Unfortunately, I missed the earlier lecture with Ram Rahman and Sunil Gupta. They’re both very provocative and accomplished photographers still doing work. The few photographs from Rahman that I’ve seen concern cinema imagery and the influence of film on Indian visual culture. (Hint: It’s huge.) On a related note, I rather like Pushpamala N, and her quasi-cinematic work.

Sunil Gupta really intrigues me. Sotheby’s describes him as “an artist, curator, writer, and cultural activist [who] has made a significant contribution to contemporary art practice and discourse around the globe. Through his work he challenges stereotypes and questions beliefs, by exploring issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and related issues of access, place, and identity.” Like a number of other Indian photographers, such as Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, his work examines (in part) what it’s like to be an Indian in diaspora.

So I was quite happy to see a TateShots video show up in my iTunes podcast playlist earlier this week:

Click for larger

In the short video, Gupta discusses the context for a couple of images currently on display in the Tate Modern’s Street and Studio exhibit.

They were taken in 2007 and they are part of an ongoing series called Mr Malhotra’s Party and the name of the series comes from what gay nights in Delhi are referred to, which are held in commercial bars and clubs, but because it’s illegal there, they are deemed as private parties.

Part of the underlying motivation is to show to people, especially in Delhi itself, that gay people are very ordinary looking, and part of just the social scene, part of the family structures that people live in. . . .

But what I like about India is that the street is like a theatre. So as you can see, tons of stuff happens around. So although the main subject and I are fixed and static, there is all this business, like it’s changing every second, what’s happening around the person. It’s like, it’s very lively. So I’m quite drawn to something that’s quite solid-looking, you know, compositionally.

Check it out.

Imagine my surprise upon finding this message from TajHotels.com in my inbox this morning:

Dear Guest,

This season, the Taj Palace offers you the perks of infidelity

The master chefs at work have engineered four spanking new menus, digging into culinary archives, throwing in a fistful of magic and plenty of oomph

Presenting you with a seductive range of culinary collectibles – each bearing the mark of the masters.

“Perks of infidelity” . . . okay . . . Only after you open the attached Powerpoint presentation do you see they left out a critical line:

For your palate to stray

On the berth across the aisle from us, two young women rummaged through their backpacks, eventually pulling out the French Lonely Planet guide to India. They were asleep when we boarded the train in Jodhpur, presumably taking the overnight express from Dehli or Jaipur. While they slept, Lisa and I passed our English copy between us, reading about where we were going and where we had just spent the night and the ominous-sounding Marwar, or “region of death.”

The train was mostly empty, and many of the travelers were in the army. Officers in untucked uniforms talked to enlisted soldiers in their civvies. A few of them sat across from us for a while, facing us and carrying on in their halting English. Perhaps a half-hour outside Pokaran I got out my map to see if I could figure out how much farther we had left. (Our train left Jodhpur late, rendering the schedule moot.) Sunil the soldier pointed to Pokaran, his destination. His buddies took a lot of interest in the map actually, and the voice of Rob, my cartographically-inclined coworker, played somewhere in the part of my American brain that I had set aside to keep me out of trouble on the trip: “In many countries, maps and imagery are national secrets.”

I suspected that Pokaran, our next major stop, was the same Pokhran where India exploded five nuclear weapons in 1998 and where they continue “special” weapons activity. But I wasn’t going to ask.

I had previously asked Nimmi about India’s nuclear weapons after learning that her president, Abdul Kalam, was the scientist instrumental in the 1998 weapons tests. What was the mood like? We were mighty proud. So it’s more than strategic deterrence against Pakistan? Absolutely. (A couple of Pakistani coworkers have shared similar sentiments about their nation’s nuclear program over the years, too.)

I’m still amazed. I understand the mental process that justifies a small-scale deterrence against another nuclear nation that you’ve had several wars with. I really do, even if I disagree with it. Like most Americans I wish we could put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, forget Duck and Cover, and not worry about WMDs anymore. Given that Iran is seriously jonesing for a nuke of their own and that A.Q. Khan was doing brisk business before he was officially “shut down,” that seems very unlikely to happen.

But GWB says it’s time for us to stop worrying and learn to love the Indian bomb. India had the bomb in 1974 before the nuclear nonproliferation treaty went into effect, so it’s just correcting past colonial intolerance, wrote one reader to the Times. Or maybe it didn’t have it — like North Korea, Israel, and South Africa, sometimes it’s hard to tell. India’s chargé d’affiares in Washington emphatically claimed today on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, that the India-US nuclear deal was all about nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons. However you explain it away, we’re approaching a point where the NPT is approaching irrelevance as a deterrent.

