A Requiem for a Song Bird

This is a piece I wrote in a graduate-level public health course in February 2017.


I have been thinking a lot about George Michael recently. He died alone on Christmas Day in his home just outside of London (“George Michael,” 2016). His body is still with the police (“George Michael,” 2017). They determined that he died of heart failure and that it was not suspicious, but they are still conducting additional tests (Reed, 2016). I don’t know what they are looking for, but I have a feeling it may have to do with substance abuse. He was only 53 years old (Pareles, 2016).

My earliest memories are of one of my older brothers dancing and singing in front of the television to George Michael’s Wham! era music videos. This was in the early 1980s when the singer was still a teenager. He went on to become one of the most famous (and stylish!) singers in the world. I genuinely loved his voice and spent many years singing along to his recordings. Since the late 1990s, however, he became known less for his music than for his run-ins with the law. He was arrested for a “lewd act” in a male public bathroom in Beverly Hills in 1998 and subsequently came out as a gay man (Lyttle, 1998). In 2010, he spent four weeks in prison for crashing his car into a shop while under the influence (Swash, 2010). In the decade before his death, he became reclusive and suffered a series of health problems, particularly an episode that resulted in hospitalization and near death (Walker, 2011).

George Michael was one of the most sought-after sex symbols of his generation. He struggled with his sexuality, however, and hid it under a veil of super-charged heterosexuality. He began to seek out sex with strangers while still in his teens (Newman, 2016), and as an adult, wallowed in depression during the AIDS epidemic in which he lost a much-loved secret boyfriend (Moore, 2016). In his words, he suffered from “grief and self-abuse” for most of his life (Newman, 2016).

So I found it interesting to read a 2015 report on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) website about the incidence of substance abuse and mental illness in sexual minorities (Medley et al, 2015). This was the first time they used sexuality as a variable in examining these issues (“SAMHSA report,” 2016). According to the report (Medley et al, 2015), sexual minorities are more likely than those in the sexual majority to use illicit drugs, smoke cigarettes, and drink alcohol. Further, they are more likely to have substance abuse disorders and mental illnesses, and according to other material on the website, also more likely to experience issues such as heart disease, cancer, and even violence (“Top health issues,” 2012). Given how I feel like I am grieving for George Michael, this hurt.

I was also reminded of a project I am working on with a professor in my department about gay athletes in the United States. The project uses interviews to gather data, and I have heard one elderly gay athlete talk about how some closeted gay men use drugs like amyl nitrate in order to get through having sex with a woman. It’s upsetting – it’s not fair to have to live like that. As if life isn’t difficult enough.

I am currently taking a gender studies course, and I’m learning about the androcentric nature of science and society. Also, in this public health course, we have learned that the way our society is organized is bad for some people’s health (California Newsreel, 2014). With researchers now paying attention to the role of sexuality in health, they may find that our heteronormative institutions have been setting up sexual minorities to die early and to have a poor quality of life until then. I feel that the slides on racism that we saw earlier in the semester could help us understand how that happens (Jones, 2000). SAMHSA even has a dedicated page for LGBT health on its website (“Behavioral Health Equity,” 2016).

George Michael, however, is still dead. That will not change no matter how much I want him to be alive and out in the world somewhere. It hurts, and I’m surprised by how much. I mean, I’m a media scholar, and I understand that people can form bonds with other people in the media, both real and fictitious. That probably happened with me somewhere over the years. My earliest memories of him are of a young, fashionable song bird, and really, all I ever wanted for him was to enjoy his life and be happy, the way I would wish for an older sibling, a cool uncle, or my own child. Maybe the way our society is set up made that impossible for him. Maybe all it could offer someone of his sexual orientation was a path of substance abuse and mental illness. It could have been different. And we will never know.

Rest in peace, dear, dear friend. I’m so sorry that I could not take care of you.

References

Behavioral Health Equity: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) (2016, November 9). Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/behavioral-health-equity/lgbt

California Newsreel. (2014, October 22). UNNATURAL CAUSES – Trailer. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXBkOYMCAro&list=PLayHb3ehfKbfxdMAmIkFm2wlRikR4Ka6f

George Michael: Coroner yet to release singer’s body a month after his death. (2017, January 28). news.com.au. Retrieved from http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/george-michael-coroner-yet-to-release-singers-body-a-month-after-his-death/news-story/c03ca7a2fb727c2e3976c7d481ac90ec

George Michael: Pop superstar dies at 53. (2016, December 26). BBC. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-38432862

Jones, C. (2000). The impacts of racism on health [PowerPoint slides]. Harvard School of Public Health. Retrieved from https://blackboard.sc.edu/courses/1/PUBH700-J50-SPRING-2017/content/_10122663_1/camara%20jones.ppt

Lyttle, J. (1998, April 8). George Michael arrested over `lewd act'. The Independent. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/george-michael-arrested-over-lewd-act-1155246.html

Medley, G., Lipari, R. N., Bose, J., Cribb, D. S., Kroutil, L. A., & McHenry, G. (2016). Sexual orientation and estimates of adult substance use and mental health: Results from the 2015 national survey on drug use and health. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015.pdf

Moore, J. (2016, December 26). GQ. Retrieved from http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/george-michael-interview

Newman, V. (2016, December 26). Sex, drugs and self-destruction: The dark side of George Michael he couldn't fight. Mirror. Retrieved from http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/sex-drugs-self-destruction-dark-9515044

Pareles, J. (December 25, 2016). George Michael, pop superstar, is dead at 53. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/arts/music/george-michael-dead.html?_r=0

Reed, R. (2016, December 30). Autopsy: George Michael's Cause of Death 'Inconclusive'. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/autopsy-george-michaels-cause-of-death-inconclusive-w458442

SAMHSA report shows higher rates of substance use and mental illness among sexual minority adults. (2016, October 11). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/newsroom/press-announcements/201610110100

Swash, R. (2010, July 6). George Michael arrested after crashing car into shop. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jul/06/george-michael-arrested

Top health issues for LGBT populations [PowerPoint slides]. (2012). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from http://store.samhsa.gov/shin/content//SMA12-4684/SMA12-4684.ppt

Walker, P. (2011, December 23). George Michael gives tearful account of near-death pneumonia ordeal. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/23/george-michael-reveals-pneumonia-ordeal

Dream Tenant

On October 3, 2011, I fictionalised myself because I thought it would help me make sense:

"The short, fat, smelly landlady had never had a stranger tenant. The girl went to work and came back, she paid her rent on time, she was always polite and spoke in an old accent the landlady had only heard in her childhood. Lately the girl had stopped going out. She still paid her rent on time, but sometimes the landlady could hear her crying in her room. In the middle of the day when all the other girls were out at work or at school. The landlady didn't know but the girl would cry at night too, but on the terrace where she wouldn't disturb her roommate. That strange foreign tenant in that room. Not really foreign, the girl was Indian but had never lived in India. Until now. Now she cried, she howled locked up in that room. She talked to herself sometimes. The landlady once thought she heard the girl say, "what is real?" between sobs, but she couldn't be sure. What kind of a person talks like that anyway, it made no sense.

