Windhoek, Namibia

November, 1999

We arrived at the gated house at the end of the cul de sac and walked through the living room to the back patio and pool. Barbecued sausage, chicken legs and Kudu steak were being served to the thirty or so guests gathered in groups. On my way to grab a drink I was intercepted by Aubun, a Dutch South African who we had met the night before. Aubun had told us he would be in Windhoek for a few days selling spark plug converters at a trade show.

Aubun was a short man with a closely shaven moustache, droopy shoulders and thick blonde hair parted to his side. Over his moustache sat a finely chiseled nose, the tip now reddened by the few glasses of whiskey and coco-cola. “Join me for a drink” Aubun shouted. I looked at his glass which was lightened to a caramel color by the whiskey. He then picked up an empty glass on the nearby table and poured half his drink into it and then added some coke. “It’s mighty strong this glass I made for myself, even after three beers I already had.” “What kind of whiskey is it”, I asked. “Some cheap shit, but it will make you sleep well and that is all that matters” he said letting out a bronchus cough. Auban then reached into his pocket and took out a pack of Chesterfields. He offered me one and then lit one up for himself.

“So when are you getting your car”, Aubun asked. “We should have it by tomorrow if everything goes through OK”. “What kind is it?” he asked. “It’s a 91 Land Rover Defender.” “Those Landy’s are good fun, lots of good fun, you can go anywhere with them,” Aubun quipped. “I remember when I was in the army we used to drive 200km through the thickest bush and desert with those things to the ----- tribe and we used to dump out the water from our canteens and they’d fill it for us with this watermelon wine they made and then we’d take the one packet ration of raisins they gave us in the army and put those raisins in the canteens and let them sit. Then at around 10 o’clock at night when the sun had been gone for a few hours and it began to get a little cold we’d light a fire and drink the watermelon wine. At the end when we’d finished drinking there would be only raisins left at the bottom of the canteen. By now though, the raisins had taken in the wine and were as big as a walnut, and we’d eat these raisins like they were diamonds and sleep well that night. It was all good fun, good fun I tell you.”

“I remember one night, this one night we were all sitting around drinking this wine and a couple of buddies heard something in the woods and we went to see what it was, maybe a Kudu we could eat with our drink. About twenty or so minutes later the group came back with a black man. But by this time we all were feeling tipsy and it was a warm night so the warm wind didn’t help in sobering us up. So Jimmy, the leader of our group put his hankerchief around the black guys eyes and went to the back of the Landy to get a spare tire from the back."

“He took off the metal center and then put the tire around this guy and set him to the ground. He then went to grab the extra petrol can on top of the car and we all knew what he was going to do, he was going to necklace the man by putting petrol on him with a tire around him and then set him on fire and roll him down the hill.

“There were some of us who just wanted to let him go, others wanted to just shoot him, but Jimmy was the leader and the wildest and wouldn’t have it any other way. He looked at the man and spit right into his face calling him kefir this and kefir that and saying how SA belonged to the whites, not those fucking blacks. Well Jimmy then took the petrol and started pouring it on the black man’s face and the man began screaming because the petrol was now in his eyes and getting into the cuts in his face and Jimmy continued until he had worked his way down to the tips of the mans toes. Jimmy then took a box of matches and lit one up and threw it onto the man and then began to roll him down the hill. The man was now screaming and trying to get loose but the tire around him was too tight and by the time he struggled free, ninety percent of his body was crusty black from the burns. But the man was still alive and he was screaming and now his flesh was coming off with every move he made. All of us turned the other way, we couldn’t stand to look and only Jimmy stood there looking at the man until he finally couldn’t take it any more too, and pulled the gun from his holster and fired three times into the man’s face, the only area on him that remained human. We then quickly got into the Landy and drove off.”

“We drove away and while we drove nobody spoke for hours, and the incident was never mentioned again, but Jimmy was never the same wild guy after that. After he left the army and I heard he opened up a game farm somewhere in Namibia. One day though he was driving through his game park when his car stalled. So he got out to try to fix the problem, and his favorite lion, one that he’d been taking care of for years suddenly turned wild and attacked him and that was it. But other than that the army was good fun I tell you lots of good fun.”

