tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26140686055267968882024-03-13T10:09:20.518-07:00Big GoraI'm a big gora (white guy) writing my life. Thanks for your visit.Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-76291378241906115192018-08-07T11:05:00.003-07:002018-08-07T11:05:38.534-07:00Childhood: Headless Chickens, Freezer Meat, and Other Murderous Beasts, part 2<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Our chickens, though, were the diabolical gift that never stopped giving. Trauma, that is.<br />
Dad had worked as a boy on family-owned small farms in Utah and Minnesota as a boy, so he knew what that work is really like. But nostalgia was working Dad's controls, not caution, so as soon as we arrived in Malad he set about creating the farmyard of his daydreams. The first step: lots and lots of chickens. "You see," he explained, "they cost almost nothing to feed, and you get lots of eggs every day, and you can sell the ones you don't eat, then eventually you can even eat the chickens. The house we're renting even has an old log chicken house all ready to use. Amazing, right? Won't it be fun to have a nice flock of chickens?"<br />
One key detail he omitted from this rosy picture: it was eleven-year-old me and nine-year-old Chad with total responsibility for the chickens. Even Jared, just six, had to help sometimes. It wasn't that the work, or the discipline of trudging down to the chickenhouse morning and night without fail, was too much for us. The winter months with their subzero temperatures were a trial, though. For months we had to carry pans of hot water down for the chickens, but it would always refreeze before our next trip. The real problem was that the chickens themselves were so freaky. Their little wet-looking combs. Their beady, reptilian eyeballs. The way they turn their heads aside to look directly at you. Their scaly three-toed feet. Their noisy irritation when we rummaged under them for eggs. Their pecking beaks! And just so darned many of them: Dad went all in from the start, buying 80 newborn chicks all milling around in one Chiquita Bananas box. It's easy to love the idea of chickens when you never actually have to touch them.<br />
We turned out to have 79 hens and one psychotic rooster. <em>Every single time</em> one of us entered the chickenhouse, he commenced attacking and <em>never let up</em> until we closed the door on him. Chad and I quickly developed a sort of military routine: one of us, wielding a wooden yardstick, stood guard over the other, who would quickly (though never quickly enough!) put down water and food and collect eggs. The rooster--whom we never named, as he didn't seem to us to deserve one--would dart here and there, feint, flutter, lunge, yell, assault. We couldn't decide which job was worse--directly facing off with the rooster for those long minutes, which also meant you became his primary target; or facing all those grumpy hens and trying not to drop an egg (or the whole basket!) when the rooster outmaneuvered his guard and PECK! savaged your Achilles tendon. We tried, weakly, weekly, to explain to Dad how terrifying the rooster was, the whole experience, really. He just said "Bah! Bah! You great big boys are afraid of a chicken?"<br />
We were almost glad when one night a rogue raccoon (?) sneaked into the coop and slaughtered half the hens. Forget the "almost": that dang rooster was still there, but now we could get out of the coop in half the time! Happy days are here again!<br />
One day--maybe we were sick--Dad had to care for the chickens himself. We advised him to take the yardstick; he just scoffed. He came back fifteen minutes later and told us he'd just killed the rooster. "That son of a bitch kept attacking me!" ("YES, WE KNOW!") "So I grabbed a two-by-four and hit him in the head."<br />O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! The rooster is dead! The nightmare is gone!<br />
Ah, but the chicken ordeal wasn't, not nearly. Soured now on the whole idea of a permanent flock, Dad declared that we would be slaughtering every single chicken. <em>We</em> would--he'd wield the axe, we'd catch them by the feet and hold their heads steady against the chopping stump.<br />
You know the expression "running around like a chicken with its head cut off"? It exists because <em>that's exactly what happens</em>. You grip the back legs with both hands, like a bat handle, and turn your head--not just to avoid looking, but against an arterial spray in the eye. <em>WHUMP</em>! goes the axe, and you let go...and the headless body jumps, flops, flaps, <em>comes right for you</em> like some terrifying voodoo legend come true.<br />
It takes a long time to kill 40 chickens one at a time with an axe. Years, I think.<br />
We put their corpses, plucked, into the giant freezer chest in our basement. We were still taking out and thawing the tough little bodies for dinner a year later, alternating between cuts from the whole cow we stored there each year.<br />
At that point, I found a new terror lurking in our bare dark cement basement. I watched a movie--an absolutely <em>awful</em> movie, but in entertainment-scarce Malad we took what we could get--screened by the high school for Halloween, called <em>Salem's House of Crazies</em>. I'm sure that was the title, though even IMDB doesn't list it; it was <em>that bad</em>. It was a collection of short horror stories, much like the later <em>Creepshow</em> movies. In one story--the only one I remember at all--a man argues and argues and argues with his wife, then snaps and kills her with an axe. (Flashback to the chicken slaughter.) He cuts her into pieces, wraps her in butcher paper, and puts her in a big freezer <em>just like ours</em>. One of the pieces is identifiable as an arm: you can easily pick out the crook of the elbow. The fingers eventually work their way out. The killer, all unaware, opens his freezer one day to take out some meat for dinner. The frozen arm <em>leaps</em> up somehow, grabs his throat, and throttles him where he stands. Freed now, the arm creeps steadily, extending and flexing, crawling away to find other victims. It strangles several others before being vanquished.<br />
Now, my brothers must have had their turns being sent down to the cold dark scary basement for meat for dinner--but it seemed like it was always my turn. That freezer arm like in the movie could be lurking <em>anywhere</em>! Open the freezer with the fingertips and jump back. Look down inside oh so gingerly. Close the lid and jump back again lest it try a last-minute lunge. Or was it under the stairs, prepared to reach around the bare wood step and drag me down? You never saw someone run up stairs so fast as preteen me with a package of steaks.</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-29949938257368515712018-08-06T16:50:00.000-07:002018-08-07T09:02:39.817-07:00Childhood: Headless Chickens, Freezer Meat, and Other Murderous Beasts, part 1<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The Disney films of my childhood had it right: if you want to apply an immediate stranglehold on a kid's feelings, one that will still shake him awake terrified and gasping well into adulthood--<em>use animals</em>. Separate Dumbo from his mommy. Give Ol' Yeller rabies and force his people to shoot him. <em>Kill Bambi's mom</em>.<br />
Real-life animal-induced traumas work even better, and I've certainly had my share. When I was six, I had a pretty sweet deal: my dad cleaned the Biology building on the Brigham Young University campus in Provo--which meant I could spend a couple hours each week filling my hungry eyeballs in the Reptile Room. Gila monsters, chameleons, horned toads, lizards...and more snakes than I thought there could possibly be in the whole world. Cages on shelves, stacked as high as a tall adult's head, all the way around the 30' X 30' room, with only a thin glass layer between me and copperheads, rattlesnakes, coral snakes, and, in an 8' X 8" cuboid cage in the center of the room, insanely huge snakes as big around as a man's waist, eight feet, ten feet, twelve feet long! I couldn't get enough of looking, especially at those monsters in the middle.<br />
One evening I was watching two scaly titans in the center cage, noticing how they neither quite ignored each other nor ever commenced open hostilities, and gee, what would they do anyway, try to swallow each other? or maybe the boa would try what he does...but no, how could the boa constrictor squeeze another <em>snake</em> to death, and...where was that boa, anyway? Oh, he's right there--wrapped around the <em>outside</em> of the cage. And there's his head, sailing smoothly my way like Kaa in <em>The Jungle Book</em>, mouth closed but forked tongue flicking and dead black eyes gazing through my tiny soul and clearly <em>meaning business</em>. I had enough nervous-mammal sense to scamper out the door, just ahead of the unmistakable <em>THUNK</em> of a fist-sized head hitting the door I thought to close behind me.<br />
Henceforth, the very sight of a snake terrifies me. Garter snakes might as well be car-length cottonmouths.<br />
Our first year in Malad was a rough one for animal-related trauma. My family adopted our first cat, a juvenile female Siamese mix we named Socks. In those days, the Mormon church hadn't yet adopted their three-hour-block format for Sunday meetings. Instead, we'd attend Sunday School (everybody) and then Priesthood (boys) or Junior Relief Society (girls) first thing in the morning, then return in the evening for an hour-and-a-half Sacrament Meeting, which typically featured speakers, most of them deadly boring but a few polished and interesting. Mom and Dad let us stay home from a few Sacrament Meetings each year, when certain favorite movies would air on TV: <em>The Ten Commandments</em>, <em>The Sound of Music</em>, and <em>The Wizard of Oz</em>. If only we'd stayed home that Sunday night!<br />
We three boys trooped dutifully across the slush, exhaling breath plumes in the January cold. My mom started backing down the driveway. There, in the glaring headlights, pure horror that still shakes me: little sweet Socks, who knew nothing of cars or tires or getting out of the way, her head and front end bloodied and immobile while her hindquarters thrashed violently. Dad was still in the house, probably looking forward to a couple hours' kidless quiet, and we had no better plan than to hand him poor Socks and beg him through tears, "Help her! Help her!" He had no better plan than to set the suffering cat into the sink, to at least avoid painting the whole kitchen in blood.<br />
<em>He told us to get back in the car and go to church</em>.<br />
Until recently, I thought this was unbearably cruel of Dad. Like, our poor Socks is suffering horribly! Do you have any idea what nightmare I just saw in the driveway? This stupid church meeting is so important compared to <em>that</em>? What is <em>wrong</em> with you?<br />
But now I see myself in his position, and I understand he did the best anyone could. Instead of a nice quiet evening, maybe a little <em>60 Minutes</em>: three boys crying like it's the end of the world, which for them it actually is, a rapidly dying little cat, no vet, no help, no good way out of this. I never asked him, but I feel sure what he did is: send us to church as a mercy, keeping us in the dark as to details; then stand with Socks for the couple minutes she had left on earth, speaking softly to her and patting her kindly.<br />
Kindly, I believe, despite his habitual grumble that he "didn't care for cats." A decade later, he was still grumbling--but my sister caught him early one weekend morning at the stove, <em>cooking scrambled eggs</em> especially for Mom's cat Pretty. (What can I say: we didn't name animals very imaginatively.)<br />
I do know that when we returned from church that awful night, Socks was dead and sealed in a shoebox. Dad told me I could bury her. I dug the hole and put the box in, then the whole family stood around her grave while Mom said a prayer. We cried a lot. A couple nights later I sat up in bed and begged out loud, "Sooooocks! Come back! Please come back!" I marked her grave with a spare scrap of plywood about the size of a school textbook, shaped like the state of Nevada, on which I scraped with a paring knife the name "Socks."</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-76867258617034947122018-07-19T12:46:00.003-07:002018-08-06T16:50:42.232-07:00Childhood to early teens: My Own Personal Bullies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I remember every last one of my bullies, vividly. I remember their names and will gladly repeat them. I remember their cruel "Hurr hurr hurr"s, the dimwitted delight they took in calling me crude names and scientifically dosing me with just enough pain to hurt but not enough to get them in serious trouble if they got caught. Their foundationless hatred. Their henchmanliness.<br />
My dad moved us to tiny Malad, Idaho in August 1974. He taught fifth grade and I started fourth. (See my earlier dictionary story.) In a town this small and insular, because I hadn't been born there and wasn't related to any locals, I was "the new kid" until mid-high school. One unbreakable law of the children's jungle is: The new kid will be bullied--so I was. I had this odd last name, too, and it proved irresistible to bullies' twisted creativity. "Brian Cauliflower," of course. Also "Collie-dog." The cruder, less religious ones opted for "Cowlishit" or "Cow-shit." One asshole with a little imagination came up with "Captain Caveman," which to be honest I didn't mind; but that one didn't stick. They were all a year or two older than me; I was invisible to kids older than that, and unharassed by those my own age. Barry Daniels, Steve Daniels, Todd Hess, Shawn Thomas, Steve Sweeten, and Jerry Steiner: they grinned like chimps and lobbed ugly names every damn time they spotted me--between classes, at church (!), at Boy Scouts (which I already hated), at sports practice. The namecalling was like the skies in Seattle: forever looming, liable to pour down anytime, not exactly deadly but nothing you'd choose to get caught in, either.<br />
Then there were the bullies who got physical. I remember like it was this week: I'm in fourth grade, it's winter, there is slushy snow outside, and I am in Jax Snax across the street from the Elementary playing pinball. I'm really killing it, too, and it's about to "pop"--to make this loud BANG! alerting everyone around that I've just earned a free game. I am as bad-ass as a new kid who likes books and cats can ever be. The jukebox is playing "I Shot the Sheriff," Eric Clapton's version, and...yeah, baby, <em>I</em> shot the sheriff.<br />
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Now there is this <em>BAM!</em> sudden horrible pain in my earlobe. I lose the ball in play. I pull back the plunger for the final one, let it loose, and <em>BAM!</em> that pain again. Turning quickly, I see it's a high school boy I don't even know. He has flipped my ear with his index finger as hard as he can, wound up and let loose. He's a senior, I think, and he's chewing tobacco and wearing boots and a cowboy hat, and his grownup farm-worked body can focus an awful lot of ouch per square inch onto a little boy's flipped earlobe. It glowed and smarted the rest of the day.<br />
