200 years ago, on this very day, the world heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the first time.
I wrote about this momentous milestone for the NCPA Mumbai magazine ‘On Stage’ May 2024 issue.
To read the article, click here and go to pages 34 to 36
07 Tuesday May 2024
Posted History, In Print, Inspiration, Milestones, Music, thoughts, Tribute
in200 years ago, on this very day, the world heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the first time.
I wrote about this momentous milestone for the NCPA Mumbai magazine ‘On Stage’ May 2024 issue.
To read the article, click here and go to pages 34 to 36
05 Sunday May 2024
I learned bits and pieces about my mum’s profession (which would eventually become mine too) from a young age.
Sometimes at bedtime while tucking my brother Victor and me in, she would for instance ask us to “say a special prayer” (one Our Father, three Hail Marys and a Glory be) for, let’s say, “Sumati.” But that wasn’t enough for five-year-old me. “Why are we praying for Sumati? What’s she got? Where’s she?” I’d ask, wanting to fine-tune my petition so there wouldn’t be any celestial misunderstanding. If she said “Eclampsia”, it would invite further questions that she would try to answer as plainly as possible. Often, she would end up saying, “Just pray for her”, and I would.
If she went on night calls, I’d try to stay up until she returned. I soon learned to “diagnose” the OT (Operation theatre) “smell.” I’d climb onto her lap and proclaim triumphantly “You did a Caesarean!”
Often, she would be called out even on off-duty nights, which angered me. “Why must you go today too?” “I have to donate blood”, she replied. Donate blood?! What fresh scam was this? “Why can’t they take someone else’s blood?” And that’s how I learned my mum was an “universal donor”, blood type O Rh negative. (Incidentally both Victor and I are Rh positive, and my mum didn’t have anti-D prophylaxis in either pregnancy as it wasn’t standard practice in 1960s Germany).
The blood bank would request her to donate all-too frequently, for traffic accidents and other emergencies. She never once refused.
As I got older, I followed her example and we’d go together to donate blood. I was present when the in-charge at Panjim Blood Bank finally gave orders to his staff “not to take any more blood from Madam Dias; she has donated enough!”
It is a powerful metaphor of my mum’s attitude to life, to her work and society. She quite literally gave her not just her blood, but her sweat, toil and tears, freely, unconditionally, even to a fault, to whoever needed it.
And this is not just in Goa, although she would give Goa the majority of her working life (1970 to 2020 when the pandemic hit, exactly fifty years!) but also in Mumbai (then Bombay) and Berlin (then West Berlin). Over the years I’ve met her colleagues and patients in the latter cities too, and the underlying thread of selfless service with a smile and good cheer runs through her entire career and indeed her life.
Most of her Mumbai colleagues have passed on (she was the last of that era) but all of them, and the Berlin fraternity too, told me that she could easily have risen to the top in those cities, she had the chops for it.
Goa has always been a different story. On a technicality, she was passed over for Professorship in the Department (and few if any took up cudgels for her then). But patients voted en masse with their feet, and her OPDs (out-patient clinics) were always overflowing and overbooked. For her, the clinical work and helping people was its own reward.
I remember once, after a session at one of the annual Casa da Moeda festivals where I had spoken of the history of the Mint and then of the house and the personalities that lived in it, I was reminded, rightly, that we had a living legend of Goa’s medical history in our very midst.
Mum was embarrassed by the spotlight, which is why I’ve never written about her while she was living.
Her life fits into neat chapters. From 1970 to 1990, for twenty years until she attained retirement age, she was employed at Goa Medical College, in effect carrying on the Dias legacy that her father-in-law Dr. Victor Dias, and his father before him, Gen. Dr. Miguel Caetano Dias, had so richly contributed to the institution’s pre-Liberation avatar, Escola Médica.
Many of Goa’s most prominent obstetricians and gynaecologists today were taught by her, and benefited from her kindness and generosity. As some of them themselves tell me, whereas many other consultants were stingy in giving surgical opportunities to junior doctors, she believed that was the whole point of a teaching hospital and gladly assisted them in their first surgical cases. Their stint in her unit (Unit 2) was a golden period in their career development, not just for the surgical opportunities, but for the clinical experience they gained and the calm unfussy attitude to patient care. The irony was that I, her own son, benefited the least from her tutelage as I joined the department exactly in her retirement year, 1990, and so was in her unit only a few weeks.
After her retirement, the department degenerated into a toxic cesspit of coteries, petty intrigue and mediocrity that I was glad to leave when I did.
Mum’s three-decade (1990-2020) innings in private practice came to an abrupt end with the lockdown. The post-pandemic years until her death were tough on her and on us, her care-givers.
As she got more house-bound, she, who went dozens of extra miles for countless others in her prime and headed a committee that gave a scholarship for advancement in geriatrics, ironically did not receive timely geriatric support herself.
In a further irony, students and relatives visiting from overseas spent more time with her in her last years than many in her own neighbourhood. Each visit was an occasion for a good laugh to lift her spirits,
but they were few and far between. Time today is at a premium, whether a doctor’s visit or a social one.
Mum wanted to die at home (she actually gave me a signed statement to this effect), and I must confess that toward her final years, I’d pray that she would slip quietly into the night in accordance with her wish. But it was not to be.
The earliest picture I have of our house Casa da Moeda is from 1936, my great-grandfather Dr. Miguel Caetano Dias’ ceremonial funeral. That occasion and my grandfather Dr. Victor Dias’s grand funeral are the stuff of family legend.
But here’s one last irony: although mum didn’t fight the bubonic plague like her grandfather-in-law Dr. Miguel Caetano Dias or oversee Old Goa’s sanitation plan like her father-in-law Dr. Victor Dias (who has been inexplicably consistently ignored by self-appointed custodians of Goa’s past), mum actually gave Goa more years of active clinical service than either of them, half-a-century! She brought countless thousands of babies to the world, and saved innumerable mothers and babies from the jaws of death. She mentored a whole harvest of successful obstetricians and gynaecologists scattered far and wide.
Does today’s Goa give a proper send-off only to the wealthy and influential, to ‘tall’ political leaders who actually ruined our land, rather than to a silent gentle kind human being, the “universal donor” in more ways than one, who kept on giving of herself until she could give no more? To paraphrase Shakespeare, all the good she did seems buried along with her bones.
Mum loved the Doris Day song ‘The Everlasting Arms’.
