The boy is a reader. In his ten days here he read as many books and finished half my collection of the complete Tintin series. When I told him how happy I was to see him read, he thanked me with a wide smile and added that last year, in his second grade, he had read a hundred and seventy five books, just twenty five short of the mark the school had set for the first prize, an iPod. No one had won it, but he seemed confident to reach the goal this year.

After reading each book he wrote a summary on a sheet in his “reading package,” a collection of empty forms issued by his school teacher, Ms.Rutledge. The summaries, brief and simple, made me wonder what sort of a reader he’d grow up into. His summary of Stuart Little, E.B.White’s classic, ran like this:

There is a mouse named Stuart. He is a great help to his family. His parents like him a lot! Soon a bird flies into Stuart’s home, and becomes friends with him. Just a few days later, the bird gets a letter which said to leave because a cat will eat her. So she leaves. Stuart follows her with a mini-car. He meets many people and spends time with them.

It is a fine outline, the sort of sketch E.B.White may have begun with. In a few short sentences we have character, setting, conflict, adventure: a plot. The narrative advances swiftly and ends, like the book, without resolution. His choice of story elements to highlight — “great help to his family”, “parents like him” — is instructive; so is his lack of interest in editing the visible error.

The novel, published in 1945, is charming in its details. Stuart’s father, Mr.Little, makes him “a tiny bed out of four clothes-pins and a cigarette box”; his parents constantly worry that he’ll disappear into the “mousehole in the pantry”; Snowbell, the resident cat, refers to himself as a “permanent guest”; during a boat race in a pond inside New York’s Central Park, when Stuart’s sailboat is stuck in flotsam, we read that he “jumped for the halyards, and the jib and the forestaysail came rippling down”. And somewhere in the middle of Stuart’s adventure to find his friend Margalo, the bird who has flown away from home, we find a chapter that opens with this sentence:

In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.

I do not know if the boy noticed these details, or paused to consider the beauty of that long sentence. Unlikely, if not impossible; like most young readers he probably glosses over things he finds uninteresting for his age, focusing on elements he can use to create the imaginary world in the book. I also did not ask him what he thought of the unresolved ending, but I suspect it did not bother him much: he was keen to start with the next E.B.White book, Charolette’s Web. An encouraging sign in a young reader.

Another book he read, and reread in parts, was Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Dahl writes with a chilling conviction about witches, so much so that when I finished it a few years ago the book left me with a lingering doubt: on this matter of witches perhaps we adults were the hoodwinked ones? After the boy read the book I asked him if he’d seen any witches in the United States. “There aren’t many left there.” I added.

“Witches aren’t real!” he replied. There was not an ounce of doubt in his voice.

“Really? But you just read about them!”

“That’s just a story.”

“But how can you be so sure there aren’t any out there?”

“I googled it.”

“Googled it? What did you google?” By now I was having difficulty keeping a straight face.

“Actually, after I read the book I asked mommy to google ‘Are witches real?’ and we found a website that said they weren’t real.”

“And you believed it?”

He nodded vigorously, a proper up-and-down American nod, not the sideways head-shuffle of an Indian, and returned to the Tintin book he was reading.

In January the world froze. On the morning of the third I looked out of my window into a town submerged under a frozen sea. A layer of ice, no less than a few inches thick, coated everything, the parked cars, the balconies and sloping roofs of cottages, the trees and their spindly branches, the garbage cans that stood on the footpath. Nothing moved. There was no sound. The light was an arctic blue, the sky clear as glacial water. A cat appeared out of nowhere and walked up the street, digging its claws into the ice and slipping every other step, like a novice climber on a steep cliff. Everyone stayed home that day, the next, and the one after. My refrigerator was loaded but I ran out of toilet paper, and the neighbour downstairs who gave me a few rolls reflected again on God’s wrath. We have forgotten how to speak to God, he said, so now we cannot speak even to each other. He was referring to the communications infrastructure — TV, Radio, Phone, Internet — that had stopped functioning. The town had turned into a sea of solitude. When it thawed, three days later, the patina of ice disappeared and world came to life again, but the image of being submerged in a vast sea remained. Flocks of birds swam like schools of fish, cars and buses crawled on streets like sea turtles in colourful shells, and the houses and trees, distorted perhaps under the heavy influence of ice during the freeze, carried the refracted look of set pieces in a large aquarium. This condition lasted a whole week, and when it ended, abruptly after a particularly warm night, the entire period from the freeze to the extended thaw acquired the quality of a dream. I still had a roll of my neighbour’s toilet paper as proof, but this was not necessary: the European-Freeze was all over the news, and everyone had a claim on this phenomenon no one understood. The Vatican and the religious conservatives claimed this as indisputable proof that God existed, the atheists saw in it the unpredictability of nature and hence the non-existence of God, the liberals called attention to the fact that the freeze had affected everyone regardless of their social and economic status, the climatologists wanted more research funding to extend the boundaries of their science, and since no scientific model had predicted the freeze the climate-skeptics took this as further proof that global-warming was a myth. Only Jörg remained aloof and indifferent. There is no point thinking of what happened, he said, when I sought his opinion, because to understand it you must stop analysing it. Thinking solves nothing, he continued, waving his finger sideways, and the answer can only be found in the absence of thought. Then he returned to the book he was reading, a slim volume on Zen-Buddhism.

