MX3 Weekly 03232025-Foolmuse
Roots 2
Desi Dhamake 5: 18 spicy slices of sonic delight from the 3rd world
Roots3
Deer in the Headlights
I’m getting tired of this attitude from Democrats:
Given where we are at, the floor of a corrupted Congress is not the place to look for resistance to Doge-bags and the Fuerher.
Remember when Yeltsin jumped on a tank? Remember when that guy stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square? Remember when Gandhi marched to the ocean to make salt?
Will someone in the United States please get out there in the streets, forget about passing a goddamn “bill” which is going to be ultimately rejected by the corrupted Supreme Court and inspire Americans who don’t want this shit?
Call me Old Fashioned
Met a mate at the John Curtin Hotel in the city last week. Free tickets from one of Melbourne’s wonderful radio stations, Triple R, for a visiting UK DJ.
Like free beer, free music is not to be sniffed at. My friend and I wandered upstairs with our pints of American Pale Ale to a large empty space with two decks of electronic noise making machines and related cables, pedals and mixers. Total audience, including us, 6.
Were they starting late? Warming up? Testing their machines? No, it was The Show. We sipped and waited as the room fell into silence. A Couple audience members wandered back downstairs. Now we were 4.
Then this.
Loud. For minutes on end.
We went downstairs again where a DJ played an electic two hours of non drone music.
At least I got a nice picture of DJ Drone.
Untitled III
My Missionary Family Pt 3 : Ocean Liners and St. Thomas
My folks and two older brothers landed in Bombay on 2 February 1952. A second application for a visa had been successful and 28 days after leaving New York they squinted at the skyline of India’s largest city ‘with its many high-rises [that] looked pale yellow in the hazy afternoon sun, more modern looking that we had expected.
The country where they would live and work for nearly 40 years was still young then. Four and half years earlier the British had left in a rush leaving behind two new countries. Pakistan and India, to sort out the affairs of state amidst deep political divisions over the Partition of the subcontinent, heightened communal identify and sensitivity, a bankrupt treasury and a level of poverty that had been severely exacerbated by several massive famines in Bengal, Punjab and Sindh.
Politically, Pakistan was in turmoil. Their first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan had been assassinated in October 1951, which saw the first direct intervention of the military in the country’s governance, a legacy the people of Pakistan continue to fight against. The UN had declared a ceasefire in January 1951 and sent peacekeepers to Kashmir to manage the fallout of the first of four wars fought over that territory.
India had the good fortune of being led by a charismatic visionary Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who enjoyed stature across the globe.  When the SS Stratheden, a British ocean liner that carried troops (during the war) and mail (after) between the UK and Australia, and which George Orwell had sailed to Morocco on in 1938, dropped anchor at Ballard Pier in Bombay, India’s first parliamentary elections since gaining independence were almost complete.  Nehru’s Congress party would win easily and remain in power for the next 25 years. Â
In Madras, the original Indian colonial city, 1300 kms southeast of Bombay, a cricket match between England and India got underway on the 6th of February. King George VI died that same day, placing young Elizabeth on the throne where she would remain for many years after mom and dad both passed away. India went on to gain its first Cricket Test victory in that match which marks the rise of the mighty Indian team of our times.
Our family, and few missionaries that we knew,1 cared little for cricket. Â It was a quaint British game played over 5 (!) days by princes and engineers. Â Like polo, it was an elite sport. Nothing like the massively wealthy and dominant public phenomenon it is today. Field hockey was the more popular and accomplished sport1 in those years.Â
We weren’t Brits so the change of monarchs in the UK would have been little more than headline news. There was, however, one anniversary or milestone that Dad would have liked (and probably knew). That his own missionary career was beginning exactly 1900 years after one of Christ’s own apostles had first arrived in India.  The tradition (which is generally accepted) tells of St. Thomas, one of the original Twelve, landing along the south east coast of India in the vicinity of the modern city of Chennai (Madras)in 52 CE. He preached to the locals and had some success but other locals, usually identified as stuffy Brahmins, murdered him around 72 CE. But he left behind India’s first indigenous Christian community and church, the Mar Thoma, which can, with strong historical evidence, claim to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest Christian community outside of Palestine. Â
If I’m to understand my parents’ life as missionaries in India I have to spend some time exploring a much broader history, that of Christian India, which pre-dates any formal European missionary by nearly 2 millennia. In the next few instalments, I’m going to highlight some of the highpoints in that fascinating but underreported history.
