Stepping Out of Old Shadows

Last night I dreamt that I had gone back to school to join my old classmates, except that I was 31 and the rest of them were still teenagers. These dreams usually are panic-ridden for me because I feel like I have missed a lot of classes because I was out living my real life for over 10 years and will now fail my school exams.

 

It was different this time. I felt very confident and sure of myself. I knew that I could make up the missed lessons by myself. I knew that I did not have a year's worth of notes and that I would have to borrow someone else's and plough through them for my exams. I remember looking at other people's notebooks and wondering how much it would cost to photocopy all of it. Making up in a short period of time would be very difficult, but for the first time I knew that I could do it. No question about it.

 

I remember a slick young History teacher talking about Italy and showing off to my young and inexperienced classmates, and I wanted to tell him that I had written history books. He did not impress me.

 

A guy in my class tried to hit on me in a disrespectful way, and I turned back and put him in his place. I would've never known how to do that before.

 

I remember some parasitic female friends from back then, they were trying to put me down again in my dream, but I didn't feel like I needed them this time. I ignored them. They were children to me and not important at all.

 

In my dream I had just come from living in Delhi, working with NDTV, and visiting Bombay, and I felt so wise and confident. I had already lived in America and Canada. I had dealt with very difficult situations and had spent most of my 20s alone and in foreign countries.

 

I decided to leave the classroom early. I carried a huge camper's bag on my back, but it did not feel heavy at all. I was able to carry it very easily, which surprised me because I am quite short. My old parasitic friends tried to follow me but they couldn't. They were even treating me nicely because they realised that I had changed.

 

But I didn't need them anymore. I was not the same. I would never need to return to this classroom again.

 

I was smiling because I was free.

Method Writer

Newspaper cutting from Muscat about an opera set in ancient Egypt

 

I'm writing a book on ancient Egypt, and while I am not allowed to say much more about it, I want to share that this project is different because it treads a fine line between fiction and non-fiction. It's difficult making a setting come alive when no one's really seen it, and I have found from experience that whenever I have to write about an era gone by, it helps to immerse myself in as much everyday detail about life back when. Seems like I write best when I can shut myself in a room and feel like I'm walking amongst the people I am making up and eating the food they are eating and feeling the fabric they are wearing. When I was a little girl and used to live mostly in my head, I had become a little obssessed with ancient Egypt and had wanted to live there. This was in the time long before the Internet or easy access to books, but I still remember a children's book about ancient Egypt that I had borrowed from the British Council library in Muscat, Oman. I can still see the book open before me to a page where the artist had drawn the picture of an Egyptian home. The artist had also drawn people walking about the mud house - through the door, on the stairs, in the kitchen. I felt like they were my friends, that if I went outside I would run into them. Of course I knew them. These little people made of ink, they had names and hobbies.

I later went and rebuilt the house using a shoebox and used my miniature animal toys to play in it. My favourite was the cat that was of the colour of the chicken curry my mother would make. The cat was always the heroine of all my games, and often another animal would be in love with her, but she would be too alone in her great thoughts and adventures to notice.

These days I feel like I'm living in ancient Egypt again. I've come across similar drawings of houses in all the research I've been doing about that time, and I think I've lived in all of them. Everytime I research this way and after my project has been finished, I carry with me a feeling of fondness for that time, that country, those people lost in the dust. I think of them often like I would of an old lover I once sparkled my eyes at because he smiled at me. It almost makes me cry sometimes.

Nothin' But Mammals

Grandchildren deities of the creator god: Nut of the sky and Geb of the earth

According to one ancient Egyptian creation myth, the creator god who was both male and female gave birth to the cosmos and other gods by masturbating. Nothing unusual - the ancient religions were based on nature's cycles of creation, death, and rebirth (think seasons and harvest). I find it funny how for thousands of years polytheistic traditions around the world worshipped male and female genitalia (and still do in India), but today most people are raised to dread and even ignore their nether-regions. And masturbation? Don't touch that dial!