In the last ten years or so the Christmas and New Year week has, for us, acquired a particular significance, shaped by a culture-driven consciousness that this is a period of renewal, a time to take stock of the year gone past and to prepare for the new one ahead. Renewal, old giving way to new, is conveyed through a total shut down of commerce (workplaces are empty; business slows to almost a halt; stores are closed from the afternoon of 24th until the 27th morning, and if you do not stock up earlier only the kindness of neighbours or friends can save you), and all the year-end lists in magazines and newspapers send home, unequivocally, the message that this is a changeover period. In all, a sense of ending, an intimation of a beginning.

I do not remember the year’s end this way before I came to Germany. Growing up in India and Nepal, this period had no significance, except, while writing into my school notebook after the new year I often found myself enumerating the old year: a trivial matter of switching the dates. (This trivial matter of the date assumed a not-so-trivial significance at the turn of the millennium, on the 31st of December 1999, a night both Wife and I spent at our workplaces awaiting alerts raised by the infamous year-two-thousand bug, dubbed the Y2K, like a code for something sinister, which ultimately turned out a false alarm: a red herring that hid the actual cause for worry, our increasing dependence on a network of interconnected systems controlled by a few and understood by fewer.) The real new year came later, in March or April during Ugadi, a festival that marked the year’s beginning in the Hindu (Saka) calender. But there was little of the Georgian New-Year mystique associated with this festival: to us it was another date in a string of events marked in red letters on the Bangalore-Press calender my mother hung in her kitchen, a public holiday like other festivals through the year, a day of rituals and a day of the feast. December, then, was an ordinary month; Santa was the stuff of fairy tales and nursery rhymes set in a faraway land, and new-year resolutions a concept alien to us until the West introduced it, along with other commercially lucrative ideas, to the local culture and media.

This December has been different. On the 20th my eight-year old nephew arrived, with his mother, from the United States, to spend the Christmas holidays with us. Wife decided to maintain the tradition the boy had grown up with, so we bought and setup a small Christmas tree, a first for us. The boy wrote a letter to Santa, listing the gifts he wished for and promising good behaviour in the year ahead. Late on the 24th, after he’d gone to sleep, we wrapped the gifts and filled the large stocking with books, toys, and games; next morning, as he opened one gift after another, mother and aunt expressed wonder and amazement at Santa’s generosity. The boy agreed that kids in Germany got a better deal from Santa than those in the United States. I couldn’t but help think that kids these days anywhere get a better deal than we ever did in our childhood.

As the years pass, we look back more often than we did in our younger days, and it is in this activity, as an aid to recollection, that the partitioning of the past into identifiable years acquires a practical value and gives meaning to all our end-of-the-year lists. Since I think of this blog as a memory chest, I’ve jotted down some 2011 experiences and discoveries I’d like to remember later: (To keep the list short and readable, I’ve limited each category to three items.)

Books – Fiction: Open City [Teju Cole]; The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet [David Mitchell]; English, August [Upamanyu Chatterjee]

Books – Non-fiction: Salvador [Joan Didion]; The Classical world: An Epic history of Greece and Rome [Robin Lane Fox]; Literary Occasions – Essays [V.S.Naipaul]

Movies: Pina [Wim Wenders]; Midnight in Paris [Woody Allen]; Distant [Nuri Bilge Ceylan]

Places: Wuppertal, Germany; Aurland, Norway; Lezzeno, Italy

Music: New York – Addis – London [Mulatu Astatke]; Zaz [Zaz]; Farida Khanum in concert [Farida Khanum]

Miscellaneous: Rediscovering film photography; Hosting the Language-Place blog carnival; Walking the Met galleries with Teju Cole.

It is a personal list, but as I’ve discovered some of these through lists shared by others, the hope is that such a list will spawn new discoveries for you, dear reader. Your presence, both visible (through comments and links) and anonymous (through statistics), has kept me going, and I thank you for the interest, engagement, and the conversation. I wish you all a wonderful 2012.

“For the first time in history, across much of the world, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition.” — The Economist, December 17th 2009


1.

The Weihnachtsmarkt in this town was a small affair. It began at the western end of Hauptstrasse, with a stall selling dry fruits and nuts, and continued up the street, extending partly into the neighbouring Marktstrasse or Blumenstrasse, and ended at the eastern perimeter less than a kilometer from the start. The stalls, small log cabins with pine sprigs and yellowish light bulbs strung across their roof angles, displayed the usual wares: chocolates and gummy bears, gluh wine, crepes, potato pancakes, bratwurst & schnitzel, christmas-tree knickknacks, and ceramic crockery. At the intersection of Marktstrasse and Höllgasse there was a small carousel, manually operated, with eight horse-shaped mounts each painted a different colour. Not far from it stood a märchenzelt, a fairy-tale tent, white and round with a conical top, glowing like a dimly lit bulb. This tent was where I was headed, with Wife and some friends, on a cold and overcast November evening not long ago.