Paul Evans was a special kind of bullying asshole--the kind that never lets up. I stupidly chose to play football my ninth-grade year, though I hated the constant smashing and bruising. I just wanted to daydream and read my books, which that year included the "All Creatures Great and Small" veterinary memoirs. I wanted to belong, and sports helped a lot with that. So. I remember desperately thinking, during an extraordinarily hot and unpleasant August practice: "This practice will be over in an hour. An hour isn't that long, really. I can stand an hour. Then it will be done. That time <em>will pass</em>. Look, a minute just passed while I was thinking about this." Because I was shooting up like a skinny weed, the coaches thought I'd make a good tight end. So they had us ninth-graders scrimmage play after play against the tenth-graders. I was permanently assigned to block their defensive end, Paul Evans. He did this filthy thing on every snap: he'd hop a step back, or to the side, and grab my shoulderpads, and throw me to the ground. I'd earnestly try as instructed to make contact and move him: skip, <em>whump</em>! He didn't even try to get involved in the play--all his focus was laser-locked on getting me to the ground. I tried not blocking, just holding my position; coach would yell. I tried holding <em>him</em>; coach yelled <em>and</em> called a penalty. In desperation I tried throwing myself into his knees; Paul just backed out of the way and laughed out loud. Play after play, set-hut-skip-whump. No coach ever intervened--I believe their sentiment was, You're going to face this kind of thing in real games, so buck the fuck up, cowboy.<br />
Marty Thorpe usually limited himself to calling me "Cow-shit," but one snowy day on the elementary playground he decided to try his wrestling moves on me. He strode right over and asked me if I knew what a "half-Nelson" was. Gee, no. Did I know what a "whole Nelson" was? Nope. Turns out he was dying to show me. Now, <em>he</em> knew he was going to grab me, that was his plan from the beginning. But <em>I</em> never saw it coming. Before I could react, he captured my head in his elbow, planted a foot between mine, and jerked me straight to the gravel-packed slush. With my head still under his arm and his whole weight on me. He added his other arm to make the full Nelson.<br />
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He held that until my vision went fuzzy like a TV station that wouldn't come in and I went limp. Then he contemptuously shoved me off, got up, and stalked away. I sat in the snow for a few minutes waiting, but the fuzziness wouldn't dissipate. My head ached and my pants were soaked. I staggered over to the teacher on duty--which by the way, where the hell had she been all this time?!--and she took me inside to the school nurse. Marty saw me an hour later, as I left the nurse to return to class, and he asked me straight away whether I'd "told on him." No, I hadn't--and thought, but didn't add, Because <em>I'm not a complete idiot</em>. Another law of the children's jungle: You never ever <em>ever</em> snitch, because you will only be bullied worse. He seemed relieved. Maybe he was. Maybe that's why he never bullied me again.<br />
Being bullied accretes fear, and shame, and impotent rage. They eventually require some kind of release. Twice I tried to exorcise all the ugliness by doing some bullying myself. That both incidents happened during ninth-grade football season probably indicates how horrible that whole atmosphere was.<br />
On a bus to Hyrum, where we were to play an eight-grade game and then a ninth-grade game, I had the perfect bullying target sitting right in front of me. William Jaussi (pronounced "Yow-zee"). He was a year younger than me, the stringiest of beans, with a beaky nose and protruding ears. No one thought he was cool; in fact, his whole family was off-putting and weird. "Everyone knew" for example that one of his older sisters had crapped her pants on a pep band bus. I probably said something obnoxious about his name, but what I remember clearly is, two or three times, thinking to pass on the same shock and pain I'd felt, I wound up and flipped his ears. As hard as I could. Just like that asshole cowboy. I attempted a triumphant laugh; it faltered and died.<br />
One day at football practice, Ed Robbins, the eighth grade's running back, was beating the ninth grade's defense on every play. He was small and fast and slippery, and he kept zipping past us for what would be touchdowns. I was playing defensive end--straight up, not trying to throw the tight end down on each snap--and was rapidly becoming fed up with the little bastard. So the next time the eighth-graders sent the ball around my end, I was prepared. I let Ed get around and about half a step past me; then, as planned, I grabbed his facemask and yanked downward. I didn't even try to disguise it or pretend it was an accident.<br />
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Ed's dad was one of the coaches, and he quite rightly yelled in my face for a few minutes. He didn't know it was unnecessary. I was already feeling a little queasy and a lot ashamed of myself. I listened and nodded.<br />
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Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-47677579023690837432018-06-12T18:34:00.002-07:002018-06-12T18:35:24.434-07:00High school: On The Cruise<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
[This post is best read with one tab open to my map, "<a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=11Av7-7rYOWDIVHc8yFn1PDNXvmXd-d4R&ll=42.18702637930359%2C-112.24651512513196&z=18" target="_blank">The Malad Cruise</a>." ( <-- Click those words.) A hefty portion of this post's content is there, so I recommend not skipping it. All bold black locations are ones I've added. Click on them for commentary/storylets about the different spots.]<br />
With this post I invite you back to my hometown, Malad, Idaho, circa 1980. Then as now, the population was a heifer's hair over 2,000. Some things never change.<br />
I got my daytime driving license a couple of months before my fifteenth birthday, June 1979. At sixteen I received permission to drive at night! Like every other Malad teenager, I putt-putted around The Cruise obsessively, all evening Fridays and Saturdays, doggedly seeking entertainment but rarely finding it. We drove like lowriders--slow, cool, impassive, in no hurry. We gave each other minimal, one- or two-finger waves without moving a hand from the steering wheel. We blasted Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin on our stereos, windows down so everyone would know.<br />
The miles we racked up! If we could retroactively translate those hours into, say, learning another language, we could have become UN translators!<br />
We drove in all weathers, all seasons, sober and drunk. We drove drunk a <em>lot</em>; it's a miracle no one I knew even had an accident. The inside of a moving car was the only place any of us could find privacy, between our huge Mormon families, the schoolmarmish atmosphere, and the simple fact that teenagers always crave a privacy that's unavailable. "You just don't understand."<br />
We followed the Nevada-shaped triangle traced on my map. Go to the Malad Drive-In for a Glamor Burger, fries with fish sauce, and a large Iron Port soda. From there drive south on Main past the Dude Ranch Café and Corner Bar on your right, turn right onto Bannock Street, past the police car usually parked in Pig Alley, right on First West and then another quick right onto First North and back to the Drive-In. Clockwise, always; right turns are easier for beginning drivers. Repeat and repeat until parents' curfew.<br />
In 1980, the KWIK Stop abruptly appeared, a "convenience store" ("Oh, they sell convenience?") just a jaunt east of the Chat 'n' Chew, over by the freeway. Unaccustomed as we were to "snappy" spellings like "KWIK," we were of the opinion that while yes in fact, it was quite a nice novelty to now buy snacks and sodas well into the night (open till 10!), or even on Sunday when all other local businesses were closed, still, that name was just dumb as hell. We referred to it as the "Kay Double-You Eye Kay Stop," never "Quick Stop." The Cruise pattern changed to accommodate it: every half hour or so, we'd break off from the triangle, pass the Chat, and see if anyone interesting was in the Kay Double-You Eye Kay.<br />
Two special cruising crews stand out in memory. There was Jim Goddard driving his parents' mile-long Cadillac, Terry Williams sitting shotgun, and me sprawled in the spacious back seat, all gulping Coors Light (which in those days we found <em>delicious</em>, particularly when paired with that gourmet treat Pizza Puffs), the stereo blasting out <em>The Song Remains the Same</em> on 8-track. We'd set our beer in the cupholder to air drum the long "Moby Dick" solo. Best of all was the Doog-Mobile, Doug Williams's family van, miraculously at his disposal every weekend, completely curfew-free. You couldn't set up a Doog-Mobile cruise in advance, because no one ever seemed to be at home to answer the phone; you could only stay vigilant for a DM sighting, then join in. Like the Chrysler in "Love Shack" it "seats about twenty," boasted a much better stereo than you'd expect any family van to have, and collected all the best drinking companions from Malad High. We talked sports, and girls, but mostly we silently contemplated AC/DC tunes and stared out the windows at the lights of Malad, content in our clearly-established, awesome adulthood. We were bad. We were nationwide.</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-82071203105327326052018-06-02T10:11:00.001-07:002018-06-02T10:27:34.839-07:00Kahaani jo sach nahin hai (A story that is not true)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="short_text" lang="hi"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">When he was in elementary school, Brian took great pride in his ability to spell words correctly. He got 100% on every spelling test. His teachers were all impressed.</span></span><br />
<span class="short_text" lang="hi"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">One day, though, he finally missed a word. Horrors! (Sadly, no one remembers which particular word it allegedly was.) Brian got his paper back and stared at it for a couple of minutes. He walked to the teacher's desk (Mrs. Thomas, 4th grade, nearing retirement). "I didn't miss this word."</span></span><br />
<span class="short_text" lang="hi"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">"I'm sorry, Brian, but you did."</span></span><br />
<span class="short_text" lang="hi"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">"No, I <em>spelled</em> it <em>right</em>."</span></span><br />
<span class="short_text" lang="hi"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Pause. "No, see, look. Here it is in the dictionary. The dictionary spells it this way."</span></span><br />
<span class="short_text" lang="hi"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Immediately: "Then the dictionary's wrong."</span></span><br />
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<span class="short_text" lang="hi">यह कहानी सच नहीं है (ye kahaani sach nahin hai/this story isn't true ). My dad loved to tell it about me, and to imply that it reveals my आत्मा (aatma/essence or soul). I'm afraid that's not so; it's just an amusing fiction to say so.</span><br />
<span class="short_text" lang="hi">My issue with this canonical telling is that it makes me sound like a little asshole. "I simply know better." Why? Just 'cause it's me, apparently.</span><br />
<span class="short_text" lang="hi">No no no. Sticking to my guns I can see; unsupported arrogance, not so much.</span><br />
<span class="short_text" lang="hi">Last spring, Paul Auster published a postmodern masterpiece titled <em>4 3 2 1</em>. I <a href="http://sequart.org/magazine/66457/4-3-2-1-paul-auster%e2%80%99s-new-postmodern-masterpiece/" target="_blank">reviewed it for Sequart</a> and, just recently, got my book club to read it (all 800+ pages)! Now <em>here</em> is an infinitely better way to tell "my" story.</span><br />
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<span class="short_text" lang="hi"><span class="short_text" lang="hi"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">[Young Archie Ferguson hears how the Rosenbergs were "fried" for their espionage, then repeats the word in his own kid-newspaper story on the subject.]</span></span></span><br />
<span class="short_text" lang="hi"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">There was some disagreement over the use of the word *fried*, which his grandmother thought was an excessively vulgar way to talk about a tragic event, but Ferguson insisted there was no choice, the language couldn’t be changed because that was how Francie had presented the matter to him, and he found it a good word precisely because it was so vivid and disgusting. Anyway, it was his letter, wasn’t it, and he could write anything he wanted to. Once again, his grandmother shook her head. <em>You never back down, do you, Archie?</em> To which her grandson answered: <em>Why should I back down when I’m right?</em></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span class="short_text" lang="hi">Why indeed?</span><br />
<span class="short_text" lang="hi">This is ज़िद्द (ziddh) we're talking about, "stubbornness" or "persistence." Persistence is a <em>good</em> quality--a <em>power</em>. May we all hold firm to our ज़िद्द when we're in the right!</span><br />
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Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-71222945080775509482018-05-28T16:49:00.002-07:002018-05-28T16:49:26.720-07:00And let us not forget the blindingly obvious<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In my last two posts I named five calamities I'd experienced recently. But to spell out the so-obvious-I-didn't-think-to-mention-it, the dirty bomb that struck the whole world: the election of Donald J. Trump as President. That was an <em>unbelievable</em> shock, and it fell right between the trial and the Morrissey cancellation. When <em>that</em> can win an election...</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-79339958953242115272018-05-26T17:54:00.001-07:002018-05-26T17:54:08.356-07:00Aur itihas (More of the story)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
My last post here focused on the end of my dad's life, last spring. Today I pull back the camera a bit: the days with Dad ended a ridiculously bad year. Five events, successive body blows, conglomerated into one almost comically awful annum. We'll eventually will get back to Hindi...in time...after a few posts, a few digressions and connections.<br />
In October 2016, I was sued in federal civil court in Muskogee. The Muskogee newspaper summed up the case <a href="http://www.tahlequahdailypress.com/news/jury-finds-against-former-nsu-professor-in-lawsuit/article_c9bab9e4-9727-59b5-81c6-816d86704caa.html" target="_blank">thus</a>, if you're interested. The judge discharged me personally "with prejudice," meaning, "this person should never have been dragged into this, he's innocent." But, you know, being sued is no fun for anyone. As <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZf7gjOwOcM" target="_blank">Morrissey put it</a>,<br />
