tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-177254192024-03-19T17:37:02.045+05:30Some GlimpsesUshahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-80389573760942408032023-08-28T00:24:00.003+05:302023-08-28T00:24:56.047+05:30Reflections on Rage and Shame<p>These are some preliminary thoughts emerging from two
incidents that had me seething with anger this time last week.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">They are on the deep connection between shaming, rage and gender violence.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It started with an annoying phone call— I was all set to
meet a friend and do some weekend chores we had each lined up for ourselves during the week.
My phone rang as I was about to lock the front door. An unknown number. My
“Hullo?” was returned with a “Heyylo” by a middle-aged sounding male voice. I
responded with “Who’s this?” and hearing his next sentence realized that it was
one of those Mujhse dosti karoge calls. As a woman in India, one just gets used
to calls from absolute strangers at any time of the day or night asking if
we want to befriend them. I immediately cut the call and blocked the number.
Locked the door and set out to have a good day with my friend.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Mostly adult women in India are way past getting angry or
exasperated at such phone calls.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We know that many men think that a woman seen to be
navigating public spaces alone is construed as someone who might need a male
friend. I know that sounds like we live in the early 19<sup>th</sup> century.
It does to my Gen Z students in my 19<sup>th</sup> century literature classes.
Sometimes the class acknowledges the disturbing similarity in experiences between women who
moved around in the world alone in 19<sup>th</sup> century Anglo-American
literary depictions and our experiences as women in the age range of 18 to 68. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The number 68 wasn’t a random choice. The first time my
mother remarked that she felt awkward outside the house was in the upper-middle class residential
area I lived in a few years ago. She is an absolutely unselfconscious
traditionally-attired modern Indian woman. On that day, she had walked about
250 metres alone to a nearby store or temple or to do some normal chore and
thought that many men had turned and looked at her. She wondered what would
explain men driving bikes and cars turning to look at an elderly woman walking
confidently towards some place during the forenoon hours of a week day? Shouldn’t
it be normal for a woman to walk alone somewhere during the day?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Well! It still isn’t normal for a woman, of any age, to walk
alone on the road without facing stares anywhere in our country, including
residential areas within the capital city.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We learn to ignore all those stares.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We also learn to overlook all sorts of unwanted attention.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And most importantly, we learn to not get provoked by men
who feel entitled to annoy us with shameless stares and pushy phone calls.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We complain among ourselves and either make bitter jokes
about those men or share some rage at our experiences and in extremely rare moments plan to take
some solid action.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We sometimes complain to men when some tacitly agreed
upon boundaries are breached. The last frontier of unwanted attention in Indian
culture is touch. If we experience unwanted touch in a public place we feel sexually
harassed. We might share that with the men in our lives. The
reactions range from getting angry on our behalf to advise on the ways of navigating the world of men and in rare instances of acknowledgement of grave harassment
to taking actions involving the laws of the land. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I have had any number of discussions – formal and informal
ones – on sexual harassment in public places with family, friends, peers and
students. I am a woman who has mostly lived alone as an adult in India. I teach
courses on gender in literature. I research literary depictions of gender. I
was part of committees for redressal of complaints, including those of a sexual
nature, at my workplace.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It shouldn’t be a surprise therefore that I know my rights. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Moreover, it should not surprise anyone that I have thought
of these matters for many years now.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Therefore, incidents like that phone call do not make me
angry. Nowadays, I do not even register feeling upset.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This time around that nanosecond worth of upsetting emotion
that had reached the unconscious at supersonic speed resurfaced due to another
violent incident I experienced within minutes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I had reached a traffic signal less than 50 metres from my
apartment gate and was trying to turn right, duly signalling that my car is
taking a right turn. At the very last second, I noticed a car violating the
signal from the opposite direction. To avoid a collusion, I had to turn
slightly right. There was a biker right next to my car and he too was
ostensibly trying to turn right. Obviously, he had to apply brakes suddenly to
avoid a potential crash. That crash did not happen but the man got raging angry
at the risk, he, his wife and his infant child, had narrowly avoided. He hit
the passenger-side window of my car with an open palm. I rolled the window a
few inches down and said, “Sorry, bhaiyya”. That riled him further. I don’t quite
know why. He started yelling—according to him, I had put the life of his child
at risk. In fact, I had done nothing. Our vehicles hadn’t even touched. I kept
starting at him, silently wondering what was making him reach a point where he
was likely to burst a blood vessel. Hadn’t I just said sorry for an almost
accident that had thankfully NOT occurred? Until I heard him say two things:
“Gaadi mein baithi hain” and then the abusive refrain that was clearly making
him angrier and happier: “besharam aurat”. Now I understood why I was
making him angry—that I was a woman sitting alone in a car, driving somewhere
on a Sunday morning. That was such an affront to this man’s ego that he declared me a shameless woman. Whereas he was unmindful of the risk to his family at his attempt at a precarious balance of speed and skill on a motorcycle with infant-child and
wife as pillion riders on a crowded road.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And to top it off, unlike his cowering sari-clad wife, with the veil
on her head and infant in her arms, I was in the ‘Western’ outfit of trouser
and top and was calmly sitting at the steering wheel of a car. Clearly, being the opposite of his
traditional wife who was dutifully standing next to him as he called a strange
woman shameless in the middle of a traffic junction, I was <i>the</i> image of
female insolence to that man.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This incident took place less than 60 seconds, for that
traffic stop turns red for 60 seconds.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Neither did he feel that he should be ashamed of his
behaviour nor was he made to feel that by the people around who wanted the
traffic jam cleared. Two well-groomed young men trotted up to this scene as
soon as the signal turned green and said: “We are saying sorry on his
behalf, please move on. Which way do you want to go?” At which I exclaimed:
“Left! My car’s indicating the signal even now. I had to veer right because of
that other car, which has zipped past”. They said, “Never mind, Madam. Please
move on”. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I did but the motorcyclist chose to deliberately hit the
rear end of my car with his bike. I stopped again at the traffic junction and
yelled out: “This is not done!” The young men ran up to my car and gestured
that I move ahead while muttering, “Please, please.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The apologies and requests of the young men were made to
handle a traffic logjam. I know that they didn’t need to make them. And I felt
thankful that such well-brought up young men do exist.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I drove ahead and met my friend within the next few seconds.
I was angry and upset. And shared my feelings with her. A brief discussion
ensued as I drove ahead. A little later, she called her husband to share her
agitation over the experience I had. Perhaps, she must have thought that speaking with
her husband – also one of my oldest friends – would help me seem less upset. While
wondering how it would help me, I narrated again the two incidents that had derailed me a bit that morning. He heard me
calmly and then advised me that I should not let it spoil the rest of my day. He
also added that it is true that the angry motorcyclist would not have behaved the way he
did if I were a man.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ah well! Thankfully, I have sensitive friends who get angry
on my behalf and acknowledge the unique vulnerability that women in India still
face in public places.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That is probably one of the reasons I can be that ‘shameless
woman’ who ‘drives alone in a car’ and manages to move on after intermittent
episodes of Delhi’s notorious road rage incidents.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Nevertheless, I am still appalled that a man can get away
with yelling abusive, loaded, gender-specific labels at a strange woman at a
crowded traffic stop.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I don’t get why a woman who can calmly stare back at a
violent outburst is a shameless woman.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Does not getting provoked into anger by abusive accusations
or not becoming tearful in the face of verbal violence make me eligible for
that label of shamelessness? Is my being able to afford to be a woman who can
drive around alone make me a shameless woman? Or just being a woman seen alone
in public make me eligible to be called a shameless woman?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I am not going to feel apologetic for navigating my way
through a very violent world populated by many troubled and frustrated people. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I am not going to bow my head down for a perceived harm or
hurt.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I do not need to feel shame for a stranger’s rage at me. And
cannot, or even will not, get angry or violent as a counter reaction to a
stranger’s anger.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I refuse to feel ashamed that I am who I am.</p>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-24187643013252874782023-08-20T22:14:00.000+05:302023-08-20T22:14:18.794+05:30Three Movies in Thirty-Six Hours<p><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I am coming back to this
space after an entire year to talk about a highly unusual experience I had recently.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">About a fortnight ago, I saw
three films and gave a talk about another two within one weekend.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Three movies in three days might
never get repeated but what an experience that was! Especially due to the
movies and the diversity they represented.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">The first was a Hindi movie about
a young woman who refuses to be objectified to a role. I saw this on Friday
afternoon, partly in preparation for the academic talk I was to give on
“Femininity and Play in Two Contemporary Bollywood Movies” in a webinar for
students from two colleges that were bridging the North-South divide in India through
this collaborative effort. One college is in Hyderabad and the other in Patna! <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">I overcame my resistance to the
movie and saw it because I wanted to check for myself the depiction of Indian
femininity that led to the mixed reports it got in 2020, when the movie was
released.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">The movie was <i>Thappad</i> and my long resistance to the movie was on account of the title.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">A thappad, a slap, is more often
that not construed as an act of violence perpetrated on one person by another
and holds within it a sense of inequality in the relationship. Having heard
that the female protagonist of the movie is a homemaker, I made the error of
thinking that it was a movie about domestic violence and had avoided watching a
movie on such a grave topic when we were grappling with the
worries emerging from a global pandemic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Although the movie did not
contribute much to my talk on femininity and play, it made me realise that
finally some voices in the large realm of Hindi cinema are representing women
as people who see themselves as people—not as mothers, mother-in-laws, wives,
sisters, girlfriends, lovers. And all of this through a series of potent shots
and actions that would be immediately understood by any regular viewer of Hindi
cinema. This was more than worthy of the three hours I spent on it on a
week-day afternoon. And will probably lead me to a more academic examination of
the crux of the movie very soon. Fingers crossed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">I can safely say that the
Saturday night movie is one that I will not engage with academically. Though it
was totally worthy of the really expensive IMAX ticket and I happily thank my
friend for picking the perfect seats for that movie—absolutely the centre of
the hall—this one got stored in my head as a one-liner my higher secondary
school Physics teacher used to repeat fairly often, not just during the Solid
State Physics module of the syllabus. This excellent teacher would remind us
that "when Physics ends Metaphysics begins", and managed to get young
adults like me to think in terms of the enigma and ethics of science. Thanks to
my teacher, I realized that the makers of the film expected the viewers to have
about as much knowledge of quantam theory as we would need that of kinematics
to enjoy a James Bond movie. Nolan did with more Hollywood elan what the makers
of <i>Pathan</i> did in true Bollywood fashion six months ago—make a stylish movie
bordering on the absurd about an unlikely national hero who suffers pangs of
conscience for ‘saving’ their nation through warfare.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Sunday’s movie stands on even more
ethically shaky terrain, for it talks of feminism through a very
glamourous object of a world steeped in consumerism. But it was a very
intelligently made movie that has also become a global hit – Greta Grewig’s <i>Barbie</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">I <i>had to</i> see <i>Barbie</i>
for many reasons. The most important one was that I research childhood and have
recently published a monograph on the child-toy link in literature and in the cultures
of childhood. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">As a researcher of childhood, I
have observed that children really do not need any store-bought toy to play
happily. However, I was also curious about this record-making movie of the most
famous doll in the modern history of toys for girls.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">It's equally true that as an 80s
child in India I had never played with a Barbie.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">The first time I saw a Barbie was
when I was in middle school.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">A friend smuggled in her younger
sister's Barbie – a gift from a Dubai-based relative – into our Jesuit convent
school. She passed a chit among the girls in class that she has something
exciting to show us during the short interval. A bunch of us crowded around her
and she brought out a doll dressed in a parrot green sari with a zari border
with tiny chilli red ambis (paisley) motifs on the border. The doll was inside
the box that it had come in and she did not dare to take it out of the box. All
of us – preteen schoolgirls in small town India – admired the absolute beauty
of that very tall doll and thought it was extremely glamourous. But it was
definitely not a doll! What can anyone do with it but keep it on display? Would
our friend's little sister be allowed to play with it? Or would it go on the
top shelf of the mantel piece of their home? That was the discussion for the
day during the lunch interval.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">This was the late-1980s. We
hadn't heard of terms like liberalisation and globalisation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">The Barbie did not mean anything
to me as a child.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">It was a toy that didn’t even
have the shape of a child and therefore seemed like a fairly useless doll for a
child to identify with to the researcher in me in the early 2000s
in India.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">However, I have been recommending
the movie to all my friends who have young daughters. We
are in a globalized, neo-liberal, consumer-centric world. It makes total sense
to use a toy they are familiar with to learn the basics of
self-actualisation. Depsite all my reservations about the doll and all that it
represents, I salute Greta Grewig and her team for appropriating the many
shades of pink in Barbieworld to let growing-up girls know that pink too can
be cool if one chooses it consciously with all the challenges it throws up at
people growing up in a post-feminist, post-LGBTQA+, globalised world. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Although I enjoyed <i>Oppenheimer</i>
and <i>Barbie</i> in two different ways, the movie that will stay with me for
the depth of message it conveyed for my fellow country<i>men</i>/ women/
non-binary adults and young adults is <i>Thappad</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">It told us that no one has a
right to the body and being of anyone in any sort of intimate or co-dependent
relationship. And that for love to sustain through the complexities of marriage
each partner needs to respect the others personhood. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">Thappad</span></i><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;"> is a movie I will recommend to everybody
I know.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-72160519592155017342022-08-06T19:57:00.000+05:302022-08-06T19:57:15.068+05:30Why I enjoyed Agassi’s Autobiography<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Agassi chose to call his autobiography <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Open</i>. When I had heard the title of the
book, the year it came out, I wondered whether he was talking about opening up
to his fans or he meant to talk about the open era of tennis. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Having spent five years of my early teens as a
keen viewer of cricket and tennis on TV, I had my favourite players in both
those games and Agassi is among the top of the list. Although, it took me the
next decade to spot a copy that I could borrow, even as I read it, I knew I
would be blogging about it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Agassi was a sensation in the tennis world
through my childhood and early youth. This was also the time I was absolutely
fascinated by Steffi Graf and to this day I strongly believe she was the best
tennis player from the 1980s to date. Friends would find it amusing that I
follow sports or have personal favourites among cricketers and tennis players,
for no one has ever seen me play any sport with any aptitude or ability.
However, the early years of live telecast of sports coincided with my
TV-viewing years as a child and pre-teen. Having been introduced to the joys of
watching sports on TV through the Benson and Hedges World Cricket Championship
of 1984/85 as a young child, one of the few things I have truly enjoyed watching
on TV is sports.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I must have watched more hours of sports on TV
in 1988 than I did ever before or after. One evening in 1988, a friend of my
parents, a university professor of Physics, noticed me keenly watching a tennis
match on an old Black and White TV set in our living room. The match was between
a young man with long light-coloured hair, wearing some dark cycling trunks
under a pair of very short denim tennis shorts and an older player who clearly seemed
more in control of the situation. I was silently rooting for the young man.
This friend wondered why I was watching the game with such fascination and
asked me what I knew about the game and why that particular match interested me.
