Tag Archives: Saraswati river

In search of a dead river and a living Goddess

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Yesterday, we had the Saraswati puja.

Why they link a specific date of the calendar with specific deities, I do not know. However, those are the dates when the devotees apply special attention to, and prayers at, a specific God or Goddess. So yesterday was the day for Saraswati, a Goddess that most Hindu people assign with knowledge. Understandably, it is popular among youngsters and the student community.

The elderly, perhaps not in want of further enlightenment, are perhaps relatively less enamored with this Goddess.

And then there is the issue of work days and weekends. So, in some parts of the world far removed from India, such as around Vancouver in British Columbia, the chosen dates are often rounded off to the nearest weekend. And thus it was for us, on Saturday the 17th Feb 2013. The thing to do, is to visit the temple, spend about 5 minutes or so before the replica of the deity and pray together, usually a few short sentences in Sanskrit that very few understand, so they repeat, word for word, what is dictated to them by the priest, who is one of us, but good at this job and often assigned the task of a priest for such occasions. He has a notebook with the required mantra’s or prayers, to be used for specific occasions like this.

But that prayer, as I said earlier, takes but five minutes or so. For the rest of the time, people mingle, share pleasantries, chit chat, meet up with each other, and have a meal if such is arranged by the puja committee. There is also a sort of music session where a few good singers might perform for the audience. Some might even perform a dance with some classical music or a Tagore song.

Its a nice way of spending the day.

Not being particularly religious, I would in the past often give such gatherings a pass. However, this year was an exception. I was going to drive Tan Lee da and Leena Chatterjee to the temple.

My wife, Anuradha, is more involved with decoration and other arrangements by the volunteers that help out the Puja Committee. So she was to leave early in the day, and likely would return late in the evening. And she would drive by herself.

Meanwhile, Tan Lee da and Leena di wished to go this time but was wary of driving. The reason is, he could not find the place last year, and eventually went back home without attending the puja. So, when he talked about it on the phone this time, I offered to be their driver.

Anuradha had donned a golden border Sari and looked fetching, so I took a picture before she drove off. I thought to using the caption – in search of a Goddess – for that picture.

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Anyhow, I took my time having a lazy breakfast, a large coffee, avoided Kurta Pajama for now and dressed in trouser, shirt and a jacket, and headed at Tan Lee da’s place.

Tan Lee da is a unique person. He was born in China and is a citizen of Canada. And yet, he is more Bengali at heart, and more attached to certain aspects of Santiniketan than myself. Describing him more fully would be outside the scope of this blog.4v001a

I had taken my camera along, with a standard medium zoom lens and a 16mm full frame fish eye lens. The fish eye was normally not used on people, as straight lines appear curved, but I had decided to use it at the puja, for fun. Thus, Tan Lee da became the first inadvertent subject of my experiment.

On the way to the temple, I was mainly engaged in explaining to Tan Lee da and Leena di about what I understood of the mass movement ongoing in Bangladesh regarding the trials of those accused of crimes against humanity during its struggle for independence in 1971.

We reached the prayer hall before noon. I did not make a head count, but suspect there were less than a hundred people present. I shook hands with everyone I knew and some I had not met before, and then headed for the snack section, to help myself with a cup of tea and some snacks, and met up with Dahlia and Ananya there.4v002a

Looking around, with the ladies dressed so elegantly and staying close to the deity, I felt as if the ladies actually came for blessing of the Goddess, while the men perhaps come to look at the ladies.

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I had an interesting bit of discussion with Amlan Dasgupta and Siddharth Gupta, regarding corruption of high officials in Government and politics in almost all soceities, and how our own friends and buddies would often stay away from controversial issues that so concerned us. To me, it was not much use blaming politician if we were ourselves not willing to stand up for it to an extent and raise awareness.

The visit was valuable for me as I met up with a lovely group of people from the neighboring state of Assam. Anuradha took down their phone number, and we planned to have an evening of dinner and adda one of these days.

The youngsters were going to the Roundhouse Community Centre in Vancouver regarding a function in Bengali and to honor the 21th Feb Bhasha Andolan day remembrance as a key event in Bangladesh’s aspiration for freedom of expression, language, and government. I was invited by Amlan, but could not make it as my time was tied with Tan Lee da and Leena di.4v005a

I did not stay long, as Tan Lee da and Leena di wished to return home early. Others stayed back for the music and dance sessions, which lasted into the evening. The ladies then went someplace for a further powwow, my wife included.