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Speaking of the inimitable Morrissey: my wife had bought me a birthday ticket for his November concert in Dallas! What an awesome present! After the trial's ugliness, I was doubly thrilled to go! "Huh, Morrissey, big fat emo deal," you may be muttering. OH NO, how VERY WRONG you are. Over half of the time I spend listening to recorded music, I devote to Morrissey. After "discovering" him twenty years late in 2008, I've enjoyed his company for more hours than any person I don't know personally--including, say, Charles Dickens and David Foster Wallace. I quote him all the time, post his songs from YouTube on my Facebook page, cheer on his vegetarian activism. Just look at this screenshot from Spotify:<br />
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Sure, you're a fan of somebody or other--but are you a "top 1% fan"? It would have been a fabulous day: sleep late, on the road by 10, Morrissey marathon in the car, nap at the hotel, a good Indian meal, then the CONCERT OF A LIFETIME. (At the time, his playlist was the <em>World Peace Is None of Your Business</em> album mixed with all-time favorites like "Speedway" and "Ganglord.") Then 10:30 the night before, <a href="https://consequenceofsound.net/2016/11/morrissey-cancels-texas-tour-dates-so-keyboardist-can-recover/" target="_blank">CANCELLATION</a>. I was crushed. What should have been doubly fantastic became doubly devastating. Two things: 1) yes, alright, Morrissey is notorious for canceling concerts, so 2) knowing the first thing, I'm supposed to suddenly not care? I tried to personally boycott his music, but that just made me even more miserable, so I quit after a couple of weeks. After all, the whole point of listening to Morrissey is his ability to soothe fans' hearts by expressing what's in them; what would we ever do without him?</div>
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So I limped along to the end of the semester, had a restful Christmas break. In late January, the next bomb landed: my promotion for full professor was denied. I had absolutely no indication or reason to expect this. I'd published plenty since receiving tenure, won a few awards, and received no negative evaluations for anything. Promotion appeared to be a mere formality. My committee and department chair said yes. Then the dean pulled the classic "if it were up to me" evasion--the venerable ruse recorded in Dickens's <em>David Copperfield</em>, whereby young David's cowardly boss at the law office says "if it were up to me," he'd totally pay back David's high apprenticeship fees--but his cruel, grasping partner whom one never actually sees, <em>he</em> won't allow that. The cruel partner, naturally, knew nothing of the matter. Here, it was the provost blamed--"<em>he</em> said no, I'm just the bearer of bad news." Later, paperwork showed me it was in fact the dean, and he never did give me a satisfactory explanation. As <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQRWo6WnKII" target="_blank">Morrissey put it</a> when he was with The Smiths, it was pretty much this nonsense:</div>
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This was a pretty hard kick while I was down, but I myself made it worse. Totally caught by surprise, tired of being kicked for things I didn't do (cf. the trial)--I quit. I said the words "I quit," multiple times. I pushed into the dean's hands some books I'd written chapters for, and hissed back at him his word "consistency," which he'd said I needed more of, and raised my voice, and stormed out of my office, down the hall, out of the building, down the sidewalk and off campus, intending never to return. "I've worked my last hour here," I said. After some quick, anxious consultation with my wife, I unquit that same afternoon. <em>Somebody</em>'s got to bring home the kibbles for our menagerie. And really, I didn't actually want to quit, I was just ambushed. (Again.)</div>
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So wow, damn, what a school year so far. At least I had that ten-day trip planned for spring break! London and Oxford! The Eagle and Child pub, where Tolkien and Lewis plotted their creations over pints!</div>
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Our hostel's internationalist Kensington neighborhood, vast bookstores, Indian feasting, Brick Lane, British television! But gosh, I just couldn't seem to locate that flight plan in my emails, so I asked the trip organizer to send it to me again. Following that guide, I left at dawn for Oklahoma City, drove three hours, walked up to the baggage check desk with a good two hours to clear security. The clerk informed me that my plane had just left fifteen minutes ago. Much computer searching, printout consultation, other-airline-querying, and consultant-telephoning later, we understood: I had been sent <em>last year's</em> itinerary. I was right on time for the flight our group took <em>last year</em>--but <em>this</em> year, I was officially SOL. It being the Friday beginning Spring Break across the country, there wasn't a flight to be had anywhere. Not for days and days. So: no London and Oxford. Worse, that same unheroic dean from earlier demanded that I explain in detail, several times, how 1) missing the flight was an accident and not my fault, though believe me I wanted to be on it and if anything was in doubt it was my return home, and 2) I wasn't somehow making illicit money from this. That second suspicion was just insulting, and in my mind went a long way toward explaining the whole no-promotion thing. With some people, you just can't win.</div>
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All through this historically bad year, of course, Dad's health had been dipping down frequently into the danger zone. His acute distress and death didn't ambush him; optimist though he was, he saw it approaching, steadily, inexorably.</div>
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So, to add it all up: a court trial of your humble narrator, a literal "federal case"; a last-minute cancellation of the show-of-shows that would have healed the wounds; a shocking "NO" to my promotion bid; a lovely trip across the pond bizarrely snatched away by fate; Dad's speedy decline and death. I spent the rest of last summer in a grief-filled daze. Through fall and spring, when I wasn't busy teaching, grief and my new application for promotion nibbled away much of my attention. I finally got some good news just last month.</div>
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And that, my friends, explains why I haven't written here for a year. I simply haven't had the heart, or the will or the energy or the animal spirits, call it what you wish, to initiate <em>any</em> project I didn't absolutely have to do.</div>
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Thus I haven't taken time lately to enjoy Indian culture much, and sadly that includes studying the Hindi language. But having cleared the final academic hurdle, and knowing I have not one damn thing more to prove, I have renewed energy, a new sense of freedom to study/pursue the things I care about. I see better too how it's all related: my own story, my love for Indian culture, the things I want to say. I'm putting it all here on Big Gora Learns Hindi. Often it'll be more about Big Gora than about Learning Hindi, but ज़िन्दगी ऐसी गलत है, न? (zindagi aisi galat hai, na?/life's unfair like that, right?).</div>
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We'll talk again soon!</div>
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Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-67471489746693584272018-05-24T13:16:00.001-07:002018-05-24T13:16:12.503-07:00Aaj se, mera itihas (Starting today, my story)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's been almost a year since I wrote here. No one's demanding that I explain, but I want to anyway. No Hindi-learning stuff today, just me. Here I am, offering you the chair nearest the air conditioner and a cold Coke. Thanks for listening.</div>
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My dad died last May 29. I'd gone to see him for a week earlier that month--fearing, quite honestly, that he'd leave us before I got there. In that week, he went from hale/jolly/100% himself, to very near death via antibiotic-resistant superinfection of mysterious origin, back to about 80% himself, and back to Death's door. Here he is fully himself.</div>
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He looks freshly shaved here. My kindhearted nephew Gavin was doing that for him.</div>
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His health behaved like a basketball dropped from a great height: every fall was succeeded by a bounce back up <em>almost</em> as high as the original elevation, followed by another drop, back up nearly as high, and so on. Zeno's Paradox be damned: with that pattern, it's only a matter of time before there's no more bouncing back. I hated to leave before he stabilized, but it looked like that might never happen, so I anxiously returned to my menagerie.</div>
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A couple weeks afterwards, my sister called with the bad news. Then she sent back my medal (see Dad's eulogy below), high school letter jacket, master's thesis, dissertation, and this framed photo I'd claimed from the empty house. I never did grow out of running home with trophies to bask in my parents' loving praise.</div>
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I wrote Dad's eulogy, as I'd written Mom's in 2006. This is the blessing and curse of being the English professor in the family--you get called on for these things. Hard as it was to write, at least I didn't have to read it at his funeral. My first cousin Suzanne did--but she butchered it. She Executive Decision-ed out some of my best lines, threw the whole thing off and out of rhythm, made it about her.</div>
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I'll end this post with his eulogy, <em>as I wrote it</em>, दिल से. It seems like a good place to stop for now. My next post will continue explaining.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Life
Sketch for David Cowlishaw</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">written by Brian
Cowlishaw (David’s oldest son)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Thank
you for coming to this funeral to commemorate, celebrate, and honor David
Cowlishaw. David influenced all our lives for the better, one way or another.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">To
his brothers and sisters, he was Dave. Little Dave. Until he was well into his
20s, he really was little—a slight string bean with a baby face. At 18, in his
Navy portrait, he looked 14.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Dave was born in 1939, the same year the movies <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gone with the Wind</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wizard of Oz</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Hunchback of Notre Dame</i> came to theaters. He died this Monday, on Memorial
Day, at 77 and a half.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">His
wife of 40 years, Cheryl, also called him Dave. After she died in 2006, Dave
never stopped missing her. He frequently told his kids how much he looked
forward to being reunited with her someday. Surely right now they’re together,
listening and chuckling and holding hands, in beautiful health and delightful
humor.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Dave
served in the Navy from 17 to 21, mostly because his mischievous brother Paul
convinced him it was an easy gig, a great way to see the world while partying
all the time. Dave was a cook on board an aircraft carrier, along with Paul.
His experiences there provided a lifetime’s worth of stories. When he really
wanted to impress a point upon his kids—maybe about how people in other
countries lived very different lives, or how some individuals were just trouble
all the time—he tended to begin the speech he would make with the words, “When
I was in the Navy…” He taught us empathy through his Navy experiences. He’d
describe direst poverty abroad, and violence, and unrelenting hardships, and look
penetratingly into our eyes and insist: “Can you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">imagine</i>? Can you?” He made sure we actually did. He told funny
stories too. He told us about the quirky chief petty officer who would opine
wistfully, “I’d rather hear a fat boy fart than a pretty girl sing.” We weren’t
quite sure what that meant, but it was funny because it featured farts. He
slayed us describing Paul’s tendency to push a joke, and push it, and push it
some more, until people including Dave positively wanted to smack him.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">After
the Navy, Dave spent a few years getting his young man’s
“I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-my-life” out of his system. He briefly tried
carpentry, and spent a few years cooking at Denny’s in the Los Angeles area.
Then he met Cheryl, they fell in love, and they married in the Los Angeles
Mormon temple. They started a family right away. Dave found work at Technicolor
in Hollywood. At work, he pressed a button to print a copy of a film, waited a
few minutes, boxed the film up for shipping, then started the process again, for
eight hours a day.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Although
the money at Technicolor was good, and the work was easy, Dave pined to do
something more interesting and meaningful with his life. So, with his
characteristic powerful determination, he packed up his growing family and
moved to Brigham Young University in Provo, where he earned his Bachelor’s
degree in Education and his teaching certificate. His L.A. family thought he
was a little crazy to go out to the “middle of nowhere” like that, away from
them, but he was determined, and he made it work. Cheryl typed his papers, and
he cleaned office buildings in the evenings after class, and he finished in
three and a half years.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">In
1974 he moved to Malad, Idaho to teach and raise his kids. Each of his four
kids had Dave as their teacher for a full year. Each of them will tell you, “It
was the worst year of my life.” That was because Dave went out of his way to
make sure no one could ever suspect him of favoritism. He was twice as tough on
his kids as he was on any other student, and he told them so and explained why.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Malad
turned out to be a good place for Dave to live and teach—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">after</i> the strike. Right as his first teaching year started, the
Malad teachers had to go on strike for a living wage. Dave walked the picket
lines with them, sometimes accompanied by Cheryl or one of the kids.