The evening’s plan was simple but unusual: from 7 to 8 P.M. children visiting the tent would be read Indian stories in German by a few Indian ladies. Wife, one of the storytellers, had made me a target of her daily practice sessions the previous week. The story she had chosen (“Sukeshini and the lake demon”) was about an Indian girl who tricks a demon and brings water to a drought-stricken village; she had translated it into German with the help of a friend. Others had chosen similar stories, Indian folk tales translated into German.

Inside the märchenzelt six or seven boys and girls sat facing a middle-aged woman reading a German fairy tale. At 7 P.M. the Indian ladies, dressed in colourful sarees or salwar kameez, started the session with a Namaste. “This is how you greet people in India,” one of them explained. The children mimicked the gesture and giggled. Then the stories were read out loud, one after another, each storyteller pausing in places to ask a question or to explain the context. Some of this context was presented as illustrations: colour printouts of scenes from the story — taken from the original storybook — or of an Indian situation or custom, like a festival or a feast served on banana leaves. The kids looked at the copied illustration before passing it on, and occasionally a curious parent leaned over their tiny shoulders for a quick glance. In the middle of the hour, after a couple of stories, the ladies sang a nursery rhyme in Hindi. The boys and girls were asked to repeat, line after line:

Haathi Raja bahut bade
Sund utha kar kahan chale
Mere ghar mein aaon na
Halwa puri khaon na
Aaon baitho kursi par
Kursi boli chatar-pattar!

The parents joined the children in this recitation. It was a charming reversal, with the Germans attempting what the Indians had been doing so far: speak in a foreign tongue.

At the hour’s end the children sang the rhyme once more, said Namaste, and left. Outside a slight drizzle had begun; we picked up some gluh-wine and crepes and stood chatting under the awning of an electronic store, next to its brightly lit windows. The store appeared closed, but soon a man approached us, with the obvious intention of entering it. Middle-aged, huge and bald and white like a WWF wrestler, he stopped in front of me and asked, with a half-smile: “Darf ich?” May I?

I moved aside, making way for him to pass, but instead of entering the store he looked at us and grinned: “You’re drinking Gluh-wine?” he asked, in German. “Indian ladies aren’t supposed drink wine, are they?”

The ladies laughed and protested. But we knew he only wanted conversation, and soon he began with questions about the Christmas Market: How do you like it? Do you celebrate Christmas in India? Are there such markets there? At one point, looking at the traditional garb visible beneath our jackets, he said he had always wanted to wear a lungi.

“Lungi?” I asked, wondering if he really was referring to the traditional garment worn by South Indian men.

He drew an imaginary circle around his large waist, and said: “Yes, lungi. Where can I get one in Germany?”

I had not seen a shop here sell lungis; it would have to be acquired from India, I said.

“Will you bring it for me?” he asked.

“Sure. What colour do you prefer?”

“Blue” he said, without hesitation. “I like blue.”

“The next time I visit India I’ll bring you one.”

“Promise?”

I smiled and nodded. He lifted his right hand, closed into a fist, inviting me to do the same; I rapped his knuckles, like a boxer rapping an opponent’s glove at the start of a match.

“I’m Michael” he said, and pointed to the shop: “You will find me here.”

He would hear from me, I promised.

2.

A few days later, during a weekend when the weather constrained me at home, I read an article that described the struggles of a family in Germany. It was a depressing report, a piece whose gloominess mirrored the weather outside:

Krause has kept careful notes on many of the incidents he and his family have experienced, and he has notified the authorities. “It’s the sum total of the relatively small things,” he says. “At some point, you ask yourself if you are being overly sensitive. But the opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that’s not how I want to be.”

His daughter, the oldest child, goes to kindergarten. “They are all very nice there, the parents and the teachers,” Krause says. But once another child told his daughter, “you are black, dirty and bad.” Where does such a thing come from? “Such a thing doesn’t kill anybody, but it is an indication of an attitude that would seem to be widespread,” Krause says.

In a department store, according to Krause, one of the saleswomen said “poor Germany” when she saw his dark-skinned wife.

In a pharmacy parking lot, a car refused to stop for Krause’s wife and child, coming dangerously close to them. When Krause rushed to stand between his family and the car, the driver stepped out and called the family “monkey asses.”

All this was in the recent past, in a city perhaps a few hours from where I lived. Some Germans there were as intolerant of foreigners as the Germans in my town were curious about them.

