29 May Tuesday

This is a late post. We had a quite day. Pishomoshai, Pishimoni, Mum and I went out in the morning to the town of Mulund, a few miles north of where we live. We were on our way to a mall called Nirmal Lifestyles. I had very excitedly taken my camera to take a photograph to put up in this blog. Nirmal Lifestyles is a sprawling commercial complex, mostly open air but with air conditioned stores. Its claim to fame is a massive dome covering almost a quarter of the mall. Inside, visitors can see a model of our solar system complete with the Mir space station, astronauts, and a rocket. This is supposedly the largest dome anywhere in the world. Much to my annoyance there were boards everywhere announcing that photography was prohibited. Probably as a security measure. India has been on a high security status for six months now, level two, something that shouldn’t have lasted for more than three or four days, as a result the security measures have been diluted and stupid things such as a ban on photography in Nirmal Lifestyles continues. We first stopped off at a clothing and home goods chain store, FabIndia. Pishimoni had to return something there. They had some excellent pieces of furniture that I enjoyed looking at. We then strolled over to Crosswords, a bookstore chain. I grabbed a copy of Ramchandra Guha’s latest book. Guha is historian who writes pop history books, his latest offering is a history of post independence India. I was pretty excited about the book but got very disappointed by the first chapter. Guha had gotten India’s partition story quite wrong, his theory was almost two decades old. It is now well known in academia that India was partitioned not because of any divide between Hindus or Muslims that existed from time immemorial or even one created by the British, rather it was the political acrobatics that Jinnah and the Congress were involved in that resulted in partition. Contrary to Guha, Jinnah did not want a separate state, all he was after was a federalist structure that he felt would be a safer bet for Muslims, the Congress refused him. Jinnah gambled and upped the stakes by making a demand for an independent Islamic state hoping that the Congress would back down. Unfortunately for him, the Congress called his bluff. The Congress was quite willing to live with partition if that was the cost they’d have to pay for a centralized India. In came Mountbatten who had no clue of what was going on, all he heard were two groups talking about partition and much to Jinnah’s horror, Mountbatten partitioned India, patted himself on the back, and left for England. Guha desperately needs to Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman. After some time we walked over to an Indian restaurant called Pulses for lunch. I ordered a combo meal of Naan (North Indian bread) and Mutton curry which was served with Raita (a very liquidy yogurt). The food was pretty good. After this excellent lunch we went back home. The other interesting thing I did during the day was to go for a swim. The swimming pool was undergoing repairs all these days and had finally been opened. The chlorine levels were quite unimaginable, but besides that I enjoyed my swim.