Take refuge in those Everlasting Arms, Mummy. Nobody ever earned it more than you.
(An edited version of this article was published on 05 May 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
30 Tuesday Apr 2024
What do you call a flawed democracy? An ‘electile’ dysfunction.
It seems an apt description for the situation India is in today.
The Democracy Index published by the Economist Group is an index measuring the quality of democracy across the world. This quantitative and comparative assessment is centrally concerned with democratic rights and democratic institutions. The Democracy Index produces a weighted average based on the answers to 60 questions, which are grouped into five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; functioning of government; political participation; and political culture.
India has the dubious distinction of being labelled a “flawed democracy”. But even that seems a rather kind assessment, given the systemic rot that pervades the functioning of democracy in India.
The biggest and most recent case in point is the scam of electoral bonds that was struck down last February by a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India, headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud as “unconstitutional.” Apart from finding it “violative of RTI (Right to Information)” and of voters’ right to information about political funding under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, they also pointed out that it “would lead to quid pro quo arrangements” between corporations and politicians.
Such an institutionalisation of “quid pro quo” undermines the very fabric of democracy, and unlimited corporate funding makes a sham of the concept of “free and fair” elections.
Unsurprisingly, when last month the Supreme Court ordered the State Bank of India to disclose the details of electoral bonds to the Election Commission of India (ECI), the biggest beneficiary of the electoral bonds at ₹6,060 crore (over 47.5% share in the total bonds encashed) was the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but other parties benefited too: All India Trinamool Congress received ₹1,609.50 crore (12.6%) followed by the Congress ₹1,421.9 crore (11.1%), the second and third biggest parties in terms of encashment in the period.
But here’s the interesting part: although the lid has been blown off the scam, and the names of donors and beneficiaries are in the public domain, everyone gets to keep the money thus acquired. So how “free and fair” will this coming election, or indeed any elections in the foreseeable future, ever be?
How surprised should we be if the political party with far and away the most stacked coffers wins yet again? Is it really a measure of good governance, or further evidence of “quid pro” in action?
India ought to currently be one notch further down the Democratic Index to what is called a “hybrid regime”, just a step away from the lowest rung of the index, the “authoritarian regime.”
“Hybrid regimes” are “nations with regular electoral frauds, preventing them from being fair and free democracies. These nations commonly have governments that apply pressure on political opposition, non-independent judiciaries, widespread corruption, harassment and pressure placed on the media, anaemic rule of law, and more pronounced faults than flawed democracies in the realms of underdeveloped political culture, low levels of participation in politics, and issues in the functioning of governance.”
Even without all of the above hugely troublesome issues, I find it more and more difficult to believe, going by past and present examples across the world, that democracy actually works in practice.
I recently came across this quote by the novelist Franz Kafka (1883-1924): “One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.”
Nowhere is this truer than in Goa, where the same rabble of politicians hop fences so effortlessly that we have trouble keeping up.
The other issue is our voting system, first-past-the-post (FPTP) or plurality voting, wherein voters cast a vote for a single candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins the election. Its advantage is that is easy to understand and implement, but it has serious drawbacks, far too many to get into here, but let’s just look at the big ones that are the particular bugbear of elections in Goa time and again: vote-splitting and tactical voting, which are inter-related.
Where two similar parties or candidates compete under FPTP, the vote of their potential supporters is often split between them, thus allowing a less popular party or candidate to win the seat.
FPTP encourages tactical voting, as voters often vote not for the candidate (or party) they most prefer, but against the candidate (or party) they most dislike.
My own voting history reflects both these issues. Ever since I became eligible to vote, I have almost consistently voted Congress (except for one delusionary phase when I thought that the Aam Aadmi Party was worth supporting; the honeymoon didn’t last long) not because I particularly believe in it all that much, but because they seemed and still seem the ‘lesser evil’. At least it was born at the hands of statesmen and women I admired, and I still do, most of them. And more importantly they seemed (and still seem, sometimes…) a counterweight to the divisive and communal forces in India. (Can our conscience permit us to forget about Manipur even in faraway Goa?)
So my voting history has always been ‘negative’, voting ‘against’ rather than ‘for’.
And this is the quandary I find myself in, like clockwork, every time another election circus puts up its tent in town wanting to blacken my index finger yet again. If I abstain, I’m called an irresponsible citizen. If I vote for someone who (surprise surprise!) actually wins, I have no way of knowing that they will not post-results hop another fence (even saying God told them to!) and betray my vote.
It’s a Kafkaesque circus, but who are the clowns: the politicians, we the people who vote them in through omission or commission, or the flawed democratic process itself?
And yet, infuriatingly, the voter will be blamed by political pundits on endless analytical television shows. “The voter got the government it deserved.”
But is that a fair assessment? It’s a rotten system, and we certainly didn’t deserve this.
(An edited version of this article was published on 30 April 2024 in my op-ed in the Herald Goa India)
07 Sunday Apr 2024
Each time internationally acclaimed concert pianist Marouan Benabdallah visits Goa, music-lovers know they are in for a feat of music, a night to remember. Child’s Play India Foundation is pleased to present him on Saturday 13 April 2024, ESG Maquinez Palace Auditorium 1, 6 PM. Donation passes available at Furtados, and at the door before the concert.
Benabdallah is indisputably the leading representative of his native Morocco on the international concert stage. With a musical heritage deeply rooted in the Hungarian tradition, he received his formal training at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary.
He first attracted international attention in 2003, following his triumphs at the Hungarian Radio Piano Competition and the Andorra Grand Prize. Later on, he was a prize-winner at the Hilton Head Piano Competition (US) and the Arthur Rubinstein Master Competition where the local media proclaimed his playing “miraculous” (Maariv).
Benabdallah has been praised for his “stunning natural virtuosity” (Nice-Matin), “delicate stylishness” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), “compelling sense of momentum” (Washington Post) and “resourceful pianism, lyrical instincts and thoughtfulness” (New York Times). He has been invited as guest soloist by numerous orchestras in Europe, Asia, America and Africa, and has collaborated with conductors such as Lorin Maazel, Charles Dutoit, Zoltan Kocsis, Iván Fischer, Renato Palumbo, Tan Lihua and others.