I recalled memories of that recent evening at the Weihnachtsmarkt; the contrast could not be more stark. My neighbours, well-to-do Germans in a small town, had understood the promise of an encounter with foreigners. To them, mere tolerance was not enough; they looked beyond, were curious for more, and they actively sought interaction: this was where the adventure began. It was like traveling to a foreign land while staying home all the time; walk into a tent and be transported, magically, into a world where people spoke strange languages, where women carried water home on their heads, where feasts were served on banana leaves; or talk to a stranger and secure a promise for an exotic foreign dress you’ve sought for long.

These were the same people, the Germans in my neighbourhood and the Germans in Mr.Krause’s city. They belonged to the same race, spoke the same language, ate the same bratwurst, and drank the same beer. They also shared a common past. But their responses were different. Should this be surprising?

3.

Sometime in the early nineties, during my college days in Bangalore, a small band of self-styled radicals visited our hostel one morning and summoned all students into the central courtyard. The hostel warden was away; curious to hear what this group had to say, around thirty of us gathered as directed. One of the outsiders began to address us in a conspiratorial tone. He said Bangalore was in danger of being run over by Tamilians from the neighbouring state, Tamil Nadu. This was already happening, he asserted. The foreigners were diluting Karnataka’s unique culture. Tamil was replacing Kannada on the streets. Prominent positions in the industry were being usurped by the wily Tamilians, and if nothing was done to check this inflow we would soon end up as minorities in our own land. It was time to rise up, he said, and to do something about it.

We received leaflets and we were told to spread awareness of the problem. No one asked what the solution was, and no one told us. Among the hostel inmates present that day were a couple of students from Tamil Nadu; they listened, stunned by the rhetoric, and in the following days they kept to themselves. Only after some of us joked about the incident did their anxiety lessen.

But a few inmates, students from Karnataka, were consumed by the ideas sown that day. They discussed how difficult it now was to find a Kannada-speaking autorickshaw driver, how often Tamil movies featured in cinema halls across the city, and they wondered why the Tamilians did not stay put in their own capital, Madras. Soon emotions climbed higher, and the Tamilians in the hostel began to face resentment in small but visible ways, in the common room or on the cricket field. One day we found a sign stuck on the notice board: “TamBrams Go Home” (Tamil Brahmins Go Home). Someone tore it up quickly, and it struck me that despite our common background a few of us had responded very differently to the implied threat revealed by those radicals.

This was my first contact with ethnic regionalism, but the concept wasn’t new to the country. A well-known movement was started in the 1960s by Bal Thackeray: Maharastra for Maharastrians. (Later the rhetoric and ideology expanded to embrace all Hindus, in opposition to Muslims. More recently, his nephew Raj Thackeray has taken up the cause of the Maharastrians, openly opposing immigration of North Indians into the state.) Similar sectarian attitudes have been prevalent at various times in other parts of India.

Fear of foreigners, anti-immigration policies and sentiments, right-wing movements: these elements are present in many societies today. From the media one may be led to believe that these issues are unique to our times, that they are perhaps a consequence of modernity, of globalisation and all the migration it has triggered. How accurate is this portrait?

4.

In the eighth century BC, Lycurgus, the lawgiver of Sparta, expelled all foreigners from Sparta because he feared they would corrupt the city:

Lycurgus actually drove away from the city the multitudes which streamed in there for no useful purpose, not because he feared they might become imitators of his form of government and learn useful lessons in virtue, as Thucydides says, but rather that they might not become in any wise teachers of evil…He thought it more necessary to keep bad manners and customs from invading and filling the city than it was to keep out infectious diseases. (Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, XXVII, 3).

Sparta was unique among the cities in Ancient Greece in its extreme hostility towards foreigners. Athens, on the other hand, offered resident foreigners — known as metics — an official status. There were laws to protect a metic; he could not own property, but had access to other forms of wealth, and he paid taxes. He was liable to serve in the army, but could practice any profession. In the fifth century BC, when metics in Athens formed close to ten percent of the population, a law was passed: the offspring of a union between an Athenian man and a metic woman could not claim citizenship of Athens.

While metics were mostly from the neighbouring Greek states, and spoke a dialect of Greek, the situation was different for foreigners who did not speak Greek. These “barbarians” had less rights than metics did (they could not, for instance, participate in the Olympic Games) and they were also the target of hostilities. In the words of playright Aristophanes, citizens of Athens were the flour made from Athenian wheat, while barbarians were the rejected chaff.

Athenian politicians were worthy predecessors of the modern Thackerays. Demosthenes, speaking in the fourth century BC about Philip II of Macedon, had this to say about the semi-barbaric Macedonian:

He’s so far from being a Greek or having the remotest connection with us Greeks that he doesn’t even come from a country with a name that’s respected. He’s a rotten Macedonian and it wasn’t long ago that you couldn’t even buy a decent slave from Macedon. (Third Philippic 31)

Two and a half millenia later, this statement has a contemporary ring to it.