The girl had first started asking that question 5 years ago. "What is real?" she had asked her mother, but her mother had not understood the question. "Amma, tell me what is real?" They were in America then, the girl had been a success - American degrees, an American job, a green card on the way. An American accent, an American attitude, American dollars in the American bank. But lately, it had all started seeming unreal. The popcorn at the theater had started tasting chalky, her mascara had stopped helping her once sparkly eyes pop. She'd started realising that every hot, young, new Hollywood starlet had fake lips and fake breasts. She'd tried so many things, but before long they'd run out. They weren't real. The female role models on TV weren't real, all the makeup she had bought wasn't real, her beautiful apartment that no one visited wasn't real. One day she realised that soon she was going to stop being real too.

What is real, what is real."

Life 2012

Title: Compartmentalised

The Song on the Radio

"Saajan!" I shouted in the crowded NDTV shuttle, but the song on the radio meant nothing to my friends. How could it, I realised, they were all mostly born in the late 80s. The movie had probably come out before they started kindergarten. Everyone in the minivan - other NDTV employees whom I didn't know - looked at me; none of them remembered Saajan.

"You know, Saajan!" I continued, returning their startled gazes. "The Madhuri Dixit/Salman Khan/Sanjay Dutt love triangle! Sanjay Dutt was a poet whose pseudonym was Saagar?"

Everyone was looking at me funny. Who was this crazy woman having a happy meltdown to an old Hindi movie song on the oldies radio channel? Was I the only one who remembered how Saajan had turned India and even Pakistan upside down with its solid starcast and Pankaj Udhas songs? When did Saajan become an oldie?

"Haanji, the songs were very nice," said the usually silent driver quite suddenly, "jiyein toh jiyein kaise bin aapke."

I was happy.

Everybody's Favourite Aunt

Aunt Alice's advice to my teenage self in a November 1996 issue of Young Times. Remember her? Good times, good times.

My Friend the Astronaut

It's 2012, and Sunita Williams is making headlines in India. She is an astronaut with NASA and is going to be heading back out to space. She is also of Indian origin from her father's side.

I heard about her on TV a few hours ago here in Muscat, Oman. All the Indian news channels are talking about her.

And I suddenly miss Kalpana Chawla. Do you remember her?

It was 16 years ago in 1996 when the world first heard of Kalpana Chawla. I was 15, and it was such a huge deal for me as a young Indian school kid in Oman to hear about a female Indian astronaut. There were no Indian news channels in those days, but I did rip out stories about her from a youth magazine I used to subscribe to. How amazing was she! In those days I almost used to live in an alternate universe where the Star Trek world was real, and here was an Indian girl like me who was going into space. The final frontier! From NASA! As far as I was concerned, NASA was the real world's Starfleet Academy, and I had a crazy amount of respect for that. I had another Trekkie friend in high school who had a thing for Mr. Spock (I was a Kirk girl myself), and all I ever heard her say was that she was going to grow up and work at NASA too. It felt nice to have one of our own - brown skin, black hair, black eyes, a name that didn't sound like Smith or Sarah - out there, someone who was actually going to see the final frontier my Trekkie friends and I were always obsessing about.

The next time I heard about Kalpana Chawla was many years later in 2003. I was 22 years old and emotional-light-years away as an undergraduate student in my final semester at the Oklahoma State University out there on the American Prairie. A tragedy had occurred, and the Space Shuttle Columbia had disintegrated - along with everyone on board - over several miles in Texas while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. From what I remember, it was because of a faulty heat-resistant tile on the body of the shuttle. The shuttle had burned up and fallen apart out there in the next state in a region only 4 hours away from where I was. And Kalpana Chawla had been on board.

The American news channels had carried stories about the Columbia crew for days. One of them told a story about Kalpana, about how she had felt while looking at the Earth through a window from inside the Columbia while in space. She had seen her own reflection looking back at her, and she had been able to see the Earth in her eyes. And she had said that the Earth had looked so beautiful and so calm and quiet out there in space, and that if everyone could see what she had seen, that no one would fight each other anymore.

I miss her today. I've never had any real-life role models, never really looked up to anyone particularly while growing up, but she had felt like someone I had known. Her smiling pictures in her astronaut suit, the ones from NASA with the American flag watching over her from behind almost like it had her back, those pictures felt like she had been smiling at me. Like she knew me too. She had kind eyes. She looked like a nice, normal person. Kalpana my friend. I miss her today.

Those Evil Ad People

Prrrrooobably not the kind of beauty Eleanor Roosevelt was talking about.

The Cleric's Worst Nightmare

The end of the world is upon us: people now get fatter during Ramadhan, and Kate Moss is the face of Harper's Bazaar Arabia's Ramadhan special (her naughty bits have been covered quite literally for Heaven's sake).

Dead Girls like Sonam

I'm sitting here in Muscat, Oman, looking at my old small spiral notebook that I used to carry around with me as a reporting intern at NDTV in New Delhi last June. The front cover is dark blue with a broad orange stripe. It says 'Lotus' in small print next to a picture of a lotus flower. The spiral is thin but tough and black in colour. The back cover says that this notebook contains 160 pages and that it cost 11 rupees. There's an address back there, probably the manufacturer: Sohan Lal Nem Chand Jain, 90 Chawri Bazar, Delhi - 6 (INDIA). You can email the company at info@lotusstationery.com and call them at their 'helpline' at 65288701. Don't forget to dial 91 for India and 11 for Delhi.

The pages of this notebook are in various shades of pastel - pink, yellow, blue, green, but the first few pages are white. Ruled. If you flip through them, you can see my scribbles through half of those 160 pages. In black ink, of course, that's the only colour I write in. The first page of this notebook has neat handwriting. This is where I would write down the extension numbers of the different departments at NDTV. The Video Tape Library (VTL), Graphics (GFX), Input, PCR B (English), and PCR A (Hindi). And the cafeteria.

A few pages after this are some questions I'd scrawled down as bullet points. I remember writing them. I had been on my way with a senior cameraperson to the Ministry of State for Women and Child Development. The minister there - Krishna Tirath - was finally going to make a statement, and I had been hurriedly dispatched from the newsroom to get that bite. It was about that 14-year-old girl who had allegedly been raped and murdered in Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh by some policemen. She had already been buried after an autopsy that had cleared the policemen, but the ministry in Delhi had decided to send in their own team to exhume the body and conduct a second autopsy. The girl who had died, her name was Sonam. Her parents were Tarannum and Intezam Ali. These were poor people. India is a poor country.

