WHEN I WAS IN AMERICA…

In the good old days, while I was growing up in the rural areas of Kuttanad near Kottayam, some priests who were lucky enough to visit United States would start their homilies or speeches with the expression “When I was in America…” Ditto for that exclusive club of laymen who felt their locus standi among their peers would improve with an anecdotal description of their American experiences at the start of every conversation. Now-a-days, when a tenth of Kerala’s population is in the U.S. at any given time, and at least a fifth has visited the country at one time or another, the expression ‘When I was in America…’ does not hold any surprises for the listeners.

I spent almost six months in U.S. from June to December 2007.This was my third visit to that country and the longest. My wife and I were there to assist with the birth of our second grand daughter Anusha or Anu as we affectionately call her. We slightly shuffled the letters of her big sister’s name Ashna, added the letter ‘u’ and presto, we have Anusha.

My daughter stays at Ashburn. It is an extremely quiet place about 50 km from the Washington D.C., the U.S. capital. It will take about 30 minutes’ drive by car on a Saturday afternoon to drop into the White House to say ‘hello’ to Barack Obama. During peak hours it is more like 45 min to 1 hour on the 12-lane highway. With the sun setting at around 9 pm in summer, there is a lot of daylight for a quick drive to Washington D.C. to visit one of the numerous museums and other tourist attractions.

In U.S. cars stay on the right. Inexpensive petrol, multiple lanes on highways and clear road signs make driving a pleasure. If you can invest around $250 on a global positioning system (GPS), even I, who tends to get lost all the time, can drive around without the aid of road maps as this device very cleverly prompts what is to be done well in advance. Drivers hardly use the hooter, a few not even aware that there is such a device. (I am not joking!) There is such competition to sell cars that buyers, particularly from the subcontinent, spend the whole day bargaining as you do in a fish market.

Unlike Indians, Americans are very polite and law abiding on the roads. In India, there is no fear of the law – everyone is either related to a politician or a policeman or at least is an acquaintance of one. In the worst case scenario, one can bribe one’s way out of most difficult situations. In America, there is fear of the law. Add to that the shoal of lawyers waiting to sue you at the slightest provocation.

One day I went with my daughter to the supermarket. In America everything is big: men and women are huge; pizzas are extra large; supermarkets are very spacious, the car park endless. I got bored of walking around inside and came out to look at the surroundings. After sitting on a bench for a while, I decided to take a stroll through the car park. I went to the pedestrian crossing and waited for a gap in the traffic as we do in India. As I put my right foot on the road, every car on either side stopped. Fearing that they would all start at any time and run over me, I decided to go back to the bench. Immediately all the cars started to move. A little later as I again put one foot on the road with the other still firmly on the pavement, all vehicles screeched to a halt. I hesitated and went back to the bench. The movement of cars started again. My daughter later told me that the cars stopped to let me cross the road. If one of the cars were to even slightly brush me that would be a golden opportunity to sue the driver and win a huge compensation! In India, drivers wait for you to cross the road so that they can run over you.

When one thinks of capitalism, the United States comes immediately to mind. But there is one area where socialism is very much evident: the domestic environment of the desi. Most of the Malayalee (+other South Indian) families in and around Ashburn come from middle and upper middle class families. Many of them have never sullied their hands back home doing manual labor. In America, they do change; in fact they are forced to change. Domestic help is at a premium. So it really amused me to see these formerly spoilt youngsters, especially the males of the species, helping in the kitchen, cleaning the house, washing the bath and toilet, doing quite a bit of gardening, and other such chores.

A couple of months into my stay at our daughter’s house, Ashna, my granddaughter was sitting beside me turning the pages of the ‘Style’ section of ‘The Washington Post’ while I was engaged in the main section. Suddenly she turned to me and asked:

“Dada, how is that my picture is not in the news?”

“Well, you must be newsworthy, or make some news.” I replied.

“One thing”, she went on, “I want to be famous and my photo should come in the newspaper.”

