Kusum Choppra

Ours is an economy based on recycling....has been since Time Immemorial perhaps. Can any of us not recall the friendly neighborhood pastiwalla taking away loads every month, the give aways to servants et all, the turning of leftovers into a paratha or a pulao? But now...the times, they are changing. Instead of handing down clothes to servants and putting the rest into a box for the annual collection drives for flood affected and disaster driven refugees, today's mems' response to the collection drives is to send driverji into the market to purchase a load of cheap clothes and bedsheets etc......"how will it look ( to my husband's boss' wife...or whoever) if I take my old bedsheets to the collection center?" Regular hand-me-downs of expensive outfits then spoil their own servants silly and cause frequent railings against servants getting bloated egos. The disaster affected have gotten so used to getting brand new stuffs, I am told, many reject used clothes, ...

Honor killings are the latest flavor of the season, just as once it was rape and earlier dowry death. Hardly does a young couple taste their married togetherness then the noses ("naak") of the male relatives gets longer and itchier and wham, bang, off with their heads, it goes. Why this extreme reaction to the most natural phenomena in the world? what are these gotras and castes after all? when did women become chattels to be used as bargaining counters by the male of the species? How did this spree of honor killing become part of our revered ancient culture? Chanakya's Arthshastra lists a bare handful of castes; few of them are original ones, the rest are the result of cross-castre marriages. From then on, through the writings of travelers like Huian Tsang, Alburni and others, plus our own venerable books and histories, down to British enumerators, the number of so-called castes has burgeoned into thousands of names of new castes created by intermarriage between ...

Perhaps the oil slick in the US came at the wrong time. Or perhaps the wrong time was that of the final judgement in the Bhopal Gas Leak case which had malingered for 26 years. For it revived the spirits of the Bhopal Bleeding Hearts with a loud bang. The debate over the quantum of compensation has sparkled all over again, with an eye on the figures that the Obama administration is demanding from BP. No, I do not have anything against our own affected Indians getting some more money to pay for the woes that Union Carbide so callously struck into them. My plea is for those vociferous bleeding hearts to please do some sincere checking: amongst the lists of affected and beneficiaries are any number of persons who just happened to be out of Bhopal that fatal night, but are listed residents. To this day, pensions are drawn by some residents of the affected areas, perhaps, just perhaps depriving those who were actually affected....a situation akin to the names of big shots showing up in th...

This morning's papers splashed the news that the maker of the highly acclaimed RAJNEETI has decided to put together an international cast, led probably by Anjelina Jolie for a film on Draupadi, the long haired woman who is the pivot of the epic Mahabharat. When will we get over our fascination for the gori chamri of Western women? Correct me someone if I am wrong, but I do remember reading that Draupadi was of a wheatish complexion, more "sawli" than "gori-chitti". Perhaps the film could work better with a dusky Indian actress, and we have many acclaimed ones with such a skin tone, and let the international look be provided by some of the Hollywood hunks who may be made over to look like some of the Kauravas and Pandvas; they were of north Indian origin and in those days, closer to the supposedly Aryan, Caucasian look. But aha, the charms of the foreign actresses have overtaken Bollywood of late, haven't they?

I read the fast and furious headlines generated by the attempt to break the Israeli blockage of Gaza within days of finishing the re-reading of a book I had last read when in school, Leon Uris’s masterpiece “Exodus.” His descriptions of the heartbreaking Israeli attempts to break through the British blockade of the same region 60 years ago were yet vivid in my mind as I pondered over the irony of what seemed virtually a scene-by-scene action replay, this time with the Isrealis as the blockaders of a hemmed in Palestinian populace, caught between economic oppression of their own leaders and the reluctance of Isreal to accept them in jobs without security against terrorism. It was soon after the birth of Jesus Christ and the unrest following his preachings that the Jews were scattered throughout the then known world, awaiting a Messiah who would lead them back home. Unlike the peaceful assimilation they enjoyed in India, across Europe and Russia, Jews had, over the centuries been victi...