Travel: Why Do You Do It?

I was born with wanderlust. As much as I love my home in Pune, India, I love to travel, and would spend the rest of my life travelling if I could afford it. Unfortunately, I cannot. Luckily for me, however, I am not alone in my love of travel, and am married to someone who loves to travel as much as I do.

Many people ask my wife and I about how we manage our marriage, considering the fact that we have spent most of it living on different continents. I agree that this is not an ideal state of affairs and we will, in the near future, have an opportunity to spend more time together.

Part of the reason we have spent so much time apart has been due to our love of travel, or rather, our love of seeing and living in new places. The actual “travelling” bit can be pretty dreadful. I absolutely hate airports and the whole process of getting from one place to another by air. If I had the time and money, I would travel the world by train, since I enjoy train travel. When I lived in the US many years ago, I saw a lot of the country from the passenger seat of a car, which was also enjoyable.

My definition of travelling and seeing new places is a little different from some other people. I like to see new places, but only at my own pace. Actually, I like to live in new places as opposed to seeing them. I like to try and understand the local culture and politics, find a favourite bar and/or restaurant and learn more about the local food. I like to meet and chat with locals, and hopefully make a few friends. This means that I need to spend a considerable amount of time in a place, until it starts to feel like a surrogate home.

For many people, travelling means continuous frantic movement from one place to another, as their camera-shutters keep clicking incessantly, showing them standing in front of famous monuments or historical buildings. People who love seeing six new places in seven days are tourists, not travellers. Tourists usually know nothing about the places they visit, and are more interested in immediate photo-opportunities and quickly moving on to the next destination recommended by their tour guide. More often than not, they aren’t interested in really getting to know the places they visit. As a result, they usually leave a place with as little knowledge of it as when they first arrived there. Tourists usually have everything organized and accounted for in advance. Travellers, by contrast, often make spontaneous decisions and prefer to go off the beaten track, in search of a unique or different experience. I have nothing against tourists, but I cannot be one. I prefer to be a traveller instead.

While the world is a large place and I doubt I will be able to see much of it, I consider myself lucky to have seen as much of it as I have. I have travelled the high cold plains of the American West, driven through Yellowstone National Park on the first day of the season, eaten “recession-special” pizzas in the Bronx in New York and lived off Coal Harbour in beautiful Vancouver, Canada. I have visited the Taj Mahal on a moon-lit night, trekked at 11,000 feet in the incomparably beautiful Indian Himalayas and watched the sunrise on the 25,600 foot high Nanda Devi. I have seen the beautiful temple carvings at Khajuraho and crossed the Ganges River in a decrepit steamboat.

Along the way, I have made several great friends who have enriched my life. Thanks to the Internet, I have rediscovered some of them after many years. There is still so much more to see and do, and if life is kind, I will continue to travel. This probably means I will sacrifice career opportunities and financial stability to satisfy my wanderlust. So be it. I may not die rich, but whenever my time comes, I can at least say I was well-travelled.

Nostalgia: The Sunday Morning Matinee

I do not know if Sunday morning matinee movies still exist. I hope they do, because some of my fondest childhood memories are from watching such movies. As usual, I will elaborate (possibly at too much length).

I grew up in a place called Bandra, in the city of Bombay (now called Mumbai). At one time, Bandra used to be called the “Queen of the Suburbs”. It isn’t anymore. It is crowded, expensive and in my opinion, not worth living in anymore. But thirty years ago, it was all different.

Bandra was a quiet, clean, tree-shaded place by the sea, full of beautiful cottages and an old world charm. Back in the old “socialist” days, very few people had cars, so traffic wasn’t a problem. In the 1970s, Bandra was still not populated with high-rise residential buildings, shopping malls, cable television and beauty parlors. Instead, we had huge playgrounds where we played cricket, football and hockey every day of the year and for entertainment, we had the New Talkies cinema hall.

The New Talkies cinema hall was a beat-up, old movie theatre on Hill Road. On weekdays, they usually showed the latest Bollywood blockbusters. But on weekends (Sunday mornings), they showed old black and white Hollywood movies from the 1940s and 1950s. And these are the movies my dad took me to see when I was seven, eight, nine years old. Going to these movies with my dad every Sunday morning was a treasured ritual; moments in time that I will remember as long as I live.