He has performed on stages such as the Great Hall of the Franz Liszt Music Academy and the Palace of Arts in Budapest, the Salle Cortot in Paris, the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, the Oriental Art Centre in Shanghai, the Teatro Communale di Bologna, the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, the Maison Symphonique in Montreal, the National Center for the Performing Arts in umbai, the Cairo Opera House, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Benabdallah makes his home between Budapest, Rabat, Paris and Beijing. He is a “Yamaha Artist”. He serves on the piano faculty of the Liszt Academy [University] of Music in Budapest.
As always, Benabdallah’s recitals are thoughtfully curated by him. The second half of his programme is devoted to ‘La Nuit’ (The Night): “The night is the realm of indistinguishability, the moment of revelation, of enlightenment. The night has always been paradoxical and malleable, it is reassuring as it is disturbing. It is a place of the imagination and the subconscious, a place that inspires artists and fires their creativity.
How do we depict the night? How do we give colour to such dark hours? How to make the night musical? Benabdallah invites the audience to an exploration of the night through paintings and music
focusing on French composers from the early 20th century,” ranging from the more familiar, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) to those perhaps less so: Henri Duparc (1848-1933), Mel Bonis (1858–1937), Abel Decaux (1869–1943), Gustave Samazeuilh (1877-1967) and Louis Aubert (1877–1968).
I’m just as excited about what is in store for us before that in the first half of Benabdallah’s concert: the not-so-frequently performed but extremely atmospheric Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 28 by Russian composer, virtuoso pianist and conductor Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943), whose 150th birth anniversary we celebrated last year.
As their overlapping timelines indicate, all the composers mentioned above were contemporaries, so a juxtaposition of their works in one concert allows us to compare their compositional styles.
Rachmaninov was considered anachronistic even in his lifetime, as a 20th century throwback to a Romantic era that had ended.
The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians !1954 edition), barely a decade after his death, notoriously dismissed Rachmaninoff’s music as “monotonous in texture … consist[ing] mainly of artificial and gushing tunes” and predicted that his popular success was “not likely to last.”
But as Alex Ross put it in his August 2022 New Yorker article (‘How radical was Rachmaninov?’), “To be anachronistic is to be outside one’s time; it does not rule out belonging to the future.”
In my column last year to mark the Rachmaninov birthday milestone, I mentioned how it had taken hypnotherapy in 1900 to get him out of a depression trough after the vicious criticism of his First Symphony. Among the trio of “Dresden pieces” he wrote after emerging from that low point in his life were his Second Piano Concerto (which he dedicated in gratitude to his therapist Dr. Nikolai Dahl), part of an opera ’Monna Vanna’ (which was never finished), and this First Piano Sonata.
Although Rachmaninov soon abandoned the thematic idea (German polymath and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragic play ‘Faust’)
that was originally the sonata’s inspiration, traces of its influence still linger. Its three movements, structured like a typical Classical sonata, (fast movements surrounding a slower, more tender second movement), are based on the play’s three main characters Faust, Gretchen (short for Margarete) and the devil Mephistopheles respectively. In that sense it parallels Franz Liszt’s 1857 choral work ‘A Faust symphony in three character pieces’ which also reflect those characters.
I rejoiced when I heard Benabdallah would be playing this “dark, demonic masterpiece”. It has formidable technical challenges. Rachmaninov himself wrote of it in a letter to a friend: “Nobody will ever play this composition. It’s too difficult and long.” The Russian critic Yuli Engel on examining the score said of it: “Unravelling this tangle of passages, rhythms, harmonies, polyphonic twistings, is no easy matter, even for an accomplished pianist.”
But its building blocks are deceptively simple: fifths, scales, and repeating notes. It is a mark of the genius of the composer that these musical devices can be employed to “paint” portraits of three completely different personalities. Rising and falling fifths in the first movement for example could be seen as Faust’s constant questioning, yearning for “more than earthly meat and drink” to give meaning to this life, even to extent of being willing to sell his soul to the devil to find answers to those questions. And the single repeating note in one motif, similar to a Russian Orthodox chant: is Faust hedging his bets here, appealing to God too, to whoever answers first?
In the middle ‘Gretchen’ movement, those devices paint a picture of innocence, virtue and bliss. The last movement is the headlong galloping descent into hell, complete with tolling bells and a generous quote of the first fragment of the ‘Dies Irae’ (the well-known Latin chant portraying the wrath of God) motif that Rachmaninov frequently inserted in so many of his works, a sign of his profound contemplation on the subject of death and mortality throughout his life.
What makes Rachmaninov’s music so compelling is not just its complexity but how it invites you to explore the whole gamut of the human experience. I was struck by the various impressions of this work by listeners on a piano forum. To one, it felt like “you’re flying through the cosmos and witnessing planets being formed and destroyed.” To another “it has this grand, subtly storytelling, yet almost hypnotic quality that makes me think of atoms and stars and stuff like that.”
What will be your own experience? Why not come along to Marouan Benabdallah’s concert and discover the answer yourself?
(An edited version of this article was published on 07 April 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
30 Saturday Mar 2024
My son’s school took its 8th and 9th standard students earlier this month to see ‘12th Fail’,
the 2023 Hindi-language biographical drama film directed, produced and written by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, based on the 2019 eponymous non-fiction book by Anurag Pathak about Manoj Kumar Sharma, who overcame extreme poverty to become an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer.
I totally get why school students should see it. It is an inspirational rags-to-riches story, with so many life lessons: Dare to dream big. Honesty is the best policy. Never ever give up. Try, try again until you succeed (or to borrow the film’s catchphrase: ‘Restart’).
I had heard a lot about ‘12th Fail’ but hadn’t yet seen it. Now that my son had gone to see it and liked it, I decided to see it too. (If you haven’t seen the film and wish to, stop reading here, as there are spoilers ahead).
I did come away impressed. But there was a disclaimer at the very beginning, that although the film was “inspired” by true events, “it is not a documentary/biography of any character depicted in the film. No scene should be construed to represent a true or accurate recreation of the actual events that transpired. The story and the relationship between the characters depicted in the film have been fictionalized. Any resemblance or similarity to any actual events, entities or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”
So: what in the film is “an accurate recreation”, and what is a “fictionalized” account? I found an English translation of the book on which the film is based, and read through it. Maybe it reads better in Hindi, but the English translation is rather clumsy. However, there are so many scenes in the film that one assumes were “actual events that transpired” (for instance the theft of Manoj’s bag with his grandmother’s life savings on the bus to Gwalior) that are absent in the book.