Fortunately, the strike was successful after just a couple of weeks. Dave taught
elementary school, and during his last few years, middle school, for a total of
28 years. Two generations of Malad schoolkids appreciated his dedication to the
job, his concern for their well-being, his determination to prepare them well
for life.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">He
valued education and hard work, and working hard to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">get</i> educated. He stamped these lessons indelibly in his kids’ minds
and characters in the most powerful possible way—by example. He didn’t just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tell</i> them education is important and
they should go get some—he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">showed</i>
them. He always walked the walk. His hard work didn’t end with the last bell of
the day, either. Dave was always working, doing the hard physical labor as
well. Every year he worked after school and weekends for his friend Rex Evans
to pay off a cow for the family’s freezer. For many years he traveled to
Preston or Lava Hot Springs to cook in a restaurant on weekends. He catered
dozens of Malad events. All his kids learned their strong work ethic directly
from him.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">You
just never wanted to disappoint Dave. He was so determined himself that he made
you want to be. One summer, Brian raised a calf for the county fair. This
“calf” was huge, and strong, and mean. Even Dave had trouble getting a halter
on Ol’ Blue and leading him around. Brian, a skinny eleven-year-old, didn’t
have a prayer. Dad insisted that Brian had to practice leading Ol’ Blue to show
him in the fair. “Just whatever you do, don’t let go of the rope,” he
instructed. After four or five steps, Ol’ Blue bolted and began racing down the
field. Brian had his instructions and by God, he was going to follow them. He
was Dave’s son. So Brian, tobogganing along the field on his stomach, filling
his pants with dirt, clutched the rope while Ol’ Blue raced down to the far
edge of the field, turned around, and raced all the way back. Dave, worried
that Brian might have been hurt, asked why he didn’t let go. “You said to hang
onto the rope!”</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">One
instruction Dave repeated frequently to his kids was to choose their company
well. “You are who you hang around with,” he’d remind us, and when we chose
companions he didn’t like, he let us know all about it. He wanted not just to
keep us out of trouble, but also to give us every opportunity to excel at
anything and everything. He encouraged us to play an instrument in the school
band, to play every sport, to go onstage, to enter all competitions. He and
Cheryl went to every single concert, game, exhibition, and contest their four
kids ever participated in. Their behavior at ballgames was 100% exemplary. They
politely applauded when our team did something good. They never, not once,
yelled at a referee or argued with other parents. Can you begin to fathom the
hundreds of hours of dull driving and waiting involved? Dave did it all so we could
be “well-rounded”—good at many things, confident, competent in many areas of
life. Dave was himself. He was a fantastic teacher, true, and he was always an
excellent cook, but he was also a talented artist and photographer. In his
fifties he learned how to silkscreen his photos, then traveled to dozens of art
shows to share his work.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Dave
always expressed the pride he took in his kids. One proud moment that he
referred to frequently afterwards came when Brian graduated with his Bachelor’s
degree. Brian was inducted into an honor society called Mortar Board, and Dave
and Cheryl attended a Mortar Board breakfast on graduation day. Dad positively relished
what the speaker said there: that only, say, half of all high school graduates
go to college, and only half of those graduate with degrees, and one tenth of
those have a certain grade-point average, and so on—so ultimately, the Mortar Board
members were “literally one in a million.” If that was true of Brian, it was
thanks to his dad. A few weeks before Dave died, Brian gave him a medal he’d received
as a professor, the “Circle of Excellence.” Brian explained that Dave was at
least as much responsible for it as Brian was, so it should belong to him.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Speaking
of English: Dave had an able and sometimes humorous way with words. Early in
his teaching career, he moonlighted as a milk tester—he drove to dairy farmers’
barns and tested each cow’s milk for health purposes. One farmer had Playboy
centerfolds posted around the work area. Dave was describing the scene, and
told his family he didn’t quite know where to look, “because here were all
these naked ladies with their…<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">linguini</i>
hanging out.” Forty years later, his boys still can’t read the word “linguini”
on a menu without remembering and laughing. Once Dave became frustrated during
a home improvement project. Whatever the thing was that he was fixing, it
refused to be fixed. Out of his mouth tumbled a homemade swear phrase: “See
homma nah.” This just cracked up the whole family and instantly dissolved the
tension. “See homma nah” instantly became a running family joke.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">If
Dave could change one thing about his life, it would probably be to have
traveled more. He greatly valued the traveling he’d done in the Navy, and also
the two-week trip he took to Paris and London to celebrate his retirement. If
he’d had better luck with Cheryl’s health, and more time, he’d wanted to travel
all around the U.S. in an RV and visit every state.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Dave,
we love you and will miss you every day of our lives. Thank you for all you did
for us.</span></div>
</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-7327418361799253372017-07-13T08:52:00.001-07:002017-07-13T08:52:06.712-07:00Ramayan update: even more किस्मत!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In episode 22 of the 2010s Ramayan, I've encountered yet another layer of किस्मत [kismat/fate]! It turns out that literally ages ago, when the world was much younger, Vishnu committed a grave sin. There was a huge war between the gods and the demons; the gods, as I'd naturally expect, were routing the demons. A party of stragglers ran to the house of Sage Bhrigu, where Bhrigu's wife Khyati gave them shelter. As we all know, Indian people consider a guest a god, and in this case the fact that they were demons didn't deter her. (Such hospitality!) Khyati forbade the gods entrance, and they stayed outside. (At some point I must comment on this, to me, mindblowing aspect of Hinduism: even the gods can be compelled if humans perform the right penances or prayers. See Raavan, for example.) Vishnu arrived on the scene, and like the other gods, told Khyati to give up her demon guests. She refused, citing the cultural rule I mentioned. Vishnu destroyed them anyway--and Khyati too! The horror! Then Bhrigu returns home to find his beloved wife dead, and is carried away by grief and anger. "I loved her so dearly!"<br />
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<br /><br />
Like many other figures in the Ramayan and Mahabharat, he expresses his overwhelming emotions in a powerful curse: "May you, Lord Vishnu, be forced one day to reincarnate as a mortal; and may you then suffer the horrible pain of being separated from your wife." The curse lands full force. Here's one more reason, then, that Ram, incarnation of Vishnu, was from ages ago fated to come to earth and live as he did. And Sita--well, we all know what's about to happen at this point in the story, and the recounting of this curse reminds us...</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-65318141961733595302017-06-22T15:07:00.003-07:002017-06-22T15:07:45.524-07:00Ek nae Ramayan hai!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
(I had written the first couple paragraphs of this post, and was working on it, when my sister called and told me my dad had just died. I just wanted to note this for some reason.<br />
Dad, as I said to you when I visited shortly before that: I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to travel together to India. You would love it, and I would love showing it to you.)<br />
<br /><br />
एक नए रामायण है! जय जय राम! [Ek nae Ramayan hae! Jay jay Ram!/There's a new Ramayan! Praise Ram!]<br />
A few years ago, when my wife's mom was still with us, the three us watched the whole 1980s Ramanand Sagar production of the Ramayan--all 152 half-hour episodes. Twice! Mom just loved Ram. At least once per episode, she'd repeat these phrases:<br />
"I just love Ram. He's so good!"<br />
"Ram has such a nice smile."<br />
"Ram loves his brother [Lakshman] so much!"<br />
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There's actually a sweet story about how we got our hands on it. In Tulsa is a friendly, packed Indian grocery we visit every couple of months: Laxmi Spices. We love chatting with the family who own it. We went there the day before my birthday for ingredients for a special Desi birthday dinner. Atop the checkout counter was...the DVD box set with this ^ cover. Wow! I'd been trying to find this elusive collection via Amazon, without success. Where in the world should I even look now?--and then boom! there it was! But, you know, I'm a humanities professor, not any sort of wealthy man, and I wasn't financially prepared to shell out $75 on top of the money I had to assume my wife had already spent on my birthday, so...alas, we'll get it another time. Bridget then managed a beautiful surprise: later in the day, after we'd driven all the way home without the discs, she sneaked <em>back up</em> to Tulsa alone and bought them! Fantastic birthday surprise!<br />
So again, we watched the whole serial over a few months, then again the next summer.<br />
Now there's another one! It was made for television, like the old one--and that shows, but I'll address Indian serial conventions in another post sometime--and aired in 2012 and 2013. It's available streaming on Netflix! I wrote in an earlier post about Amazon's new "Heera" channel; Netflix, too, has seriously been stepping up its Desi entertainment game. Just last night I even spotted the not-especially-good show Fear Files there, along with lots and lots of recent Bollywood movies.<br />
Having watched the 1980s actors playing Ram, Sita, Lakshman, Raavan, and Hanuman for a couple hundred hours, it's hard to imagine <em>anyone</em> else playing those parts.<br />
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<br /><br />
But the new actors do a beautiful job, both in contemplative still shots and in action. The new Ram is taller and manlier-looking. The new Sita has gigantic, sad, liquid eyes. The new Laxman believably expresses admiration for Ram and the hotheadedness that's never far away with him.<br />
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I'll save other observations about the new Ramayan for later posts, and there are a whole lot of interesting things to say about it, but I wanted to note one here: the new production makes Ram's 14-year exile in the forest clearly/ineluctably fated several times over. In 1980s Ramayan, pretty much only Ram's devotion to धर्म [dharm/doing the right(eous) thing] drives him out: King Dasharath made a promise, two boons, years ago to his queen Kaikeyi, so when she asks Dasharath to enthrone her son Bharat and exile Ram, Ram believes he must go in order to fulfill his father's promise and save his family's honor. Well. In the new Ramayan, it's much more freighted:<br />
1) The palace astrologer finds that the match is dreadfully inauspicious: Ram "मांगलिक हैं" [manglik hain/was born under Mars in a way that guarantees misery in Sita's marriage to him]. (For a modern example of this continuing dread of one partner's being "manglik," see the Bollywood movie <em>Lage Raho, Munna Bhai</em>.) HOWEVER,--<br />
2) There's a one-hour window during which this combination will work out fine IF they're careful not to miss this rare opportunity. The wedding is thus planned for this precise time. HOWEVER,--<br />
3) A consortium of gods, led by Indra, wants to prevent Ram and Sita from escaping fate so simply. They send one of the gods down disguised as a dancer, who mesmerizes the wedding party so deeply that the short auspicious hour slips away unnoticed. The loophole is closed. ADDITIONALLY:<br />
4) Before the wedding ceremony even started, Sita made a rash vow to Parvati (Shiva's consort): she (Sita) would voluntarily go through great suffering if only Ram were given sufficient strength to lift and string Shiva's bow, in the testing ceremony designed to choose Sita's groom. Parvati is distressed, knowing that the vow was unnecessary--Ram would have been fine on his own--but at Shiva's urging, grants Sita's prayer at the cost Sita specified. We all know where her suffering will begin--with Ram's removal to the forest. And FINALLY:<br />
5) Years ago, it turns out, Dasharath made a horrible, fateful mistake. (This mistake appears in the 1980s Ramayan as well, but less highlighted.) Back before Dasharath sired Ram, he was hunting, alone, with his bow one night, and he thought he heard a deer drinking at the nearby pool. He shot into the dark--and fatally struck a young man who was collecting water for his aged, blind parents. The mother curses Dasharath: May your firstborn son be taken away from you, and then may you die a terrible painful death yourself! So Ram's forced departure, followed soon by Dasharath's demise, clearly fulfill this powerful curse. (Side note: I must look into these Indian curses...)<br />
With all this going on, the exile doesn't seem one bit like a choice. The gods, a curse, astrology, and Ram's own wife all contribute to guaranteeing that he goes away.<br />
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Anyway: I invite you all to join me and my wife in watching this fantastic new production of the Ramayan on Netflix!</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-53042968800943305052017-05-08T10:22:00.001-07:002017-05-08T10:22:54.079-07:00Chalein!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It's been too long since I've hung out here. But that changes now. चलें ! (chalein/[let's] go!)<br />
Truthfully, it's been a rough year. The end stages of the USA's national election brought out the worst in everyone...and then it had the nightmarish result we all know. Inauguration was a sick joke, and the atmosphere since then has grown steadily more dystopian and authoritarian. I had a fantastic seat at a Morrissey concert--which was then canceled (in November). My dad has been in the hospital a lot, and frankly it's not looking great for him. I'm leaving the day after tomorrow to visit him for a week. I didn't get the promotion to full Professor that I earned. (I can/will apply again in September.)<br />
BUT.<br />
New green buds are swelling. My students this spring confirmed to me that I'm where I belong: teaching, helping people like myself to learn English. I've had doubts about that over the years, but right now I feel wonderfully sure and at peace. And ऐ भगवान, how very glad I am not to be an administrator of any kind. It would be constitutionally awful in the best circumstances, but with Oklahoma leading the country for the last six years in cuts to education, and no end of such in sight, ऐसा काम (aisa kaam/that kind of work) would kill me (perhaps literally).<br />
