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My turn was up, and it was all a somewhat scary blur. I was pushed to my knees, then shoved into the mother’s breast (Amma), which smelled like a thousand sprays of sandalwood and spices, and I noticed to my horror just before my face was shoved in that my head was being pushed to a spot on her shirt over her right breast where countless others had been pressed earlier that day. And it had a kind of wierd stain all over it, sort of bluish and spotted. I kinda got the icks a little and this was mostly what I was thinking about while my head and nose were pressed firmly against this stain.

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Powertoni
Suketu Mehta, 19 May 2005
Subjects:Culture asia & pacific arts & cultures literature
“Being Muslim or Hindu or Catholic was merely a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle” but in the second extract from the prize-winning “Maximum city: Bombay lost and found”, Suketu Mehta also discovers a more sinister force: “powertoni”.
About the author
Suketu Mehta is a fiction writer and journalist based in New York. His first book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found won the Kiriyama Prize.All great cities are schizophrenic, said Victor Hugo. Bombay has multiple-personality disorder. During the riots, the printing presses were running overtime. They were printing visiting cards, two sets for each person, one with a Muslim name and one with a Hindu name. When you were out in the city, if you got stopped your life depended on whether you answered to Ram or Rahim. Schizophrenia became a survival tactic.

People told people: the Muslims, angered by the destruction of the Babri Masjid, are stockpiling arms; there will be a bloodbath. The news was relayed at the pan-wallah’s, in the commuter train, during the office tea break. In the evenings, a small convoy of cars would drive on to the beach at Shivaji Park, turn towards the wide Arabian Sea, leave their headlights on and keep vigil all night. They were standing guard against the Iranian armada that was supposed to be just off the shores of Bombay, holds packed with all kinds of bombs and guns and missiles for the coming jihad.

Read more extracts from Maximum City: Bombay lost and found:
The Country of the No (introduction)
Powertoni (part I)
Pleasure: Vadapav Eaters’ City (part II)
Passages: a Self in the Crowd (part III)
After the riots, 240 NGOs united to put the city back together. Human chains of citizens were formed, stretching across the city, to demonstrate unity. Groups called Mohalla Ekta Committees were formed to bring together Hindus, Muslims and the police, to identify fist fights before they could escalate into riots. There hasn’t been a major riot since. But the fault lines had been set. An entire segment of the population had been made to feel like foreigners in the city in which they were born and raised.


*

In the Bombay I grew up in, being Muslim or Hindu or Catholic was merely a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. We had a boy in our class who I realise now from his name, Arif, must have been Muslim. I remember that he was an expert in doggerel and instructed us in an obscene version of a patriotic song, “Come, children, let me teach you the story of Hindustan”, in which the nationalistic exploits of the country’s leaders were replaced by the sexual escapades of Bombay’s movie stars. He didn’t do this because he was Muslim and hence unpatriotic. He did this because he was a twelve-year-old boy.

Now it mattered. Because it mattered to Bal Thackeray.

The Shiv Sena shakha in Jogeshwari was a long hall filled with pictures of Bal Thackeray and his late wife, a bust of Shivaji, and pictures of a muscle-building competition. Every evening, Bhikhu Kamath, the Shakha Pramukh, sat behind a table and listened to a line of supplicants, holding a sort of durbar. There was a handicapped man come to look for work as a typist. Another man wanted an electric connection to his slum. Husbands and wives who were quarrelling came to him for mediation. An ambulance was parked outside, part of a network of several hundred Sena ambulances ready to transport people from the slums to hospitals at all hours, at nominal charges.

In a city where municipal services are in a state of crisis, going through the Sena ensures access to such services. The Sena shakhas also act as a parallel government, like the party machines in American cities that helped immigrants get jobs and fixed streetlights. But the Sena likes to think of itself not so much as a political party but a social service organisation. It functions as an umbrella for a wide variety of organisations: a trade union with over 800,000 members, a students’ movement, a women’s wing, an employment network, a home for senior citizens, a cooperative bank, a newspaper.

Kamath was a diplomatic sort, hospitably showing me around his terrain. He had the reputation of being honest. “There are very few people like Bhikhu in the Sena,” said Sunil (a deputy leader of the Jogeshwari shakha, or branch, of the Shiv Sena). “He still has a black-and-white TV at home.” But he could be a street thug when the occasion warranted. And through his connections in the state government, he provided political cover for Sunil. ‘The ministers are ours. The police are in our hands. If anything happens to me, the minister calls,’ boasted Sunil. He nodded. “We have powertoni.”

He repeated the word a few times. Sunil had hired a Muslim boy in the Muslim locality for his cable business. “He has twelve brothers and six sisters. I give him money and his brother liquor. He will even beat up his brother for me. I hire him for powertoni.” Likewise, the holy man who exorcised his daughter had powertoni. Then I realised what the word was: a contraction of power of attorney, the awesome ability to act on someone else’s behalf or to have others do your bidding, to sign documents, release wanted criminals, cure illnesses, get people killed. Powertoni: a power that does not originate in yourself; a power that you are holding on somebody else’s behalf. It is the only kind of power that a politician has: a power of attorney ceded to him by the voter. Democracy is about the exercise, legitimate or otherwise, of this powertoni. All over Mumbai, the Shiv Sena is the one organisation that has powertoni. And the man with the greatest powertoni in Mumbai is the leader of the Shiv Sena himself, Bal Keshav Thackeray.

