Mournful memories of moments in Mumbai

A former Art professor at the University of Maryland and his daughter were dining when the raid on the Oberoi Hotel and the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, took place. The Scherrs would be two of the almost 200 fatalities of a coordinated assault on the city of Mumbai late November 2008. The father-and-daughter diners ironically were in India on a spiritual journey, attending to the disciplines and practices of attaining internal stillness as a point of equanimity in a chaotic world.

It was in the summer of ’78 that I embarked on a journey from Chicago to Mumbai to attend an experiment in training massive village level workers in effecting broad-based rapid human development. They called it Nava Gram Prayas, and it centered in the village of Maliwada near Aurangabad in the State of Maharastra. In Maliwada where the Haridjans (untouchables) were still clearly unwelcomed around the communal well, the task of genuine leveled-playing-field democracy was being attempted.

I was at the time in a Quixotic attempt also to turn the Marcos of the Philippine’s stated policy of guided democracy towards serving the cause of barangay village level movement for self-sufficiency and self-determination. Similar efforts were being done by colleagues in the Harambe movement in the African continent, a Saemul Undong movement in Korea, Desaruyo Humano in Sud America, and a critical mass drive in participatory democracy in the United States following one-day Town Meetings during the bi-centennial celebration. The late ’70s lent itself to efforts of this nature like the micro-credit service of what in 1983 would be formally organized as Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Some efforts were intentionally coordinated while others sprang out of the human impulse to decide one’s own destiny.

A father-and-son team, the father well into his 80s who also figured in the Maliwada comprehensive human development effort, and was finally making his last adieu to the Subcontinent, was also at the Oberoi as part of the Scherr’s group. The Canadian Globe and Mail carried his picture in a wheelchair coming out of the Oberoi, and in a video report after the four-day siege. It was then that I got flung back deep into memory lane.

Bombay (before its name got phonetically retranslated closer to Mumbai) has always been India’s primary commercial center so I was not prepared in the ’70s to be confronted by India’s poverty-stricken massive population in that city. I had read about government workers picking up corpses from the sidewalks in Mother Teresa’s Kolkota but I did not expect to see that in the commercial glitter of Mumbai. From the airport to town, I would witness a caravan of ox-carts moving a homeless population of some 15,000, who would camp where there are open spaces in the outskirts of the city, and where the animals could graze for a week or so, until the place become so barren that it could no longer sustain any further animal life, let alone, human existence.

Billeted down Sankli Rd. in Byculla where Christian Aid agencies were located, I was within striking distance to the Central Train Station where I caught one of the famously dependable iron horses left by the British Empire that offered express as well as milk-run accommodations in its intricate rail system. This late November 2008 day, the Central station would be one of 10 locations attacked by the yet-to-be-fully identified assault group that had marred the developing tranquility and equilibrium of a world just recently buoyed by the equanimous ethos emerging from the Obama ascendancy in U.S. American politics.

One of the fallacies that the newly initiated to any country generally holds is the picture of homogeneity of a nation just because it has attained some form of unity. Unity is particularly untrue to those where oneness were previously politically imposed. Such was the case with India, as it is also true for those who see the United States, or China, for example, as not only perceivably but actually “one people.” They aren’t, and even as tiny a community as Saipan is, it is a futile exercise to even pretend that it can be “one people.” Not in the global village, and definitely not under the aegis of the American Empire.

Mumbai in the late ’70s was a city of contradictions, as I am sure, it still is. It was clearly not culturally a homogenous entity, and the disparity between the haves and the have-nots was just too overwhelming to even pretend of a political and economic stability. The area around the Oberoi and the Taj where the Gateway to India commemorating King George V and Queen Mary’s visit in 1911, is dotted with gated communities and homes of former Maharajah’s and the nouveau riche whose penthouses are found from Vancouver to Shanghai, Montreal to Rio, Madrid to Johannesburg, and points in between. The nation that seemingly houses the most destitute of the world’s poor, is also home to the richest emerald-wearing Rajas and Ranees of the realm, whose assets are seemingly limitless, and whose manicures/pedicures are flawless!

I survived two months in the shadows of the famed Ellora and Ajanta Caves in central Maharastra, though with the assistance of two litres of Glenn-something single malt whiskey from Scotland and two cartoons of DFS red Dunhills. Blood shot eyes from lack of sleep, having struggled with a curriculum that naively assumed altruism among the enthusiastic young villagers out to eke out their survival, and having gotten scared to wet my pants after a not-so-funny encounter with a stuffed cobra in the dark, I was at the abysmal verge of cynicism and despair (it did not help that I was in Rome on my way to India when Paul VI brought the Cardinal’s flame to the Vatican, and the newly chosen smiling John Paul I would last barely 33 days before his suspicious demise) when a young colleague took me to a Maliwada village celebration where Gandhi’s Raghupati hymn was chanted, and where the ubiquitous sound of the “OM” was simultaneously inhaled and exhaled, signifying the determination of a people to take upon themselves anything that comes its way, anything from anywhere!

I had this picture of a skirted (sarong/sari) Hindu men and women, standing tall in the flatlands of the Deccan plateau, facing the coldness of the Himalayas of the north, the arid winds of the west and the Arabian Gulf, the humid hurricanes from the east and the Bay of Bengal, and the moist rainforest fungi of the south, beckoning one and all to “bring it on,” affirming their capacity and ability to “take them on” together and at once.

I would walk out of India with this attitude, and symbolized it with a trip to the AMEX office by the harbor. Holding my last $50 traveler’s cheque, I went to cash it amidst well-coiffed customers holding bundles of Marks, Francs, Pounds and Sterlings. Taking my meager rupees, I walked to the Taj and bought myself a hamburger lunch (meat consumption at the village was limited to mutton as even chicken was in short supply, and, of course, beef was sacrosanct) at five-star hotel price, just to indicate to myself that I was not going to be a victim of my external situation. OM!

Seven years later, I would stare down the muzzle of M-16s as a military squad would raid a training center I was directing in Mactan Island on suspicion of harboring insurgents to Mr. Marcos’ martial law. This time, my pants stayed dry. Previously, I shed tears to the senseless killing of a former medical student who went underground and was found in Toril, Davao. I would lament the half of the villagers who took some methods training in mobilizing villages up in Langub, Davao City who would be “salvaged,” an extra-judicial killing that remains a practice in Pea Eye to this day.

My elderly friend in a wheel chair at the Oberoi late November 2008, who greeted well-wishers simply with “My, my, my!” and a smile, I am sure had underneath his breath the primordial formation of the fundamental human sound, “OM.” And I this mournful Monday in Saipan, who 30 years ago when my life style took a radical paradigm shift in the streets of Mumbai, chant my Raghupati and quietly utter my “OM” as I lift up in prayer the casualties in this recent incident of humankind’s recent inhumanity to its kind, and even as Unity March participants in Saipan continue to confess that this may be the season of the Christ, but their lives inexplicably remain crucified. OM!