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I have plans for some massive learning of Hindi this summer, and for once they're specific and certain to produce results. I've loved watching Hindi movies for almost a decade now, and now I'm going to tap that power. It's not much trouble to keep a clipboard nearby, pause the movie, and write down words I want to look up and/or remember. Before, I'd just look up a word, make a mental note, and forget the word by day's end. I have about twenty good new vocabulary additions already, just beginning, and they're sticking! Amazon.com now has a channel called "Heera" (हीरा/diamond), which I've subscribed to: it offers Hindi and other regional Indian movies and shows for unlimited streaming at the insanely low price of $5 per month.<br />
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In case you're wondering: yes, Sultan lured me to the channel, and yes, it was the first movie I watched there. It was awesome! I mean, how great is this number?<br />
So there will be more Big Gora, coming regularly, as soon as I return from seeing Dad in Utah. चलें!</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-60006742441128830892016-12-20T13:10:00.001-08:002016-12-20T13:10:24.018-08:00Mujhe Dilli yaad aa raha hai<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">मुझे दिल्ली याद आ रहा है. [I'm remembering Delhi.]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times";">Four years ago this week, my wife and I arrived in Delhi and began exploring. On this particular day of 2012, we visited Chandni Chowk, definitely a highlight of the trip.</span><br />
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We marveled at the sensory intensity of the place: tightly packed, fast-moving crowds, twisting narrow lanes, a new packed little shop every few feet, something amazing to see everywhere you looked, calls to prayer, Hindi film songs over tinny speakers, chatting, street foods of all kinds, mosques, shrines, holy portraits, and insane electrical wiring! Like tourists, as I suppose we inescapably are, we rented a bicycle rickshaw manned by a polite young man speaking pretty good English.<br />
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He took us through, and around, and (I later realized) by arrangement, took us to a particular spice shop in the heart of the district. The shop was as packed and, well, <em>spicy</em> as you can possibly imagine and then some. We couldn't help buying something or other there, to take back to friends at home. At the end of our jaunt, our guide photographed me in the driver's seat.<br />
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These are some of my favorite photos, and memories, of my whole life. Add this one to the list, from our first full day in Dilli, of Bridget at a stone window of the Qutub Minar.<br />
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On Chandni Chowk day, we also visited the Jamma Masjid--the Friday Mosque--which stands right at the district's edge. What an inexpressibly gorgeous place it is. Just look...<br />
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I feel sickened, pretty much daily, here in the States, at hearing ignorant bigots angrily spewing their misinformation about Muslims. Dilli has a considerable Muslim population, particularly in this part of the city. We talked (or clumsily pantomimed) to many Muslim people right on their own turf, the Masjid for example, and they were helpful, sweet, welcoming, adorable, generous in every case in every moment. One man who, I gather, could not speak led us around the place. Somehow, between our questions--he seemed to understand our English pretty well--and his signs and nonverbal utterances, he gave us a guided tour. I was a little surprised by the way he threw his arm around Bridget for this photo, but it seemed companionable and not the least bit improper.<br />
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He dropped us off at a quiet corner of the Masjid where religious relics were kept. The man inside this little alcove showed us the prophet Mohammed's (peace be upon him) sandals and prayer beads, and a Koran many centuries old. These kind people, in short, showed us their dearest treasures, with smiles and respect.<br />
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Just for fun, notice how relatively huge the Big Gora is in this setting. Our rickshaw-wallah and guide are Bridget's size, which is over a foot shorter than me, and I had to bend almost double to see the holy relics.<br />
My chest hurts, remembering all this. I want to go back and stay.<br />
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Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-24544504789440119192016-06-08T10:23:00.004-07:002016-06-08T10:53:04.721-07:00Unnati karna sitar ke sath<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
[Making progress with the sitar]<br />
It's good to be back! Sorry to have been away so long!<br />
I'm working hard to learn the sitar. A friend from graduate school started teaching herself to play the saxophone, and began posting "Saxophone Friday" videos to record her progress. Inspired, I'm doing "Sitar Sundays." I have three so far, which I'm posting here newest to oldest. Together they total about three minutes.<br />
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Here's my problem. As far as I can make out, learning this instrument involves a series of great learning leaps. The first one is just figuring out how to hold it and yourself properly. This is a lot more complicated, and necessary, than you'd ever guess without trying. To make it sound right and even to keep from falling over, you have to put the big bottom gourd in the correct position <em>on top of</em> your bare foot, while you sit on the floor. The sitar must be at a 45-degree angle for you to see the music and/or to hold the frets. You must be sturdy and comfortable, or you will essentially be juggling the instrument rather than playing it. One of my musically talented friends told me that the great Sri Ravi Shankar himself warned George Harrison, "You will need three years to even learn how to hold it properly." Am I ahead of the game, then? Hah.<br />
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The next big leap is tuning. The sitar has twenty-three strings--count 'em, 23! I broke one, the not-unimportant second string, tightening it up. Then I broke two more trying to replace it. That third one just about broke my will to live. Finally, though, a few hours' worth of cursing and tinkering have showed me exactly how to do it--and it <em>must</em> be done according to a very exact series of steps. Now I'm afraid to ever tune that string again.<br />
I'm getting reasonably fluent with one-string tunes and exercises, or "paltas" as they're called. When you play a wind instrument, it takes a significant amount of time and effort just to produce a clean tone, one in which there's no squawking or breathiness. The sitar works similarly. You learn how to properly work the frets, which are quite different from Western-style guitar frets: sitar frets are metal, and you have to press down on them <em>hard</em>, with your left index finger on the peg <em>side</em> of the fret rather than on top of or between. Luckily for me, I guess, I never tried playing guitar, so I haven't had to unlearn guitar-style fret placement. When you use the left hand properly, you soon wear a crease right into the left index fingertip. The masters who make YouTube instructional videos have deep, solid creases, plus colossal calluses on the right index finger, which bears the "mizrab" (pick). I see not so much as a small callus on my left index finger, so clearly I need to play a whole lot more!<br />
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So now I'm coming up against the next huge hurdle: how in the world do I play <em>more strings</em>? Early on, I gathered from brief passing references in my two teach-yourself books:<br />
1) There are "drone strings," which as the name would indicate provide a kind of constant background harmonic. These are--I think?--the next two or three strings after the all-important first string.<br />
2) There are "chikar strings," which are strummed. The key first string is at the "bottom" of the instrument as it's held, most readily available to the mizrab-playing finger. The chikar strings, which would be all the strings <em>other</em> than first and drone, count down from the opposite side, the top. I remember from tuning that they cover the full tonal range: one is super-low, one is super-high, and there are a couple in between.<br />
Now that I have a tiny bit of fluency in simple one-string play, I'm wondering:<br />
1) How advanced will I have to be to start adding in these other elements, drones and chikars?<br />
2) Are these notated on the music? Or do people just improvise?<br />
3) How in the world am I going to learn all this on my own?<br />
About this third concern. Learning Hindi is in a sense much easier, because it's just not difficult at all to hear Hindi spoken. Put a Bollywood movie on Netflix, and voila. With the sitar, there seem to be innumerable lessons online, at YouTube, to get people started and playing at a beginner's level--then nothing. I barely feel qualified to say "I am playing the sitar": my instrument is gorgeous, complicated, and capable of producing amazing art; I am plinking out little one-string baby tunes on it. As David Foster Wallace said about most Americans' use of English: "It's like using a Stradivarius to hammer in nails." "You know nothing, Brian Cowlishaw."<br />
I'm humbled, and I'm doubtful about how far I can or will get--but I'll keep plinking away!</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-88004957828467439932016-03-06T17:11:00.001-08:002016-03-06T17:11:18.578-08:00Maine sitar bajata hoon!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
मैंने सितार बजाता हूँ ! (I play the sitar!)<br />
Well, sort of. I try. I took a few hundred dollars that would have gone towards a conference (which I just didn't have the heart to attend this year--long, boring story, so never mind why), and instead bought this beautiful sitar! Check it out...<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEpUG8v5Ui6meSQEBL-nzvxVDTh4_muxK6ZP0h3gxDd5XQ-kW3z_xp1lZwfoEbJCjIhrcg7DDe3pi_L9s2I7C1pz9mks9H1gtSwMrmW-w949Z-bM1pscmjfmgdJ3crMBjv7phwYCftLKE/s1600/12373281_10153726680131399_6437731180643436814_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEpUG8v5Ui6meSQEBL-nzvxVDTh4_muxK6ZP0h3gxDd5XQ-kW3z_xp1lZwfoEbJCjIhrcg7DDe3pi_L9s2I7C1pz9mks9H1gtSwMrmW-w949Z-bM1pscmjfmgdJ3crMBjv7phwYCftLKE/s320/12373281_10153726680131399_6437731180643436814_n.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
It came in this huge box! I am, as you know, a Big Gora, and this box comes up to my chest! Heavy, too. So I unpacked it, screwed on the smaller upper resonating bowl, and started goofing around with it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSiUlmDETx-J-oH7jqpFAR7t3T57fNIt4ROcmWpqFD5LYYiPDmW7DLiXULIWBT5iklRXL4m8lNsU63fUbVP7WMgGQD3GMTAbn10H7XyG-K0OK0rN8lYTtMBLWYnYW2TcDaYgvpsVv6NkE/s1600/11226038_10153726684211399_6785886899595117722_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSiUlmDETx-J-oH7jqpFAR7t3T57fNIt4ROcmWpqFD5LYYiPDmW7DLiXULIWBT5iklRXL4m8lNsU63fUbVP7WMgGQD3GMTAbn10H7XyG-K0OK0rN8lYTtMBLWYnYW2TcDaYgvpsVv6NkE/s320/11226038_10153726684211399_6785886899595117722_n.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
You can tell this is fresh out of the box in two ways. First, I'm sitting on a bench in nothing near the same ZIP code as proper sitar-playing position. One of the very first things I learned is how to sit, and it's not this: instead, sit on the floor or a fairly flat cushion, cross the legs with left foot underneath, and prop the sitar against the left foot and right, upper leg. Second, I'm holding it like a guitar--another big no-no. Any sitar player can tell you that you hold its strings/frets exactly 90 degrees from the floor; you should be looking at the strings that mark each fret from about a foot behind the instrument. Unlike with a guitar, you don't look at the strings--they're on the other side of the board from you.<br />
But what the hell, eh? As with learning Hindi itself, this is all about having a good time as I enjoy participating in Indian culture. I'm an amateur, etymologically meaning that I do it just for the love of it. What does it matter if I'm any good?<br />
I'm intrigued by the Indian music notation system. It's called "Sargam," an acronym for the first four notes. Just as Western music has "Do Re Mi Fa" and so on, Indian notes have names: "Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni Sa." There are three octaves, so the middle or base octave notes are just written as the (capital) letter without embellishment, whereas the upper octave places a dot over the letter and the lower, a dot below the letter. Thus, "S R G M" is all the notation you'd really need for those four middle-octave notes. Apparently--and I haven't gotten to this yet, in practice--sharps and flats, which is to say keys, are taken care of by tuning beforehand and/or by pulling a string to change the pitch. For now, I'm playing little scales and learning-the-notes and getting-used-to-the-notation-type exercises. I'll put up a short demonstration video as soon as I feel a little better about making that public.<br />
It's a gorgeous instrument, and very satisfying to play. It's also one of the most engrossing things I've ever done; when I'm concentrating, I lose myself completely, more so than playing a video game or reading a good book. There is so much to learn! I need to learn the complicated art of tuning all those main and sympathetic strings, the "chikar" strokes (strumming the bottom few strings during play), how to keep a "drone" going (the signature sound of the sitar), and of course gain some dexterity/skill at basic play. Here I go!<br />
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Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-68106598782743982012015-09-27T17:45:00.005-07:002015-09-28T07:02:20.239-07:00Dushman Ke Bare Mein<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I've had this notice up on my office bulletin board for five years now.<br />
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It says दुशमन नहीं है [dushman naheen hai/(literally,) enemy not is].<br />
I had just barely learned the alphabet at that point. Look at the last letter on the first line, and compare it to the first letter of the second. They're supposed to look the same. In print, in my Teach Yourself Hindi book, they look like the upper example; the lower is the more stylized way you see in handpainted signs. It would also probably be more elegant to take the straight vertical line out of "dushman" make it दुश्मन.<br />
This is one of the first attempts I'd ever made at a complete sentence. I see now what I didn't then: it's not. Word for word, it says "enemy not is." At the time, some soul-searingly horrible political stuff was happening in my department. Never mind all that; it's a long, boring story. But it left me feeling alone and pursued for things I never said or felt. These words--"dushman naheen hai"--came out unbidden, a kind of covert protest. They let me whisper, "You think I'm the enemy, <i>your</i> enemy; I'm not, and please don't think of me as one."<br />
What I thought I was saying here, and wanted to tell people but without buttonholing them and forcing the issue, was: "He [the officeholder, viz. I] am not the enemy." It amuses me now to see that it doesn't quite say that; there's no "He" or "I" in there, and how else could anyone tell I meant myself?<br />
What it actually says is, "There is no enemy"; "The enemy does not exist."<br />
I want to believe that. Now the sign gives me a daily reminder to choose to do so.<br />
