The Blessing of an Impermanent Smile

If you’ve read the Kite Runner – you might remember that the eponymous character, a preteen Afghan servant-boy was born with a cleft lip; a permanent smile as the book put it. I read the book relatively recently at the urging of my Mom. Though initially not very interested in the book, I found I couldn’t put it down once I’d started and was rather disappointed when it ended. I wish it had been a few hundred pages longer. It’s a story spanning several years spent in pre and mid-civil-war Kabul and in San Francisco.

One of the most heart-warming passages in the book for me – and the book had many heart-warming as well as heart-breaking ones L - was when the protagonist’s father, a rich Afghan Pathan, at whose house the Kite-Runner worked and lived, flew in a doctor from India on the Kite Runner’s birthday to perform surgery on him to fix the cleft lip. And in doing so, gave him the gift, no a blessing, of smiling only when he wanted to, only when his smile could also reach his eyes.

It wasn’t long after I finished reading the book and perhaps because it was on my mind, I came across an ad in the newspaper by an organization called the TheSmileTrain. I think it was the organization’s name that first caught my eye…it brought a vision of train bogies full of happy, smiling, sunny faces to mind. I read the ad – something I don’t usually do – and then checked out their website too. Feel free to do the same by clicking on anywhere that TheSmileTrain’s name is mentioned in this post. Beware – before you click - you might find yourself compelled to make a donation. TheSmileTrain is an organization dedicated to performing the simple surgery to fix cleft lips on kids all across the world. That’s all they do. In countries like India, Brazil, Uganda, these surgeries cost as little as $250 and have the ability to transform the lives of these kids. Since 2000, they’ve helped more than 200,000 children, many of them in India.

In TheSmileTrain’s words millions of children suffering... with unrepaired clefts...cannot eat or speak properly. Aren’t allowed to attend school or hold a job. And face very difficult lives filled with shame and isolation, pain and heartache. Many are also abandoned by their parents at birth. Think about it, when was the last time you saw someone with a cleft lip in a position of power or eminence. Families suffer too. A friend of mine who was looking at the web-site with me, told me about a friend who didn’t want to share pictures of her new-born baby with any of her friends and relatives. The mother privately told my friend, that the baby had a cleft lip and the parents, who I’m sure loved their child, did not want to show him off until the surgery that they were lucky enough to be able to afford.

There are so many things in life that we should not take for granted. A voluntary smile, I think, is something everyone should be able to. Here’s to TheSmileTrain for working to extend that privilege and blessing to more and more people everyday.

Pigs Without Wings? Too True

Another in the series detailing cruel treatment of animals...OK, I promise to find a new topic to post on soon - I couldn't let this picture go - I initially thought the pigs were sacks of grain or something. They didn't look like living beings.

I don't think I'm going to become vegetarian anytime soon...but I certainly would like not to be a part of this particular food chain. Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish has a great post on how Burger King has decided to start buying free range products. 2% of eggs will be free-range. (Small) Yay. (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/03/thanks_burger_k.html)

Requiem For A Short-Lived Dream

Obscure Topic Alert

She was brave beyond belief. So ran the first sentence of Anna Politkovskaya’s obituary in the Economist. Regular readers of the magazine that likes to call itself a newspaper will know that the magazine is not given to exaggeration and hyperbole – if medieval England’s butlers had been locked up in a room and ordered to bring out a magazine every week, their writing style would probably be very much like that of the Economist.

It takes a lot to win the Economist’s unqualified admiration, the magazine specializes in seeing three or four sides of every issue where a regular person would barely manage to see two. And so, the strong language of the murdered Russian journalist’s obituary served to convey the sense of profound loss and anguish that the magazine felt. It also succeeded in giving me goose-bumps and bringing a few hot angry tears to my eyes – that this happened to such a person and that it will go unpunished.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for some time – just never got around to it…but it keeps coming back to haunt me. Anna Politkovskaya’s death is old news – so if you don’t remember it or never heard of it, its not really surprising. We can thank the localization – a really good euphemism for moronization – of all news for that. Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist who was murdered a couple of months back; she was 48, not that much younger than my Mom, a well-known journalist who’d become famous for reporting from the frontlines of the wars in Chechnya. She was respected for reporting the truth…often truth that shone a terrible light on Vladimir Putin’s government. On the night she was shot point blank, at close range, in the elevator block of her apartment, she was working on another Chechnya story that exposed alleged rights violations by the Russian army.

Her death, in my mind, was also the clearest signal yet, that the dream of democracy in Russia is largely dead. It came after several other dissident journalists and editors had been murdered and was followed by the radiation poisoning of another dissident in London and the killing of another journalist just last month.