The NDTV car had been smelling hot and dusty. The monsoons hadn't hit yet. I'd been making notes during the ride about questions I wanted to ask the minister. I remember my scalp feeling tight, I had wanted to do a good job. I had planned on asking the minister 3 things: had they received any new information about the alleged crime, was the ministry stepping into this issue because of political pressure, and was there reason to believe that the proposed second autopsy was expected to yield different results? That's what's in my notes anyway. I was quite a serious little intern.

I remember rushing into the ministry with the cameraperson, a no-nonsense South Indian man with a strong vibe of strength about him. The ministry was dank and moldy from the inside. Sticky feeling. The elevator we took to go upstairs kept shaking and making mechanical chewing noises like a robot's digestive system. We were late, late, late, what if the minister had already begun? The cameraperson and I rushed out of the elevator as the doors opened too slowly and ran down a corridor that looked like there was a war going on outside. The lights were out, the ceiling was gone and had wires and other skeletal building material hanging down from it. We found the door to the minister's office. We opened it. A number of eyes turned to look at us. We were late, the other channels - their reporters and camerapeople - were already there. The minister was at her desk. And her room was amazing. A shiny floor (was it hardwood?), expensive couches, and large black statues of Renaissance-type children and women in various corners of the room. Air conditioning. A corporate office almost, a whole other world far away from the decaying ministry outside.

I helped the cameraperson quickly set up his tripod and the mic. With the red NDTV muff. I felt a little embarassed about being the last ones there, but the minister hadn't started giving her statement yet. "Aaiye, aap hi ka intezaar thha," a number of reporters and camerapeople there said to us, almost rolling their eyes. Please come, you were the ones we'd been waiting for. We were NDTV after all, the most famous, the most sophisticated channel of them all.

Everyone was crowded around the minister's shiny desk. There was no space to stand close to her desk because that's where all the camerapeople stood with their large cameras. I was the youngest and the shortest - and female - but in the confusion I somehow found my way up across her desk. Someone patted my shoulder to make me sit down on the chair there, and I did. No one was paying any attention, the reporters were mentally disconnected, the minister was chatting with another female reporter, and I didn't really know what to do. These were the real camerapeople and reporters, and they all knew each other. Even the politicians and other newsmakers knew them. I didn't know anyone. I didn't know what was supposed to happen next. The minister looked at me, a new face sitting across from her desk. I caught her eye, and after an awkward second, I decided to ask her a question. One of the ones I had come up with on the way to the ministry.

The minister had started to smile at me when I spoke. I think I asked her about the autopsy. Her face fell, she looked at me like I had gone off-script. Her mouth trembled, her eyes darted left and right, and her voice shook as she turned away. "Not now, not now, later, later." Later? When? Isn't that what I was supposed to do as a reporter?

I guess not. The minister immediately started making her statement, memorised and well-rehearsed, inflecting at all the right places. She first did this in English for the English channels, and then performed it all over again in Hindi for the other channels. It was like watching a play or the taping of a show. Aaaand turn to this camera for Hindi. I sat there across from her the whole time, wondering why I had even bothered to use my brain to come up with questions that I had thought needed to be asked.

We were hardly in there for more than 10 minutes before the statements were taken and the camerapeople and reporters decided to leave. I had looked around but no one was asking any questions, I didn't know why. I felt somewhat stupid and useless. Redundant. Everyone left the minister behind in her office and stepped back out into the muggy haunted corridor and packed the elevator on our way down. The reporters and camerapeople were abusing the minister the whole time. "What a waste of time," they had said. "She's an idiot. She's only doing this to suck up to her boss Chidambaram." I felt like a dancing monkey. I'm sorry, Sonam.

We Called Her Ruby

The last time I met Ruby Baaji was the night before I was about to fly out to the US for university. It was August 1999, and I had recently turned 18. She was married by then, the mother of 2 young children - a baby girl and a boy - and she gave me a present that I kept for a long time. A pouch full of makeup brushes. A blue, yellow, and green pouch. The brushes inside had pale white handles. It was a rather grown-up present for me from a person who symbolised my childhood. Our relationship had always been that way. I had no elder sisters, and she had been to me what I think one is like. I still remember her giggling in that tinkly laugh of hers as she handed me the present. Ruby Baaji used to laugh everytime she felt like it. Her eyes would grow small, and she'd slightly lean back and hunch as she laughed from head to toe. I'd felt slightly embarassed and self-conscious about the make-up pouch. It meant that she was looking at me as if I were a young lady and not a gender-free school kid (we still had those in those days). I had not been ready for that. Our relationship had been changing as the both of us were growing into our 20s and the things that can mean, and this was another new thing for me.

Ruby baaji died in a car accident a few months later in early 2000. I was in my second semester at university in the US at the time. That's around the time I bought my first lipstick. A dark brown one. Browns were in in those days. Ruby Baaji had been about to move to Canada with her husband and children but had decided to accompany her family and her in-laws for a quick umrah in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. They had all been returning to Muscat by road when one of the tires of the car had exploded. Ruby Baaji had been flung out of the fast-moving car with her little daughter who had been sitting in her lap. I was told that they had both been found lying by the road outside, her little daughter unhurt, still shielded by her mother's body. But Ruby Baaji had already passed away from internal injuries. She was eventually buried in a cemetery somewhere near Riyadh. That was 12 years ago. Was it really? I think Ruby Baaji was 8 years older than me. She was born on May 1st; I remember because I had made a big deal about it being the same as Labour Day. I had had a 365-days storybook - one story or poem for every day of the year - and I had made her read the story that was listed under her birthday. It was about a caterpillar that felt ugly and wanted to be beautiful until it went to sleep and woke up a beautiful butterfly. It was crowned the May Queen by all the insects, the most beautiful of them all. The moral of the story was that some people may not be born beautiful but they can grow beautiful.

Ruby Baaji had once cut out butterflies for me from a pretty writing pad she owned. She had put them in an envelope for me to take home. It was on one of those evenings when my parents would drop me off at her house because they had a serious grown-up event to go to. I spent many days like that with her. Ruby Baaji was very popular with the younger kids she knew, myself very much included. We were all in primary or middle school and she was in high school. We all used to bounce around her at parties or whenever we stayed over at her place. And Ruby Baaji used to talk to us like we were the most interesting little people ever. She used to laugh with us all the time.

I guess you could say that Ruby Baaji was one of those soft, feminine kinds of girl, the sort that wears red on Valentine's Day and likes babies. She was thin, not too tall, and wore glasses (contact lenses weren't common in those days, I only got mine in high school). She had pale skin, the kind that grows yellower the lighter it gets. She had a long smooth face and long delicate limbs. I remember her feet, they were very beautiful. Long delicate light-looking feet with very clean skin. Sometimes I look at my feet, and when they're in their best shape, they almost look like hers.

