I have been saving and saving and saving this post, since it seemed to me most appropriate for Walentine’s Day.

Cheap V- and W-switching jokes aside, as you may remember, I was recently in Singapore. Along with Preston Merchant, photographer extraordinaire, I made my way out to the Sri Senpaga Vinayagar Temple, on Ceylon Road in Katong. This temple, which just may be my favorite temple in the world, is gorgeous. It’s beautifully painted, clean, and welcoming. It’s got a huge collection of different Ganeshas, and all the priests are from Sri Lanka. Ceylon Tamils in Singapore built the temple over a century ago, but now Hindus of all backgrounds worship there.

There are rules for worship on the wall that detail the kind of clothing to be worn, and the temple pamphlet specifies an order of worship. But the reality of the temple did not hew to the rules as they were written—indeed, no temple I know really does. Women came in dressed for work, toting children; live musicians played nathaswaram; priests served warm paiassam; people worshipped in the order that pleased them (or, at least, I did). They let Preston take pictures. I paid for prayers in my family’s name. The chief kurrukkal loaded me down with books about the temple and gave me a tiny statue of Ganesha, gratis. It didn’t feel like a place with many rules—just a lot of warmth.

The temple also has a store. I purchased many things there: a few Ganesha pendants, a five-faced Ganesha statue, Ganesha keychains, and some books. Among the books: guidelines to funeral rites for Saivite Hindus—and guidelines to marriage for Saivite Hindus.

I pointed at the display case on the wall and told the volunteer running the store that I wanted both.

“Both?”

“I’m preparing for my whole life here,” I said. “Who knows when I’ll come back to Singapore?” Continue reading →

One of the many standard narratives populating accounts of the desi experience in the US is the difficulty in explaining the vast numbers of ‘servants’ performing a vast litany of semi-skilled labor in homes all over south asia. In the context of the American D.Y.I mentality (definitely eroded by our service economy), it seems incredibly strange to employ somebody for the purpose of cooking or taking one’s children to school–an unjustified expense when one has the time and the means of transportation to complete the task. NPR correspondent Eric Weiner entered this discussion as a result of being posted in Delhi and summarized his interactions with his ‘servant,’ “Kailash” in the New York Times. Cultural relativists, as critics of the post-modern regime in the humanities are wont to remark, do a disservice to academia when they uncritically accept what they see as a ‘cultural practice’ on the grounds of it simply belonging to a culture different from the observer’s own:

A few days later, the servant loped upstairs and reported for duty. He was skinny, alarmingly so, with mahogany skin and sharp features. His name was Kailash, and he was 11 years old. This was a cultural difference that I was not prepared to accept.

Weiner clumsily avoids the relativist’s folly by boldly going where perhaps a million other travel writers have gone, “It’s strange to me and feels wrong, so I can’t accept it.” But, like many before him, Weiner must eventually capitulate:

I started downstairs to confront the landlord, but then hesitated. I rationalized that if this boy, an orphan from a neighboring state, didn’t work for me, he would work for someone else, and who knows how that person would treat him? Washing my hands of Kailash seemed like a cop-out, or so I told myself.

It was at this point that I remembered a similar strain of teeth-gnashing from a writer of yesteryear:

Take up the White Man’s burden– Ye dare not stoop to less– Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloke your weariness;

Continue reading →