Slumdog Millionaire

While I was in DC after my trip to India, my parents and I went to see the movie Slumdog Millionaire.  It was a great movie and a terrific bookend to my India trip.  The story is amazingly told and the imagery is also fantastic.  Not everyone in India is as enthusiastic about the movie (see this article, for example) but I found it fairly realistic based on my experience there and what I had read in preparation for the trip (see this post, for example).  I would highly recommend this movie to anyone.

Poor but Cheerful

Here is another article that my mother sent me before my trip to India.  The subtitle of the article is "a day spent on a mountain of trash in the Philippines inspires a young man to ponder the meanings of privilege and deprivation".  This person's experience certainly supports the fact that a big part of how we evaluate our own situation, circumstances, and happiness is in comparison to other people.  If none of the people around us have much, we are content without those things also.  Where problems start coming in is when others around me seem to have more and I - by comparison - have less.  In business school, I remember having a conversation with one of my classmates where I noted how lucky we were.  Most of us would make more money per year than >99% of the world population.  In response, my classmate told me that he didn't compare himself to 99% of the world population.  He only compared himself to the people at HBS (and would only be happy if we did better than the rest of us).  A sad commentary on the human condition.

Color Connection

Before my trip to India, my mother shared this article with me.  It discusses the fact that India is still a color-conscious society.  I didn't experience this myself while I was there but I wasn't looking for it either.  It, unfortunately, doesn't take me by surprise and India certainly isn't unique in this regard.

Meeting God

While preparing for my trip to India, I checked out Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion from the library.  It's a great book that takes an intimate look at Hindu religious practices, supported with amazing photography.  In the foreword, it says:

In this presentation of Hinduism, I deeply appreciate the coming together of two potent spheres: the hard work of daily survival and the limitless imagination that gives such vitality to ritual, story, painting, shrines, statuary, temples, and gestures, to note just a few elements of puja.  Here religion is colorful and entrancing. It is practiced by ordinary people on ordinary days and usually in ordinary places, but all that ordinariness is transformed by an imagination for the infinite that is vivid, passionate, and remarkably sophisticated, and articulated with great subtlety.

The preface goes on to say:

For the average Hindu, the Divine is personal and approachable. The most common word describing worship is darsham, literally translated as "seeing and being seen by God." My own rich experiences in India during the past three decades have led me to a deep understanding of this process of "meeting God." In writing this book, I have attempted to convey the transformative intensity of worship in India as it evokes the heart as well as the mind, and as it involves the active use of all the senses ... Hinduism is a religion of strength, vitality, innovation, and balance. By opening our hearts and minds to its messages, we can enrich our own lives.

I won't try to get into every aspect of Hindu belief or devotion in this post.  I covered some of it in a prior post.  I'll provide this excerpt, though, since I think it does a good job of summarizing some of the key concepts from the book:

Puja is the ceremonial act of showing reverence to a God or Goddess through invocation, prayer, song, and ritual. An essential aspect of puja for Hindus is communion with the Divine. The worshipper believes that with this contact she or he has established direct contact with the deity. Most often that contact is facilitated through an image: an element of nature, a sculpture, vessel, painting, or print. When the image is consecrated at the time of its installation in a shrine or temple, the deity is invited to invest the image with his or her cosmic energy. In the eyes of most devotees, the icon then comes the deity, its presence reaffirmed by the daily rituals of honoring and invocation. Certainly most Hindus recognize that the magnitude of a God or Goddess is far greater than any image. Nevertheless, most also believe that divine power is so magnificent that it can be present anywhere in the world at any time. In other words, while one image of Shiva in a small town temple is believed by his devotees to be the God incarnate in stone, it is nevertheless consistent in Hinduism that every other sculpture of Shiva in each of hundreds of thousands of shrines throughout the world also contains his divine presence and power. Many Hindu sages have remarked that very few are able to understand the abstract, formless essence of the Absolute. Most individuals, they state, need to approach God through images and with rituals specific to that deity, not so much because the deity requires it but because of the limitations of the devotee. They believe that humans need something concrete on which to focus in prayer. Hinduism fulfills that need through innumerable manifestations. Although many images are exquisitely and elaborately fashioned by sculptors or painters, and, for the devout Hindu, artistic merit is important, it is secondary to spiritual content. Images are created as receptacles for spiritual energy; each is an essential link that allows the devotee to experience direct communion with the Gods.

