Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Hindi Words of Arabic Origin

When I was in the tenth grade, I studied a little bit of Arabic before concentrating on Hindi. Hindi has been influenced a great deal by the Arabic language, and a hybrid tongue, Urdu, is even spoken in Pakistan. Knowing the Arabic alphabet and being able to read Urdu script really helped to east the transition between English to Hindi, I think. So if you are interested in learning Hindi but don't have access to a school with lessons (which I completely understand - they're impossible to find), try taking an Arabic course instead. Though not terribly common, Arabic lessons are simpler to find than Hindi ones. And of course, Arabic is a particularly important language to have some knowledge of in order to understand current events.

अदब (adab) – good manners
आदत (adat) – custom; tradition
ऐना (aina) - eye
ऐनक (ainak) – glasses (from Arabic أين)
अजीब (ajib) – strange
अक्ल (akl) – intellect (from Arabic عقل)
आलम (alam) – the universe
अलीम (alim) – learned
आशिक (ashik) – lover (from Arabic عشيق)
अजं (azam) – great (as in ‘मुग़ल इ अजं’, great Mughal empire)
अजमत (azmat) - greatness
अज़ीज़ (aziz) – dear; अजिजी is a girls’ name
दुनिया (duniya) – world (not in the geographic sense)
कसम (kasam) – promise
वक़्त (waqt) – time
सब्र (sabr) - patience
जन्नत (jannat) - heaven
मुसाफिर (musafir) – traveler
मुश्कील, मुसीबत (mushkil, musiibat) – problem
आमिर (amir) – rich
शहीद, कुर्बानी (shaheed, qurbaani) – sacrifice
इंसान (insaan) – man
जिस्म (jism) – body
ख्याल (khayal) – hopes; dreams, i.e. “I Had a Dream” by Martin Luther King
माफ़ (maaf) – forgive
हवा (hawa) – wind; air
अलीम (alim) – scientist
ग़म (gham) – a sort of pain; sadness
बस (bas) – enough! That’s it!
इन्तिज़ार (intizaar) – to wait
काफी (kaphi) – enough, sufficient
मदद (madad) – help
मोहबत (mohabbat) – love; a general context
इश्क (ishq) – love between two people
महबूबा (mehbooba) – my lover
ग़लत (galat) – wrong; i.e. क्या ग़लत है?; What’s wrong?
सवाल (sawal) – question
जवाब (jawab) – answer
दिमाघ (dimagh) – brain
मतलब (matlab) – asking for something (from Arabic تالاب)
किताब (kitab) – book
मौज्रिम (moojrim) - criminal
इशारा (isharaa) – a sign
कुर्सी (kursi) – chair
दौकने (doukane) - store
हकीकत (hakikat) – the truth
इन्सान (insaan) – a person; human being
यानि (yani) – meaning [that]… (a common sentence-filler like ‘um’, ‘yeah’, or ‘well…’)

A Lesson in Learning Hindi Through English

English is a hybrid of many different tongues, including Hindi. Can you believe it? You've been speaking Hindi all your life and never knew it.

Some common words:

Anaconda – from Sinhalese henakandaya, “whip snake”
Bandana – from Bandhna, “to tie a scarf around the head”
Bangle – from Baangri, a type of bracelet
Bungalow – from Banglaa, lit. “a Bengali house”
Candy – from Sanskrit khanda, “sugar”
Cashmere – from Kashmir, the Himalayan state in India where wool is from
Cheetah – from c’itaa, “speckled”
Cot – from Khat, a portable bed
Cushy – from khushi, “happy, soft, comfortable”
Himalaya – from himalayah, “place of snow”
Indigo – from the Indus river; a tropical pea plant that can be used to make dark blue dye
Jungle – from jangal, “forest”
Khaki – “dust colored”
Loot – from luta, meaning “to steal”
Mango – from Malay manga or Tamil manaky, a fruit
Mongol – from Mughal, an Indian emperor
Mugger – from magar, meaning “crocodile”
Orange – from niranj, “orange”
Pariah – from pariah, an untouchable Tamil caste
Pundit – from pandit, an educated person
Sentry – from santri, “armed guard”
Shampoo – from champoo, “to massage”; i.e. to massage the scalp
Swastika – originally an Indian symbol denoting good luck. From svastika, “well-being”
Thug – from thag, “thief”

Dhadkan Oct./Nov. Issue Released!