In particular, a few movies stand out. The first one was the “The Corsican Brothers”, the 1941 black and white version, starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as a swashbuckling swordsman in a double role. For an eight year old, it didn’t get any better than this. An epic tale of sword-fighting, revenge and romance, with not one, but two Douglas Fairbanks sliding down banisters with sword in one hand and the damsel in distress in the other. The two Corsican brothers (both played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. of course) are separated at birth, and destined to meet at some point. To add to the drama and pathos, both of them become expert swordsmen and fall in love with the same woman (actress Ruth Warrick). There is a dastardly villain, and of course, one of the brothers then has to sacrifice himself for the other. I wonder if our Hindi movies got the idea of siblings separated at birth from “The Corsican Brothers”!

Another movie was “Godzilla” – the original black and white Japanese version dubbed in English. The opening scene showed Godzilla emerging from the Pacific Ocean at the stroke of midnight, poised to terrorize whole villages of Japanese peasants. For some reason, Godzilla’s preferred time of surfacing from the Pacific Ocean was always midnight; and in the movie, church bells ominously chime twelve times every time Godzilla is about to emerge. This was my first “horror” movie, and watching Godzilla terrorize the Japanese countryside was plenty scary for a seven year old.

I remember many other such matinee movies I watched with my father; “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1937 version with Ronald Colman and yes, the ubiquitous Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers”. Watching these movies with my father made for some enduring and happy childhood memories. They were great opportunities for me to bond with my dad. For him, it was a chance to re-live his childhood, since most of these Sunday morning matinee films were from the 1940s and 1950s.

Today, the New Talkies cinema hall is long gone; replaced by a huge, glittering mall. I feel no sense of attachment to the mall, but every time I walk past it, I still mourn for the New Talkies theatre, that air-conditioned palace of dreams from my childhood.

Nostalgia: The Little Train That Could

Distinguished author Paul Theroux has written a great many books on travel; especially train travel. In one of his travel books he says that he never saw a train go by without wishing he was on it. I know that feeling.

Unlike air travel which is soulless and impersonal, train travel offers the traveler a chance to escape - from a dead-end job, a stressful life, an unhappy personal event. It offers a chance to assume a new identity, reinvent oneself.

And of all types of train travel, steam train travel was undoubtedly the most enjoyable. Steam engines have gone the way of the dodo, and I doubt there are any railways in the world that use steam engines anymore.
But I still have memories from thirty years ago, when as a child, my parents and I would make the annual pilgrimage to visit my grandparents up in the Indian Himalayas. Nowadays, there is a reasonably good highway from Delhi, as well as a couple of high-speed trains (high-speed by Indian standards, anyway).

But thirty years ago, there was just one meter-gauge train from the Indian city of Agra in the congested plains of North India. That train was the Kumaon Express, so named because it transported travelers from the city to Agra to the Kumaon Himalayas. And best of all, that train was pulled by what looked like a toy steam train engine. The engine had a distinctive whistle that sounded like a boy on the cusp of puberty. It was shrill and broke when it hit the high notes. In Bengali, we used to call it “bhangaa-gola”, or “broken voice”.

How mightily the little steam train huffed and puffed to cover the three hundred and fifty kilometers to our destination! Its maximum speed was about thirty kilometers an hour. At that speed, the whole train compartment would shudder and shake, and it felt like it would come apart at the seams.
The train journey was an overnight one. All through the cold foggy winter night, the train would travel through the fertile plains of North India, with its distinctive whistle blowing.

In the morning, you woke up to winter mist and fog, and little stations in the verdant green fields of the Indian terai. The train stations would suddenly loom through the fog, and you felt you had suddenly gone back in time. The stations looked and felt like they were lost in time; shades of Stewart Granger and Ava Gardner in that old Hollywood classic “Bhowani Junction”.

Tea-sellers rushed through the morning fog, selling tea in small matkas (earthenware pots). Porters (known in India as coolies) rushed hither and yon pursued by harried passengers looking for their train compartments. The cries of hawkers shattered the early morning silence, as the train leisurely ambled its way through places with names like as Lalkuan, Kicchha and Baheri.