I had no intelligent answers to give. He then asked which of the two players I
was backing. Upon being told that I was backing the younger player, my interest
was dismissed as a pre-teen’s passing fascination with a young and attractive
sportsman. I neither knew the game well nor could I actually pronounce the
names of the two players.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This was a match between Andre Agassi and
Miloslav Mecir and as a young child in a small town in India, I truly didn’t
know the correct pronunciation of either of those names.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">However, my best friend and I had, by then,
spent each morning of an entire school year watching half an hour of badminton
practice that my school’s sports teachers put the badminton champs of the
school through before the day’s schedule began. Additionally, I had rather
unsuccessfully tried to put into practice some of my observations from the
early morning sports ‘class’ during our evening playtime, on a strip of grass
in front of our building. I am reasonably sure that even now if someone gets me
to go onto a badminton court and ties a net in front of me, my serve would not
go above the net. I am probably confessing to being a spectacular failure at
learning to play a sport even after focused watching of training for many
hours. But that did work as a negative catalyst to my watching badminton on TV—the
rare exception was the spectacular one between Sindhu and Carolina Mari
recently.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Why then do I enjoy watching sports on TV?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It is not the love of sports or any interest in
watching any live event from the comforts of home or even a typical couch
potato’s escape into reveries of alternate realities through TV. I love
watching sports because it leads me into thinking about the amazing ability of
the human body and human mind to reach unimagined heights. Watching it shows
how will, grit, discipline and creativity can be put to good use to turn the
dream of achieving a goal into a reality.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">While that young man there in that tennis match
was being dismissed as an undisciplined teenager, on account of his hairstyle
and unusual tennis outfit, by two middle-aged successful men, I knew why I was
rooting for him. He was displaying grit and was clearly determined to do his
best to not let the Olympic champion give him a thorough routing. The match
went on and on for 5 sets and the younger guy was clearly making the older champion
sweat it out. Beneath that American teenager’s demeanour was a young person
playing to prove that he had it in him to be a champion, if not now, then soon.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Obviously I could not explain all of this to
the two men who were quizzing me. In 1988, neither did I have the cognitive
ability to process my thoughts this clearly nor the articulation to explain it
to the grown-ups who seemed intent on dismissing the young man. All I knew was
that I wasn’t watching the game because it was a young and attractive man
playing an older but also attractive man. I was watching it because I wanted
the young man to win. I wanted the grown-ups to understand that beneath the projection
of teenage rebellion there was someone who was trying to put his training and
knowledge to win a match in his own way. The late teen’s struggles spoke to the
atypical pre-teen I was. Here was someone who was not towing the line but was
successful enough to be right there with the biggies—playing in the
professional circuit. Over the course of the next 5 years of watching a few matches,
mostly the big matches during the US Open and French Open, I could sense that
he was hardly the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">enfant terrible</i> the
newspapers described him to be. Only upon reading Agassi’s autobiography, all
these decades later, I realized that the long hair and denim shorts were just
his ways of saying that he will be disciplined and determined on the tennis
court because that’s his day job but he will do it as Andre Agassi, not as a
replaceable ideal called the tennis champion of the year or the decade or the epoch.
He was an original.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">On that day in 1988, when I turned an Agassi
fan, I didn’t know that he would go on to win the Golden Slam and don’t yet have
the technical knowledge to say whether he was the best player of his times. As
a completely uninformed tennis spectator, all I can say is that I have admired
the unique way in which he held his own in each match I had watched, no matter whether
he finally won or lost that match.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">As it turned out, he managed to pull an Agassi
with his autobiography too. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Not only did he begin the book at the moment
where he ended his professional career but also completed a full circle of a
life spent as a professional tennis player by ending it with the same match.
This might seem like he talked only about tennis throughout his autobiography.
He did and he didn’t. Although the book didn’t make me more informed about the
technicalities of tennis, I got to see the human being who worked as a
professional tennis player, became the number one player in the world, created
a few stunning records in the game, grew into a responsible young man who remained
close to his natal family, found love and made a stable family of his own with
the best tennis player in the world, chose to remain a professional tennis
player as long as his body let him and finally found his vocation in running a
school that facilitates under-privileged children to aspire to a college
education.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Reading his autobiography was like watching him
play—being unique but with a single-minded focus on his goal to make the best
of everything that was coming his way. During his tennis matches he would use
his years of training and discipline to engage his opponents in long and
involved games whose outcome he definitely didn’t always have control over.
Similarly, in his book, he draws his reader into his life by opening his
thoughts and emotions and bravely putting them out there to get his reader to
realize that the man put his sweat and blood to become a contented person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Here is a unique tennis champion who seems
prouder of his educational institution that helps under-privileged children
complete school than of the world records he made in the sport he devoted his
childhood and youth to and reached the pinnacle in it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Doesn’t it make sense that someone who never
hit a tennis ball in her life but has watched at least two dozen tennis matches
would thoroughly enjoy Andre Agassi’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Open</i>
(2009) and would want to write about it?<o:p></o:p></span></p>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-86150791687321587892022-02-27T13:10:00.001+05:302022-02-27T13:10:12.867+05:30Remembering Professor Sudhakar Marathe<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">For the past couple of days I have heard and read many
wonderful memories people have shared about my teacher, Professor Sudhakar
Marathe. He passed away this Thursday evening and hundreds of people, whose
lives he has touched in deep ways, have been writing messages on various new
age portals to connect with each other and express their loss. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To me he was the most observant and altruistic teacher
I knew. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The first time I was helped by Professor Marathe was
when I was an anxious twenty-year-old scribbling away at a desk in a large hall
in a strange city, attempting to write an impressive essay during the entrance
exam for University of Hyderabad. Suddenly I saw one of the invigilators holding
out his wrist watch to me. I looked up from my paper and he indicated that I
should note the time. He repeated that action three times in the next hour and
a half. I felt immensely grateful that an invigilator during an entrance exam
noticed that I wasn’t wearing a wrist watch for an examination and wouldn’t be
able to keep track of time. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">That was the beginning of a long association through
which I gained much. Not only did I find the affectionate guidance of an
extremely generous teacher who selflessly gave his time and energy to his
students to help them become good readers and writers but also a person I knew
I could call and consult whenever I felt the need for wise counsel.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The picture below is of the books he had edited and/or
translated in the first decade of this century and given to me during my visits
to him after I moved on to a different city and a different educational institution.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjUEKuOorOl2xh1wv_8QBCQotzFFCqow8zJprGiAnDsYBxDreP9eTufChGUJE5iHnswAHLG1qQXL0FCtXRmvxjYnOlqYNj1sdUhIQ6c6AbOCq2Hy3Br0rAdGCjhJwfZc93Dt3GIAe9KcRTU_8Y-D0q-5rH5BZiGAS45lETeEjtvckNYd9L58w=s3949" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3949" data-original-width="2713" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjUEKuOorOl2xh1wv_8QBCQotzFFCqow8zJprGiAnDsYBxDreP9eTufChGUJE5iHnswAHLG1qQXL0FCtXRmvxjYnOlqYNj1sdUhIQ6c6AbOCq2Hy3Br0rAdGCjhJwfZc93Dt3GIAe9KcRTU_8Y-D0q-5rH5BZiGAS45lETeEjtvckNYd9L58w=w440-h640" width="440" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">He was also a great upcycler of every imaginable piece
of paper. That bookmark placed on the cover of his translation of R R Borade’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fall</i> was made by him using a part of a
used reference card and some sketch pens. He gave it to me some twenty years
ago when he I went to his office to discuss my latest draft of a chapter of my
M Phil dissertation and he got to know that it was my birthday that day.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Almost all his students who knocked on the door of his
office knew that he will find a way to help, either by hearing the person out
if he had the time or by setting up an appointment to meet later and give the
issue his full attention if it wasn’t urgent.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I have been dealing with his slightly nasal drawl,
“Come on in” going around in my head for the past few days, coupled with the
regret that I did not call him up for years. I have been in touch with him
through other new age ways of communication, including a newsletter he painstakingly
composed and sent every Sunday to some of his friends, urging them to look
around and learn from the natural world around us. I received the last one on
30<sup>th</sup> of January, which was a heartening account of a rescue of a
lake in Pune by a group of nature-lovers. I had read it late evening that
Sunday and had planned to write to him to thank him Monday afternoon after my
class because I felt an upsurge of positivity upon reading that extremely
optimistic account of the success of perseverance towards an altruistic cause. My
email remained unwritten, for I received news of his hospitalisation from Mrs.
Marathe— a very warm-hearted and generous lady who welcomed any student who
rang their doorbell most work day evenings for decades on end. I had truly believed
that he would solider on through this obstacle too and promised myself that I
will go to Pune to meet them during the next break I get from work. That was
not to be. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In all of this, I have surprised myself by reacting
like a child. I don’t care whether it was in a childish manner or a childlike
manner—after all it was Professor Marathe who also led me to the realization
that adults are being very judgmental when they use these terms pejoratively or
otherwise. He was my first guide into the world of research and into childhood
studies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I began my journey as a teacher under his firm
supervision and Mrs. Marathe’s gentle support and no one could have wished for a
better apprenticeship. If I manage to find it in myself to give half as much as
he gave to his students I would think I have been a good student to a great
teacher.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-58173740762818895662021-08-30T22:34:00.001+05:302021-08-30T22:34:34.105+05:30Flashback of a Janmashtami in Mathura<p> </p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN;">My usual Monday morning tizzy came to a brief halt
when I thought there was something out of sync. The girl at the door to pick up
the laundry was particularly well-dressed for a work day morning. Then the
house help remarked in passing that her teenage daughters are doing ‘vrat’
today. Suddenly it dawned upon me that it’s a holiday due to Janmashtami and
that I can actually recalibrate my pace of work—no classes or work meetings. Amidst
these thoughts, I suddenly felt that surge of joy one feels when one knows it’s
a holiday. That feeling reminded me of the days of early youth when one could genuinely
enjoy a sudden break to the week’s routine.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN;">Close to two decades ago, as a young adult in a
college hostel in Delhi, I sauntered down for lunch to the hostel mess one
Janmashtami day. Spotting two of my friends tucking in the Janmashtami feast, I
joined them and remarked on the special fare that day. I also added that I had
heard it was an established practice in student hostels in Delhi to serve a
feast on a day when most of the country is fasting to mark the birth of
Krishna. None of us minded that we were feasting when many were fasting. After
all we were young people living on mess fare. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN;">The conversation suddenly became interesting when my
friend remarked that it would be wonderful to be in Mathura on Janmashtami day.
Being young, energetic, curious and mildly adventurous I suggested that we
could attempt that. Within minutes we managed to convince each other that we
should actually set out to find out what it would be like in Mathura that day.
We bolted down the food on our plates and rushed to our rooms to check whether
we had sufficient money to travel out of Delhi. This was the pre-ATM era in
India. To our dismay, our combined resources was less than two hundred rupees
but that would not stop us. We started knocking on the doors of our friends to
borrow some money for our plan to work out. Most of them dismissed us as crazy
creatures who are asking them to finance the risky venture of dashing down to a
pilgrim town on the day when it’s likely to be hosting millions of people. Finally,
a sister soul decided to lend us around three hundred rupees but politely
refused our offer of turning it into a three women adventure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN;">And we set out for the New Delhi station, armed with
the knowledge that most south bound trains are likely to stop at Mathura. All
we needed to do was get tickets for one and we will be in Mathura by late
afternoon. That was not to be. We managed to get tickets for a train called Janta Express, which took close to six hours to finally release us around
dusk on the milling platform of Mathura station. Although it was chock-a-block with people looking for vehicles to go the main temples in Vrindaavan
and Mathura, probably we stuck out in the crowd—two young women in khadi
kurtas, cotton pants, and flat sandals with tiny knapsacks on our backs. If I
were a tour guide or a tout or a tempo driver who wanted to make some good
money without the hassle of haggling with the regulars to the temple town, I
would definitely have picked that pair of young women who seemed to be calmly checking out the scene. It was not at all astonishing
that a young autorickshaw driver made a beeline for us and told us that he
could take us for darshan to the Baanke Behari temple and deposit us at the
Krishna Janmabhoomi temple within two hours if we agreed to pay him Rs.200/- We definitely did not want to spend that princely sum on a ride into Vrindaavan from Mathura and got into a crowded open rickshaw that should seat seven people but already had nine people sitting on three seats. Along with the driver, we made a neat dozen dashing through the crowded streets.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN;">Not for a second did we
feel any apprehension or anxiety as women travellers. It wasn’t that those were safer times.
However, I feel we were sure about two things—we had no expensive goods on our
person or in our knapsacks and that no one would dare commit a crime in a pilgrim
place on the most important day for the worship of the reigning deity of the
place.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN;">We were hurled through the town to reach the Baanke Behari
temple in Vrindavaan while our driver-cum-tour operator told us the story of
Krishna’s miraculous birth. I silently wondered why he thought travellers to Mathura on Janmashtami day would not know that tale. But it’s always fun to
listen to a local burst with pride about their town and its history. I am yet
to figure out how our guide managed to lead us to the temple, through the
milling crowds and how we got out within half an hour of joining that ocean of human beings inside the huge hall of the temple. I have no memory of how we got back to Mathura and found ourselves outside the Krishna Janambhoomi temple. It's highly likely we rattled through the roads in another overcrowded autorickshaw.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN;">It was utterly impossible to do anything but follow
the crowds into the main hall and bow our heads in the general direction where
the idol was placed in the temple. I am not sure whether I managed to get a glimpse of the
idol but the devotion in the hall was palpable. After exiting the temple, we
followed the crowds to the Dwarkadhish temple, to watch the enactment of the
birth of Krishna being performed in the large inner courtyard of the temple.
The midnight hour when the baby Krishna was declared to be have been born was
the high point of the trip for me. Amidst the celebratory cries and appeals by
the management committee to not crowd the stage to pay respects to the new-born
infant god, I sat spellbound. I was trying to comprehend this experience of
being a witness to guileless bhakti—a moment when the performance is forgotten
by thousands of people and they unite in a mass suspension of disbelief.