The principal aim of any puja is this feeling of personal contact with the deity. Darsham, literally translated from Sanskrit as "seeing and being seen by God," is that moment when the worshipper is receptive to recognition by the God or Goddess. Darshan may be achieved in a variety of ways. It may be felt by an individual during his or her daily household pujas or meditations, when the contact is made alone. A person may experience darshan simply by viewing a particularly sacred sculpture or holy spot, perhaps during a pilgrimage or at a festival. Or the individual may feel a special communication with the deity through the intervention of a priest during a strictly regulated temple ritual. Through whatever means it comes, darshan brings both peace and blessing to Hindu devotees, and through it, they believe, miracles can and do occur frequently.

Hinduism is not in general a congregational religion. Its adherents worship singly or in small family units. Most sacred rituals take place in the home or in temples or shrines that may be visited at any time from early morning until late night (in some parts of the country they may be closed for several midday hours). Unlike most other religions, Hinduism has no sermons. Priests are trained to act as liaisons with the Divine, learning the complex prescriptions of rituals that must be enacted precisely to show proper respect to the Gods and to facilitate darshan for the devotee. Learned priests and holy scholars may conduct discussions on sacred texts and philosophies, but there informal meetings are held outside the temple's sanctum. The closest parallel to Judeo-Christian services are bhajanas, in which followers of the Bhakti movement join to sing hymns and praises to their Lord Krishna, yet there still is no preaching as it is known in the West. Although anyone may worship in a temple at any time, there are auspicious times during the day when many people gather to perform pujas. The format is not congregational in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word; instead, each person lines up to get as close as possible to the image of the deity in order to have his or her darshan.

In spit of its focus on the individual, Hinduism still provides many occasions for group activities. Perhaps the most common are the numerous religious festivals held each year, usually joyous celebrations involving the entire community. Although some festivals are centered on the home, most involve special pujas at the appropriate nearby temples, which are thronged with devotees in their finest apparel. Others revolve around huge parades in which consecrated processional images of the deities are brought out once each year for public darshan by the elderly and infirm, who might not be able to visit the temple. Through pilgrimages a large group of devotees from one community can visit sacred spots in other parts of the country, gaining darshan and subsequent merit by performing pujas in these distant shrines and temples. Finally, recitations and reenactments of sacred stories are often held within and outside the temple, and they may be followed by discussions led by scholars and priests.

One of the most popular deities in Bengal (where my father's family is from) is Kali.

To the outsider, Kali is perhaps Hinduism's most confusing deity. She is often envisioned as a hideous black crone with pendulous breasts and lolling tongue, her neck adorned with a string of human skulls, her many hands brandishing weapons (one holding the bloody head of a demon), while she dances upon the seemingly lifeless form of Shiva. Kali is Shiva's wife in her most horrific form. According to legend, she has assumed her terrible role to annihilate evil is all of its guises, but in her rage she devours all existence, even trampling the body of her husband, in order to re-create life. She symbolizes the absolute power of the Divine Feminine (Shakti) for action and change. For her devotees she is uncompromising and direct, demanding total surrender of the ego and detachment from materialism. She is intolerant of complacence and vanity, requiring from her followers rigorous self-honesty. But to her millions of devotees, Kali is also the Divine Mother, the nurturer, the provider. To them, she is beautiful and beloved, enriching and fulfilling the lives of those who follow her path.

Little wonder that Kali is my deity (via my family in India) given the focus on action, change, and surrender.

In closing, perhaps the thing that I most admired about Hindu devotion is how integrated it is into the daily existence of its adherents.  While I was in India, I saw religious symbols and shrines everywhere.  I saw people doing puja at a small public shrine on a busy sidewalk.  There was no separation between one's spiritual life and the rest of their life.  That's something everyone - regarding of their religious affiliation or beliefs - can admire and benefit from.