Then she started on one of her tantrums and insisted that her photo appears somewhere. I suddenly remembered that a couple of her photos were on my website where my blogs appear and showed them to her. She was immensely pleased. And now she wanted to know what a blog is. I spent the next twenty minutes explaining blogs. After a few minutes of deep thought, during which time I went back to reading the paper thinking that she would soon forget the whole thing, she suddenly jumps up and says:

“I also want a blog and become famous!”

The next couple of days she kept pestering me about the blog. On the third day, she brought a bundle of papers, a pencil and an eraser and made me sit at the dining table. She sat next to me and being very lazy herself, told me she would dictate and I should write down what she wanted to write on her blog!!

So I wrote, very slightly edited and typed verbatim what she dictated. I hope this is not her first and last blog. The following is the finished product.

ASHNA’S LATEST NEWS

By Ashna Maria Vayalil

Ashna wanted to be in the news for a long time. She is only six and a half years old. Ashna has a baby sister Anusha who is only 3 weeks old. She also has a cousin sister whose name is Diya. Ashna’s birthday is on October 13. When she was 4 months old she was in ‘Editor’s Choice’ and she won first prize. Sometimes she is good, at other times she is bad. She wants to have 2 sisters instead of 1. She has a nice beautiful garden. There are tomatoes, cucumbers, green chilies, strawberries, bitter gourds, curry leaves and mint leaves in the garden. We also have pine trees, jasmines, roses and other exotic plants as well in our garden.

Ashna’s house is pretty too. There are 3 bathrooms, 1 kitchen, 3 bedrooms, 1 library, 1 breakfast room, 1 family room, 1 living room and 1 dining room. We have 4 clocks, 1 TV, 13 windows, 25 lights, 4 closets, 3 exits, 6 sofas, 4 umbrellas – that is all in Ashna’s house.

Ashna the girl loves to dance and sing and watch TV. She also watches a program called ‘Kutties Choice’. She loves to paint and she loves to play on the computer and watch lots and lots of TV. She wish she had 56 sisters and 54 brothers and 100 cousin sisters and 1 cousin brother.

She is in grade 1. She is going to grade 2. She wishes that she is already in grade 9!! The grade 2 school is ‘Hillside Elementary’. Her old 1^st grade school was named ‘Virginia Academy’.

She really wanted to hear about herself in the news and she wanted to be famous. And now she is going to be. She has lots of pictures, almost 100 that she made. When she was already in her mommy’s tummy she wanted to be famous. She calls her mommy ‘mama’ and her dad ‘daddy’.

She loves Hindi movies and some English movies and her favorite one is ‘IQBAL’. And her favorite song in Iqbal is “Aashaye” and it goes like this:

Aashaye, hile dil ki

Ummidien hasse dil ki

Abu mushukil

Nahee Kuchbi

HoOOooOOOoooo

Aashayee………………..

Ashna will write again later.

I hope she will.

SEX, LIES AND CATHOLIC CHURCH

The basic urges of living beings are two: self-preservation and self-propagation. Hence the pleasures associated with food and sex. Plants to a lesser degree and animals to a greater degree satisfy these urges through instinct whereas man tends to temper his instincts with a rational approach. If pleasure was not associated with these two propensities, Adam and Eve would have been the first and last humans. There would have been no need for Jesus to die to save us. And the Catholic Church would not exist today. With no Catholic Church, there would be no priestly celibacy and no pedophile clergy abusing children.

I read the following somewhere on the internet:

Sex is an interesting topic. We tend to think we have free will, and that we are not animals. The reality, however, is that our character is inherited genetically and supplemented by hormones and other chemicals that drive behavior. Of course, there is free will within a small environmental envelope, but survival by reproduction seems to be the dominant instinct! “Our behavior can be altered within narrow parameters according to the social and cultural customs of where we live and how we are raised. But much of our life cycle is pre-ordained. In all major essentials, we are a reproductive skin covered bag of water, subject to instinctive controls of an organic machine, run by genes, hormones, enzymes, acids, salts, proteins and small electrical currents.”

