Uncategorized – Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits

August 28, 2026August 28, 2026

WHO NEEDS A BULLET TRAIN WHEN YOU HAVE SO MUCH TIME TO KILL?

आगनित भुवन फिरेउँ मैं राम न देखा आन ||

I saw the same story of Rama, in each universe, in innumerable worlds [Ramacharitamanas of Tulsidas ]

I just took a thirty-seven-hour train trip straight down the center of India. Like a surgeon’s scalpel, the train sliced open the skin of the land to reveal worlds usually unseen and taken for granted, but hiding in plain sight.

It was a long-distance train with an equally long-winded name–12630 Hazrat Nizamuddin – Yesvantpur Karnataka Sampark Kranti Super Fast Express. As she sped along, we travelled through time traversing ground whose extrusion 66 million years ago helped bring the age of the dinosaurs to its end. We were carried through the myths of Lord Krishna playing on the banks of the Yamuna in Mathura; the Taj Mahal watched us from a distance. The number of dynasties that ruled these thorny, dry hills boggles the mind. I lost count at ten but love saying their names to harmonize the clickety clack of the train’s wheels. Shunga, Kanva, Naga and Shilahara. Bundela, Maratha, Scindia and Patwardhan.

The trip touched not only the mythical origins of Hinduism but the peaks of Indian Buddhism and glories of medieval Islam. We swayed our way by supreme icons of Indian art such as the seven storied stone palace at Datia, built as a guesthouse by Bundela king Maharaj Bir Singh Deo for the World Conquering Jahangir who never set foot inside. And the seven-meter-tall pillar of quartz sandstone gifted to Shunga king, Bhagabhadra, by Heliodorus the Greek ambassador of Taxila, to commemorate his conversion to Vishnu worship. The sublime Great Stupa of Sanchi commissioned by Ashoka for his wife, the first Buddhist power couple of South Asia, just a short distance from the tracks near Vidisha.

On and on I could go.

We crossed two of India’s sacred rivers, the Yamuna within the first few minutes of the trip and the Krishna just before entering northern Karnataka 30 hours later. We climbed up and down several mountain ranges: the Satpuras, the Sahyadris and the Dharwad Crags. And of course, the range that divides the north from the south–the Vindhyas–about which I’ll tell you an old story.

Once upon a time Vindhya, the king of mountains, felt slighted that Suryadev (the sun) circumambulated Mt. Meru, the original mountain of creation, but ignored him. He demanded that Suryadev include him in his orbit. But Suryadev explained that his route was not his call but the command of Lord Shiva. Sorry, dude.

Vindhya flew into a rage. To show his power he and his fellow mountains began growing higher and higher, and promised to block out the sun . The gods panicked. They begged the sage Agastya, who Vindhya respected as a guru, to have a talk with Vindhya. “Convince him to stop growing, dear Sage. You are our only hope.”

Agastya felt compassion for the gods and began his journey southward. As he approached, Vindhya called out a welcome to his guru and asked where he was going. Agastya replied that he was on his way to the southern part of Bharatvarsha (India) and requested his friend to let him pass. “And while I am away, I would like you to bow your heads until I return this way, at which time you can again stand straight and tall.”

Vindhya and his followers unquestioningly bowed their lofty heads and swore to remain thus until such time as the Sage returned North. In the South the sage did many wonderful things and was so feted he never returned North. And so, until today, Vindhya and his clan of mountains remain bent low, as they promised, allowing the Himalayas to reign supreme as the Land of the Gods.

All this lore and history in 37 hours; in a single train journey covering 2100 kilometers. Hundreds of books could be written about the stories that echoed against the glass and steel of the train as it tracked that single course through central and western India.

There is another story, a favorite, about the sage Kakbhusundi, the immortal crow-man who is playfully swallowed by the infant Rama. Inside the god’s young belly Kakbhusundi is entertained by a phantasmagoric, psychedelic, wild and crazy show of multiple worlds, multiple timelines, multiple universes all unfolding simultaneously in the past, present and future. When the crow sage is burped back out of the child’s belly, he discovers that in fact, no time has passed whatsoever. On this particular journey, in the late spring of 2026, that strange and wonderful creature took the form of an elderly Bihari man travelling to his son’s home in Pune and became my travelling companion.

I normally am a ‘stick to myself’ traveler. I’ll be polite and converse, but rarely will I introduce myself or initiate a conversation. But as soon as I entered the cubicle, I found myself saying, ‘Namaste. My name is Rabe. I am travelling to Hubli.’

I am Pradeep Kumar Yadav.

The speaker wore a dark blue flat cap, a new, still-creased purplish-blue shirt that changed color depending on the light and, track pants. He reminded me instantly of my mom’s oldest brother, Uncle Omer, a kindly, gentle-countenanced school cook from Minneapolis. Shri Yadav had my uncle’s cherubic face, his quick warm smile and balding pate (which I noticed a bit later, was peeling from being outdoors too long without his cap). He was quiet. His black corvid eyes sized me up while I exchanged the usual traveler’s chitchat with his daughter and grandson who had come to see him off. Before too long they asked his blessings, wished him safe journey and took their leave.