The latest Dhadkan is now floating around. See me if you'd like a copy, or try sifting through your neighbor's trash.

A Harvest of Water - Nov. 2009 National Geographic

An insightful and moving piece on rainwater harvesting in India:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/11/india-rain/corbett-text

पानी के पॉवर - Pani ke Power?

Green is the new black. Quiet is the new loud. And…water is the new oil?

It has been said the next war will be fought over water, the liquid natural resource that covers seventy percent of the earth’s surface. And why not? We often overlook the intrinsic power that water has over us – without it, life cannot exist.

For us humans, though, we need fresh water – which only makes up two percent of the earth’s total available water, and even most of that is frozen in glaciers or underground.

You can see, then, why wasting it could be a problem.

The most accessible source of freshwater is underground. We use diesel pumps to extract the water fairly cheaply for use in the home, and also for irrigation of crops. The Midwest consumes the most groundwater for agriculture; most notably to produce corn, which is then used to feed cattle – they fetch a better price after butchering.

The problem is that we are pumping the water too fast. We have to wait for rains to replenish the source, but not only is rain an unpredictable faucet, but even with rainfall it is becoming progressively more and more difficult for water to be re-absorbed into the ground. Why? Well frankly, there’s little ground left. It has been covered with cement, tar, houses, parking lots, buildings, you name it.

(Thought: What would happen if we stopped eating beef?)

The consequences of a shortage of water are even direr for the poor. In India, the cost of women fetching water is equivalent to a national loss of Rs 1000 Crore, or approximately $214 million.
In a country where most people make less than two dollars a day, $214 million is an enormous sum. As if such an injustice weren’t enough, 1.8 million children die each year from diarrhea – 4,900 deaths per day. At any given time, nearly half the hospital patients in India are suffering from water-related diseases. Worst, people living in the slums often pay 5-10 times more for water than do wealthier Indians living in the same city.

What can be done?

A new crop is on the market: rainwater harvesting. By capturing the runoff from buildings and sculpting the landscape to slow the flow of rain, we can ensure that we are collecting the water rather than wasting it. The water can then be used directly to refill empty tanks.

By installing water pipes on rooftops, in tanks or underground wells, urban families can conserve water while rural farmers can plant trees and create barriers on slopes to make the most of this precious resource.

“I think the simplicity of rainwater harvesting has made the water crisis much more approachable as a whole,” says Sweta P., a student in Udaipur. “When people feel daunted by new things, they tend not to get involved, but when the task seems to be fairly simple, their involvement level rises.”

“When I see people wasting water, it makes me really angry,” says Marttanda G., an economics student in Guwahati. “People here know there is a shortage of water. They see their neighbors suffering, but they still waste it.”

How can we reach out to people?

“People think the government will fix it; they have all the power. It’s so hard to make them realize that the government hasn’t – and won’t – do anything,” Sweta explains. “And even if they ever do, people will be dying of thirst by then.”

“Groups don’t understand,” says Marttanda. “But if you talk to an individual, you can explain the process to them, answer their questions. Really have a conversation. If they’re interested, they will tell others and the information will get passed on anyway.”

Though the shortage of water affects people in rural areas most harshly, it is those in cities that waste the most. Laws are being passed that require water pipes to be installed in urban homes and buildings.

Who knows? With heightened awareness and action, there may be a chance of having water for everyone in the years to come.

Shikshantar – The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development

The idea of school has always perplexed me. Sure, it seems well-intentioned. Sometimes I even like it. How can I complain? Every once in a while I get a decent instructor and subject matter that can hold my attention for the full ninety minutes. But when I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City last weekend, my eyes were opened up to more than just the paintings and sculptures that surrounded me.