Ruby Baaji was very talkative, and she used to laugh a lot. Her voice was husky but not raspy, you could call it a girly breathy. I, like all the other little girls, used to follow her around like a tail. Our mothers used to shop together a lot, and I have a memory of Ruby Baaji and I sitting together on the dirty worn-out carpet that covered some wooden steps in that store and her singing the title song from 'Chandni' to me. "Khaali haath nahin aate, khaali haath nahin aate..." she tinkled in her sweet voice. I think we were sitting next to a wall with a poster of Sridevi's, possibly in one of her signature tight chiffon saris from that time. I have since stopped by that store a number of times or just simply walked by, and every single time I can see Ruby Baaji and I sitting on that dirty carpet and singing songs from that old Hindi (the word 'Bollywood' hadn't been invented then) movie. The Sridevi poster has long since gone, but they always do.



Sometime after a spate of Salman Khan starrers had been released in the early 90s that I noticed that Ruby Baaji used to talk about him all the time. I remember one dinner party where she was explaining to us clueless younger girls that Salman Khan's character was more noble than Sanjay Dutt's character in 'Saajan' because he had decided to sacrifice his true love. Everytime I now see that old Salman Khan - thinner, swifter, a better actor - from 'Saajan', 'Pathar ke Phool', 'Maine Pyaar Kiya', I think of Ruby Baaji at that table in that restaurant I don't remember.

Ruby Baaji left Muscat for university in India, and I began to see less of her. I remember the first time she returned on a holiday; I'd visited her at her home with my mother, but I'd been nervous and awkward. So had she. We'd had less to talk about. We'd become more formal, and she was getting along better with our moms. Something had changed between us. I guess we didn't have as many things in common anymore, and I'd only met her after a long time. I had brought my Arabic test paper from school with me to show her the way I used to show her every small thing before; I'd aced the test, and I had wanted to tell her that, but it somehow felt stupid and unimportant when I did. I told her about how I was angry with my parents for not letting me visit my Jain best friend's house just because in India the Ayodhya Masjid had been demolished by a right-wing Hindu mob. I must've been in 6th grade then. Eleven years old. I told her that it made no sense. I didn't think she agreed, but she didn't say anything. I think I stopped talking to her too much after that, it all felt too awkward. And I just felt ridiculous, I don't know why. But it was alright.

And the years sped by. I discovered boys and menstruation and my own movie star crush (Shahrukh Khan, right after 'Baazigar') that lasted me well into high school. Ruby Baaji entered her 20s, got married into a family we also knew in Muscat, and had kids. I only saw her at grown-up parties where I had to wear grown-up clothes and behave myself. My hair was longer, and I had learned how to wear liquid eyeliner. Ruby Baaji looked like light, like she was truly made of light. She was young, newly married, and always laughing. She looked wonderful and glowy and dressed so beautifully. I remember running into her at a party when I was in high school. She wore a gharara, I can't remember what colour, but she looked like light. I was shy and only spoke to her formally, but she was still very friendly. I didn't know how to behave with her - like the 10-year-old I used to be or the chirpy 17-year-old I thought I was supposed to be. But she was still very full of life. And happy. I think she was the type of person that has a clean heart. Everyone doted on her. All the aunties and uncles and even the young ones. She'd grown up around all of us. Even her two little children would call her Ruby because that's what they heard everyone around them call her. Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. She once sent me a card that I think I still have with me somewhere. It had two ducklings, one blue and one pink, cosying up together on the front. The card read 'I like it when you're nice...' on the outside and '...but I love it when you're naughty!' on the inside. It was adorable. It was only many years later that I realised that at that point, when I had just finished high school, that neither she nor I had realised in our innocence that it was not a card that was meant for friends.

Her real name was actually Masarrat. I remembered her very strongly yesterday because of a glowy young wife I saw in a Pakistani drama the other day. She had long hair like Ruby Baaji's and was very light-skinned. She wore a white gharara that made her glow. She had very little make-up on because she didn't need any, she glowed without it. I've been meaning to write about Ruby Baaji for such a long time. I'm 31 now, she would've been almost 40. After Ruby Baaji died, her mother found an old friendship band in her belongings that I had made for her as a kid. Did she really die 12 years ago? I can still hear, see her giving me that make-up bag.

Malcolm and Betty X

"The unease Malcolm had shown toward marrying Betty almost immediately manifested itself in their lives together as man and wife. The challenges they faced were linked, in part, to the general problems that many black Americans encounter when adopting Qur'anic standards for marriage. Many basic beliefs Muslims have about its purposes and duties are at odds with Western Christian values. Another serious issue is the concept of machismo that some African-American males carry into Islam. The Nation had long drawn its converts from the lowest rungs of black society, and many of its flock came from difficult or self-destructive backgrounds. Those who, like Malcolm, had converted while in prison often continued to bear painful scars, both physical and psychological, from that experience. Trauma can last an entire lifetime, and the Nation had no self-help program to assist men in overcoming such emotional problems. Malcolm's prior sexual history had been largely defined by encounters with prostitutes and women like Bea Caragulian. Now he would have an obligation not only to provide financially for Betty but to address her emotional and sexual needs."

- Manning Marable, 'Malcolm X'

The Men and Women of the Nation

"Elijah Muhammad's views about gender relations would be set out in this 1965 manifesto Message to the Blackman in America. To Muhammad, males and females occupied separate spheres. Black women had been the mothers of civilisation, and they would play a central role in the construction of the world to come. Metaphorically, they were the field in which a mighty Nation would grow; thus it was essential for black men to keep the devil, the white man, away from his "field," because the black woman was far more valuable than any cash crop. There was no question that all women had to be controlled; the question was, who should exercise that control, the white man or the black? He also warned against birth control, a devilish plot to carry out genocide against black babies. It was precisely a woman's ability to produce children that gave the weaker sex its value. "Who wants a sterile wom[a]n?" he asked rhetorically.

What attracted so many intelligent, independent African-American women to such a patriarchal sect? The sexist and racist world of the 1940s and 1950s provides part of the answer. Many African-American women in the paid labour force were private household workers and routinely experienced sexual harassment by their white employers. The [Nation of Islam], by contrast, offered them the protections of private patriarchy. Like their middle-class white counterparts, African-American women in the Nation were not expected to hold full-time jobs, and even if Malcolm's frequent misogynistic statements, especially in his sermons, were extreme even by the sexist standards of the NOI, it offered protection, stability, and a kind of leadership. Malcolm's emphasis on the sanctity of the black home made an explicit promise "that families won't be abandoned, that women will be cherished and protected, [and] that there will be economic stability."