Foreignness, then, is not a modern concept. Ethnocentric attitudes, views that place our “group” at the center and make us judge others in relation to it, have always been with us. History has plenty of evidence here, but it has little to say on why this is so.



5.

In 1967, zoologist Desmond Morris published The Naked Ape, a popular account of the human species interpreted through an animal-centric lens. Two years later he extended his arguments in another book, The Human Zoo, which used a similar comparison with animal behaviour to explain why civilised societies — especially in dense urban settings — are the way they are. In his view, “the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo,” and to understand humans in the city one must look at animals in captivity, in a zoo.

The Human Zoo, though full of oversimplifications and some fanciful theories, offers some interesting pointers that help us understand our attitude towards outsiders. Describing the concept of “super-tribes” (a group of a few thousand or more people that began to live together when the first cities emerged), it says:

In a super-tribe [man] no longer knew personally each member of his community. It was this change, the shift from the personal to the impersonal society, that was going to cause the human animal its greatest agonies in the millenia ahead. As a species we were not biologically equipped to cope with a mass of strangers masquerading as members of our tribe. It was something we had to learn to do, but it was not easy…we are still fighting against it today in all kinds of hidden ways — and some that are not so hidden.

Although striking, Morris’s theories cannot explain the diversity in our responses – why do some people fear outsiders, some tolerate them, others embrace them? Reason, a capability that is uniquely human, seems to play an important role here. Some of us have evolved, through thinking, a different set of answers to the problem of dealing with strangers. How did this happen? Does culture play a role? Are some societies more capable of this than others?

Amartya Sen, the Nobel-prize winning economist, explores some of these questions in his book The Argumentative Indian. In an essay on reason and identity, he debunks the notion that the West, with its values of individual liberty and tolerance, is better equipped to deal with this issue. Although he does not offer a solution, Sen highlights some examples of tolerance in the past – notably during the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar — and is optimistic about the future:

The central issue here is not how dissimilar distinct societies may be from one another, but what ability and opportunity the members of one society have — or can develop — to appreciate and understand how others function. This may not, of course, be an immediate way of resolving such conflicts…Rather, the hope is that the reasoned cultivation of understanding and knowledge would eventually overcome such impulsive action.

It is unclear if — and how — we can encourage this “reasoned cultivation of understanding and knowledge” within a modern society. What we know, however, is that people like Michael — the German in my town — exist, and my eleven years in Germany tell me that their numbers are growing. Most of the time I am not conscious of my foreignness, and when I am my foreignness appears in a positive light. To be foreign, as The Economist observes, is now a perfectly normal condition.

“This is not a good time to be foreign.” — The Economist, November 19th 2011

Earlier this month, xenophobia again grabbed the headlines in Germany. Investigations following the arrest of a woman, one of three members of the “National Socialist Underground” group, revealed that they had killed nine people between 2000 and 2006, and injured many more with a bomb in 2004; eight of the nine killed and most of those injured were of Turkish origin. Until this recent discovery, none of these hate crimes against foreigners were linked to the neo-Nazi group. (Suspicions were directed instead at the Turkish mafia.) The news caused the Germans embarrassment, shame, and regret, in that order. Media uproar followed, and the issue reached the parliament. Chancellor Angela Merkel called it a “Disgrace”. Politicians renewed their call for a ban on the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD). On the 22nd, two weeks after the sensational discovery, the parliament issued a joint statement that began: ”We are deeply ashamed…”

News about attacks on foreigners are not infrequent in Germany. Since the country’s reunification in 1990, right-wing extremism in the former east has grown in the margins, and reports of violence against non-German ethnic groups in the east have appeared now and again. In 2007, following a brawl at a late-night street party, a mob of neo-Nazis chased and attacked some Indians in the town of Mügeln, injuring a few before they found refuge in a restaurant. Similar incidents, mostly random, have provoked media outbursts, followed by debates on the threat posed by far-right groups and by some actions in the local community. Larger measures, like banning the far-right NPD, have not been pushed enough, and the right-wing extremism issue has received noticeably less attention from the authorities than the threat from Islamist terrorists.

This time, however, the crisis is of a different proportion: xenophobia has not just “reared its ugly head”; media reports suggest that its entire monstrous body now stands exposed. The killings have been systematic, cold-blooded, and guided by a hatred of a specific ethnicity. A DVD created by the neo-Nazi group, highlighting the killings in a macabre fashion, leaves no room for doubt on their intent. Right-wing extremism, the Germans realize, is no longer a random phenomenon; it is well-organized, it can kill methodically and with precision.

At the heart of all this debate and reflection lies the matter of image. Germany’s image, its reputation, its place in the modern world: these concerns rank high in the consciousness of a nation still recovering from the spectre of history. After the attack on the Indians in 2007, Spiegel ran an article that summarized the main worries of German officials:

The attack has triggered fresh public debate about far-right extremism in the formerly communist east of Germany, which has seen a string of racist assaults since unification in 1990. Politicians and business leaders have expressed concern that the country’s reputation abroad may have been hurt and that foreign investors be deterred from coming to Germany.

