Anita Jain

So I just got done reading Anita Jain’s Marrying Anita.

I’d heard about Marrying Anita at the Ultrabrown blog. It’s an interesting book about the author’s attempts to find the right guy to marry in both New York and Delhi. It’s been described as chick lit, and after reading it, I agree — its main subject matter is the heroine/author’s dating/romance sentiments. It’s just that this book is a lot more than just chick-lit. Anita Jain does something I find very interesting: she writes about trends, patterns in society that she observes. While I don’t think all of the social patterns she puts forth in her book are 100% representative or factual (not all Indians omit articles from their English), many of them are a good succinct precis of what seems to actually be happening. I’d go so far as to describe this book as a sort of romantic Maximum City Lite. It does talk mostly about the author’s emotional ride through New York and Delhi, but you actually learn a but about Delhi during the reading of it.

I recently heard an interview of Anita Jain at NPR. It was interesting, but it was also quite amazing how the host, Jane Clayson, seemed to completely miss the point of what Anita kept saying. She also didn’t seem to have read the book. She seemed fixated on her opinion that Anita had been trying the arranged marriage route. Excerpts like this one dominated the mood of the interview:

The pressure on me to find a husband started very early. A few days after my 1st birthday, within months of my family’s arrival in the U.S., I fell out the window of a three-story building in Baltimore. My father recalls my mother’s greatest concern, after learning that I hadn’t been gravely injured: “What boy will marry her when he finds out?” she cried, begging my father to never mention my broken arm—from which I’ve enjoyed a full recovery—to prospective suitors out of fear my dowry would be prohibitively higher.

Though you’d never guess it from this interview, the book is really 95% about Anita’s love life, not so much about the high-shock-value nitty-gritties of arranged marriage.

To be fair to Jane Clayson, I get the feeling Anita herself provides these anecdotes as a publicity element to shock her American readers, who expect to hear precisely such things in connection with arranged marriage. They can conveniently gasp at the delicious backwardness of certain parts of the world, be reassured that their stereotypes about India hold good, and get on with life, safe in the notion that their worldview needs no adjusting. Anita’s dad’s hours spent on Shaadi.com are probably no different than what thousands of Americans do on Match.com, but if you throw in the words “Arranged Marriage”, it suddenly becomes shocking.

Another surprise was in store when I read the comments on the interview webpage. There were a lot of listener complaints about her articulation or lack thereof. It’s true that Anita seems to punctuate every sentence with “Umms” and “Aahs”, but it didn’t annoy me nearly as much as it did some of the commenters. The predictable Harvard-envy type comments really bothered me though. You have all these people who would love to hate Harvard students simply because they went to Harvard, wait for any mistakes made by Harvard graduates, and then pounce. “What do the folks at Harvard teach their students,” one might hear them grouse, “Even my 5-th graders speak more articulately.” Harvard-bashing is pretty popular, even though Harvard is much more egalitarian these days.

The book is a very courageous one. I’m surprised all of Anita’s various, um, acquaintances in Delhi acquiesced to have their names in it. They might have had their names changed. Either that, or this brave new India is more daring than I imagined. It must also have taken something out of Anita herself; the first question that sprang to my (admittedly parochial) Indian mind is how her parents reacted to her exploits. It’s interesting that she lays her own thoughts out so openly; I’m not sure most people could do that!

So, I’m curious about two things: how did Anita’s parents react to the book? And how is her new love life after publication of her book?

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh is an interesting author. So far I’ve read only two of his books: The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace. I really like The Hungry Tide, but The Glass Palace was a huge disappointment. I’m about to read the recently released Sea of Poppies, maybe I’ll post my impressions.

Ghosh is supposed to be historically very authentic. Problem is, he’s also a master of insipid writing. He’s at the opposite end from Salman Rushdie or even Arundhati Ghosh. Prose in The Glass Palace is earnest, sincere, grammatically perfect — but not brilliant. The moments of brilliance in that book derive from the vivid detail, not from the prose itself.