One of the cleverest inventions of the Catholic Church is the guilt associated with sex. Credit must go mainly to St. Augustine of Hippo, the brilliant fourth century theologian. Like Tiger Woods, David Duchovny and Michael Douglas of the present era, he suffered from sex addiction in his early life. But unlike today, when these celebrities can check into a sex de-addiction centre, Augustine had to rely on his own resources. First, he chased away his concubine of seventeen years and the child they had together. Then his brilliant mind went into overdrive and he ‘invented’ the idea of original sin. All men and women (except Jesus and Mary – I am not sure about Joseph) are born in sin from the time of Adam and Eve’s honeymoon. Human nature as a result is corrupt. The ideas of the Stoics and of Plato in particular helped Augustine in this invention. The latter had developed the concept of the duality of human nature wherein the ‘soul’ is regarded as superior to the ‘body’ and the ‘spirit’ at a higher level than ‘matter’.

The ideas of life after death, heaven, hell, and devils also helped. Unlike the body that does not survive death; the soul is destined to live forever – happily in heaven or crying in hell depending on how one lived on earth. One had to save one’s soul by all means. For this, man has to overcome his corrupt nature and there is nothing more corrupting than sex. Hence celibacy and chastity are hoisted over family life as the superior ideal in life. The list of sins against the flesh is a legion: even your private thoughts and words are added to those of your acts.

However all is not lost. The Catholic Church introduced the idea of ‘confession’ to help you save your soul from eternal damnation. The moment the little lamb has entertained an ‘impure’ thought, he or she can rush to the priest, confess and be absolved so that the door to heaven is reopened. He can now have a go at another bad thought; confession is there to save him. Thus the fear of hell and God’s anger bring the little lambs back to the church again and again for salvation. The association of guilt with sex is part of a master plan towards controlling the minds of the lambs leading to the consolidation of church’s absolute power over all matters spiritual and temporal.

“All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord Acton.

Very few are aware that he was referring to papacy when he said those famous words.

Along with confession came ‘confessional solicitation’, something quite common, but not frequently talked about. Many a priest uses the confessional for the detailed cross examination of sexual sins so that the conversation sounds like the sound track of a highly erotic movie. This in itself is highly pleasurable to the ‘celibate’ priest starved of intimacy. The more adventurous opportunists of the lot use this occasion to identify the weak willed and easily available ones and propose a more private one on one physical encounter. After all, he cannot be faulted since self-propagation is a basic human urge.

Against this natural human urge the Catholic Church has declared celibacy and chastity as superior. Priestly celibacy was enforced from the early days of the church. At first the intentions were noble; later the purpose was not to let church property fall into the hands of the children of priests and bishops. Right from the outset, it was doomed to failure. Presently we are seeing this compulsion’s sad fallout – abuse of children and cover up of the abusers. The present Pope is also in a pickle with the revelation that he was aware of abuses but did little to stop them.

“Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Archbishop in Munich at the time, was copied on a memo that informed him that the Rev Peter Hullermann, whom he had approved sending to therapy in 1980 to overcome pedophilia, would be returned to pastoral work within days of beginning psychiatric treatment. The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in another parish.”

Hans Küng, a highly respected theologian who was banned from teaching because of his opposition to the doctrine of infallibility, unleashed a fierce attack on the Pope demanding that the pontiff "acknowledge his share of responsibility, instead of whining about a campaign against his person".

Pope Benedict XVI has apologized to Irish Catholics for the sexual abuses of its clergy through a pastoral letter.

The following is part of an email from a good catholic commenting on Pope Benedict’s pastoral letter:

“The overwhelming feeling conveyed by the document is that the moral authority of the Church has to be upheld at any cost — even at the cost of truth itself or of finding a genuine solution to this crisis that has been like a slow cancer eating away the heart of the Church. What comes across in this document is an attempt to portray the Pope as some sort of Divine Being and Teacher himself who speaks down to everyone else in Creation, including Bishops.”