Yadavji opened the proceedings.

What job do you do in Australia?

I told him, but not fully trusting my Hindi asked if he was familiar with what I had described.

Oh, of course, I know NGOs. They do good things for people. Bahut accha. Retired? I see. Ok. Ok. I understand.

When he spoke I could see he loved his paan(betel nut). He was missing several of his upper teeth; the rest were stained a dark reddish brown especially in the fault lines where they met. I marveled at his coloring. He was not an albino but every part of his skin including his toes and feet were closer in hue to mine than those of any other passengers. I asked him what he had done for work.

I was a junior engineer in the railways. Actually, a little above junior engineer. Mostly worked in the big Jamalpur workshop, on the loop line between Patna and Calcutta. No no no. I was not a driver. I was mechanical. Working inside the shop itself. My original place is Munger. Next to Bhagalpur. In the 1960s some Baba set up a big yoga school and now people come from all over, mostly Ingland and America, to study yoga. You know when I was young, between 1962-65, we used to see lots of American young people in India. We used to call them hippies! ‘Look at that hippie. This hippie is doing that.’ That is what we called them. Hippies.

He broke into little chuckles as he spoke. His eyes twinkled at certain points for emphasis. As is commonplace in India his hands and fingers moved as well, unconsciously adding visual punctuation.

Bihar is very ancient, isn’t it?

Very ancient. Yes. Very much . All the great philosophers, Buddha (well, he came from Nepal actually but he became enlightened in Bihar), Mahavira the saint of Jainism. Adi Shankaracharya, you know his name? Yes? Good. He travelled all over India, going from one corner to the other. But he found the greatest fame in Bihar. He was the one who emphasized Jnana. Knowledge. But you know, today, even though the teaching of these philosophers has spread across India and the world, in Bihar itself everyone has turned it all upside down. No one considers the teachers’ main message which was ahimsa. Non-violence. Instead, today people practice only himsa. Life is all about violence, power, corruption only.

He was clearly a man well-read for this station in life. He talked about Israel and Iran, Max Mueller, and theorised about the benefits of ‘evil’ being a step toward human development. He asked me what my favorite place in the world was, seeing as ‘you’ve been everywhere.’ Before I could finish my usual too-long answer, he was talking again.

Our Vedas and purans you know are full of amazing things. They have written that the gods would use bows with arrows that shot fire! And even that they could shoot the other arrows out of the sky. And if the arrows collided in the air they would join together and shoot straight up into the heavens. Zhoom! Rockets! Even, some scientist discovered, that in Mohenjo-Daro the people could write something on one tablet here, and on the same sort of tablet hundreds of kilometers away, the same exact thing would be written.

I push back at this. ‘How does anyone know that? No one has deciphered the script and how can you say any two slabs of stone were written at the same time.” I suspect he might be what they call these days a bhakt. A Hindu chauvinist who believes that nearly everything we experience in the contemporary world from plastic surgery and the internet to air travel existed in Vedic times (1500 BCE). But I see that I’ve missed the point he is making.

Of course, you are correct. But you see scientists discovered that in some of those stones in that area there was some sort of magnetism that allows this process to happen. Here, one thing. There, the same!

He quickly shot his arms in different directions to help me understand what he was saying. Here. There.

I want to mention quantum entanglement theory; the one Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’ but knew I would never figure out how to do so in Hindi, so let him continue. But he’s in no hurry. He falls into silence. I look out the window. He tells me we are coming up to Mathura, the land of Krishna. I watch the station of the modern city whiz by. Our train doesn’t stop. Neither does it at Agra, a further half hour down the track. This is the agricultural heartland of UP he says, before nodding off. When the train lurches he wakes up and continues the thought.

One time during the British days, Germans came to India to study our philosophy. They studied it deeply and took back 500 Sanskrit scholars to Germany and set up a Sanskrit University! Yes! In Germany itself. People from every country, even from India, go there to study. Can you imagine!

That Indian scholars would travel to Europe to gain knowledge of their own culture seemed to simultaneously tickle and disappoint him.