Bengali bag

Yesterday, AJ and I went up to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I backed some supplies and put them in a bag I brought home from India (see photo to the right). The writing on the bag is in Bengali - one of the many languages spoken in India. While I was pushing AJ on the swing at the large children's playground, I looked down at the bag and realized that most people wouldn't recognize the writing as Bengali. Without knowing better, they might have thought the writing was Arabic and assume that I was Muslim - I am an International Everyman after all (see prior post). All of a sudden, I became very self-conscious of what people might be thinking and kept expecting parents to pull their children away from me as if I were a terrorist. That feeling persisted for the rest of the time we were at Golden Gate Park - a couple of hours. I'm not proud of my response and, as far as I could tell, no one noticed the bag or thought anything of it if they did. But it did give me some small appreciation for what it must feel like to be a victim of racial profiling and the assumptions people sometimes make based on little or no information.

Sri Siva Vishnu Temple

This morning, my parents and I visited the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple in Lanham, Maryland.  It's a really impressive Hindu temple in this area - see pictures from our visit.  The architecture and attention to detail were amazing.  My dad said that the facility and the deities are more reminescient of South India than West Bengal.  We also tried to visit the Washington Kali Temple but it turned out to be closed when we got there (too bad).

one night @ the call center

While I was in the Kolkata airport, I bought a book called one night @ the call center by Chetan Bhagat (later turned into a movie called "Hello").  Here is the description on the back of the book:

In the winter of 2004, a writer met a young girl on an overnight train journey. To pass the time, she offered to tell him a story. However, she offered to tell him a story. However, she had one condition: that he make it into his second book. He hesitated, but asked what the story was about. The girl said the story was about six people working in a call center, set in one night. She said it was the night they had got a phone call. That phone call was from God.

Given the description, I was expecting a much more spiritual book than it turned out to be.  So I was a bit disappointed but the novel was still entertaining.  Probably the most interesting part of the book was an exercise the author has readers go through at the very beginning:

Before you begin this book, I have a small request. Right here, note down three things. Write down something that (i) you fear, (ii) makes you angry, (iii) you don't like about yourself. Be honest, and write something that is meaningful to you. Do not think too much about why I am asking you to do this. Just do it ... okay, now forget about this exercise and enjoy the story.

At first, I was at a bit of a loss on how to respond.  As I thought about it more, here is what I wrote down. I fear not living up to my potential and not doing what God would have be do in life.  I later amended this to also include a fear of being stung by bees/wasps and using toilets in public bathrooms.  What makes me angry is illogical and irrational behavior.  And what I don't like about myself is my shortness of temper with my kids sometimes and also being "yahoo serious" most of the time (well, really all the time).

India videos

Over the last couple of days, I've watched 9 hours of video related to India - three movies and one travel guide. The movies were Pinjar (3 hours), The Namesake (2 hours), and Gandhi (3 hours) and the travel guide was by GlobeTrekker (the 1 hour portion on West India). All of this is in preparation for my trip to Kolkata in January with my father. I've been trying to get a better feel for India as a country and the specific events that influenced who my father is today. Pinjar and Gandhi were particularly helpful in terms of understanding the Partition of India and the ensuing violence and family dislocations. It's one thing to think about that time conceptually but it's another thing to see some of those events visually depicted and think about what it must have been like to live through that period of time. The Namesake was helpful to understand the challenges that first- and second-generation Indian families face here in the United States - in terms of culture clash and other issues. I don't think I was ever sensitive enough to this topic - since I didn't spend much time trying to really understand it. And the travel guide was helpful to see Kolkata in action and get a glimpse of what I will see and experience there.

The catch-phrase for The Namesake is "the greatest journeys are the ones that bring you home". I suspect that will be true about this trip in January.

A Fine Balance

I recently read a book called A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. It is a masterfully written fiction book about India between 1975 and 1984. My mother suggested that I read it since I'll be visiting India in January with my father to see family there. The book certainly gave me a much better feel - at a very personal level - of the struggles that so many went through in that country (and still go through today). Right before the table of contents, the author includes this quote from Honore de Balzac in Le Pere Goriot: "Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true." I can't think of a better summary for this book. Reading this book reminded me of how many blessings I have in my life that I so often take for granted - a place to live, food to eat, freedom, a loving family, and hope for my children's future (to name a few). The book also made me realize how little I probably know about my father and what it must have been like for him to grow up under challenging circumstances in India.