Denial of truth, inability to move with the times, disregard for the sufferings of the faithful, a permanent ‘high’ brought on by a feeling of absolute power continually reinforced by sycophants groveling and offering adulations 24/7 – these have been the recurring pattern of papacy throughout the ages. 2000 years ago, in a fit of righteous anger Jesus said:

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which looks beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”

His words are more relevant today. The following is one example of how ‘priestly celibacy’ is one big fat joke.

Church Head in a fix over affair with cook

Bangalore: A priest in Bangalore has found himself in a spot for ordering sex from a cook - something like what Tiger Woods did when he ordered a `plate-full' of hot and spicy sex from a waitress in the US.

The priest, Arokya Das, heads the St Peter and Paul Church in a posh locality of Bangalore. Reports said that the priest had been having a sexual relationship with the cook in the church. While this has been going on for quite some time, church-goers warned the priest to focus on the work of God and not on the assets of the cook. But Das obviously had his own preferences and continued his relationship with the cook.

When things started to spill out into the open, three youngsters thought of teaching the ‘reverend’ father a lesson. According to the police, soon after Sunday mass, the three youngsters tried to assault the father in full public view.

A shaken father managed to escape and dialed the police. But the three youths prevented the police from entering the church saying that they wanted to give the father a lesson or two in morality. Later, the three were arrested.

Soon after the arrest, hundreds of church-goers surrounded the church and wanted to know why the three youngsters were arrested and not Father Das. The police had to summon the president of the Karnataka Tamil Catholic People's Voice, John Kennedy.

Kennedy admitted that Father Das had been having an affair with the cook and despite warnings, he had continued to maintain a clandestine relationship.

Later in the evening, Vicar General Father S Jayanathan visited the church and held a meeting. He assured the agitated crowd that action would be taken.

There was no word from Father Das or the cook. They were probably cooking up something!

Random thoughts on some recent tragic/comic/tragi-comic events

 

1. Michael Jackson moonwalks to nowhere land.

Death and taxes are inevitable. Birth is sooner or later followed by death. What is tragic is the way MJ died: skin and bones; totally bald; unable or unwilling to eat proper meals; symptoms of skin cancer; signs of numerous plastic surgeries. How far are wealth and fame measures of health and happiness?

2. Mayawati’s 1000 crore elephantine inferiority complex.

Mayawati is the prime example of Paulo Freire’ assertion that the more one is oppressed the greater will be the oppression dished out by that person in turn. The whole exercise is highly comical to an outsider but very tragic to the poor of UP for whom 1000 crore is a lot of money. Remember Saddam Hussein and what came of his statues?

3. Teacher absenteeism in Indian schools.

Gurcharan Das, who often writes in Times of India on educational matters, said in an interview that 1 out of 4 primary school teachers are absent on any given day; further, 1 out of 4 do not teach! This is more tragic than MJ’s death or Mayawati’s elephantine ego. The government needs to spent money on upgrading teacher training, put in mechanisms to make teachers more professional and control the unions. Can anyone tell me which university in India allows a person, teacher or not, to do M.Ed. by dissertation without written papers, which only serve to test your skills in recall and reproduction? I hope the new education university proposed by Azim Premji will cater to all those who wants to make a contribution to educational theory and knowledge, irrespective of age and whether they are in teaching service or not.

4. Minister Kapil Sibal’s proposal to abolish standard 10 exams.

No doubt, there is merit in his proposal. However, in the Indian context, the numbers of teachers absent and not teaching on a given day will go up from 1 to 2/4. The quality of education will, most likely, come down. In many other countries, there is accountability on the part of the teacher. More internal assessment means, more abuse of the hapless pupil. If we follow Sibil’s thinking, after a 100m dash on sports day everyone who ran is given a grade and a certificate of completion. In singing competitions that dominate our TV these days, there will be no elimination; everyone will win, each given a grade – fair, average, good - as well as a prize. Competition is part of life and education is a preparation for life; the key is to keep it healthy