“Look Mama A Geine “And Other Tales from the Life of Avi B

I did my first degree in Commerce at Panjab University. We were a group of four Sikhs, three from St. Johns in Chandigarh and one from Sanawar who always hung around together. We all talked about going to America.

I applied to a few schools in the United States for my MBA and got accepted at Southern Methodist University (SMU)in Dallas. Its recent claim to fame being the place where George W Bush’s Presidential Library is housed. After the excitement of getting the acceptance wore down, I started to have doubts. Should I go or not? It was a lot of money. What if I did not do well? What if I could not get a job and so on. My Mother who was a strong woman, sat me down and said “You should go. Otherwise, you will regret it all your life “.

So late August 1972, wearing a marooned coloured turban, a newly tailored pin stripe suit, from Purba Tailors of Sector 7-C, and carrying a briefcase, I boarded an Air India flight to New York. I was seated next to a young American girl. She was part of a group of students from the University of Rochester who had come for a holiday. We chatted. I asked her about her visit. She mentioned that before coming, the gossip among the friend was that the Indians were generally deferential to the Whites and you could bully them and be rude to them, however to be careful about doing that to the Sikhs as they would not take any crap.

I reached Dallas late in the evening and took a bus to downtown and checked into a cheap hotel. Next morning around nine, the confident fresh off the boat (or plane) sardar walked out and saw a dinner across the street. Walked in to a “How you doing?” greeting which was ignored as I didn’t realize it was welcoming me. I sat on the counter and confidently ordered a burger and coffee – for breakfast. Took a bite and almost threw up. Never having had a burger before, I did not realize that apart from the meat and bread, there would be onions, tomatoes, mustard and ketchup. Then took a sip of coffee. Being used to the instant coffee and hand beaten espresso coffee, this bitter black coffee was awful. Paid and took a bus to SMU.

SMU is an urban campus and quite spread out. I decided to stay on campus and got allotted a room in the Theology Graduate Dorm. Next day stepped out to go for breakfast. As I started walking a blonde girl walked by smiled looked at me and said “Hi, how you doing?” I straightened up and looked around to see if she had said that to me or someone else. Another few steps and the same thing happened. I was a bit confused. Was there something about me which attracted these girls? After half a day or so I began to realize that it was the Texan way of greeting - strangers’ and friends.

Next morning, I found my way to the cafeteria. Hundreds of students all piling up their plates with food. What caught my attention was some big guys both Whites and African American, their trays full of food and two or three glasses of milk. Reminded me of the big sardars at the desi halwai’s knocking of their tall steel glasses of milk. But those guys were no match for these football players.

That weekend some senior Indians who had been there a while rounded up the Indian newbie’s and took them shopping. Walked into a mall where JC Penny was the anchor. Since this was the first time in a department store and I looked around with wide eyes at the variety of stuff on display. Being of small build and not realizing that I was in Texas, I went to the men's section, but because of my size, I was directed to the boy’s section. Bought a few drip-dry shirts, same print, different colours and of course a long-desired pair of Levi blue jeans. Next day decided to wear my blue jeans. I had great difficulty walking, as it was so stiff. Had to wash it at least half a dozen times to be able to wear it.

After a while got a part time job in the books and records section of an upper middle class department store in the books and records section which was housed in the basement next to an escalator. Of course, my turban would get discrete glances. One day saw a young boy coming the escalator holding his mothers’ hand noticed me. Pulling her hand, he said loudly “Look Mama there is a genie “. She tried to hush him up and then dragged him away.

Being always interested in books I very quickly became familiar with what we had and what was selling well. One of the books which was on the best seller list then was Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution. Whenever a woman would come to the counter and before she could say anything, I would hand her a copy of Dr. Atkins. “How did you know?” I would just smile enigmatically and not say a word.

One of the sales ladies was a nice old lady in her fifties offered to give me her old car when she heard that I was next going to a school in Phoenix, which I declined. One weekend while walking around the mall at lunch time, I ran into another bearded, turbaned sardar. He was actually from Chandigarh and we had known each other slightly. Sat down to have lunch. He told me that he was driving around rural Texas selling bibles door to door. Try picturing a sardar ringing the doorbell of a house in Luckenbach, Texas trying to sell a bible to the housewife who answered the door. Apparently, he was a good sales man and was doing pretty well.

Another day it was late afternoon and I was walking in downtown Dallas doing a survey for my Marketing Professor and I heard a shout from behind me. There were two big African Americans. “Where are you from man? Are you a A rab? I said “No, I am from India”. Then one of them said “Give me five dollars “I said “No “, turned around and started walking. After a few steps I turned around and saw one of them looking a bit confused and the other bent over laughing. Fortunately, I was not in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles where the ending might have been slightly different.

While in Dallas I would see the Texans walking around in bleeding Madras shorts and jackets which were very popular then. Before heading out to Phoenix I decided I had to have a bleeding Madras sports jacket. I don’t know what had gotten into me. Neiman Marcus was having a sale and I splurged on a jacket. It lay in my cupboard as I moved to Hong Kong and Singapore and back to Hong Kong. Eventually I gave it away, never having worn it even a single time.

The Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management was a very different type of school compared to SMU. It was housed in a former air field and some of the dorms were in the old barracks. It had the largest number of foreign students among all the schools in the United States. It was a popular recruitment stop for the multinationals, particularly those with operations in Asia. It is now part of Arizona State University.

I decided to stay off campus sharing a house with a couple and another single guy. It was an interesting experience. We went to the Goodwill store and furnished the place for under twenty dollars. One of the roommates was perpetually stoned, even while attending classes.

At school there were a few laid back hippie types with whom I got along. One of them had a long beard, wore flip flops, a bag slung over his shoulder and a stray dog by his side. During classes the dog would sit outside the class. Not sure what they were doing in a business school? They were serious fans of The Grateful Dead. One weekend we decided to go to a Grateful Dead concert at a stadium at Phoenix. It was one the coldest days in Phoenix for the last twenty years. However, it did not stop the Deadheads from stripping and running around naked totally stoned or blown.

After graduating from Thunderbird, I went to Los Angeles to look for a job. I bought an eighteen-month-old Volkswagen from the official dealer. Drove once from Los Angeles to San Francisco. On the way back had some trouble with the car. A few months later I decided to drive to New York as my sister had come to get some medical treatment for her son.

It was fall 1974. Accompanying me part of the way was a German couple. We drove from Los Angeles to Phoenix. We spent the night with a friend who was still at Thunderbird. Early next morning she went off to classes. We packed up our bags and were loading them into the car when two police cars drove up and the cops jumped with drawn guns. We identified ourselves and gave the name of our host. Apparently, the neighbours had reported that some foreigners and hippies (the German had long hair) were stealing from the house. The police checked with my friend and everything was settled.

We drove off to the Grand Canyon and spent the night there. Next morning, we started off early and decided that we would take turns as I wanted to get to New York as soon as I could. The Germans were getting off somewhere near Memphis. However, we started having trouble with the car. The engine started heating and the oil was bubbling over. Every few hundred miles I had to pour in a quart of engine oil. After dropping off my friends I stopped to get some gas. The car refused to start. It was late in the evening and next day was a Sunday and the earliest I could get it fixed was Monday. I spent the night at a motel close by.

Next morning, I decided to try starting the engine and to my surprise it worked. I drove for the next thirty-six hours with a few hours stop in DC and frequent cups of coffee (I had gotten used to it). I reached the New Jersey turnpike late evening. It was the end of a long week end and the traffic was a mess. I prayed that my car would not break down. Luck was on my side. I reached our friends house in Chappaqua in upstate New York late in the evening. The friends my sister and I were staying with came to our wedding as well as Simran and Priya’s. Some of you might remember meeting them – Steve and Maddy Gunders.

In January I was informed that I had a job offer from Citibank in Hong Kong. Landed up there in February 1975 after attending my elder brother’s wedding in Chandigarh.

After about three years, I decided to go on a holiday to Europe taking the Euro rail as it was known then. I was visiting Amsterdam, Rome, Zurich, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo. Don’t remember the exact route I took. While in Rome, I decided to visit Venice by train. At the station in Rome was wandering around when t a sardar wearing a baseball cap came up to me and started asking “Kithu aye ho? (where are you from?). I told him and asked him what was he doing here. He said Mei kya sare England ja re. Italy koi ne ja ren te meh ticket la eke agia . (everybody was going to England so I decided to come to Italy. I bought a one-way ticket). But after a few days he was running out of money and was unable to get a job. He had met some Pakistani’s who told him that it was easy to get jobs in Austria and they had some friends who would help him, so he was leaving that night. Wished him good luck and went off to Venice. A few days later I returned to Rome and saw the same person wandering around. I asked him what happened? Apparently, he got sent back from the border since he did not have an Austrian visa. He now only had about five or ten dollars. I told him to go to the Indian embassy and asked them to send him back. That was out of the question for him. He asked me where I was going next? I said Zurich. He asked if the train went via Munich. I said yes and he said “take me along till Munich “I asked him if knew anyone in Munich? He said he had a cousin. I asked him if he had his address? He replied vaguely that he lived near the YMCA or something. I declined to travel with him, but gave him enough money to buy a ticket to Munich. He took down my Chandigarh address and promised to send me the money. I never heard from him. I wonder if he was one of the first of the forty thousand Sikhs who landed up Northern Italy and helped solve the shortage of dairy farmers and saved the Italian Parmesan industry.

(https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33149580).

 

Continuing my trip, I was in Stockholm walking down the street late one evening and I heard a shout in Punjabi. I turned around and there was this Indian man running towards me. After the introductions, he said let’s go across to meet my friend who is at a restaurant. I thought perhaps his friend ran an Indian restaurant. We ended up at a McDonald where his friend was working behind the counter. While chatting he mentioned that he was a merchant navy seaman and had jumped ship and stayed on. Married a Swedish girl and was quite happy staying on. He asked me what I did and where do you stay? I said that I lived in Hong Kong and worked in a bank. Looking at me seriously he asked “Are there any Swedish girls there. Get married to one and come to Sweden. It’s a great life here. I work for six months and live on dole for six months”. I promised to find some Swedish girl and be back in Sweden.