A Conversation with the Man at the Museum

"I'm taking a panorama photo, it's not a video!"

But the museum employee would not listen to me. "I don't know anything about that," he said, "but you have to pay 2000 rupees to take videos."

I showed him the 200 rupee permit that I'd bought to take photographs in the museum with my DSLR camera, but he insisted that I had been taking a video. I tried to show him the panorama photo I had taken with my smaller camera, but he didn't want to see it. "I don't know these things," he kept saying.

The more I tried to show him the photo, the more agitated he got, the louder and more shrill his voice got, and he then went off to report the 'video' to the authorities. He returned a few minutes later by himself - looking sheepish, I thought - and then suddenly straightened up and said that I was using two cameras but had paid to use only one.

I just kept looking at him because the whole encounter was ridiculous, and he soon ran off, but not before telling me to delete the 'video' I had taken because I would be 'checked' upon leaving the museum. Of course, nothing ended up happening.

Museum Directions

There was something very creepy about the Parsi-looking man from the Jehangir Art Gallery. I had asked him to tell me where the Prince of Wales museum was, and even though it was down the street, he'd almost leapt to take me there himself.

What a creepy man. He was probably in his mid-30s, light-skinned, stout, clean-shaven, and with no expression at all. He mumbled and stared directly into my eyes the whole time, and about 2 minutes into our awkward walk to the museum where I could feel him looking me up and down and rubbing his hands with silent slimey glee I told him I could get there myself and I very happily left him behind.

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.

A Good Idea Turns 16

Like 2012, 1996 was an Olympic year. That was the year I turned 15. That was also the year my high school in Muscat, Oman, was turning out an Olympics-themed issue of our school magazine.

My English teacher was in-charge of putting this issue together, and I had very excitedly gone up to him with an idea I had had. I had told him that I had the lyrics of the Gloria Estefan song 'Reach' and that it would be a great idea to include those lyrics at the very end of the magazine. The song had been released as part of the Olympics, and its lyrics were very inspiring. These were the days before the Internet; song lyrics were either published in expensive or hard-to-find (especially in Muscat) book collections or on a flimsy sheet of printed paper inside the pastel-coloured plastic cases that some audio cassettes came with. I had an ear for song lyrics and usually wrote down those of my favourite songs and shared them with my friends who desperately wanted to be able to sing those songs correctly. I had found the lyrics of 'Reach' in a youth magazine and had torn the page off and saved it. I still have it with me somewhere.

But my teacher ignored my idea. He never even shot it down, he just plain ignored it. He almost made me feel like I wasn't there standing in front of him. I even think he looked over my head and continued about his business. I didn't know why then. He was an unpleasant sort of person, and I now can recognise him as the sort of person you don't want to hire or work with. I've met people like him over the years; these are the people who recognise a good idea when they see someone else come up with one, and some dark bitterness in them makes them want to kill it immediately. They do this by using humiliation, shame, discouragment, mockery, or repeated silent dismissals. My teacher used the last technique on me on this particular occassion. He used the others on me and other people the rest of the time. For everything. These kind of people ought never to be allowed near children who can't recognise or know how to interpret this brand of toxicity. These are the kind of people who can never be happy for someone else, who flinch at the sight of a smile, who feel relieved only if they can say or do something to dampen another's success somehow and get them to just.stop.smiling. These are the kind of people who feel big by making others feel small. My teacher had once told me that I thought too much of my poetry and that I was arrogant. I hadn't understood what he had meant, I was chirpy, chatty, and quite sensitive about feelings that belonged to me and also to other people .

The lyrics never made it to the school magazine. I still think including them would've been a great idea. So here is the song. It's songs like these that make me want to direct and edit a music video someday. It's people like my bitter high school English teacher that keep people from reaching. Thank goodness we eventually learn to recognise them and don't let them get in our way.