Wolfgang Thierse, Social Democrat vice president of the Bundestag lower house of parliament, said: “The worse Germany’s reputation becomes, the fewer people who we need for our progress and prosperity will come here,” Thierse told Berliner Zeitung.

The emphasis on “foreign investors” hides a larger concern, one related to Germany’s past. To a nation preoccupied with getting rid of that stigma, such incidents serve only to remind the world of its most embarrassing moment. This partly explains the media’s sustained interest in right-wing extremism, its efforts to get the government to act seriously against the threat. Ironically, all that attention has the unintended effect of strengthening the stereotype that Germans either hate foreigners or fear them.

What emerges from the media is a skewed portrait of society. Positive stories, sketches of how well foreigners are accepted in society, do not make the news. Reading these one-sided reports on racist behaviour in Germany, with all the accompanying murmurs on shame and embarrassment, a visitor may be forgiven for believing that hatred towards foreigners is a peculiarly German trait. As for the average foreigner, the Turk, the Indian, or the African living here, the concerns of day-to-day living bear little relation to these extreme events. Media and politics, it would seem from such episodes, are far away from the reality confronting the majority.

(To be continued)

An exhibition at the Heidelberger Kunstverein.

In the winter of 2000, a few weeks before we left India for Germany, Wife and I were invited by a relative for a farewell lunch. This uncle and aunt were encouraging and optimistic about our plans to migrate (“At least you aren’t going to the U.S. like the rest of them,” they said), but the aunt’s father, an elderly man with hawk eyes, took a different view. “Why are you going to Germany?” he asked. “It is the most racist country in the world, don’t you know? Haven’t you read about Hitler and the Jews? The Germans hate foreigners — I would think ten times before going there.”

An awkward pause followed, before someone changed the subject; no one referred again to the incident, but the old man’s words remained with me.

The first few months in Germany flew by, as we adjusted to our surroundings and evolved a routine. We found an apartment to rent, opened bank accounts, registered with the local authorities, took driving lessons, joined the local library, bought brands we hadn’t heard of. The language, though foreign, was never an obstacle; we coped well, helped by strangers who translated into English when we claimed ignorance of German, or by a curious mix of words — both English and German — and signs that bridged the gap between the locals and us. Sometimes, stuck under a heap of bureaucratic complications typical of interactions with the German state, my colleagues offered assistance, apologizing for the state’s inflexibility and annoyed at its obsession with rules. Our neighbours, curious about this Indian couple who had added colour to their locality, often stopped for a chat; most of them spoke only German, but they seemed satisfied with our “Ja”s and nods, and went on about the unusually long winter that year (a remark as regular as the weather was fickle), or the new supermarket nearby that was too expensive, or the roadworks in the village that made driving difficult. One of them, a retired journalist who lived on the top floor, invited us to identify our hometowns in his atlas, a large, thickly bound artifact that showed familiar geographies annotated with unfamiliar names, all in German, and when I pointed to the Indian peninsula he grew excited and produced a flurry of questions about the region and its history.

Our first experiences, then, were unlike anything the old man had predicted; Hitler and his National Socialists appeared now and then in the papers, but world associated with those words had nothing in common with the society around us.

“The politics of a country” writes V.S. Naipaul, “can only be an extension of its idea of human relationships.” In our case, the politics of Germany was at variance with what we encountered in our relationships. We arrived at a time when Germany was opening its doors to well-educated immigrants, computer professionals who could fill the gap in its growing IT sector; the German “Green Card”, a five-year visa issued with few expectations and in less than a week, was aimed at foreign “computer specialists” from non-EU countries, especially India. It drew mixed reactions from the conservatives: a member of the opposition built his election campaign around the slogan “Kinder statt Inder” (Our children, instead of the Indian), and this brought the immigration topic, ever present beneath the surface, to the front page. The politicians and the public were divided (a poll in March 2000 reported that 56% of Germans opposed the green-card programme, while 37% were in favour), and the media concluded that the debate highlighted the “latent German fear of all things alien.” (In the end, the fear of Indians overrunning the country — there was even a cartoon depicting a steam engine train, bursting with Indians lodged on the roof and hanging on all sides, arriving at a German station — proved overblown: few Indians arrived here with the green-card; the programme was adopted mostly by specialists from Eastern Europe, citizens of Ukraine, Romania, Croatia, Poland, and even Russia, while the Indians stopped at Frankfurt in transit across the Atlantic.)

Life in our village continued, oblivious of and indifferent to these public debates. This was possible in part because we lived in the west, far from the east or the north, two areas in Germany with a reputation of intolerance towards foreigners. The west had a high standard of living, very low unemployment, and a low immigrant population. (I hadn’t realized how successful Germany had been in limiting its immigrant population until we visited Paris in the spring of 2001: the African crowd there presented a sharp contrast to the homogeneity I had seen in Germany; it was like emerging from an all-white clinical lab into a middle-eastern bazaar); the east and north, with their share of economic and employment difficulties, were (reputedly) less open to foreigners. So there was no single story of Germany’s attitude towards foreigners: that was a stereotype created — and circulated — by the media or by those seeking simplistic answers.