I realise of course that any ‘biographical’ film has to truncate a lot, but there is a dizzying and frankly rather depressing timeline of “attempts” of the three-step (prelims, mains, interview) sequence of the UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) qualifying exam of not just the main protagonist but his friend circle, with so many “failures” along the way, compressed into a short span. And there are the various state-level exams as well, to further thicken the plot.
As one fellow aspirant ‘Gauri bhaiya’ (who is also not in the book) explains, the odds are rather sobering in what he calls a game of ‘snakes and ladders.’ “Out of 200,000 Hindi-medium applicants for the UPSC, only 25-30 become IAS (Indian Administrative Service) or IPS officers. The remaining 199,970 go back to zero. Restart.”
‘Guari bhaiya’ seems an invented composite character just for the film (part of the ‘artistic license’), but was it really necessary to have this very character come from a ‘backward caste’, who then explains that he is allowed six attempts (rather than the four in the ‘general’ category), and have him then fail even that last attempt? Caste is strangely absent in the book, a glaring omission in caste-discriminating India.
And then, wonder of wonders, the ever-selfless ‘Gauri bhaiya’ instead of returning home, opens a tea-stall named ‘Restart’, a ‘free UPSC guidance centre’ (again not in the book).
All the motivational rhetoric is of course necessary for young minds to hear and internalize, but what comes across in book and film and is painfully obvious in real life is the yawning chasm between rich and poor. It is no coincidence that the rich kids are fluent in English and able to afford expensive coaching classes for these entrance exams (which are conducted in English), while those from poorer, rural India, educated in vernacular-medium schools have to compete with their affluent peers at these incredibly tough exams with this added handicap of language (which comes across poignantly when Manoj misreads ‘Tourism’ as ‘Terrorism’). To me ‘12th Fail’ is not just “the gripping narrative of a man who put his heart and soul into making the impossible possible” (as one publicity blurb puts it) but it is also a deafening indictment of our woefully skewed education system that offers English-medium instruction to a privileged few in urban India to the neglect of the remaining majority of our children and youth in suburban and rural India. Surely the abysmal annual UPSC exam pass percentage (0.015% according to the film) could be far higher if English-medium instruction was more uniformly distributed?
Another issue I found disturbing is the subtle emotional blackmail, the family pressure “of only returning wearing a police uniform” i.e. having passed the IPS exam. Pressure like that can be a double-edged sword. I knew a young Indian doctor in my UK years who repeatedly failed the PLAB (Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board), the qualifying exam to start working there as a doctor, incurring huge financial losses and borrowing money from friends and family, but felt he “couldn’t return home without getting a British postgraduate degree.” Eventually after many years it got too much for him and he did return, but the stress he endured was so unnecessary, from the real or imagined psychological pressure: “I can’t face my family and society unless I’m successful.”
There’s also the undiscussed issue of the girl-child’s education opportunities in the film. Manoj’s sister Rajni has to be content studying in the village and doing household chores. The only female students in Manoj’s friends circle are from well-to-do backgrounds. Maybe I’m nit-picking here, but it’s a thought.
What does one make of the media hype over lead actor Vikrant Massey getting a ‘tan look’ for the film? Would a lighter skin tone in hue-obsessed India make his role less believable? We can guess why. Poor India, literally, isn’t ‘fair.’
Around the same time, another article discussed school drop-outs and ‘12th fails’ in celebrity Bollywood dynastic scions. What a stark contrast between the two Indias!
(An edited version of this article was published on 30 March 2024 in my op-ed in the Herald Goa India)
24 Sunday Mar 2024
Looking through the list of films that bagged or were nominated for the Oscars this year, I realised I had seen a handful: Oppenheimer, Barbie, Maestro, The Last Repair Shop, The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar.
Until then I hadn’t even heard of ‘Poor Things’, the 2023 film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. But as it won four Oscars this year and numerous other accolades elsewhere, I found it on a streaming service and watched it.
To say it has a bizarre storyline is an understatement. Bella Baxter (played by Emma Stone, who won Best Actress for the role) is a young woman in Victorian London who dies by suicide by jumping off a bridge, is brought back to life via brain transplant (from her own baby that she was heavily pregnant with!) and embarks on “an odyssey of self-discovery.” The “odyssey”, surprise surprise, involves to a lot of graphic sex scenes and nudity.
Frankly, I wasn’t sure what to make of it at the end. Is this dark comedy, film noir? The protagonist’s “creator”, called “God”, Godwni Baxter (Willem Dafoe) looks like a ‘creation’ himself, of Dr. Frankenstein. The “poor things” ultimately seem to be a revolving-door of the men in Bella’s life who momentarily think they have her in their thrall. Is she a “poor thing” too? You be the judge.
Most of the reviews have raved over ‘Poor Things,’ calling it “wildly imaginative and exhilaratingly over the top”, and variations on that theme. There were a few dissenting voices, however. Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle pronounced it “a 141-minute mistake” adding: “Worst of all, it’s dishonest. It purports to be a feminist document, but it defines a woman’s autonomy as the ability to be exploited and not care.”
Angelica Jade Bastién of ‘Vulture’ identified the decision to make Bella Baxter mentally a child as the “primary failure of Poor Things’ sex scenes…. In many ways, the film demonstrates the limits of the modern cis-male auteur’s vision for and about women — particularly their sexual selves.” I quite agree.
To me there was a touch of the grotesque in much of the film. It was the idea of ‘using’ suicide as a plot device, a literal springboard for absurdist comedy, and the very thought of in effect murdering a live newborn just to transplant its brain into a dead adult makes my stomach churn. It’s fiction, it’s just a movie, yes, I know, but it was quite a revolting stretch of the imagination for me.
I looked up the book (‘Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer’) that inspired the film, but have no desire to actually read it from cover to cover. Life’s too short; there are many much more worthy books vying for my attention on my bucket list.
The only reason I sought out the book was to check how prominently Lisbon (which Bella visits on her “odyssey” in the film) features in the book. It is mentioned just once, and just fleetingly in passing, at that.
The film dwells on the city for a little longer, but it is a very surreal nineteenth-century Lisbon. In Bella’s imagination, its trams (‘elétricos’) glide in mid-air like ski-lifts between mountain-slopes.