While I was wrapping my head around this magical experience, my friend whispered
that we should be heading out towards the railway station before the thousands
of pilgrims around decide to head in that direction. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN;">Stepping out of that zone into the biggest annual fair
of the temple town reminded me that we hadn’t had a bite since we gobbled down
the Janmashtami feast in our hostel’s mess. We walked among the sparsely
populated shops, had thick creamy milk and the famous Mathura ka peda for
dinner and took a tonga through the dimly lit lanes to the railway station. We managed
to buy sleeping berths for a train to Delhi which was scheduled to arrive at
Mathura station around 3.30 AM. Being among the early ones reaching the station
that night, we managed to plonk ourselves on one of two unoccupied benches to wait for our train. While my friend nodded beside me, I held on to a book
and watched the station master working really hard to ensure that there were
no squatters on the platform that night. I quietly wondered why we were allowed undisturbed
access to that bench. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN;">A couple of years after that trip my friend got
married and left the country. The global uncertainty of 2020 brought her back
into my life. When I reminded her of that Janmashtami trip on Janmashtami day
of 2020, she remarked that the trip and those times now seem like they were
from a different janam. This morning I was reminded of her remark and wondered
whether it was possible to travel back in time by jotting down a memory of an
impulsive trip. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-3364051642306478502020-12-27T22:38:00.000+05:302020-12-27T22:38:52.273+05:30To leave or not to leave...<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I saw <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ijazzat</i> (1987) once again! I resisted it
for years, despite strong recommendations from many people, and finally saw it
for the first time around three decades after it was made. Then I saw it two
times in three years. It wasn’t fascination that led me to a second viewing. It
was befuddlement.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I must have
resisted the movie because of its name. A movie called ‘Permission’ wouldn’t
really be my choice for leisure activity. Otherwise, a movie with Naseeruddin
Shah and Rekha directed by Gulzar would have been an easy pick, especially
after discovering that some of my favourite songs are part of that movie.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">After
watching the movie twice, I can confidently declare that I intensely dislike
this movie.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I do acknowledge
that there are many reasons to like it. And here a few: excellent songs,
outstanding acting by almost all the actors, aesthetically appealing sets, some
lovely handloom saris worn with élan by the beautiful Rekha, a camera that
captured the jitteriness of the characters, such care for detail in the
screenplay and direction that there was a moment when I could smell the musty
odour of a moist towel of an eternal wanderer. Very visceral cinema. Wholesome
too, in its way. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Why, then,
do I dislike it?</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I believe
it’s because I feel betrayed. In its presentation of three complicated people,
it seems to promise that it will dwell into the existential issues of each of
them. The commitment to good cinema, seen in almost every shot, raises the
expectations of the viewer. However, as the movie progresses the viewer
understands that the narrative has only one protagonist – the man, for it’s his
existential anxiety that seems to resonate with the auteur.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This is
good cinema perpetuating the age-old neglect of women’s desires that Hindi cinema
has been propounding from the beginnings of time.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The first
time I saw it, I thought that Sudha touching Mahender’s feet as a leave-taking
gesture made me see red. But then, if I had totally switched off at that
disconcerting gesture by Sudha I wouldn’t have registered anything after that
shot. However, I had noticed that it was ten minutes to seven on the station clock when
the relieved husband gently escorts his wife out. I also remember thinking that
this hero will have to stand there frozen for the next forty minutes for the train
scheduled for seven thirty to jolt him out of that state. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Of
course, I felt bad for the poor chap—losing chance after chance to find
emotional stability. Moreover, I had also noted that Gulzar had invoked Devdas,
Hindi cinema’s favourite lover, when the hero calls himself Devdas and wants
‘Paro’ to let him into the bolted waiting room after stepping out to find some
food. This wasn’t a nonchalant reference to the most popular Hindi cinema trope
of unfulfilled desire. It was Gulzar’s experiment with the Devdas trope, albeit
a bungled one. For the one who left a “stamp” on the lover – an echo of the
original Devdas’s mark of ownership of Paro – was a woman in this movie. It was
an awkward transferring of the affect memories of one woman invokes in Mahender
when he meets the other woman of the two significant women in his life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Probably among the most interesting characters
in Hindi cinema, Maya was a rare depiction of a free-spirited woman who lives
by her own rules without intentionally meaning to hurt or harm anyone around
her. Why ruin such a courageous portrayal by calling her Maya – an illusion –
is quite incomprehensible! Does the name indicate that the truly free woman is
an illusion? And why was the composed and mature woman called Sudha—invoking
the calming effect of moonlight on fraught nerves? Doesn’t the naming of the
two women reveal the ways in which they are to facilitate the man?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Mahender
man can simply take his tangled web of desire to his wife for her to sort
through while he continues to remain a connoisseur of artistic illusions. And
when the wife strongly indicates that she will not participate in the mess that
he’s made of his love life, he gets a heart attack! Such self-indulgence and
sense of entitlement! Leaving an open and messy suitcase in a railway waiting
room is an apt metaphor for the night long conversation the two of them have.
At the end of it all, he doesn’t get closure. However, he is seemingly not even
seeking closure. He’s a will ‘o’ the wisp, a wanderer—he doesn’t live in
contained ways for him to feel the need for closure to get on with his life. On
the other hand, both the women who were his emotional mainstays are shown to be
explicitly asking his permission to leave his life. The artist does it through the
most popular song of the movie and the wife does it with an age-old convention—
touching the feet of an elder, seeking blessing, before parting. So yes, that
ghastly gesture is a very significant reason for my dislike of the movie.
However, that is not the only reason. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">On watching
it the second time, I gained more clarity on why I disliked it so intensely.
The narrative’s perspective is such that while there is an empathetic gaze
towards the injustices life metes out to all the three main characters, we are
expected to shed a tear or two for the lone guy stranded on the platform of an
isolated railway platform. We are to stand next to Mahender while he watches a proud
gentleman gently take away his best chance at feeling anchored in life. We are
to feel his pain at this fresh blow in life. Where there was such empathy for
the man’s loss of love and emotional stability in this movie, there was very
little empathy for the losses of the two women.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">That
accusation might seem a tad unfair to some connoisseurs of Hindi cinema because
it is actually one of those rare movies in Hindi cinema that fleetingly
presents, through two songs, the two women as desiring subjects instead of
merely remaining objects of desire. However, I felt that this attempt was
half-hearted at best, for these women’s desires were overlooked or thwarted
throughout the narrative. Maya dies a violent death within the narrative and
throughout the narrative Sudha continues to be the wife who often morphs into
the motherly facilitator, suppressing her needs. Additionally, she shows every
sign of not getting closure in her relationship with Mahender until he
explicitly gives her permission to leave him and be happy in the life she had
built for herself. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Sudha had
so easily slid back into caring for Mahender within minutes of his walking into
that railway waiting room that it was difficult to process that there was a
fissure in that relationship. Mahender having to borrow her suitcase keys to open
his suitcase marks the beginning of their reliving of coupledom. Sudha is at
her best as the efficient homemaker who knows enough to make room for the man
in her life to play the adult every now and then. The man, too, does full
justice to these opportunities— cycling down in the rain to fetch food, gamely
accepting the appreciative laughter at the wasted effort and cleaning up a
minor wound after displaying some charmingly possessive anger at the woman’s
clumsiness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">If both of
them are capable of displaying such adult maturity in their relationship why
does each of them seemingly need the man’s permission for the woman to move out
of his life? Absurdly enough, she seeks permission to leave his life during a
chance meeting a few years after marrying someone else. Does that mean she
wasn’t truly emotionally connected with her current husband until she receives due
permission from the previous one to desire another man? I would say then that the
poor chap deserves to be pitied and not envied by our hero.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This
rendering of the man as the one who wields power to permit women to love him or
leave him, displayed through the title, the beloved song and the climax, reiterates
Hindi cinema’s propensity to depict women as caged beings. And as a double
whammy in this movie, both the women are made to go through the full cycle of
emotions for desiring subjects – expression of their desire through beautiful
songs, feeling desired, and finally feeling that they are no longer desired by
the man in their life. To add insult to injury, they also have to seek his permission
to stop loving him. But the audience’s gaze is firmly focused, through that of
the auteur, to empathise with the man’s losses!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I truly
don’t see how women viewers of the movie could have found this acceptable.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-66171637001006241892020-11-20T00:36:00.001+05:302020-11-20T00:36:22.171+05:30Some thoughts on Devdas<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
While doing the dishes one afternoon during the severe lockdown this summer, a song in a language I barely know floated into my thoughts. It starts with a sweet young male voice telling a woman that he sees her: "Ami chini go chini..." This song, actually this movie is the only Bengali one I can claim to have seen rather thoroughly. It was on the course list of a translation studies course I had done. That was more than two decades ago. But the song stayed in my head, not just as a lovely tune but as a beautiful song. Here's a young man telling his benefactor's wife something like, "Here's looking at you kid." Yes, from Casablanca -- that poignant tale of star-crossed lovers. In a Keatsian way the love is within reach but forbidden. No wonder generations of young Indians have loved Keats's poems. We, whose lives are controlled by cultural rules, feel the pain of consciously giving up love. Although it feels like it is just within reach, we also always already know it never was. We do, in some way, understand why such painful decisions are taken. In <i>Charulata</i> it is societal restrictions, in <i>Casablanca</i> it is ideological choices. What was it in <i>Devdas</i> or <i>Pyaasa</i>? In <i>Kagaz ke Phool</i>, limiting oneself to a very straightforward interpretation, it was society that was keeping the auteur and his muse from becoming lovers. And we can't overlook the fact that the fictional film they were making was an adaptation of <i>Devdas</i>. But no, really, coming back to the one that inspired all these other tales of unfulfilled love: I have often wondered why couldn't Devdas <i>rise to the occasion</i>. Yes, I will let that phrase stay there. The italicised one, I mean. Unintended though the obvious pun was, what's the point of reading so much Freud if I edit that phrase?<br />
As a nation, we have loved and celebrated Devdas for over a century now. During the course of some research on it, one of my students found out and informed me that the book did reasonably well as soon as it came out. We know that there are any number of movies made based on that book. There are three directly adapted, with the same title, in Hindi. The latest witha slightly altered and new age title, <i>Dev D</i>, seriously challenges the idea of the love being star crossed and suggests it is something else that prevents the union. Riveting though that one was, my personal favourite remains the one with Dilip Kumar. I saw bits and pieces of a very bad print of the first one with K L Saigal and that must have ruined the experience for me. And I also suffered through the gala that Sanjay Leela Bhansali called <i>Devdas</i>. My suffering was not out of empathy or identification. It was due to the loudness of it all. The movie is just titled Red in my head. He does seem to do colours, not stories! One colour per movie. This one was red. There was a lot of beige and off-white too but the dashes of red remain in the mind's eye. Probably there is something to be said for that sort of film-making too. Not my preference for cinema, though.<br />
Also, Shahrukh Khan as Devdas! The one who has mastered the act of a quintessential go-getter cast as a helplessly pining lover! What were they thinking! Shahrukh Khan was the best at being Amar in <i>Dil Se</i>. And Amar is as far removed from Devdas as is possible. Amar's a guy who plunges into the unknown, chasing an engima, tries to reason himself into living by rules but is inevitably drawn into the vortex of his desire to finally get consumed by it. Let's not overlook the name-- Amar: Immortal. Immortalised by his love. That was a reworking of the Romeo-Juliet story. Not at all a story of a man who will pine but will not face up to his desires.<br />
I have also, to clarify my thoughts around this national obsession, had any number of discussions about Devdas with many people -- friends, family, colleagues and researchers. I supervised a graduate level dissertation taken up by a young person who seemed committed to crack that enigma-- the pining lover who had willingly given up the chance for union. That young researcher conducted a committed exploration and turned in a rather well-written dissertation. My role in that was to push the envelope-- in terms of thoughts, chasing existing research and in meeting fixed timelines for writing. I am hoping that the said researcher will turn it into a good academic paper and send it to a decent journal at some point. So, I will not go into the thesis arrived upon through that exploration and offer a few of my thoughts over this love our culture exudes for an unfulfilled love. Specifically that. Not unrequited love. That is a totally different bitter-sweet emotion endlessly explored through literature and art. But <i>Devdas</i> is not that.</div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">It is a deeply internalised external, probably cultural, element that disallows the person from accepting their desire. And truly worthy of serious academic engagement, which I do hope I will take up some time in the near future. For now, a small exploration of that beautiful song and here it is: <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MT-1ETlxJHM" width="320" youtube-src-id="MT-1ETlxJHM"></iframe></div>Now, while doing that course on translation studies, with a professor who had a deep engagement with Bengali literature and culture, I learned that this movie is based on a Tagore novella titled "Noshtoneer" and very recently I also found out that the lyrics of the song are actually a poem Tagore wrote for Victoria Ocampo.</div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Despite my limitedness in comprehension of Bengali, I can hear that Tagore is pointing out that the consciousness of his attraction should not just be sublimated but also censored. He gives very rational reasons for this act of censorship -- that he belongs to a different land (thereby a different culture) and that he's a guest (who he seems to feel should not 'betray' the trust his host has placed on him by desiring a woman from the host's land) and that, added to all this, would be the undeniable fact that he's only temporarily there in that place and in her life. To me all these reasons and the very act of rationalising is very annoying. Simply because it's really not talking about the emotion as something that needs to be felt, reflected upon and made actionable by two adult individuals. It's talking about a man trying to tell himself, in a language that was probably almost completely incomprehensible to his muse, that he forbids himself this woman. How about letting her into the equation? That would really mean that he's treating her like an adult who can take a decision for them to act upon. But I'd say it was also a bit of a personal clash between the Indian man and the Universal man out there. And anyway, it really was written at least a hundred years ago. So, one can say it emerged from a context and a cultural milieu. </div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The cinematic adaptation, though, of this Tagore poem, was done in the second half of the 20th century. A decade and a half after India became an independent democratic nation with universal franchise, which means that every adult man or woman, at that time agreed upon to be 21 years or older, could exercise their right to vote to choose who represents them in the decision-making body of the nation -- the legislature. And here's a beautiful movie, set half a century in the past, in which a beautiful young woman who is indicating, in unambiguous ways, that she appreciates the fact that he "sees" her is being serenaded with a song of rejection! He sings a song where he tells her that although he sees her, he's must also reiterate that he's a guest, she's exotically beyond his reach and seems to imply that he cannot betray the trust another man placed on him by giving him free access to his zenana. Somehow that reminded me of the anger that surged through me when my literature teacher in one of the earliest classes of my first year as an undergraduate student passionately quoted from <i>Dr Faustus</i> to talk about Helen of Troy's beauty. The quote goes: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/ and burnt the topless towers of Ilium/ Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss". Oh well, yes, the end of that quote is the absolute opposite of the intent of the song and also the climax of the movie. But to cut to the chase, the two instances do reiterate the notion that the beauty of a woman can start a war between men. And that is supposed to be a compliment to women! It can only be a compliment if all concerned accept the underlying objectification as a 'given' in a culture. Well, ancient Greece did, if we were to base our understanding of its ways on its representations in literature. Renaissance Europe sure seems to have. Looks like even 20th century India did -- given how well-received the song and Ray's movie was. </div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">I was spellbound by the beauty of the movie when I saw it for the first and only time, yet, in the late 1990s. I don't think I blinked even once through the entire movie. It was not just the worry that I might miss something and, therefore, fail to do justice to the assignment set on the movie in pre-YouTube days when students solely relied on the one screening done in the class. It was simply that the movie was breathtakingly beautiful. It led you through corridors and stairways into the cloistered lives of the upper class women in late 19th century women. It showed that clad in those beautiful Bengal cottons and lacy Westernised blouses, surrounded by late Victorian furniture and modern toys, like Charulata's binoculars, these women were suffocating. They were possessions of the zamindar and were traditionally expected to act out their deemed roles in his household. They were either the fairly young wife or older dependent relatives, at least I remember only these two categories in this movie. While the zamindar was navigating his way through a changing world, the women spent their entire lives in households shackled by traditions. Left to their own devices in the zenana, with not much productive work to occupy their time, they seemed like extremely well-facilitated people. The "bahu-thakurani" definitely did seem to be so. We do tend to forget that the song ended with her objecting to that moniker from Amal with a "huth". No, I really don't remember that from my only viewing of that film. I saw the song again, on YouTube, this summer when it floated into my head at my kitchen sink. Her seemingly playful objection holds her concealed disappointment at Amal's placement of her as the lady of the household while he's a lowly passerby. I don't need to reiterate what Charulata expected from a young man who's singing "I see you" about her. But we must give it to Tagore that he named the guy Amal, which means "Expectation" -- I learned that through a quick Google search. And he deliberately falls short of her expectation. There goes another Devdas, for all of us to shed quiet tears about and love. What is it about this sort of self-effacement that tugs at out heartstrings? Is it that we recognise the choosing of duty over desire as an appreciable act? A willful sacrifice of pleasure at the altar of civilisation. Isn't that how civilisations are built? By sacrificing pleasure and channeling all the pent up energies into constructive work. Sounds wonderful. If only we can forget Charulata's heart-rending cry, her palpable fear when she hears the gari's sounds and her correcting her nervous welcome into a slightly flirtatious one to invite her husband back into her quarters!</div>
Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-18175476864198523182020-03-04T15:48:00.000+05:302020-03-04T15:48:15.466+05:30Delhi 2020: A Reflection on Violence and Vulnerability<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Delhi is
burning or at least large parts of the metropolis were throughout this week.
