Burden of History

"Migrants make Germany dumb". German central banker Thilo Sarrazin has been in the news for some time now for the inflammable comment he made about the migrants (read Muslim migrants) in Germany. He has given voice to the thought and feeling shared by a large number of German natives though not many have the courage to admit their own misgivings towards the immigrants in Germany.

In the past one year that I have lived in Germany, I have found the Caucasian Germans to be a very warm, welcoming and helpful populace. I have had the opportunity to interact with a fair share of them, including my home owner. She has seen 67 German winters and drives down every month in her 25 year old Mercedes from the beautiful village of Saulheim on the outskirts of Mainz for a spot of shopping and to hand over our rent receipt. Like most Germans she is pleased to see my progress in learning the German language. Germans are fiercely protective of their language and culture and expect all foreigners to at least make an attempt to learn the same if they are living in Germany. Hence she is always keen to converse in German with me and assess my grasp on her mother tongue. After giving me her approval, she often laments about the Turks and other Muslim immigrants who in her opinion have plagued her country. Now, I have always found her to be grounded and humane. Yet her rants against the immigrants is just a reflection of the disgruntlement the older generation of Germans have for the Muslim immigrants.

However, owing to their forefathers unimaginable acts of horror against the Jews and other minorities in the past, today they have little courage to speak up against the changing demographics of the German society. The current generation is trying hard to compensate for the injustice the Third Reich meted out to the minorities by taking a very lenient stand towards immigrants. Today, when one looks around one might see more immigrants than the indigenous population. The high birth rate amongst the immigrants coupled with the low number of births in the local German household translates to an ever increasing strain on the German social system. Most immigrants live off the state and contribute very little to the host country. Germany pays social benefits including free health care to immigrants. The state also pays them a generous amount of money per child for their food, clothing and shelter. A immigrant household of two parents and five kids paw off enough money off the state to not only be able to lead a luxurious lifestyle but send some dole back to their relatives in their native country.

After the WW II, Germany as a country has upheld the humane values of it's continent. Europe has always given shelter to the down-trodden and the persecuted. But perhaps the time has come for Germany to forgive itself and take measures to protect and maintain it's identity. While immigrants should always be welcomed, what will prove beneficial will be a point based system for immigrants based on education, background and lifestyle. As a country, it will have to balance the number of skilled and unskilled labour it brings onto it's shores to maintain it's superiority in the field of engineering, scientific research and social development.

Sehr geehrter Deutschland - Viel Glück ( Dear Germany - Good Luck)

Freunde ohne Grenzen...Friends without borders

It was my second day at the local language school here in Germany. I was eagerly looking forward to mastering the basics of the German language. The classroom was large and bright, with huge French windows ushering in the warm rays of the sun on a chilly, winter morning. The students were seated at the U-shaped setting of the tables and chairs - no front benchers and back benchers, no slackers or pranksters. Everybody was in the plain sight of our Lehrerin (teacher). The class strength was 19 till yesterday. Our classroom resembled a mini UN assembly meeting. After our formal self introduction session yesterday, I had determined that between the 19 of us, we represented 17 different nationalities. We had Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, Kazakhstan, USA, Morocco, Russia, Macedonia, Lithuania, Belize, Iraq, Brazil, UK, Spain, Turkey, Portugal and of course India. There were three students from Iraq and thus we have accounted for the nationalities of the 19 students. But today we had a new student. She knocked on the door and walked in, greeting the class at large in a timid voice. She seemed to be in her late thirties and sat at the opposite end from where I was seated. My Iraqi neighbour on the right leaned in and asked if I was familiar with the garb our new classmate had donned. I told her I was not. The seat to my left was empty. Soon our Lehrerin waltzed in and took the roll call. When she noticed the new student she asked us to introduce ourselves to her in German. When we were done, she introduced herself, “Hallo, Ich heisse Farhat und ich komme aus Pakistan”. For a second I lost my balance, after all I had never met a Pakistani ever before. 15 years ago my sister had a pen pal from Pakistan and that was as close as I had ever got to a citizen from Pakistan.

Given the long standing feud over border, river water, Kashmir and of course the partition, Kargil war, nuclear tests etc, one never knows what sentiments to hold for our neighbours. I, for one, had been unable to take a stand until that eventful day. I am quite a liberal in many ways. I don’t care for race, religion, age, sexual orientation, political leanings or any other forms of personal beliefs. But due to the ever-super-charged atmosphere between India and Pakistan, one never knows how to break the ice or where the boundary is. So my surprise is justified when Farhat walked over to my end of the table and seated herself to my left. I managed a charming smile and she immediately broke into a full fledged dialogue, “Oh, so you are from India! Very nice to meet you. Where are you staying, why are you here, how long will you be staying, do you like it here, do you speak Urdu, where does your husband work, do you have children”, the questioning went on. I was delighted to answer her questions because I had realised I had a friend in the making. She had just shown me how easily border disputes could be swept into oblivion.

Just a few weeks later, she invited my husband and me to her beautiful home. She is a marvellous cook. The biryani was delicious and the kebabs were scrumptious. Her husband is a warm person who fondly recalls how well he was treated by his Indian host when he had visited Delhi in 1996. Her children are delightful and have been brought up with good values and morals. When my relatives visited us here in Germany, she invited them also to her house and treated us to the best Rasmalai we had ever had. Since then, we have gone back and forth many times between her home and mine. She has taken us out for weekend trips and barbeque sessions. We have had them over for Rajma-chawal and cutlets. Some friendships are destined to live forever. It has been a year since Farhat reminded me that international boundary lines apart, at the end of the day we are all same-same.