These Germans began to look for the science in our scriptures. The Vedas are actually about science, they concluded. But our Indian pandits say the Vedas are only religious books. They are content with that much only. They are happy to say, “you see, we are the world’s best religion because we invented all these modern technologies before anyone else.” But the Germans wanted to understand and discover how they could use the Vedas and purans to benefit mankind. So, they did deep research to discover and explain the Vedas in scientific terms. As a result they invented so many things like rockets and missiles. And today we have the modern world. You see Europeans, especially the French and the Germans, not so much the English, were clever. They didn’t just say, ‘we thought of these things first.’ They wanted to test to see if Vedic science could be made to work. That is why Europe and the West are so much more productive than India. We Indians are content to simply know. And make statements about things. But take action. Look at those fields. The soil here is so rich but the productivity is so low. Go into any village and you’ll come across a group of men here, and one over there, and more over there someplace else, playing cards. That’s what they do. Play cards and gamble all day. When others could make the land so much more productive for the benefit of everyone. That is why Europe and Japan are so far ahead of us. They work and use their minds to help others, not just to chant slogans. Which is all these pandits and holy babas our government likes to promote, do. This is our predicament.

While he’s talking a part of me sees glimpses of other people I love in his face. Mike, my oldest brother. Yadavji shares his birth year (1947), and he has the same inquisitiveness about the world as my brother did. I hear Phil, a school mate, in the way Yadavji speaks Hindi; especially the way he becomes more confident towards the end of a story or a thought. His cadence quickens and his mannerisms, slightly challenging, like a fired-up cock, match the way Phil spoke Hindi back in the day.

Stanley, a dear friend for many years, also seems to be winking at me from within Yadavji. They shared a love for Bihar and told the same kind of jokes. Simple ones. Not especially clever ones but ones you could not help laughing out loud to because the punchlines pointed to the foibles of being human in a crazy world. Like this one:

Modi wanted to get a bullet train for India so went to Japan. He had a ride and was very impressed. On return home he invited the Japanese PM to come and visit India. Having been so impressed by the bullet train and Japan in general, Modi wanted to show his counterpart the best of India. So he took him to Varanasi. They spent hours floating around the river, up and down, in front of the bathing ghats and temples. 100s of priests and pandas chanted mantras and did aarti with incense and small diyas. There was loud religious chanting and resounding drums. After four hours, the officials got off their boats and climbed to the top of one ghat for the official ceremony. The Japanese PM leaned over to Modi and said, “I don’t know why you’re so interested in a bullet train when you’ve got so much time to kill!”

We both burst out laughing at this absurdity. And then we laughed a bit longer because we were both laughing and enjoying the moment. This was exactly how Stanley would get me to tears of joy and draw me in. As Yadavji and I looked into each other’s eyes, I felt the uncanny presence of my deceased friend, chortling and smiling back at me.

As to his halting Hindi this is what he had to say.

In Munger we speak Angki. The area is old and in those days that area was known as the kingdom of Ang. No, no. It is Hindi. My language is Hindi but my boli, my tongue, is Angki.

I knew about Maithili and Magadhi. I even could understand a bit of Bhojpuri, all dialects and boli from Bihar and Eastern UP. But I’d never heard of Angki.

Yadavji was from the Hindi belt but messed up his genders, cases and tenses. Like me and Phil. This was another little bond that connected us for the time we were together. We didn’t care about the delivery but the content of what we were saying. And yet when his family called, his words flowed smoothly without any hesitation. I could understand a word here and there, but not many. It was a completely different language than what I knew as Hindi.

I later discovered that Angki is one of the oldest living languages in India, stretching back to the 5th and 6th centuries before Christ. Indeed, as Aramaic was to Jesus of Galilee, Angki was to Gautam Budh. Kakbhusundi it seemed, had avtared as Yadavji, from a lost world speaking a language that Buddha would have preached in. And morphing from one familiar face to another in some sort of play.

Yes, indeed, Bihar is an ancient land.

We rolled into Pune about an hour late. There was a lot of slow going as maintenance crews bolstered the tracks against the dynamic earth that shifted frequently and radically just a few meters below the surface. He plugged in his earphones and returned to watching something on his phone. He laughed to himself. I watched the big city grow around us. But I couldn’t stop thinking of the crow-man in the belly of Rama. And how within a single soul, the soul of one man, a myriad of worlds, histories, and incarnations exist, not in conflict but in some weird harmony.

By the time I helped him on to the platform at Pune we had sailed together through several worlds. From geologic epochs up to the present day. Dozens of kingdoms and rajas had risen and fallen over the hours. Timeless ragas and sermons had been composed and preached and yet this all had unfolded in a single train compartment.

Yadavji, like Kakbushundi, the man who became a crow who worshipped Vishnu who in turn became Rama and later Krishna, and Hanuman who could leap across time and space with ease, was a man who contained avatars of my family, my friends and myself. Displaced outsiders living in just one of the many possible multitudes of universes laughing and discussing and sitting as two friendly ghosts, translucent to all who observed us.

August 27, 2026

Rest in Peace: Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton DOWNLOAD

Dolly Parton STREAM

March 19, 2026March 19, 2026

5 Best American Pop Songs as understood by a teenager in a hill station in North India in 1970

In the 1960s and ’70s, India wasn’t a place to buy the latest Western pop music. In the few shops that sold LPs, you might find some Mantovani, the odd Herb Alpert and the TJB, quite a bit of Ventures and always, India’s very own Englebert Humperdink.