Temple women during those years rarely perceived themselves as being subjugated. The [Muslim Girls Training] was its own center of activity, in which members participated in neighbourhood activities and were encouraged to monitor their children's progress in school. At the Newark NOI temple, not far from Temple No. 7, women were involved in establishing small businesses. They also took an active role in working with their local board of education as well as other community concerns. It is likely that Harlem's women made similar efforts. As with those who were working in civil rights, women in the NOI had in mind the future of the black community. What attracted them to the Nation was the possibility of strong, healthy families, supportive relationships, and personal engagements in building crime-free black neighbourhoods and ultimately an independent black nation."

- Manning Marable, 'Malcolm X'

Looking For Black Role Models

"An impressionable young black man in search of roles and images in the movies and media, however, would have found a sorry set of models. In the forties, the dominant representation of the African American was the comic minstrel, typified by the national radio show Amos 'n' Andy. (Ironically, of course, the original actors in the series were white, mimicking black dialect.) In films, blacks were generally presented as clowns or mental incompetents. Gone With the Wind, Hollywood's 1939 extravaganza celebrating the prewar slave South, offered up the servant Mammy, docile yet loyal, obese and hardworking. One of the few Hollywood movies of the period that departed slightly from crude stereotypes was Warner Brothers' Bullets or Ballots, featuring black actress Louise Beavers as the notorious Nellie LaFleur, the numbers queen. It is likely that Malcolm saw this film as well as dozens of others that addressed racial themes; decades later he would recall Hollywood's distortions of black people as part of his general indictment of white racism. Even the title of the Warner Brothers' film may have been recycled in Malcolm's 1964 address "The Ballot of the Bullet.""

- Manning Marable, 'Malcolm X'

Those Black Kids at School

"The Little children were constantly drilled in the principles of Garveyism, to such an extent that they expressed their black nationalist values at school. For example, on one morning following the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing of the national anthem at school, Wilfred informed his teacher that blacks also had their own anthem. Instructed to sing it, Wilfred complied: "It began with the words...'Ethiopia, the land of the free...' That creates some problems," Wilfred recalled, "because here is this little nigger that feels he is just equal to anybody else, he got his own little national anthem that he sings, and he's proud of it...It wasn't the way they wanted things to go."

...

"When Malcolm went to Mason, you could see a change in him," Wilfred recalled. "Some for the better, some for the worse...He would complain about some of the things the teachers would try to do - they would try to discourage him from taking courses that black people weren't suposed to take; in other words, keep him in his place." It hadn't bothered him particularly during the previous year when white students who had befriended him continued to call him nigger. But now Malcolm was keenly aware of the social distance between himself and others. An English teacher, Richard Kaminska, sharply discouraged him from becoming a lawyer. "You've got to be realistic about being a nigger," Kaminska advised him. "A lawyer - that's no realistic goal for a nigger...Why don't you plan on carpentry?" Malcolm's grades plummeted and his truculence increased. Within several months, he found himself expelled."

- Manning Marable, 'Malcolm X'

Go back to Africa!

"The destruction of a black family's home by racist whites was hardly unique in the Midwest at this time. In 1923, the Michigan State Supreme Court had upheld the legality of racially restrictive provisions in the sale of private homes. Most Michigan whites felt that blacks had no right to purchase homes in predominantly white communities. Four years before the Littles' fire, in June 1925, a black couple, Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife Gladys, purchased a single-family home in East Detroit, a white neighbourhood, escaping Detroit's largest ghetto, known as the Black Bottom, and were forced to pay $18,500 even though the fair market value of the modest bungalow was under $13,000. On the night the Sweets moved in, despite the presence of a police inspector, hundreds of angry whites surrounded the house and began smashing its windows with rocks and bricks. Several  of the Sweets' friends shot into the mob, killing one man and wounding another. Ossian and Gladys Sweet plus nine others were subsequently charged with murder. The NAACP vigorously took up the case, hiring celebrated defense attorney Clarence Darrow. Despite an all-white jury, eight of the eleven were acquitted; the jury divided on the remaining three. The judge subsequently declared a mistrial, and ultimately the Sweets were freed."

- Manning Marable, 'Malcolm X'

Why Chris Left Marxism

"Trotsky had a sound materialist critique that enabled him to be prescient, not all of the time by any means, but impressively so on some occasions. And he certainly had a sense - expressed in his emotional essay Literature and Revolution - of the unquenched yearning of the poor and oppressed to rise above the strictly material world and to achieve something transcendent. For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not yet quite abandoned. But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself, from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical  and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer a guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined - as I hope - I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking."

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

An Ordinary Miracle

"Mother Teresa died in 1997. On the first anniversary of her death, two nuns in the Bengali village of Raigunj claim to have strapped an aluminium medal of the departed (a medal that had supposedly been in contact with her dead body) to the abdomen of a woman named Monica Besra. This woman, who was said to be suffering from a large uterine tumour, was thereupon quite cured of it. It will be noticed that Monica is a Catholic girl's name not very common in Bengal, and thus that probably the patient and certainly the nuns were already Mother Teresa fans. This definition would not cover Dr. Manju Murshed, the superintendent of the local hospital, nor Dr. TK Biswas and his gynecologist colleague Dr. Ranjan Mustafi. All three came forward to say that Mrs. Besra had been suffering from tuberculosis and an ovarian growth, and had been successfully treated for both afflications. Dr. Murshed was particularly annoyed at the numerous calls he had received from Mother Teresa's order, the "Missionaries of Charity", pressing him to say that the cure had been miraculous. The patient herself did not make a very impressive interview subject, talking at high speed because, as she put it, she "might otherwise forget" and begging to be excused questions because she might have to "remember". Her own husband, a man named Selku Murmu, broke silence after a while to say that his wife had been cured by ordinary, regular medical treatment."

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

A Miracle at Mother Teresa's

"I had already helped expose one of the "miracles" connected with the work of this woman. The man who originally made her famous was a distinguished if rather silly British evangelist (later a Catholic) named Malcolm Muggeridge. It was his BBC documentary, Something Beautiful for God, which launched the "Mother Teresa" brand on the world in 1969. The cameraman for this film was a man named Ken Macmillan, who had won high praise for his work on Lord Clark's great art history series, Civilisation. His understanding of colour and lighting was of a high order. Here is the story as Muggeridge told it, in the book that accompanied the film:

[Mother Teresa's] Home for the Dying is dimly lit by small windows high up in the walls, and Ken [Macmillan] was adamant that filming was quite impossible there. We only had one small light with us, and to get the place adequately lighted in the time at our disposal was quite impossible. It was decided that, nonetheless, Ken should have a go, but by way of insurance he took, as well, some film in an outside courtyard where some of the inmates were sitting in the sun. In the processed film, the part taken inside was bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and confused...I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light that Cardinal Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn.