Still I can see the Indian point-of-view with respect to nukes — both power and (to a lesser degree) weapons. India needs power to continue growing their economy and to serve the hundreds of millions of their citizens without reliable electricity. As with every developed nation, electricity is a national security issue. Supposedly the American part of the deal is about civilian nuclear power, with an impermeable firewall between that fissile material and technology and India’s nuclear weapons “non-program.” We trust India enough to take their fissile material (or MATLAB or whatever) and not use it to make bombs or give it to Pakistan or sell it to al Qaeda. Everything’s above board and on the straight and narrow in India.

Besides, we Americans have our own security issues, so the story goes. We need all of the yummy oil we can get; and we have to keep the man down in Iran. The most interesting thing I read in India was a set of articles in the rather fair-minded Economic Times concerning U.S. interference in energy politics in Central and South Asia. In the very Cold War-esque post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy, the economic development of India and Pakistan — one a vital business partner, the other a vital partner in the war on terror™ — comes second to keeping Iran from getting anything until they give up nukes. Still, it seems like a mixed message to nuclear would-bes.

—  —  —

When we were visiting Bara Bagh on the outskirts of Jaisalmer, we met a couple of bored university students at the maharajas’ cenotaphs who showed us around. All along the horizon were giant wind turbines. “They’re for the military. The city’s power comes from hundreds of kilometers away . . . along with the water.”

Well, even our better publications can be just as vapid. Witness, the scene set by our largest print news outlets:

• In Newsweek, it’s all India all the time:
• Fareed Zakaria has a crush on India,
• Jhumpa Lahiri tells Americans what it’s like to be the daughter of Indian immigrants, while . . .
• Ramin Setoodeh says Indians aren’t just for med school anymore.
• Meanwhile Americans should stop worrying and learn to love outsourcing their jobs to “Silican Valley East”. (What a delightfully awkward use of direction!)
• The lovefest in the American edition excluded a cautionary note for Indians, included in the international edition and online.
• The New York Times, which is surprisingly shallow in international news coverage except on the big, big issues has taken note of India, starting with three articles on how good it is to be rich in India (1, 2, and 3) and progressing via editorials to actual news (1 and 2). Thank god.
• But how does it play in Des Moines? While India didn’t make the front page, the Register seems to get all of its world news from AP, and anti-Bush protests are above the fold.

There must be something in the water in Britain, because their press seems to be doing things right. The BBC ignored the America-focused backstory, waiting until today to report any significant news on the meeting, all the while providing extensive South Asian news on a daily basis. And the Economist — which has become my news analysis source of choice — is running a thoughtful lead editorial on the visit and an in depth analysis in their current issue.

While I haven’t read the whole Economist article yet, the editorial cautions the US against giving up too much ground on nonproliferation and warns that India might not be the ideal counterbalance against China, if such a counterbalance is actually needed, which is unclear.

These thoughts have been on my mind since early in our trip to India, and will be the source of another dispatch soon. . . .

“As you can see, the fountains are off right now,” our guide told us. We had been told from the beginning of the ride by Baabloo, our rickshaw driver, not to get one; and we dutifully followed his advice as the teenage boys ran alongside us hawking their services. But our man in red was quite insistent that we have a guide — it’s like watching a movie without the sound — and he was a card-carrying government employee who wouldn’t charge us. “They only turn it on for VIPs. . . . Please, stand here. Photograph there, like so!”

“And there is the bench where all of the VVIPs sit for the most famous pictures.” VVIPs? Apparently, in a nation of more than one billion people there are VIPs and even more important folks. “You know: prime ministers, presidents, Lady Diana.”

“Bill Clinton came here with his family. He was such a nice man. Your current President Bush has not yet come to visit.”

I shrugged. “He doesn’t get out much.”

“Bush is a good man,” our guide insisted, ever the diplomat. “Hopeuflly he will come visit us soon.”

Well GWB is going to visit India this week, but he won’t be going to the Taj. He’s going to be on a two day tour. From the press briefing, it sounds like he will be mostly in Delhi, chatting up VVIPs, visiting a farm, and meeting with entrepreneurs. (He’s also scheduled to watch a cricket match in Pakistan — well part of one, at least. They can last longer than his trip.)

In honor of our maharaja’s visit, this week I’ll be sharing more recollections of India and covering the mainstream media reports. Stay tuned.

Leslie tipped me off to Indian Writing which hooked me up with The Wonderful World of Ms. World, who is traveling around her namesake.

On the Indian leg of her trip she had these departing thoughts that pretty much summed up Lisa and my time there thoughts when leaving, too:

I wanted to come, so I came. I gave it everything I had. It didn’t turn out the way I would have liked it. However I’m deeming it a success because I survived it all. And I am so much more richer and stronger for it all. I also feel like there is new demarcation in my life, before India (B.I.) and after India (A.I).