The Beatles was rare, as was Deep Purple and The Doors. But amazingly, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters was readily available and quite popular. Indeed, so precious was Western vinyl in those ancient days that I once made a handy sum selling some old Elvis and Beatles LPs to the management of Allahabad’s coolest dining venue, El Chico. I knew nothing about the music and cared even less. I was a 13 year old cashing in. But the two middle-aged men didn’t even bargain when I offered them the records. They handed over the 25 or 30 rupees I thought they might be worth. An early example of what is now called a “win-win” situation.

But somehow, some way, we young people, did develop an ear for rock ‘n roll, or what we thought qualified as such. I, much later, learned that there were indeed ultra-hip clubs in Delhi, Calcutta and Bombay where not just rock ‘n roll was bashed out by Indian bands, but also some very cool jazz, I was too young at the time to get to such clubs.

Instead, my early learning began during the intervals at Rialto or Picture Palace cinemas in Mussoorie. As the lights came up and the hawkers entered the hall like storm troopers, a scratchy recording of Cliff Richards or the Beatles would fill the room. It would blast over and over, for the next 20 minutes, while ticket holders relieved themselves, sipped a Fanta or puckered their faces to the taste of mango papad dipped in chili salt.

In eateries like The Tavern (on the Mall) and Kwalitys you could also hear the odd rock song. How our teenage hearts thrilled! It made us American kids feel like we were somehow connecting with the “homeland” even though we had only the vaguest idea of what the States, Australia or England were really like.

Here are five of the most famous Western rock ‘n roll songs that nurtured and inspired an entire generation of Indian (and American expat) boys and girls.

For what seemed years, this was the song that blasted out of the Rialto cinema in Mussoorie during intermission. We went every Saturday to see a show and soon knew this song by heart. Sir Cliff, of course, like Mr Humperdink, was another native son and thus had pride of place in any rock and roll rotation.

An absolute icon of a song. This suave Santana anthem penetrated the consciousness of India’s urban, West-looking youth, like nothing else. It was almost guaranteed to be heard in every darkened restaurant, bar and coffee shop from Srinagar to Srirangapatnam.

Someone eventually had a quiet word with the projectionist at the Rialto.  Congratulations was ditched for The Ballad of John and Yoko.  This was then played for the next three years straight. We loved it! “Christ! You know it ain’t easy.” Boy! Lennon was singing for us!

Like Black Magic Woman, CCR’s first big hit Born on the Bayou touched something in the Indian spirit. It’s heavy, bluesy riff seemed to connect with nothing that Bollywood was producing. Perhaps that is why it caught on.  So influential was this song that an Indian garage band called the X’lents made a cover of it.

The Ventures were pretty well known in India in the ’60s and ’70s. If you couldn’t identify their name you knew the sound. Their album covers were bright and as the ’70s broke, covered with very beautiful babes in interesting poses. This crisp little number was as big a hit in Hyderabad as it was in Honolulu.

Peace, man!

March 18, 2026

This War in Iran has me thinking

of a quote I had posted to my wall when I was a working man.

The code of tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. But NGOs often try strategies with dead horses including the following:

o Buying a stronger whip

o Changing riders

o Charging a lower price for the ride

o Saying things like, “This is the way we’ve always ridden this horse.”

o Appointing a committee to study the horse

o Declaring the horse is faster, better, cheaper dead

o Harnessing several dead horses together for better speed.

January 12, 2026

Recalled Conversations: Taxi driver, Delhi.

For the first several minutes he said nothing, just guiding his yellow and black Suzuki taxi through the clamorous traffic of midday Delhi. My daughter wanted me to ask him what his name was. “Jai Bhagwan,” he said. “An old-fashioned name.” His smile is half apologetic.

“You’ll be going to Jaipur? That’s a beautiful city. They call it the Pink City. Its a five hour drive from Delhi and Pushkar is another 2 or 2 and half hours further. You’ll stay in Pushkar for a few days? No? I see, just for a day. Ajmer is just half hour more away. What a place that is. Moinuddin Chisti…the Emperor of India! Will you be taking the train from Ajmer to Varanasi? No, from Agra. Ok. I see, your agent arranged it that way. Watch out for these agents. They’re in it for themselves, a lot of them.

This traffic is like this but not for too long. There’s a fly over up ahead and the road narrows so everything slows down to a crawl. But soon we’ll be moving again. Yes, that metro line was made for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. What a rip off! The organizers stole 80% of the investments. Only 20% was spent on the infrastructure. The main crook, Kapladi is in jail but what does it matter. It won’t change anything. The rich and our netas don’t give a shit. All the rules are for the poor, not one of them is for the rich. It never changes.