He concluded that

This is precisely what miracles are for - to reveal the inner reality of God's outward creation. I am personally persuaded that Ken recorded the first authentic photographic miracle...I fear I talked and wrote about it to the point of tedium.

He was certainly correct in that last sentence: by the time he had finished he had made Mother Teresa into a world-famous figure. My contribution was to check out and put into print the direct verbal testimony of Ken Macmillan, the cameraman himself. Here it is:

During Something Beautiful for God, there was an episode where we were taken to a building that Mother Teresa called the House of the Dying. Peter Chafer, the director, said, "Ah well, it's very dark in here. Do you think we can get something?" And we had just taken delivery at the BBC of some new film made by Kodak, which we hadn't had time to test before we left, so I said to Peter, "Well, we may as well have a go." So we shot it. And when we got back several weeks later, a month or two later, we are sitting in the rushes theater at Ealing Studios and eventually up come the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, "That's amazing. That's extraordinary." And I was going to go on to say, you know, three cheers for Kodak. I didn't get a chance to say that though, because Malcolm, sitting in the front row, spun around and said: "It's divine light! It's Mother Teresa. You'll find that it's divine light, old boy." And three or four days later I found that I was being phoned by journalists from London newspapers who were saying things like: "We hear you've just come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and you were the witness of a miracle."

"

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

The Lawmakers and Their Subjects

"In 1996, the Irish Republic held a referendum on one question: whether its state constitution should still prohibit divorce. Most of the political parties, in an increasingly secular country, urged voters to approve of a change in the law. The did so for two excellent reasons. It was no longer thought right that the Roman Catholic Church should legislate its morality for all citizens, and it was obviously impossible even to hope for eventual Irish reunification if the larger Protestant minority in the North was continually repelled by the possibility of clerical rule. Mother Teresa flew all the way from Calcutta to help campaign, along with the church and its hard-liners, for a "no" vote. In other words, an Irish woman married to a wife-beating  and incestuous drunk should never expect anything better, and might endanger her soul if she begged for a fresh start, while as for the Protestants, they could either choose the blessings of Rome or stay out altogether. There was not even the suggestion that Catholics could follow their own church's commandments while not imposing them on all citizens. And this in in the British Isles, in the last decade of the twentieth century. The referendum eventually amended the constitution, though by the narrowest of majorities. (Mother Teresa in the same year gave an interview saying that she hoped her friend Princess Diana would be happier after she had escaped from what was an obviously miserable marriage, but it's less of a surprise to find the church applying sterner laws to the poor, or offering indulgences to the rich.)"

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

Tears at the Rajghat

Something happened to me that day at the Rajghat in Delhi last June. I'm usually able to write out any given blogpost in one sitting, but I think there were so many cognitive interpretive layers in what I was experiencing that it took me a year to be able to understand all the things that had hit me all at once then. That almost never happens to me, I usually know exactly what I'm feeling and why. But it's taken me a year this time. I'm much better now, but I can never be the same person that I was then. Not at all. Has that ever happened to you, like when everything you ever believed in falls away and for a long time you don't know which end is up? You're as helpless as a newborn baby and wailing just about the same way as when you did when the warm world of the womb that you'd known for months slowly spat you out and, unbeknownst to you, had been repositioning you for the expulsion for a long time before. The betrayal! And as the old world fell away, the new one with all its awful noises and light and temperatures made you cry. It is at that time that you, a pruned blind piece of primal meat covered in body-slime, are at your most vulnerable. You need a parent from the new world to shield you, to tell you that everything will be alright, to make sure the predators from that new world don't sniff you out and eat the squishy lump of meat that is you.

Not everyone gets that parent.

The Rajghat incident happened when I was interning in reporting at NDTV in New Delhi. I tried writing this out a few months later at the end of August but couldn't get very far. All the pictures and colours and sounds and temperatures and textures that I was trying to convey were swirling so fast and phasing in and out of each other, I just couldn't separate each strand out long enough to lay out in writing before it curled up again and rolled away. It was like trying to unravel a jumble of sticky tape that had been glued onto itself. I'd try to straighten it out, but the tape would either stick to my fingers or upon its own self even more. So before long I balled up the whole mess and chucked it away. But it still lay there, gathering more dust on its exposed sticky parts. Like when you're trying to get all the colours of a Rubik's Cube right so it makes sense, but you just can't nomatter which way you spin it. You even try to cheat by changing the stickers, but that doesn't help. You never get to forget the things you left unresolved.

So why did I start crying that day?

I felt frustrated and helpless and a sense of doom. And I was tired. We all were. All the reporters and camera people who had been at the Rajghat that day, some from the previous day, covering the BJP's protest against the central Congress-led government's decision to lathi charge Baba Ramdev's demonstration a few days before. June was turning out to be a busy month politics-wise. I had been put on 5am shifts everyday so far and had been sent out to mostly wait on people everyday. Hang out at the Congress headquarters where I remember the ants floating in the drinking water cooler in the press room. Go find out about the people who had been injured at the lathi charge. I had even spoken to the doctors who had treated the injured. My cameraman and I had had to wait for 3-4 hours in the lobby of the GB Pant hospital to speak to the doctors who ran the place. It had been a depressing wait. We all had heat-related headaches and were suffering from heat-exhaustion, and we couldn't even go back to the newsroom because we had been ordered to get a story. I felt really bad for the camerapeople because they had to lug those huge cameras around. So we waited and waited in the lobby with another cameraperson from another channel too. They told me things. They told me that the Indian public deserved the kind of politicians and leaders it got because the people themselves were stupid. I remember sitting there in the horrible heat of Delhi in June. The lobby wasn't really a closed-door lobby. It was an open corridor to the outside. I remember I saw a mongoose running past me. A mongoose? In a hospital? I'd leapt and pointed it out to the cameraperson, but he hadn't been surprised at all. I had wanted to cover that story, of how rodents seemed to skip around quite freely in a famous goverment hospital in the capital of India. Animals carry diseases. They carry fleas. They can chew through equipment and patients' bodies. What kind of healthcare standard was this? Why did people care about movie stars and beauty pagaents when their government wasn't able to give them the living standards that any human being deserved? I shuddered at the thought of having to seek treatment at a hospital like that. In a country like that. In the country I had been born in.

We were eventually led in to the medical officer's office. Imagine my fury when I realised that she'd been in all along and that her secretary had been lying to us about how she hadn't been in the whole time. My cameraman and I had been baking outside and feeling quite ill for hours. Imagine my shock at how nice her office looked compared to the rest of the hospital that I'd seen. It was air-conditioned, nice shiny floors, couches, a beautiful shiny desk, like a corporate office. I doubted that the rest of the hospital, where cleanliness was really needed, was like that. The medical officer was nice enough to us though. We were offered ice-cold Coke. We felt grateful. In that kind of heat, one starts to feel like one is breathing fire. A couple of days later I would be laid up in my depressing rented room with heat stroke, lying flat on my back staring at the rickety fan, completely dehydrated and hungry, unable to raise my head because my booming heartbeats pounding on my eardrums wouldn't let me move enough to order food or water. I felt so pathetic and sorry for myself that day, and I was crying on the inside but couldn't on the outside because any sort of movement was making my heart pound even louder. I was scared. I thought I was going to die. I wondered what it was that I had been trying to prove to myself.

