2 deaths and a new life

We found out today that two of our friends with HIV have died.

One man - who we will call Nathulal - had moved back to his village with his family as he felt he was not getting better here in Thane. His HIV positive wife remains in the village. We had tried to persuade Nathulal to stay on here but he was fixed on leaving. It was a miracle that he did not die in the train.

Another man - lets call him Tappan - died in a little hut. A long series of alcoholic relapses had interspersed his TB treatments. His wife had long since left - unable to bear the continual abuse she got from him. The day before he died one of our staff members - Rahul - had met him and again shared with him about Jesus. Which side of eternity Tappan is on is known only to our Lord.

We also found out that one of the many small miracles had taken place.

Bunty, the son of Mr and Mrs Washim (all names changed of course) was born 2 years ago to a broken family. Mr Washim was in the hospital with HIV. Mrs. Washim had just found out their infant daughter was HIV positive. There was so much despair.

But there was also prayer.

We prayed. The church prayed. Mr and Mrs Washim prayed. She took Zidovudine in her last month of pregnancy - and gave the drug to her infant child for his first month.

Bunty has been growing more and more beautiful. He weighs almost the same as his older by 3 year sister - who has HIV.

We found out today - that Bunty does not have HIV.

What an answer to prayer. It is like he has been given a new life!

We were dreading having to do the HIV test on Bunty - esp. as there was a small chance he would be postive despite the medication. We are so thrilled and really thank the Lord.

And so the 31st of January 2008 comes to an end. A month has already slipped by. People have slipped into eternity. The world continues to turn.

And so we are borne into the future. A chosen people, a holy nation, a royal priesthood - once we were not a people, now we are the people of God - being called out of darkness to show forth His glorious light

Gandhi's ashes

One of the better commentators we have is Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Today is the 60th anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's assassination. Here is how Mehta closes off his op-ed piece in the Indian Express:

But on the sixtieth anniversary of his assassination, it is difficult to shake off the feeling that he is revered more because of his absence than his presence. As with Munnabhai, his ghost occasionally haunts us, but the important thing is that it is only a ghost. His assassination allowed us to cope with him.

How jarringly true. The picture at the right is made up entirely of the word 'Ram' - the name Gandhi invoked even as he was dying. The picture comes from the US where a Californian Hinduistic commune has posted it as part of their inner healing. Despite the many 'Gandhis' that we see bandied about today - his essentially Hindu religiosity just cannot be extracted from him.

What struck me in Bhanu' s op-ed was realising actually how much Gandhi's death saved Gandhi from the ignomy of marginalisation (did anyone say 'Tony Blair'?). And how much our political climate today resembles the powerful Hindutva currents of the early 40s - which were subsumed by the embarrassed silence for a few decades as the 'Gandhi-killers' found the wind robbed from their sails.

On another tangent, here is what our dear friend Salman Rushdie said a few years ago in TIME:

Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a freeloading concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth.

In the end most of us really don't know what to do with Gandhiji - and so he gets invoked in every which way. In today's rememberences of him we have the irony of a solidier guarding his statue. And far more interest and column-space is given in the press to our robust cricketer Harbhajan Singh's slanging match with his Australian bete noire Andrew Symonds than in the shots that cut short the frail but intensely complex man that Gandhi was on a cold last day of January in 1948.

The best place for a troublesome person is to deify him. Our nation cares nothing about what Gandhi stood for. It should be pointed out that the complex tapestry of Gandhi's life doesn't provides much of a realistic - or even desirable way of life (there is only one person in history who can lay claim to have lived an exemplary life). But the irony is that our nation has disemboweled Gandhi and stuck him up like a trophy - with his saintly visage gracing many an official item - while we bask in the aura of Gandhism - without having to even act like anyone of us follows a whit of what he stood for.

The Performer

Sheba and I had a treat last night.

A complete one-girl performance of the class Christmas play - performed by Asha Esther Alice Eicher. All parts. Including stage directions. And dances.

Today is the programme - her standard 1 is show-casing different festivals - and her section has been chosen to do a Christmas festival programme - possibly because her teacher is a Christian.

Christmas on the 31st of Jan. In a Jain school. Wonders never cease.

What we do know is that we have a little live wire in Asha who just loves to perform.

The Team

There was a time in my early teens when I used to love reading about the Second World War - especially about the daring deeds of spies and the resistance in Nazi-occupied France. An amazing book called A Man Called Intrepid tells of how the Allies worked to counter the Nazi spread through a variety of espionage and counter-intelligence methods including code-breaking and active planting of agents. The book also chronicles a generation of young people who were prepared to penetrate France by the Allied intelligence agencies - and how many of them died shortly after parachuting into enemy territory.

We are all looking for superheroes aren't we? Perfect people who can do anything. Looking back at those heroic days in the WWII, I now don't see so much the great break-throughs that thrilled me at the time - I am more taken by the many heroic failures - and the willingness people had to lay down their lives for the cause.

Take a look at the folks in the picture above. They are most of the JSK team (Dr. Adam was not in that morning) and represent our very modest set of folks who are shaking the world. For the most part we are all very ordinary, normal, mundane.

And yet.

If we need superheroes to run things - well - we won't get them. The brilliant, the erudite, the charismatic, the all-rounders - they all stand out precisely because they are so rare. What hope is there for change if we have to wait for the exceptional to show up to bring it about?

God's plan has from the beginning been to use the weak, the limited, the sin-stained-by-redeemed. We fit that mould very well. We are focussed (most of the time) on the task at hand (thank God), but my do we ever squabble and pout over the silliest of reasons...