 A year later I got married to an Indian girl and had to keep working for thirty years before I could call it quits. Some guys just choose the long hard road.

As for my three friends, they are all in the Bay area, with one specializing in marketing and working for most of the technology names. One is in retailing and the last has his own business. I am the only one who decided to do a ghar wapsi in 2005.

 

 (This is a third blog which is autobiographical. The other two were written in 2014 and are attached in case you have any interest)

 

            A Friend’s Comments Come True

In March 2017, I received an email from a former Citibank colleague about a group visit to India which he cancelled. I was shocked for his reason, but unfortunately four and a half years later, he has proven right.

When I joined Citibank in February 1975 there was a Hong Kong Chinese colleague with whom I got along. We also attended a three-month training course in Manila in 1978. After a few years he moved to the US and about ten years later he moved back. We kept in touch sporadically prior to our moving back to Delhi in late 2005.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to receive an email from him in November 2016, saying that a group of about 15 friends wanted to visit India and if I could introduce him to a travel agent who could take care of their travel plans. I introduced him to the agent whom we used.

A couple of months went by and I did not hear anything. I checked with my travel agent. With an embarrassed tone, she said that after two months of correspondence, he had cancelled their plans with a strange email. I asked her to send it to me.  She did and it read as follows:

“My group is very concerned about hygiene and health hazard to India and decided to put the tour on hold pending further deliberation. The concerns include “superbug” that according to a recent Bloomberg article 9 out of 10 foreigners got infected with superbug after visiting India. The other is the existence of feces and dead corpses in different places.”

I was absolutely livid and wrote to him that about a year ago my son, Simran got married and that we had seventy to eighty visitors from overseas, some of whom travelled all over India. None of them had fallen ill, other than the odd case of a stomach bug.  Also, that never in my life had I seen dead bodies lying on the streets. I also told him that he was being ridiculous and that the previous year India had almost nine million tourists and using his numbers at least eight million should have come down with the superbug. I quoted him a Bloomberg article which confirmed “That finding and other recent studies show antimicrobial resistance is a growing worldwide problem, with an especially high incidence in countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, and some areas in southern Europe, such as Greece “said Lindsay Grayson, head of infectious diseases at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne ". He responded with a conciliatory message.

Now with the state the country is in I feel that I should write to him and say that perhaps he was right after all. All of you must have read enough and seen photographs of patients queuing up outside hospitals due to a lack of beds and erratic oxygen supplies and funeral pyres being light in parks. In the meantime, the politicians are playing politics about the supply of oxygen. State governments allowing elections, religious festivals and the list goes on.

 

The local politicians in the meantime talk about the virus being cured by drinking cow urine or rubbing cow dung. A couple of extreme videos circulating on social video show a group of men in Karnataka dipping in pool of cow dung shouting Jai Mata or crowds running through the streets with the air full of cow dung being showered on them.

A few months ago, we were strutting around the globe saying that we had slayed the virus beast and we were the world’s pharmacy. During this period specialists in India were warning the government of the impending tsunami, but they were ignored. We were trying to outdo China by handing out millions of vaccines doses to other countries. While all other countries around the world were placing orders of hundreds of millions of doses, we placed our first order in January 2021 for a relatively modest amount.

I am reminded of the sixties when we were dependent on the world for food grain and we were pitied. The US PL 480 together with the Green Revolution bailed us out. Now we have the Indian Air Force planes flying in oxygen plants “donated "by all the major developed nations to bail out the “super power”. Our credibility has been shattered.  To add salt to the wound, the Government is continuing to spend thousands of crores to build temples and government buildings. UP with its usual sense of priority, has set up help desks which can be approached by gaushalas or to deal with sick cows.

The population in the meantime is trying to do its best to manage the situation. The Residents Welfare Associations have organized vaccine camps, set up medical rooms with oxygen tanks and staffed by nurses. Their web sites act as resource centers for medicines, hospital beds, plasma and doctor contacts. Just seeing it at close quarters within our own apartment complex, it is amazing, heartening and joyful to see that the spirit of humanity is alive and willing to help out each other, providing leads, sourcing oxygen tanks, donating blood or plasma.

The party sycophants of course continue to praise the great job the government is doing and make other inane comments. One politician commenting on the oxygen shortage said that “the hospitals should use the oxygen judiciously and follow the guide lines “. The doctors at the hospitals are all mystified as to how to do that?  What else can I say?  

 

 

                                              MANAGING RELATIONSHIPS 

I was a banker from 1975 to 2005 where the perennial buzz word was Relationship Management. Whether you were a Corporate Banker or an Investment Banker or a Retail Banker, managing relationships was what you did one way or the other, except if you were a trader. This concept of managing relationships caught on with other industries as well. However, in all my years of banking both as a banker and a customer, I have never had a person who was as good as my best relationship manager. He is a real estate broker in Hong Kong - David Cheung. 