I'd discovered at the hospital that one woman was in a critical state because her spine had been damaged. She had died later, but the others had suffered non-fatal injuries. The information had been nothing great, the BJP themselves had read out the official statistics about the injured that had been released by the hospitals earlier. So why did they start comparing it to the Jalianwala Bagh massacre? That was another story I thought needed to be covered. Compare the statistics of how incomparable the two events had been, and that maybe it was grossly irresponsible for a democratic political party to chant slogans and stir up emotions and historical memories of an event where foreign occupiers had massacred the natives of India. Criticising one's own elected government in a democracy to the extent of its actions makes sense. Constantly repeating established inaccurate information despite knowing it is inaccurate is lying. Deception. At the political level. Political parties often have very passionate followers, most of whom get swept away by one-liner slogans and the charisma of their leaders. That is the nature of the mob. Riots, genocide, even wholesale ethnic cleansings have been the result of irresponsible political behaviour. All over the world. Throughout history. These things can effect people's identities for generations to come. People still talk about how Europe and its offshoot countries still demonise the rest of the world, the monolith Orient, as the digusting other. It's part of some of their national behavioural patterns even. And for what? Lies? The kind I was seeing in action in front of my very eyes? And I couldn't do anything about it because the system was so huge and big and in a flurry that there was no one who wanted to listen. And I was in reporting that month! If I didn't express these things, then who would! Why didn't the others?

I stood in horror a couple of days later at the Rajghat where the BJP was holding a protest against the Congress-run central government. I tried blogging about it a few months later, but I just wasn't able to, it was knocking the wind out of me. I'd abandoned the post after writing the following, after which I abandoned my life for about a year:

Picture this: a 29-year-old female NRI uncomfortably sitting on the edge of a low platform in the shadow of about 10 tripod-hoisted video cameras that look suspiciously like machine guns. The month is June, the city is Delhi, and that brings to mind words like inferno, fire and brimstone, heat exhaustion, and body filth. It is the second day of the BJP protest at the Rajghat. Swarms of sweaty shiny boney Indian people have gathered at the ineffective shamiana by the sectioned-off road. The police is there, the media (oh, the media!) is there, the big politicians are there. The NRI is tired. She has had about half a meal per day over the past week. She has been here since 6am when things were just warm. It is now well into the afternoon, and like a fever, the heat of the sun and the passion of the protesters has been rising, rising, rising. This is the most disgusting season of the year (second only to the monsoons a few weeks away). She has been leaking from every conceiveable pore, her precious skin now looks like burned toast, she has sweated and evaporated in turns so many times that she now has layers of body salt in the most frustrating of places, and there is no place she can go to for relief for miles. She is not even allowed to return to the newsroom, they told her to stay put. There is no escape.


So she sits at the foot of the cameras, facing the famous right-wing politicians and their supporters who are making very loud speeches and screeching rude slogans against the Congress party. They go on and on and on, and after a few hours, when the heat is unbearable, when the ear-drum damaging loudspeakers feel like they're installed inside her brain, howling the same cheap slogans and songs over and over and over and over and over again, when the followers begin to sway like as if in the (original) Dum Maaro Dum video, followers who have come from no-name villages from far and wide with their children in their gaudy best to touch the feet of these politicians who will just.not.stop.with.the.scree.ching...

The NRI saw other things too. From where she was crouched under the cameras she saw a circus. She saw people coming up to the cameras to declare their alleigance to the right-wingers by bringing God into politics. She saw token Muslim politicians puffing up their chests and calmly informing journalists that the Muslims of India are now beginning to realise that the right-wing is the only political segment that truly cares for them. She saw ugly sloganeering that involved bare-faced lying which people ended up believing just because it was repeated so many times. She was alarmed about people bowing down before the god-like politicians. But this was what was wrong with the whole Indian democracy - the politicians are the ones who are supposed to be bowing down to the people, not the other way round! What is wrong with the citizens of this country?!

Life cornered me that day, there was no escape. I'd been out at the protest all day. I'd been sent there by the input desk to keep an eye out for anything strange. It wasn't so hot that early in the morning, but it got hot soon. I was out there until around 3pm, and I couldn't leave any earlier because the desk wanted me out there even though nothing was happening, even though I felt like I'd been getting sicker and sicker and sicker because of being run ragged over the past week. There were so many reporters there from so many channels and newspapers, most of them hanging out, some of them changing shifts with those who had been there from the previous day. I envied the people with the OB vans, they were sitting somewhere where it was cool and dark.

I did enjoy walking around and talking to people for the first few hours. I wondered where the big politicians were. This was supposed to be a continous protest. Many of the followers had stayed out there overnight. I then found out that the star politicians had all gone home at night. They returned towards noon, freshly showered and well-rested and well-fed, unlike their followers who had stayed out at the protest overnight in the horrible heat. I wondered what the point of such a protest was. Napoleon I've heard used to sleep out on the battlefield with his soldiers. He used to wrap his cloak around himself and go off to sleep.

Everything was sleepy and slow until when the big politicians started showing up. That's when I heard one man calling someone on the phone and telling him to get some supporters out there because they seemed to have more police than party workers around. By then most of the reporters were sitting under the shamiana where all the video cameras had been set up from the day before. You didn't want to talk to a cameraperson that day. They were all very angry and snappy. And I totally understood how they felt too. Like they were wasting their time.

I noticed a lot of things I wished the reporters would bring up instead of just trying to get bites from the famous people. Someone told me that the women who were sitting up on the stage behind the famous politicians slept with them for important political positions. What! But these were aunties in bhhartiya naari saris and bindis and everything! Someone pointed out another famous politician up there who was known to run various transport companies as a front for an illegal money-making setup. All the reporters knew about him but couldn't prove anything because that politician used to keep his trail clean. But, but, but these were the politicians who were howling about corruption in the Congress. They had been using some really tacky low-brow slogans too - "Sonia jiski mummy hai, woh party nikammi hai." I mean, are you serious, this wasn't even intelligent, it was like some twisted version of kindergarten. At some point a train of people marched into the shamiana waving their fists in the air in support of the BJP. "They are hired," I was told.

It grew hotter. Noisier. More crowded. People were streaming in from the poorest parts of town with their families and approaching the top politicians where they sat on the stage with their arms folded and chins tilted upwards. The people touched the feet of their leaders. It was blind respect, something bordering worship.