She is introduced to the city’s fabled pastéis de nata (egg custard tart pastry) by her debauched escort Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) thus: “So nuns and monks would starch their clothes with egg-whites, and with the yolks, make these tarts.” Seems like a pat explanation for any dessert involving egg-yolks! And the advice on eating them? “Not dainty flake by dainty flake, but inhaled with gusto like life itself.” And “one’s enough; any more is too much,” something Bella proceeds to ignore when she goes off wandering the city’s streets on her own.
She soon sees and hears a woman on a balcony strumming a ‘guitarra portuguesa’ and singing a melancholy fado.
An audio-search revealed it to be ‘O quarto’ (The Room), sung by Portuguese superstar fadista Maria do Carmo Carvalho Rebelo de Andrade, better known as Carminho. She was invited by director Lanthimos to make a special appearance in ‘Poor Things.’
The fado (lyrics by Carminho) was chosen jointly by her and Lanthimos, and seems an apt one, chiming in with what Bella must be feeling.
The “small room” (her mind?) she thought was just hers is infiltrated by the poison (veneno) of “loneliness (solidão). The emptiness is suffocating and is compounded by the “invasion” of the cold.
As in so many fados, these outpourings seem to be triggered by “a heart that broke” (“um coração que se partiu”). “You don’t even see me when you enter.” Who? The thought of the one who hurt her? Or the past in general in Bella’s case?
“This room is of no use,” where the air doesn’t even fit” (“onde nem lá cabe o ar”).
In ‘Poor Things’ we hear just a little over a minute of the fado before Bella is distracted by a squabbling couple, and then, climbing up a flight of stairs to take in a stylised version of Lisbon’s rooftop view of its skyline, her visceral reaction is to retch and throw up. If only she had heeded the warning not to over-indulge on pastéis de nata!
‘Poor Things’ elicited a similar regurgitating reflex in me in places. Don’t watch it if you’re under-age, or on a full stomach, or perhaps a prude like me. I don’t think I’ll be seeing it again any time soon. Like Wedderburn’s advice, once is enough; any more is too much.
Nevertheless, that one-minute spotlight on fado in an Oscar-winning film will do much to showcase it to a global audience.
Incidentally, a wag was recently heard saying that we are getting an “overdose” of fado here, that not even in Portugal is such fuss made over fado as in Goa.
To me it seems a case of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’. It’s bad enough that nurturing anything with the ‘Portuguese’ tag (except for ‘Portuguese’ houses on the real estate market!) is viewed in some quarters as ‘anti-national’, (which mysteriously never happens to the British legacy, say cricket, tea, or the English language). Had these aspects of our heritage been left to wither and die, we would have bemoaned their passing. So when they are revived and even made commercially viable by an enterprising, passionate handful, why is that a bad thing?
Coming to fado, as in any art form, there are the stubborn entrenched purists who feel it should remain fossilised in its purported 19th century original state, extending only to its early to mid-20th century heyday; and then there are the innovators who want to give fado a 21st century relevance, context, and (shock horror!) even fuse it with music from other genres and other geographic regions than Portugal. If history is any indicator, innovation and evolution are what make any art form endure, even thrive. In more ways than one, ‘tudo isto é fado’. All this is destiny, all this is fado. Viva!
(An edited version of this article was published on 24 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
17 Sunday Mar 2024
If you double the fortification of a city, what do you get? Eightification of course. And if you halve it, twentification. Yes, I know, terrible. My teenage son and niece thought so too. But when you visit one fort after another in just a couple of days, you become a serial ‘kila.’
In a recent previous column, I had begun the account of my serendipitous visit to Chaul (also called Revdanda fort), the historic fort ruin in Maharashtra’s Raigad district, a few kilometres away from Alibag.
Senior lecturer in Portuguese history at the Université d’Aix-Marseille Ernestine Carreira’s book Globalisng Goa (1660-1820): Change and exchange in a former capital of empire’
documents the history of this fort city and its strategic importance to the Estado da Índia.
Chaul comes up in the context of the complex interactions between the Portuguese and the Marathas, and Carreira rightly quotes the landmark 1983 text (translated from the Marathi) by Dr. Pandurang Sakharam Pssurlencar, ‘Portuguese Maratha relations,’
so I looked this up too.
What emerges is far from the black-and-white clear demarcations that 21st century hindsight tends to confer on our past. Pissurlencar himself writes in the first chapter that “between the Portuguese and the Marathas alone, no less than 25 pacts and treaties were concluded.”
Pissurlencar in his second chapter quotes a 1636 letter from Shahaji (father of the eventual Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj) to the Portuguese captain at Chaul, seeking shelter to his family “as he had always maintained friendly relations with them” and his family’s safety was in jeopardy from the Mughals and the Bijapur sultanate. The Portuguese declined fearing the wrath of Delhi and Bijapur, but offered to covertly secure his safe passage onward.
Pissurlencar also quotes a source in the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Lisbon) which makes it obvious that there were Portuguese men serving in Shivaji’s army and in building ships for the Maratha navy, eventually causing alarm to the Portuguese authorities, as the ships could be “a source of trouble” not only against the Siddi [of Janjira] but against the Portuguese themselves.
In 1667, the Viceroy João Nunes da Cunha, Conde de São Vicente wrote to Lisbon: “I am afraid of Shivaji’s naval ships. We did not take sufficient preventive steps and he has built many a fort on the Konkan coast. Today he has several ships and they are large ones.”
In keeping with their guerilla tactics on land, Shivaji’s fleet consisted mostly of ‘galvetas’, small but speedy, a distinct advantage over the “slow large-sized Portuguese ships.”
“On 10 February 1670”, Pissurlencar writes, “Shivaji entered into a pact of friendship with the Portuguese.” One of its terms was that, since the Siddi [Janjira] had accepted the overlordship of the Portuguese, they were under an obligation to protect him, but since this ran counter to the “new friendship” between the Portuguese and the Marathas, the former would use their influence to conclude a mutually satisfactory treaty between the Siddi and Shivaji. Talk about ‘frenemies’!
Carreira refers to the collapse of trade for Goa’s merchant fleet in the early 1700s “both in the Atlantic and within secondary networks in Asia, but Chaul, Bassein, Daman and Diu could take over on regional, coastal shipping, sometimes by joining up with Jewish and Parsi shipping companies from Surat.” Some of those Jewish merchant families must certainly have been in this region? Are some of their descendants still here, if they haven’t been part of the mass migration to Israel and beyond?