Remind me again why I go to school for an Art History class that costs $270 (not including the textbook, which the professor reads from verbatim anyway) when I could spend 25 cents to go and see the real things?

Drilling an ‘artist’s vocabulary’ into our heads becomes utterly unnecessary when you walk through the exhibits; the words come as naturally as the works are striking. The contemplative restraint and repose of medieval art is plainly demonstrated by a man that seems to sigh while getting his eyes gouged out in an intricate relief altarpiece by Embriachi, while Jean Cornu’s Renaissance-era Venus Giving Arms to Aeneas’ sweeping melodrama pulls you in so closely, that if you’re not careful you might set off an alarm.

Oops.

(To be fair, I don’t think that even Jesus, or the Buddha, or whoever, could have resisted touching these sculptures. Maybe for a little while, sure – even I could do that. But lock them up, alone, in the museum for ten days, and you see what happens. They’re like hot stoves to children – burning with energy and simply begging to be touched. I swear, if you step close enough, these things defy the first law of thermodynamics.)

Someone please explain, exactly, why I need somebody else to evaluate, on a scale of 0-100, whether or not I am sufficiently appreciating art (as if that’s a valid thing to judge anyone for in the first place), but especially when that ‘art’ is just two-dimensional pictures in a book? Since when can x-number of credit hours honestly and accurately determined how much worthwhile knowledge I have gained?

And I’m not the only one to feel this way.

“There is so much pressure on engineering here,” says Sagar, an engineering student in Bangalore. “It’s considered by most to be ‘the best thing’ to do. If someone were to take up the pure sciences, or architecture, or the arts (God forbid), then people begin to think he has done so only because he isn’t meritorious enough for engineering. And in engineering again, there are these ridiculous notions. Computer or Electronics Engineering is considered to be the most prestigious. Almost everyone wants to do it, without the slightest idea as to what it really is, or what it means for them. And people inwardly sigh if you tell them you’re doing Chemical Engineering, or Metallurgy.

There are so many people here who are so unimaginably narrow-minded that think if they do well at college, or get some rank, they are successful in life. Outside school, they don’t exist. They have no hobbies; they are indifferent to so many issues. Here, in India, if you can learn the textbook by heart, you can secure a one hundred percent in your exams. And that’s the ‘successful’ everybody wants to see. It’s pathetic.”

In a country that desperately needs the creativity of its citizens to come together and craft solutions to its infinitely complex problems, it seems a crime to standardize education and the definition of ‘success’.

So when fourteen friends got together and decided to take a cycling yaatra (यात्रा - journey) around the city of Udaipur, Rajasthan for one week in order to reclaim the freedom of their education, it was a revolutionary gesture. How could these students, mostly from middle-class homes, be rebelling against a ‘privilege’ that is such a precious commodity to lower-class Indians?

The first tenet of the Shikshantar movement addresses the question bluntly: rather than being an escape from impoverishment, the formal education system is a means of stratification between the educated and the uneducated; it perpetuates inequality by labeling, sorting, and ranking human beings. It propagates the viewpoint that diversity is an obstacle, which must be removed rather than utilized if society wishes to progress. Schooling confines the motivation for learning to a superficial reward system, and disconnects knowledge from practical wisdom and living experiences.

Formal education privileges literacy in a few elite languages and degrades human expression and creation in other tongues. It causes people to distrust their native languages while relying upon newspapers, TV and radio for reliable information. It not only limits the scope of knowledge, then, but also reduces the sphere of opportunities for learning through abstract barriers (such as culture and language) but also physically (by institutionalizing education.) It invalidates learning experiences outside the four walls of the schoolhouse and of the English language. It degrades the dignity of labor; the learning that takes place through day-to-day experience and physical work.