As an aside, I had thinking that I should try to read some books in preparation for my trip to India but I couldn't decide what to read. The very day I was thinking about this, A Fine Balance arrived in the mail from my mom. It's hard for me to believe that's simply a coincidence - and I am very grateful for so many keeping a watchful eye over me.

Hinduism - part 1

As I mentioned in my world view post, my father is Hindu and my mother is Christian. I recently decided to learn more about Hinduism. My mom sent some information to me and my brother via email. I also read the chapter on Hinduism in The World's Religions, watched the first two tapes of the Bill Moyers special "The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith", and read the Wikipedia entry on Hinduism. I won't try to describe all Hindu belief or practicce here. I'm certainly no expert based on this limited investigation. Rather, I'll just focus on the things that I've learned so far that were most meaningful or surprising to me. I suspect I will return to Hinduism again and incorporate many of its philosophies and practices into my world view. Hindus believe that the goals of spiritual life can be attained through any religion so long as the religion is practiced sincerely. So, even if I ultimately go down the Christian route, it doesn't mean I'd need to forego the insights and teaching of Hinduism (see this mission in India that my grandfather was a member of later in his life).

One immediate misconception I had about Hinduism is that it's polytheist. This brief essay does an excellent job of distinguishing between Brahman (the unique Godhead of Hinduism who has no other and no second, "thou before whom all words recoil"), Iswara (the all powerful Almighty which is the subject of all religions), and other deities such as Kali. The logic chain is fascinating to me:

The difficulty with this concept [Brahman] is this; there is no subject-object relationship in this context, Brahman cannot be the object of cognition, since Brahman has no second. In fact nothing can be predicated about Brahman without delimiting the infiniteness of Braham. So Hindu Vedanta, with a mathematical precision, has postulated that the moment one wants to think of Brahman as an object of thought, one has already delimited Brahman and is only thinking of Iswara, , otherwise called saguna Brahman – Brahman with attributes. Iswara is the all powerful Almighty which is the subject of all religions. It has all the supreme qualities of Brahman – if Brahman could be said to have qualities or attributes – and, in addition, it could be the object of our thought process. By its very nature all names and forms suit it. The Vedic logic here is really very subtle, interesting and should be enjoyed as such. It has no name or form and therefore it could be called by any name and could be given any form. The concept of idol worship is the practical implementation of this unique logic of Hinduism. Hinduism has the daring to carry the rationale of this to its logical conclusion and hence it is we find a plethora of gods and goddesses in the Hindu framework.

To oversimplify, there is a single, infinite God (Brahman) but that God can manifest itself in a number of lesser, finite forms (Iswara and deities) that are easier for man for understand and relate to. These lesser forms, however, do not diminish or compete with "THAT" which "permeates everything in the world".

But what is Hinduism all about? Huston Smith says "if we were to take Hinduism as a whole - its vast literature, its complicated rituals, its sprawling folkways, its opulent art - and compress it into a single affirmation, we would find it saying: You can have what you want. This sounds promising, but it throws the problem back in our laps. For what do we want? It is easy to give a simple answer - not easy to give a good one. India has lived with this question for ages and has her answer waiting. People, she says, want four things." The first two (pleasure and success) form the Path of Desire and the second two (duty and liberation) form the Path of Renunciation (see excerpts from The World's Religions or this Web page for more detail).

I've been thinking a lot about the Path of Desire and the Path of Renunciation today. Specifically, I think I'm transitioning from one path to another. In some ways, I've been doing it my whole life but never realized it until now. It would explain a lot. I've always felt that I was meant to do something great in this life. Given our cultural stereotypes, I had always associated that material wealth and power (the second half of the Path of Desire). But it's really not that. It's about serving my fellow man, about making a difference in this world (whether that's the environment or something else). I might remain in the business world but it takes on a very different complexion when viewed through the lense of duty rather than success.

Our society (on a whole) is so focused on pleasure and success that you get sucked into it. I've wondered why I can't embrace it more fully. It's actually quite uncomfortable and alienating - especially here in Silicon Valley. But I've probably had multiple lifetimes to really enjoy (and suck dry) the Path of Desire. I've had my fill and now I find it wanting.

There's so much more to say about Hinduism, including the eternal within us (Atman-Brahman), the way to God through knowledge (Jnana yoga), karma, non-attachment, etc. More to come in subsequent posts.