Usha Alexander is the author of the novels The Legend of Virinara and Only the Eyes Are Mine. She once worked for many years at Apple in the San Francisco Bay Area. For a while she lived in Vanuatu, a Pacific Island nation, where she taught high school science as a US Peace Corps volunteer. And many years before that, she lived for awhile in Germany. She retains an abiding interest in science, anthropology, and history. Usha grew up in Pocatello, Idaho, a remote little town in the Rocky Mountain region of the USA. Though currently residing near Delhi, she carries her home within her self. Visit her website for more.
Recent Posts from Author
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Dispatches from India 1: First Impressions
(Usha Alexander’s periodic musings on her life in India. She moved there in mid-2013.)
Jamun sold in Old DelhiSo here I am living in Gurgaon for the last four months. We arrived in the hottest days of the year and to summer’s sweet deluge of fruits—mangos, lychees, jamun, watermelon—which we enjoyed daily. Within three days of arrival, we found a furnished rental with adequate water and power backup, and we lucked upon the services of an excellent cook and a cleaning woman, both recent migrants from West Bengal. We soon identified some take-out places, a barber, dairy outlet, and other services in the small bazaar two streets over. And we found a gleaming mall with a modern gym, theater, grocery stores,
bookstores, and electronics, just a 15-minute walk from our
door, across lots filled with cows, stray dogs, mansions, and shanties. -
Of Meenas, Migrants, and Medicine
By Usha Alexander (Also cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
Two days in south Rajasthan with AMRIT Health Services, a not-for-profit initiative
Humankind’s Best Friend
Dogs may have been a better friend to humanity than we ever realized, according to an article by Dr. Pat Shipman in American Scientist. They may have played a crucial role in helping modern humans outcompete our Neanderthal cousins.Many theories have been proposed for why Neanderthals couldn’t seem to compete with the invaders, when modern humans arrived in Europe some 35-45,000 years ago, including climate change, the newcomers’ better social organization, or their greater facility for language. But new lines of evidence are beginning to suggest another possibility: that it might have been the domesticated dog that gave H. sapiens sapiens the edge over Neanderthals (and, one must presume, Denisovans). There’s now mounting evidence that modern humans were domesticating dogs by 35,000 years ago, during the same period when modern human populations began to increase and Neanderthal populations were in decline. Dogs were used for hunting and as pack animals, as they are used even into modern times by some groups. Studies reveal that dogs can significantly increase the success of a hunt and the amount of meat brought in to a community who uses them.
If the dogs carried the meat, humans would have saved a lot of energy, so each kill would have provided a greater net gain in food—even after feeding the dogs. Additional food generally has marked effects on the health of a group. Better-fed females can have more babies, can provide them with more milk and can have babies at shorter intervals. Before long, using pack dogs could have caused the human population to increase.
Trujillo’s Castle on a Hill
On our recent visit to the Dominican Republic, we passed through San Cristobal, a quiet city of a little over two-hundred thousand souls, in the shadow of its nation’s bustling capital, Santo Domingo, which lies an hour-and-a-half to the east. Its one claim to fame is as the birthplace of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, a brutal strong-man dictator, considered one of the worst in Latin American history, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. During his decades–long tenure, ordinary Dominicans were spied upon; tens of thousands of were abducted and tortured or “disappeared.” Centers for torture were established and run by Trujillo’s secret intelligence organization. And tens of thousands of Haitian laborers and those suspected of being Haitian laborers were brazenly massacred. Meanwhile, Trujillo was also building roads and schools for the middle classes, as well as transferring ownership of all the major sugar, lumber, and other agricultural industries to himself, his family members, or his supporters. Trujillo’s family and supporters enjoyed outlandish wealth, while the campesinos and the laborers in the bateys remained in abject poverty with little hope of a better life.