Leslie’s suggestion seemed just credible enough to work. But I’m not going to be writing any books on India. Maybe one day my memoirs will have a chapter on my fascination with India. Thanks for the advice, but self-indulgent, unrequested honesty is my style du jour.

The casual reader of this site may wonder why there is so much India in it. The South Asian reader may even groan (as Deepti wants to when I mangle my Hindi lesson, though she is too polite to actually do it) at what I choose to write about. And academy sorts might accuse me of Orientalism, which we all know is a rather bad thing.

I’m not trying to construct India for Indians, which was Said’s primary post-colonial criticism. To be honest, I didn’t know very much about India before traveling there, and now I feel like I know even less, precisely because many notions were dismantled when Lisa and I visited.

I have this habit of immersing myself in the subjects that fixate me. It’s what I do. It’s my defining trait. (That’s probably why I took the somewhat misguided plunge into Catholicism — even going all the way through R.C.I.A. — when I was really just interested in Medieval history.)

And I do find India fascinating. While we were there, India seemed so different from and remarkably the same as the U.S. all at once. I found it interesting to watch a hegemon at work that wasn’t my own country, and to see how a rising nation views America. For many, India almost defines a particular form of globalization that I personally find rather nuanced, confusing, and controversial. As with many countries, in India the promise of free markets and international development yields the uncomfortable contradiction of dire poverty and a bright future for hundreds of millions. It’s a nation with a governing coaltion that includes communists and economic liberals. And as Holland Cotter observed in his review of two 2005 South Asian art exhibitions, fundamentalism ocassionally threatens to rend India apart, while throughout its history nationalism bound it together at the expense of isolation.

Many Indians have a heartfelt, honest belief in that most un-Western and un-Iowan idea: polytheism.

I was amazed in Rajasthan to be no more than 30 miles from Pakistan and to have the railway and all of the roads just end at the border. I was even more amazed to see that until recently Amritsar was the only official crossing point between the two fraternal, nuclear neighbors. When Michael Wood set out on his mythic journey to Shangri-La, he was forced to detour through Nepal (by air) to cross the land border to Tibet, despite being able to look out upon the roadway he might have driven. That it is easier to fly across a land border than to go overland is a complete inversion of human history. Unfortunately, the perpetual threat of conflict is not.

And as someone who moved some distance from home for education and later stayed away for economic reasons, I’m sure my fascination is also related to diaspora. This dislocation is isolating and liberating and guilty.

And so नमस्ते and good night, dear readers. More about India and everything else later.

Exurbs: Whilst searching for the Times article to link against last, week I chose “exurb” as my keyword. That led to an interesting collection of articles in addition to the one I wanted. Some interesting titles include:

• 4 Debutantes Will Be Presented Tonight at Tuxedo Autumn Ball – By CHARLOTTE CURTIS (Oct 17, 1964; pg. 33, 1)
• How to Live in Suburbs and Not Be ‘a Suburban Housewife’ – By MARYLIN BENDER (Aug 15, 1967; pg. 28, 1)
• Suburban Women at Work – By MARYLIN BENDER (Aug 22, 1971; pg. F3, 1)
• Energy Crisis Inducing Return To City Stores and Attractions – By FRANK J. PRIAL (Feb 21, 1974; pg. 1, 2)
• Conflicting Court Actions Perplex Towns Seeking to Curb Growth – By GLADWIN HILL (Jul 29, 1974; pg. 20, 1)
• Suburbs Face More of Ills Already Troubling Cities – By ROBERT REINHOLD (Nov 16, 1978; pg. B4, 1)

While Wikipedia says the term originated in the 1950s, the Times used it in an article in 1890, in the article “No More Roads on Stilts.” Apparently it didn’t stick, and with the drowsy prose from the extract it’s easy to see why:

The reported Gould-Platt alliance for the purpose of controlling rapid transit by means of such legislation at Albany as will incorporate in the Fassett bill amendments to the Rapid-Transit act of 1875, and to the amendments thereto known as the Cantor act, while recognized by those who are interested in this subject as a very convenient and clever thing for the elevated railroad, and perhaps …

Indian Airports: India is liberalizing its airlines, but it has a long way to go before air travel is easy, efficient, and capable of meeting demand. That was my sense while waiting for one late flight after another on each of the three major domestic airlines in India (Indian Airlines, Jet Airways, Air Deccan). Everybody expects the airlines to grow, but even the experts aren’t sure India’s infrastructure can keep up.

Black and White Printing: Lots of photographers have trouble making their own B&W inkjet prints that match their vision. And we find it a bit frustrating. I know it’s possible to get great prints—not only because the marketers tell us so—but because I’ve seen beautiful prints made outside the wet darkroom. Practice, practice, practice . . .

I sure hope Lisa and I didn’t violate any sensibilities while we were there.