My people used to own the land around the airport. A long time ago the government came and forced us off the land and gave us Rs1.40 per square meter! A very low price. But they got what they wanted. You know Gandhi? They say he is the father of the nation. We say he’s the number one Thief. Don’t believe me? What did he ever do for us? Did he do anything to improve our lot? He and Nehru did everything for themselves and to make their own money and name. Gandhi, the old bastard, used to feed his goat grapes while the rest of the country starved.

The real hero of India was Subhas Chandra Bose. What a guy. You know what his slogan was? Give me your blood and I’ll give you freedom! He was a man of action. That’s why they killed him. You know Gandhi could have freed Bhagat Singh but he didn’t. He let him hang. All for his own glory.

Ambedkar? Yeah, he was a good man too. He wrote the Constitution. No one else could have done that. He was a great man actually. I have nothing bad to say about Ambedkar.

Right, we’re almost at your destination. Just 5-10 minutes more.”

November 17, 2025

Break in transmission

Hello dear friends.

Life as they say is always full of surprises and U turns and black ice.

I’ve neglected this blog due to all of the above. It may continue for a while. Or maybe not.

It’s Life.

Thanks for your support and encouragement through many years. I will definitely be back at some point but unlikely to be posting regularly until the turbulent skies clear a little.

Other than that, I am physically and mentally well.

My bandwidth is very limited.

July 22, 2025

High Point: a compendium of Ramsey Lewis

May 24, 2025May 24, 2025

Faces and Sonder

One of the most telling ‘words’ in the English language is sonder. Defined in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, sonder is, “the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”. It highlights the profound and often overlooked fact that everyone around us is experiencing a unique and intricate existence, similar to our own.

I don’t take many portraits these days. But over the years I’ve captured a few faces that I cause me to enter a state of sonder.

Double click on each image for a full screen experience.

Custodian of the Nepali Temple in Varanasi. 1980

Mr Cool taking the evening air on the stoop of his house in Rajahmundry. 2006

A young girl acting up in a backstreet of Old Delhi watched over by Lord Shiva. 2008

May 4, 2025May 4, 2025

Real Politics beats Anger-tainment

Last night Australians demonstrated their good sense, groundedness and well-honed pique in a big way. They voted for an imminently moderate, Elmer Fudd-like, Labor party lifer, someone who I (like almost all Aussies, except Labor party lifers) thought would probably lose the election or be so constrained by the political forces around him and his party that he/we would limp through another 3 years of soothing talk but precious little action on things we all care about: climate action, costs of life and health care.

His opposite number, the bald pated ex-Queensland cop (for non Australians, that is like being an ex-LAPD cop) not only the lost the election but also was given a tight kick in the pants by his own constituents. His career was yanked out from under him and there will be few tears shed.

I watched Albo’s acceptance speech. This guy has turned from Elmer Fudd into Conan the Barbarian! He spoke like he has rarely done. Confident, strong-voiced (yes he still has a high, slightly silly voice) and full of grace, goodwill and kindness. He didn’t bag the Liberals or his counterpart. He spoke of doing things the ‘Australian way’, with decency and kindness and caring for those doing it tough.

It’s easy to get cynical about politics and I’m a deep cynic. But I felt my chest swelling (for once outdoing my belly) as he spoke. I especially felt glad and proud to be Australian for one of the first times since I became a citizen. I am so grateful to be living in a country that despite being full of larrikins, (Crocodile) Dundees and (Breaker) Morants and which can be pretty crude from time to time, is indeed a country in which decency is deeply felt and practiced across all layers of society.

Pundits predicted a minority government for Labor. Once again, they got it wrong. Not only did Labor win a thumping majority, on track to have more than twice the number of seats of the Libs, but have won the largest number of primary votes (sort of like the popular vote in the USA) ever by a Labor government since WWII. And that includes those of Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd!

The Liberals have experienced a plane crash in which most of their leaders (a pretty low standard I admit) are gone and their brightest rising stars have all been killed. They have almost no (zero, zip) representation in the major urban centres of the country where most Aussies live. They’ve lost young people, women and the sane.

The Liberal/National Party are now even more adrift than the American Republicans. At least the spineless yesmen of the GOP are united in blindly marching over the cliff. Where they stand is clear…behind Trump with their noses and tongues on his arse. Their Australian wanna-be’s have no idea of what they want, should want and most of all have spent nearly two decades stubbornly ignoring what their own constituents want. Good luck to the grubs.

The Australian Labor Party has delivered every major social and economic reform that makes us a modern serious country. It began with Whitlam 50 years ago and continued through Julia Gillard. The Liberal grubs have done nothing but undermine, block and seek to take a torch to all of these reforms all the while espousing pioneering ideas on how to mistreat asylum seekers (El Salvador and Trump have lifted the overseas gulag idea from the Liberals), demonstrated their luddite attitude toward technology while all the time bashing the oldest human culture, Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples, at every turn.

