India News

More fun to read than the back of a cereal box

I’m back in Mumbai and am back in my daily routine, which begins with breakfast and an incredulous reading of “The Times of India.”  This morning’s lead article reports on a scandal that seems to involve cricket, but I cannot be certain because it is written in code, i.e., “On the last day of the IPL, a far more gripping — and consequential — behind-the-scenes battle saw the league’s architect and chief Lalit Modi being forcibly shown the door by BCCI.” Come again?

Then there is the usual Indian-who-died-outside-of-India article, today’s featuring an Indian who died in a deadly hot air-balloon crash in a United Arab Emirates desert. And there are the city’s daily catastrophes . Yesterday, an 11-year old boy died under the tires of an SUV. Why? “The police said probably the Tata Safari driver did not notice the children because there was no light on the street.”  This is the sort of article that makes me shout with rage over my cereal, much as my mother does daily when Republicans hold executive power. There should be lights on the streets! Mumbai drivers should NOT BLARE THEIR HORNS and accelerate to beat a pedestrian crossing the street. Is it any wonder that there seems to be a hit-and-run fatality or sari-stuck-in-motorbike fatality every day?

Next, I skim over the usual assortment of failing infrastructure articles — the housing society in ritzy Colaba that must pay for twenty tankers of water to be delivered daily, since the building is not adequately served by the  city’s water pipes. The cost is $30 per tank, which everyone finds exhorbitant. Water shortages are a big problem in Mumbai but, if you’re rich, there’s always a solution.

And then there are the articles that really destroy me — the graphic violence against women articles that appear every day. The railway staffer who was raped by her neighbor, also a railway employee, who taped the attack… and blackmailed her, ultimately extorting $9,000 by threatening to use the tape to “prove” to her husband they were having an affair. This crime merited an article — other crimes are condensed in the “India Digest box:”

• Teen raped, murdered. A teenaged girl was raped and killed in a mango orchard at Sargaon village in Orissa’s Balasore district on Sunday.
• Suicide over marriage: Unable to bear pressure from her parents to get married, a 13-year old girl allegedly committed suicide by drinking pesticide at Kaliachak in Bengal’s Malda district on Saturday night. Firoza Khatun studied in class V.

Sometimes, I go to the kitchen, get out the scissors, carefully cut out one of these articles, and stick in the file folder along with my collection of articles on surrogate mothers.  I have articles about eve-teasing (as they call sexual harassment here), and dowry burnings, and rapes, and joint suicides, and girls who poison their own parents in despair.  I have an article about a man who beat his wife and tied her to a tree — a ceremony to cure her infertility that, in fact, solved his problem another way….by killing her.  (Now he can get remarried.) I don’t know what I’m going to do with these articles, but I keep them.

And then I flip to the single page of international news, which is always eclectic. America has new high-speed missile!  British officials sorry for mocking pope! Naomi Campbell accused of accepting a blood diamond! “Hollywood execs plump for natural looking women again!” That one I read — as it turns out, after promulgating unrealistic standards of female beauty forever, Hollywood casting agents are now desperately hunting for women with un-augmented breasts for period films. Lately, they’ve had to turn to England and Australia because too many American actresses are like 23 year-old Heidi Montag, proud of her 10 cosmetic procedures.

It’s enough, I think turning the page, to make you think that there’s a global conspiracy against women… except that “The Times of India” is also sure to tell you all of the horrible things that can happen to men.

Finishing my muesli, I read a light piece on the latest wisdom from Stephen Hawking.  Hawking reasons that given the infinite number of star systems, there must be intelligent alien life somewhere in the universe… and that we should not attempt contact. Hawking warns that these intelligent aliens are probably eager to colonize and raid Earth, much as the Europeans did with America, saying, “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

And with that, I close the paper and start my Mumbai day.

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