Trujillo built two mansions in his hometown of San Cristobal, at enormous cost. His favorite, Mahogany House, was looted and vandalized after his assassination and now sits as an empty shell. The other, Castillo del Cerro, or “the castle on the hill,” he rejected the first day he saw it and never spent a single night within. It has been converted to a police training academy, which seems fitting, since it looks like a prison from the outside. We stopped by there for a brief tour. From the ornate ceilings, after the fashion of European castles, to the gleaming marble floors, to the wedding-cake ballroom, to the imported, handcrafted tiles, it’s clear the sort of opulence Trujillo enjoyed in his lifetime. Also on display is a replica of the electric chair that was regularly used to torture and kill his citizens. A large, evocative mural of a country dance is said to have angered Trujillo, because the party-goers look sad. We’re told the artist was only painting what he thought was real, and that he fled the country in fear for his life. In another room, the molding lining the ceiling depicts tiny figures of people in the electric chair. Trujillo apparently hated that touch of inspiration, as well. I had to wonder whether the details that enraged Trujillo were intended to please him, or if they were a kind of silent protest.Cuevas del Pomier
The Pomier Caves are located within a ragged limestone quarry a few miles north of San Cristobal in the Dominican Republic. When we visited earlier this month, it took us some time to find them, since there is no signage indicating the way to these 55 protected caves, nor that they represent the largest collection of ancient rock art in the Caribbean. Inside the caves the 6,000 pictographs and petroglyphs—the oldest of which date to about 2,000 years ago—were created over a period of 1,500 years by the Taino, Carib, and Igneri peoples. They had inhabited Hispaniola and the other Caribbean islands beginning about 8,000 years ago until their cultures were destroyed by European colonization, starting in 1492.
We visited the first three caves, guided by the local ranger. Inside the air was fresh enough to breathe easily, though it was humid, and in some spaces we saw bats darting around. It was absolutely dark and we could not have made any progress without the aid of our guide and a few flashlights. The floor of the cave started out wide, smooth, and flat, but as we went deeper into the caves systems, passing from one into the next, the going often got more challenging, the way suddenly littered with jagged rocks. Here we had to scramble up a jumble of small boulders. There we had to slide down a dry wash. Around us, the beams of our flashlights revealed deep passageways and cavernous chambers. Great stalactites clinging to the ceiling and walls, stalagmites spiking up from the floor, gave the interiors a lushly organic irregularity, like the inside of a monster’s gullet. And as we walked, the guide pointed out the drawings on the walls around us. We were allowed to photograph only a single group (photo above), using our flashlights for illumination; we were permitted to use the camera flash only if it was not aimed at the drawings.
Death by Dialogue
The position of the colonizer’s language within the changing culture of its former colony is always a fraught one, and the difficulty of the matter is severely compounded in a country like India, whose citizens never shared a common language prior to their colonization. Lack of a common language must be one reason why English persisted in India after Independence, despite the fact that it had little penetrated the colonial population. Although it’s still far from being a language of the masses, English is more widely spoken in India today than it was in colonial times.English remains a first language of the uppermost classes, and it’s increasingly gaining traction as a lingua franca, the language of the modern office place. Yet Indian novelists who write in English have been taken to task for their choice of language, and questions regularly arise as to the “authenticity” of their works. These are matters worth discussing, but we can acknowledge that the answers will never be neat or straightforward.
In The Caravan, Trisha Gupta has added to this conversation by describing the surprisingly complex relationship of the Hindi language to Hindi cinema, suggesting a relationship that’s always been difficult, if not contrived. Gupta describes the changing registers of filmic Hindi, and how, as Hindi filmmakers increasingly come from English-speaking households, and as more and more of their films are actually depictions of the Indian English-speaking world, this messy relationship continues with new challenges and artifices.
An Indian-American in China
In a large mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, lies a crystal sarcophagus containing the mortal remains of Mao Zedong. Every day, masses of Chinese citizens line up on this largest of the world’s public squares to view and pay tribute to him. An immense, framed portrait of Mao gazes beatifically upon them from the high walls of the once Forbidden City, a palace fortress at the edge of the square. A few years ago, I too had arrived hoping for a glimpse of the man—the spectacle of Mao’s refrigerated body held for me nearly as much morbid fascination as my interest in his legacy and place in the Chinese imagination.As it happened, the mausoleum was closed for renovation. Disappointed, I mused that perhaps the real reason for closing the mausoleum was to hide the evidence that Mao had been turning in his grave of late: watching China grind from feudalism to communism to capitalism in a mere half century cannot be good for his repose. If “communism” means a classless society with a centrally planned economy in which the state owns the primary means of production, then poor old Mao—as the man who fought for it, forged it, and upheld it for decades—became irrelevant long ago. And though the frozen Mao may still be revered, the pulse of China throbs now to a different beat.