It artificially separates human rationality and human emotion, inhibiting the sensitivity and aesthetic sensibility needed for creative output. Feelings are eschewed as inappropriate at times when they could actually be used as motivation and valuable tools for progress. Arguably the worst effect, it disintegrates the intergenerational bonds of families and communities, causing people to increasingly rely upon the government, science and technology, and the global market for their sense of identity, livelihood and self-worth. It exploits people, nature, and knowledge on a market of buy-sell relationships.

The students combated this by using the world as their classroom a week. They carried no money and refused to engage in monetary transactions; they didn’t eat without an honest day’s worth of physical labor. They approached the surrounding farming villages as learners seeking to change their own urban lives, not as ‘teachers’ trying to change others. And, most importantly, they offered of themselves freely and received from others with gratitude and humility.

Most learning is experiential anyway, isn’t it? We hardly get to pick and choose the lessons life teaches us.

The formal education system we have today was historically designed for the industrial economy. The public schools – which serve the university elite – emerged in the 1800s and reached their zenith in the 1950s. In the old days, education was one-size-fits-all. Schools have since been steeped in history and static knowledge; they fail to capture the here-and-now and to prepare us for contemporary society and the emerging issues of our time.

The Venezuelan Ministry for the Development of Human Intelligence enacted a series of programs and projects in the 1970s and ‘80s to improve its educational system and expound upon each person’s individual strengths and talents. These programs were offered for people of all ages – from birth to elderly age. By employing every available resource and reaching out to people across the nation, from the farms and rural areas to urban communities, the Venezuelan government promoted life-long learning for people of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds. Our nation is now slowly awakening to the educational needs of our times as we slip further behind on the global scale. President Obama is urging all Americans to seek higher education. But we must also take into account the radical changes that need to be made for college degrees to actually be considered valuable, and also to ensure that the disadvantaged peoples of the United States receive equal opportunities and ease of access to tools that can change their communities and their lives. Encouraging creativity through government programs, such as Venezuela has done, may be a starting point.

We also need to get honest about what ‘education’ really means. We either need educational reform in order to promote individual freedoms and the pursuit of happiness, or admit that school is designed to produce faithful, obedient citizens for jobs that require little more than technical skill and de-emphasize originality in the workplace. (I’m guessing the latter won’t be too popular.)

If you’re interested in learning more about the Shikshantar movements, check out their website at www.swaraj.org/shikshantar. The site has a huge database of alternative schooling-related articles that go into much more detail and propose a variety of future frameworks for societal learning.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

We women all know it but hate to admit it: Oprah Winfrey is the American goddess.
I confess: I read her book club recommendations verbatim. And they’re usually excellent reading. But not this one.

After a sticky divorce (aren’t they all?), writer Elizabeth Gilbert sets sail across the world to re-discover herself and achieve spiritual epiphany, including a several-month stint at an ashram in India.

I don’t see why she bothered to be in India, anyway, as she befriended a Texan and bemoaned all her crises to him the whole time she was there. And it’s not like you can’t wake up at 3AM and practice yoga in the States, if you really had any willful inclination to “find God”, or whatever Gilbert prattled on about ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent was her sobbing and occasionally shouting to the heavens at the injustice of it all. Oh, and there were some little bits about “seeing a blue light” and being filled with “blue energy”, which apparently cannot be found in America, because, you know, God isn’t here. Or maybe he/she/it is, but he/she/it is green. Or yellow. Or pink. Or something.

To be marketed as a ‘travel’ book is an utter lie. Rarely does the reader get to stop and enjoy the scenery. Rather, one is subjected to the endless nauseating rants and raucous outbursts of the author.

If you’re looking for a pat-on-the-back-reassurance that the world is okay, that the universe falls into perfect order, and that everything is going to be just fine, complemented by some one-dimensional sex and so-called ‘friendships’, then this is the book for you.

If you are actually interested in learning about India, then you will learn nothing from Gilbert.

Sadly, you will learn an unfortunate truth about Indo-American relations with regard to the phenomenon of American recreational travel.

