Shonakaka

Posted on by Moni Basu
Shonakaka with me,  (from right), my cousin Jayanta, my brother, Shantanu,
my cousins Sudip and Suman at our grandfather’s house  in Kolkata. Circa, 1968.
The last time I saw Shonakaka, I knew he was ill.
Gone was the mirth; his enormous zest for life reduced to a meager smile. At a family gathering in New Delhi last December, he could hardly eat a thing.
Shonakaka was suffering from renal failure and had to be most careful about what he put in his belly, especially foods high in phosphorous. His son — and my cousin — Ronny was not pleased his father had put a heaping spoon of daal on his plate.
If you knew Shonakaka at another time in his life, you would hardly believe my words.
He was always the boisterous one; the one who loved to eat, drink and make merry. “Live life king size,” he always said. At my cousin Suman’s wedding in California, Shonakaka danced atop Suman’s brand new Acura Integra.  We laughed, amazed at Shonakaka’s energy, though, perhaps, Suman was a tad worried about dents and scratches on his shiny car.
Shonakaka as a young man.
Unfair then that at a fairly young age, Shonakaka was forced to adopt a curtailed regimen and give up things that he loved. Cruel even.
He was my father’s youngest sibling. Kaka means father’s younger brother in Bengali. And Shona means gold or someone very precious. It used to be the norm to have a naming convention so as to avoid calling elders by their first names. That was considered disrespectful.
Shonakaka was born Ranjan Kumar Basu on July 8, 1942 in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. He was 18 years younger than my father and grew up as the baby in a family of five boys and three girls.
Now, within the span of a few months, that generation of my father’s family is down to just a brother and sister still living. Everyone else, including my father, is gone.
Many of my friends in America may not understand the pull of an uncle or aunt.
I was raised in an extended family system in which my grandfather’s house was occupied at various times by various members of the family. That meant Shonakaka often stayed in one of the many bedrooms in the house.
Shonakaka holding me. I was about a year old.
When I was a baby, he made me cry and took a photograph of me wailing. Just to be contrary, he said. Why should I be happy in every shot?
From his travels abroad, he brought us back chocolates and other goodies that were non-existent in India in the 1960s and early ‘70s. He regaled us with stories of his travels – each adventure made grander with Shonakaka’s unique infusion of enthusiasm and zeal.
Once, he started growing chickens on the roof. My brother and I raced up the stairwell every morning to see how many eggs we could retrieve. And in the backyard, he built a tank to farm tilapia so we’d have the freshest fish.
Shonakaka (center) at a dinner at my parents’ house
in Kolkata in the late 1990s.
It was understood that Shonakaka would fix the menu for family weddings and other festive events. I’ll always have images in my head of my two youngest uncles breaking into a pot of syrupy sweets before they even made it into the kitchen.
After he married my aunt, they lived for a while on the ground floor of the family house. It was there that my cousin Bideesha — Ronny’s elder sister — was born. I often babysat her with my brother and our housekeeper, Shantidi, when Shonakaka and Kakima went out with friends.
Shonakaka was not far from home when he was attacked on the streets with acid and lived the rest of his life with scars. But he always rose above his woes. He never let anything interfere with living life to its fullest.
Until recently, when his health began to fail him.
Shonakaka with his daughter, Bideesha, in Delhi last
December. That was the last time I saw him.
I’d not seen him in a couple of years when we met last December. He was not even 70 yet but looked frail. He’d lost weight and suddenly, he appeared to me just like my grandfather. At the time, my aunt in California was in her last days of battle with cancer. It was then that I realized how those I loved in India were going away, how I was losing the links that kept drawing me back all these years.
The finality of death brings with it a host of regrets. I always hear people say, I wish I had done this and I wish I had done that. Yes, I have my regrets regarding Shonakaka. I wish I had visited more in recent years. I wish we had talked more on the phone. But I am glad for what I had with him. Glad that I made the trip to Delhi to see him in what turned out to be the very last time.
And that he was still smiling then.

Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou? At the arena in Verona, of course

Posted on by Moni Basu
The Arena in Verona’s Piazza Bra
I’d been up for many, many hours – too many to count, I think, after a day of work at CNN, a trans-Atlantic flight and a train ride from Venice.
But when I finally stepped foot in Verona and realized I could watch Romeo and Juliet performed at the Arena di Verona, perhaps the most famous outdoor opera venue, I felt a second wind. http://www.arena.it/en-US/HOMEen.html
Dinner with Mary Foster Batten

Before heading out, I had dinner with Mary Foster Batten, a fellow visitor from Ireland whom I’d met at the lobby of the Hotel Novo Rossi. 

We shared pizza with prosciutto and funghi and glasses of fine Valpolicella. And fine conversation. And then I was off to the Arena.
I took my seat, high above the stage, under fragments of columns that have stood since AD 30. It’s a remnant of Roman glory, like the Coliseum in Rome. Except the Verona Arena is still vibrant, still a place where thousands go to watch.
I took my seat high above the stage in a Roman
arena that was 2,000 years old.

No more gladiators and fights to the death. But mellifluous music.

As in the voice of Polish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak in the role of Juliet and American tenor John Osborn as Romeo.  And so it began. Lucky for me that I knew so many lines of Shakespeare’s tragedy. “Oh Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love. And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
A bust of Shakespeare
in central Verona

There were no translations offered at the Verona Arena, no sub-titling. I might have been lost had it not been for a story so familiar. A couple in front of me bought a libretto. But as the sun faded, darkness befell our seats, the only lights reflecting off the stage and from the stars above.

Juliet’s statue
at the real house of
Capulet
I was told that the opera’s start depends on the sun’s timetable. On this magnificent July evening, the first notes sounded at 9:15 p.m. It ended at near 1 a.m., by which time I was awake purely on the fumes of excitement.
The next morning, after a breakfast of prosciutto e meloni, I ventured out into Verona, eager to see the house of the real-life Capulets and the famous verandah where Romeo and Juliette’s love for one another was sealed.
At an old castle overlooking the river in Verona
It is, of course, somewhat of a tourist trap. But I looked at Juliet’s statue and gazed upward at the walls of the massive house and began to understand why Shakespeare was inspired to write his tale.
 
Next stop: Venice

 

Some like it hot

Posted on by Moni Basu
Hot. Hotter. And hottest.


First it was 103. Then 106. Today, 104.


Wednesday’s forecast of a high of 93 looks absolutely delightful.


The extreme heat gripping Atlanta and other cities across the Midwestern and Eastern United States has been deemed dangerous, especially for people without air-conditioning.
I heard a woman on the radio this morning who said the temperature in her house had risen to 95.


Made me think of my parents flat in India. On an early May day, before the monsoons had arrived, the temperature read 101 in my room. It was nothing unusual in Kolkata, where temperatures can climb to above 40 degrees celsius (in the 100s in fahrenheit) quite regularly. At least in my room, there was a ceiling fan whirring so fast that I’d get dizzy watching the blades.


I suppose we all get used to things. My niece, a born and bred Canadian, could walk through snow in sandals and think nothing of it. Some of my friends in Kolkata cannot even imagine what it feels like to have frozen stuff fall from the sky. Or how people up North make fun of us Southerners for not knowing how to navigate icy roads. And how we in turn feel no pity for them in summer sizzle.


I am usually thankful to live in Atlanta, where extreme weather is a rarity. But this weekend, I am staying inside. Glad to be reading the Sunday New York Times, watching the Euro finals and cooking dinner — all in the comfort of air-conditioning.


Guess that Indian tolerance to heat has finally worn off.

Team Tymoshenko

Posted on by Moni Basu
It seems that in every football pool, I pick near the bottom of the first round. Funny how that works, eh?
 