In any case, it's not me and never has been.</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-1435653745109344262015-08-06T16:53:00.003-07:002015-08-06T17:02:12.675-07:00A New Direction and a New Favorite TV Show<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm happy to announce that I'm taking this blog in a different, more inclusive direction. Up to now, I've focused quite specifically on language-learning issues. But the more time I spend learning Hindi and enjoying Indian culture, the more I realize how deeply intertwined they are. For example, my wife and I are now watching the late-80s TV serial production of the Mahabharat; as each episode progresses, I gain a little more mental fluency with Hindi, a little more skill recognizing individual words, phrases, and grammatical word order. I refresh my memory of all the different, often formal/Sanskritic ways to say the same thing: किंतु (kintu) and परंतु (parantu), rather than the more modern पर (par) or लेकिन (lekin), all meaning essentially "but." So it makes sense to me to include my responses to Indian culture in this space. Frankly, I'm hoping this change will also noodge me to post more often and reach more readers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For this first "cultural" post, I want to tell you about my new favorite Indian TV show. As I discussed in an earlier post, I followed <i>Pavitra Rishta</i> for some time, but now it's gone off the air. I enjoy <i>Neeli Chatri Waale</i> even more!</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB4jVTdrK8YJzTSbLulqYhQbSimA283WyRyQ1vt6MDLul2z-z8v4-2Z0VY6BaXRDRt3g4t7sHr1D66xdMW243DKIAqKJDiVGYgKzqipeg1fPe1c-L_sYyAhEjrFcMVz-xugUlrtNnGfOU/s1600/showpage-b-371d9090d8ba1f2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="191" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB4jVTdrK8YJzTSbLulqYhQbSimA283WyRyQ1vt6MDLul2z-z8v4-2Z0VY6BaXRDRt3g4t7sHr1D66xdMW243DKIAqKJDiVGYgKzqipeg1fPe1c-L_sYyAhEjrFcMVz-xugUlrtNnGfOU/s320/showpage-b-371d9090d8ba1f2.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here is how Zee TV describes the show on its <a href="http://www.zeetv.com/shows/neeli-chatri-waale/" target="_blank">official web page</a>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"1.2 billion People pray to 330 million Gods every day, reason being people generally thank or blame God for whatever happens in their lives. There is a perennial search for God. We have all wondered at one point or another, what will happen if we come face to face with God one day? What will we ask of him? And one day, you actually meet God on earth. What if there are no miracles? What if God does not look the way you always imagined him to be? Rather than giving you answers, what if he has more questions for you? Questions that make you introspect and listen to your own inner voice. How will your life change? These are just some of the questions faced by Bhagwan Das, the protagonist of Zee TV's weekend fiction show 'Neeli Chhatri Waale powered by Vinod Appliances who has the privilege of meeting and befriending God. The show explores a unique relationship between man and God as his friend. Based on the philosophy of 'God is within us', 'Neeli Chhatri Waale powered by Vinod Appliances is a light-hearted drama highlighting Bhagwan Das and his relationship with Lord Shivaye who emerges in front of him - not as the hallowed, much revered avatar but as a young, smart, contemporary youth wielding a blue umbrella. Catch Bhagwan Das on a journey of listening to his inner voice through conversations with God."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is a wonderfully profound and unexpected question to focus a soap opera upon! But pardon me, please, while I disagree a bit with Zee TV's description. To describe the show as being "based on the philosophy of 'God is within us'" is to suggest that <i>the</i> fundamental premise of the show is different from what it is. This <i>sounds</i> like our humble hero Bhagwan Das is thinking deeply, meditating off by himself, "listening to his inner voice" <i>only</i>, not anyone else's. His first name, meaning "God," supports that interpretation. But the whole point of the show is that Shiva truly does exist, truly is Bhagwan-sahib's friend, and truly does talk with Bhagwan about his ordinary human problems. Shiva even tells Bhagwan regularly, in kindness, "You are my most beautiful creation."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This point is all-important: Bhagwan Das hears, sees, and talks with Shiva; that is the given circumstance upon which the whole show rests. Other people don't see or hear Shiva, but Bhagwan emphatically does. He's not an extraordinarily pious/religious man, and he's not delusional. Nor does the show ever explore these possibilities. God is not <i>only</i> within Mr. Das, who (actually) sees Shiva as a "young, smart, contemporary youth" wearing modern clothing, like so.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(Note how this quotation, too, is misleading in the same way described above. So is the hashtag phrase "#DilKiAwaaz": "voice of the heart" or "inner voice.")</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Once in a while we see Shiva in his classical form, as on the left below. But most often, he appears as on the right.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, ponder this for a moment: imagine Shiva is your friend, and you see him all the time. You can ask him anything. Would you not <i>listen</i>? This is the source of most of the show's humor: Bhagwan Das rarely listens before (comic, minor, temporary) damage is done. <i>Then</i> he'll sadly nod his head and take Shiva's advice, sure, but not until.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Bhagwan is thoroughly an आम आदमी (aam admi), "ordinary man." He invites light-hearted derision, with roughly an equal amount of sympathy. Look at him more closely with his family (and Shiva). He's chubby and not particularly handsome. His son--no pageant winner himself--openly displays disrespect. His father is exasperated with him. His wife looks aggravated enough to bounce the rolling pin in her left hand off his skull.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The atmosphere in his office, not pictured here, is no calmer: he has the moderately embarrassing job (for a proper middle-class urban Indian) of marketing and selling...underwear. His boss yells at him and/or threatens to fire him constantly. No wonder Bhagwan himself quite understandably looks heavenward for assistance with all this. Surely most viewers can relate to some of these circumstances.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So, Bhagwan Das, an ordinary man, miraculously has Shiva as a close friend. Who can say why? (It's not explained, just given.) He has an ordinary hectic life and an ordinary bickering family. He experiences ordinary troubles. In one short story arc, Bhagwan and his wife Bobby become irritated with each other. The husband is convinced that the wife must lounge around the house all day and waste money on luxury items; the wife is convinced that office life is nothing but chatting and coffee-drinking, followed by coming home to criticize her. Piqued, they vow to trade places for a month; the expected amusing blunders then follow--he can't manage the housework or make the money stretch far enough, while she can't stand the pressure at the office. In another story arc, Dad has a heart attack and lingers near death for several days in the hospital, while Bhagwan begs Shiva to spare him a few years more. These very common troubles keep the show relevant and relatable for its target middle-class audience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Bhagwan has Shiva's ear and assistance, yet he continually disregards Shiva's wisdom. Bhagwan <i>must</i> ignore Shiva's advice if this show is to work as an entertaining comedy. This is true for two reasons. First, if Bhagwan faithfully and humbly followed his divine friend's advice, the show would be essentially religious instruction. The clear message would be, in every moment of the show: "Like this most sensible man, follow Shiva's advice. This is how you do it. You may not be so fortunate as to have Mahadev in your presence, but you have the next best thing--this show. So listen and obey." Indian television already abounds in straightforward religious instruction. There are many "God-man" shows on the air, in addition to the numerous classical/mythological representations of the gods. For example, at Christmas 2012 I took this short film of a TV show (called just <i>Ganesh</i>, I think?) that mostly showed religiously themed conversations between Shiva and his son Ganesh.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Neeli Chatri Waale</i> airs among soap operas and other light entertainment. It markets itself to ordinary middle-class viewers. It's entertainment, not religion. It's purely entertaining (as opposed to instructive) only so long as Bhagwan ignores Shiva's necessarily wise advice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Second, the show's funniness depends upon Bhagwan's foolishness. You really have to see the show to believe how it milks <i>every little moment</i> for its humor. (You can find Hindi-language episodes, unsubtitled, on YouTube and here at the <a href="http://www.zeetv.com/shows/neeli-chatri-waale/" target="_blank">show's official website</a> under "Episodes.") Every line receives a double-take or funny look; every second line is accompanied by a "humorous" sound effect (exaggerated laughter, the "wah-wah" trombone sound that means "oops," etc.). Bhagwan invites mild, humorous derision nearly every moment by not listening to Shiva. Again, any of us would surely listen to Him if He were right there in front of us; so, when Bhagwan doesn't have enough common sense to do so, we can't help but join Shiva in laughing at him, shaking our head in amused disbelief: "Can you believe this silly human?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If you've clicked the link to the official <i>Neeli Chatri Waale</i> website already, you may have noticed the "Ask Shivaye" tab. Zee TV offers you the chance to have your own questions/problems addressed by Shiva! I tried it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I selected "I hate my job" for my example, though that's not true. It didn't seem realistic for me, at age 50, to choose the last possibility--"My parents are forcing me to pick a career of their choice"!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Shiva finally offered a solution--well, a nonspecific, impressionistic solution.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Apne dil ki awaaz suno, dheere dheere sab kuch samajh aa jayenga," computer-generated Shiva tells me: "Listen to your inner voice, [and] slowly you will understand everything."</span></div>
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Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-8647038216001764052015-03-02T11:16:00.000-08:002015-03-02T11:16:03.161-08:00Chal do...krpya<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
चल दो.<br />
[chal do/go away]<br />
I said it, and I'm not proud of doing so.<br />
Back when I first started falling in love with India, I started imagining going there; and when I imagined going there, I pictured one big fat greasy fly in the ointment. Namely, though I'm not at all wealthy by American standards, I would be by India's standards--so I'd be swarmed by people (I mostly imagined children, but why not adults also?) who are positively <em>crushed</em> by poverty. How could I say no, but then, how could I help everyone? There was no helping the problem: I <em>would</em> stand out, as a very white 6'4" American tourist, and I <em>would</em> seem wealthy, and actually be so relatively speaking, so I'd be in a pickle every time I went out in public. (I apologize for the selfishness built into this train of thought.)<br />
But when my wife and I went to Delhi, Agra, and Mumbai in 2012-13, this hardly happened at all. Mostly we encountered beggars at red lights in Delhi, one at a time and through the glass of the car window. We spent our time in monuments, restaurants, and middle-class establishments of various kinds, so we were never overwhelmed by crowds of the tragically poor as I imagined. Our driver and our travels insulated us.<br />During my recent trip (December 2014-January 2015), Oklahoma Study Abroad and my travel group ventured farther afield. We spent a couple of days in Pushkar in particular, and encountered a wider variety of people. This is where I learned to say "चल दो."<br />
We took a fantastic camel safari--a one-hour camel ride, beginning about sunset, during which we rode out into the desert. There a local group entertained us with some local music and dancing by firelight, accompanied by platters of delicious Rajasthani food. Anyway, the camel handlers included several children. One little guy in particular, about seven years old, I'm guessing, stuck to us with unbelievable tenacity. He mimed an eating motion, putting invisible food from his fingers into his open mouth, then holding out the open hand in our direction. He wore ragged, dirty clothes and no shoes. His face was dusty. He <em>would not give up</em>; he begged for a solid hour while the safari got set up. He stood looking at me, begging, for many minutes. I grew more and more uncomfortable. I had only 500-rupee bills on me (about $8.20 American each), and that seemed too much for the circumstances. I finally said the thing I'd heard our Indian guides say to the aggressive hawkers crowded around Amber Fort and Delhi's India Gate: "Chal do." Go away; get lost; scram.<br />
"चल दो." But I felt so bad saying it that I added, a couple of beats later: "क्रप्या" [krpya/please].<br />
"Get lost...please."<br />
भगवन मुझे माफ़ करें. [bhagwan maaf karein/may God forgive me.]</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-80867049839459653282015-01-23T20:02:00.002-08:002015-01-23T20:02:17.648-08:00Big Gora, Pukka Translator<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
One key milestone in any language learner's journey is translating, in the moment, without a dictionary, without hesitation, effectively. Spontaneously understanding and making oneself understood. Bridging the language gap in real time.<br />
During my first trip to India two years ago, I didn't have any single interaction that I can honestly say qualifies as that. But now I have!<br />
Let me make a brief observation or two here before I tell the story. (Granted, "the story" is probably only really dramatic and/or meaningful to me, but then I guess that's the nature of most blog writing, isn't it?) First, my travel group very sweetly and generously gave me a lot of credit for being able to read and speak Hindi. It felt kind of funny: I've been working on it for a few years now, but only now was I receiving any recognition for it--as if I'd offhandedly learned it on the plane ride over. My fellow travelers noticed, and congratulated me for, reading signs and talking with people (our drivers and guides) in what <i>I</i> know is the Hindi of a small child. Second, I can tell that my fluency is improving a lot, even if my vocabulary hasn't expanded much recently. I can speak in sentences, and understand them when others speak them, without having to think nearly as much as I used to about issues like word order and postpositions. I even worked in a couple of (I'm told) idiomatic phrases: "अलग-अलग" [alag-alag/separately] and "तंग करना" [tang karna/to harass or bother (literally, to make narrow)].<br />
