[Oe List ...] Mourning in Mumbai

[Shelley Hahn]

Thank you, Jaime, for sharing your reflections and insights with us all.
I greatly appreciate your eloquence and your ability to create such vivid
images with your words.  I look forward to reading more of your reflections
in the future!

Fond regards,
Shelley Hahn

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 11:53 PM, <SVESjaime at aol.com> wrote:

> On occasion, when I have time, "and the spirit moves me," I take 3 hours of
> my Sunday and send my thoughts to our local newspaper.  Here's one that will
> be in the Monday edition:
>
> *Mournful Memories of Moments in Mumbai
>
> *A former Art professor at the University of Maryland and his daughter
> were dining when the raid on the Oberoi Hotel and the Taj Mahal Palace and
> Tower Hotel, took place. The Scherrs would be two of the almost 200
> fatalities of a coordinated assault on the city of Mumbai late November
> 2008.  The father-and-daughter diners ironically were in India on a
> spiritual journey, attending to the disciplines and practices of attaining
> internal stillness as a point of equanimity in a chaotic world.
>
> It was in the summer of '78 that I embarked on a journey from Chicago to
> Mumbai to attend an experiment in training massive village level workers in
> effecting broad-based rapid human development.  They called it* Nava Gram
> Prayas,* and it centered in the village of Maliwada near Aurangabad in the
> State of Maharastra.  In Maliwada where the* Haridjans* (untouchables)
> were still clearly unwelcomed around the communal well, the task of genuine
> leveled-playing-field democracy was being attempted.
>
> I was at the time in a Quixotic attempt also to turn the Marcos of the
> Philippine's stated policy of guided democracy towards serving the cause of
> * barangay* village level movement for self-sufficiency and
> self-determination.  Similar efforts were being done by colleagues in the*Harambe
> * movement in the African continent, a* Saemul Undong* movement in Korea,*Desaruyo Humano
> * in Sud America, and a critical mass drive in participatory democracy in
> the United States following one-day Town Meetings during the bi-centennial
> celebration.  The late 70s lent itself to efforts of this nature like the
> micro-credit service of what in 1983 would be formally organized as Grameen
> Bank in Bangladesh.  Some efforts were intentionally coordinated while
> others sprang out of the human impulse to decide one's own destiny.
>
> A father-and-son team, the father well into his 80s who also figured in the
> Maliwada comprehensive human development effort, and was finally making his
> last* adieu* to the Subcontinent, was also at the Oberoi as part of the
> Scherr's group.  The Canadian Globe and Mail carried his picture in a
> wheelchair coming out of the Oberoi, and in a video report after the
> four-day siege.  It was then that I got flung back deep into memory lane.
>
> Bombay (before its name got phonetically retranslated closer to Mumbai) has
> always been India's primary commercial center so I was not prepared in the
> 70s to be confronted by India's poverty-stricken massive population in that
> city.  I had read about government workers picking up corpses from the
> sidewalks in Mother Teresa's Kolkota but I did not expect to see that in the
> commercial glitter of Mumbai.   From the airport to town, I would witness a
> caravan of ox-carts moving a homeless population of some 15,000, who would
> camp where there are open spaces in the outskirts of the city, and where the
> animals could graze for a week or so, until the place become so barren that
> it could no longer sustain any further animal life, let alone, human
> existence.
>
> Billeted down Sankli Rd. in Byculla where Christian Aid agencies were
> located, I was within striking distance to the Central Train Station where I
> caught one of the famously dependable iron horses left by the British Empire
> that offered express as well as milk-run accommodations in its intricate
> rail system.  This late November 2008 day, the Central station would be one
> of 10 locations attacked by the yet-to-be-fully identified assault group
> that had marred the developing tranquility and equilibrium of a world just
> recently buoyed by the equanimous ethos emerging from the Obama ascendancy
> in U.S. American politics.
>
> One of the fallacies that the newly initiated to any country generally
> holds is the picture of homogeneity of a nation just because it has attained
> some form of unity.  Unity is particularly untrue to those where oneness
> were previously politically imposed.  Such was the case with India, as it is