Normally real estate brokers are a breed apart like the used car salesmen, particularly in Hong Kong. You should watch the Hong Kong movie Temporary Family  to get an idea about the aggressiveness and inventiveness of the Hong Kong brokers. I have had a woman broker ringing my door bell at mid-night to make me sign an agreement, so that I did not change my mind next day and sell to someone else. I have also dealt with real estate brokers in London, New York and in India. They are all the same.

I met David in the early nineties. He is a smallish bouncy always cheerful man. He helped me buy, rent out, manage and sell my properties over the years. He had a cousin who takes care of the repairs and maintenance. Over the years I introduced him to a number of my friends and to a person they have been delighted with his services. A friend still uses him to let out and manage his property even though he is no longer in Hong Kong. 

We sold our last property in Hong Kong soon after leaving in 2005. David helped find a buyer and arranged for all the documentation. I flew in for a day, signed the sales agreement (the whole process took 15 minutes) and left. However, that was not the end of the relationship.

Almost sixteen years later, even though he knows that he is not going to get any business from me, both during Western and Chinese New Year, I get Ecards or emails from David greeting us and enquiring about our family. Today I received a message expressing his concern about the Covid situation in India and offering to ship over masks or anything else we might need. This is the ultimate in relationship management. No banker can match that or even come close.

 

                                                           COMICS

When we were children, we loved reading comics. There was a large variety, but for me there were a few categories - the War comics, the Classics Illustrated, the Western and comics such as Archie and Popeye. Also, every week we used to get the English comics such as Desperate Dan and Beano and some others. Many parents stopped their children from reading comics as they felt it was a waste of time . Fortunately for us our parents did not.

The War comics were about the Second World War and the villains were always the Germans and the Japanese. I still remember the few words from the war comics– Achtung when the Germans are out on a patrol or Schweinhund when the German soldiers would capture the Allied prisoners. And of course, the Japanese pilots with the headbands shouting Banzai as they dived their Zero aircraft on to an American battleship in a suicide mission. The illustrations showed the Germans and the British soldiers shooting and bayoneting each other with the Japanese using their swords to kill and cut off heads. At that time there was no political correctness. I can understand why this genre of comics are no longer available.

Perhaps that was when my baser instincts were first aroused. I should not be admitting this, but even to this day, while I do not like seeing violence in real life, I like nothing better than seeing movies with the swords and spears being thrust down the throats or passing through two bodies. I just saw the tv series Spartacus for the second time in about three to four years. The War movies or the Western movies where the bullets are shown in slow motion hitting the target and the explosion of blood or the historical movies with sword fights and arrows piercing the throats are shows which I like seeing repeatedly. The special effects nowadays are amazing. Perhaps I enjoy these because I know it does not happen in so in real life. 

The Classics Illustrated were pictorial illustrations of the classics such as Tom Sawyer and the Count of Monte Cristo or H G Wells the War of the Worlds. I used to find them fascinating. As I grew older, I  read some of them but for the others, the Illustrated Comics were the earlier version of Wikipedia where when discussing a classic, you don’t come across as being totally ignorant, since you know the summary.

The Westerns or the Archie or Superman comics introduced us to Americana or the brief biography of the founding fathers of America from the likes of George Washington to Benjamin Franklin to Buffalo Bill and Davy Crockett. This was later supplemented by reading the children’s version of the books from the American Library in Rangoon and in my teens reading Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour for the Westerns. Interestingly these were all available from the bookstores and the state library in Chandigarh. 

Nowadays when I look around it appears that while the Archie comics are still around, the ones which are the most popular are the action type of comics such as Superman or Batman or as those from the Marvel list such as Spiderman, Avengers, and Iron Man which are hot properties for movies. The other category of movies which are now increasingly popular the world over are the Manga comics from Japan.

Manga comics or graphic novels originate from Japan and cover a broad range of genres from action, adventure, comedy, historical, detective, among others. They are widely read in the US, Canada and France and East Asia. Surprisingly Manga erotica in violent form is read not just by the legions of salary man on the trains in Japan, but also by the women. "Men read these kinds of comic books, so why shouldn't women as well?" asked Yayoi Watanabe, a demurely dressed woman who draws the comics. "Women seem to be starting to say, 'Hey, we lust, too,' and 'We're also thinking of porn and promiscuity. (1)). This represents the contradictions in Japan. One the one hand you have grown up women in their uniforms and white gloves, talking in little girl voices ( such as in the lifts in the stores such as Takashimiya or Mitsukoshi) and on the other hand sitting in the subway and reading violent Manga novels. 

And then there are the underground comix ,which according to Wikipedia are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They depict content prohibited by the Comics Code Authority (apparently there is such an authority) such as explicit drug use, sexuality and violence. Very popular in the sixties and seventies but to a lesser extent now. Why bother with sex in comics when you can see the real thing on your internet.  The exception is Japan where you can have both. Japanese porn became widespread in the seventies with the emergence of the VHS video (see The Naked Director on Netflix).