Like the Republicans in Washington they’ve become more extreme and stupid with every election. They can be formidable in opposition but perfectly inept and corrupt when every they get near the cookie jar. Their analysis of their own coalition and approach was summarised by a senior Liberal senator last night as a ‘knife fight’.

Corruption, fear mongering. A party of drunks and women haters the LNP is out of touch with Australians on every single issue. So confused were they this time they actually took a policy of ‘tax increases’ to the election.

We did the needful, Australia. We wiped them off the mat, save for a few skid marks.

Suddenly, we are in a new era of gradual change but decency in public life. That sounds like a winner to me.

Trump was a definite factor in the final tally. Dutton praised Trump’s ‘big thinking’ and announced a cut of 40,000 bureaucrats which went down like a loud fart in church. One of the Party’s attack dogs, a young Aboriginal woman, who goes about with 3 or four bouncer types pinned in close, swore to Make Australia Great Again and proudly sported the ubiquitous red cap.

In the words of a former Liberal Prime Minister, a man who was politically assassinated by Peter Dutton in one of their Party’s famous ‘knife fights’, Trump was the mood music in the background to the election. Very clearly Australians don’t dig that sort of music. Another reason to be proud today. Trump was not THE factor as in Canada. The LNP just got whupped everywhere on every issue. Refer to my comments on ineptitude above.

So, today is a bright sunny day. Literally and politically. This has been a victory for consistent trimming of the “system” in favour of the non-millionaire class, calm and considered responses to the devils Trumpism has released. Australians chose not to go with radical ambition or goofy ideas but rather voted for the dull, the gradual and the diligence of the Labor Party lifers.

Huzzah!

April 28, 2025May 6, 2025

Deep Dive: The Wadia Brothers and the Masked Woman

Lollywood: stories of Pakistan’s unlikely film industry

Of the many Parsi clans who leveraged their interaction with the British in Bombay to establish themselves as economic powerhouses, even to this day, the shipbuilding Wadia family is worth a closer look.

Even before the community fled Persia to seek refuge along India’s western coast, the Zoroastrians were renowned ship builders and sailors. During the reign of King Darius (522-486 BCE) the Persians had learned well from the Phoenicians (1200-800 BCE) and become the acknowledged shipbuilding and maritime empire of the epoch. Though their numbers were tiny in their new home in India, (never more than 100,000) the community kept these ancient skills alive.

Settled and working out of Surat, the Wadia (Gujarati for ‘ship builder’) clan, interacted with the various European trading nations—Portugal, Netherlands, France—that sought trade with the Mughal empire and its wealthy business communities of Gujarat. When the rather slow-starting English received the islands of Bombay from the Portuguese, Parsis began to migrate from the hinterland south. One of Surat’s most prominent shipbuilders, a Parsi named Lovji Nusserwanji Wadia who had built ships for a number of European trading firms in Surat, was invited by the English to establish a branch of the family business in Bombay. And so, beginning in 1736, Lovji along with his brother Sorabji set to work building Asia’s first dry docking facility where EIC ships could be drawn entirely out of the water to be repaired and refurbished. This single bit of infrastructure increased the economic and strategic value of Bombay immensely. It brought to the foreground Bombay’s exceptional qualities as one of the best deep water harbours (the city’s name derives from the Portuguese words Bom (good) and Bahia (harbour)) from which the British, with their new infrastructure and world-class Parsi shipbuilders, were able to not only vanquish the Portuguese, Dutch and regional Indian naval powers but also clear the Arabian Sea of pirates which led to a steady increase in traffic and trade. By the mid-19^th century Bombay had become a major international commercial and naval port and the most important city in British India.

By 1759 the dry dock was operational. At the same time the brothers Wadia were providing many of the ships that carried cotton and spices and eventually that fateful black gold, opium, from India to China and other Asian ports. Given the EIC’s monopoly on the Indian trade and the massive growth in the economy opium facilitated, particularly in the first part of the 19th century, the Wadia’s became immensely wealthy. Theirs was a full-service enterprise, building single-sailed sloops, water boats that managed trade up and down the west coast, beautifully sleek, fast-moving clippers, well armed frigates and man-o-wars for the military as well as cutters, schooners, and eventually steamships for the Asian/Chinese trade. Using teak, rather than English oak for the hulls, the Wadia’s ships were lighter and more resilient than ships made in Britain. Over the years, the family built over 400 ships for the EIC’s Maritime Service and others including their fellow Parsi sethias.

Lovji’s grandson, Nusserwanji Maneckji continued the family business and in addition to servicing the British became a much sought after local agent for early American traders building up the trade between India and New England. Maneckji Wadia was so well regarded by the Americans that he and his relatives enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the Yankee business with many American traders exchanging effusive letters with him in which his ’impeccable character’ is praised and his family compared to ‘satraps’. Both sides profited handsomely. In the words of one Yankee businessman, they profited ‘monstrously’, recovering up to 300% on the Indian textiles and other goods sourced by the Wadias.