His monstrous ego was nurtured from infancy. Thackeray’s father considered himself a social reformer and anglicised his surname after William Makepeace Thackeray, the Victorian author of Vanity Fair. Thackeray’s mother had given birth to five girls and no sons. She prayed ardently to the family deity for a son and was blessed with Bal. He was therefore considered a navasputra, a boon directly from God. Thackeray, now in his seventies, is a cross between Pat Buchanan and Saddam Hussein. He has a cartoonist’s sense of the outrageous. He loves to bait foreign journalists with his professed admiration for Adolf Hitler. Thus, in an interview for Time magazine at the height of the riots, when he was asked if Indian Muslims were beginning to feel like Jews in Nazi Germany, his response was, “Have they behaved like the Jews in Nazi Germany? If so, there is nothing wrong if they are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany.” A woman in the Jogeshwari slums observed, “Thackeray is more Muslim than I am.” He is a man obsessed by Muslims. “He watches us, how we eat, how we pray. If his paper doesn’t have the word ‘Muslims’ in its headline, it won’t sell a single copy.” The organ of his party is the newspaper Saamna (Confrontation), which, in Marathi and Hindi editions, distributes Thackeray’s venom all over Maharashtra.

Thackeray, like anybody else in the underworld, is called by many names: the Saheb, the Supremo, the Remote Control, and, most of all, the Tiger – after the symbol of the Shiv Sena. The newspapers are full of pictures of him next to pictures of tigers. Public billboards around the city likewise display his face next to that of a real tiger. He has taken pains to be present at the inauguration of a tiger safari park. He is a self-constructed mythic figure: he drinks warm beer, he smokes a pipe, he has an unusually close relationship with his daughter-in-law.

Sunil and the Sena boys described the Saheb for me. It was impossible to talk directly to him, they said; even an eloquent and fearless man like their Shakha Pramukh became tongue-tied in front of him, and then the Saheb would berate him. “Stand up! What’s the matter? Why are you dumb?” It was impossible to meet his eyes. On the other hand: “He likes it if you are direct with him. You should have the daring to ask direct questions. He doesn’t like a man who says ‘er... er...’”

Sunil’s colleague talked with great pride about the time every year on the Saheb’s birthday when they went to his bungalow and watched a long line of the city’s richest and most eminent line up to pay homage. “We watched all the big people – ministers, businessmen – bow and touch his feet. All the Tata-Birlas touch his feet and then talk to him.”

“Michael Jackson only meets presidents of countries. He came to meet Saheb,” his friend added. The president of the giant American corporation Enron had to go to Thackeray to get a power deal cleared. When Sanjay Dutt, son of the principled MP Sunil Dutt who resigned in disgust after the riots, was newly released from jail, his first stop, even before he went home, was to go to the Saheb and touch his feet. Every time one of the corporate gods or a member of the city’s film community or a politician from Delhi kowtowed before him, his boys got a thrill of pride, and their image of the Saheb as a powerful man, a man with powertoni, was reinforced.

They told me what to say if I met the Saheb. “Tell him, ‘Even today, in Jogeshwari, we are ready to die for you.’ Ask Saheb, ‘Those people who fought for you in the riots, for Hindutva, what can your Shiv Sena do for them? Those who laid their lives down on a word from you? What can the old parents of the Pednekar brothers, who have no other children, do?’”

I felt like a go-between carrying messages from the lover to the loved one: “Tell her I am ready to die for her.” But there was a hint of reproach in their questions, as if they felt their Saheb had been neglecting them, these people who had died for his love. As if the blood sacrifice their comrades had made had gone unacknowledged.

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Picture a 50 year old white guy in a cowboy hat with long grey hair and beard up on a throne.
Imagine him:

* hugging people all day,
* selling action figures of himself as a way to pray to him
* having a “stargazer” who sat at his feet in rapture every time he gave blessings to masses of people weeping
*charging $2k for the privilege of volunteering to work in his organization
* selling $5 K crowns he had “blessed”
* rumors of him being physically and emotionally abusive behind closed doors and a story of his closest disciple fleeing under cover of darkness hidden under a blanket on a car floor only years later to recount the underlying dysfunction.

What would you think then?

Bear in mind this is an exact summary of what the article above says about Amma.

Is it possible that our critical thinking and reasoning ability gets blinded by some of the cultural details and a part of us that wants to believe that an enlightened holy person from India might really exist?

Is it possible that built into the very structure of belief in magical gurus is the injunction not to question, not to think critically —because these are manifestations of “ego” and not “being in your heart…..”

Therein lies the rub.