While animation has been around since the late 1880’s, it was only in the 1940’s, (regarded as the Golden Age of American Animation according to Wikipedia), that cartoons took off. Like other memorabilia such as baseball cards, and first editions of books, comics are also becoming collectibles. The following three are the most expensive comics sold.

1, “Action Comics” #1, CGC 9.0 - $3,207,852

2. “Amazing Fantasy “#15, CGC 9.6 -$ 1,100,000

3. “Detective Comics “# 27 CGC 8.0 - $1,075,000 (2)

For me it is difficult to understand why any one would pay such huge amounts for them. You would argue that this an art form. But the artists were anonymous. Perhaps it’s the rarity value. If the original drawings made by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby of their original hero’s such as Thor, Iron Man and X Man were being auctioned off, I could understand, but a mass-produced copy. I am nor sure if the first editions of classics go for anywhere near these amounts. Perhaps I am just envious because I did not have a copy.  

 In the movies you had the cartoons which Walt Disney first started with Snow White and Seven Dwarfs in 1937 and popularized with Mickey Mouse and numerous other characters. Since the 1970’s movies have included both animation and real actors together. The next major push was with the use of computers. Steve Job’s Pixar pushed it to the next level and created a number of animated best sellers starting with Toy Story. Nowadays in some movies at times it is difficult to differentiate with computer generated images with real live actors, like the Spartan based movie 300 based on the comic of the same name. Interestingly enough some of the Visual Special Effects, even for the Marvel originated movies such as Thor, or the Life of Pi or others are being done in India.

With computer games, merger of animation with real life and cartoon movies and of course political correctness, how long will comics be around, expect perhaps with Manga in Japan. In the meantime, I am adding the Illustrated Classics comics to my Amazon Wish List for my grandchildren.

Column from today's Guardian newspaper

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/27/marvel-cinematic-universe-films

 

(1)    '(https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/05/weekinreview/the-world-in-japan-brutal-comics-for-women.html

(2)    (https://www.cbr.com/the-10-most-expensive-comic-books-ever-sold/)

 

The Times They Are A-Changin

 

Come gather ‘round people, wherever you roam

………….

For the time, they are a-changin'

Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call

Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall

For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled

The battle outside ragin’

Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls

For the time, they are a-changin’

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land

And don’t criticise what you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly aging

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand

For the times, they are a-changin’

Bob Dylan – Lyrics – The Times They Are A-Changin’

'(On July 7th,2007, I had written a blog “Race, Religion & Politics - Race .This is a continuation of this. )

Over the last few months, I have read and seen the following:

Book - Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Interesting book about the trials and tribulations of  African Americans and comparisons with the Dalits in India and the Jews during Hitler’s Third Reich.

Television show - The Loudest Voice - It is about Roger Ailes, the person who set up Fox News for Rupert Murdoch.

Movie - The Deacons of Defence - 2003. It is based on a 1964 true story about a group of African Americans who took up arms to challenge the anti-black police, judiciary and the Ku Klux Klan in a small town – Bogalusa, Louisiana and succeeded. 

CNN - Mobs laying siege to the Capitol in Washington on January 6^th.

Your obvious question is what is the link between them?

The start of racial abuse and discrimination started when the first slave ship arrived in Virginia about 400 years ago. A national culture was created where Americans perceived that the white population should be the dominant majority and the African slaves remain a minority - not deserving of equal rights and dignity. Now, the minorities in the USA are getting together and voting for a party which they feel will provide them equal opportunities.

The second concern among the right-wing conservatives is the rise and influence of the “leftist liberals”, particularly among the recent immigrants who are now becoming political and standing for election at the state and federal level. The conservatives fear that they would push for increased taxes and handouts to the poor thus disincentivizing them from seeking jobs. This in spite of the gap between the wealthy and the poor being at an all time high.(1)

 

It is perhaps worth going back into time, since America has a relatively short history. Their goal when they declared Independence was to be a Republic and have a democratic form of government which would be a model for the rest of the world.

The opening lines of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, read as follows:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

While the words were inspiring,14 out of the 21 signers of the document had at various times held slaves. Thomas Jefferson, the person who drafted the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, is believed to have continued holding slaves and had an African American slave as his mistress and who bore him children (2).

From the early days there was a tendency for America to be not just a White dominated country, but for some of the Founding Fathers it was to be a White Anglo Saxon Protestant nation. In the 1750’s Benjamin Franklin was concerned that “.... Pennsylvania, founded by the English, (would) become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”

Similarly, “The Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion”. He was not alone. In spite of the lyrics in the musical Hamilton “Immigrants, we get the job done,” Hamilton, Jefferson and some of others felt the same way (3).  

The slave owning practice continued and in fact increased over the next century. While the North was industrializing, the South was increasing the land under cultivation and using slaves to carry out the hard labour. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, he tried to end slavery. The Southern States decided to break away from the Union, resulting in the Civil War which the North won. 

