I am a Lucknowite settled in Noida and enjoyed reading Vinod Mehta’s piece on Lucknow, How I Became a Pseudo-Secularist (Nov 19). For me, the biggest contrast lies in the spoken word. In Lucknow, even now, expletives are laced with sweetness, whereas here, the sweetest of expressions sound like admonition. ‘Aap’ is a pronoun unknown in these Turkish lands.
Rajeev Tivari, Noida
"In the formative years of my life in Lucknow I became what I am today." To borrow someone else’s line, Mr Mehta, why blame Lucknow?
Sandeep C., New Jersey
As a fellow Punjabi-Martinian-Lucknowite-in-Delhi from more recent times, I’d like to assure Mr Mehta that Lucknow’s cosmopolitan spirit is alive even after so many decades, the trips to check out IT College girls included. Kazim & Co may now sell Woodland shoes but Nasirbhai and his sense of humour are still around. Kwality restaurant may have disappeared but Royal Cafe still survives. And Mayfair cinema is dead but Beethoven’s symphonies live on in Ram Advani’s bookshop. Let me assert also that the refugees here have, in fact, imbibed some of the Lakhnavi cosmopolitanism over the years, unlike their Delhi counterparts. I wish you had written a line about the Anglo-Indians; they have more or less disappeared from the scene—to Australia via England—and this has been a major loss to the city’s culture. As globalisation reaches the city, the Punjabi-Sindhi traders too are facing competition, not unlike Kazim & Co in Mr Mehta’s ’50s. The malls and retail chains are taking the business over from Hazratganj and Aminabad. But the most popular mall is called Saharaganj, and Tunde’s sells his kebabs there like fast food.
Shivam Vij, on e-mail
Looking back often makes one gloss over unpleasant details, the carefully-chosen images hiding any ugliness. This piece is no exception.
Harsh Rai Puri, Bhopal
What self-indulgent gibberish.
Kiran, Hyderabad
What a delight it was to read Vinod Mehta’s piece and how true it rang. I’ve always considered myself incredibly lucky to have grown up in Lucknow. Even as it became known (justly) for its incomparable culture, it also proved to be the land of the brave (the Residency being a living testimony) and the heart of political India. As the saying went, whoever ruled Lucknow ruled India. And Vinod Mehta is right: Lucknow taught us to look at a person, not his station, caste or religion. It also taught us how to appreciate the finer things in life, be it music, beauty, delectable food or poetry. What would life be without them?
Jaipat S. Jain, New York
Great piece. However, when Vinod Mehta says Nasir claimed he was the best mechanic "West of Suez", could he have meant East of Suez?
Shajil Kumar, Bangalore
That was a vivid and candid account of Lucknow as it was in the ’50s. I lived there only for two years, between 1959 and 1961, but they were enough for me to savour the delights of Lucknow. Royal Cafe, Kwality, Mayfair and, of course, the Coffee House in Narhi were favourite haunts, and I lived and worked in Hazratganj. We also used to have beer at Kapours in Hazratganj when we had some money to spare. One thing in your piece was jarring, though, Mr Mehta. Talking about the refugees, you say they came to Lucknow in hordes. "They were mainly Punjabis, Sindhis and Sikhs." Aren’t Sikhs Punjabis too and didn’t they also come from West Punjab? Why mention a religious sect among areas of origin? Not a very secular thing to say, Mr Pseudo Mehta.
Surinder Kalia, Gurgaon
Mediocre piece. But what else can one expect from someone who himself admits he was busy chasing girls and gained no academic distinction at school or later at university?
Rishi P. Singh, Derby, UK
Vinod Mehta defines pseudo-secularism quite aptly. That is telling the minorities they are the real India and the Hindu majority is just a bunch of second-class citizens. This has been our history and Vinod Mehta is no exception. I wish a Safdarbhai or a Nasir could write this way and talk about Hindus in his vicinity.
P.N. Razdan, Gurgaon
I was growing up in Lucknow at the time Vinod Mehta was busy sharpening his pseudo-secularism—apart from editing Pioneer, of course—so, his emotive prose brought back a lot. Mostly about tiring oneself out on empty evenings by cycling on a self-marked circle connecting Hussainganj to Hazratganj to Indira Nagar to Hussainganj, checking out mutton biriyani made by practically every single vendor this side of Charbagh, watching movies at the halls dotting Hazratganj and Lalbagh and getting increasingly sceptical of carving anything remotely similar to a career in that city. The time I spent in Lucknow—mid-’80s to the mid-’90s—was without aim but not entirely worthless. I experienced the remains of a rich, bygone culture, learnt the delicacy of language and learnt to respect people. Everything so pitifully out of place in today’s Delhi where I reside.
