America upsets people for various reasons today, though it’s hard to resist the music, movies and much else. However, you can’t help but approve of the American work ethic that made peanut farmers into Presidents (Jimmy Carter) and dirt-poor secretaries into glamorous magazine editors who defined a new way to be for working girls (Helen Gurley Brown). That’s just two historical examples.
Moreover, if you examine their upper class, the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), those ‘Boston Brahmin’ values were pretty sound, really. You had to study, you had to have accomplishments (in music, ballet, or foreign languages), and you had to be outdoorsy for body-mind balance. Besides wealth creation, you had to work on something that added to the sum of human knowledge; you had to support museums, universities, and good causes, grow gardens, and practise serious philanthropy. Most appealing, you had to practise thrift: use money for acquiring graces, not for showing off.
An Austrian Jew who embodied these values was Justice Felix Frankfurter, a star of Harvard Law School, an advisor to President Franklin D Roosevelt, and a Supreme Court judge. I love his ‘Advice to a Young Man Interested in Going to Law’; it’s a life-bestowing mantra:
“No one can be a truly competent lawyer unless he is a cultivated man. If I were you, I would forget all about my technical preparation for law. The best way to prepare for the law is to come to the study of law as a well-read person. Thus alone can one acquire the capacity to use the English language on paper and in speech and with the habit of clear thinking, which only a truly liberal education can give. No less important for a lawyer is the cultivation of the imaginative faculties by reading poetry, seeing great paintings, in the original or in easily available reproductions, and listening to great music. Stock your mind with the deposit of much good reading and widen and deepen your feelings by experiencing vicariously as much as possible the wonderful mysteries of the universe and forget all about your career.”
On the flip side, the American ignorance of the world can be startling, at least about Indians. Loads of Indians are asked by foreigners, “How come you speak such good English?” The first American to ask me this was a lady I enjoyed reading in my teens and twenties: Helen Gurley Brown, the founding editor of Cosmopolitan. Way back in New York, I asked to meet her and she agreed. So, I went careening into the West 57th Street Cosmo office, staggering under the biggest bunch of flowers I could afford, because Mrs Brown had been such fun to read and imparted several insights into the workings of the modern world. She was really sweet and commended me as a hardworking journalist. She gave me a Cosmo bag and a Lucky the Cat tee, but when I got up to leave, she suddenly asked, “Where did you learn to speak such good English?”
“Well, Mrs Brown, it’s been around in India for a few centuries,” I managed to say, squashing a desperate need to giggle while I’m ashamed to say, the script in my head ran, “An Ozark Mountain hillbilly is asking me this?”, which was her background. I was a ‘nothing-burger’, to use her catchphrase, and she was an international celebrity, but I found it hilarious.
I almost smacked the face of a curator at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art who was showing me around the Magritte exhibition when he sprang that very question at me. Instead, I lifted an eyebrow and murmured, “Quaint”, which clearly stung, because he insisted on buying me lunch.
I think this ‘Speakee English?’ syndrome belongs, ironically, with what American writer Saul Bellow apparently said about the French: that they have a ‘Larousse mentality’. Meaning the famous French Larousse Encyclopaedia has already defined everybody and everything, and the French couldn’t handle anything outside the stereotype imprinted in their minds. For instance, I was often told in France, “Mademoiselle, j’adore la femme typique!” (I love the typical woman, meaning an Indian in a sari). Amusingly incomplete about multicultural ‘me’, whoever that ‘me’ was.
But not so funny when you consider how very Larousse we ourselves are, especially in matters of faith. Many Indians are guilty of this, and it’s dismaying how not keeping an open mind to go beyond stereotypes is so widespread.
A story that can’t be bettered for its sting is about Utanga, the old mendicant in the Mahabharata. Wandering around the Gangetic plain, he suddenly encounters Sri Krishna going home from Kurukshetra. Krishna wants to do a favour for his old devotee. “Well then, please grant that I may always find a drink of water,” asks Utanga. “So be it”, says Krishna.
Later, the Lord wants to give the faithful Utanga a drink of amrita, the nectar of immortality. But when he asks Indra, king of the celestials, to handle this, Indra wants to test Utanga’s worthiness first. He finds Utanga in a barren place, desperate for water. Indra changes himself to look like an ‘outcaste’ Chandala and offers his drinking gourd to Utanga. But the old man refuses to accept, little realising that the gourd contains amrita. After much earnest persuasion, Indra shrugs and vanishes. Krishna is very disappointed that Utanga should prove so unworthy. But there it is. His mind was proto-Larousse and closed to reality. The reality being that things are not always as they seem. We have to think a bit before we shoot off our mouths.
Renuka Narayanan | FAITHLINE | Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(shebaba09@gmail.com)