After the Civil War, the Congress passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitutions and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which granted full citizenship to the freed slaves,  including the right to vote.

Its Section 1 stated “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The first African American  member of the Senate, Hiram Rhode Revels was elected in 1870. However, the equal rights in the Southern States were short lived.

As a means of allowing the country to get back to normality, the federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877 and this allowed the Southern States to regain control of their state legislatures. This enabled them to pass laws which restricted the rights of the African American people, including the right to vote by imposing new requirements for poll taxes, literacy tests and strict residency and other requirements which were difficult to satisfy. In addition, they passed the Jim Crow laws which segregated transportation, public facilities and daily life. 

The US Supreme Court in 1896 supported these laws under the fig leaf of “separate but equal” judgement. In 1954 the Supreme Court reversed this but the discrimination continued. 

This led to extreme violence, including lynchings and race riots against the black population, mainly in the South. It also gave rise to the right-wing organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups.

As a result of the violence and discrimination, the African Americans started moving out of the Southern States. The Great Migration happened in two waves – the first wave from 1916 to 1940 when about 1.6 million African Americans went from the rural South to Northern industrial cities, the second wave from 1940 to 1970, around 5 million African American  people moved to the North and West where they could exercise their right to vote. The percentage of African Americans living in rural areas declined from 47 percent to 16 percent between 1950 and 1990 (3).

It is interesting to note that Abraham Lincoln the President who tried to end slavery was from the Republican Party. The Southern States were primarily White, Democrat and in favour of slavery. The switch started in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs offered economic relief to deal with the Depression. By the mid-60’s the majority of the African  American voters were voting for the Democrats.

As the land mass in America expanded to more states, there was a large influx of European immigrants. Initially, the Germans, Italians and Irish all went through the phase of being discriminated against, but once they assimilated, they all began to develop the characteristics and behaviour of what Isabel Wilkerson calls “the dominant caste “and they also discriminated and mistreated the African Americans.

To build the rail roads across America there had been an influx of cheap Chinese labour. Also, in the early 1900’s a group of Sikhs landed in Northern California. To prevent America becoming a multicultural nation, the government controlled the racial mix through the immigration laws restricting the flow of new immigrants from different parts of the world, and in some cases even restricting the ability of immigrants to bring their families. The group of Sikh immigrants who settled in Northern California married Mexicans and established the first Sikh community around Stockton. They tried legal means to obtain citizenship.

Following the attempt by two Japanese Americans Takao Ozawa and Takauji Yamashita, a Sikh named Bhagat Singh Thind petitioned the Supreme Court. He had served in the US Army and fought in World War I. He was granted citizenship twice and which was rescinded both times. His argument to the Supreme Court was unique.

Thind argued that he was Caucasian, Aryan in fact, descended from the same stock as Europeans, given that it was widely held that Aryans migrated south to India and formed that country’s upper caste. It could be said he had a more rightful claim to being Caucasian than the people judging him. After all, the Caucasus Mountains were next to Iran and closer to neighbouring India than western Europe .His appeal was declined but he was ultimately granted citizenship in 1935.(4)

In the early 1900’s the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe began to outnumber those from the Northern and Western Europe and in 1921 and 1924, caps were set for total annual immigration and quotas imposed for the Northern and Western Europe countries. In the forties and the fifties, America started to relax the immigration laws and the racial mix began to change.

Starting 1943, and later in 1952 a limited number of Chinese and Asian were allowed to immigrate. In 1965, laws were changed to allow reunification and skilled immigrants were allowed in. Later in 1986 and 1990, the Immigration Reform and Control Act focused on allowing refugees from Indochina, Nicaragua and Haiti and other war-torn countries (5).

The change in immigration laws led to the increase in population and to the United States becoming a more multicultural society. The U.S. population in 1900 was 76 million. In 1950, it rose to 152 million; by 2000 it had reached 282 million and 331 million in 2020. By 2050, it is expected to reach between 422-458 million, depending on immigration. The percentage share of the white population has been dropping since 1950. From 59.7% in 2020, it is expected to drop below 50% in 2045 to 44% in 2060.  The Hispanics will be the second largest group followed by the African Americans and Asians. 

The Jim Crow laws lasted until 1965. It was the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-sixties, led by Martin Luther King Jr, who inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, protested non-violently, and which ultimately led to President Lyndon Baines Johnson passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and The Voting Rights Act of 1965. These acts outlawed discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, national origin and subsequently sexual orientation and gender identity. They also did away with unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial  segregation in schools, public accommodations, and employment discrimination. In 1964 after signing the Civil Rights Bill President Johnson predicted that the Democrats would lose the South for the generation for supporting the African - Americans. For over half a century no Democrat running for Presidency ever won a majority of the white votes” (4). 

 

 

The passing of the Bills caused some concern that the non-whites combined with the liberal left from the East and West coasts were going to take over the country. The fear was that after almost four centuries, the skin-based colour dominance would be coming to an end as the racial mix became more diversified. 