The big guns were all beyond my grasp – again. So in Euro Cup 2012, I picked Ukraine.
 
Yulia Tymoshenko in her signature braids.
 Photo from The Guardian.

They are the home team, after all. Who knows? Maybe their fans will boost them past powerhouse Spain. Ha!

 
I suppose I could have picked Russia. Then I’d be cheering along with Bad Vlad.
 
Not that Ukraineis without its political woes.
 
Several European leaders are boycotting the matches because of Ukraine’s treatment of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
 
A Kievcourt tossed her behind bars for signing a multi-million dollar energy contract with Russia. It found her guilty of abusing her powers in making the deal.
 
But many say all that was hogwash; that the charges against Tymoshenko were politically motivated.
 
Evgeniy Zakharov, the co-chair of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, a human rights organization that monitored Tymoshenko’s trial, told Human Rights Watch that his organization viewed the case against her as orchestrated by the authorities to remove a prominent opposition leader from the political scene. 
 
Tymoshenko rose to prominence as a heroine of the Orange Revolution that swept the Ukrainealmost a decade ago. But her government floundered from constant battles with her allies.
 
Her daughter Eugenia said her mother was badly beaten up in April when prison guards arrived in her cell to transfer her to hospital.
 
Tymoshenko, who has staged a hunger strike before, refuses to be seen by government doctors. Instead, she has asked for her own physician or German doctors, according to a story in The Guardian. Human Rights Watch has urged Ukrainian authorities to afford Tymoshenko proper medical care.
 
My fellow football poolers decided we should come up with names for our teams. My friend Chrys is pulling for the Czechmates.
 
And I decided I will be cheering for Team Tymoshenko.

A master of words; a man of integrity

Posted on by Moni Basu

On that afternoon, I didn’t know what to expect inside Room No. 34.

I’d seen Ron several days before, at Piedmont Hospital. I hadn’t even fully stepped into his room when he looked up from his bed. “Ah, Moni Basu and Kevin Duffy!” He recognized us instantly and we had a delightful two-hour conversation about things past and present.

At one moment, after Alex showed up and we began talking about India, the talk veered to Varanasi, an ancient, holy city on the banks of the Ganges River. Many Hindus hope to have their last rites performed there; their ashes scattered in the murky waters; their souls dancing free.

“Perhaps we should talk about something else,” Alex finally said.


I realized then that I had never even thought that Ron might die. Even though he had cancer.

He was lucid that day, his spirits strong. He even laughed, the way he used to on the 6th floor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom.

It was the kind of laugh that echoed through the hallways and was instantly recognizable. It was comforting, like a mother’s embrace. And reassuring —  it made me feel that everything would be all right.

Ron edited my stories occasionally when we both worked on the National Desk. I remember how he tightened up my prose, took out unnecessary words. Verbiage was baggage, he told me. It just weighed readers down.

Everyone knows what a master Ron was with words. At Piedmont, I meant to tell him what a mentor he had been to me. But the right moment never seemed to arise that afternoon.  Surely, I would have other opportunities.

Two weeks later, when I entered Room 34 at Hospice Atlanta, I knew I would probably not get to say much to him. He was weak and frail. And sleepy from the drugs.

His longtime friend and journalist Ann Woolner was there that afternoon, as was his sister, Angela, and niece Stephanie.


The family had brought a bunch of photos that showed Ron at various stages of his remarkable life. As a baby. A child. A teenager. A young reporter. A professor. A father and grandfather.

I sifted through the photos. Some were colour and some not. Some were indentified, others not. It didn’t really matter. I saw in them a man who was always true to himself and to those he loved.

Ron’s mother, Bertha, had saved all his early clips from the Summerville newspaper, the Red and Black and the AJC. Angela had painstakingly collected them in a scrapbook. I flipped through the pages and marveled at Ron’s ability to write with wit, with grace and always with clarity and honesty.