The entire country knows that. It was in the newspapers, on online news
portals, on social media and most definitely on an infinite loop on TV news. I
try to stay away from sources that give news updates by the minute. What I see
and get to know is more than enough to bear. That photograph of a young man in
a red sweater striding down a barricaded road, pointing a pistol at someone,
completely oblivious of the presence of a policeman close to him, is going to
haunt me for a while. It reminded me of a picture of a young man in a blue
windcheater with a gun at VT station more than a decade ago. The horrifying aspect
of both those pictures was the ease with which arms invaded the frame of a
routine day. They suggested that there is no way one can absolutely avoid straying into a dangerously violent incident. I admit that I try to emulate the proverbial
ostrich, yet, I live in Delhi, in 2020 and I am intensely affected by the sudden
volcanic eruption of violence in many pockets of the metropolis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Through two
decades of active engagement with Delhi, I have arrived upon the belief that regular
letting out of violent emotions in small bursts– through callous stereotyping, cuss
words, everyday misogynistic acts, and regular road rage – ensures that the
quotient of latent violence remains low in this city. Violence is framed by the
quotidian out here, making it one of the various aspects of its unique culture.
There are some wonderful aspects too that make Delhi’s culture unique. Some of
those are vivaciousness, generosity in actions, emotional reactions to
practical acts, confident pragmatism and a true appreciation of leisure. It is
almost as if Delhiwallahs are singing along with that young person who’s energetically
advising, “Duniya mein aayein hai to love kar le, thoda sa jee le, thoda mar
le”, probably conflating “love” in that line with “live”. A full blooded
plunging into living life, the way Delhiwallahs know best would necessarily
involve navigating through violence and making peace every day. When violent
thoughts and emotions get dissipated every single day, there is no scope for
bottling it up for it to explode.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Living in
Delhi never seemed like living on a volcanic mountain. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I know that
I live on shifting tectonic plates. Every time I ‘imagine’ I felt an
earthquake, I quickly get to know within hours that the plates did shift and that
there was an earthquake in Afghanistan or Nepal or at some other place
thousands of miles away. Mostly this information reaches me through calls from
family and friends outside Delhi, enquiring about my safety. These calls also tell
me that when these people hear some unusually threatening news about Delhi,
they think of me. And to think that I didn’t get a single call regarding my
safety in the past week! A series of volcanic eruptions of violence and, aside
from my parents, not one person I know and care for wants to know whether I
stayed out of the scalding lava! Either I have been completely forgotten by all
who care for me or they don’t think that this large scale violence was ever a
threat to me. Being confident that it is not the former, based on other kinds
of evidence, I am inferring that it is the latter – they don’t think I am in
danger. That <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> a rather disturbing
thought! How can anyone think that a person who lives and works in Delhi is not
at risk when there is a riot situation? Did we not make frantic calls to
friends and family during the Mumbai terror attacks in 2009? Did we not queue
up outside STD phone booths to get across to friends and family in Bombay in
1993? Did we not worry, across the country, about the lives of even absolute
strangers in 1984? Didn’t we shudder in horror at the thought of all those
people stranded outside the safety of their homes during all these violent
disturbances? How, then, is this different? Why are people not panicking about
their family and friends in Delhi? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">People who care for me would think that I am sure to be safe when they absolutely <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">know</i> that I am not part of the
demographic which will be affected by the violence. Although they live outside
Delhi and their palmtops are buzzing with news and images of a burning Delhi,
they are quite sure that I am not a target of this violence. Clearly, people
outside Delhi understand that there are specific targets for this violence; a
random denizen of Delhi is not a target. None of my Delhi friends have shared
with me that they are getting frantic phone calls asking them to stay safe. Middle
class India seems to be quite clear about the target of this violence. It is
not a middle class person – man or woman – who also has a Hindu name. It is not
people who are protesting against a bill – those protests have been going on for weeks
now and it’s been business as usual in Delhi. A look at the names of the people
who died in the violence reveals that one out of three dead has a Muslim name. Middle
class Hindus located outside Delhi revealed through their nonchalance that they
knew the targeted demographic of this violence on the very first day it erupted.
It took three days of observation, reflection and theorization for intellectuals
and activists in Delhi to reach a realization that the rest of the country
already, almost instinctively, understood.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">We,
Delhiwallahs, didn’t realize something the rest of the country seemed to have
known all along. We are confused. We don’t understand large scale violence because
we navigate through small provocations of violence each day, cobble together some
sort of peace and go through the day. We do, sometimes, hold protests at India
Gate or Jantar Mantar. Some of these protests lead to volatile situations that
are swiftly handled by the machinery of the state. We see that Shaheen Bagh was
different from most other Delhi protests. The protesters are right there in
the middle of the city, for us to notice. We just skirted around, if we were
not drawn to join them. We have witnessed many instances of communal clashes
and have handled the trauma and destruction they cause. But we have never before
seen a chain reaction of localized volcanic violence co-existing with large
chunks of the metropolis living through a regular Delhi day, with its minor
outbursts of completely manageable miniscule violence. We don’t know how to
make sense of this cognitive dissonance. It leaves us helpless at an emotional
and intellectual level. We summon our pragmatism, confidence and generosity to
see ourselves through this incomprehensible situation because we cannot let
Delhi burn. We are doing our best to douse the fires but to piece back some
sense of normalcy we also need to ask ourselves why Delhi is burning and
courageously face the answers to that question. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br /></div>
Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-64346295673072032372015-07-23T10:58:00.003+05:302015-07-23T10:59:29.283+05:30The Personal in Public<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I have come back to this space after a very long time. It has been left alone so long that I don't know whether it has stayed a public space anymore. That is the most important reason for my coming back to this space -- to express myself and to clarify my thoughts on the personal in public. It provides me space to type out my confusions on communicating personal anxieties in public spaces and it is a space which blurs the public and the personal in its very conception.<br />
I remember starting this blog when I was utterly amused at watching someone talk animatedly on a mobile phone which was hidden from sight. The <a href="http://someglimpses.blogspot.in/2006/08/new-age-talk-scraps-of-tales-floating.html?view=sidebar" target="_blank">first post</a> in this blog records my thoughts and impressions of that experience. It looked like this person was inhabiting a completely different space while we were actually sharing a rather cramped physical space -- a lift in an old government building!<br />
I was amazed at the ease with which the public space was being personalised by this co-rider in the elevator. There was no thought given to the reactions of the neighbours, for the neighbours did not really exist. I think the last decade has made that mode of communication so pervasive that the most well-adjusted person blanks out her surroundings, invisibilises her immediate neighbours and inhabits mind spaces which are miles away from the physical space she is occupying. She doesn't have to worry about hurting her neighbors. For her neighbors don't exist. Not really. Not for her to connect with that moment.<br />
In my childhood, one of the crucial tasks I had to learn in 'civilising' myslef into society was to understand that my words and actions can cause emotional hurt just as much as they cause physical ones. Part two of that lesson made me aware of the spaces in which liberty to hurt can be taken and the extent to which that liberty can be taken. You can sometimes say or do things which may cause some form of hurt to immediate family but you should stop yourself from doing that to people outside your family; of course, family can also mean friends who become family. If you do, it is called a tantrum. And tantrums are bad. I suspect this lesson is not part of upbringing anymore; especially because even adults have forgotten it.<br />
Nowadays, even newspapers regularly carry features in which personal hurt is expressed in public spaces. Any why should they not? After all, there are any number of blogs which do that and are among the most popular ones in cyberspace. Also, reality television probably has the maximum viewership in the world governed by TRP ratings. However, when I had begun reading newspapers, in high school, those personal features reminded me of my grandfather. I imagined V. Gangadhar as a contemporary of my grandfather. As it turns out R V Smith actually is! They can write rambling reminisces with mild doses of humour and the reader will indulge them just as all good-mannered children listen to a story Grandfather is repeating the thirtieth time. Feature articles were light reading, along with film and food reviews. They were spaces for the reader and the newspaper to relax.<br />
Having said that, there is a serious danger of a feature article, even a film review, getting spoilt when the personal comes in. I do not mean the destruction caused by prejudices, I mean the destruction caused by grief. Case in point is the latest by my favourite film critic, Baradwaj Rangan. Do compare<a href="http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/baradwaj-rangan-pays-tribute-to-msviswanathan/article7429526.ece" target="_blank"> this one</a> with <a href="https://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2015/07/11/any-body-cannot-dance/" target="_blank">that one</a> Quite often, I reserve Rangan's article for the last on Sunday mornings, the best for the end. I like his critical engagement with cinema, his style peppered with mild humour and the ease with which he displays innocuous disapproval. The former of the two articles referred above had none of those. It thoroughly alienated all readers who are not extremely well-versed with Tamil cinema and its use of Carnatic music. If I knew the man, I would have called him to say -- Listen, it is alright to mourn. With people whom you trust. Even when you are mourning the death of a public figure do you trust the public to mourn with you? For, the first recollection the article brought up was a call during rush hour in Bombay from someone very dear to me saying in an uncharacteristically flat and grim tone, "Listen, something has happened. It seems Michael Jackson died last night." Immediately I knew the loss he experienced with that death. It was the loss of the person who showed the capacity of the human body to create beauty. It was the loss of the man who drowned the noises in our head with his music when we were growing up. This person's friends and family who understood his loss called him to pay condolences till late evening that day. There was some form of closure to that loss, while mourning with near and dear ones. Obituaries are feature articles which mark the public end of an era; they hardly provide closure to an emotional loss to the writer of the obituary. Unless there is some distance already traversed in the lessening of emotional investment in the relationship.<br />
One of the best contemporary writers of features seem to have blurred the difference between personal grief and public marking of the end of an era, in one of the best mainstream newspapers today. This should indicate that modes of communication are changing. The personal can be brought into the public and it <i>is </i>being brought for the public's notice. Spaces like this -- blogs -- started this and the trend is making inroads into newspapers of record. We witness displays of this trend in academia nowadays. In conversations -- personal, semi-official or official -- we are smoothly blurring the distinction between personal hurt and public grievance. And we are hurting and getting hurt in the process. Some recent events at work let to intense, emotionally charged exchanges over email, phone calls and a public meeting of a collective of thinking individuals. One of the emails sent to a large group at work started with a brilliant use of the first <a href="http://www.amazon.in/A-Book-Memory-Confessions-Reflections/dp/0143423894#reader_0143423894" target="_blank">paragraph</a> of Sudhir Kakar's autobiography. I interpreted it as the attempt to tread the razor's edge between denial and drowning in loss. Kakar had no choice but to work towards learning to walk on that razor's edge. His dead father will not come back. There is no alternative. He has to show the "<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/07/slavoj-i-ek-greece-courage-hopelessness" target="_blank">courage of helplessness</a>".<br />
We were surely not at a funeral in our workspace. Our loss is not a permanent one. It is an instance of loss of perspectives on who we thought we are and who we think we should be. If it is not permanent it can be resolved. Probably through good communication. We might have to adapt the new ways of communication, the ones in which the personal and public get interspersed. That does not mean we cannot learn to do it without hurting ourselves. After all, we know as teachers that we are perpetual students too. If we have to lean this new trick, I am sure we can. At least, I mean to start. And that is why I am back in this space which blurs the personal and the public.</div>
Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-17318834567938689022011-03-15T23:35:00.000+05:302011-09-12T11:43:50.234+05:30Do Urban Young Women need Empowerment?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I have been thinking of women empowerment quite a bit lately. In a steering away from my usual academia oriented thoughts on this issue, of late, I have been wondering about issues of theory and praxis in gender studies. Random conversations with people from various segments of society have made me wonder about the penetration of theories of empowerment into the lives of women. </div>
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A few minutes before I sat down to write this, my barely literate domestic help was sharing her troubles with me. She is not at all an effusive person. On the contrary, her silent but efficient presence for about three hours every day in my house reminds me of the story of the Shoemaker and the Elves. I wonder if any of my readers are aware of this story for children but it has stayed with me through the vagaries of time, especially due to its dubious message. I never could figure out why those elves, under cover of darkness, did the thankless work of creating those lovely shoes that made the shoemaker a reasonably rich man. I now know why my elf is here rather than in her village about which she gets so nostalgic on those rare communicative days. She has had to migrate, lose the familiar environs of her village, forego the support structure of the village community, turn into a semi-skilled worker from an artisan and regularly worry about her children’s future in this big bad city, to ensure that her husband breaks out of the habit of gambling. She has all her losses tucked in her armoury to throw at the husband each time he shows signs of steering towards gambling. And she puts them to good use. Recently, she used all of these and, for good measure, added the threat of a stick. This woman is totally entrenched in patriarchy but has learnt to negotiate her space within it. My instincts, training, and experience have taught me to fight patriarchy and to be wary of women who try to work from within the patriarchal structure but I have new admiration for this woman, especially when I compare her with the young girls I meet in this huge metropolis. </div>
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Recently, while travelling in one of those wonderful air-conditioned DTDC buses, I saw a young man sitting on a seat reserved for women while a girl stood, struggling with a huge bag, clutching the too-high handle. I walked up to him and pointed out that the seat was reserved for women. He vacated it without a murmur. As it turned out, the passenger sitting next to him debarked at the next stop and the girl sat on that seat. Striking a conversation with her, I asked her why she had not demanded her right for the seat. There was a strange and poignant vulnerability in her, “what could I do, he was sitting there?” I didn’t know if I should empathise with her vulnerability or get angry with her. Here was a young girl, obviously a college student in this metropolis, who feels she cannot demand a right for which hundreds of her predecessors fought for years. The idea that the reserved seat was a safe and comfortable place within a crowded public space did not percolate down to this urban young woman while her need to come across as an amiable, independent and physically strong young person was overwhelmingly there within her. What’s more, she was not thinking of her sisters who might need this space and of doing her duty towards them by reiterating women’s right to a reserved seat.</div>
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What’s with young people nowadays?</div>
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This question has been haunting me quite a bit of late. Regular interaction with the young adults I teach begs this question rather often. One such instance was a debate competition that I judged with two other colleagues. The organizers of the youth fest, in their wisdom, thought the topic they announced in advance should generate some excitement. The topic for the day’s debate was: “This House believes that live-in relationships are a threat to Indian Society”. </div>
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I will focus only on the contents of the debate that day and ignore my analysis of the form and structure of the presentations.</div>