This fear was not limited to just the rich and middle class. Even the poor and working-class whites were concerned, perhaps even more so, because the feeling of entitlement based purely on their skin colour was gradually being taken away. Roger Ailes was the first to recognise the impact it would have on American society as the ethnically distributed population began to change America. 

Roger Ailes worked as a political consultant to Richard Nixon, Ronald Regan and George H.W. Bush and others including Mitch McConnell, Quayle and others. Apparently, he also helped Donald Trump, including writing his speeches. After working for CNBC, he convinced Rupert Murdoch to help him launch Fox News in 1996.

According to an article dated May 2011 in the Rolling Stone Magazine, Roger Ailes’s viewers market “…. are old, with a median age of 65. The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38 percent of viewers are African-American. “Roger understands audiences,” says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. “He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about.” The typical viewer of Hannity, to take the starkest example, is a pro-business (86 percent), Christian conservative (78 percent), Tea Party-backer (75 percent), with no college degree (66 percent), who is over age 50 (65 percent), supports the NRA (73 percent), doesn’t back gay rights (78 percent) and thinks government “does too much” (84 percent). “He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,” says a former News Corp. colleague. “He feeds them exactly what they want to hear. This understanding of the demographics helped make Fox News the most viewed channel and a cash cow in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire”. (6)

The interesting thing about the Trump fan base is that there is also a small percentage of coloured persons (including Asian) who voted for him. Their rationale perhaps - the tax cuts which he was promising.   

From the time Obama began contemplating his candidacy, Fox News went all-out to convince its white viewers that he was a Marxist, a Muslim, a African American nationalist, a 1960s type radical and strongly pushed the “birther” conspiracy theory - insisting that President Obama was not born in the United States.

While everyone thought Obama got elected because he was biracial, spent most of his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, had Asian roommates, studied in Ivy League schools was an “acceptable African American , “the reality was that the majority of the whites did not vote for him. “Only an estimated 43 percent of the whites voted for him - close to two third did not vote for him in 2008 and even less 38 percent voted for him in 2012. 

President Obama’s two election successes also proved to the African Americans the power of their votes. This was the trigger point for some of the right-wing organisations and brought out the passive Republicans to vote for Donald Trump. His campaign team also did their best to try and disenfranchise the African American  voters and with the support of right-wing news media such as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others, together with the use of social media, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2018.

They tried to employ the same tactics in 2020. In subtle and not so subtle ways, the African Americans continued to be discriminated against. They tried to take away their right to vote by various means, including redrawing the districts or the proof of identity required to vote. 

Biden’s victory was in no small measure due to the support from the African American community, starting from his primary victory in South Carolina. Stacy Abrams ten-year effort was instrumental in swinging Georgia to turn blue and helped the Democrats win the two Senate seats which gave them a 50-50 split in the Senate. Like the Deacons of Defence, the African Americans together with the Asians and some Hispanics were better organised and came out in large numbers to vote. In addition to Joe Biden, they helped Kamala Harris, the first woman of colour, get elected as the Vice President, in spite of President Trump and his team’s various attempts to claim that the results were fraudulent. 

When all attempts to overturn the results of the election failed, a large number of the Republicans again attempted to do what the opposition party did in the 1890's. At that time a group of Whites and African Americans  called Fusionists - whose objective was to seek free education, debt relief and equal rights for the African Americans, won every state-wide office in 1896, including the governorship in North Carolina.

 In 1898 during state wide elections, a group of white Supremacists called the Red Shirts rode into Wilmington and started intimidating the voters. A Democratic leader named Alfred Moore Waddell gave a speech urging insurrection, demanding that white men stop the (African Americans)  from voting and to shoot them if they refuse. They then forced the resignation of the government and appointed their own Mayor. Within two years new segregation laws were passed and the (African American)  population were stripped of their right to vote. The number of African American voters dropped from 125,000 in 1896 to about 6000 in 1902 (7).  

Is this the beginning of the end of the single ethnic dominated society? With the changing racial mix over the next three to four decades, my personal view is that the minorities (African Americans, Hispanics, Asians) will all get better organised and you will see a bigger mix of different colours in both houses.

The first Asian to be elected to the US House of Representatives was a Sikh, Dalip Singh Saund from 1959 to 1963. This year there are 109 non-white members in the Congress and 9 in the Senate. The change is also being felt in the business circles as well, as you see more companies being led by Asian and African American senior management. Also, the share of the multiracial group will grow as America finally becomes the melting pot.

It will be interesting to see how the two political parties react to the change? Will the Republicans move more to the centre? The Democrats more to the left to accommodate the newly elected immigrant politicians who are pushing to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor? Will the Republicans split with groups such as the Lincoln Project group forming their own party? Will the gap between the rich and the poor continue to grow as it has been over the last three decades? Will this result in more social unrest? The issue then moves from race to economic issues.