- India holds the record for most consecutive Olympic Golds (6) and most total Olympic Golds (8) in the sport. ↩︎
My Missionary Family Pt. 2
By mid-1951 Dad and Mom’s preparations to leave for India were in high gear. The few worldly possessions they had accumulated were packed away, ready to be shipped to their new home, or stored in the garages and basements of relatives in Minneapolis. They had been recruited by a mission board known as the Oriental Missionary Society (OMS), a minnow in a lake dominated by the mainline Methodist and Presbyterian churches.
They were excited but anxious, not knowing what to expect or how to prepare for what was going to be their first 5yr tour of duty. They received two bits of advice from senior missionaries. Dad writes about the first one:
Orville French (an OMS missionary in India) accompanied us for a walk. He encouraged us to keep focused on India–’a desperately dark and needy land’, he said. Later while studying in Houghton [College, New York] we corresponded with the Frenches who had arrived in Gadag by then. In one of his letters Orville asked us about our conjugal relationship. Hmm. He said that couples planning to serve in India, especially, needed to be sure that they were well adjusted sexually, and ‘at peace’ with their sex lives. For India, he warned, was a place where sex was overtly ‘worshipped’ (Shiva phallus symbol, erotic temple carvings etc.) and this might prove to be troublesome! His concern was doubtless given in the context of what happened to two missionary families who were forced to return home because of the husbands’ improprieties. Orville’s questions we found a bit intriguing, and actually the ‘only word of counsel’ we had from OMS on how to get ready for India.
Now. If there ever was a paragraph that deserved unpacking, this is it. But Dad’s final statement is not entirely accurate. Mom wrote of another piece of advice they received, this time from Orville’s wife, Aileen.
Aileen, in response to my queries as to what to bring with us, replied that India (and Gadag in particular) was rather drab and dreary, so ‘Bring whatever you can to make your home cheery and cozy.’ One surprising suggestion was to bring toilet paper—India’s being hard to obtain and or poor quality, if and when available. We packed a [55 gallon] drum full of it when we sailed for our first term.
Thus alerted to the pitfalls they could expect to find, they were ready to set sail from New York in September, 1951. With tickets booked and much of their luggage enroute to New York, they were informed that their visa had been refused by the Indian government. This was, in Dad’s words, ‘a slap in the face’ and suddenly it looked as if the erotic temples, jewel encrusted turbans and lost souls would remain figments of their imaginations forever.
The Indian government’s hardening stance against new missionaries was a theme of many family conversations throughout my childhood. Though individuals who could be classified as Christian missionaries had been in India since the early years after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and though southern India was home to one of the oldest orthodox churches in the world, predating any European missionary presence by centuries, the ‘modern’ missionary movement in India really began in the early 18th century.
It is a story filled with ups and downs and long periods of marginalization followed by shorter bouts by lionization before an inevitable return to ostracism. I’ll write more about that at some other point, but for now, the refusal of a visa for Mom and Dad, though disappointing for them, was not surprising given the political context of a newly independent country.
Indian elites had waged an ever more acrimonious and violent war of resistance against Imperial Britian, aka The Raj, for decades. Indeed, you could make the case that the ‘natives had been restless’ for more than a century and that the first mass armed uprising against the British had taken place in 1857, when a loose coalition of soldiers, disempowered regional rulers and peasants, nearly succeeded in wiping all Europeans off the north Indian map.
The country’s new rulers, though committed to building a non-sectarian, secular state, viewed missionaries as a subversive, antiquated, anachronistic and altogether unwanted cohort of foreigners living in their midst. Missionary evangelizing, as unsuccessful as it was in convincing more than a handful of Indians to renounce the faith of their birth, was especially hated.
Prominent leaders including the Governor General Mr. Rajagopalachari and Prime Minister Nehru expressed their views that missionaries were cultural aggressors and foreign fifth columnists. An official investigation in the early 50s by the government of Madhya Pradesh concluded:
Evangelisation in India appears to be part of a uniform world policy to revive Christendom, to re-establish Western supremacy and is not prompted by spiritual motives. The objective is to disrupt the solidarity of the non-Christian societies, with danger to the security of the State. Enormous sums of foreign money flow into the country, and it is out of such funds that the Lutherans and other proselytising agencies were able to secure nearly four thousand converts. Missions are in some places used to serve extra-religious ends. As conversion muddles the convert’s sense of solidarity with his society there is a danger of his loyalty to his country being undermined.
A vile propaganda against the religion of the majority is being systematically and deliberately carried out so as to create an apprehension of breach of public peace. There has been an appreciable increase in the American personnel of missionary organisations in India.
Which must be halted immediately, the report declared.
Things didn’t look good for wannabe missionaries like Rudy and Eleanore Rabe and their two young sons Michael (4) and Gregg (2).
Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits 