A decade in Toronto - 23

2015 was a significant improvement on 2014. My new job at Simmons da Silva introduced me to a number of colleagues, many of them became friends; a couple of them still are, although I’ve moved on from that incredibly dynamic firm.

The leadership of the firm is forward looking and progressive, committed to multicultural ethos, despite a majority of its members being white (or as Stephen Harper would refer as “old stock Canadians”). 

Although being a five-decades-old firm, and law being an endemically conservative profession, thanks to its leadership, Simmons da Silva constantly strives for professional excellence.

Howard Simmons

At the firm, I knew Puneet, who'd created the opportunity for me to work there, and Pathik Baxi, a person who owns the term ‘laid back’. After joining, I instantly became friends with Howard Simmons, the founder of the firm. Howard is a rare free-thinking intellectual in a profession that encourages and often ensures regimentation.

Over the next three-and-a-half years, I got to know nearly 40 individuals who worked at the firm. In any work environment, some colleagues become more important than others. And, as I said at the beginning of this blog, a couple of them remain important, even though I’ve not been able to maintain contact with them as regularly as I’d want to.

When my colleagues surprised me by
celebrating my birthday - the first time in more
than two decades that I celebrated my birthday
in such a manner

However, since there are people in our midst who have the tendency to turn everything pure and magical into prurient and ugly, I shall refrain from naming those who are still important to me only because I have no desire to embarrass them, and because what I shared with them was special and will remain so forever.

May 2015 was the last time the Festival of South Asian Festival of Literature and the Arts (renamed as the Toronto Festival of Literature and the Arts in 2015) was organised by the indefatigable team of MG Vassanji and Nurjehan Aziz.

I was involved directly in organizing the East Asian panel with the help of Diana Tso, a playwright and actor. Sang Kim moderated the discussion on ‘Is Asian-Canadian a helpful label in terms of the Canadian canon’ and included the following eminent Asian-Canadian authors as panelists: Denis Chong, C Fong Hsiung, Madeleine Thien, Diana Tso, and Terry Watada.

The festival filled a vacuum in the cultural landscape of Toronto because it gave representation to authors who were invited from across the developing world, and to Canadian voices that seldom found representation in mainstream cultural programming. 

However, it clearly needed a larger professional organisational strength that the group of volunteers was unable to provide. 2015 turned out to be the last of a great series.

If interested in reading more, click here:  FSALA-15

In the summer of 2015, my friend Kumar Ketkar and his wife Sharada Sathe came to Toronto. It gave me an opportunity to invite a few friends over to my place (the party room of Lexington on the Green) to celebrate a warm evening together. 

All those invited were friends who’d helped me in my journey to become a Canadian, and while not everyone invited was able to come, those who did, contributed substantially to making the evening memorable and loads of fun.

Kumar and Sharada with friends

What I remember most about that evening was the selfless and unselfconscious manner in which Jasmine Sawant took the responsibility of doing the dishes after the party.  

Nitin and Jasmine then invited Kumar and Sharada to meet with their Marathi-speaking group for another dinner reception. It turned out to be a grand success. Both Kumar and Sharada are committed liberal progressives who have spent their entire life for the left ideological causes. 

Here’s a post about Kumar’s visit to Toronto when we went to the Toronto Reference Library: Erasmus of Rotterdam

2015 was also important for another reason – Stephen Harper lost the federal elections. He lost because of an exclusionary political agenda that targeted Muslim immigrants during the last years of his tenure. 

In retrospect, I think, Harper’s sharp exclusionary bend was probably a couple of years before its time.

By 2016-17, the tumultuous events across Europe (in the wake of the Syrian crisis and the ceaseless influx of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa) and the unexpected victory of Donald Trump’s extremism in the Presidential elections in the United States the forces that Harper tried to unleash in Canada had gained ascendency in the political narrative across most of North America and Europe.

Despite this obvious shortcoming in his politics, I admire Harper for his visionary leadership in improving Canada’s relations with India. He went to India on two occasions during his tenure and expanded the Canadian trade office network across India. And more pertinently, he understood and encouraged the role that Indo-Canadians have and can play in improving bilateral ties.

Also, he was Canada’s prime minister when I arrived in Canada in 2008 and became a citizen in 2014. These are significant landmarks in my life and Harper was an integral part of it. Thanks to my involvement with the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce, I was able to meet him on a couple of occasions.

With Stephen Harper and the ICCC leadership

I voted for the first time in a Canadian election hopeful that my vote would make a difference in making Canada a more just society, a society that treats all its citizens with respect. As they say, the jury is out on that one.

We lost many stalwarts in 2015, among them were: Charles Correa, the eminent architect from Bombay; novelist Gunter Grass; Narayan Desai, Mahatma Gandhi’s executive assistant and an eminent pacifist; Lee Kwan Yew, the creator of modern Singapore.

Vinod Mehta, one of India’s finest editors; and Praful Bidwai, an activist journalist, also passed away. And we lost RK Laxman, the legendary cartoonist of the Times of India, the creator of the Common Man. Laxman shaped the sensibilities of three generations of Indians by his cartoons. I shared the same workspace with him briefly when I worked for the Times Group. Here's the link to a post that narrates my encounter with him:

Uncommon encounter with the creator of common man

In India, Hindu fundamentalists assassinated Govind Pansare, a Communist, and MM Kalbargi, a Kannada academic. A couple of years ago in 2013, they had assassinated Narendra Dabholkar, and a couple of years later, in 2017, they'd assassinate Gauri Lankesh, a journalist who was vociferous in her opposition to the right-wing Hindutva nationalist politics that has come to control India. 

I remain worried for my more outspoken friends in India, and have often told them that in case they perceive any threat to their lives, they should immediately hop on to a plane and reach Toronto. I'd help them in every way possible to get settled here and continue to wage their ideological battle.

I lost a friend – Najia Alavi, a Pakistani-Canadian, and an active member of Communications, Advertising, Marketing Professionals (CAMP), Canada’s first voluntary organization for the marketing fraternity. She died by drowning while on a family vacation in Dubai.

Belief in Marathi

Cover of Belief

Welcome to 2019.

This blog enters its second decade. It’s a bit disconcerting that I’ve continued to write here for a decade and want to continue doing so. 

Except for being married to Mahrukh for 23 years, I haven’t done anything for quite as long.

None of my jobs have lasted for a decade, and have always ended for good reasons. A former colleague compared me to dust, because, as he put it, “I take time to settle down.” 

He was wrong. I’m not like dust. Dust settles eventually. I don’t think I can ever settle down.

So, as I said, it’s a bit unsettling to realise that I’ve been at it on this blog, posting about all things that are of interest to me, over the last decade.

Here are some reasons why started blogging.

• To let people (potential employers) in Canada know that I could write in English
  
• To reacquaint myself with regular writing – something that I’d not done in many years, as I abandoned journalism as a vocation.

Back Cover

• To create a platform to write about books, authors, and book events. I was quite clear in my mind about taking writing more seriously in Toronto than I’d ever done in Bombay.

Despite years of writing, I cannot claim to be a proficient writer, but despite that rather obvious shortcoming, blogging is a gratifying experience. 

One frees up time from the burdens of the world to engage with one’s thoughts and turn them into words. 

Blogging in Canada led to an opportunity to become a columnist with the Canadian Immigrant (between 2010 to 2014).

I also began writing my first fiction. I struggled with the manuscript for many years and am thankful to the guidance I got from many friends and well-wishers in my journey to become a published novelist.

Belief, my novel, was published in 2016 by Mawenzi House Publishers, the Toronto-based prestigious publishing house that MG Vassanji and Nurjehan Aziz launched nearly four decades ago to create a platform for Canadian multicultural writing.

My friend Kumar Ketkar (who is now a Member of the Indian Parliament's Upper House) and Sharada Sathe were in the USA when the book was published. Kumar insisted that I send him a copy immediately. To my pleasant surprise, Sharada decided to translate Belief into Marathi.

Sharada (second from left) when Kumar and Sharada were in Toronto in 2015.
This photograph is of a get together of friends in their honour

Although diminutive in appearance, Sharada Sathe is a formidable woman. She is one of the founding members of the Stree Mukti Sanghatana and continues to serve as the organisation’s secretary.

Over the last decade or so, Sharada has begun to translate works from English into Marathi. Her translations include works by such eminent personalities as Amartya Sen, Somnath Chatterjee, Mohit Sen, Sam Pitroda. Her most recent translations include Ramchandra Guha’s India After Gandhi and Makers of Modern India.

Sharada completed the translation of Belief in a record time and the book was to be published in 2017 by Manovikas Prakashan in Pune. But, there was some hitch and the publishing was delayed. I'd given up hope of the book actually being published anytime soon.

And then suddenly last week, as 2018 was coming to a close, I got an email from Kumar and Sharada informing me that the book is ready and will be hitting bookstores in January 2019.

Having lived for 46 years in Bombay, Marathi is an integral part of my life. I cannot write in the language, but I read it and speak it with some degree of fluency. It is, indeed, my honour and a privilege that such an eminent personality as Sharada Sathe has translated my novel into Marathi. 

The Mahatma of Pakistan

Abdul Sattar Edhi

My father Meghnad Bhatt was a socialist. For him Pakistan was never an enemy. He wrote glowingly about ZA Bhutto and received letters from the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

The first time I saw Karachi was on a map that my father showed me during the 1971 Indo-Pak war. The headlines of the newspaper (Free Press Journal) proclaimed the Indian Navy had bombed Karachi harbour.

“And to imagine,” my father dismayed, “both the cities were once part of the Bombay Presidency that stretched from Sindh to Mysore.”

The second time I saw Karachi was on television, when the India Pakistan cricket series was revived after a long gap in the mid-1970s. Bishen Bedi and his boys were beaten black and blue by the “wild Pakistanis”.

If I recall correctly, the last test was at Karachi, and Pakistan won rather handsomely, turning the last hour into a sort of a one-day match, and flaying the famed Indian spin quartet (Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Prasanna and Venkataraghavan) out of international cricket.

Pakistan won the series. We discovered Kapil Dev.

As a journalist, my most serendipitous experience was to discover Gujarati businessmen from Karachi who on the invitation of the Indian Merchants’ Chamber came to Bombay (Mumbai) in the late 1980s.

A few of them had experienced the trauma of Partition first hand. They were in tears as they happily recalled their lives in Bombay. The younger among the group were dazzled by Bombay’s buzz.

The older members of the group spoke of long standing and deep commercial relations between Karachi and Bombay that needed to be revived..

Then, years later, my student, who became a dear friend, Ehtesham Shahid, got married to Amna Khaishgi, a resident of Karachi. Both met in Dubai.

Amna wrote a scintillating piece for The Quarterly Journal of Opinion (an online magazine I edited for a year in 2002) comparing Bombay and Karachi.

She wrote, “Mumbai and Karachi reflect the diverse meanings of its disparate inhabitants. Both sit at the crossroads of aspirations and desperation, narrating numerous tales of rags to riches. Both have a thriving underworld, fast moving traffic and throbbing nightlife. Perhaps the biggest similarity is the gap between the rich and poor in both the cities. Violence on the streets of both is analogous too. Both touch the same Arabian Sea from their respective coastlines.”

Another friend, Jatin Desai, a journalist-activist, introduced me to Pakistan India Peoples' Forum for Peace and Democracy. In these cynical times, here was an organization that was at least attempting to do something genuinely good and effective.

Kumar Ketkar, both a friend and a mentor, was part of this group. He suggested I be a part of the SAFMA delegation that would be traveling to Karachi in June 2006.

I visited Karachi as part of a delegation promoting Pakistan-India people-to-people contacts. Our delegation comprised journalists. We had a wonderful time.

Two of the many memorable evenings have remained etched in my mind: one where the inimitable Tina Sani sang ghazals, and the other was when we met the Mahatma of Pakistan – Abdul Sattar Edhi.

Edhi was a simple man, who began his work by providing a decent burial to the poor, and then slowly rising to become the philanthropic face of Pakistan. He narrated his story in a straightforward, no-nonsense manner.

One of our delegates asked him, why, if he believed in humanism more than religion, he went to Pakistan during the Partition. He said Pakistan was not a different land at that time, when he went from Gujarat to Karachi. And he emphasized that he did not regret his decision.

He spoke gently for more than an hour, happy to be interacting with Indians. He spoke of the tremendous work his foundation had done during the Kashmir earthquake in 2005 (at that time it was fresh in memory); he spoke of the Indian government not giving him a visa to do disaster relief and philanthropic work in India. He spoke of his tremendous dependence on his wife.

He did not speak from any prepared text, he did not always complete his sentences, his agile and alert mind racing faster than his speech could cope with.

The organizers gave all of us a copy of his biography.

Today, when I saw my social media feed flooded with tributes to Edhi, I remembered the trip to Pakistan, Karachi, Indo-Pak cricket of the 1970s, and, of course, Edhi.

Independence Day musings

It requires some distance and a fairly long separation for one to realise the significance and the importance of a milieu.

I’m in India on August 15 (India’s Independence Day) after a three years

And it feels good!

August 15 is when India remembers Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, khadi.  

The following are some impressions of the day.

• The early morning speech by the Prime Minister from Delhi’s Red Fort (no prime minister has ever equalled Indira Gandhi’s soul stirring Jai Hind!)
• Doordarshan remains firm in the depiction of the official version of Indian nationhood. I find it exasperatingly irrelevant, especially now, when India has the confidence to straddle the global stage (although AR Rehman singing Vande Matram is guaranteed to give gooseflesh, always; and the full version of the national anthem, shown for the first time, is interesting only because of the stanzas are sung by stalwarts) 
• The Times of India has its annual review of the Indian nation on the editorial page (Patrick French today), and glowing tributes to Shammi Kapoor, the legendary actor who passed away yesterday; sadly none of these mentions his Govinda Ala Re (from Bluff Master, I think) which is a quintessential Bombay song, shot in the city’s chawls)
  
• A listless parade and flag hoisting by the young merchant navy cadets of the Shipping Corporation of India (SCI) outside my window. The cooperative where I live used to hold a flag hoisting till some year ago; it’s been abandoned, I guess
  
• Patriotic songs wafting in from a Sarvajanik Satyanarayan Mahapuja pandal (a pandal is a makeshift platform) in a slum nearby (heard Jai Jai Maharashtra Maazaa! after a long time; to me, a Maharashtrain is a combination of Shivaji Maharaj and Sant Dnyaneshwar)
  
• The Satyanarayan Mahapuja could well be Bombay’s second most popular all-inclusive publicly observed religious festival. The first is – without question – the Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav (unfortunately, I’ll be back in Toronto by the time that festival begins)
  
• Independence Day is also when the truly secular and multicultural ethos of the Indian nation really sinks in. A woman in a black burqa is as much a part of the urban landscape as a man with his forehead pasted with sandalwood and a large red tilak (religious mark) – both impatiently awaiting their turn at the ticket window at Ghatkopar station along with some 500 other Indians; I’m awaiting my turn, too. India teaches patience

In the evening I attended a book launch event in Thane.

Sharada Sathe is an activist with a lifetime of work for the underprivileged and the underrepresented millions in India. She has translated Ramchandra Guha’s India After Gandhi into Marathi

The large hall in Thane is overflowing with people. Guha is present and so are filmmakers Amol Palekar and Ashutosh Gowarikar.

Kumar Ketkar, free spirit advocate and intellectual, is the master of ceremonies, sets the tone for the evening by speaking in English and Marathi.