> also true for those who see the United States, or China, for example, as not
> only perceivably but actually 'one people.'  They aren't, and even as tiny a
> community as Saipan is, it is a futile exercise to even pretend that it can
> be 'one people.'  Not in the global village, and definitely not under the
> aegis of the American Empire.
>
> Mumbai in the late 70s was a city of contradictions, as I am sure, it still
> is.  It was clearly not culturally a homogenous entity, and the disparity
> between the haves and the have-nots was just too overwhelming to even
> pretend of a political and economic stability.  The area around the Oberoi
> and the Taj where the Gateway to India commemorating King George V and Queen
> Mary's visit in 1911, is dotted with gated communities and homes of former
> Maharajah's and the nouveau riche whose penthouses are found from Vancouver
> to Shanghai, Montreal to Rio, Madrid to Johannesburg, and points in
> between.  The nation that seemingly houses the most destitute of the world's
> poor, is also home to the richest emerald-wearing Rajas and Ranees of the
> realm, whose assets are seemingly limitless, and whose manicures/pedicures
> are flawless!
>
> I survived two months in the shadows of the famed Ellora and Ajanta Caves
> in central Maharasthra, though with the assistance of two litres of
> Glenn-something single malt whiskey from Scotland and two cartoons of DFS
> red Dunhills.  Blood shot eyes from lack of sleep, having struggled with a
> curriculum that naively assumed altruism among the enthusiastic young
> villagers out to eke out their survival, and having gotten scared to wet my
> pants after a not-so-funny encounter with a stuffed cobra in the dark, I was
> at the abysmal verge of cynicism and despair (it did not help that I was in
> Rome on my way to India when Paul VI brought the Cardinal's flame to the
> Vatican, and the newly chosen smiling John Paul I would last barely 33 days
> before his suspicious demise) when a young colleague took me to a Maliwada
> village celebration where Gandhi's* Raghupati* hymn was chanted, and where
> the ubiquitous sound of the "OM" was simultaneously inhaled and exhaled,
> signifying the determination of a people to take upon themselves anything
> that comes its way, anything from anywhere!
>
> I had this picture of a skirted (sarong/sari) Hindu men and women, standing
> tall in the flatlands of the Deccan plateau, facing the coldness of the
> Himalayas of the north, the arid winds of the west and the Arabian Gulf, the
> humid hurricanes from the east and the Bay of Bengal, and the moist
> rainforest fungi of the south, beckoning one and all to "bring it on,"
> affirming their capacity and ability to "take them on" together and at
> once.
>
> I would walk out of India with this attitude, and symbolized it with a trip
> to the AMEX office by the harbor.  Holding my last $50 traveler's cheque, I
> went to cash it amidst well-coiffed customers holding bundles of Marks,
> Francs, Pounds and Sterlings.  Taking my meager rupees, I walked to the Taj
> and bought myself a hamburger lunch (meat consumption at the village was
> limited to mutton as even chicken was in short supply, and, of course, beef
> was sacrosanct) at 5-star hotel price, just to indicate to myself that I was
> not going to be a victim of my external situation.  OM!
>
> Seven years later, I would stare down the muzzle of M-16s as a military
> squad would raid a training center I was directing in Mactan Island on
> suspicion of harboring insurgents to Mr. Marcos' martial law.  This time, my
> pants stayed dry.  Previously, I shed tears to the senseless killing of a
> former medical student who went underground and was found in Toril, Davao.
> I would lament the half of the villagers who took some methods training in
> mobilizing villages up in Langub, Davao City who would be 'salvaged,' an
> extra-judicial killing that remains a practice in Pea Eye to this day.
>
> My elderly friend in a wheel chair at the Oberoi late November 2008, who
> greeted well-wishers simply with "My, my, my!" and a smile, I am sure had
> underneath his breath the primordial formation of the fundamental human
> sound, "OM."  And I this mournful Monday in Saipan, who 30 years ago when my
> life style took a radical paradigm shift in the streets of Mumbai, chant my
> * Raghupati* and quietly utter my "OM"  as I lift up in prayer the
> casualties in this recent incident of humankind's recent inhumanity to its
> kind, and even as Unity March participants in Saipan continue to confess
> that this may be the season of the Christ, but their lives inexplicably
> remain crucified.  OM!
>
>
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