HMS Minden in the heat of the Battle of Algiers

One of Nusserwanji’s sons, Jamshetji Bombanji, was appointed Bombay’s Master Builder[1], a role usually held by an Englishman, but which the Wadia family was to hold for 150 years running. Several of Bomanji’s ships found their way into the larger events of the time, including the first man-o-war built in India—a huge warship with three masts and loaded with 74 large cannons—the HMS Minden. When it set sail in 1810 a Bombay newspaper, the Chronicle, praised “the skill of its architects” and went on to note that with “the superiority of its timber, and for the excellence of its docks, Bombay may now claim a distinguished place among naval arsenals”. Several years later, on the night of 13 September 1814, the HMS Minden was tied to a British ship in Chesapeake Bay, along the east coast of the United States, after a local lawyer, Francis Scott Key, had helped to secure the release of an American prisoner-of-war held by the British. Fighting between the Americans and British was intense with the night sky flashing red and yellow. The frightening spectacle inspired Key to write a poem, The Star Spangled Banner, which was eventually adopted as America’s national anthem.

Steel eventually replaced teak in the building of ships and steam took over from wind. The Wadias, like many Parsis diversified initially into textile production where steam-derived technologies helped to propel the Wadia’s Bombay Dyeing mill into one of the most successful and iconic of India’s modern businesses. And when the movies came to India, two great-great grandsons of Lovji Nusserwanji took the daring decision to turn their back on textiles and ships altogether and embrace the world of moving pictures.

Jamshed Boman Homi Wadia, known as JBH, was only 12 when Dadasaheb Phalke exhibited Raja Harishchandra, but spent his youth captivated by the Hollywood films that were becoming an increasingly common form of entertainment in Bombay. Though well-educated as a lawyer JBH horrified his family with his announcement that he intended to make films for a living. He quickly found work with the then prominent Kohinoor Studios producing a dozen films for the studio, some of which saw moderate success. But being an entrepreneur JBH didn’t want to work for anyone else, so, joined by his younger brother Homi, launched his own studio, Wadia Movietone in 1933, retaining the family’s shipbuilding past as part of the studio’s logo.

The brothers became icons of the early Indian film history and throughout the 30s and 40s Wadia Movietone was the most profitable of all Indian filmmaking enterprises.

Wadia Movietone studios was financially backed by several other Bombay Parsi families-including the famous Tatas-and grew into one of the most successful and consistently profitable studios of the 1930s. The brothers were basically in love with stunts and action. They especially adored derring-do characters like Zorro and Robin Hood played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and blatantly copied many of Fairbanks’ movies for Wadia Movietone. When Fairbanks visited Bombay, JBH made sure the actor visited his own studio; so impressed was his American idol that Fairbanks agreed to sell the Indian rights of his mega hit Mark of Zorro to Wadia Movietone.

The brothers proudly low-brow fare of fistfights, speeding trains and masked heroines dominated India’s box offices throughout the 30s and became the most popular genre in India at the time. Sadly, as film historian Rosie Thomas states, Indian “film history was rewritten”, by starchy Hindu nationalists who objected that stunt films did not inspire sufficient pride in India’s Hindu classical past. The whole stunt movie genre was effectively eliminated from most histories of Indian film giving virtually all attention on the more staid and far less fun, middle-class targeted ‘social’ melodramas focusing on family and relationships.

At their height, however, the Wadia brothers’ studio was the rage of the box office. Their greatest success was without a doubt a series of action films which in today’s parlance might be called a franchise, starring a stunning white woman they billed as Fearless Nadia.

Mary Evans, a West Australian girl of Scottish-Greek extraction, moved in 1911, at the age of three, to India where her father served with the British army. Settled and schooled for several of her early years in Bombay, Evans father was killed in 1915 while fighting in France and eventually moved to Peshawar to live with an ‘uncle’ who in fact was a friend of her deceased father. It was the wilds of the NW frontier of India that stimulated Mary’s tomboy personality to blossom. She discovered a love for the outdoors, sports and horse riding and with a mother who had once been a belly dancer, found herself singing (often bawdy songs) and dancing on stages across the NW and Punjab. Between 1927 and 1934, Mary performed as a dancer and singer in various troupes and circuses as well as a solo performer, travelling across the Indian subcontinent performing for wealthy maharajas as well as illiterate labourers. It was a risky job for a slightly big boned, well-built blonde-haired woman, travelling (often) alone across India, speaking only English and Greek, working at night in (often) seedy venues but it was one that seemed to suit her. When an Armenian fortune teller predicted a bright career for Mary, they used tarot cards to select a stage name, eventually settling on Nadia.