Anyhow, if was a pleasant way of spending a day, and I passed another year without consciously asking for the Goddess of knowledge for any blessing. To me, Saraswati is primarily a key historical river of ancient India that disappeared as the Himalayan ice age glaciers that fed the river receded and finally vanished at the Sivalik hills post ice age around four thousand years ago. To me, that river was the location where the first recognizable congregation of humans were laying down practices, rituals, lifestyles, and thoughts that would later come to be known as Hinduism.

I was not a religious person, and to me Hinduism is not even a religion that follows the conventional yardsticks of other mainstream religions. Lately I have come to question the centralized Governments of nation states as well as the concentration of power by mainstream religions. I have come identify more with agnosticism and a theoretical anarchy that is often professed by free thinking individuals such as Noam Chomsky and others. I am not a convert into it yet, since I do not know if horizontal form of local governance without vertical structure of hierarchy is at all possible for industrial societies with larger populations. We have several millennia of practice and getting hooked to a vertical system of power structure and Governance.

But, we can always ponder these issues, especially since the current vertical control model is clearly fraying at the edges, and cracks are beginning to show at its foundations.

On the drive homeward with Tan Lee da and Leena di, we broached the topic of Brahma Samaj and its decline, Arya Samaj as its current status, and what position Rabindranath Tagore took with regard to the perceived Hindu Samaj – Brahma Samaj divide of his time. People like Prasanta Mahalanobis and Sukumar Roy and their interaction with Tagore and the then Brahma Samaj were touched upon.

Not a bad way to spend a day.

Perhaps, in spite of my skepticism, the concept of Saraswati the Goddess had blessed me not so much with knowledge per se, but with a tendency to question everything I read or heard, and to analyze the information, filtering in what seemed believable at the time, and rejecting what appeared unlikely, and yet leaving the doors and windows open, for future changes in ideas.

I guess this was my way of relating to Saraswati, the river, the Goddess and the perception of knowledge.

Who is an Aryan?