The journey would finally end at the last railhead – the Kathgodam train station, where the pine and oak trees of my beloved Himalayan foothills would suddenly come into view. Although I would be covered in soot and coal ash, my spirits would rise as the Himalayan foothills appeared on the horizon. They were the land of Jim Corbett and tigers. They promised everything I craved for – deep, dark forests, cool, crisp mountain air and best of all, the sight of those snow-covered titans in the distance.

The train would finally stop, its labors complete for the day. With a huge whooshing sound, the engine would finally shudder to a halt, sounding like a marathon runner with respiratory problems breasting the tape at the end of a race.

Today, there are broad-gauge, comparatively high-speed trains that cover the same distance within a much shorter time. But I will always remember the Kumaon Express fondly. It was the little train that could. It was the train that took me home.

Music: The Romance of Bootlegged Audio-Cassettes

A couple of years ago, as a new blogger, I wrote a paean to the long-playing record (LP). I still believe that a true music connoisseur will always prefer listening to LPs than to compact discs (CDs). CDs provide crystal-clear sound, but sound soulless. LPs on the other hand can be temperamental and are high-maintenance. Only someone who truly loves music will take the trouble of owning, maintaining and playing LPs. The sound of an LP is so rich and natural. LPs have personalities of their own. CDs do not.

Besides, perfection is not always everything it is cracked up to be, anyway. A little bit of imperfection always makes anything more interesting. Please read my blog on the long-playing record to find out more about that particular subject.

Today, while surfing the Internet, I stumbled across an astonishingly powerful cover version of “Almost Cut My Hair”; a classic 1969 song by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY). Listening to it brought back a flood of memories, of youth and life in college in India, when the most pressing concern we had was whether we had enough money to buy a quarter of rum. I still remember the beat-up old CSNY LP (which contained this song) that a friend of mine loaned me in 1984. I rushed to dub the LP onto a Sony audio-cassette.

Those were innocent, fun-filled days when my friends and I would gather at my home to listen to bootlegged audio-cassettes. Much of the music I still listen to today I first heard on an audio-cassette. I still remember where I was and what I was doing when I first listened to the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” with its beautiful violin solo. I borrowed a bootleg cassette of the “Who’s Next” album from a friend. He was very reluctant to loan it to me. I don’t blame him. I would have been reluctant too.
I used to take a bus back from my college in Matunga to my home in Bandra. I wasted no time and started listening to the cassette the moment I got onto the bus. I had a brand-new Walkman, gifted to me by my uncle who lived in the US. This was 1984, and owning a Walkman in India back then was a big deal. I remember playing “Baba O’Riley” on the Walkman in the bus, and as it wound its way through the slum of Dharavi, the violin solo at the end of the song came through the headphones. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I had never heard anything so beautiful, so immediate. I wanted to grab hold of the passenger sitting next to me and say “Listen to this!”

I had many enjoyable evenings (and afternoons) listening to bootlegged audio-cassettes of “Who’s Next”. The audio-cassette had an audible hiss and eventually wore out. When this happened the spool would get entangled in the tape recorder, and I would painstakingly unspool it and make sure the tape did not break. I was a pretty good “cassette surgeon”. But bootlegged audio-cassettes were all that broke college students could afford back in those days. Besides, it wasn’t easy to get original albums of the music I wanted to listen to, since these albums were simply not available in India at the time. Therefore, bootlegged cassettes were the only way to go.

This was how it worked. Someone you knew usually knew somebody who had an elder brother who owned the Cream’s “Disraeli Gears” LP. Since you were a big fan of Eric Clapton and the song “Sunshine of Your Love”, you made it a point to get know the somebody in question. Over tea and a cigarette at the corner tea-shop, you begged and pleaded with him to speak to his elder brother and ask him to loan you his copy of the “Disraeli Gears” LP for just a day. You impressed upon him how careful you were with other people’s things, especially other people’s LPs (this was true).

After much coaxing, you got the LP you wanted. Then you ran home and promptly taped it on the best Sony audio-cassette you had, and invited all your friends to drop by and have a listen. I was always the “music guy” back in college, which made me pretty popular. Some of the best friends I made were at these music listening sessions we had. I turned on a lot of people to rock and jazz music. I often wonder what happened to all of those people, and whether they still listen to “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Almost Cut My Hair”.

