Rupchanda

Fish-vendors in Noida stock a fish with a lovely name - Rupchanda. 

Over the past few weeks, I have been keeping an eye on it at the fish-vendors, but until last Friday I somehow could not muster the confidence to try a new unfamiliar fish over the tried and tested Pabda or Rohu. The fishes were always placed in ascending order of pricing - Pabdas cost INR 120/kg, the going rate for Rohus is INR 180/kg, and Rupdhanda was lined up in the middle at INR 160/kg.

True to its name Rupchanda does have a striking, beautiful form - flat like a pomfret but fleshier, with a larger mouth and a dash of pinkish red scales on its belly. Another prominent feature is its teeth, a fine set of incisors and grinders line up in its mouth, giving it an almost mammalian appearance.

I tried to look it up on the online stores, and was puzzled to find that this evidently popular best-seller was not available on FreshtoHome, Amazon, Licious, or IndiaMart. 

Why so?

Digging a little deeper I finally came across an article in the Hindu newspaper. Rupchanda is also called the Red-bellied Pacu or Piaractus brachypomus. It is an alien species that has not yet been approved for farming and sale in India because...its original home is in South America, and is closely related to...the Piranhas!

So my fish-vendor was selling me a banned fish with cousins that have a fearsome reputation of being 'extremely predatory...with a powerful and dangerous bite generated by large jaw muscles'. Its cousins may be dangerous and the Rupchanda too may be tearing apart the fisherman's nets...but its delicious!

Now those teeth make sense. 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Sudhi, KS (2018), The Hindu: A delicious alien in Kerala Kitchens - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/south-americas-red-bellied-pacu-a-delicious-alien-in-kerala-kitchens/article24421299.ece

Tsuneno's World

 

Let us be upfront about two things about this book: first, its a fine piece of work, and second, it might look like a tome but its not - nearly half the book is notes, bibliography, references and the index!

Amy Stanley's "Stranger in the Shogun's City" is a labour of love spanning nearly two decades. It is the real life story of an ordinary girl named Tsuneno, daughter of a temple priest, who gets married at 12, lives through four divorces and many journeys through Japan before landing up as an impoverished migrant worker in the capital city of Edo, now Tokyo.

The book reconstructs her life from a vast collection of letters that Tsuneno sent to her brothers back home. Letters that were preserved at Risenji, a temple in Ishigami village for nearly 200 years before finding its way to the archives section of a library in Niigata Prefecture. 

Tsuneno's lifetime (1801-1853) covers one of the biggest inflection points in East Asian history - the colonial powers, the Dutch, England, France, and Americans are carving out their colonies in Asia, and the Japanese Shogunate is waking from its slumber to see the aftermath of gunboat 'diplomacy', the Opium Wars and the humiliation heaped on China. It is also a time of terrible deprivations - especially the Tempo Famine (1833-37), a period when -

 "...it was hard to say how many died of hunger and how many died of epidemic diseases - typhus and dysentery - the ravaged the weakened population...in the northeast, half the peasants in one domain had died of some of the survivors had resorted to cannibalism. Even reliable accounts described people reduced to eating grass and straw sandals, roadways strewn with emaciated corpses, and gravediggers too weak an exhausted to continue their work".

The book brings to life many familiar places in Tokyo - Chiyoda, Kanda, Tsukiji, Ginza - areas that are now teeming with skyscrapers, clean roads and manicured gardens. It is good to be reminded of the millions of hapless migrants like Tsuneno who did their bit to raise a grand city from dirt and squalor.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Stanley, Amy (2020): STRANGER IN THE SHOGUN'S CITY - A Japanese Woman and Her World, Scribner 2020

Drones Over the Black Garden

Last autumn, while serving on a UN assignment in Afghanistan, a Tanzanian colleague said something at floats up in my mind ever so often. He was telling us about a jihadist terrorist organisation in Central Africa that has killed thousands and displaced about 2.3 million people from their homes. "Boko Haram", he told us,  "simply means 'books are bad'" - all books, except, of course, the Holy Koran. 

Come to think of it, this is a recurring theme across the world - Khymer Rouge, The Great Leap Forward, the power of a radical ideology, encapsulated in a seemingly innocuous slogan, packaging an ideology that divides neighbours, drives ethnic cleansing, forced migrations, and wars.

Why do neighbours make the worst enemies? Is it the old adage 'familiarity breeds contempt' driven to extremes? 

Just as it is difficult for non-South Asians to differentiate between Indians and Pakistanis, it is not easy for us to figure out why the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis are at each others throats now. The news channels tells us that these two former Soviet states are fighting for an enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh or "Mountainous Black Garden" - itself a Russian-Turkic term, representing an amalgamation of cultures covering an undulating, fertile patch that lies at the tri-junction of three old empires - Russian, Ottoman and Persian. 

When you look at the map it seems like a puzzle at many levels: How did so many Christian Armenians end up in an enclave surrounded by Shia Muslims? How on earth did other large chunk of Azerbaijan - the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic - end up on the other side of Armenia, next to Iran and Turkey?

Then there is this ongoing spectacle of a real war being played out like video games. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have put up slick twitter handles that update the world on how efficiently they are now slaughtering each other. Images from kamikaze drones closing in on their targets - a tank, a truck, or a group of soldiers huddled in a corner - before obliterating them; images of a peaceful, tree-lined avenue disappearing in a haze of cluster bombs; long shots of artillery shells landing in cities, decorating it with plumes of smoke. Each side puts up daily scorecards of soldiers killed and military hardware destroyed or captured. 

People are getting killed in hundreds and yet it all seems like a video game being played by kids sitting sitting in front of computer consoles in Turkey or Russia. They are just following an example set by USA in Afghanistan and the Middle East. 

Wonder what point these gamers and their puppeteers conclude that have shifted one way or the other...