I am disappointed by the number of people I meet who have been to India, and then manage to return and know next to nothing about the place. They complain about the music, the food, the poverty, the traffic, on and on. They can’t string two words together of a language other than their own. They have learned nothing new; they have no appreciation for where they’ve just been. They, like Gilbert, traveled to India with their own agendas, with preconceived notions about the way India should be; about the way the world should be. In return, they end up either disappointed or permanently clueless.

Gilbert is in the permanently clueless category.

Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki

Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki

I have a standing joke, if there is such a thing, with one of the customers that comes into the restaurant every Saturday night where I work. He asks if I’ll be in church tomorrow, and I always reply with some stupid one-liner or another. And perhaps, after awhile, I am a little afraid that the roof will collapse if I go.

But several weeks ago I went to a Sunday service. Don’t get the wrong impression; I didn’t pay attention to the sermon, of course. The organ’s tones were deafening and the crowd of people rising and lowering at arrhythmic intervals might have been distracting if the lighting in the balcony hadn’t been so perfectly conducive to getting lost in thought.

Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan is a collection of memoirs of his life as a Dalit shortly after India won its independence from Great Britain. Though untouchability was indeed outlawed in the country’s constitution (an untouchable, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, provided the document’s framework), Valmiki demonstrates in heartbreaking detail the prejudice and injustice that still prevails. And yet, up until that day, nothing had very deeply stirred me about this book.
Hunched over the book’s final pages in the last pew of the sanctuary, I discovered it. It was a little sliver of a line, nearly ten pages from the end, that brought the story full circle for me, and it was all hinging on this single, unintentionally poignant axis. It wasn’t even about an event that had happened in the author’s life, but rather a curt blurb about a Maharashtra community of Dalits sacrificing a child in order to persuade the gods to bless them with enough grain to survive another year.

I was suddenly and irrevocably grateful for my little brother sitting next to me, for being born into a country with an (at least supposedly) non-discriminatory public education system, for being able to eat dinner at a table every night. Or every other night. Or, okay, maybe I can’t remember the last time I ate dinner at a table, but it was dinner nonetheless. These things, which I’ve taken for granted on far too many occasions, now came crashing into perspective at once. I was filled with a sort of joy and despair all at once, a ‘malegria’, if you will. I handed my brother a relatively squashed Tootsie Roll from my purse and volunteered for the community CROP Hunger Walk the next week.

Maybe, I think, it’s these small gestures that count the most.

The White Tiger

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

I’m not usually a fan of Booker Prize winners. Originality, I think, does not always equal quality. When I first started getting into it, I thought, if it weren’t for the story taking place in India, I wouldn’t be reading this crap. But then, I couldn’t help it. As you read, the story becomes progressively more and more strange, wild, and darkly enticing, keeping you on the edge of your seat because you can never quite trust Balram Halwai, the “White Tiger”. He’s everything to love and hate about India. He’s corrupt and cynical and clever and cunning. He’s
chaotic and consummate, charismatic and celeritous. All those C’s.

The story is written as a series of seven letters to the Premier Wen Jiabao of China, beginning with the birth of a no-name boy in the small village of Laxmangarh, near Bodh Gaya, where the water buffalo is the head of the family and the townsfolk are forever at the mercy of crooked and dispassionate landlords. The tale progresses as Balram rises to the status of a Bangalorean entrepreneur through methods of eavesdropping, nicknaming, cab-driving, and murder. It is a profound and unapologetic portrait of the political strife of contemporary India, an informal but striking dissertation on poverty and terrorism and sacrifice.

I used to be very judgmental of books like this – books with no righteousness, no morality. And then I read another little book called Letters to A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. He said something along the lines of, “Literary critics will have their day, but their opinions are determined by their times. You have to appreciate a writer’s work for what it is, for how it speaks to you.” And this, I think, is completely fair.

By the end of the book, I realized that I had grossly misjudged Adiga. Rarely does an author exhibit such prowess at displaying profound ethical insight without saturating his words with overt sentimentality.

Thank you, Mr. Adiga. Maybe now I will go back to Steinbeck with an open mind.