The last time I was in the US, I met an old buddy of mine from the 1980s who now lives there. He is wealthy, married and has a family; he is a poster-child for the successful Indian immigrant. He picked me up from the airport. While we were driving back to his home, he turned on the radio, and the Who song “The Seeker” came on. He turned to me and said; “I first heard this at your place more than twenty years ago”. Then we both proceeded to sing the lyrics of the song at the top of our lungs all the way home. For a few moments, the years melted away and we were teenagers again.

The next time I get home, I will try and find the old bootlegged cassettes of “Sunshine of Your Love” and “More Than A Feeling” and play them. I now own these albums on CD, but listening to music on CD just doesn’t give me the same thrill.

Those old carefree days are gone forever. But maybe those memories can be recaptured for just a little while when I listen to those old bootlegged cassettes. Baba O’Riley still lives (fans of the Who will know what I am talking about).

India: An Economic Prediction

This is probably the first blog where I am making an economic prediction. Let me start by saying I am not a financial expert. Many (including me) will say that there are thousands of people far more qualified than me when it comes to predicting India’s GDP and stock market growth. And all of them will be right. I am only an amateur economist. I do not have a PhD, and I do not have the expertise to run complicated mathematical models of economic data. Nevertheless, I will persevere in making my own predictions, because as everyone knows, economics is the “dismal science”, and my guess is as good as anybody else’s.

So here goes. India’s GDP grew at a very healthy 7.9% last quarter, on the back of 6.1% for the quarter before that. We are talking real (inflation-adjusted) growth here, not nominal growth. Therefore, India’s real GDP growth for the six months of this financial year stands at 7%. Considering the GDP growth rates in the rest of the world at the moment, 7% is very healthy indeed. In addition, India’s stock markets have risen over 80% in this calendar year alone.

The key question is: will this GDP and stock market growth continue over the next six months?

Some pundits are now saying that the recession is over as far as India is concerned, and the time has come again for celebration. Let the good times roll! I suggest caution, for the reasons outlined below.

First, let us look at the stock markets. In business school, one is taught to look at “fundamental value” of any stock before buying it. Is the Indian stock market currently overvalued, undervalued or correctly valued? I would say that it is overvalued at the moment. It is not domestic investors who are flooding the Indian stock markets with money, but American fund houses and investors. Why American investors? Because the rate of borrowing in the US is ridiculously low right now, thanks to the recession.

Imagine if you could borrow money at 2% and get a return of 20% on that money. You would make a killing. That is precisely what is happening right now. Interest rates in the US are at artificially low levels right now, and these low rates are not sustainable. Sometime in the next six months, US interest rates will rise, as the economy comes out of a painful recession. The US Fed will then start concentrating on controlling inflation, and they will do this by raising interest rates. Also, investors (especially the Chinese) are beginning to get nervous about the returns they are getting on their US investments (Treasury bonds). The Chinese want higher returns on the US $ 1 trillion they have invested in US Treasury bonds. If they don’t get it, they may pull out some of their money and invest it elsewhere. So sooner rather than later, the US Federal Reserve is going to hike interest rates.
When that happens, the plug will be pulled on the Indian stock markets, as the easy money dries up. So, Indian stock prices will fall. I predict that this will happen in the first quarter of 2010.

Second, let us look at India’s GDP growth. Most of the stimulus in the Indian economy today is being created by the government through its borrowing and demand creation schemes. The largest of these is the implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission which has put billions of dollars into the pockets of India’s millions of under-performing government bureaucrats. This has stimulated consumer demand which in turn, has increased demand for goods and services, which has contributed to 7.9% GDP growth in the last quarter. Is this sustainable for much longer?

The answer is no. Unless the Indian private sector now steps in and starts borrowing and expanding capacity rapidly, GDP growth will stall. The private sector expanded capacity rapidly between 2004 and 2008, and they feel that at the moment, there is a surplus capacity of goods and services in the system. Unless the private sector starts investing, job and money creation will not happen and domestic demand and GDP will not grow.

When do I expect this (increased private sector investment) to happen? Not before the last quarter of 2010. By then, the recession should have played itself out and they should feel confident enough.