In the previous column I had highlighted the Bene Israeli settlement going back over 2000 years, and even being responsible for the etymology of Alibag (“Eli cha Bagh”, “Eli’s garden”). Although Alibag’s Magen Aboth synagogue was temporarily off-limits to us (as a precautionary security measure in the wake of the recent events in Israel-Palestine), we passed by the Bene Israeli cemetery in a deserted location in Korlai
and were able to get close to the few gravestones there, in Hebrew and Marathi, with names such as Eliyahu Solomon Sogaonkar, Michael Eliyahu Sogaonkar and Jonah Moshe Ashtamkar.
Portuguese influence continued to wane, and Chaul fell to the Marathas in 1740, then to the British East India Company, and was already a ruin when J. Gerson da Cunha wrote his ‘Notes on the History and Antiquities of Chaul and Bassein’ (1876).
Da Cunha’s tone to the current reader smacks of what Edward Said called “the Orientalist gaze”, but he waxes almost poetic when he says in the Preface: “Even at the present day, among the thousand associations which crowd upon the mind when we gaze upon their ruins, none is more moving than the thought that we have before us the relics of a civilisation that, whatever its faults, or howsoever anachronistic its institutions may appear to the present dwellers on the globe, there is no doubt that it answered its purpose well, met best all the exigencies of the time, and when it became effete ceased to exist – a mere question of evolution, and not of revolution. To try to prolong it, however, beyond the period it was intended to serve in the economy of human society, to strive to extend it outside the sphere within which it was designed to move, would naturally amount to involving it in ruin. And that is precisely what took place.”
That ruin has undergone further decay since then to the time Amita Kanekar described Chaul in her valuable pocket-book on Portuguese sea forts
(which I sadly forgot to carry with me) and the downward slide (“evolution, not revolution”) continues.
The only somewhat imposing structure still standing was the tower of the Franciscan convent of Santa Barbara, founded before 1564 but rebuilt after 1570. Kanekar informs us it was probably intended as a watchtower and navigational landmark. Two arched openings in its roofless upper storey (through which one sees bare sky) and a little window below give a ghoulish face to the façade, helplessly looking at the surrounding desolation.
Subsequent visits to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS, formerly the Prince of Wales Museum) revealed two inscription headstones from Chaul in the verandah area to the left of its entrance. One records construction in the fortress between 1635-36, and that João de Veloso Thobar, its captain, adopted St Francis Xavier as patron of the city.
The second inscription documents the vow made by the King Dom João IV in the Cortes in 1646 to “defend by all means in his power the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary”, for which purpose a decree was passed to carve such inscriptions in every city and fort of the Portuguese in India.
However, as we have seen, despite all the talismanic appeals for divine protection, barely less than a century later, there was a different writing, figuratively on the wall for the Portuguese in India. Surely there is a lesson from history here about the folly of mixing state and religion, which we ought to heed today?
We had met the Marathas in Kolaba, the Portuguese at Chaul, and now the Siddi were waiting for us at Janjira. More about them in the final column about this fort-uitous odyssey.
(An edited version of this article was published on 17 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
29 Thursday Feb 2024
I was at a dinner party some months ago, when I heard snatches of conversation a few places down the table from me.
The topic was some bureaucratic appointment in a government department. “He can’t even speak English properly! Honestly, it’s high time reservations were scrapped. Everything should be on merit.”
And then the conversation drifted off to something else. I know I should have said something to counter the comment, but I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t. I can give a list of excuses why I didn’t: I was too tired to get into an argument; I felt it might dampen the mood; and perhaps most crucially, I felt it would not change the person’s viewpoint no matter what I said.
So I’m writing here what I should have said.
Some decades ago, I too subscribed to the view that “everything should be on merit.” It sounds so egalitarian, so just, so logical, doesn’t it, on the face of it?
The first seeds of doubt to this view were sown in the wake of the massive protests nationwide against the implementation of the Mandal Commission report by the V. P. Singh government in 1990. I was a resident doctor then, and was initially impressed by NDTV coverage of young doctors like me, in white coats, stethoscopes around necks or in pockets braving water-cannons and lathi-charges on the streets. I was aghast by the self-immolations by students in protests, and their deaths in many cases.
But NDTV also covered the other side of the argument. A young Dalit asked, “Why is it OK to have capitation colleges for those who can’t get in on merit? If you have money, you can bypass the merit-based system and nobody questions this.” I had never thought of this before. I knew colleagues studying medicine and engineering in such colleges, and it was just accepted as ‘normal.’
I began to read up in earnest about caste discrimination and injustice a decade later for a whole host of reasons not worth going into here, when I really understood the fallacy of the ‘merit’ argument.
The idea of ‘merit’ presupposes the notion of a level playing field. The oppressed castes and other marginalized sections of society have had to endure systemic barriers to education, employment (except those considered demeaning and other sections were unwilling to do), nutrition, healthcare, housing, land ownership for so many centuries that they have been left far behind.
The caste system, in other words, has been in everything but name, another ‘reservation’ system where its benefits have accrued over centuries if not millennia, to the dominant castes. The inherent endogamy that keeps it alive to this day has conferred a ‘blindness’ to their own privilege and entitlement, and a blissful ignorance of and insulation from the hardships faced by those outside that ‘entitled’ ‘elite’ circle.
There’s an interesting video on YouTube called “Equal opportunity? Different starting lines.”
It has an American setting, of course, but the message is universal: Those born into privilege have a head-start in the “running race” of life. In the video, the youth with the head-start for example were those who didn’t have to worry where their next meal was coming from, didn’t have to help their parents to put food on the table and pay for rent and other living expenses. In the Indian setting, so many more privileges could be added to that list: just having a roof over one’s head, or indeed a stable address to allow one to have an Aadhar card and other essential ‘kaagaz’ (documents) that increasingly, ominously are tied to belonging and citizenship; access to electricity to be able to study at night; adequate living space without being cramped which became so relevant for social distancing during the Covid pandemic; ready access to running water; ease of transport to school or college to name just a few. The privileged among us are blind to these ‘head-starts’ but still talk of ‘merit’.
As for ‘fluency in English’: the privileged among us have had access to education for generations, and if that education was in English (which even in Goa is true for at least two generations or more by now), its byproduct is some degree of fluency in that medium of instruction. To hold a lesser degree of fluency against someone who is a first-generation learner in that family is churlish and unkind. I remember an instance at Dhempe college where one such first-generation graduate was working as a demonstrator in the chemistry lab, and the fact that she mispronounced the word ‘solution’ would draw smirks and snickers in the class. But she knew her stuff and actually that is all that should matter.