In his introductory remarks makes a telling point that India is both a democracy and a republic, which has a few parallels.  

Sharada Sathe, the book’s translator, believe the present seemingly terminal decay in the Indian society is perhaps because her generation preferred to follow instructions instead of asking questions

Amol Palekar, actor and filmmaker, is an erudite speaker in both English and Marathi.

He asks why only theatre and cinema are pre-censored in India. But clarifies that once the censors clear a film for release nobody has any right to prevent or disrupt it.

Palekar quotes Ambedkar (from the book) who had said that extra-constitutional measures such as satyagrah, used effectively against the British, should have no place in a newly independent republic.

Ashutosh Gowarikar, filmmaker, take a quick poll of the audience – is media in India good or bad. Nobody raises their hand to say it’s good; many do to say it’s bad.

Gowarikar observes that 1992 shattered the belief of the post-independence era generation that the excesses of the Partition wouldn’t be repeated in independent India.

But clearly, the evening belonged to Ramchandra Guha – who called himself a Nehruvian Indian; which, he said, meant a confused Indian. The Nehruvian Indian believes he can belong to any part of India, but his enemies are convinced that he doesn’t belong to India.

Paying fulsome tributes to the Maharashtraian intellectual traditions, Guha said a meeting such as this one wasn’t possible anywhere except in Maharashtra, where a social activist, two filmmakers, an urban planner and a journalist along with an historian are releasing a book.  

He said while he had lived and worked in all parts of India, somehow, he hadn’t in western India. However, his three passions – cricket, Hindustani classical music and history – were intricately linked with western India.

Guha observed that every visit to Maharashtra is a triple pilgrimage for him because of “Tendulkar, Tendulkar and Tendulkar – cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, playwright Vijay Tendulkar and the Mahatma’s biographer DG Tendulkar.”

An enthralling evening, where I briefly met a couple of friends from my journalism days.

India: A Portrait

Patrick French’s book on India (India: A Portrait – AnIntimate Biography of 1.2 Billion People) is a mixture of racy history, stories about jugaad (innovative approach at fixing intractable problems) and stories about the bizarre.

It’s a welcome addition to understanding India at a time when understanding India is becoming imperative.  As French said during a  panel discussion about his book organised by Literature Live!, in the week US was downgraded, India was upgraded.

In the last decade or so – since Sunil Khilnani’s Idea of India was published, there has been a surfeit of books on India, some by historians and some by western journalists.

These books are meant for the western reader who can't quite figure out the India as perceived from media headlines. Increasingly, as Kumar Ketkar pointed out to me, these books are also for Indians whose exposure to India is through English language.

All these book seem enthralled by the amazing turnaround of this once famine ravaged, poor nation into an economic powerhouse.

For many years, as it floundered economically, India’s only redeeming feature was its surprising success in democracy and electoral politics – something that no other postcolonial, newly-independent nation quite managed.

French’s book traverses all the known terrain and even does excellent primary research in unravelling the extent of nepotism in politics – with truly insightful results.

Although I don’t quite get the point of this Hereditary Members of Parliament (HMP) exercise – isn’t everything in India is nepotistic? And, Anil Dharker made a pertinent point that the second or third generation dynastic politician wouldn’t be corrupt.

Some of these and many other issues were discussed at the panel discussion at Bombay’s Prithvi Theatre earlier this week. The discussion was scintillating.

Besides French, Kumar Ketkar, public intellectual; Shabana Azmi, activist and actor; Aditya Sinha, journalist; and Anil Dharkar, former editor; participated in an engaging debate that touched upon several aspects of French’s intimate biography of 1.2 billion people, as well as some that aren’t part of the book.

On a vacation in Bombay, I'm able to do a few things (such as attend a book discussion) that I could only dream of doing when I lived here.

About “Literature Live!, The Mumbai Lit fest. The Festival was launched in November 2010. The response from Mumbaikars during the three-day fest was truly enthusiastic and it was clear from the level of audience participation that Literature Live! was answering a long-felt need.”