And all through this, amazingly, God is somehow able to use us to make an impact the sufferings that people with HIV/AIDS are going through.

This is the hope that we also hold out to others. Its not that we are some special people who are doing this work. Hardly. Its more that we are flawed people who are grinding through - and if God can use us and our motley crew - well then He can jolly well use anyone. Any church. Any set of His people who listen to Him and seek to please His heart (even if not successful so many atime).

Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. I Cor. 1:26-30

An unsettled neighbourhood

Our neighbours are sadly restive. As we look across South Asia - we see almost total chaos in Afghanistan and Pakistan (the image above is of Pakistani policewomen taking a break from duty) with an on-going Talibanised civil war going on there. To the South we see Sri Lanka throwing away any pretence of peace as the goverment feel they have the Tamil Tigers on the run. To the East the quiet military take-over of Bangladesh. To the North we have the Maoist republic of Nepal and the quiet conflict of Tibet / China taking place.

Where does this leave the great expanse of India? Naipaul says we have a million mutinies now. To an extent that rings true. The on-going insurgencies in Kashmir and the North East fit the bill. On republic day an army officer was given a gallantry medal - the next day - while his family was still celebrating in their home village - came the news that he had been killed in a fire-fight with the ULFA in Assam. The low-level warfare that dots most of the Maoist infiltrated areas of central India bear this out. The lumpen-criminalisation of vast swathes of the Gangetic plains. The powerlessness of the government to bring people to task for the numerous gruesome 'riots' between 'different communities' (read: Hindu and Muslims). All point to a deep and lasting decay in the fabric of our land.

And yet, living in urban Thane, all of this can seem strangely far away. The daily comforts of life, the media barrage of filmi-flingers and flannelled-fools, the pleasures of a semi-broad-band internet connection - suddenly the other India and our restive neighbours seem to belong to a distant dreamland.

How do we make sense of the big picture while remaining true to the here and now? How do we be world-citizens while also nurturing our local heritatge and involvement?

Jesus had some interesting contrasts. He attended marriages and funerals (though the recorded ones seemed to end in un-funerals) - he ate at special meals and wandered dusty roads - and yet while his interactions were often intimate and restricted to a small number of key followers - his words reached out farther. He headed to Jerusalem and cried over it and its fate. He spoke to his disciples in the present, but always had an eye on the future.

Our hope and prayer is that Asha and Enoch will be able to see our restive neighbours and our often fevered land be changed into the peace and tranquility we are all praying for. May they learn how to be both passionatedly involved in the local and here-and-now, while at the same time thinking and praying big. And may they learn this from their own transformed parents!

Formation

We had the distinct privilege of hosting another of God's many living legends - Dr. M.C. Mathew.
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The night he spent with us was suffused with a grace and calm that seeps out of the good doctor.
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The next day at the EMFI Conference he spoke in his wonderfully measured and calming way - about life and its beauty.
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The word that struck me was formation.
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Before you were born I knew you - I formed you in your mother's womb.
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God speaks of forming us - mirroring the initial work of God's hands in forming man out of dust - and breathing his spirit into them. Humanity became living beings - as we do in the secret places.
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Formation also speaks of process - of development. We change in that mysterious apparently self-promoted manner - which observers have the arrogance of calling 'undirected'. How quickly we assume we know everything based on the ability to detect certain patterns. Just because I can describe 1 zygote become 2 cells, and then 4 etc. hardly qualifies me from feeling that I know it all.
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Formation speaks of time and change - and growing into structures of meaning. How beautiful to think of our very being being formed. The image of the rough but purposive hands of the potter come to mind - shaping the spinning lump of clay into the swirling circle of a vessel-to-be. We think of the sculptor chipping away at the block to unlock the beauty she sees inside the rock.
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Formation hints at the process of change that we go as we begin to understand God. Our spiritual formation sees a quickening by the Spirit as we start to taste truth and allow our lives to be shaped by Him.
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Formation speaks of a Former.
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Thank you Dr. Mathew for giving us a glimpse of the Lord.

Bring in the clown

I can't remember exactly the last time I went to a circus.

On Saturday we passed the big tent of the Kohinoor circus while on our way the to EMFI Christian Doctors conference -and I realised it would have been near the end of my first decade - and now here I am almost at finishing my fourth!

The big animal acts have been stopped in India. No more roaring (and usually fairly mangey) lions and tigers. No more gigantic elephants. In their place we have horses and dogs. And Russians. The last 2 decades have seen various circusses importing Russians to add special appeal - usually trapeze or ice-skaters - both allow for spectacle and skimpy costumes..

At the Eicher's home this morning, however, it was circus time again. Enoch was to go to his class as a clown. Later in the morning Sheba and Asha were able to visit the 'Jumbo Circus' that the teachers had organised in Enoch's class. A splendid time was had by all. Sheba along with the other parents were asked to do activities ranging from artistic (making a pin-point picture) to the aesthetic (twirling a hula hoop). She was given a star on her hand by Enoch's teacher - we won't reveal which activity deserved the prize!

There is of course the special poignancy of a clown. As I put on the war paint on Enoch this morning (enjoying myself thoroughly) I had to wonder about those who do this for a living. The many dwarf-people who find the circus as one of the only places where they are accepted and able to earn - and yet where they are the butt of people's laughter all day long.

"I am Peppy the Clown, I never see anyone frown" said Enoch today. How true is that in reality? The real ones will see at least one person frown - their reflection in the mirror at the beginning and end of their day.