S. Bhattacharya, Ghaziabad
Great piece of writing, Vinod. I spent my childhood in Aligarh, not Lucknow, but I remember celebrating Holi and Diwali along with friends, lighting diyas and crackers and devouring home-made halwa. It never occurred to me that I was not part of ‘them’.
Moin Sattar, Dubai
Merely interacting with people of other religions is not secularism. Nor is identifying people with sweets or eateries. The ability to live with another worldview is what I think secularism is. And so, Mr Mehta, being soft on terrorism, advocating different standards for different sets of people, targeting the bjp, being a Communist or Congress chamcha may sound like arch secularism but it is not.
Srinivas, Lucknow
He might call himself pseudo-secular but Vinod Mehta is a communal beast. Friends are just friends, why should he refer to his childhood associates as Muslims or Hindus?
T. Mukherjee, Rochester, US
How I Became a Hypocrite. Thanks, Vinod, for telling us.
J. Chadha, Vancouver
VM stayed in Lucknow for a long time, and long back. I stayed in the pristine cantonment there for only three years, that too recently. But I have the same sentiments about Lucknow that he expresses so lucidly. I have stayed in many parts of the country during my long innings in the army but Lucknow will always be dear to me. Its people are friendly and warm; traces of ‘nawabiyat’ still lurk in unexpected ways. Having said this, a shared nostalgia for the city is the only thing I find common between VM and myself: I oppose his views on almost everything else.
C.P. Nair,
Taliparamba, Kerala
Dear Vinod, there is nothing surprising about you being a pseudo-secularist. We lost out on honesty the day Nehru pushed socialism and mixed economy down India’s throat. Indians no longer speak what they think nor think what they speak. Truth is a casualty even in our courts. One way out of this quagmire is to abolish reservations. That culture has introduced rank opportunism and falsehood. It has also brought in a rampant rowdyism of the creamy layer.
Vedanta Rao, Hydera bad
Vinod Mehta has told a great story and given us a good peep into the composite culture of India. Some of us too grew up in similar environs. But we became liberals, not pseudo-seculars. We remain liberal in outlook and deeply nationalistic. Our country was partitioned at enormous human cost to appease Muslims and create a ‘homeland’ for them. Today, that homeland is a wasteland, injecting terror and hatred into the whole world. As for the sardars, they haven’t destroyed anything. If anything, they have made life better for everyone.
S. Prasad, Santa Clara, US
So Vinod Mehta is another Khushwant Singh. The question I’d like to ask him is: do you think those who are not pseudo-secular like you are dishonourable?
D.C., Omaha, US
Perhaps next time Comrade Mehta will tell us How I Became a Communist.
S.V., Bangalore
While surveying and documenting tribal languages may ensure that their linguistic features are recorded for posterity, it’s unlikely to save the vibrant cultures they express, or more importantly, the people who speak them (Mind Your Languages, Nov 19). To prevent tribes like the Jarawa of the Andaman islands—and their languages—meeting the same fate as the Great Andamanese, the Indian government must respect their rights to their land, and allow them to make their own decisions about their future. What use is a language if there is no one left to speak it?
Stephen Corry, director, Survival International, London
For most of human history, it seems likely that a kind of linguistic equilibrium existed, that is the number of languages lost roughly equalled the new ones created. The reason why this persisted is that there was no massive, enduring differences among the expansionary potentials of different peoples, of the sort that might have caused the sustained expansion of a single, dominant language. This mutually neutralising factor has been lost in today’s world.
Abhishek Avtans, Agra
It is reassuring to read that the Central Institute of Indian Languages has taken up the task of preserving the linguistic diversity of India. When a language is lost, its culture is not too far behind! We are already seeing the relentless onslaught of English on the official languages of India. In Bangalore, I found the vast majority mixing Kannada and English at will. There is also another insidious evolution going on for centuries: Sanskritisation, as discussed by noted sociologist M.N. Srinivas. In writing, we note the almost universal substitution of Sanskrit for the more robust Kannada usage.
S.S. Kere, Richmond, US
I don’t understand the point in saving languages that have only a handful of speakers. Munda, Gondi, Santhal, Bhil, Bodo, Malwi and other languages spoken by many thousands by the turn of the 20th century will be consumed by Telugu, Bengali and Hindi wherever they predominate. The latter will be enriched in the process by accepting words from the receding languages. Even now, you find many words in Telugu that came from central Indian languages that have withered away with time.
Chaitanya Likchitalavanya, Chennai
From where I stand, it makes absolute sense to abandon Bengali, my mother tongue, for English and Hindi. Bengali is fundamentally useless for any purpose but the purely social if one lives outside West Bengal. These days schools in this state have recognised this reality and stopped teaching dead-end languages like Bengali and Assamese in favour of Hindi. In the light of this, the plight of smaller languages can be imagined.