Some dreams live on in time forever

Those dreams, you want with all your heart

And I'll do whatever it takes

Follow through with the promise I made

Put it all on the line

What I hoped for at last would be mine

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be stronger

Know that I've tried my very best

I'd put my spirit to the test

If I could reach

Some days are meant to be remembered

Those days we rise above the stars

So I'll go the distance this time

Seeing more the higher I climb

That the more I believe

All the more that this dream will be mine

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be stronger

Know that I've tried my very best

I'd put my spirit to the test

If I could reach

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

I'm gonna be stronger

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be so much stronger yes I am

I've tried my very best

I'd put my spirit to the test

If I could reach

If I could, If I could

If I could reach

Reach, I'd reach, I'd reach

I'd reach' I'd reach so much higher

Be stronger

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.

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.

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'

Creative Accounting?

"Don't do any work on the Sabbath yourself, but pay someone else to do it. You obeyed the letter of the law: who's counting? The Dalai Lama tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her. Shia Muslims offer "temporary marriage," selling men the permission to take a wife for an hour or two with the usual vows and then divorce her when they are done. Half of the splendid buildings in Rome would never have been raised if the sale of indulgences had not been so profitable: St. Peter's itself was financed by a special one-time offer of that kind. The newest pope, the former Joseph Ratzinger, recently attracted Catholic youths to a festival by offering a certain "remission of sin" to those who attended."

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

A New Island Religion

"In 1964 there appeared a celebrated documentary movie called Mondo Cane, or "the world of the dog", in which the directors captured numerous human cruelties and illusions. This was the first occasion on which one could see a new religion being assembled, in plain view, on camera. The inhabitants of the Pacific islands may have been separated for centuries from the more economically developed world, but when visited by the fatal impact many of them were shrewd enough to get the point immediately. Here were great vessels with billowing sails, bearing treasures and weapons and devices that were beyond any compare. Some of the more untutored islanders did what many people do when confronted with a new phenomenon, and tried to translate it into a discourse that they could themselves understand (not unlike those fearful Aztecs who, first seeing mounted Spanish soldiers in Mesoamerica, concluded that they had a centaur for an enemy). These poor souls decided that the westerners were their long-mourned ancestors, come back at last with goods from beyond the grave. That illusion cannot long have survived the encounter with the colonists, but later it was observed in several places that the brighter islanders had a better idea. Docks and jetties were built, they noticed, after which more ships came and unloaded more goods. Acting by analogy and mimesis, the locals constructed their own jetties and waited for these, too, to attract some ships. Futile as this proceeding was, it badly retarded the advance of later Christian missionaries. When they made their appearance, they were asked where the gifts were (and soon came up with some trinkets).

In the twentieth century the "cargo cult" revived in an even more impressive and touching form. Units of the United States armed forces, arriving in the Pacific to build airfields for the war on Japan, found that they were the objects of slavish emulation. Local enthusiasts abandoned their lightly worn Christian observances and devoted all their energies to the construction of landing strips that might attract loaded airplanes. They made simulated antennae out of bamboos. They built and lit fires, to simulate the flares that guided the American planes to land. This still goes on, which is the saddest but of the Mondo Cane sequence. On the island of Tana, an American GI was declared to be the redeemer. His name, John Frum, seems to have been an invention too. But even after the last serviceman flew or sailed away after 1945, the eventual return of the saviour Frum was preached and predicted, and an annual ceremony still bears his name. On another island named New Britain, adjacent to Papua New Guinea, the cult is even more strikingly analogous. It has ten commandments (the "Ten Laws"), a trinity that has one presence in heaven and another on earth, and a ritual system of paying tributes in the hope of propitiating these authorities. If the ritual is performed with sufficient purity and fervor, so its adherants believe, then an age of milk and honey will be ushered in. This radiant future, sad to say, is known as the "Period of the Companies", and will cause New Britain to flourish and prosper as if it were a multinational corporation."

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

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'