A Basic Call to Consciousness
In 1977 the NGO arm of the United Nations put out a call for papers from the native peoples of the world, asking them to describe the oppression they have suffered. The Haudenosaunee—better known to us as the Six Nations Confederacy, or by their French appellation, the Iroquois—responded with three papers (collectively, A Basic Call to Consciousness), which they described as “an abbreviated analysis of Western history, and which call for a consciousness of the Sacred Web of Life in the Universe.” Further, they wrote:What is presented here is nothing less audacious than a cosmogony of the Industrialized World presented by the most politically powerful and independent non-Western political body surviving in North America. It is, in a way, the modern world through Pleistocene eyes.
Vacation Break
We’re off to Trinidad and Tobago. There may be no new posts for at least a couple of weeks.
The islands of T&T, by Caribbean standards, are a tourist backwater. This despite the fact that Trinidad has a unique natural history. It was once a part of the South American mainland, which has endowed it with the greatest biological diversity of any Caribbean island. Both islands harbor old growth rainforest and unspoiled beaches.Centuries of colonialism saw the islands’ indigenous populations almost entirely wiped out and then replaced first with Africans, brought as slaves, and later with indentured laborers brought mostly from India. Today, Trinidad has perhaps the most cosmopolitan population in the Caribbean, with about 40% claiming African heritage, 40% Indian heritage, and most of the remaining 20% claiming mixed ancestry, also including French, Spanish, British, Chinese, Syrian, and Amerindian. Tobago, on the other hand, had a separate history, which never included the importation of indentured labor, and the population of that island remains almost entirely of African descent, with strong French influences. This cultural diversity is evident in the islands’ music, food, religions, festivals, languages, pop culture, and more.
Becoming Human
In Nov 2009, NOVA aired a 3-part documentary series on human evolution, focusing on the last few million years of our story. It’s a great primer for anyone interested in a thorough overview that incorporates some of the latest findings from various fields of anthropology. The series aired, however, before the latest and most surprising genetic findings came out, early in 2010, showing that non-African humans do carry some Neandertal DNA. Click below to see parts 1 through 3.
Endhiran: A Review
Or Why I’m Not a Fan of Popular Indian Cinema
I’ve often wondered why Indian popular cinema generally leaves me cold. Though I’ve offered up defensive explanations to Indian friends and family who feel slighted by my lack of regard for it, the question has continued to simmer for many years on a back burner in my mind.Take, for instance, this latest offering, Endhiran (The Robot), India’s biggest blockbuster foray into science fiction, starring Superstar Rajinikanth. Though told with humor, Endhiran is a familiar story about a gifted man whose hubris brings tragedy upon his people (in this case, however, not upon himself). The archetypes and themes familiar to most Americans from the story of Frankenstein, also echoed in the story of Icarus, or Rabbi Loew, are styled here for an Indian aesthetic and sensibility. (For a plot summary, see the review in Variety.)
Aluna and the Future of the World
The Kogi are relics of a pre-Columbian civilization, one of very few peoples who have remained separate from the European influences that have shaped the history of South America. They continue to live in austere traditional homes and wear only their homespun cotton clothes, as they have done for unknown generations. They follow their ancient belief system, in which Aluna is the mystical world in which reality is conceived. Their homeland, a great massif in coastal Columbia called Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, is rugged and remote enough to have preserved their isolation for hundreds of years.This same geography is also responsible for providing the Kogi with a unique view of environmental degradation and climate change, since their mountains, which rise from the tropical waters of the Caribbean shoreline to over 18,000 feet (5,700 m), are home to nearly every type of ecological zone in the world. To the Kogi, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is the heart of the world, and their spiritual leaders, Mamos, have been entrusted with its care. But over these recent decades they have witnessed so much change and destruction that they—who call themselves Elder Brothers to the Younger Brother of the West—feel they must step forth and engage with the West in order to impart a message, a warning, a lesson: our way of life is destroying the world, and we must learn to see the earth in a new way.
They have decided that the best way to communicate may be through the West’s medium of choice: film. And to this end, they have teamed with documentary filmmaker Alan Ereira to make a documentary in which the Kogi hope to show us the way they see the world. As it’s described on the film’s website:
The Minangkabau: Mixing Islam and Matriarchy
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
“In your marriage, who is the boss?” our driver, Arman, asked in a playfully provocative tone, like he was setting up the punchline of a joke.My partner and I looked at each other, laughed, and shrugged. Arman belonged to the Minangkabau, the society recognized among anthropologists as the world’s largest and most stable surviving matriarchy* (though some prefer to call it a gylany, matrix, matrifocal or matricentric society, or something else to avoid conjuring images of mythical Amazons). Knowing this, I presumed his question was part of a routine entertainment for tourists.