Sometime in the early 1930s, a Mr. Langa, the owner of Lahore’s Regent Cinema, saw one of Mary’s stage shows. Given that cinemas in those days regularly booked dance troupes to complement the movie, it is possible Langa hosted Mary at the Regent itself. Whatever the circumstances, Langa was taken by her presence and striking looks. He offered to introduce Evans to a friend of his, someone named JBH Wadia, who ran a movie studio in Bombay. Was she interested? With sparkling blue eyes and blonde hair, Nadia hardly fit the bill as the ideal Indian woman but she was not alone. Throughout the silent era and even into the age of Talkies, many of India’s initial generation of female starlets were in fact Anglo-Indian (mixed European and Indian heritage), European and Jewish women. At a time when acting was considered a dishonourable career by most Indians, non-Indian women felt less inhibited socially to take to the stage. Most adopted Indian stage names and worked hard to improve their unmistakably foreign accents. Still, the basic assumption was that actress was a synonym for prostitute. German film historian, Dorothee Wenner, whose biography of Evans, Fearless Nadia, sums up the situation as follows:

The connections between theatre, dance, music and prostitution remained so closely entwined well into the twentieth century that any official attempt to limit prostitution simultaneously represented a threat to the dramatic arts. The consequences for cinema were first felt by the father of Indian cinema, D.G. Phalke. He knew that filming made different demands on the realism of scenes than the stage did and therefore he wanted a woman to play the female lead in his first film Raja Harischandra. It was 1912 when he went looking around the red-light district of Bombay for a suitable performer. Although the impoverished director offered the few interested parties more money than they would normally earn, all the prostitutes turned the film work down…it was below their dignity!”[2]

When they met, Wadia immediately understood Evans’ appeal and potential. He suggested that the Australian change her name to Nanda Devi and wear a plaited dark wig. But Mary refused. “Look here Mr Wadia,” she said, undeterred of her future employer’s power or status, “I’m a white woman and I’ll look foolish with long black hair.” As for the name change, she scoffed. “That’s not in my contract and I’m no Devi! (goddess)” She pointed out that her chosen stage name, Nadia, resonated with both Indian and European audiences, and also just happened to rhyme with his own name, Wadia. JBH, not used to be spoken to so boldly by an employee, let alone a woman, figured she just might have what it takes to make it in the movies. He hired her on the spot.

An agreement was reached and in 1935 the brothers tested her in a couple of small roles in two films. Her charisma, not to mention her stunning and exotic looks, were obvious. She stood out like a ghost at midnight. Immediately, she was offered the lead in a Zorro-like picture called Hunterwali (Lady Hunter) which became a smash hit and is now considered one of the most significant milestones in South Asian film. The Wadia brothers had been unable to find a distributor for their extravagant production. Most considered it too radical and unsuitable for local tastes. A white masked woman, cracking a whip, smashing up villainous men, riding a horse and sporting hot pants that revealed her very white fleshy thighs? Absolutely not!

Unbowed, the brothers pooled their resources and sponsored the film’s premier at the Super Cinema on Grant Road, on a wet June evening in 1935. This was make or break. The Wadias believed in Nadia even though everyone else did not. Not without a little trepidation rippling through the cinema the lights dimmed and the show began. Fifteen minutes in, as Nadia pronounced that ‘From now on, I will be known as Hunterwali!’, the working class male audience stood up, cheered and clapped and in their own way pronounced the coronation of the Queen of the Box Office, a title she would hold for more than a decade.

The Wadia’s, as indeed most of their countrymen and women, were politically active (supporting Independence from Britain) and socially progressive. They championed women’s rights, Hindu-Muslim solidarity and anti-casteism. Though official censorship prohibited open discussion of these themes the Wadias made sure their superstar made casual references to them. As Nadia herself said, “In all the pictures there was a propaganda message, something to fight for.”[3]

The girl from Perth via Peshawar and Lahore, was now a superstar of action and stunt film with millions of fans. Known and billed as Fearless Nadia she insisted on doing all her own stunts be it fistfights on the top of a fast-moving train, throwing men from roofs or being cuddled by lions. She starred in nearly 40 pictures most made by the Wadia brothers (she married Homi in 1961) with such fantastical titles as Lady Robinhood, Miss Punjab Mail, Tigress, Jungle Princess and Stunt Queen.

In 1988 a version of Hunterwali, perhaps the most famous of all of Nadia’s films was released in Pakistan, starring Punjabi movie icons, Sultan Rahi and Anjuman.

[1] A highly critical and strategic role that oversaw ship design and construction but innovation, compliance with international shipping regulations and development of the shipbuilding industry.

[2] Wenner, Dorothee. 2005. Fearless Nadia: The True Story of Bollywood’s Original Stunt Queen. Penguin. Pg. 79.

[3] Thomas, Rosie, “Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts”, in Bollyword: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, ed. Raminder Kaur & Ajay J Sinha (New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, 2005) 35-69.