Again that day, the conversation turned uncomfortably to death. I suppose that’s what people talk about when the end of a life seems inevitable. So many arrangements to be made, loose ends that need sewing up.

Ron himself had recognized his circumstance and told Alex: “I don’t want all this to get too complicated… I’d prefer to just go out like an old Indian and walk off into the woods.”

Now, as we spoke of Ron and his life, we did so in the third person. Ron lay still on the bed, his eyes closed. Before I left, I held his hand and said goodbye. Ann told him she loved him.

“Dad,” said Alex. “Your visitors are leaving.”

Ron opened his eyes for a moment and nodded his head.

The next morning he died. His close friend Joni was with him.

When I heard the news the next day, a dark cloud descended upon me in the midst of the CNN newsroom. I wanted to run home. Or at least, run to my car so I could cry without notice.

Someone asked me a question and I blurted out: ”Please give me a few minutes. I have just received some very sad news.” I told my friend Joyce that Ron had died. She did not know him but for me, it was matter of saying it out loud. I was not there when my father died. I had to mouth the words before it sank in.

Later, I read on the CarePages website, that in Irish tradition, a nurse opened the French doors to the patio outside his room to allow his spirit to leave.

It was as just as we had spoken that day about Varanasi. And it gave me great comfort to think that Ron’s soul will shimmer everywhere, like the eternal waters of the Ganges.


http://likethedew.com/?s=ron+taylor

Of kings, queens and heroes

Posted on by Moni Basu

The earliest versions of chess originated in ancient India but it wasn’t until Viswanathan Anand did my homeland claim its first grandmaster. 

The 42-year-old just won another world championship this week in Moscow. No. 5, to be exact. His unmatched prowess on the board now undisputed.

Tied at six-six after 12 regular games, Anand and his challenger Boris Gelfand faced off in a tiebreaker, which Anand won 2.5-1.5. It’s not often that a chess match carries the same excitement as football. But Indians were on the edge of their seats, watching as though a win depended on last-minute penalty kicks.
Check mate: When is the last time a chess player
 commanded rock-star status?

Are we talking about chess here? Where all the battle is done on a checkered tabletop board? 

Yes, but Anand, or Vishy, as he is known, is a rock star in India. Even kids who don’t have the slightest idea how a knight or bishop moves were enthralled this week, cheering on their compatriot to victory. His name appeared next to that of cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, God in the world of Indian sport.

Indian reporters followed Anand around as though he were a Bollywood star. 

“His status in India, meanwhile, showed with the jostling posse of reporters who followed him to Moscow, hanging on to his every word and reporting it in breathless dispatches, the quiet man’s daily habits laid out before the nation,” said NDTV, a leading English-language television station in India.

Anand has won all sorts of accolades — in India and in Spain, where he keeps a home in Madrid. But his biggest honor isn’t in the form of a plaque or a trophy but in the adoration of Indians. 

India doesn’t always excel in global sporting events. Very few Indians stand on the podium at the Olympics. We don’t have a soccer team that makes it to the World Cup. We used to make a stand in field hockey but after the emergence of fake grass, the Indian team stopped faring well. 

Yes, we have cricket. But we are not always No. 1.

But now we have chess. And Anand has made India champion of the world.


A voice in Vietnam

Posted on by Moni Basu
Ho Thi Bich Khuong.
Born: 1967
Activity: Writer
Date of arrest: November 15, 2011
Sentence: Sentenced December 29, 2011 to 5 years imprisonment followed by 3 years house arrest
Charge: Propaganda against the socialist state
Current location: Nghe An province

This is the information available on the Vietnam Reform Party’s page on blogger Ho Thi Bich Khuong. Few in America have probably heard of her. But this is her third arrest. She has been tortured in detention, according to Human Rights Watch.

She was found guilty of violating article 88 of Vietnam’s penal code, designed to deflect criticism of the Communist government. The state said she “blackened” Vietnam’s name and belonged to human rights groups led by “reactionaries.”