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“This question has been with me ever since my childhood. Am I an Aryan ? Till date, a clear answer has eluded me.” Neil told Mabel. They were walking towards a coffee shop next to the movie theater. It was Friday. The weekend was ahead of them. They had just seen a movie. Later, he was going to take her to a Chinese restaurant. Meanwhile, they were going to have a coffee and yap a bit. It was still early for dinner.
Neil was enjoying her company, and her keen interest on things that Neil liked. He knew he was a bit different, and shared hobbies that were not particularly popular among folks he met or went out with. Among the expatriate Indian community, the issue of the Indus Valley Civilization, and the origin of the so called Aryans, was one such issue. The current debate in the academic circles on this issue, raging for a good generation now, was of intense interest to Neil. He had even tried to befriend a few experts on this topic.
But he never found another person among his friends, either of Indian descent or Canadian, or even American from his time in Florida, that was aware or interested, in this topic. This was a source of some frustration, for Neil.
Mabel was walking with her arm around his waist. She turned and smiled at him. Mabel was about the same height as Neil, five ft ten inches. The only thing was, she was wearing a few inches of heels, while he was not. Anyhow, this was something he had to get used to – finding her eyes at the same horizontal plane as himself. “So, are you an Aryan ?” She asked.
Neil smiled back and pulled her closer, still walking along the pavement, heading for the coffee shop. “The thing is, what exactly is an Aryan has not been properly settled yet. Conversional wisdom says that an Aryan was an invader in India, an ethnically different man than the locals. However, this view is getting a lot of scrutiny these days, and the answer is likely a lot more complicated. But, my interest in it is more to do with finding the facts. I am tending to lean towards the view that Aryans were part of the indigenous population, although a small trickle of outsiders might have come, mingled, and settled there, adding some flavor to the local culture, a long time ago.”
“Hmm ? How long ago?”
“Well, the time period under question relates to the dating of the Vedas, the original compositions of huge verses, that are often considered the original pillars of Hinduism. The dating itself is under debate. Conventional wisdom says 1,500 BC. But new thoughts appear to push that back by another thousand to 1,500 years, going back 2,500 or 3,000 BC, say five thousand years from now.”
They turned and walked into the coffee shop.
“Wow. You have to tell me about all this. I want to know. To me, sadly, Aryans only mean blue eyed blond crew cut soldiers that marched for Hitler and devastated half the world during the last world war.”
They took two cups of coffee and sat at a table. The coffee shop was almost full. It was attached to a large book store. People could take a book or a magazine, without paying for it, and sit down in the coffee shop to read.
Since the age of internet and eBooks, as well as online ordering of books through Amazon, local book stores have taken a major hit in their business, and are going through a continuous process of change, trying to stay in business and expanding the range of merchandise on sale.
Their table was near the magazine stack. Neil could see some of the magazines nearest to him. At least two of them were on tattooed women. It showed women with pierced nose, pierced eyebrow and pierced lower lips, not to mention ear lobes. They sported extraordinary multicolored tattoo on themselves, on their back, shoulder, arm, legs, and even on the back of their necks.
Neil disliked the idea of permanently disfiguring the body in the name of beauty. But, he was careful not to impose his opinion on others. To each his own. Thankfully, Mabel wasn’t one of them.
Mabel watched him glancing across the Magazine covers, his face displaying a tiny inadvertent frown. She chuckled. “I can see you are not too fond of full body tattoo.”
Neil turned back to her and smiled. “Well, no, I am not. Anyhow, about Aryans, I shall tell you little by little, so as not to overwhelm you with too much information. Suffice it to say that India is a very old civilization, and it has been in the cross roads of human movements ever since anatomically modern humans walked out of Africa. For me, the prime interest is to know a bit more about my ancestry. Therefore, the issue of who were the Aryans and what was the range and lifestyle of the Indus Valley civilization and how they interacted with each other and what influenced the later evolution of the faith system known as Hinduism, and its brother religions the Jainism and Buddhism, and other smaller sects, is of interest to me on an academic level. I am otherwise not too religions, you know.”
“Yes, I know. You were the first and the only person that told me the origin of the Aryan people were not Germany, and that Hitler borrowed the term from ancient Hindus, and likely unjustifiably. That is something I am unlikely to forget.”
Neil finished his coffee. He pulled her hand and watched her palm and her fingers carefully. He was not a palmist, but knew the basics from his childhood. She had a longish and smoothly semicircular lifeline, which did not quite connect with her head line. The line of destiny, or the fate line, was moderate and not as long as his own fate line from his right hand.
Mabel watched him. “Don’t tell me you can read palm too.”
“Well, I can see you are attracted to an older man from India.”
Mabel laughed out loud and cuffed him playfully. She too had finished her coffee. “One does not need to read my palm for that.”
They got up and left the coffee shop, heading for his car that was parked nearer to the movie theater.”
——————————————
I wrote this much and leaned back.
Should the ice age lady appear at their Chinese restaurant and share a Won Ton soup or something ? Or was I going to be spending more time with the non-Germanic Aryans that might have been brown skinned Indians wearing a loin cloth and bathing by the bank of the now vanished Saraswati river?
Or perhaps I was going to coax Neil into talking about his Y-chromosome ?
More I thought about it, more I felt that any sensible Canadian girl should by now get up and leave. These were likely taboo items for a date – essentially a first date between a young attractive woman and her boy friend.
But, I was not writing a book that would fit conventionality. I was writing it for my own pleasure, and for improving my unconventional writing style. Besides, I was writing on things that I liked.
I spent some time thinking about the difference between conventionality and conventionalism. Eventually I ended up scratching my head and looking up at the ceiling.
I had not yet been able to make up my mind on who the writer of the story should be. After all, this was not just a story of the present time about an expatriate Indian living in Canada. It was a story about writing a story, and that story was to have multiple centuries, millennia, spanned across it, with participants from different historical era and regions.
And yet, who was writing the story, itself was not yet clear in my mind. I could make myself the writer, and write this part in first person, like now.
Or, I could write in third person, describing the writer as Tony. Tony was, of course, the westernized version of my own pet name, which was Tonu.
Or, the writer could be Tonu.
I had used all three versions in different chapters by now. And yet, I could not decide.
Meanwhile, Mabel and Neil had gotten off the starting point, without achieving much of a plot. The ice age woman of central Asia was hovering at the periphery, mysteriously appearing and disappearing. She had a child with her. In one of the episodes, she is supposed to have sacrificed herself while in danger of attack from wild animals, in order to let the child survive. They carried the mitochondria, that was to come down copy by copy and generation by generation, all the way to me, or rather, to Neil. How they would eventually fit into the plot, I was not yet sure. The writer could keep hallucinating about the ice age woman, but how does one connect her with Neil?
Could it be that Neil too can see her in his minds eye? Could it be that she was a figment of not just my imagination, but also of Neil’s? Neil himself was a product of my imagination, as was Mabel.

Ohh well. I decided to slice an English cucumber and eat it with salt. Dinner is still an hour away. My wife had prepared some lasagna.