Blowin' In The Wind

I am flying to Calcutta today

I am flying home from Singapore to Calcutta (Kolkata) today. I will meet my wife, whom I haven't seen since she went back to teach in her college in Calcutta at the end of June after spending five weeks with me in Singapore.

And I will be seeing my son for the first time in more than a year. We last met when he spent his summer holidays in Calcutta last year. We chat online almost every day, but he has been at his college in America while I have been working in Singapore. Now he is in Calcutta. He flew home in August after spending most of his summer holidays completing a project in his college.

He isn't returning to his college in America for the fall semester.

He will be spending the next three months at a university in Britain instead under a "Study Abroad" scheme popular in his college.

My wife and I will be accompanying our son to Britain just as we went with him to America when he enrolled in college two years ago. We will be flying from Calcutta to London in the first week of October. My wife and I will return to Calcutta at the end of October.

My son will return to Calcutta in December. He and his mum will be spending Christmas and New Year together before he returns to his college in America.

This will be my last post till I return to Singapore in November.

Of course, I am looking forward to being with my wife and my son. It is she who wanted to accompany him to Britain. He insisted he could take perfect care of himself. But she didn't want him to travel alone.  She also loves Britain. It may be partly because she teaches English.

Times(de)Select

This is the best news I have heard in a long time. The New York Times, my favourite newspaper, will be free again. It's dropping TimesSelect, the pay section, from tomorrow. Welcome back to the free world, Paul Krugman, Nicholas Kristof, Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman. It's no reflection on them that readers will no longer have to pay to read them. The fact is, it's difficult for even the best writers to get people to pay to read them online.

I don't know whom to thank: The New York Times or Rupert Murdoch. After all, the New York Times is dropping the subscription model only after Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch, of realised, the subscription model doesn't work -- at least for a general newspaper -- and scrapped the  The Times Online fees a long time ago.

That the New York Times was able to continue TimesSelect for two years, attracting 227,000 subscribers who paid $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year to read the pay site, which generated a revenue of $10 million a year, says something about the Times' immense popularity. 

Meanwhile, in Singapore ...

The irony is, I first stumbled on the news on a partial pay site, the Straits Times online. Though in Singapore, I haven't read this Singapore newspaper for more than a week now. Usually, I head straight to the New York Times and the Guardian when I go online. But I decided to check out the Straits Times online this morning and that's where I saw the headline: New York Times to end paid Internet service. After that, of course, I ignored all the Singapore news to concentrate on this really BIG news. For if the New York Times can't operate a subscription model, almost nobody else can.

Ah yes,the Straits Times is a partial pay site. Readers have to pay to read some of its stories online. But I wonder who does -- except homesick Singaporeans languishing abroad, local nerds who don't want old newspapers piling up in their homes (and the Straits Times can be monstrously fat with all the ads it gets), and analysts and researchers who for some reason might want to know more about Singapore.

But what they get is more spin than news. The Straits Times isn't the New York Times or the Washington Post. And most of the news one can possibly expect to get about Singapore is available for free at the Channel NewsAsia site. (Unless it's something to do with maids or mistresses, when one has to read the tabloid New Paper.) But the Straits Times publishes what news and views it can, and there are people still willing to pay to read it online. I wonder, for how long?

Indira Gandhi

Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi by Katherine Graham

I just finished reliving my school and college days, reading Katherine Frank’s biography of Indira Gandhi, who was India’s prime minister almost throughout that era.  Any nostalgia I feel for those days evaporates when I recall the Indian newspaper front page headlines of that time, extolling Moscow and the non-aligned movement and warning against the “foreign hand” (that is, America ). Indira Gandhi was undoubtedly popular for a long time. Spirited, courageous, cultured, artistic, she had many admirable qualities. But I wouldn’t want her back as a leader. Nor her father, Jawaharlal Nehru.