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One would have thought the team arguing against the motion would win hands down, especially due to the demographic representation of the house; it was overflowing with urban young people in their late teens. The motion was not put to vote but the arguments for and against the motion indicated the direction the wind took that day. 26 out of the 27 young people who spoke that day were envisioning marriage to be the ultimate goal for each romantic relationship. The ones speaking for the motion were probably using this premise to build an argument, I thought, but why would the ones speaking against the motion shy away from alternatives to marriage, I wondered. The 14 participants who spoke against the motion were unanimous in deeming a live-in to be a trial run for a marriage.</div>
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Apart from the glaring lack of research on the institution of marriage, on the definition of the term and on the various forms of marriage, there was not a thought spared to relationships among the LGBTI people. Not one of the participants critiqued the mores of patriarchal, heterosexual marriages. No one worried about the situation of women enduring abusive marriages while there was a great deal of worry over girls getting “dumped” by guys in live-in relationships that go bad. And the best one of them all, the participants as well as the interjectors from the audience kept asking, “What will happen if the girl gets pregnant?” I really wanted to yell, “Go figure that out” but being one of the judges there I had to maintain a grave demeanour. </div>
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I mean, what is up with these young people?</div>
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Are these their real thoughts? Are they that dumb? Or is this their idea of politically correct thought that should be presented from official platforms such as the lectern? Apart from the maddening lack of research, why is there such resistance to new avenues of thought? Is this urban complacency speaking? Have they fallen hook, line and sinker for the consumerist propaganda of Hollywood rom-coms and Bollywood cinema that celebrate the big, fat, expensive wedding as the ultimate dream of every individual?</div>
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I got some of my answers that day, in the form of one of the participants. The 27<sup>th</sup> participant, the one exception who acted as a foil to foreground the lack of depth in the thinking of this young crowd. She had fire in her belly. This agrarian metaphor fits her perfectly. She could barely speak English, was far from an advertisement for MNC brand names in her attire, did not flaunt a chic hair-style, and hardly had any make-up on. This girl kept trying to divert her peers’ attention towards alternatives to marriage, to the oppression within marriages, was asserting the need to look beyond marriages. Here was a girl who battled with the very real threat of being pushed into a patriarchal marriage and was building her ammunition against it. And on the other side were all those urban young kids who think that they are way beyond the machinations of patriarchy. They believe they need not worry about reaching their dream destination of the grand consumerist wedding to the one they love or will learn to love, a la the Bharjitya movies, however, they sure are worried about unwanted pregnancies and getting ‘dumped’. </div>
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Is it time courses on gender studies were rethought? Should we teach them Germaine Greer and Shulamith Firestone? Would it help them? Or should we figure out new ways of empowering them to face the crises in their 21<sup>st</sup> century urban lives? </div>
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Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-76977996600629390932010-05-21T15:57:00.000+05:302010-05-21T15:57:07.260+05:30Identity Issues<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">This post is seriously overdue. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">My friends have commented on the previous post and raised pertinent issues. One of the foremost of these being a displeasure with my interpretation of the Gita. As I had stated earlier, I am not claiming that mine is the definitive interpretation. However, I will not accept it to be wrong. An interpretation cannot be declared right or wrong; the critic can at best ask for a justification or an argument to support one's hypothesis. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">It is generally agreed that Arjuna was advised to do his duty. While I go with that part of the common interpretation, I would like to ask the following questions: </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">1. Duty towards whom?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">2. Duty for what?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">3. Why should I not worry about the result (and in some cases the outcome) of my action?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">4. If I do something how can I shrug off the responsibility of the results of my action?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">5. Where does my rationality figure in all this?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">The last question is the most important one. I am not demeaning faith here. I have immense respect for the faithful. It takes a lot of courage to believe in an abstract concept and to let your faith guide you through life. Also, it takes a lot of courage to hand over your rationality to an abstract concept. Even Arjuna, the Nar of the Nar-Naryana duo and therefore our preceptor, didn't do that. He believed in his hero, a human form whom he could perceive with all his senses. But his descendants outdo him. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">Most of the faithful, follow some interpretation of one or more of our religious texts. Very often they believe or are led to believe that the interpretation they follow is the most authentic one. This leads to fundamentalist thoughts and practices. While the people who identify with the group that is usually recognised as the intelligentsia feel there is not an iota of fundamentalism in them, I believe all of us are confused, for we are straddling between contradictory group identities. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">Take the case of Nirupama Pathak, a member of a professional class that is considered part of the intelligentsia in most societies. Her story is rife with contradictions. Not just the kinds of contradictions that make investigation difficult but also the kinds that make life difficult. The media tells us Nirupama was told by her father that the Sanatan Dharma precedes the Indian Constitution. He was not stating a historical fact. He was revealing the group he identifies with. Dharmendra Pathak was telling his daughter that his identity as a follower of Sanatan Dharma is more important to him than his identity as an Indian. Making such a declaration is not an act of treason in our country; nor is it an instance of disrespect to the constitution. The very same man was spending hard-earned money to help his daughter crack a rigorous set of tests to join the elite group that formulates public policy in our country. This sort of ideological confusion in more a norm than an exception in our country. His daughter was prey to similar confusions. This girl trained to become a journalist at one of India's most competitive journalism schools. She moved from a small town in a backward state of our county to the capital of the country to join a demanding profession. Probably, she set an example for dozens of girls in her town to think of careers. The very same girl addressed her lover in the form that is reserved for husbands in traditional Indian marriages. Her lover, who reminded her that she was a journalist and therefore cannot be coerced into anything, was fully aware of her rights and power as a journalist. Parallely, he seemed to have accepted her formal way of address and thereby endorsed the power imbalance between them. And as we all know, this power imbalance arises from age-old perceptions of gender roles in our society. This young journalist couple, with one of the best training in their field, were mimicking the power-structure that their parents followed; at least in form. Here is an instance of education leading to good careers but not to radical change in personal choices of social practices.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">Poor Nirupama lost her life due to her confusions. There are those also who thrive in them and glorify them. The less said of the leaders of the khap panchayat the better. These men are committing atrocities in the name of duty towards their culture. Most of them might not be able to state the religious source for their diktats on the kinds of alliances they will endorse and the kinds they will condemn. They get self-righteous about practising obsolete customs and do not feel the need to give their declarations even a semblance of rationality. The leaders of these khap panchayats wield an immense amount of power under the guise of culture. And once again, the most vulnerable are the women. With their rules, these men efficiently ensure that a woman marries into a village where she has no support; a place where there are no chances of finding a connection with her natal family. With such customs, a bride enters a domain where she cannot find the comfort of familiarity, will have to set out to be amiable and create a support structure. No wonder they cry as they do towards the end of the wedding ceremony. And the few who dare to defy these culture czars are killed. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">And these culture czars of Haryana are very clever. They have declared that tradition is on their side. They now want the law of the land to support them too. And they have roped in a few representatives of the people to speeden their goal. While one would not blink an eye over their getting an Om Prakash Chautala in their team, Navin Jindal was a total suprise. He stumped his party by identifying with his electorate rather than with his public persona of a progressive, educated, cosmopolitan young man. No wonder they have asked him to explain his group identity. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify;">So, Mr. Jindal which group do you identify with more? The urbane man or the jat?</div>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-3898290789757578182010-05-11T12:52:00.005+05:302010-05-11T15:56:34.247+05:30Group Identity<div style="text-align: justify;">I have just stepped out of an academic presentation of some serious research on the link between memory and self-identity. When I saw the notice for this presentation, I felt that it would not interest me at all, couched as it was in social science jargon. I gave in to a gentle nudge to 'waste my time' over it only to realise that it gave me well-researched answers to questions that have been plaguing me for over a week now. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Before all of you who have no interest in academia or academic debates stop reading, let me clarify, this is not a blog championing the cause of academia or an appeal to intelligent young people to consider academic careers. This is one more post adding to my corpus of such posts, on the need for young people to spend some time thinking: thinking about issues around them, issues that affect their lives and their choices. It is easy to take the "<a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-road-not-taken/">beaten path</a>" and reach one's goal within the time-frame set by oneself but can one live with that kind of success if it involves trampling upon family and friends? Old question, I know. Most Indians would immediately think of Arjuna, Krishna and the Bhagvad Gita and various interpretations of Krishna's legendary advice to Arjuna. So, here is my version of that famous dialogue, it went somewhat like this:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Arjuna: How can I wage a war with my elders for a kingdom?</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Krishna: Kingdom, you are not fighting for something as paltry as a bit of land, I created a kingdom for you, remember, that can always be taken care of; you are fighting for your right.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Arjuna: But is my right greater than peace?</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Krishna: Well, your right might not be greater than peace but your duty of fighting the evil in the world is. These people you see in front of you are perpetrators and / or supporters of evil. Fighting them equals fighting evil. Now that, as you very well know, is a good thing. So, while you seem to be doing an evil thing you are actually doing a good thing. Go ahead, fight your family, teachers, cousins, nephews, childhood mates for this will lead to ushering a better world. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I know many of you will tell me that is an extremely simplistic interpretation of an important part of the great song. Yes, I know that. It was deliberate. Simplistic never means incorrect. Let us start with simple stuff first. Anyway, this is not an exposition on the Gita; I am using my interpretation of this famous conversation to illustrate my point.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In this famous instance, the warrior was convinced by his political advisor that he should identify the group he belongs to and act accordingly. The legendary warrior is not the only one who learnt his lesson well enough to lead his group to a Pyrrhic victory, most Indians learn this lesson rather well. We pick the groups we belong to and live by the rules of the group. Sooner than later, we learn to identify with some social groups and accept its rules. We then internalise those rules and develop our persona. People we interact with regularly can usually predict our behaviour and our reactions to social situations. That is possible because they learn to recognise the groups we belong to. The problems and discomfort begin when we shift allegiances from one group to another. Say, Arjuna decided that his allegiance lay with peace and not with helping in destroying some people identified as evil. What could Krishna have done then? What advice would he have given to Arjuna? That would have changed the Mahabharata significantly. It would probably have changed the Indian mindset also quite a bit, for we are a nation that takes our legends very seriously. Unfortunately, asking such questions borders on blasphemy. My intention, though, is to ask such questions and ask them of people whose behaviour affects the lives of millions in this nation. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">Watch this space for on how group identities killed Nirupama Pathak and many more young girls in the recent past. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-68383252413783388112010-03-04T11:43:00.005+05:302010-03-04T13:59:34.471+05:30One more crash<div style="text-align: justify;">Early in the morning my husband was recalling the first time he saw the new Boeing advertisement in a newspaper. It seems he noticed the image of a flying plane before he registered the name of the brand being advertised and was suitably impressed that the latest model from Boeing was being used in the ad. Having read about a plane crash a few seconds before our conversation began, I was struggling with memories of another plane crash and was not in the mood to appreciate his obsession with aeroplanes. I skeptically remarked on his recognition of the specific model via the miniature image in the advertisement. That was just the impetus he needed to launch into a tutorial on aircrafts. Within a few minutes he complained that I was not listening and that I was simply not interested. He had forgotten that my first ambition was to be a pilot. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is just that as a child I had not heard of women pilots in our country. Considering that I grew up in an airport colony, this kind of ignorance is appalling, in retrospect. The concept of real women navigating planes was introduced to me by my English textbook through a story about Amelia Earhart. Around the same time, Saudamini Deshmukh captained an all-women crew and once more I began to dream of navigating aircrafts. Soon my career dreams changed. I went through a range of them before picking up the area that I am trying to build a career in. Over these years I kept hoping that at least one girl from my airport colony will choose to become a pilot. I heard that a girl whose parents lived in our airport colony, before she was born, is an Airbus pilot now!</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I have had a long association with aeroplanes and aviation in India, through this airport that grew as I was growing up. I was witness to its transformation from a small airstrip to an international airport. This transformation involved awesome stuff like installation of new technology to enable landing of planes after daylight hours, new radar machines and a brand new air traffic control tower along with expansion of the runway. I remember going with a bunch of kids to see the inside of a plane. I was about five years old then. It was a Boeing 727 that had developed a technical snag. The pilot gave us a guided tour of the cockpit! We couldn't stop showing off at school the next day. I remember the sudden beefing of security after Indira Gandhi was assassinated. I remember the drama of a mock highjack staged to drill the then new Black Cat Commandos. I also remember running to the airport gate to see the first international flight that landed there. It brought the then French President Francois Mitterand to promote an Indo-French Friendship Program. I vividly remember climbing a neem tree to get a closer look of the wheels touching the tarmac of the first flight that landed there after nightfall. These memories are very dear to me.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The one memory, though, I'd like to erase permanently is that of a plane crash at the said airport. This was in 1993. It was the 26th of April. A very hot summer day. I was, unusually for me, cooking. My mother was not in town. My father had gone out. I heard some kids chanting noisily about a plane falling. I had barely heard a plane takeoff and somehow did not associate that plane with the children's chatter. I rushed out to the garden only after I heard the fire engines. To my utter horror I saw a tower of fire and smoke at the eastern horizon. Within seconds the fire engines whizzed past. My father was driving at top speed towards the control tower from the direction of the fire. He halted at our gate to tell me that the plane had not crashed into the airport wall and that it had fallen somewhere near an acquaintance's farm. Being at his storeroom opposite the airport wall, my father had heard the snick of the rear wheel and left wing against the stationery truck. He had hurriedly advised the truck driver to call the owner of the truck anticipating the hullabaloo that would ensue. He, then, rushed to appraise the airport manager about the probable cause of the crash and the general location of the crash site. In a few minutes he was back at our gate wondering if we should go to the crash site. I agreed that we should. And we did. The scene at the crash site is best forgotten. I cannot forget, though, that one of the airport employees was trying to convince me that the charred stump we spotted was a tree trunk while I was vociferously arguing that it was surely a woman's leg. Ironically, this sensitive man was one of the few who lost their jobs after a departmental inquiry into the crash. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">To this day I don't know why we went there. For years I have wondered why my father and I felt the urge to go to the crash site. My current theory is that we felt we needed to be there because it was happening at our airport– a place that we saw changing and growing every day of our lives. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">Each time I read about a plane crashing anywhere in the world memories of that crash come rushing back to me. I wonder why we are not more careful while using sophisticated technology. There could be a hundred thousand reasons for a plane crash. Many of these are admittedly beyond our control. Some of these occur due to human error, some others are caused by perverted humans and a few others owing to human greed. But the thought that hurts me most is that no prophylactic measures are taken to prevent such mishaps. Why are faulty planes not grounded? Why are technically unsound aircrafts bought for our defense personnel? Why are aviation norms flouted by builders and town planners? Why cannot people take up suggestions for constructive use of space. Check <a href="http://www.hindu.com/mp/2008/03/15/stories/2008031552320100.htm">this</a> article written by a friend around two years ago; it has some wonderful suggestions to use the old Begumpet airport. If only someone had taken it seriously this crash would have been prevented. Two pilots would not have lost their lives and the lives of three families would not have changed for the worse within a few seconds. </div>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-83184248241613155742010-02-15T14:47:00.005+05:302010-02-15T20:16:01.285+05:30Flamingoes and Food for Thought<div style="text-align: justify;">The most hectic weekend of my life ended in such physical exhaustion that I could sleep for three whole days! But the weekend was more than just a tiring one; it was a stimulating one too! So stimulating that I'm back to my blog! Although I must admit, I required some not-so-subtle nudges from <a href="http://anushankarn.blogspot.com/2010/02/waders-and-other-water-birds-morning-at.html">Anuradha</a> to get over my inertia. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ever since Anuradha and Samhith introduced me to the joys of birding I've wanted to go on a birding trail with them. So when she told me late friday afternoon that she planned to sign up for <a href="http://addithebirdie.blogspot.com/">Adesh</a>'s saturday morning trip to Sewri, I agreed to join them knowing full well that I had already planned too many things for the day. After the trip I had to go for a brunch, tidy up the house for a party, go for my driving class, shop for presents and host the party. Yes, I managed to do all that – to all those skeptical friends who've seen me frozen in the same posture for hours with a book in hand. And no, it was not a typical saturday for me; I'm not a socialite – to all those who are getting introduced to me through this post.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The day began with a joyful ride on a nearly empty Mumbai local and a walk to the jetty from the station. The sun had not quite done its rising for the day when we reached the jetty but we didn't get time to exclaim about the dawn. For there was a more unusual sight. The sea was bursting with flamingoes, literally thousands of them. And there was such silence that Samhith's excited, "hey look" was instantly shushed by the spoilsport grown-ups Anuradha and I turned into; however he bravely went on, albeit softly, "the flamingoes look white". Oh yes, they did! Owing to the soft light of the dawn, we reasoned in true grown-up fashion. But Samhith likes his magic as much as any six-year-old would. He adjusted his small binoculars, waited for a few minutes and declared, "they look pink through my binoculars, see". And of course they did. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">We exclaimed, we watched in awed silence, we mourned human callousness; meanwhile the birds went about completing the elementary task of feeding themselves before the tide set in. Thousands of them were searching for food, while thousands of other living beings were turing into food. An entire eco system was working perfectly without any help from humans. In fact, we might have been disturbing it by our very presence. And yet, we have the arrogance to believe that the universe was made for mankind to use.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Thankfully, there still are a few people who care. Some of them were around that morning; telescopes, binoculars and cameras in tow. It was not very difficult to locate them. Soon, Anuradha and I realised exactly how wet we were behind our ears. Birds that we had assumed to be sandpipers turned out to be a dozen different species of birds. The pros in the crowd forgot about the flamingoes and gave us a well-meaning but totally unexpected lesson on the common errors in spotting and identifying birds. They patiently showed us precisely twelve kinds of waders in ten minutes within a radius of ten meters! I got a ringside view of the excitement seasoned bird-watchers feel when they spot a bird they would not have expected in those surroundings. A Black Capped Kingfisher's appearance generated quite a buzz! </div><div style="text-align: justify;">The good girl in me made yet another public appearance: I fished out a pen and paper and jotted the names of all the birds we spotted. I will refrain from listing them here. In case you want to see the list, check Anuradha's blog. After having learnt about waders and stared at the graceful flamingoes to our hearts' content, we left to begin our noisier weekend activities. I did manage to do all the things I had set out to do that day and, in fact, enjoyed doing them. When I plonked into bed that night, I drifted into sleep with the peaceful picture of hundreds of flamingoes ploughing out their food. </div>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-32487138874912565932010-01-29T12:19:00.003+05:302010-01-29T12:26:04.497+05:30ChangesA whole new year ahead! Good news is that I've decided to post more often on my blog. Bad news is that I already broke my resolution of blogging everyday!<div> Anyway, I thought some glimpses should include accounts of visits to places and reviews of books. After all those are glimpses to too, into cultures and minds. </div><div>So, here's to a lot more writing and reading this year!</div>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-62954290390942947632009-12-08T10:41:00.003+05:302009-12-08T12:41:59.609+05:30Hollow People<div align="justify">Two very dissimilar incidents in the recent past pointed out people's hollowness to me and made me react enough to post about them. I'll talk very briefly about the first incident and go on to the second one that affected me more deeply. </div><div align="justify">The first one was noteworthy because it stirred the most laid-back guy I know into action when a hundred others were sitting and cursing their luck. We happened to get stuck in a not very uncommon Mumbai phenomenon -- a traffic jam. The uncommon things about this jam were that it occurred in one of the least happening suburbs of Mumbai, on a weekday, in one of the arterial roads, in a direction that is opposite to the usual flow of traffic and at around half past eleven in the night. We drove into a long queue of stalled vehicles on our way back home from a rare outing to get some much-needed ice-cream post a particularly bland dinner rustled up by our household help. After waiting patiently for about 10 mins my husband decided to check out the reason for the jam. He apparently walked half a kilometre before he ran out of steam and gave up the quest to sit out the jam in the car. I was in my PJs and refused to step out of the car. My bored brother decided he should grab this opportunity to pollute the air and spoil his lungs one more time. On his quest for a smoke, he walked around a kilometre and half and reached the spot the jam originated. He realised that all of us were in quite a pickle. An ambitious truck driver had broken the axle of his truck in an attempt to manouver his way onto the main road from a bylane via a narrow path through one of the cordoned off Monorail construction sites. There was no way we could move unless the truck was towed away. There were about hundred vehicles behind the truck and not one of the occupants had the energy to think of a solution. Appalled at the passivity, the most laid-back person I know, i.e my brother, donned the leadership mantle and made the appropriate noises to stir some people into action. He called the fire-station who directed him to traffic-control. The somnolent person on the line at the traffic-control centre noted the location of the jam and said that action will be taken in due course. Meawhile, the lately charged up drivers realised the traffic could clear, despite the unfortunate postion of the truck, if one car driver does a slighty difficult manoeuver. The risk in this option was a couple of scratches to the car. The owner refused to expose his car to that kind of risk and declared that he will stay put till the truck moves, while his aged mother and pretty partner were watching his performance from the passenger seats. Finally, the home-guard on duty awoke to his duties and suggested that all the vehicles lined up for about 2 kms behind this car should carefully drive reverse till they reach the diversion that would lead them onto a parallel road. This suggestion was readily taken up by drivers with all levels of skills and all kinds of vehicles. They shifted their gears to gently drive reverse and the traffic jam was cleared in about half an hour. This was choreoraphed by my brother and a bunch of people lead by an energetic middle-aged man. So, nearly 50 drivers risked hurting others and crashing their vehicles because one driver refused to risk a few scratches on his car! </div><div align="justify">I thought the kind of hollowness displayed by the car owner needs to be written about when something more personal overshadowed the personality traits of a stranger. </div><div align="justify">Yesterday, I keyed in my name on a Google Images search to show a dorky old photograph of mine to a new friend. To my utter surprise a blast from the past stared back at me. Click <a href="http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.dnaindia.com/imageshowcol_5.asp%3Fobjid%3D1013&imgrefurl=http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_upper-caste-hindus-and-the-question-of-merit_1178274&usg=__kBEbmR2VddncTufDdn_4YEtl5ow=&h=132&w=102&sz=15&hl=en&start=39&tbnid=bQGv_QpK2WEQ1M:&tbnh=92&tbnw=71&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmudiganti%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D20">here</a> to know the details on this. I followed it to find that my name occurred in a response to a newspaper story about caste-based reservation in our country. The story was in itself quite pointless and was almost flippant in its treatment of a serious social issue. To worsen the harm done by that kind of an article, the first respondent's reaction to the article was tangential and rather unnecessary. In this unnecessary response, the respondent, who happens to be one of my oldest friends, mentioned me as one of the priveleged people in our country on account of my caste. She noted that people like me happen to be on the merit list of national universities due to the accident of our being born in families that belong to particular Hindu communities. To me, the most astonishing factor in her writing was that she and I happen to come from families that belong to the same community! Simple logic would show that if I were to be considered priveleged, by the same token, so should she. So why not own up to the 'privelege', if any, rather than 'discuss' the 'priveleges' others seem to have. Especially since she and the writer of the article had better ranks on the merit list she mentioned! Just goes to show that caste-based 'priveleges' are not the only deciding factors in merit lists. Things like access to good colleges also count. Having had access to better colleges than mine, I'm amazed they forgot the 'priveleges' they enjoyed.</div><div align="justify">And the most cutting bit of the incident for me was the fact that, she carelessly used my name knowing fully well that my views on caste-based reservations have been seriously misunderstood during a specific agitation on gender issues in our student days. So, here's to my first use of a new verb in the English language. I have decided to unfriend her.</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify">PS: Taking this opportunity to set the record straight on caste-based reservation -- I completely support equal opportunities as I believe that it helps in bridging the gap that cultural capital brings about. In case, the main protagonists of the newspaper story incident happen to read this one, the phrase you were looking for is 'cultural capital', remember Raymond Williams?</div>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-65816487654824580972009-08-19T20:26:00.000+05:302009-08-19T20:28:23.660+05:30Process FlowWhat do these three questions have in common? – Why was APJ Abdul Kalam frisked at New Delhi airport by the staff of an American airline company? Why was Shah Rukh Khan singled out for a ‘secondary interrogation’ and put through a finger print and retina scan at an American airport? And why was Henry Louis Gates, Jr. arrested from his Harvard home?<br />There is one answer to all these questions – process flow.<br />The men who executed these acts are likely to be entry level officials who were thoroughly following the procedure given to them. They were not being deliberately malicious. They were just doing their duty. They are probably actively discouraged from thinking about the process. And they are forbidden from making any changes in the process-flow. Their job is to follow the process, not create it. We can hardly target a Sgt. Crowley or any of those anonymous airport workers for being racist, prejudiced or paranoid.<br />We should, however, question the processes that instruct these people to behave in the ways they have. We should haul up the creators of these processes. We should criticize the lawmakers who let these unintelligent processes take over serious issues such as a country’s security. We should condemn all acts that push these problems under the carpet, methods like ‘beer diplomacy’. Ironically, it is being celebrated! The problems within the processes of the police force of the world’s most powerful nation cannot be settled over a few mugs of beer and small talk. Sgt. Crowley will maintain that he was doing his duty, and rightly so. For that was what he was doing. If we overlook the fact that lack of deference towards the uniform bothered Sgt. Crowley so much that he arrested a man who showed a valid ID card to prove that he had more of a right to be in that house than Sgt. Crowley did. Well, if the entire government mechanism of the US, including its President is ready to overlook this fact, should we be bothering?<br />Yes, we should. But for the moment, let us also overlook that slight human emotion that got into Sgt. Crowley’s uniform-clad person. Let us focus on the fact that this policeman reported to a place where someone broke into a home. Being a good policeman he has to go through the checklist set in the procedure given to him. He does that. Mr. Gates, being a scholar of African-American studies reacts as any person obsessed with race issues would. A regular check done by a policeman quickly snowballs into an issue of such gigantic proportions that we see two sides of the world’s most powerful man. As a knee-jerk reaction, he is as astonished at the process as any average citizen of a liberal democracy should be. He is quickly reminded that he is not an average citizen but is the citizen who is responsible for the validity of these unintelligent processes. He retracts with speed. Stylishly sharing a few mugs of beer with the dramatis personae and his deputy on the lawns of his official residence, he indicates that the policeman was doing his duty. He validates a process that had astonished him. The policeman is vindicated. He got to have beer with the president of his country for having stuck to his checklist, if not his guns. That is a big pat on his back for following the process. And the police force in America, now knows, there could be a good incentive in scrupulously following the process.<br />Similarly, the staff of Continental Airlines and Newark Airport will be appreciated for doing their duty, without letting human elements like thought, courtesy and diplomacy disturbing the process flow. They might actually be penalized if they are caught overlooking the process flow. They will not make compromises in the process for anyone, when they know that changing the process flow might lead to punishment. They will proudly declare that their senators and a former vice-president of the country have had to go through special checks at their airports. They do not see anything wrong with the process. Sadly, their lawmakers also do not see that deifying process is turning it into a Frankenstein’s monster. It is targeting as indiscriminately as any unthinking but powerful monster will.<br />A process cannot think for itself. And the people who are supposed to think for it have declared it their superior. They cannot recall it without admitting serious system failures. An acceptance of failure will raise an expectation of repair. Instead of admitting failure and promising repairs, they will let faulty processes go out of control. Moreover, they would like everyone to join them in calling their processes fool-proof. They will pour beer over the chinks in the process, as had happened in the Harvard incident. What kind of fool-proof process lets a policeman expect deference for his uniform but will not allow an African-American scholar to react sensitively to being subjected to a police interrogation for forcing open the door to his residence? There is an obvious imbalance in this process. If there is scope for human error in a process, as this one has, is it fool-proof?<br />It isn’t. And there are two ways to correct this. Either work real hard to make all processes fool-proof or encourage people to use processes intelligently. Show them that processes are frameworks that should guide instances of action. That every action need not have an analogy in the process-flow chart. That every instance that does not fit in a slot in a process flow chart needs to be subjected to more processes.<br />The process flow chart should be a grammar book not a compendium of every possible sentence in a language!Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-47915260764674888922009-07-14T12:41:00.002+05:302009-07-14T12:52:06.211+05:30What Women Wear<p align="justify"><br />One of the topics that holds the potential to incite violent arguments among the most sanguine group of people is what women should or should not wear. Everyone – men, women, children – has an opinion on this issue. If these opinions are made public, especially by powerful men, they affect large numbers of women across class, caste, race and ethnic barriers. Recently, the French president’s personal opinion about a significant item of a Muslim woman’s attire has stirred a hornet’s nest. Well, Mr. Sarkozy better watch out for the juggernaut that will come rolling soon enough!