The government that the immensely popular Putin is running seems to be the offspring of an illicit affair between plutocrats and the mafia. Putin with his quiet purge, is more frightening to me than Zimbabwe’s brutal and clownish Mugabe. It takes a special kind of dictator to order hits on specific, identified individuals versus masses of faceless protestors …you’d have to be cold-blooded enough to be sure that their faces wouldn’t come back, like Banquo’s ghost, to haunt you in your sleep. The fact that Putin seems unperturbed, as ever, is scary. (Of course, none of this is to say that Mugabe isn't the tyrant he is or that he hasn't ordered hits on dissidents)

There are those who will point to Putin’s popularity to justify Russia’s direction and other cynics who will trot out a dictator’s favourite adage – “Democracy is not for everyone – specially not for ________ " (fill in country’s name – Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, China, Russia etc). The popularity argument is very weak – Hitler’s government was damn popular too in Germany at one point and he led the country into Poland. Or closer home – take Laloo Prasad Yadav who single-handedly ruined Bihar, or even a certain American president who recently won a popular 're'-election (Do I really need to say what happened after that?). Nope - popularity doesn't convince me that Putin deserves being cut some slack.

The second argument might have carried more weight – after all each country is different and the same system (i.e., democracy) need not be suitable to all. But the reason it falls apart is because the people who claim that democracy is not for their country are almost always the ones who stand to directly gain power and money in a dictatorship. Let the whole population – the poor, the dispossessed, the wretched and the depressed – march in the streets demanding a dictatorship and then I might think there’s something to it. Curiously enough, I can’t think of one instance of that having happened. Can you?

But these are theoretical debates. What’s tangible is, is Anna’s absence from the newspaper pages for those readers who drew courage from her (unfortunately I wasn’t one of them) and what's tangible is Russia’s absence from the ranks of democratic countries.

Anna – Rest in Peace – there are those who didn’t know you, who mourn you, even if many of your own countrymen don’t.

Why Scaring The Pigeons is a Good Thing

Sometime back I wrote about how I thought the alliteratively titled Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was one of my favorite new shows on TV. Disappointingly, the show didn't quite live up to its promise - and being unashamedly fickle about my TV viewing I have a new favorite - Showtime's rather innocently titled "Dexter".

Dexter is probably the darkest show on TV - certainly the darkest show I've seen on the small screen...Its about a sociopath who works as a forensic specialist in Miami's police department
and who channels his urge to kill into murdering other sociopaths. For those who think he sounds like any other superhero in Marvel comics, you've gotta see the show to understand how horrifying and fascinating Dexter the character and Dexter the show is.

I love the show and not just because its so dark but also because it raises a serious, but completely overlooked, animal rights issue. As a kid, Dexter, hones his skill as a budding psychopath, by murdering small animals (like dogs). There is a serious disconnect about how we care for kids and equally cuddly, equally innocent small animals that bring us into their circle of trust. We warn little kids to stay away from strange adults but encourage pets as well as semi-wild fauna like pigeons, squirrels etc to trust strange humans - kids and adults alike. And so, across the world, there are probably hundreds of quasi-domesticated small animals being massacred by mini-Dexters everyday...and nothing is being done about it

Take the example of pigeons...Almost any self-respecting historical monument in the world has several score pigeons floating around - strutting, fluttering, clustering around delighted tourists who throw down pieces of sourdough or baklava or corn depending on which country they're in and how cheap they are. These pigeons are so used to being around people and strangers that they'll trot up to just about anyone...they're perfect sitting ducks (sic) for any cute sociopathic Dexter/Dmitri/Dhritrashtra that scampers along. The show doesn't talk about Dexter visiting Trafalgar Square as a child like the kid in the picture, but you can be sure that if he had, there wouldn't have been quite so much cooing going on there, as there is today

The fact is, its not safe for these pigeons to trust humans. Given the centuries of indoctrination that these birds have gone through, there's a dire need for a comprehensive Pavlovian education program to get them to not trust humans again. And any animal rights activist worth their iodized salt should be doing his/her bit. It can be as simple as volunteering to spend a couple of hours every weekend to jump out at these silly birds from behind bushes while screaming bloody murder (IMPORTANT NOTE: but not actually committing it) to scare the guano out of them. Over time though, I think, more innovative methods might be more effective - ummm - like scattering electrostatically charged pop-corn that shocks any bird that pecks at it.

I spent one summer afternoon in May doing the jumping-out-the-bushes thing to scare some particularly blase pigeons on the lawns in front of Ghirardelli Square. I can vouch for the effectiveness of the method - it cleared the lawns of both pigeons...and people (including my fickle friend :( over a 100m radius within the first 30 minutes. I must admit, the lack of understanding with which my work amongst pigeons was greeted was rather discouraging. However...like Steve Irwin with crocodiles...I shall continue harassing them for their own good