The loudspeakers had been playing loud patriotic music the whole time. The leaders were sloganeering along with the music. For hours. 6am. 7am. 8am. 9am. 10am. 11am. 12pm. 1pm. 2pm. 3pm. My head had started hurting, but I had nowhere to go. I had been rotating between the same set of clothes every few days, I wore cheap black flip-flops on my feet. The sun was so bright and hot, my skin had started burning. The skin on my feet was pricking, but there was hardly any place were there was real shade in the severely overcrowded shamiana. There must've been around 100-200 people around, moving, sweating, talking, cheering, swaying to the songs on the loudspeaker that had started hurting my ears. The songs kept saying that India was great and that one's life had no meaning if it wasn't spent in service to one's nation. They said that India was the best country in the world. But it was not! There were rodents in hospitals, no city had a regular water supply, power shortages were common, the rich exploited the poor, and charismatic people made money off of the emotions of everyone else. Why did the songs have to be so loud, I felt like I was being programmed, like everyone was being programmed. I saw 1 token man with a Muslim cap and a black beard and baleful eyes sitting in the crowd with the party supporters. I don't think he was Muslim at all.

One of NDTV's reporters nudged me along to go stand next to LK Advani, the grand-daddy of the BJP. An anchor from CNN-IBN was speaking to him then. I stood next to where he sat. I can't remember what he was saying. I couldn't believe I was standing 2 inches away from the man that I had grown up seeing only in magazines or in newspapers overseas, the man whom the Muslims of India hated and feared, one of the men who have been named in riots that have resulted in the deaths of Muslims in Ayodhya, one of the men I grew up learning to fear. He was a lot smaller than I'd expected. Just an old man. Meticulously groomed, dressed very, very clean. Somebody I might've thought was neat and clean and educated if I had been someone else. He was just another human being - could've been my uncle, my teacher, my grandfather. He was just another person. How could someone so normal - educated even - do the things he had been accused of? Did he never think about the people who had died because of irresponsible politics, did he never think about someone like me, hoards of young people whose lives, identities were shaped by the words people like him uttered and the commands they issued?

I found a space under the tripods where the camerapeople still stood. I wanted water, I wanted to eat. They had been handing out little sealed cups of water which were hot as tea. My feet were still burning. I felt dirty and pathetic, like a little animal. It was so noisy and crowded. The NDTV reporter I had been shadowing had stepped away for a minute. I watched the circus play out before me from under the shadow of the tripods. Why was this not bothering anyone? Why were all the reporters simply telling the people at home about what they could see but not what they could not see? Isn't a journalist supposed to think, analyse, see through things? Suddenly an old man with his limbs in casts was carried onto the stage and almost placed in the laps of the big politicians who cradled him like a baby. They gave the old man a mike. He had been one of those who had been injured at the lathi charge at Baba Ramdev's demonstration a few days before. Everyone oohed and aahed as the man spoke about the horrible Congress party and then started calling out for Ram Rajya. Someone began to hand out brochures in Hindi about the Ram Janmbhhoomi while another man held up a large collage of newspaper articles that showed how evil the Congress was. People flocked towards the video cameras, eager to show their faces on international TV. One man standing in front of me cried out to the camera about how God had sent Baba Ramdev to the people and how the Congress had condemned the nation in the eyes of God because it had physically attacked God's messenger. And the politicians on the loudspeakers kept shouting about how the lathi charge had been the Jalianwala Bagh massacre, and that the Congress party was even worse than the British Raj. People cheered them along. And at least 2/3rds of the people there, including the people sloganeering, knew that the Jalianwala Bagh comparison was a complete lie. But they still said it!

A tear ran down my cheek. And another. And another. I wanted to get away. I felt like I was the only sane person in a madhouse.

The NDTV reporter showed up and saw me looking like a deer caught in headlights under those tripods. She took me away from the crowd and the noise and talked to me. I didn't know what to say. She had told me a while ago that economists are always excited about how India will have the greatest number of young people in the world because that metric predicts development. But then, she had said that 60% of those young Indian people were unskilled labour and would be dependent on the other 40% who would then exploit them. She had earlier pointed out to me the particularly anti-Muslim BJP politicians and how over the years the right-wing had tried to erase the contributions of Indian Muslims from Indian textbooks and had skewed how they were represented. I was told that they had even de-Islamised spoken Hindi by discouraging the use of any Urdu words. They had tried to erase...me.

The reporter was a kind one. She asked me if I was okay. I had so many thoughts racing through me. I was thinking about 9/11 and how people had become viscious and terrible in America and in the world about Islam, how it had effected me for years, how I had tried to understand exactly what was happening and why. I told her that I just couldn't believe how easily a lie could be made into truth if it was repeated enough times. I had seen young people subscribing to right-wing ideologies everywhere in the world. Educated, intelligent people. I hadn't been able to understand them, but I had thought there might've been some truth to what they believed in. But then, who knows what's true, really? A few days ago I had asked another reporter why he never felt terrible about the things that went unreported about Baba Ramdev and how people like him exploited other people's misfortunes and troubles and dreams and feelings for money and power. "I can't help it if people think he's Jesus," I was told.

Jesus. God. Angels. Prophets. Crusades. Burning towers. Oil. Beards. Veils. Churches. The Pope. "Go back to the Middle East!" If a lie can be written in books and passed off as truth, if lies can be passed down in families, in entire communities, if these people then grow up to lead countries and cause the death of innocent people, if not even what one's own parents teach us about the nature of the universe may be true, if entire countries and movements and governments and national and regional identities can be based on a lie, if it has been happening for eons...

Some poor old people stopped by where the reporter and I were sitting. They had wanted to know if I was alright. I honestly didn't know what to say to them because I couldn't trust anyone around the place. The reporter simplified things for them and told them that I had grown up overseas and was feeling upset about the way things really were in India. The poor people immediately felt bad for me. "Dekho, bitiya," they said to me, "see how cruel the Congress is, they beat us at the lathi charge where we were following the great Baba Ramdev..."

I didn't even say anything. I just shook my head, my tears leaving dirty sticky trails across my sunburned red face. It was not the Congress that was making me cry or the BJP. Or Al-Qaeda or the Republican party or the Taleban. It was them. People who never questioned what they were told and wouldn't get it even if they saw it in front of them crying on a hot June day. Their leaders didn't care about them. Their leaders cared about no one. Leaders need followers. Everywhere in the world. In life you're either a king or a pawn, Napoleon is supposed to have said, an emperor or a fool. Who knows what's real anymore, who knows what really goes on behind the curtains of power. Who knows who wrote history. Who knew that this new world I was suddenly seeing - a world where people lied and didn't bat an eyelid about the staggering human consequences of their lies - could be so simple in its ugliness. And the only person who'd been missing from the whole scene throughout history? God.