She publishes detailed accounts of the repression and harassment she and her family have faced, and writes about the suffering of poor rural farmers and of human rights defenders, said a statement from Human Rights Watch.

In November 2010, she visited the families of people killed by police in a land rights protest and questioned the authorities’ silence on the case. After that, she wrote about violence against Mennonites at Christmas. Three weeks later, she was arrested, said Human Rights Watch.

“Vietnam should be grateful that people like Ho Thi Bich Khuong call attention to local abuses,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of the global rights monitor.

“They give the government an opportunity to investigate and show commitment to the rule of law,” he said. “When the government instead clamps down on the media and locks up independent bloggers, it simply encourages further corruption and abuse of power.”

Human Rights Watch honored Ho Thi Bich Khuong with a Hellman/Hammett award in 2011. The group said it wanted to give an international platform to those who Vietnam will not allow to be heard.

Vietnam launched a crackdown on freedom of expression in 2009. Since then, dozens of political and human rights activists have been handed long jail terms, rights groups say. Vietnam now ranks 172 out of 179 countries on the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

It’s a disturbing trend we don’t hear much about in the Western media. We ought to, especially when we are so focused on the Arab Spring and the great risks people take to get information out to the rest of the world from places like Syria, Yemen and Bahrain.

A Vietnamese court will hear Ho Thi Bich Khuong’s appeal tomorrow. It’s unlikely she will be released. She may be silenced for now, but her voice, I am sure, will resonate for as long as there is injustice in her homeland.

Bobbie and Wallace

Posted on by Moni Basu

Bobbie and Wallace Edwards

Almost eight years ago on an early July morning, I got into my Honda CRV and raced like the wind towards Robbins, North Carolina.
It’s a small town east of Charlotte where John Edwards’ parents, Wallace and Bobbie, lived. I wanted to see firsthand the excitement about their son being named as John Kerry’s running mate.
They were simple folks and lived in a comfortable but modest house — considering that their son was a successful trial lawyer, a U.S. senator and now a vice-presidential candidate.
But despite his own success, John Edwards had always called himself a champion of regular people. He was the son of a mill worker who worked hard to support his family in the Deep South.
It all showed in Bobbie and Wallace.
They were simple, down-to-earth people who were fiercely proud of their son.
Bobbie opened the door for me and when she found out I had driven all the way from Atlanta, she welcomed me in.
They were sitting down to dinner and had the television set tuned to CNN to watch their Johnny. They graciously asked me to join them.
“We weren’t absolutely sure it would be him until this morning,” Bobbie said.
The morning announcement was emotionally overwhelming. After that, they had tried to go about their day as routinely as possible. But, of course, their emotions leaped out of their hearts
“It just doesn’t seem real, ” Wallace told me.
He said that when his son talked about the values instilled in him, he wasn’t just spewing rhetoric.
Last week, I looked a photographs of John Edwards escorting his parents into the federal courthouse in Greensboro, North Carolina. The man who’d been hailed once as a populist candidate had fallen so far from grace, accused of conspiring to secretly obtain thousands of dollars from wealthy supporters to hide his affair with videographer Rielle Hunter.
His wife of many years, Elizabeth, lost her battle with cancer and is no longer here to see John Edwards lowest moment before the public.
His daughter, Cate, who has been by his side all along had to leave the courtroom one day last week when a former aide described a moment when Elizabeth found out about the affair in the National Enquirer. She confronted her husband at an airport, ripping open her blouse in front of staff members.
Bobbie and Wallace stand by their son but I can imagine the agony inside being just as strong as was the excitement on that July day in 2004.
John Edwards proved to be more disappointing to me than any other politician, perhaps because I felt so betrayed. I had written countless stories about a man I once perceived as genuine. 
Now, I feel sorry. Not for him but for Bobbie and Wallace, who raised him to be a good man. Even if he is found not guilty, his name is marred forever and his parents will end their lives with that painful knowledge.