After the army I met my wife and well its still good fun. In South Africa there are two ways you meet your wife, you either fall in love and then have sex, or have sex and then fall in love. I fell in love and then had sex but you see right now at the show in town here I got myself two girls lined up to have sex with. One’s older, the other is younger but the older seems more wild than the younger. It’s good fun though lots of good fun, but one has to be more careful now with AIDS but it’s still good fun though, good fun.”

Auban continued talking amongst the heavy smoke and the heavy coughing. Suddenly I felt my head getting hot and it began to hurt. “You don’t look so good,” Aubun said, “maybe you should go inside and rest.”

Mumbai Train

March 13, 2009

Inside the ragged pantry cart on a train to Mumbai, a train cook, Pratik, sprinkles cardamom over an enormous wok of sizzling onions and is thinking of Hollywood film reels. 'The movie is not real, it is not like India is today,’ he say's before wiping his brow with his sleeve. 'No one from the chai wallahs to the First Class AC passengers on the train can really say what the real India is today except that it is not like what Slumdog Millionaire makes it to be’

Gaurav, an Indian-American, sees things differently. He is seated in the Second Class AC cart and recently moved back to Delhi to assume a management position for a development NGO. He believes the movie is an exact representation of modern India that people like Pratik just cannot see yet. 'In India and in other developing countries most people are used to struggling everyday just to get by. They do not have time to reflect and piece together a narrative of their life. What is so great about Slumdog Millionaire is that here you have this nobody, this chai wallah, and the narrative of his life is pieced together to show it to have meaning in the end.’

He argues these narratives are not only instrumental for developing ones individual identity but are also important for shaping a country’s identity as well. ‘The stories become a self-fulfilling prophecy and represent what the future may hold,’ say’s Gaurav. ‘Hollywood has been making movies and music of African-Americans making it out of the inner-city for years and look at America now, they've elected a black community organizer as president.’

What bothers Pratik, the train’s cook about Slumdog Millionaire more than anything is that the movie was made by the West and is marketed around the world as portraying how India is today. "I don't care that the movie is fantasy," say’s Pratik. "I like fairytale. We have Bollywood here which is one big fairytale, but it is our fairytale. What I don't like is to create a fairytale about us and have other people believe its true. What if you call Microsoft for help with your computer and I pick up the telephone in Mumbai and say, 'Hello this is Pratik in Seattle, how may I help you?' If I am living in Mumbai, it's a lie, even if you in America cannot tell the difference."

And this is what Pratik believes Hollywood is saying with Slumdog Millionaire. It sells India as America, and for Pratik the concern is that Hollywood is exporting a fairytale of what America wants India to be, a nation of upward mobility where dreamers and entrepreneurs are rewarded with millions of rupees.

Today in many places all over India there are no shortage of dreamers and entrepreneurs trying to make those millions. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs have been successful in setting up outsourcing factories, generic pharmaceutical industries and software firms that have created great wealth for a few individuals. The reality however, is that most places in India still have no drinking water, electricity, sewage system and public transportation.

The question remians: With Slumdog Millionaire, is Hollywood creating its own caricatures and manufacturing its own fantasy of the new India? Is it leaving behind the majority of Indians like Pratik and making it more difficult for them to formulate an identity of their own India that does not mirror what Hollywood is portraying?

Inside the train, the meals, now ready, are being hurried to the passengers before they turn cold. Gaurav, our Indian-American friend seated in his AC cart, watches the workers dash and jump hurdles trying not to spill the thirty different dishes of which to choose from. Sikhs, Jains and Bengalis sit across from him and remove the foil from their trays as cardamom, coriander and cumin fill the air. Gaurav looks around at the varied faces and their meals and shakes his head. “India is too complicated, there is too much diversity and chaos for it to be transformed by call centers and software firms. India will just be, like its always been, a world of its own, quite happy and content in doing its own maddening dance.”

Bitch is the New Black?