The last and probably most important factor influencing India’s GDP growth is inflation. The government proudly trumpets the fact that Wholesale Price Inflation is below 2%. This claim is ludicrous. Food inflation in India currently stands at 18%, thanks to a poor monsoon and harvest last year. In a country where spending on food is the highest part of the household budget (for at least 50% of the population), this is alarming.

There is no reason to assume that food inflation will come down in the near future. There is much the government can do to alleviate it in terms of optimizing the food supply chain “from farm to fork”, but so far, we have only heard lots of talk on this front, and no action.


In addition, as the world economy recovers the price of petroleum will start increasing again. Combine increasing petroleum prices with already rampant food inflation, and you have all the ingredients for high inflation levels for the first half of 2010. High inflation means lower savings and lower real GDP growth.
There is much the Indian government can do to improve the situation; such as rapid disinvestment of Public Sector Units (PSUs), increased spending on infrastructure, improving the food supply chain to reduce waste and lower costs, etc. But the government’s record on making and rapidly implementing firm policy decisions is poor, and unlikely to improve anytime soon.

So what is my final prediction?

The stock markets will come down by 15% to 20% in the first half of 2010. Real (Consumer Price) inflation will go up to between 8% and 10%. Real GDP growth will come down for the first half of the year – to about 5% to 5.5%.

We will see light at the end of the tunnel during the second half of 2010, when borrowing by the private sector will start increasing (even though it will be at higher interest rates). This will spur capacity expansion and job creation and a rise in the stock markets and GDP growth. If we have a good monsoon in 2010, we should end with GDP growth of about 7 to 7.5% for the year ending March 31, 2011, on the back of a strong economic performance in the second half of that fiscal year.

Of course, all of what I have just said could be completely inaccurate and things may in fact, turn out just the opposite. But this is my prediction! Your comments (including any mistakes I may have made in my assumptions in this blog) are welcome.

India: Bombay Meri Jaan

Bombay Meri Jaan (which in English roughly means “Bombay, My Life” or “Bombay My Love”) is a very famous old Bollywood song from 1956. The song is sung by a character who is a petty thief, and he sings about how tough life can be in this City of Dreams, this modern-day Babylon – a city where millions of people come with stars in their eyes and the hope of making it big.

I am attaching the youtube link to the song. Most Indians would know and love this song. If you haven’t seen this video, I recommend you watch it. It has English sub-titles for those who do not speak Hindi.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6INOamqU7xs

Fifty three years after this song was written, Bombay has lost much of its luster, though millions of people still come here from thousands of miles away in India’s hinterlands, seeking a livelihood and a respite from the desperate poverty in their villages. This huge migration of people has caused the city’s population to swell to twenty million, and put a huge strain on the city’s infrastructure which was designed to cater to five million inhabitants.

65% of the city’s population now lives in slums. The overcrowding in the city has also started causing tensions between “locals” and “outsiders”. India’s political parties, who never miss a trick, have started encouraging and exploiting these divisions for votes. Still, Bombay is the only truly “Indian” city in the country, with every single one of India’s states represented (and probably every district as well).

Citizens of Bombay are famed for its toughness. They are known for their intelligence, street-smarts, sass, tolerance, hardiness and sense of humor. It could hardly be otherwise. People live in tiny, one bedroom apartments in the far-flung suburbs, and often commute one hundred kilometers a day or more, packed like sardines in sweltering train compartments. You need all of the qualities mentioned above to cope.

You may not like Bombay; it is no longer a beautiful city. But you cannot deny that the city has a character and personality of its own, and how many cities of the world can you say that about?

I no longer live in Bombay, mainly because of two reasons. Firstly, I am not as young as I used to be. Pretty much everybody who works in Bombay is a workaholic. No matter how smart you are or how hard you work, there is always someone younger and smarter snapping at your heels. As I settle into comfortable middle age, my competitive spirit doesn’t burn as brightly as it did ten years ago. Secondly, Bombay is a chain of islands, and since there is no room for growth, the price of residential real estate is astronomical. A decent 1,000 square foot apartment in the area I grew up in costs in the region of US $ 400,000. I am not willing to mortgage my life to buy an apartment in a city that is already way too crowded, polluted and noisy.