The story. Very nearly all my attempts to employ Hindi were ones I chose. We had two guides with us most of the time, BP and Jeet, both native Hindi speakers and excellent speakers of English. Jeet, a Sikh 30-year-old with a vast collection of beautiful, spotless turbans, seemed to get a kick out of teaching me. When someone needed to speak with non-English-speaking locals, or our only-Hindi-speaking bus driver, BP or Jeet did it. One day, though, both of them were off on other errands. We were on our way to the Dilli Haat for some shopping, when suddenly someone in the back of the bus spotted a glasses-repair shop on a side road that we needed to visit. Busy Delhi streets have four parallel lanes: the two wide ones in the center for through traffic, plus a narrower lane on each side for closing in on individual shops and offices. My goal was to alert our driver as quickly as possible, so he didn't miss the turn onto the narrower street, that we wanted him to <i>turn around here</i> and <i>stop in front of that business over there</i>.<br />
<i>Turn around here</i> came out as "जाये यहाँ। कृप्या।" [jaie yahaan. krpya./Please go there. Please.] I made darned sure I used the respectful "आप" form, so the "कृप्या" was probably gratuitous, but better safe than sorry.<br />
<i>Stop in front of that business over there</i> came out as "ठहरिए यहाँ के सामने।" [thaharie yahaan ke samne/Please wait facing over there.] "ठहरिए" tumbled out, though I'm told "इंतज़ार करना" (literally, "to do waiting") is the more common way to say that. "के सामने" is closer to "facing," whereas "के आगे" [ke aage] would be a more accurate way to say "out front of."<br />
But hey, Anil just nodded his head and did exactly what I was <i>trying</i> to ask him to do. He never even looked confused. I give him full credit for reading the mind of a bumbling gora--but I'll also count this as my big moment as an English-to-Hindi translator!</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-21279127561420164372014-12-17T10:23:00.003-08:002014-12-17T10:23:59.744-08:00Back to India!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Next week I return to India! The only way I could be more thrilled would be if my wonderful wife were coming with me!<br />
I'm going for two weeks, leading a group of students and alumni from my university, along with trip organizer <i>extraordinaire</i> Christian Alyea from Oklahoma Study Abroad. We're hoping this will be the first India trip of many. Ideally, we'll do this every year, between fall and spring semesters when India is a bit less boiling hot than usual.<br />
We'll spend about a week in the Delhi area, including an overnight trip to not-that-far-away Agra. Then we have a couple of days in the south, in the Kochi area, traveling on a backwater boat and visiting a beach resort. We'll wrap up with a couple of days in Jaipur.<br />
Naturally, I'm working on my Hindi. I'm at that in-between, frustrating stage--which I'm still in with French--where I recognize most of the words, and the subject of the conversation, but I'm lagging considerably behind the speed of the chat with my comprehension.<br />
Here are a few phrases I'm working on, to say while I'm in India.<br />
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"This food is really delicious! Please give me some more!" [Ye khana bahut swadisht hai! Krpya mujhe kuch aur dijie!/ये खाना बहुत स्वादिष्ट है! कृप्या मुझे कुछ और दीजिए!]<br />
"Excuse me, where is the bathroom?" [Sunie, bathrum kahan hai?/सुनिए, बाथरुम कहाँ है?]<br />
"How much does this cost? Are you completely crazy?" [Iska daam kya hai? Kya aap bilkul pagal hain?/इस्का दाम क्या है? क्या आप बिलकुल पागल हैं?] (Note: this one amuses me. I use the respectful form of "you," "aap," though of course the content of the sentence would suggest the more familiar "tum.")<br />
"I want to live here. May I do that?" [Main yahi rahna chahta hoon. Kya main us karun?/मैं यही रहना चाहता हूँ. क्या मैं उस करूँ?]<br />
"How well do you like Pomeranian dogs?" [Kitne aapko kutte Pomerania se pasand hain?कितने आपको कुत्ते पोमेरानीअ से पसंद हैं?]<br />
"If I bring several cats with me, that's okay, right?" [Agar main kai billiyan mujhse laoon, ye bilkul thik hai, na?/अगर मैं कई बिल्लियाँ मुझसे लाऊं, ये बिलकुल ठीक है, न?]<br />
" I think I lost my passport. Now I can't go home. I will ask my wife to meet me here!" [Main sochta hoon ki mera pasport bhula. Ab main ghar nahin lautna sakta. Main meri patni se yahan mujhse milne punchunga./मैं सोचता हूँ कि मेरा पासपोर्ट भूला। अब मैं घर नहीं सकता। मैं मेरी पतनी से यहाँ मुझसे मिलने पूँछूँगा।]<br />
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If I do indeed come back, I'll tell you all about the trip and show some photos!</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-83976948286833896302014-08-07T09:37:00.005-07:002014-08-07T09:37:59.844-07:00Shuddh Hindi?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A few years ago, when I was just getting started learning Hindi, I started a Facebook page called "Hindi and Sanskrit Learners." The Sanskrit was there in the title because one very self-motivated grad student I knew wanted to learn it, and of course it's the mother of Hindi. I figured we could encourage and motivate each other.<div>
I had no idea then about what I know now: to a certain conservative type, that combination of words--"Hindi and Sanskrit Learners"--signals a whole worldview in shorthand, one that I find repugnant.</div>
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Let me back up to where I first began getting inklings about this whole thing. There's a wonderful memoir called <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Hindi-Coming-Another-Language-ebook/dp/B003K15ILC/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407426875&sr=1-1&keywords=dreaming+in+hindi" target="_blank">Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language</a></i>.</div>
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Katherine Russell Rich published this account in 2010. She describes moving to first one dinky backwater Indian town and then another and learning Hindi full-time, as a sort of extended timeout from life. If I could somehow take my wonderful wife, and our adorable pets with us, I'd love to do this myself. Rich says she became "near-fluent" in that time; she could completely understand any Bollywood film without subtitles. (Wow!) Each chapter contains a well-researched meditation on a related concept: how learning a second language influences our first; how adults learn vs. how children do; the relationship between Hindi and Urdu, and so on.</div>
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That last topic was introduced with a little anecdote. One day she took a bicycle rickshaw somewhere, and when she paid the driver, told him "शुक्रिया" [shukriya/thanks]. He glared and told her she should instead tell him "धन्यवाद" [dhanyavaad/thank you]. The former is considerably less formal, and therefore much more commonly used. An equivalent in English, as I understand it, might be something like "Thanks" vs. "I am grateful to you." His annoyance was at her use of an Arabic-root word rather than a Sanskritic one. Maybe an American equivalent would be expressing annoyance at someone for saying "Gracias," on the grounds that it's a "foreign word." To the driver, "shukriya" is a foreign word, "not Indian."</div>
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I did this reading a few years ago, and since then, I've learned more about this kind of Indian conservatism. There's a party, the BJP, that expresses the value of "India for Indians," meaning these "outside," "foreign" influences--American/Western values, Arabic/Urdu words, and religions other than Hinduism (especially Islam)--are simply not welcome. These "foreign" things "aren't really Indian."</div>
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The phrase used to describe this ideal as applied to language is "शुद्ध हिन्दी" [shuddh hindi/pure Hindi]. The phrase, and the attitude, has a lot in common with the sentiment expressed by, for example, the crowds of "real [white] Americans" currently screaming at buses full of desperate immigrant children. "Pure Hindi!" The attitude finds Bollywood Hindi, Muslim-influenced Hindi, impure, corrupt, not-Indian.</div>
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Back to my well-meaning Facebook page. To me, Hindi is Hindi. If it's in my dictionary and/or my Teach Yourself book, it's Hindi. I don't know (though now I'm starting to) whether a given word's roots are Sanskrit or Arabic; it's all new to me, all equally not-my-mother-tongue. Also, I consciously try to live an inclusive, tolerant attitude: a Hindu and a Muslim are equally my siblings. In fact, one of the reasons I love India and her culture so much is the frequently-expressed ideal of diversity.</div>
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About a year ago, I guess as a result of improved search capabilities on Facebook, some "shuddh Hindi" folks started joining the page. They thought because of my title, "Hindi <i>and Sanskrit</i> Learners," that I was one of them. Sanskritic Hindi only; away with those filthy Urdu words. More joined. One poster began encouraging members to join his other, "more Sanskritic" page instead. Then someone began posting, almost daily, subtly pro-Hindu (and anti-anything else) religious messages with old-fashioned Sanskritic wording. The page had become its own entity, one I didn't like or support now though I'd started it.</div>
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So I left it. Let the "shuddh Hindi" folks talk to each other without me.</div>
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The attitude makes me sad. I love <i>all</i> of India, all her languages, all her cultures, all her diversity, सब कुछ भारतिय [sab kuch bhaaratiy/everything Indian].</div>
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Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-15857126358228578622014-03-18T10:16:00.001-07:002014-03-18T10:16:21.216-07:00Dhire dhire!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
धीरे धीरे!<br />
That means, essentially, "slowly, slowly," or maybe "gradually" or "a little bit at a time." I think anyone who's ever studied another language has that response all the time: "Please just slow down a little!" Apparently linguists have found that there's no significant difference in the respective speeds at which different languages are spoken; but of course, the languages you don't know as well and struggle to keep up with seem to move lots faster. One's native tongue has to be spoken super-superfast to seem like it's going that speed--like in the old Federal Express commercials.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeK5ZjtpO-M" target="_blank">1970s Federal Express Commercial</a><br />
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Nevertheless, I blame Shah Rukh Khan for the high speed at which Hindi barrels toward me.<br />
Maybe if I knew more about Indian popular entertainment I'd have additional guilty parties to name, but for now I blame him! In several of his movies, especially everyone's sentimental favorite Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, he adopts a persona that is goofy and hyperactive.<br />
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He never stops moving, twitching, mugging; he speaks a mile a minute. See this, for example.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSkptlJZDsg" target="_blank">SRK in DDLJ</a><br />
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He's still one of the world's biggest movie stars, so he was bound to be copied. Uday Chopra in particular seems to be channeling hyper-SRK most of the time. It comes across (to me) not as funny and appealing--just as hyper and annoying.<br />
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Maybe that's why Uday Chopra hasn't made many movies lately--no one wants to listen to him!<br />
I've become a fan of the Indian soap opera Pavitra Rishta. I checked out several, and this one (for me) has the best combination of elements I'm looking for: things actually happen (as opposed to one American soap I watched for about a year just out of morbid disbelief in what I was seeing--Passions; any simple conversation there could be repeated and rehashed for weeks); moment-to-moment implausibility is held to a minimum, by soap opera standards; and most importantly, it features current everyday Hindi that I can use to practice and improve my fluency. (I also, by the way, like Qubool Hai, but it features a lot of Urdu, so it's not as useful.)<br />
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A longish digression on Pavitra Rishta: the show did something very strange a few months ago, something I'm still trying to process. The man and woman on the far left and right of this picture were (in, yes, one of the more implausible elements) supposed to be husband and wife, parents of the female behind them. (The two women look the same age to me.) The husband in back--Arun, was it?--was an aggravating hothead, always picking fights with his wife. The older and younger couples were the main characters, then there was also a major subplot in which the older couple's adopted son was frighteningly stalking a beautiful young doctor. This doctor was engaged to marry someone else, but the stalker "knew" she was "destined" to be his, so he would never be turned away. Anyway, the stalker apparently kidnapped the pretty young doctor, killed her in an accident (?), and ran away. Cut to: it's now 20 years later, just like that. There's no warning or explanation, it just is. (Despite the fact that cell phones and other prominent markers of technology were current with ours now, 20 years ago, and in the new timeline still are.) Somehow this crazy stalker guy, still alive and well in Mumbai despite his horrible alcoholism, has five kids but no (living?) wife, including a beautiful 20something daughter whose love life is at center stage.<br />
But get this. Said daughter looks <i>exactly like</i> Archana, the implausibly-young-looking mother pictured above, did those twenty years ago, although there's no blood relation or even contact between them. (For now.) Even the alcoholic stalker was only Archana's <i>adopted</i> son. Archana is now old, grey, and tired, and lives with her husband (who did <i>not</i> visibly age) somewhere in Canada. The show's focus stays on the circle of people around the young daughter in Mumbai, named Ankita, with occasional brief reminders that Archana and her family are still out there, much older now.<br />
Ankita is married to a "mad genius" named Naren. For reasons just now beginning to be explored, he has a persistent delusion that his wife's name is Ahana, and he always calls her that. She'd married him for his money, to help her family, which was socially and financially devastated by the drunken father's perpetual bad behavior; however, Ankita/Ahana has now fallen in love with Naren, living up to the Indian ideal "Marriage first, <i>then</i> love."<br />
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Now, at last, to the point: Naren is a fast talker to rival the Federal Express guy! Check him out here, especially at about the 1:00 mark.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI7Yi-xKgeA" target="_blank">Naren talks fast on Pavitra Rishta</a><br />
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Look what you've done, SRK! Just LOOK at what you've done!<br />
धीरे धीरे!<br />
And शुक्रिया भगवान को लिखित भाषांतर के लिए! [shukriya bhagwaan ko likhit bhaashaantar ke lie/thank God for subtitles!]</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-65877826751001273282014-01-07T09:13:00.002-08:002014-01-07T09:13:49.570-08:00Chalte chalte<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
First, let's get this out of the way: I didn't get the Fulbright for fall 2014. I spent about a week feeling very depressed, then another two coming out of it very gradually. Damn. That was going to be my excuse/occasion/motivation to work super-hard on my Hindi in 2014; now I'll just have to do it for its own sake!<br />
One thing I'm amused by about Hindi, which actually it shares with English, is the repetition (or echo/rhyme) of words, and the use of two similar words together, for effect. Think how often we do this in English:<br />