On my trips home I was sometimes asked about life in Germany, in particular if I had been a victim of racist behaviour. It wasn’t, in some cases, even a question: the person had made up his mind, and was looking only for supporting evidence. My answer, always in the negative, surprised some, disappointed others. I made no attempts to explain that this isn’t a black or white question, that there are shades of grey, left, in the end, to our interpretations.


(To be continued)

* * *

On this day there is a long queue, unusual for this place, and the German woman behind the reception desk is not in a friendly mood. She is a young woman, wearing a white shirt over white pants, her blond hair pulled back in a short pony-tail. She is efficient in the way Germans usually are: doing the job with precision and speed, assuming a polite but firm manner. But she also seems disturbed, not at ease: she moves her hands rapidly, avoiding eye-contact with the patient in front, which lends her a distracted, impatient air. She deals with a couple of patients in this manner, and then it is the turn of the black man two places ahead of me.

From behind, and from the occasional glimpses of his profile, he resembles the actor Morgan Freeman: an elderly man, tall and heavy-set, curly greying hair, a pockmarked face with deep lines on his forehead. I imagine him speak in a clear, intense voice, but what comes out is hushed and hesitant: German is foreign to him, and he is struggling.

“Ihre Telefonnummer, bitte?” the woman asks, looking into her computer screen.

He gives her the number, uttering the German digits slowly, as if extracting each from a faraway place. As he nears the end he falters; the left hand reaches for his jeans pocket, pulls out a mobile phone — but he does not look it up.

“Wer ist der Hauptversicherte?” she asks, still looking at the screen. Who is the main insured in the family?

The man does not reply. She repeats the question, slowly, and asks if that is his wife.

“Ja,” he says. Yes.

By now a hushed silence has descended on the room, as though the dozen or so people were all absorbed in this conversation.

She asks him his wife’s date of birth. He dithers for a moment, and that moment cripples him: conscious of being overheard, perhaps intimidated by the lady’s impatience, he goes numb. Then, after what seems like an unbearably long pause, he mumbles a date that ends with 1949.

The woman repeats the date, and ends it with a question mark: 1949?

Yes, I think so, he says; his voice says he isn’t sure. She types something into the computer and asks him to wait until ten-thirty; you can take a walk outside if you wish, she adds.

He stands still, looking at her. Then: Sorry?

The woman repeats her statement, and instead of looking at him she shuffles some files around.

But I called yesterday and was asked to come at eight-thirty, he says. His tone underscores his puzzlement; he isn’t frustrated, only bewildered at the prospect of waiting for two hours. But this two-hour business is common at this doctor’s place; it has happened to me before, and to some Germans too.

The woman is trying hard to conceal her impatience. Still without looking up, she says: One needs to be registered to confirm an appointment!

And then, facing a wall of silence: I can’t do anything else!

Her voice is no louder than usual, no louder than it has been this morning, and yet what she has just said sounds like a dismissal. The conversation can go on no more.

When he turns around I see the man’s face. The likeness to Morgan Freeman dissolves, and I am faced with a look of weariness, of resignation. There is no anger: only pain, and helplessness, in the way he moves himself forward, shoulders drooping and head bent, as if carrying all that bulk were an enormous burden.

* * *

There are different ways to view this episode. You could take a straightforward view, one that fits well into the dominant narrative: white-locals (the insiders) mistreating dark-skinned immigrants (the outsiders). Or you could take into account the woman’s mood, the long queue facing her, her surly behaviour towards people — whites, mostly — before and after this black man, and conclude that the black man faced nothing unusual.

But think again about that second interpretation. What strikes you?

First, this interpretation is unlikely to be accepted by a dark-skinned onlooker because it does not make a good story: it robs the victim of his pathos, and lets the perpetrator off too easily. So the outsider goes away carrying with him the juicy episode of “white-local ill-treating black immigrant,” a post-modern version of the-colonial-and-the-colonized relationship.

Second, the interpretation is unfair to the man, as it does not consider the history of hostility and violence suffered by blacks. The black man cannot ignore this history — of his people, and his own experiences — which suggests that he cannot interpret the woman’s behaviour as an innocent outburst. For him it is about his race, about his skin colour, and he feels offended and hurt. With every such encounter he becomes more sensitive, more resentful.

Third, the interpretation, because it cannot be accepted, reveals the tragic nature of the episode. Despite the absence of ill intentions, the white-local’s behaviour is doomed to be misinterpreted by outsiders. What can be more depressing?

Fourth, if accepted by the black man this interpretation is easiest to deal with on a personal level. If the woman treated him as she treated the others, he has less reason to feel offended. Easy, once accepted; but impossible to accept.