He might not have been authoritarian like his daughter. But they were both British-educated leftist patricians who smothered India in a protectionist cocoon in the name of nationalism and achieving self-sufficiency while they themselves travelled far and wide in pursuit of their own agendas. It is no surprise that they were drawn to the Soviet Union and the non-aligned movement whose leaders tended to dominate their countries.

Indira Gandhi had genuine grievances against America. She had to devalue the Indian rupee by more than 50 percent under American pressure when she visited President Johnson seeking aid after drought and famine ravaged the Indian economy. Later, she failed to persuade President Nixon to stop the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh. Instead, he sent the US Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate her when she intervened in Bangladesh in 1971. Never mind that Pakistan struck first, bombing Indian air bases. Never mind that millions of Bangladeshi refugees were pouring into India to escape the genocide. Nixon remained hostile to India. It was only then that India sealed a military alliance with the Soviet Union. The US was already committed to Pakistan.

But the problem started with her father. Jawaharlal Nehru’s foreign policy was quixotic, to say the least. He preached solidarity with China, for which he was duly rewarded when China attacked India in the 1962 border war. He preached non-alignment but was friendly to China, Ho Chi Minh and the Soviet Union. It was President Roosevelt who urged the British to give up India. Yet, Nehru never built up a close relationship with any US president.

Both Nehru and Indira Gandhi felt more comfortable in London than in Washington. Blame it on their British education. Though Nehru had been beaten and jailed by the British during the Indian independence movement, yet he shared their prejudices. The Americans apparently were brash, crass, materialistic. Nehru was not even impressed by President Kennedy. Indira Gandhi later made fun of President Reagan. But she enjoyed a warm relationship with the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. It is telling that in her early days she sometimes thought of leaving politics and moving to England.

Katherine Frank relates all this in intimate detail in her biography of Indira Gandhi. It is balanced and well-written. The book gives a marvellous picture of the entire Nehru family starting from her grandfather’s time. We see her as a girl, a young woman in love, her conflicting feelings for her father and her husband, her fierce maternal instinct which would tarnish her final years.

I wouldn’t want her back as a leader, but there is so much to admire about her. Beautiful and spirited, she was certainly not lacking in courage. Consider the manner of her death. She was shot dead by two of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. They said they wanted revenge because she had desecrated their holiest shrine. (She had ordered the army into the Golden Temple in Amritsar to deal with Sikh extremists fighting for an independent homeland.) Commentators wondered why she still employed Sikh bodyguards when their loyalty might be suspect. But that was Indira Gandhi. She couldn’t be seen discriminating against Sikhs. “I am India’s leader,” she said.

The Highwayman

Reading brings such unexpected pleasures. I was reading The Fallen, a whodunnit by T Jefferson Parker, when I came across The Highwayman, a poem I had last read in school.

It was such a surprise finding this romantic ballad in a hard-boiled cop story set in modern-day America.

I have read no other poem by Alfred Noyes ((1880-1958). The English poet was too old-fashioned to be taken seriously by critics who admired TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Dylan Thomas and other more modern poets. But he did teach English literature at Princeton from 1914 to 1923, according to Wikipedia.

The 18^th century England described in the poem couldn’t be more different from dusty Calcutta (Kolkata), where I went to school on a double-decker bus or a rattling tramcar. But the poem is so vivid that reading it was almost like watching a period drama, with the highwayman riding to meet his beloved innkeeper’s daughter in the dead of night.

From Alfred Noyes to Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson

Coming across the poem in a modern-day American crime story made me think of the other Highwayman –- of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. The indomitable highwayman who is hanged, killed, buried but still lives on. The highwayman who sings:

I fly a starship across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
And I'll be back again, and again and again and again and again.

There's idealism and poetry in the lyrics. This video shows Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson in concert.

But The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes is a genuine ballad, romantic and tragic. Here’s the first verse of the poem which I found on the Internet:

THE wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
    The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
        The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
        And the highwayman came riding—
                          Riding—riding—
        The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

And it gets better as it goes along. It's a long poem and doesn't have any profound message, but it tells a touching story and reads beautifully. Click here to read the complete poem.