Hustle and bustle, wear and tear, willy-nilly, shilly-shally, kitty cat, puppy dog, tick-tock (also used in Hindi), and so forth.<br />
One really common instance is चलते चलते [chalte chalte/gradually, over time]. Here it is in one of my all-time favorite Bollywood numbers, from Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi: it's "Phir Milenge Chalte Chalte" [see you later, down the road].<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33zcfmqTNi4" target="_blank">Phir Milenge Chalte Chalte</a><br />
The wonderful (and earlier-posted) song "Dard-e-disco" includes लम्हा लम्हा [lamha lamha/from moment to moment].<br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrQA-w8s-uc#t=32" target="_blank">Dard-e-disco</a><br />
Here are a few more I've learned that I especially like:<br />
अलग अलग [alag alag/different-different, separately]<br />
एक एक [ek ek/one each]<br />
कौन कौन [kaun kaun/which various people]<br />
बड़ा बड़ा [baraa baraa/great big]<br />
मीटिंग-शीटिंग [meeting-sheeting/ meeting or anything of the kind. This is an example, too, of the vast potential of echo words to convey mocking. That usage is very common in English-language novels with Hindi-speaking characters; they import this tendency into English, all the time.]<br />
नौकर-चौकर [naukar-chaukar/servant of some kind (the words both mean "servant"]<br />
गप-शाप [gap-shap/idle chatter, gossip. This approaches to onomatopoeia, I think--kind of like saying, "Blah blah blah."]<br />
सब हैम लोग तालियां बजाइए [sab ham log taliyaan bajaie/let's all clap hands] for repeating words in Hindi!</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-45229495800555658572013-11-26T11:00:00.002-08:002014-03-18T14:12:18.418-07:00Kya main thik se bol raha hoon?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Am I speaking correctly? क्या मैं ठीक से बोल रहा हूँ? [kya main thik se bol raha hoon?]<br />
At this stage of learning Hindi, I'm asking myself this all the time. I need a native speaker whom I can ask these questions constantly by my side.<br />
For example, in my question above, here are all the little grammar and diction questions I have to ask myself, and am forced to answer the best I can, solo:<br />
1) The *<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Hindi-Teach-Yourself-Language/dp/007176609X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385484917&sr=1-1&keywords=teach+yourself+hindi" target="_blank">book</a>* I'm using says I should most often begin questions with "kya" [क्या] or the other question words, कैसे, कौन, कहाँ, क्यों, and so on. But do actual Hindi speakers drop it habitually in everyday usage? I get that impression from the Hindi TV and movies I watch.<br />
2) Would "ठीक" or "ठीक से" (thik or thik se) be correct grammatically? I *think* that "ठीक" is just used as an adjective--right?<br />
3) I still need to slow down and think of all the verb parts: Let's see, the root of बोलना is बोल, and I use that rather than the imperfect बोलता because I want to indicate I am speaking right now rather than habitually ("I am speaking" [main bol raha hoon/मैं बोल रहा हूँ] as opposed to "I speak"); then "raha hoon," masculine of रहना + हूँ (rather than + है, third person, the most common form).<br />
This is a lot of mental calculation happening in half a second! Just to ask if I'm speaking correctly--about which I'm rarely sure! It's definitely a mental challenge that I'll continue as long as I'm learning Hindi.<br />
I was thinking particularly about getting my Hindi exactly right at the recent Diwali celebration in Tulsa. Over the summer, the India Association of Greater Tulsa sponsored a writing contest for adults and children on the topic, "Why I Love India." I was deeply honored to have my essay, "Falling in Love with India," chosen for the adult first-place prize. I received that news the first weekend of November, with the celebration on the ninth.<br />
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On the drive up, I composed sentences in my head, in case I happened to be handed a microphone:<br />
"बहुत धन्यवाद इस भेंट के लिए!" [Bahut dhanyavaad is bhent ke lie!/Thank you very much for this gift!]<br />
"मैं भारत से बहुत प्यार करता हूँ." [Main Bharat se bahut pyaar karta hoon/I love India very much.]<br />
(By the way, it's always mystified me that it's so difficult to say "I love X" in Hindi. It's one of the first things we learn in any other language, right? But in Hindi you have to say, literally, "I India with much love doing am.")<br />
Playfully, if I were to receive a compliment from the IAGT president Santanu Das, with whom I'd spoken on the phone: "आप बिलकुल मालिक हैं." [Aap bilkul maalik hain/You (respectful) are totally the boss; roughly, "You're the man.")<br />
Fortunately for everyone, I was not handed a microphone. 8)<br />
Here I am receiving the award/recognition:<br />
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I don't mind a little mispronunciation of my name under the circumstances!<br />
Anyway, on this issue of getting my Hindi not-quite-right: I keep flashing back to a wonderful <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Me-Talk-Pretty-One-Day/dp/0316776963/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_pap?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385486700&sr=1-1&keywords=me+talk+pretty+one+day" target="_blank">book</a> by David Sedaris called Me Talk Pretty One Day. That title is how he figures his attempt to say "One day I will speak beautiful, fluent French" must sound to native French speakers. The words may be more or less accurate, but it's those little nuances that turn the latter sentence into the unintentionally funny one. Someday… एक दिन? कुछ दिन? कभी? [Literally: ek din/one day? kuch din/some day? kabhi/sometime?]<br />
P.S. Thank God, the Hindi transliterator, which has been nonfunctional for a couple of months, is back in order here on Blogspot. I was forced to use Shabdkosh.com in a way it wasn't really built for, to get transliterations; it's much easier not to leave this page.<br />
P.P.S. Still no word on the Fulbright. Insert the Hindi curse of your choice here.<br />
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Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-17977713303289913382013-10-03T13:03:00.001-07:002013-10-07T09:34:33.391-07:00Main haule-haule paagal ban raha hoon<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
That ^ is to say: I'm gradually going crazy. It has been distracting me from my Hindi study, blast it. Here's the story.<br />
I applied for a Fulbright research/teaching scholarship this year. I worked on the application over the summer, including soliciting letters from academic friends/colleagues: my department chair (to vouch for my teaching), a dear friend associated with the big conference I go to every year, and an Indian-American friend from another academic department (to vouch for my serious personal and academic interest in India). The whole packet was due August 1, but I turned it in by mid-July. (Somewhere I'd read a sentence that suggested the awards committee would begin reviewing applications as they came in--rather than after the Aug. 1 deadline--so I got it in early. I can't find that sentence now in any of the material, and half-suspect I imagined it.) I was asked to name two universities I'd like to work at, so I named schools in places I most fervently wish to go: Banaras Hindu University, on the shores of the Ganges River (!), and the University of Delhi. If I were to receive one of the (as far as I can make out) 62 such scholarships, I'd teach and study in India from August to December of 2014.<br />
So what's the problem, you ask? If you ask this, then आपके पास बहुत भाग्य है [aapke paas bahut bhaagya hai/you're very lucky]: you're not afflicted with an obsessive personality. Every time I sit down to study I run through the whole catalogue of fretting questions, which I've been counting out like a rosary for almost three months now:<br />
What do you suppose my odds are? How many people sign up for those 62 scholarships? Is that even the right number? What if it's like 10?<br />
I wonder if my being an American gora (as opposed to an NRI) will help, or hinder, or not at all affect my chances at this? Do you suppose they're looking for people who already have lots of connections at Indian universities, or would they be seeking to forge new ones instead?<br />
Am I going to be really disappointed if I don't get this? Probably so, but how can I help being emotionally attached to something I want so badly?<br />
If I don't get to go, will I be able to find out how to improve my chances next time without being one of Those People? You know, the kind of person who wants to know how to get his grade on the next assignment up from a 97% to 100?<br />
WILL THEY PLEASE GET BACK TO ME so I know how urgently I need to study!?<br />
The Fulbright website says that those applications due August 1 will receive notification "between October and November." Do you even need to ask whether I've been checking my email hourly since Tuesday morning, Oct. 1st?<br />
There was one small bit of news that at least isn't bad. I got this email from the program director:<br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dear Brian Cowlishaw,<br />I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to let you know that your application for the Fulbright US Scholar Program is currently under review. We have posted the <a href="http://www.cies.org/us_scholars/us_awards/Notification-Timeline.htm">notification timeline</a> on our website. In my experience, you can expect to receive the peer review decision in late fall (likely between mid-November and early December). Pending the peer review outcome, final notifications are sent in the spring.<br />Best wishes,<br />[etc.]</span><br />
This came September 17. I interpret it to mean that I made a preliminary cut that weeded out those who are simply not qualified or didn't turn in a full application. But did you catch that: "BETWEEN MID-NOVEMBER AND EARLY DECEMBER"!!?? ए भगवान [e bhagwaan /oh, God]!<br />
तो मैं इंतजार कर्ता हूं [to main intzar karta hoon/so I wait].<br />
If you can spare a moment, please do this for me: send out into the universe the helpful wish, "अच्छा भाग्य, मेरे दोस्त!" ["accha bhaagya, mere dost"/"good luck, my friend"). You may help this fond wish--to live and work for a time in India--come to pass!</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2614068605526796888.post-85928565353479585222013-08-22T14:37:00.002-07:002013-08-22T14:37:52.529-07:00Practice, practice, practice!; or, a new stage of the journey<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
You probably know the old joke. I used to (rather dickishly, I acknowledge) tell it all the time when I played EverQuest and someone would ask, for example, "How do you get to Faydwer?"<br />
Q: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?<br />
A: Practice, practice, practice!<br />
I know, terrible. It's also the most obvious learning principle in the world; however, obvious as it is, I--and maybe you too?--need to learn the truth of it over and over.<br />
That's what this summer has been about for me हिंदी सिखने में [hindi sikhne mein/in learning Hindi]: learning for the five-hundredth time the value of "practice, practice, practice." That is, अभ्यास, अभ्यास, अभ्यास.<br />
I want to tell you the details about this for two reasons: so you don't get down on yourself if you don't adhere to a steady, rigid learning regimen; and so you can learn from my imperfections. When I started learning Hindi three years ago, there was a lot of turmoil and angst at my job; studying Hindi was a peaceful escape from all that. I studied religiously, every day for an hour minimum. I learned the alphabet quickly, then spent a lot of time just enjoying drawing the letters. It felt more like an art project at times than like learning a language. I completed the exercises in my book (see the first post for more), memorized the vocabulary, and listened to the podcasts. Everything about the language was brand new, so every tiny thing I learned felt like a big bonus. There's something intoxicating about knowing, "Two months ago I didn't know how to say <i>anything</i> in this language, but now I know ____!" Anything in that blank is cause for celebration. After about six months of that, though, my devotion flagged: I got busy, and/or frustrated by forgetting what I'd just learned, and/or tired. You may know how that goes: steady enthusiasm and total adherence to a regimen are hard to maintain for very long. They're fragile. (See also: jogging.)<br />
I steadily progressed, one way and another, until Christmas 2011. At that point, my wife and I were heading to India for three weeks! I was eager to try out my baby-talk Hindi भारत में [Bharat mein/in India (itself)]. Instead, abruptly, shockingly, we were sent home. We've both traveled many times to Europe, where Americans do not need visas (only passports); we'd checked online, and were mistakenly told that we didn't need a visa for India, either. As all NRIs surely know, though, <i>we did</i>. So, visaless, we were taken out of the line in Newark for the flight to Delhi. We tried to get a visa in New York City, but that didn't work either--so we went home, shocked and angry and depressed. I believe I said--and definitely felt--"F**K INDIA!" After a couple of weeks I recovered enough just to loathe the visa-granting process and all those involved in it, rather than the nation as a whole.<br />
But--that hurt a lot. <i>A lot</i>. I just didn't feel up to studying Hindi for at least half a year after that nightmare. Not a bit. And when I did finally resume studying in summer 2012, I wasn't quite as steady and dedicated as I'd been at first. Who knew if we'd ever make it to India? What would stop us next time? बहनचोद सरकार! [behnchod sarkaar/sisterblanking government!]<br />
Thank God, Bridget and I did finally make it to India for a beautiful three weeks between December 2012 and January 2013. More on that in future posts!<br />
So at the beginning of summer 2013, mathematically speaking, I'd studied Hindi for nearly two years. Realistically speaking, it may be stretching to say I had a full year under my belt. The good news is, this summer my Hindi leveled up rapidly. It's been incredibly satisfying.<br />
Earlier, I had worked quickly, and shakily, through the first 16 chapters of my book. This summer, I went through those 16 chapters again. And again and again and again. I also listed to the podcasts repeatedly until I could remember each chuckle, audible breath, and hesitation from the speakers. I'm now at a point that is equal parts frustrating and exciting. I can legitimately say a lot of things in Hindi that I might say in English, without needing to look anything up. For example:<br />
"मैंने बहुत अच्छा किताब पढ़ रहा हूँ." [Maine bahut acchaa kitaab padh rahaa hoon/I'm reading a really good book.]<br />
"बिल्ली को मक्खन न खाने देना." (<--actually a sentence right from my book) [Billi ko makkhan na khaane dena/Don't let the cat eat the butter.] (We have a butter-obsessed cat, so this does come up in real life.)<br />
"प्रिय, मैं तुमसे प्यार करता हूँ ." [Priya, main tumse pyaar karta hoon/Darling, I love you.]<br />
I can practice much of the time now in my head--put everyday thoughts like these into Hindi.<br />
I was able to translate this page from chapter 14, only looking up two or three words:<br />
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The frustrating part comes--frequently enough--when I find I simply don't know enough words. I need to expand my vocabulary.<br />
The next stage of my Hindi-learning journey will involve two big tasks: learning new material, now that I feel pretty solid with what I've learned so far; and learning more words!</div>
Brian Cowlishawhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07694434377543214367noreply@blogger.com0