Sex at Dawn
Eric Michael Johnson reviews “Sex at Dawn” by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá over at SEED:
But why should a species often described as monogamous be so hypersexual? Monogamous animals by definition don’t have to compete for reproduction and, as a result, are generally characterized by a low level of sexual activity. But according to Ryan and Jethá humans top a very short list of species that engage in sex for pleasure. “No animal spends more of its allotted time on Earth fussing over sex than Homo sapiens,” they write. In fact, the animal world is filled with species who confine their sexual behavior to just a few periods each year, the only times when conception is possible. Among apes the only monogamous species are the gibbons whose infrequent, reproduction-only copulations make them much better adherents of the Vatican’s guidelines than we are. In this way, Ryan and Jethá argue, repressing our sexuality should not be confused with reining in an “animal” nature; rather, it is denying one of the most unique aspects of what it means to be human. ….
New York’s Unique Collection of Languages
Linguists today are realizing that New York is a language “hot spot,” where they can study several of the world’s disappearing languages:
The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.Category: CultureSeafaring Hominids?
Archaeology seems to be undergoing an explosion of new finds in the past decade or so. More and more, new information is completely scrambling old assumptions about human evolution and early modern human and hominid culture.The latest amazing find was written up yesterday in the New York Times:
Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.
The Other Swastika
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
When I visited India the summer I turned 9, my grandmother took my siblings and me to a jeweler to select pendants to bring back to the US. My brother and sister chose the gold-tipped tiger claws, still available easily and guilt-free in India in the 1970s. But I found the tiger claws too “gee whiz”; I wanted something that was meaningfully Indian. So the jeweler trotted out his line of large, bright silver pendants shaped either as Om or swastika. I was drawn to the pleasing aesthetics of the swastika designs, with their symmetry and regularity of line; the Om was alright, but it didn’t do much for me. Still, I had a difficult time deciding to bring home the swastika, waffling on the matter until it grew late and even the jeweler was losing patience with me. In the end, I came away with the Om, which languished never-worn in my dresser drawer for years until I simply lost track of it. Something about the entire episode never sat quite right with me, but as a child I couldn’t puzzle out why.I was probably in high school before it first dawned on me just what it was that kept me from the swastika that day: Growing up in an observant Brahmin household in the US (from which I’ve long since recovered), I felt an emotional dissonance around the symbol, which I associated with something like serenity, nurturance, and cosmic benevolence, and at the same time with “evil,” hatred, and genocide.
Avatar: A Review
By Usha Alexander
I look for the same strengths and value in science fiction as I do in any other kind of film. But I don’t care for macho, action-adventure films; I absolutely avoid them. Avatar is an action-adventure science fiction film. But it’s not macho. Which is not to say it doesn’t include some macho characters. I hope the difference is obvious.James Cameron has long been recognized as the rare writer-director whose blockbuster vision allows as much value and presence to his female characters as to his male characters. Whatever the general merits of his previous films, The Terminator, Rambo II: First Blood, The Abyss, and The Titanic, one thing they can’t reasonably be accused of is celebrating the masculine at the expense of the feminine. It’s not only that his strong, brave, intelligent, and resourceful lead characters, Sara Connor (Linda Hamilton, The Terminator 1984) and Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, The Abyss 1989), are two among the spare handful of feminine hero(in)es one finds at all in science fiction films. It’s not just that his male characters are full enough to encompass the feminine, as when he shows us Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, Rambo II 1985) crying, even succumbing to the wilderness of his grief, driven by his heart as much as his head, or as when he casts the romantic hero of The Titanic (Leonardo DiCaprio, 1997) as a man who runs from a fight, preferring to sketch pictures, instead. Cameron not only doesn’t flinch from femininity or see it as weakness in opposition to masculinity, he seems hardly to notice the divide, and that’s what allows his characterizations to feel natural and authentic.
Category: Art & CinemaChampion of the Green Revolution Dies at 95
Who has heard of Norman Borlaug? I had not heard of him until now, after his death, when the Wall Street Journal calls him “arguably the greatest American of the 20th century”.
Borlaug’s life work, the Green Revolution, is the reason the world is not starving today as it was half a century ago. As the individual responsible for spreading high-yield agricultural practices through the hungriest parts of the world, beginning with South Asia in the 1960s, he was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006. He changed the world, as much as did Louis Pasteur or the Wright Brothers, yet his name is commonly unknown outside the Developing World. And his contribution is today seen as controversial.