Isn’t it rich, how we find it ‘cute’ when visiting European speakers (for instance so many Portuguese academicians at Goa University, Fundação Oriente, Instituto Camões or elsewhere) get their English grammar mixed up or mispronounce words, but we cannot extend the same courtesy to our own first-generation student or graduate brethren, for whom English-speaking is just as challenging? We still collectively suffer from the white-skin worship syndrome.
Also, as at the dinner party where casual casteism reared its ugly head, those who denounce reservations suffer from selective recall bias. They harp on one or two instances where a beneficiary of a reserved seat in academia or employment was (to them) found wanting. But instances where other reserved candidates were silently efficient, or instances where someone from the ‘general’ category was grossly incompetent, are conveniently ‘forgotten’ or ignored.
As for the rhetorical question “How long do reservations have to continue? Haven’t they been around long enough to make a difference?”, the answer is: there is still much left to be done. Through bureaucratic sleight-of-hand stemming from casteism, reserved seats go unfilled or, on grounds of being ‘unfilled’ are filled by the general category. As long as societal caste prejudice persists, caste-based reservations should continue.
(An edited version of this article was published on 29 February 2024 in my op-ed in the Herald Goa India)
18 Sunday Feb 2024
As medical students we are bludgeoned by such an overload of ‘knowledge’, hoping to upload it into the memory drive of our brains for as long as possible (definitely until we can spill it out for our exams) that there is little room (certainly not in our dry textbooks) for the fascinating lives of the pioneering men and women who were responsible for those facts, discoveries and innovations in the first place.
I’ve been a social media follower of Hungarian-American writer Daphne Kalotay ever since I read her magnificently crafted 2010 historical fiction novel Russian Winter’
about an aging ballerina and the secrets from the past that come to light when her priceless jewellery collection is auctioned off.
Kalotay recently posted an image of the books she was then reading. Among them was ‘Breaking Through: My Life in Science’,
the autobiography of Hungarian-American biochemist researcher Katalin Karikó,
who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine last year (along with colleague Drew Weissman) for “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.” It was published just days after they won the prize.
I expected it to be a jargon-peppered read, but her blunt, direct, no-nonsense style drew me in. Her book deserves a whole column someday but I want to focus on the foremost influence on her from her school years in Hungary.
Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-1986), the Hungarian biochemist who first isolated vitamin C,
and whose breakthrough research into cellular respiration laid the groundwork for the identification of the Krebs (or citric acid) cycle and who won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is a cult figure in his native country,
although like Karikó, he would also finally live in the US.
As schoolchildren, Karikó and her classmates decide to write to the great man in the US. They didn’t have his address, so they just posted it to “Albert Szent-Györgyi, USA”.
She called it “a stab in the dark, a wild gamble.” They didn’t believe the letter would ever arrive, but incredibly, a month later, they received a reply, a personal letter from Szent-Györgyi himself, with a copy of his book ‘The Living State.’ He inscribed it “To the enthusiastic cultivators of science in Kisújszállás” (Karikó’s rural hometown).
That small gesture of kindness touched Karikó. “I had no doubt, The great scientist is talking to me. Cultivator of science. Oh, yes. That I am.”
That little schoolgirl, a butcher’s daughter, would become a biochemist researcher herself, and also win a Nobel almost a century later. Millions around the world owe their lives to her because of the COVID vaccine that her work enabled.
The pathbreaking work of Szent-Györgyi (Hungarian for “Saint George”, a chivalric order in the name of the saint) straddles two of our first-year subjects in medical school, physiology and biochemistry. He also ascertained the molecular basis of muscle contraction; that muscles contain actin, which when combined with the protein myosin and the energy source adenosine triphosphate (ATP), contract muscle fibres. If his name did appear in our textbooks, it would have been at best a footnote.
Music played an important part in the Szent-Györgyi household. Albert’s mother Jozefina had wanted to become an opera singer when young and auditioned for Gustav Mahler, then a conductor at the Budapest Opera. He advised her to marry instead, since her voice was not suitable for operatic singing. Albert himself was a good pianist, while his brother Pál became a professional violinist.
Albert’s academic studies were interrupted in 1914 by the First World War, where he served as a medic. Two years later, disgusted by the war, he deliberately shot himself in the arm and claimed he was wounded by enemy fire in order to return to civilian life and research.
He received a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1929 where his research involved isolating an organic acid (which he then called “hexuronic acid”) from adrenal gland tissue.
A year later, after accepting a position at the University of Szeged, Hungary he and his research fellow Joseph Svirbely found that “hexuronic acid” was actually the thus far unidentified antiscorbutic (anti-scurvy) factor, known as vitamin C, later given its chemical name L-ascorbic acid.
There is a humorous story about Szent-Györgyi’s isolation of vitamin C from paprika. One night his wife served him paprika for dinner, and it occurred to him that he had never tested it for the vitamin. He said in a 1984 interview. “I didn’t feel like eating it but didn’t have the courage to tell my wife.” So he told her he would finish eating the dish it in his laboratory, and subjected his “dinner” to tests instead and found it was a rich source of vitamin C!
It was for his work not only on vitamin C but also on cellular respiration, identifying fumaric acid and other components of the Krebs cycle (which is also known now as the Szent-Györgyi -Krebs cycle)
that he won the 1937 Nobel Prize.
But Szent-Györgyi offered all the Nobel Prize money to the fight against the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1940. He joined the Hungarian Resistance movement during the Second World War and helped Jewish friends escape to safety.
Although Hungary was allied with the Axis Powers, the Hungarian prime minister Miklós Kállay sent Szent-Györgyi to Istanbul in 1944 under the guise of a scientific lecture to begin secret negotiations with the Allies. The Germans learned of this plot and Hitler himself issued a warrant for the Szent-Györgyi’s arrest. He escaped from house arrest and spent 1944 to 1945 on the run from the Gestapo.
After the war, Szent-Györgyi entered Hungarian politics and was even touted as a potential President but his disillusionment with communism prompted his emigration to the US in 1947.
Nevertheless, Szent-Györgyi is so revered in Hungary that an anthem to him, for choir and orchestra was composed in 2012 at the University of Szeged, which is incidentally also Karikó’s alma mater, and which she visited just a week after her own win last year, posing next to a life-size statue of him.