<br />Nothing annoys a people more than being told by an outsider that their women should or should not wear some form of dress. I don’t know about other women but I know that nothing annoys me more than being told how to dress. I believe that one of the greatest joys of being a woman is that I have the privilege of choosing to drape myself in a range of dresses that begin with the saree and end with the short skirt. Also, being an Indian, the plethora of colours in our markets increases variety in my closet. I have wilfully resisted being influenced by anyone about my choice of clothing. The only factor that has governed my choice was my mood / state of mind. I have hardly paid heed to the unsolicited fashion advice, never allowed my peers to pressure me into choosing one form of dress over another and barely worried about the opinion of community leaders on my clothes.<br />While experimenting with my personal style, I have driven a gay poet to writing a poem about my sartorial choices, exasperated my mother with a long drawn battle over the issue, driven my dad into repeating the Hindi proverb ap ruchi khana aur per ruchi pehenna countless times, got teased by my siblings, aggressively defended my choice of dress with my extended family and survived disapproving looks from my husband’s extended family. However, I’m yet to control my temper when I hear someone, especially a man, tell me or any other woman in the world what a woman should or should not wear.<br />I understand that people set a lot of store by clothes as representative of their cultural leanings, their lifestyle and their social moorings. However, I am annoyed by the fact that the responsibility of representation is laid squarely on the shoulders of the women of their community. This role of representing culture through clothes is one of the last vestiges of cultures where women were seen but not heard. It is absurd to expect articulate and efficient women to use clothes to represent themselves or their affiliations. Not only are they insulted by being reduced to mannequins of culture but injury is also inflicted upon them by snatching away their agency.<br />I believe the right to choose her dress is a fundamental right of a woman. She has the sole right to decide whether she wishes to dress according to the rules periodically given out by the world of fashion or she wishes to please her family, friends, employers, workmates, community by representing them through her sartorial choices or she dresses for her comfort. This ought to be as much a right as the right to free speech and the right to knowledge. Most of my peers would like to believe that all of them enjoy all the three rights I mentioned above. I would like to sit with each one of them and show them the various ways in which families, friends, communities, teams, societies and states curtail each of these rights.<br />At present, I’ll deal with the right to choose one’s dress and try to show the ways it gets curtailed. If we begin at home, off the cuff, I can present a list of half a dozen sets of people who believe they have a right to state their opinion: spouse, children, parents, siblings, parents-in-law and grandparents. The minute she steps out many other players join the game. Friends will declare what is in and what is out of style and will gently nudge her to dress appropriately for each occasion. Communities will judge her abilities as a member of their group, as a member of society and even as a member of her family by interpreting her style in clothes. She is supposed to follow dozens of overt and tacit dress codes at work. She is expected to follow the diktats of her religion and every once in a while she expected to wear her ‘traditional’ costume to represent her home state or country at some forum.<br />If a woman sets out to fight with each set of people to reserve her sartorial choice for herself, she will be embarking on a task that will be as unending and exhausting as that of Sisyphus. So, most women choose to turn a deaf ear to the people who are imposing dress codes on them and wear whatever they want to. That is definitely the pragmatic way to handle such interference but is it helping in sending the message that women ought not to be judged for how they look?<br />Should women allow the ancient role of representatives of culture to be foisted upon them? Shouldn’t they claim agency in this area too?<br /><br /><br /> </p>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-26062227123711403532009-06-12T23:06:00.003+05:302010-06-24T11:31:34.891+05:30Staging a Walk-OutHans Andersen “Emperor’s New Clothes” has been twirling in my brain for the past few days. An incident at a wedding in the family sparked recollections of this tale that I had last read more than a decade ago.<br />
The details of Andersen’s tale are a bit fuzzy in my head but I seem to distinctly recollect that the child in the tale is mentioned just as a child – name, gender, accurate age was not specified – in one version and in another one the child is a five year old called Gloria. I also remember that I had then preferred the previous version to the latter one. As a researcher of childhood I needed a peg -- some cliché, stereotype or depiction that would give me a ‘quintessential’ dimension of childhood. And in the previous version of the tale, this child whom I chose to see as the Universal Child, in my naivety, represented the brutal honesty that grownups like to associate with childhood.<br />
Many books, many libraries, many discussions and many observations later, I now know that ‘scholastic’ assumptions about childhood and children are just about as harmful to them as market driven ones are. I try my best to steer clear of generalizations about childhood and ecstatic reactions to children’s ‘unusual’ behavior. Some incidents, however, lead me to the brink of glorifying some dimension of childhood.<br />
I was playing with a five year old niece, during a wedding in the family, when we were informed that we were missing out on witnessing an important ritual in the elaborate Hindu wedding. We were also told that we ought to postpone our game and watch the rituals because both of us had travelled quite a distance to be there; she had come from the US and I had gone from Mumbai. I was sufficiently admonished and she was equally curious. We made a dash for it. At the scene of action, I tried holding her aloft so that she gets a ringside view of the ritual. Soon I had to confess that I might break my back. Promptly she stepped down and we hunted out a corner from where we could see the proceedings in minute detail. The ritual we were witnessing involves the bridegroom walking out of the wedding, accessorized as a sanyasi, and declaring that he cannot turn into a householder while his calling is that of a monk. The bride’s brother is sent to coax the bridegroom back to the altar. The rituals deem that this mission ought to turn successful, in each case, by merely offering the groom some jaggery. Knowing that most guys of our generation don’t quite like eating raw jaggery, the bride’s party keeps some chocolate handy to help the proceedings along.<br />
Now my little friend could not make head or tail of the proceedings. I clarified them as briefly as possible; that the bridegroom is scared to get married and the other chap in the scene will give him a chocolate to make him come back to the altar. She had two quick queries: “Does he get to eat the chocolate?” and was suitably impressed by the assertive from me and followed it with, “So, they are not putting up a show?”. Now, the second one was difficult to react to. “Of course, they are!” ought to have been my answer but sudden aid from the part of my brain that stores information made me hold my horses. I remembered the catastrophe that ensued the child’s declaration that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes in Andersen’s tale. To avoid the immediate catastrophe of my little Indian-American friend publicly calling an Indian ritual a show upon my confirming her hunch, I quietly took the cowardly grownup route out of the situation by telling her, “No, that was not a show; that is how one gets married”. My spirits sank at my cowardice but were instantly revived when the child turned to me and planted a kiss on my cheek and ran away to play with people nearer her age.Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-22402462046388695212009-05-13T19:24:00.004+05:302009-05-13T21:52:40.847+05:30A few observations, mine and those of others, triggered this one. Recently, we travelled long distances by train. In one leg of our journey, we had two students and a young couple with a baby for our travel companions. For about 3 hours after the train started, we ignored each other and were engrossed in settling down for a 19 hour haul. Just as the train attendants started bustling around with pre-dinner arrangements, the baby started demanding his dinner. The mother looked around, tried to divert the child, brought out a milk bottle which the baby rejected. It was clear the baby needed to be breast-fed. The mother started getting distinctly uncomfortable at the idea of feeding her child sans privacy. All this while, the father was engrossed with the travails of the three losers in Five Point Someone. When she saw that there was no way out, the mother turned towards the window, her back to her co-travellers and went about feeding her baby. Now, our other co-travellers, the two students, got uncomfortable. They self-consciously looked away, started exchanging inanities with each other and began making poor jokes at each others' expense. Their discomfort reminded me of an episode of Friends, in which Ross tries, with little success, to make Joey and Chandler realise that Carol feeding Ben was the most natural thing in the world and that they need not get embarassed. It also reminded me of another such incident I had witnessed during an earlier journey. In the latter case, the husband had taken out a large bedsheet and, with some ingenuity, created a tent around his wife and child each time the mother had to feed the baby. As the tent-making scene unfolded in front of me, my mind dwelt on the significant change in perceptions over the years. Throughout my childhood and adolscence I had seen countless instances of women breast-feeding their babies in public places without getting self-conscious. And I had never witnessed any discomfort among the 'onlookers' in such situations. The only real onlooker would be the odd curious child.<br />Obviously, the general perception towards breast feeding has changed. As a public activity, it generates discomfort. Whereas it is being continuously promoted by medical professionals, maternity literature, health-workers and activists. The message to new mothers is that babies ought to be breast-fed. Breast-feeding enhances the physical development of the child considerably; at the same time it nourishes the budding filial bond. Well, if mothers are to feed their children, then one of two things needs to be addressed quite urgently. Either there should be well-organised campaigns to curb the new-fangled discomfort towards this activity, or there should be comfortable private spaces within public spaces that mothers can retire to when they need to feed their babies. While the need for the former suggestion has not been felt acutely enough by the various bodies that run public campaigns, the latter is not a new concept. Feeding rooms have been around, at least in theory. I have never seen one. And I'd heard of only one in our country, until recently. I am told that there is a very comfortable feeding room at Goa airport. Last week, I saw another being as one of the USPs of the latest shopping mall in our area. Well, if feeding mothers are being offered this facility at a shopping mall, then our railway authorities should definitely think of sparing some space in long-distance trains.<br />I know I am being unrealistic in my hopes. Historically, we have celebrated matrutva and ma-ki-mamta through popular media and literature. In such fora, the demigod-mother is glorying in her matrutva and indulging in her mamta within the confines of her household. When mothers started joining the workforce, in significant numbers, they brought their babies and motherhood along with them into the public sphere. These women multi-tasked between their maternal and professional duties. Somewhere down the line, women started identifying more with their professional rather than their biological selves. While it is beyond the scope of a blog post to discuss the pros and cons of this change, it has definitely made women more conscious of their bodies. Motherhood has become more complex. Complex, and a lot more uncomfortable, despite the increase in the overall comfort levels of a large chunk of human population. If you are tempted to contest this, recollect your reaction when you saw a pregnant woman in a local train compartment or bus. I remember one of my students exclaimed in awe, "How brave! She travels in these crowded trains!" when a woman in her final trimester made her way into a crowded ladies first class. In true Mumbaiyya style, I deadpanned, "What choice does she have?" <br />Here are some of the alternatives to crowded trains that Mumbai offers pregnant professionals:<br />1. Take as much maternity leave as possible. If none is sanctioned, quit your job.<br />2. Fork out half your salary to commute by cab.<br />3. Start for work a few hours before your usual time and take only less crowded public transport.<br />4. Negotiate work timings to avoid rush hour traffic.<br />5. Find work-from-home jobs.<br />6. Quit your current job and find one nearer home.<br />I must admit, I spent the last 30 mins listing these half a dozen ‘alternatives’. Do they sound feasible? Frankly, these are not real options for most women. So, here is another aspect of mothering in urban India that requires urgent attention.Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-72648264814168170052009-03-31T19:34:00.003+05:302009-03-31T22:21:18.593+05:30Marching Forth -- Are We?Today is the last day of March and I waited 3 weeks to watch another commercial 'festival' unfold. Actually, the drama went on for 4 weeks, in spurts and breaks; with the peaks scheduled around weekends. You see, one needs some time to indulge in the favourite pastime of the globalised new world -- hanging around in shopping malls and checking out 'deals' during sales. And there were sales galore; all of them to appease one half of humanity that has an international day reserved for them. Every shop worth the neon lights that illuminate its signboard had large sign announcing gleefully SALE and all these sales were for women to shop and celebrate International Women's Day. The original political beginning of this day, marked to remind people of societal committment towards improving the lives of the women of the world, is completely forgotten. It has become just another celebration of spending power, akin to those hundreds of 'days' that keep the registers clanging at the thousands of Archies and Hallmark franchisees around the world.<br />The list of services offered at disocunted rates for women to celebrate their womanhood ranged from spa treatments to pedicures to getting dental plaque removed! The range of goodies women could grab at sales stretched from diamonds to underwear! And the gamut of experiences open to the adventurous included yachting and flying! The conventional lead story about the 'development' of women, however, made itself conspicuous by its absence. Every year, on reading that cursory gesture towards women by the media, I would ask myself whether any real stock taking happened around early March to note a significant improvement in the lives of women around the world.<br />Undeniably, we have more choices in terms of careers than our grandmothers did. Also, we exercise our right to choose more often than our mothers did, be it about our careers or our personal lives. But does that mean we have more real choices to make our lives more comfortable? Here are a couple of scenes from the lives of more than 90% of Mumbai's women:<br /><strong>Scene 1</strong>: A women manages to rush out of her flat, after finishing all the morning chores of cooking and packing lunchboxes for herself and her family, about 15 mins before the scheduled departure of her local train to work. She knows it takes about 5 mins to reach the station if she takes an autorickshaw. A slight drizzle starts while she is on her way to the nearest autorickshaw stand. To her dismay she finds that no autorickshaw driver will oblige her by driving such a short distance during rush hour on a rainy morning. She alternates between jogging and trotting to the station and manages to reach nearly 3 mins before the train is scheduled to pull in and realises that the train is going to be late that day. She is not sure if she should be relieved that she gets time to catch her breath or should be exasperated at the delay. As the seconds tick by she notices that the crowd at the station is swelling. The people who usually take the next train are already on the platform. The train pulls in and this crowd of women rush towards it to get in. The regulars as well as the newcomers. She resents the presence of these 'extra' passengers. She cannot empathise with their fear of getting delayed in case their regular train too gets delayed. She does not curb her impulse to snap at them and elbow her way into the compartment. Afterall, she has more of a right to be there than those 'newcomers'.<br /><strong>Scene 2: </strong>It is a bright october morning in Mumbai. The weather is on its best behaviour. A young woman walks smartly into the station and takes her regular position on the platform, in front of the pole marked with red and yellow diagonal stripes to indicate the place the first class compartment will be when the local train pulls into the station. She is smartly dressed and well made up. Looking as cool as the proverbial cucumber she digs into her extra large tote and fishes out earphones that connect to some kind of a music player. She seems oblivious to the bustling sweaty crowds around her. She glances disdainfully at young men eyeing her and blocks herself with the help of her earphones from the chatter of the mob of college girls around her. She dislikes them. She has a reason. They crowd into the already miniscule ladies first class and bunch up in gossiping groups till the terminus while they pay one third the amount she does to earn the dubious privilege of travelling in a first class compartment. <em>It </em>is a dubious privelege for it entails being cooped inside a compartment that is a quarter of the size of a regular train compartment with close to 200 women at any given point in the journey for the next half an hour or so. While she prefers the proximity of perfumed bodies to the sweaty bustle of the larger ladies general compartment, she has to admit that she thanks her stars each time she gets out of her first class compartment in one piece. Each time she feels claustrophobic trapped in the sea of strange human bodies, she mentally ticks off the advantages of a first class pass, the advantages of the local train and the advantages of living in Mumbai and holds her breath till she can jostle her way out at her stop and get some air, even if polluted with particulate matter, on the crowded streets outside the train station.