Biswapriya Purkayastha, Shillong
It should be easy to start a website to preserve the languages mentioned. This will offer employment opportunities to people who don’t know English too.
K.V. Sadasivan, Bharuch
Keralites migrating to the Gulf were slow in realising that it wasn’t the paradise it was projected to be in the heydays of migration (Back from Mars, Nov 19). It was only in the late ’90s that people began to speak of the hardships there, including poor working conditions. With India’s booming IT sector, smart Keralites started flooding engineering colleges in neighbouring states in the hope of getting a white collar job, an improvement over the blue collar sweatshop jobs they’d aspired for in the Gulf.
Rohit C.J., Cochin
There is nothing new in the revelations Sankaran Nair makes (Spooks ’n Sprouts, Nov 19). B. Raman had already spilled those beans in KAOboys in the RAW. What we have now an overdose of the same secrets!
Sachin Dixit, Mumbai
Who says today’s politicians are more corrupt than those in Indira Gandhi’s days?
Rajesh Chandra, Phoenix, US
Your story (Jab We Met, Nov 12) reflects a new trend being encashed by the likes of Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran, Navbharat Times, Amar Ujala and Rajasthan Patrika. They are helping propagate the new trend—now what shall we call it...lingua hinglica?
Dharmendra Kumar Rai, Jamshedpur
Deve Gowda has proved one thing: that he indeed is a master political strategist (Bull’s Eye, Nov 19).
Sohan Aggarwal, Rockville, US
The developments in Pakistan, with its roots in the US-backed military-mullah alliance of the ’80s, holds grim portents (The Martians Take Islamabad, Nov 29). We express our solidarity with the civil society of Pakistan and its fight against tyranny and fundamentalism.
Kamla Bhasin, Praful Bidwai, Amrita Chhachhi, Sonia
Jabbar, Ritu Menon, on e-mail
Pervez Musharraf’s political gamble of declaring an Emergency to meet the challenges of militancy, military unease and fundamentalist mullahs is proving patently erroneous. It’s a desperate bid to cling on to power—despots, anyway, have never been democrats; the Pakistan president is no exception. His acts of gagging the judiciary, subverting the Constitution and maiming the civil society deserve highest condemnation.
George Olivera, Mysore
A despot’s psyche is characterised by two major illusions: one, he is indispensable; two, he will remain in power forever. In any case, the general has proved it again: uniform and politics seldom go together.
Madhu R.D. Singh, Ambala
Be it Musharraf or his predecessors, Pakistan has always been ruled by autocrats.
Raj Bhardwaj, Chandigarh
Which democracy in Pakistan is the international community speaking of? Islamabad has always been ruled by an elitist bureaucracy and/or an over-ambitious military. The deep-rooted feudal system in most parts of that country shares a common interest with the army—it warrants a revolution if democracy there has to mean something beyond mere casting of votes. In short, should Musharraf hold elections, it won’t change the lives of its people. It can only pop up corrupt leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto.
Sandeep Giya, Mumbai
Benazir managed to re-enter her homeland only because she enjoys the support of the US, the main power-broker in Pakistan politics. Many in her country believe she is irreversibly tainted by corruption.
Safiya Sameena, Vijayawada
The US is making the same mistake it did in Latin America: supporting pompous dictators who enjoy no popular support.
Rajiv Chopra, Jammu
That dreaded ex-isi chief Hamid Gul is in solitary confinement in Adiala jail. Why only him? Islamabad abounds with such progenitors of jehad. How did the rest manage to remain invisible?
A.K. Ghai, Mumbai
Prem Shankar Jha gave great insight into the happenings in Pakistan (Saviour Musharraf ). The West doesn’t grasp the nuances of that country—thus views Musharraf like any banana republic leader, and worse, an incorrigibly corrupt Benazir as a champion of democracy.
N. Maganti, Hyderabad
A good analysis but for one flaw. The writer doesn’t speak of any mullah or extremist arrested post-Emergency.
Biju Varghese, Mavelikkara, Kerala
I totally disagree with Jha. It’s hard to believe that Musharraf, who has dismissed judges threatening his rule, is out to instal democracy in Pakistan.
Ravi Krishnamoorthy, Sunnyvale, US
Going by the way the Taliban is gaining ground in Pakistan, the country would disintegrate. And that will be good for India.
Chaitanya, Chennai
Who in India won’t rejoice over the dethroning of Musharraf?
S. Aggarwal, Rockville, US
For once, I agree with Jha. Musharraf is the best thing to have happened to Pakistan.
Jha is sounding loopy. He should get his head examined.
Narsing Gowd, Secunderabad