Headaches and terrible movies

Each one of us has seen a bad movie at some point of time. What characterises a bad movie? Is it poor screenplay, limp direction, insipid acting skills, uninspiring storyline or a combination of two or more of the above? It is difficult to place a finger on the worst aspect of a movie that ticks you off. Nevertheless, one feels nauseated in the gut when one is forced to pay good money at a fancy multiplex for three hours of self inflicted torture. I was lucky in this regard since I at least did not waste any money on this monster of all bad movies – ‘I Hate Love Storys’. I managed to watch it on the Internet (Long live, Thee Internet). The server hosting the movie had broken it down into six parts and over a span of six gruelling days, I managed to watch the whole movie. For sake of self preservation, I dared not see more than 1/6th of the movie every 24 hour. Each day, I would click on a link for one part and pray for that segment of the movie to have a tiny measure of sense or sensibility. No such luck. Right from the very first 1/6 part till the last 6/6 part, the movie got progressively worse. What was Karan Johar thinking? Why did he put his money in the most unbearable movie ever made?

In my opinion, I Hate Love Storys(IHLS) should be the new yardstick against which all bad movies are measured. Initially I thought, probably movies could be given a rating of 1 to 10 IHLS depending on how tortured the viewer was feeling by the end of the movie. But logic would then state that a 3 IHLS movie is thrice as bad as the original IHLS. This is an impossible scenario since IHLS is the worst ever. So I decided to go with the calculation that 1 IHLS (100%) being the highest rating, how bad a movie is can be rated as 0.5 IHLS(half as bad or 50%), 0.2 IHLS (one fifth as bad or 20%) etc, etc. For those of you who did not pay attention in school to fractions and percentages, this might be a slightly challenging scale to comprehend. However, please rest assured it is comprehensive and accurate. Of course to truly understand the implication of each rating, one will have to watch 'I Hate Love Storys' so that one has a mental image to calibrate the other movies against. My suggestion, catch the movie online. It is not worth even a penny. (I apologise to the Copyrights people and of course to the recording industry, to the producer etc for encouraging the ever booming Internet piracy).

What about the incorrect plural of story? I don’t believe they were exercising their poetic license when they decided to use ‘storys’. In a world where SMS lingo is the norm and vowels are being dropped like hot potatoes, one does not need to confuse a child or even an educated adult by using bad grammar in movie titles. My bet, more than 50% of the kids in schools will at least once use ‘storys’ as a plural in an English test and lose marks for it just because he/she thought KJo always spells correctly. But that is for another day.

Deutschland vs Germany

Indian: A word used to refer to a person whose ‘usual country of residence’ is India or in other words one who is a legal citizen of India (let’s forget the American Indians for now. Even if one wishes not to forget that, one can always remember that the reason why American natives were called Indians was because Columbus thought he had reached India).

Indian: A synonym for immigrant? Maybe not, considering that the top five countries of origin for immigrants are in the African continent. But then, it would be more appropriate to call asylum seekers from Africa as refugees since they are fleeing from drought, hunger, poverty and persecution. Not so for Indians. For the educated, skilled and employed, India is a beautiful and quite a comfortable country to live in. Also, apparently amongst all the countries in the world, Indians have the highest Happiness Quotient (HQ). Yet hoards of Indians leave the shores of India for more exciting, foreign lands. These lands have typically been USA, UK, Canada or Australia.

Though Europe is an equally enticing and challenging continent, very few immigrants from India chose Europe as their future home. Germany in particular is the most advanced and the richest European country. It has the best social benefit programme for its citizens and immigrants. Right from the first day of arrival, a refugee is provided food, shelter and health insurance. Agreed, Indians do not migrate as refugees rather as skilled or semi-skilled assets. So why do Indians avoid this incredibly attractive country? The answer lies in the immigration requirements of Germany. One primary requirement is an adequate command of the German language. As the inimmitable legend, Amitabh Bachhan once said, I(ndians) can talk English, I(ndians) can walk English, I(ndians) can laugh English, I(ndians) can run English. But learn another foreign language? Na re baba na!

Between the 22 officially scheduled languages and the dozen unofficial ones, Indians already know at least three languages and bits & pieces of many more. German is not an easy language to learn either. Everything has a gender. So every living or non-living entity has either a male, female or neutral gender assigned to it (him/her). If one was to replace the noun with a pronoun in the sentence, “Please pass the bag around”, it would become “Please pass her around”, since bag is a feminine entity. Similarly, “The machine is broken. Get her fixed” or “I have hidden the house key near the front door, you will find him under the doormat”. As hilarious as it may sound, learning German is not a laughing matter. So why would the Indians, educated in English bother to cram a foreign a language into their already over-taxed brains? There are far simpler options available wherein their only concerns will be unpacking and setting up base rather than spending bewildering nights delving into the depths of accusative, dative, nominative and genitive cases of German grammar.

However, Germany with the largest economy in Europe has the greatest shortage of IT staff. The German Information Technology Association estimates that twenty-five percent of IT vacancies remain unfilled. While low skilled workers will find it difficult to gain permission to work in Germany, highly skilled workers find it easier to gain permanent residency since the government is making an attempt to lure highly skilled workers into Germany. The professions most in need are natural scientists (biologists, chemists, physicists), engineers, professors and scientific personnel in high technology areas. But with German being the official working language, may God Bless those who decide to move to this green pasture for their German green card.