Living life to the fullest, Szent-Györgyi was passionate about motorcycles and cars and loved sports such as horse-riding, tennis, swimming, and gliding.
There are several of Szent-Györgyi’s wry comments and statements that are quotable quotes in the scientific community.
But it is my own fascination with how great men and women of the sciences respond to religion or thoughts about a Creator and the beginning of life that prompts me to end with this quote:
“I am not religious, but I am a pious man… A religious man has a definite religion. He says ‘God is there’ or ‘Your god is not my god, and that’s all.’ But the pious man, he just looks out with awe, and says, ‘Where is God?’ and ‘I don’t understand it and I would like to know what this creation really means.’ A pious man is really touched by the greatness of nature and of creation.”
(An edited version of this article was published on 18 February 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
04 Sunday Feb 2024
We get cable TV at home, and some channels are part of the package deal even though one doesn’t particularly wish to watch them.
One of these is Rophe TV. I encounter it only when channel-surfing, and I gathered from the beginning that it is an evangelical Christian channel. I give any evangelical enterprise a wide berth if I can help it. But I did notice in passing that quite often their ‘preachers’ were flanked by the Israeli flag. I shuddered in disgust but moved on.
Conflating the Biblical land of Israel with the modern eponymous state established in 1948 in the same region is not only erroneous but dangerous as it compounds an already vexed issue.
But after the unconscionable Hamas terrorist act of October 7 2023, I noticed a ramping up of the presence of the Israeli flag on the channel. There are at least four video clips still on their website from two months ago, where the disproportionate military response, the collective punishment meted out to Gaza’s civilian population by the state of Israel was spoken of approvingly and given ‘Biblical sanction’ by cherry-picking selective excerpts and actually saying that Devache utor (God’s word) was coming to pass.
The videos began with imagery of warfare: guns, helicopter gunships, cannons, barbed wire, to the sound of booming explosions. The irony of the greeting ‘Shalom’ (Peace) by Dr. A.R. Royan, Bro. Anthony Dias (Founder and Director) and Pastor Royston Dias after that ‘shock and awe’ introduction antithetical to peace seemed to be lost on them.
What I found quite remarkable in all four video clips was the fact that every last quotation from the Bible that they resorted to came from the Old Testament, never the New. And all of them take those quotations written several millennia ago, quite literally.
For instance Royston Dias (quoting Zepheniah 2:4) makes no reference to its context whatsoever, and instead plays upon the viewer’s assumed ignorance, asking breathlessly, “Do you know the word Gaza is mentioned in the Bible?” as if the mention itself has sealed its fate. Such simplistic Scriptural ‘interpretations’ do no-one any credit, least of all the viewer it seeks to address. It is unconscionable to forcibly extrapolate obscure chapter and verse, even if it be from a Scripture, to our time merely because it suits a devious, twisted, hateful agenda to do so.
But such Biblical literalist interpretations are used extensively by fundamentalist Christians; and the Old Testament, with all its instances of a vengeful God, is their happy hunting ground for their devious agenda. They wilfully ignore the New Testament, which focuses on the actual life and teachings of Jesus Christ (whose name they nevertheless evoke so fervently, sometimes as Jesus, Jezu or Yeshua) where the overwhelming narrative is one of love, humanity, humility, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation.
Evangelical Christians view the Jews as ‘God’s chosen people’ and the creation of the state of Israel as the fulfilment of Biblical promises. In their twisted binary of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the Palestinian people are therefore ‘evil’. This is why, quite callously, in none of those videos is there even a throw-away word of empathy for the two million innocent defenceless civilians trapped as bombs and missiles rain upon them. Instead, the viewer is told “Do not fear what is happening, but trust in the Lord. These things are going to happen,” a harbinger of ‘End Times’ and one even asserts blasphemously that Jesus said so!
Over 27,000 civilians (with several thousands more unaccounted beneath the rubble of demolished homes, hospitals, shelters), over 10,000 of them children have been systematically, remorselessly slaughtered in the Gaza strip so far at the time of writing this, and the number keeps rising each day. To put 10,000 children’s deaths in perspective: if one were to attend the funeral of each child each consecutive day, it would take over 27 years. This is not an act of God but the bloodthirsty sadistic evil of Man.
What evangelical Christians wilfully ignore is the fact that there are Christians among the Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, who stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their Muslim brethren in the face of Israeli oppression, apartheid, and yes, genocide. Israel recently went on trial at the United Nations’ International Court of Justice, accused by South Africa of committing the crime of genocide with its ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip.
John Munayer, a Palestinian Christian theologian told the press, “When you support a specific state that has racist policies and is enforcing an apartheid state, that would be un-Biblical in my mind. That wouldn’t be loving thy neighbour as thyself.”
Now that’s a quote-worthy Old Testament text, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18) the Golden Rule or the Great Commandment.
Jesus himself quoted it in Matthew 22:37–39.
The great Church theologian Saint Augustine in his ‘De doctrina christiana’ stresses the importance of humility in the study of Scripture. He also regards the commandment of love in Matthew 22 as the heart of Christian faith.
Add to that Matthew 25:40. “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto Me.”
And the gospel of John: “A new commandment I give unto you: That ye love one another; as I have loved you.”
Love is central to true Christianity.
Listen to this excerpt from the speech of Pastor Munther Isaac of Lutheran Church Bethlehem (“Palestinian Christian Response to Christian Zionism” 7 November 2023): “The irony for us Palestinian Christians is that evangelicals with their overemphasis on prophecy have lost the capacity of being prophetic. You want to prove that the Bible is right? You don’t do this by pointing to self-fulfilling prophecy, or by pointing to world events as prophecy fulfilment. This is not how you prove that the Bible is right. We prove that the Bible is right by radical obedience to the teachings of Jesus, by proving that Jesus’s teachings actually work, and that they can make the world a better place. Let us love our enemies forgive them which sin against us. Let us feed the poor, care for the oppressed, walk the extra mile, be inclusive not exclusive, turn the other cheek and maybe and only maybe then the world would start taking us seriously and believing in our Bible.”
As a practising Christian myself, I find Bible-thumping messages of hate by false prophets who callously rejoice in the annihilation of the Palestinian people utterly reprehensible. “Not in my name,” is my response to any doctrine of hate, whatever the twisted ‘Scriptural’ justification for it.
(An edited version of this article was published on 04 February 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)