During the United States Presidential campaign we had our first female presidential candidate and our first black presidential candidate. Tina Fey went on SNL and asked people Why are they abandoning Hillary for Obama? Is it that most people think Hillary is a bitch? “Ya she is,” Tina say’s “and ya so is this one,” pointing to Amy Poehler her co-host. “Bitches get stuff done…. So I am saying, Texas and Ohio it’s not too late. Get on board….Bitch is the new black.”

I know many ‘bitches’. In fact I work for one. She is my attending Neurosurgeon Dr. Tina Duhaime who is a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton. And she shares many of the same ambitious qualities and status within her field that Hillary Clinton does in hers. First becoming an extraordinary skillful neurosurgeon and then being one of only three females to be elected as an active member of The Society of Neurological Surgeons. But why is it that I could so readily accept Dr. Duhaime as my President and not Hillary Clinton?

It is because Dr. Duhaime also possesses feminine qualities which Hillary Clinton does not. Even while rejecting the “touchy feely” aspect of medicine for “outcomes and results”, I am always struck by the consolation and empathy that comes through during every one of Dr. Duhaime’s interactions with patients and their families. To ascribe that as a feminine quality is not being sexist. Just as I would not find it sexist if someone was to dismiss the new choice for James Bond because he was not manly enough.

This aversion to Hillary because of her lack of feminine qualities also resonates with most European women. When I asked my female friend in Paris why she didn’t like Hillary it was not because of her support to invade Iraq or her plan for Universal Healthcare, which she supports or because Hillary was a women. It is because “she acts like such a man”.

This response I found odd coming from a European women, especially considering recent elected European female political leaders Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel don’t necessarily strike me as womanly. In the United States the closest women we had as our Queen was Jacqeline Kennedy Onassis. I don’t know a man in the world that would turn down an evening with her sipping Negronis at Bemelman’s Bar at the Carlyle on any day of the week. In an ideal world it seems what we’d all prefer is for our women leaders not to be alpha males, but to be strong and carry with them great feminine qualities which men could all learn from.

That is why we will continue to love you Tina Fey. That is why I will continue to adore you Dr. Tina Duhaime. Tracy Morgan another SNL cast member who a few weeks later responded to Tina Fey’s proclamation would never shy away from calling either of you two his girl. So what I want to say is that we love these powerful women not because bitch is the new black, but because being a feminine bitch is.

I want to see Barack Obama President of the United States

I want to no longer be surprised to find out where all the money I loaned my brother for his 'studies' went every time I Google search my name and see my brother's name next to multiple hundred dollar campaign contributions to Obama.

I want my friend Brandon not to be mad when after an all night phone conversation trying to convince his grandfather from North Carolina to vote for Obama, his grandfather ends the phone conversation with, 'Well... after all these years I never thought I'd be voting for a nigger.' I want my friend to think of this as change.

I want African-Americans across the United States to be proud, the same way Irish Catholic Americans were proud when John F. Kennedy won the White House and the same way Greek-Americans were proud when Michael Dukakis almost did the same.

I want to hear Beyonce sing Happy Birthday Mr. President in the White House and then rumors started of an affair. I want Beyonce to write in her autobiography years later that Barack refused her advances that night and I want the pundits and late night talk show hosts to then say for years to come that that turning down Beyonce’s request may have been the worst decision he made during his presidency.

I want Barack Obama at the end of his eight years to reflect on his time in office and admit that being President put a strain on his relationship with Michelle and his children. Then I want him to ask for forgiveness from the American people for not accomplishing all that he promised, for not fixing the health care system and not getting all of our troops out of Iraq. But I want for us to accept his forgiveness as there are now 50 million less people uninsured and no more military were sent in to occupy another part of the world.

I want Americans to say things are not the same as they were eight years ago and believe that in eight or even four more years they can still be made better not only for themselves.

And during the end of Barack Obama's presidency when the media are fighting over the coronation of America's next King or even Queen I want an Englisman to turn to his friend in a London Pub and say after his third pint of Guinness, ' I told you those Americans weren't as bloody stupid as you said they were.'