But Bombay is still the city I was born in, the city I grew up in, the city that shaped the man I became. And there will be many others just like me; people who escaped Bombay to live in less stressful places. But ask them how they feel when they see a picture of Victoria Terminus (as in the “Bombay Meri Jaan” video), or Marine Drive or the Gateway of India, and wherever they may live, and however long it has been since they last saw Bombay, chances are they will look at the pictures and think “home!!”.

There is so much more I could say about Bombay, but for that, I would have to write a novel. So I will cease and desist!

Tomorrow (November 26th) marks the first anniversary of the terrible terrorist attacks on Bombay. This is my salute to everyone who lives in Bombay. People like the accountant I knew in one of my workplaces many years ago; a woman who lived in Kalyan and commuted every morning by train to Fort (a distance of about sixty kilometers one-way). A woman who woke up at 5 am every morning to cook breakfast for her family, feed and dress her kids for school and then come to work. A woman who returned home only by 10 pm every night, to cook dinner and then help her kids with their homework. She was super-efficient at work too, and accomplished more in a day than most people do in a week. I was in awe of her. And Bombay is full of millions of men and women like her.

So I would like to dedicate this blog to her and the millions of other hardworking residents of Bombay, that western-most of India’s cities. You deserve so much better.

India: The Many Indias

Having lived overseas for more than half of my adult life, I have often been asked the question “What is India like?” I always find this question difficult to answer, because India, unlike many other countries in the world, is very difficult to categorize.

There is nothing homogenous or uniform about India. When people want to categorize India, I often tell them to think of India as Europe – if Europe had been a single nation. India has fifteen (or is it sixteen) different languages (each with its own unique script), thousands of dialects, and dozens of ethnic groups. Culturally, ethnically and linguistically, Hungary and Iceland have more in common than Tamil Nadu (a South Indian state) and Uttar Pradesh (a North Indian state). Western India is more economically prosperous than Eastern India, Southern India is better educated than Northern India, and then of course, there are the “seven sisters”, India’s North-eastern states, beautiful but distant, with warm and hospitable people but populated by separatist groups. Culturally, the North-eastern states have more in common with Tibet and Myanmar than India.

This same diversity applies to India’s urban and rural areas. Urban India has its face to the West, and sophisticated Indian cities have some of the finest restaurants, entertainment and nightlife on offer anywhere in the world. Parts of rural India on the other hand (especially in economically backward Northern and Eastern India) are as backward and poor as sub-Saharan Africa. Real estate prices in Mumbai and Delhi are among the highest in the world; on par with cities like Tokyo and New York. An Indian corporate magnate recently constructed one of the most expensive buildings in the world, and converted it into his residence. He is among the fifty richest men in the world, I think. Yet, barely a hundred kilometers from where he lives is one of India’s poorest districts, where malnutrition and hunger cast a dark shadow on the lives of the rural poor.

Is India a rich country? Yes. Is India a poor country? Yes. Are primary education standards in rural India abysmal? Yes. Does India have some of the finest universities and scientific research institutions in the world? Yes. Is a large percentage of the Indian population illiterate? Yes. Does India have the largest English speaking population in the world? Yes. Is India’s government venal, corrupt and inefficient? Yes. Does India have some of the best-run private sector companies in the world? Yes. Does caste and religious discrimination still exist? Yes. Are some of India’s most distinguished people (including the country’s Chief Justice as well as former President) from these communities? Yes. Does religious bigotry exist in India? Yes. Are all religions equal under the law in India? Yes. Is India one of the most densely populated countries in the world? Yes. Are parts of India among the most sparsely populated places on the planet? Yes. Is India a hot country? Yes. Is India a cold country? Yes.

You see how difficult it is to categorize the place. All this diversity causes huge problems that would daunt many nations. Yet somehow India endures. I would like to say that it thrives, but that would be too strong a word to use. It is my fervent hope that India can and does start thriving soon. In school, we were taught that India meant “unity in diversity”. That cherished idea is still alive and well, despite many organized attempts to kill it. India can and should thrive, because no other country in the world is as diverse, as unique and as flawed. But this diversity also means unlimited potential; a latent ability to show the rest of the world how so many different cultures, races, ethnicities and religions can co-exist and prosper. It is an honor for me to call myself Indian. To paraphrase Nobel Prize winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, may India thrive and “into that heaven of freedom, My Father, may my country awake”.