she said.

"Why not?"

"Well, you don't seem like a bean-counter."

"What do you mean?"

"Jews are known for being careful with their money, though nothing compared to the Chinese!"

"Where did you learn that?"

"You just seem more fun --"

"I didn't think there were enough Jews in India for anyone to have an opinion about us. What have you read?"

At that point, another of the smarter people in India, who was listening, interjected, "Anyone here *would* have read."

"What? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? I heard that that was big elsewhere in Asia, actually."

They looked at me blankly, and so I inferred that the nutty rag didn't ring a bell. "What if I made a generalization about Indians?"

"We wouldn't mind. In fact, we're terrible to ourselves. If you walked into a restaurant here with a disabled Indian friend, who needed assistance, they'd help you first because you're white."

I've never felt so white as I do here. I've always thought of my skin as greenish and definitely not pink, like full-fledged white people (like white people who are not on the hate-list of the Ku Klux Klan). And yet in India, I feel like a white person.

At a glance in the United States, of course, I am registered as white. I do not feel as white there, though, both proportionally and culturally. That is, there are many more white people in the United States than here, and so there's a hierarchy of whiteness, I feel, that is absent here. Instead, there seems to be a hierarchy of brownness. It is definitely all relative.

To India-based Indians, in my experience, Jews are mostly literary characters or occasional figures in news from Israel; we're not part of their basic frame of reference, and so here, I'm just white and also assumed to be Christian.

I can't recall if I wrote this here or not, but during our first week, staying at the Windsor, we asked the concierge to see if there were a synagogue or anywhere for us to worship with other Jews during our Sabbath.

At the end of the week, she reported hopefully, "There is no synagogue, but I have the address of a Methodist church if you like."

Deck the Cars with Strings of Jasmine

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Comparative Conversation with a Colleague

Yesterday, a colleague who typically works from home appeared as a pleasant surprise, wearing a rich, dark-and-light, pink-patterned, thick silk sari, looking elegant as always. She was coming in to the office to settle some expenses.

"I thought about you during my commute today. I saw the same Aum symbol that you painted [in vermilion] over your doorway on several cars and buses." (In celebration of the final, pivotal days of Navrati, Channa, my driver, also strung yellow mums on the hood and across the grill of the car, and hung jasmine from the rear-view mirror.) "Remind me: What does Aum stand for?"

"It's really the idea of one god as compared with idol worship."

"And that's the worship you do, of the one god?"

"I do both. My mother worships idols, though her father was a member of Arya Samaj."

"Arya Samaj?"

"Yes, they were scholars of the Vedas and felt there should be no distinction among castes, and no idol worship.

"How is that possible, if your grandfather was against idol worship, that your mother was able to do it?"

"Because her mother did."

"So they're not far enough apart religiously that it caused problems in their marriage, I guess, since both of them were still Hindu --"

"Right."

"Sikhs are also monotheistic, aren't they?"

"Well, they don't believe in a human sort of god, but they do have nine gurus, including Gobind Singh. Sikhs used to be part of many families. Originally, a Sikh was just the first-born son of any Hindu family, whose function was to protect the family."

"First-born sons are special in Judaism, too." (If you click on the link in the previous sentence, among other details of the tradition, you'll learn, "According to the traditional rabbinic interpretation...the duties of a priest fell upon the eldest son of each family. The first-born was to be dedicated to God in order to perform this task.")

"And they really became separate only in the last century. Things became bad when the army entered the Golden Temple in 1984, to arrest a terrorist."

"Oh, that's awful that they defiled the temple --" I said, recalling the reason I'm forbidden, as a non-Hindu, to enter some temples. (Months ago, I told a colleague that I thought it was exclusive to be barred from entering some temples and he said that the exclusion resulted from the British, having desecrated a number of Hindu temples pre-independence.)

"Just as there is Pakistan, the Sikhs wanted their own state, Khalistan...."

"I'm most comfortable, talking about others' religions when I can find parallels or parts of them that remind me of mine. Then they don't seem so foreign...like the nine-day Navrati festival together with Diwali remind me of Chanukah, which is our eight-day festival of lights."

My colleague's eyes became wide and she said, "Wow!" smiling at the similarity.

"Yeah, I was a Comparative Literature major and I guess I always enjoy being comparative."

"I studied Child Psychology and was able to do some comparative work, too. A number of us lived with and studied the tribe in the east that speaks Ho --"

"Ho?"

"Yes, it's a really rural tribe, and also the Nairs of Kerala (in South India) and the Khasi of Central India, in Madhya Pradesh. They're all matrilineal.

"Neat."

"And we did some other work, comparing other parts of Asia with India."

"Like where?"

"Like China and Japan....I didn't like the clinical part of Psychology, though, as it made me so sad to meet with, for example, autistic children and --"

"My partner Pat got a Masters in Psych., but opted out; the clinical part upset her, too."

I could have kept talking with my colleague all afternoon, but I knew I needed to let her get her work done, so that she could get back to her holiday celebration, and I was also trying to leave early to work from home for the rest of the day, so that I could enable Channa to continue his holiday celebration with minimal interruption.

At 2 o'clock, when I sat down in the backseat, Channa reached over to the other front seat and handed me a package. "Sweets for the holiday, Ma'am."

"Oh, Channa, I should have known to do the same for you. Thank you! It's so kind of you!" It was a small, foil, heavy tray of something. The bag referred to "pure ghee." My doctor forbids me to eat sugar to help keep my blood sugar in check for my otosclerosis, but I knew to accept the candy in any case.

When I got it home, Pat and I opened it, to see if it might be of interest to her, and also because I was curious what candy made of pure, clarified butter (ghee) would look like. It looked like a tray of solidified butter and hardly smelled sweet.

It was a perfect example of how there's not necessarily a 1:1 translation or parallel between what I value and what people of other cultures value, but how there are still universal values we share, e.g., gift-giving/receiving.

One more comparison comes to mind: Last night, I was wired and couldn't fall asleep till 1:30 am. I started a book by R.K. Narayan, which my friend Chitra recommended to me, Malgudi Days. Could the author be the Indian Sholom Aleichem or I.B. Singer? I'll have to keep reading to see.