Can we ever break out of this cycle? Can we ever erase the line between the outsider and the insider?

(To be continued)

A spray paint artist in Heidelberg

My first acquaintance with Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table was through an extract published this spring in The New Yorker. Reading it, I felt like an eleven-year-old watching a magician pull a rabbit out of his hat. I wanted to see more. The book, I learned, would be published “in summer”.

Summer arrived early, but the publishers kept their date fixed not to the season but to the calender. The weekend before the book’s release I scanned some reviews, avoiding parts that revealed the book’s contents, looking for whiffs of judgement. Everyone seemed to love it. On the day of its release, the Kindle edition on Amazon was prized at $3.50. Could this be true? For the price of two ice-cream scoops I could buy a new novel from a contemporary master of fiction? And it would be delivered instantly?

* * *

I do not own a Kindle, but the iPad at home has a Kindle App that lets me read Kindle eBooks on the iPad.

Let this be an experiment, I told myself, as I greedily purchased The Cat’s Table, Kindle Edition. Perhaps this would mark my transition into the world of eBooks, a step I had avoided this far.

* * *

Months later, I am still at “location” – the Kindle analog for “Page” – 235 of 3525. And I’m struggling to understand why.

* * *

Did I just say location 235? To be honest, I’m not so sure. Each time I click it open, I see a different number. At times this depends on how I hold the iPad, horizontally or vertically, and on other occasions the font size I choose determines the location. But even these things being equal, I sometimes get a different count when I open the eBook. Like a fortune wheel that turns to a different slot at each run. Others may find this cool, but it disturbs me. I like pages that are reliable, constant. The books on my shelf work that way.

* * *

On my iPad Kindle App, at the bottom of each page a group of icons offers additional options. I can set the display brightness, choose the font size, select a font colour and page background. I can highlight sentences, look up sentences highlighted by other readers. I can search for words or phrases in the book. An option called “Book Extras” leads me to a screen that shows a summary along different sections:

* Characters and people
* Settings and places
* Memorable quotes
* Awards
* First Edition

Each section has a switch that allows me to “Show spoilers” or not.

Selecting a word anywhere in the text pops up an option to query a dictionary. The definition is displayed in a small strip, and below it are two links to Google and Wikipedia, offering more information, more distraction.

* * *

A book and the iPad lie on the table.

I can see the book’s title; I can’t see what’s inside my iPad.

To read the book:

1. I pick it up
2. Open the bookmarked page
3. Start reading

To read the eBook inside the iPad:

1. I pick up the iPad
2. Press the ON button
3. Slide the “unlock” bar
4. Swipe once to reach the screen with my Kindle App
5. Click on the Kindle App and wait for it to load
6. Click on the eBook in my library
7. Start reading.

* * *

The book on the table is a book.

The iPad on the table is a gadget.

With a gadget, like a Hi-Fi system or a TV, I have a different sort of relationship than the one I have with a book.

My affair with the book is personal, one-to-one, physical, intimate. As long as I’m reading the book, I do not share my attention or my affections with anything or anyone else: I am with the book, the book is with me, in my hands. We share a private universe, complete in itself.

Reading an eBook, I am with the gadget, which is a container. It may be smart, but it still is a container. It is not a book. I don’t feel it, and my attention is shared: with the gadget, and with the innumerable distractions the gadget offers. Due to these intrusions, it is no longer a private universe. I no longer feel I’m reading a book.

If my relationship with books is physical, how can I accept something in between? If I accept something like a gadget in between, it is no longer the same kind of relationship.

Reading a book out of a gadget is like trying to make love over Skype.

* * *

Think about that for a moment. I find it difficult to accept a new kind of relationship because I’m used to an old one, the one I’ve grown up with. The implication is clear: the value we place on physical books may not last long. For a new generation, a generation that hasn’t grown up with physical books, there is no sense of loss. If all you’ve experienced is sex over the Internet, how can you miss the real thing?

This also reveals why logic cannot fully explain my distaste for an eBook or an eReader. The reason is emotional — it cannot be rationalized; it can only be felt. At this point, an eBook seems to me like a compromise: a cheap, fast, light-weight alternative to the richness of a physical book.

Unless I’m desperate, this isn’t an option I’d consider.

* * *

John Updike, in his essay ominously titled “The End of Authorship”, writes about the edges of books:

Books traditionally have edges: some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained.

Edges of a book give it character, traits I can feel in my relationship with it. Here’s Alberto Manguel, writing about this in A History of Reading:

I too soon discovered that one doesn’t simply read ‘Crime and Punishment’ or ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’. One reads a certain edition, a specific copy, recognizable by the roughness or smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover.

The Cat’s Table, in its current form, has no edges, no scents, no tears. It exists, formless and spineless, somewhere in the gadget. The words and sentences are present, but it isn’t the book speaking to me, it isn’t me reading the book.

My affair with eBooks has ended before it could begin.