Multicultural America will once again be a model for the world. You will also see the European countries following America as their share of the non-whites increases and the minorities get better organised. The UK and Canada are perhaps slightly ahead with the South Asians already sharing the stage with the whites. The twenty first century will the century when the world truly becomes global. The exception will be Asia.

India is already the United States of India, but it appears now to want to change to a religion-based majority dominated country. China and Japan the other two large economies are probably the only two countries which are racially pure and are reluctant to open the doors to other races.  With the aging population, it will be interesting to see how these countries cope and whether they will change in any way. Will they be able to maintain their economic growth?

In the medium- and long-term globally, race will be less of an issue. Will it be religion where many of the recent immigrants, particularly in Europe are Muslims? Will this create tension among the different religions?  Time will tell.

As Bob Dylan said during the 60’s …. The Times They Are A-Changin’. They certainly are but at a much faster pace.

1. Source: US Census Bureau and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. – Pew Research Centre

2.https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Founding-Fathers-and-Slavery-1269536

3. https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-bias-starting-with-benjamin-franklins-hatred-of-the-germans

4.Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

5.America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences: Volume I (2001)

6.The Rolling Stone: May 25,2011: How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factor

7. BBC.com - Stacey Abrams: The woman behind Biden's biggest surprise - 10th, November 2020 

8. “How U.S. immigration laws and rules have changed through history by D’Vera Cohn - Pew Research Centre

 

The Digital Graveyard

I just read an article in BBC.com that Facebook has almost 30 million users who have died and whose Facebook accounts still continue. With the increased offerings of free Cloud based services this is going to be a major problem in the future.

Until the last few years you just had to buy a new computer with a larger hard drive or a external hard drive to store your files. But with the introduction of the cloud all that has started changing.

While I am not a techie and am perhaps sticking my neck out, but I would venture and say that Sabeer Bhatia the guy who started Hotmail ( which was bought over by Microsoft) was probably the first free  cloud service provider. Prior to that all your emails were provided by your internet service provider. You saved them on your had drive or paid extra for additional storage. Then along came Mr. Bhatia and started offering Hotmail for free with a limited amount for free storage.

Now Google, MSN and a number of all allow you to store thousands of emails and in addition they offer you separate drives with a fair sized storage capacity.

The free cloud services have tremendous amount of advantages. To give you a few examples

- if you are travelling and are concerned that you might loose your passport  and travel documents, you can store them in your cloud account ( Google drive).
- sharing large  files and photographs
- your medical records . If you have a medical history and you travel rather than carrying a voluminous file it can be stored on your drive.
- your  academic records.

The list goes on . However there are dangers that someone might hack into the drive and steal your identity but assuming that you have the confidence in your password and are willing to take the risk it makes life easier.

However we all have a tendency to have to use different passwords and in some cases ( like me ) even multiple cloud storage accounts.

The Facebook news made me think what happens when you forget some password of an account which your use rarely and you dont remember the security question or have not given any back up email address or your family dont know your passwords ?All the information stored on your cloud will be inaccessible.

What do you ? You can of course do one of the following;
- give your spouse and your children the list of accounts and the passwords ( or leave it in your locker).
- have a back up on an external drive which you keep at home and your family is aware of it. But that still leaves all your files floating in the netherworld or when the service providers implement a policy that after a few years all inactive accounts will be automatically deleted.

Of course the services providers should  do about something about resolving this problem because of the growing size of it.While some of the cloud providers such as Google link it to your email address which ask for a back up email address but the problem is that tends to be another email which you control. What they need to do is like the banks have a nominee and when the account is not actively used for a certain period ( say three to five years) a email automatically goes out to the both the account holder and the nominee informing that the account is inactive and if not accessed will be deleted within the next six months. The nominee should also be given the right of access . 

Also what happens when a service provider such are Amazon or Microsoft or Google goes bankrupt ( unthinkable but look where IBM was and where it is now ) and some of the blue chips of yesterday such as GM which actually went bankrupt. Again the regulators should have the service providers ring fence this service and as in the case of the financial institutions have a living will so that the users are not left high and dry.

Of course some of you who are more tech savvy might have better suggestions. I certainly would like to hear from you.

"When Breath Becomes Air "

"When Breath Becomes Air "  is the title of a book by  Paul Kalanithi. It is one of the most touching books I have read. Its about a brilliant young neurosurgeon /neuroscientist who at the age of thirty six ,  in the last year of his residency finds out that he has lung cancer. It is a relatively short book since the author could not complete it . The epilogue was written by his wife Lucy.

Kalanithi was an American of Indian parentage. After a brilliant academic career at Stanford majoring in English and Biology he went to Cambridge and then decided to become a doctor . His Father and Brother are both doctors. After graduating in medicine from Yale he went to Stanford for his residency for specialization as a neurosurgeon.

To read about his battle with cancer, first despair, then hope and then acceptance and trying to make the most of his time and  the decision with his wife to have a child is most heart breaking.

The Epilogue itself almost brings to you to tears.

Needless to say the book has received rave reviews from almost every literary source you can imagine.
I would urge you all to read the book.