Somehow, he managed to make The Hungry Tide a great book in spite of this. Perhaps it was the subject: the dark, dank, dangerous Sunderbans. The Glass Palace is unsatisfying, though. Ok, his ideas may have been good, but it really doesn’t feel like a finished product. While it starts very well, I got the impression Ghosh got tired of the book midway and just wrapped it up somehow. Parts of the book spend several pages on the description of events in a single day or hour. Other parts skip several decades in a paragraph. Parts are intensely detailed, other parts are totally textureless. Entire subplots are introduced and then fizzle out without any consequences in the book. I mean, who cares about an intimately detailed illicit encounter one of the female characters has if she hardly plays a role in the rest of the book? The book isn’t really meant to have a plot, it’s just a succession of events in the lives of some families. But it just didn’t work for me.

Having said that, it wasn’t a total loss either. I did get a good deal of interesting historical detail from it, and I think I understand conditions in those days better than I did before I read the book. It also has some interesting studies into the British army in India. Overall, I think it’s worth reading just for the historical perspective.

Hopefully Sea of Poppies will be a more coherent read.

NYT on the Nuclear Deal

The New York Times has this hack of an opinion piece on the Indian nuclear deal. I felt like expressing my Indian viewpoint on some of the things it said, so here goes:

Article: IN the next day or so, an obscure organization will meet to decide the fate of an Indian nuclear deal that threatens to rapidly accelerate New Delhi’s arms race with Pakistan — a rivalry made all the more precarious by the resignation on Tuesday of the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf.

Response: The Pakistan angle is always used as a catch-all to explain why India shouldn’t have nukes. This is hypocritical and specious. Hypocritical, because rivalries between the USA and Russia have always been closer to nuclear flashpoint level than those between India and Pakistan. Specious, because India and Pakistan are actively taking steps towards reconciliation and there’s no clear reason to believe that nukes will play a role in any future conflict.

Article: If the president gets his way, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — for 50 years, the bulwark against the spread of nuclear weapons — would be shredded and India’s yearly nuclear weapons production capability would likely increase from 7 bombs to 40 or 50.

Response: The NPT is no bulwark; all it does is allow for a veil of secrecy for certain nations to secretly proliferate with impunity. China has been giving nuke tech away to Pakistan for decades. The USA gave nuke tech to Israel. And Pakistan proliferated to Iran even as the US mollycoddled it and gave it military funds.

Article: India’s nuclear history is checkered at best

Response: Er, no. Now you’re just lying. India has a perfect nonproliferation record.

Article: … exploits foreign nuclear energy assistance to make a bomb, as India did. [India] misused civilian nuclear technology to produce its first nuclear weapon in 1974

Response: How was it better or more ethical to use Nazi war tech to create nuclear weapons, and then use those weapons to kill hundreds of thousands of people, than to use civilian nuke tech to explode a handful of proof-of-concept weapons? Does the former not count as misuse?

Article: Just last month, the Pakistani government darkly announced that waiving the nuclear rules for India “threatens to increase the chances of a nuclear arms race in the subcontinent.”

Response: Perhaps this is just a pressure tactic from a nation which had also demanded the same concessions that India did but never got them? That ever cross your mind?

Article: India must sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a step already taken by 178 other countries and every member state of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. After all, why should the group’s members grant India a huge exemption from the rules that they themselves are supposed to follow?

Response: Perhaps this can wait until India achieves nuclear parity with the exclusive nuclear club and stockpiles a few thousand nukes. Why not ask why the nuclear weapon states aren’t required to reduce their arsenal to the 5 or 6 bombs that India has? After all, the USA has thousands of nukes, enough to destroy the entire world. Why should a treaty designed specifically to protect the USA and other nuke countries’ nuclear stockpiles be allowed to stand? Finally, this demand is ridiculously unrealistic in the face of the fact that India has consistently refused it for 5 decades and domestic public opinion is perhaps 90% opposed to it.

Article: India must agree to halt production of nuclear material for weapons.

Response: First, is India continuing to produce nuclear material for weapons? Then why aren’t there any more than 5-7 nukes in India? Second, India should halt production when the existing nuke powers reduce their stockpiles to Indian levels, and not before that.

The world will be a better place when 60 year old, old-world, Nixon-era-educated India-haters like the authors of this article are all gone.