Chaplain Turner's War

Posted on by Moni Basu

Chaplain Darren Turner counsels a soldier at a combat outpost
in Arab Jabour, March, 2008. Photo by Curtis Compton/AJC
Four years ago, I spent time with an Army chaplain in Iraq because I wanted to write about how war affected American soldiers. His name is Darren Turner. He had only been a chaplain for a few months before he headed to Baghdad.
I discovered through him a world different than mine. In the midst of war, I learned about faith, specifically Christianity, and how it was vital to so many of Turner’s men in the 3rd Infantry Division.
Their battalion was part of the surge and had seen a lot of bad stuff in searing summer months and the rugged terrain of Arab Jabour. Turner had grown weary form memorializing so many of his men.
I met Turner at Fort Stewart, flew up with him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Spc. David Battle was struggling for life. He had lost three limbs in a bombing and Turner recently told me he was the most injured soldier at the time.
A few weeks later, photographer Curtis Compton and I flew to Iraq. My plan was simply to follow Turner around and document everything he did. I did not know how the story would turn out. Every day brought a new tragedy, a new triumph.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the story in June, 2008. Now it is out as a digital book. http://www.amazon.com/Chaplain-Turners-War-ebook/dp/B007XULHX4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335542515&sr=1-1

The publisher thought it was as relevant as it was when it was written, now that the Iraq war has come to a close for America and in many places, it was has been swept under the rug, almost as though it never happened.
But it did happen. For more than eight long years. It changed lives here – and there – in the most disturbing ways.
Nearly 4,500 American troops died in the Iraq war. More than 30,000 others were physically wounded. Countless others live with scars that can’t be seen.
I want people to read this story and think about the costs borne by their fellow citizens. I want them to know that life will never be the same again for so many of them.
Darren and Heather Turner in Clarkesville, Kentucky, 
Feb. 2012. Turner tried to help his soldiers save their marriages 
but ran into trouble in his own.
A big thanks to Jan Winburn, who edited this story for the AJC – with a broken left arm to boot.
To Valerie Boyd, who had the wisdom to get me on this project and push it as a digital book.
Of course, to Agate Publishers for taking this on.
And to Darren Turner. I was glad to see you again this year and even more glad to know that you are happy again.

Barnabas and Baba

Posted on by Moni Basu
Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins
in the 1960s “Dark Shadows.”

In the late 1960s, we lived for a while in a rented house on Adams Circle in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Every afternoon, I walked home from Whittier Elementary and plopped myself down on the living room couch, waiting anxiously for Baba to return home from university.

My father was a brilliant man, a mathematical thinker who has a statistical theorem named after him. But, like all of us, he had his guilty pleasures. One of them was “Dark Shadows,” the vampire soap opera starring Canadian actor Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins.

Baba sat on the couch with me and the two of us were mesmerized by the gothic, black and white images flashing before us on our Zenith television screen. Intrigue. Love. Lust. Death and, of course, life after death.

That was the part that I could not stand. Every time Barnabas got ready to sink his fangs into a young maiden’s juicy neck, I’d slither off the couch, get behind it for protection and watch sporadically. Or I’d announce to Baba that I had to go to the bathroom right then.

One time I was so frightened that Baba held me on his lap. “These scenes are not real,” he said. “They’re just make-believe on TV.”

But he’d go right on watching, transfixed on Barnabas’s ghostly white skin and the crimson streaming out of his mouth.

Jonathan Frid died in Hamilton, Ontario, last week. He was 87, a year younger than my father, who died in 2001.

He didn’t live to see his character resurrected in director Tim Burton’s remake of the classic vampire story. This time, Barnabas will appear to us in the handsome form of Johnny Depp.

I wish Baba were still here. I’d take him to the theater to see “Dark Shadows.” And when the lights went dim and no one could see, I’d hold his hand tight and wait for Barnabas to bite.

Skip to content