September 2012

A store specializing in western clothes in Ahmedabad, India, has called itself Hitler and is using a swastika as a logo, totally unaware that it would create an international furor. One of the owner’s grandfather was so strict he was nicknamed Hitler, and the store was named after him. In that part of India Hitler and the holocaust are seen through a different lens. Hitler was against the British and the British were the occupiers. During WWII many people in India did not know whom to root for. It is apparently not the first time the name Hitler is used in India, a few years ago a restaurant in Mumbai was forced to change its name after the Jewish community and Israel protested. But Ahmedabad is far more rural and the owners were not conscious of history. WWII was too long ago and too far away. What attracted me to this story which I read about in several newspapers from several countries was the fact that something like Hitler’s evil which in the West could be said to be a universal truth, is not seen as such everywhere. One can make a case for the culture and history of Ahmedabad and yet one still wonder how can it be in this age of Internet and cyber knowledge where anything can be demystified—maybe not completely but to a degree—by a click of a search engine? And then I read about why U.S. analysts could not see through what became the Iraq’s WMDS debacle. They looked at reports from the point of view of the United States, not Iraq. It hadn’t occurred to them to think through how the issue of WMDS looked through Saddam Hussein’s eyes. If American intelligence officers were blind to Saddam’s perception, somehow that lack of perspective helps us better understand—or at least explain—that of the Ahmedabad clothier.

It takes Eric, the mail carrier, an hour and a half each way to drive to work. He wishes he could instead spend that time with his family, and even though the drive is becoming expensive given the price of gas, he considers himself lucky. There are 6 people in the station where he works that have commutes longer than his. And never does Eric complain about his heel. The doctor told him the only way to make it stop hurting and stop the damage would be to stop walking, which is of course not possible. Mariza, another mail carrier can’t lift her arms above her head due to the heavy loads she’s been carrying and lifting. She had her hair cut almost to a shave so she wouldn’t have to comb it since she can’t. My neighbor Rachel met a woman at the park who spends most of the day there waiting for her husband who works nearby. They live about 2 hours away and have a small child. By the time he would get home the child would be in bed and not see his father. This way they drive to and from work together and have their family time then, thinking that in the car is better than no family time at all. Sometimes they can even have lunch together. Keena, who works in my dentist’s office, has no car in a city like Los Angeles where public transportation is so inadequate it takes quite a long time to get anywhere. She leaves home with her two young children, takes a bus to drop one off to school, then another to drop the other off to day care, then takes 2 more buses to get to work. The dentist told her it would be fine as long as she wouldn’t get to work later than 10am, but she makes sure she gets there by 9am otherwise her salary would be even smaller. Working people can’t help to be inspiring, ordinary human beings who in order to work do things that are far from ordinary.