<br /><br />These two scenarios are not at all extraordinary or exaggerated. These are two glimpses of the real experiences of almost all Mumbai women on their way to work, every day of their lives. Undeniably, the Mumbai local train grind is not gender specific. And any Mumbai man who has ever travelled by either of the two offered classes of travel by Mumbai locals will rightly point out that the ladies specific comaprtment trains are less crowded than the ones the men struggle through every day of their lives. Once again true. However, most men do not need to calculate every minute of the morning hours to be able to hurry out of the house just in time to catch their trains. They mostly do not worry about facing a frowning domestic help if the fridge is not well stocked with vegetables or bother about saving time by using the commute to cut vegetables. While they share the women's taxing experience of the dreaded commute, most of them do not juggle with household chores during the few waking hours at home. In such a context, the real choice for a Mumbai woman is not choose between being a housewife and a mortal avatar of the multi-limbed Durga.<br />Mumbai women reel out comforting information about the 'social life' in local trains: train friendships, long gossip sessions, learning skills such as knitting, saving time at home by cutting vegetables during their commute and, the best of all, buying trinkets at unbelievably unMumbai prices. I can vouch for just the last one. I have done that, in the ladies general compartment at non-rush hours. They choose to block out memories of the painful elbow digs at various parts of their bodies, the rude abuses hauled at them, the risky jump onto moving trains and the frequent fights for space to stand inside the compartment. No one, of course, wants to think of the periodic tragic falls from local trains that newbie commuters suffer from, some times fatally. For if they thought of all these things they would be left with only one choice -- sitting at home. And the only acknowledgement the railway authorities occassionally make of the increasing number of women commuters is an arbitrary move of declaring a couple of compartments as reserved for women and requesting the male passengers not to enter them.<br />The first class ladies comaprtment, which is supposed to be an improvement over the general one, has only the range of perfumes to recommend for itself! The much-touted camaraderie of the ladies general compartment is non-existent. Rudeness and abuses manifest themselves in more 'sophisticated' forms and the density of people is much worse than the other kind of ladies compartment. This particular type of compartment was designed and launched about a hundred years ago. Probably it <em>was</em> a luxury then. I assume all the career women a hundred years ago in Mumbai got to sit during their commute to work if they could afford the first class pass. Isn't it time the concerned authorities woke up to the fact that the number of women who can and do commute to work by the first class compartment has increased by a thousand fold in these hundred years? Wouldn't the women of Mumbai appreciate such much-needed concern more than crazy discounts to buy diamonds that they can ill afford during a recession?Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-2238876919461275842008-11-06T18:18:00.000+05:302008-11-06T18:28:38.801+05:30It is a good time for writing the future. A day when history redeems itself is definitely a good day to begin creating a new world. America has begun taking a few baby steps towards undoing historical wrongs by electing its first multi-ethnic president. I get the same feeling I did when Deep Blue won a chess match against the then Grand Master. There were ways and ways you could take that outcome. You could see it as the triumph of machine over man or, more optimistically, as the edge collective brains got over one brain. Much has changed from then to now. Even the preparations for a game of chess, at that level, are no longer a single brain trying to outdo itself. Now, it is a team trying to outdo its previous execution.<br />While these changes were happening in sports and other arenas that touch my life only via the media, we cannot vouchsafe that many changes were happening in American foreign policy. The first American election followed carefully by me was the one that put Bill Clinton in the most coveted seat in the US. And I was a teenager in a small town in Andhra, a town that had gone to sleep sometime during the Independence Struggle and was shaken out of its slumber by the mighty roar of globalization. In one such somnolent household in that town, two teenagers would get permission to watch TV beyond 9.30 pm every Thursday, to see an “informative” program called The World This Week, or as it became more popular TWTW– probably the first TV serial to be called by a diminutive. The suave Pronoy Roy would track Clinton’s progress every week. We were ecstatic when Clinton won. We would have been hard pressed to give a reason for the euphoria. We now joke that he won our admiration over his rival probably due to his looks. Anyway, it didn’t make much of a difference to India. At least a young Indian cannot give an intelligent summary of the Indo-US relations through the Clinton years. Then, Clinton had sex (at least in the new age definition of the word, if not his own) with a girl who was probably a couple of years older than I was then and nearly lost his spot in the White House as well as his home. The younger Bush with an already dubious nickname got in there after an appallingly messy election. My jaw dropped at what was possible at the mast ship of the new world. And my American acquaintance’s jaw dropped at my knowledge of their election system. I got it clamped back by telling her I did political science as one of my main subjects for my bachelor’s degree but started contemplating on the reasons behind our being a lot more informed about them than they are about us. Is this a subaltern thing? Very soon, 9/11 proved the pointlessness of being informed about their ways. This time around I decided to chill through probably the longest campaign in American electoral history. Believe me, Indians saw YouTube videos of the Democratic nomination debate in June 2007! I, on the contrary, started discussing the surprising and controversial but momentous nomination of a woman to head our country. That debate sort of fizzled out as all India debates tend to among globalised Indian youth and I, in my pig-headed way, decided to ignore this ‘history-making’ in the US of A. <br />I was pleasantly surprised that Obama did win, (yes, after 2000 I knew all that could go wrong and the newspapers informed me about the added woes the Obama camp faced). Being utterly jobless at the moment, I spent the most productive hours of the day lolling in bed, nursing a backache and reading everything the world knows yet about Barack Obama. That is not the best way to begin a day for any young person in the developing world. And surely not the way to creating a new future for oneself!<br />Obama’s rise from a black child in a completely white Texan family to waving as the president-elect of the largest democracy of the world with his unabashedly African-American family joining him on the podium is very inspiring. It gets people dreaming. We have Indians talking about the first Dalit prime minister. And also speculating on who that could be. Of course, at such moments of optimism we don’t want to talk about how we have already had a Dalit head of state who was just as good or as bad as any other head of state our country has had in the past 58 years! We still have primary school teachers painting caste names on plates to ensure that they do not commit the ‘sin’ of serving the free mid-day meal in government schools to children from upper caste families in plates ‘contaminated’ by children from lower class families. We still have mothers in upper caste household giving their daughters a dose of untouchablity for three days every month when the daughter goes through the physiological process of menstruation. And we still get Bookers for writing about dire poverty, impossible dreams and immoral means of climbing barely two rungs of the ladder: from poor to upper middle class. Munna alias Balram Halwai can give himself the new name of Ashok Sharma but his being murdered is not going to give rise to the extinction of an entire family. Outsourcing can get him a few cars and some designer clothes but will never make him the Stork.<br />Yes, I am talking about The White Tiger. I read a pirated copy picked up by my brother from the footpaths at Fort. Yes, I am against piracy and yes, I don’t buy pirated copies of books. People gift them to me and I accept gifts of books. Despite being part of the liberalized economy, albeit indirectly, with a husband who is an alumnus of both the Mecca and Medina of India’s role in globalization, I am, at heart, a liberal arts student who is proverbially short of cash. I tried participating directly in the new economy. About two and a half years back I got myself a job in a business processes outsourcing company. One of the best employers in the world, I was constantly reminded; while I was working for it and for six months after I had said my final goodbyes to my colleagues and bosses there. People were appalled when I called it quits there and I managed to save myself from being called a freak by taking support from a rather strange quarter – patriarchy. I suddenly transformed into the good old Indian woman by quitting a lucrative job to be with my husband. People swallowed that without a glitch while they would have choked if I had stated the real reason – sheer boredom at being treated as a processor rather than a person. And that job is one of those jobs that were heralded as the future of the country, nearly a decade back.<br />Recently, a few Indian academics of the 21st century got together to write the future. Or that is what they called their conference. Although my future is at its foggiest best at the moment, I wish I was there to listen to their speculations and discussions rather than be homebound with my bad back. Well, the bad back is the pound of flesh the liberalized economy extracted from me. What with bad postures using oh-so-convenient gadgets like laptops! Technology may grow in leaps and bounds and there could be as many Deep Blues as one may care to have but technology will never beat the human ability to dream. The MS Word program on my computer, the 2007 version , proved that to me. MS Word still does not recognize the spelling of either the first or the last name of the president-elect of the United States of America! There Obama, your work is cut out! You’ve got to get them to put your name in their mobile dictionaries! You are the White Tiger who has to prove that they are not anomalous but are variants. And my prayer for you is that you will do it with more morals than the fictional White Tiger.Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-6937712216862347882008-07-07T11:14:00.000+05:302008-07-07T11:18:08.631+05:30Every now and then a scene from my childhood flashes across my mind – that of my best friend running away from an absorbing game to watch TV.<br />A technological invasion took place in my life when I was 9 years old. Suddenly, we had a TV station in our small town. TV became the new symbol of middle class affluence. Of course, the rich and a small portion of the middle-class people who had newly moved in to town from the metropolitan cities already had TV in their sitting rooms. These were large, ugly and mostly useless showpieces. During the Benson & Hedges Cricket Series, I remember, entire households spent hours together trying to attract some transmission rays with the help of quaint devices called boosters attached to the TV antennae. The antennae were also gently nudged in all kinds of direction to chance upon the appropriate angle for a clearer telecast.<br /> The very first thing I saw on TV was Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s funeral. This took place a few months before TVs started mushrooming in our town. The entire colony gathered in the only house that had a TV. The funeral of the nation’s prime minister was the first funeral that was broadcast live on national television.<br />It was almost a party for the children of our colony. All normality was suspended. No nagging about homework, no enforced afternoon-naps. We were all sitting on a carpet in a friend’s house, waiting excitedly for the show to begin. And wonder of wonders! Our mothers were sitting on chairs and sofas behind us! The transmission began. A grim but attractive looking young woman made an announcement. And all of us – sitting in that room in a government colony in Maharashtra went on a virtual tour of Shantivan in Delhi! The wonder of it all! Were those VIPs really crying? Why was Yaseer Arafat – the man whose name my dad uttered with respect – hiding his face behind a temporary sunshade fashioned from a programme-card? Why was Sonia Gandhi – then known only as Mrs. Gandhi’s Italian daughter-in-law – wearing black glasses? Was it because foreigners do not weep openly, as we Indians do? And were they actually using logs of sandalwood for the funeral pyre?! These were some of the questions whirling around in my head. It was all so new; so fascinating! There was nothing sad or grim about this funeral. Not until I happened to glance at a friend’s mother and noticed that tears were streaming down her cheeks. I was puzzled by her grief. Now I realize that TV had actually transported her to Shantivan while I was just peeking at it through the window called TV.<br /> TV has always been and still is that for me – a window that I switch on once in a while; especially when I am feeling too lazy for any other kind of diversion. It never managed to reveal its magical powers to me. My best friend was enchanted by the magic of TV. Right in the middle of a very exciting contest of hop-scotch or during our regular badminton sessions she would request an obliging elder to tell her the time by their watch. If it was a Tuesday and it was 6.15 p.m then off she would run to watch ‘Phool khile hain gulshan gulshan’. Never understood the fascination! Not even after watching the programme myself. What was so fascinating about a simpering woman coaxing some ‘celebrity’ from the film world into ‘revealing’ his ‘secrets’? And why did that become more fascinating for my friend than playing with me? After TV came into our lives, all our elaborate Saturday morning and Sunday morning games came to a standstill. Saturday and Sunday became TV days. From being my favourite days of the week they slowly became the worst days of the week. I thought my friend and all the TV watching children had gone MAD. I was sure grown ups had not got carried away. I was in for a rude shock! TV had not only captivated children but also grown ups. My parents’ friends came over for Sunday lunch and post-lunch one of the guests wondered whether we see the Sunday afternoon movie on TV! My dad, playing the perfect host he likes to be, switched on the TV. And for the next three hours this family – who had supposedly paid us a social visit – were sitting on our sofa and focusing on a subtitled Assamese movie. My brothers and I were wasting a precious Sunday putting on our best behaviour and ‘proper’ clothes. Weren’t those grownups supposed to talk? Weren’t they supposed toss a few questions at us and then send their children to play with us? How could they do this to our Sunday? Why did they have to ‘visit’ us if watching TV was all that they wanted o do? That meant some grownups had also gone MAD! TV had driven so many people crazy.<br /> It took me a good deal of time and some well-made TV programs to give TV a chance. I allow it to ‘waste’ my time sometimes and enjoy watching it once in a while. Although I refuse to spend good money on buying one, yes I conceded, I have accepted it as a permanent prop of modern life but I wince at the idea of playing second fiddle to TV for someone’s attention. I still fail to understand the ‘modern’ impulse to switch on the TV since the remote was handy while I am talking to that person. Somehow I cannot the swallow the excuse of the remote or understand the need for background noise as accompaniment to conversation. My companion switching on the TV indicates a clear preference to me. Clearly, the TV or the premium on TV’s ability to entertain is greater than the conversation. However, if I am convinced switching it on is habitual then I conclude that my battle against this technological invasion is still on. Even after two decades neither of us seems ready for a truce.Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-51905683328096798492008-07-01T13:41:00.000+05:302008-07-03T20:37:04.659+05:30<p>All Mumbaikars please stop reading rightaway. I don't intend to offend people I share geographical space with.</p><br /><p>Having put that disclaimer in place, I can go on to show how I am bemused by this city. I don't mean the geography of the place. That is pretty clear to me. When I landed in this place, about a year back, I thought it was a maze; until my husband brought out the map and proved that it was just three horizontal columns, separated by two highways, and governed by three railway lines. Then I took up a job, started commuting by local trains, fell off one of these trains onto a station platform, faced total indifference at the said station for my clumsy fall, overheard personal stuff from strangers' lives on some of these trains (stuff that could seriously fuel my writerly ambitions), and naively concluded that these trains run this city. </p><br /><p>Now, those kind of simplistic conclusions do no good to my credentials as a student of humanities and social sciences. So, I kept my 'conclusions' to myself and pontificated further. I tried exploring the common myth that it is money that runs the show out here. And there is enough dope to get that myth going. One look at the city-specific pages in any given day's newpaper would prove that -- at least one story on a murder within a family for the ownership of a flat, and surely a couple more on legal wranglings among siblings. Other than that, talk to any local and the sentiment, "there's money in Mumbai", is sure to come out in whichever dialect of English or Hindi that person is comfortable using.</p><br /><p>As an aside, Mumbai has some amazing amount of ghettoisation, even in the way the locals express themselves. Other than the fact that people of the same language group tend to flock together, they evolve their very own version of Mumbaiyya Hindi and English! I suppose I will write about that some other time. </p><br /><p>Anyway, slowly I was gravitating towards buying into that money theory. Come to think of it every other day the media calls it the "Economic Capital of the Country". Today's unexpected holiday in the middle of the week gave me time to do a rethink. Here's why:</p><br /><p align="justify">It was raining last night and there was nothing remarkable about a rainy June night in a coastal city of a mostly tropical country. And, we retired for the night at half past midnight. Nothing remarkable about that again. The first unusual thing was that our doorbell didn't anounce the arrival of our maid at 7 am. Well, that being our alarm, we overslept. The husband's subconscious must have warned him for he shot out of bed at 8 am and shouted out that we are terribly late. So, we gave up our morning tea and breakfast and got ready to head to work. I was stepping into my shoes when the husband called from the car to warn me of the situation outside. All roads were flooded, there were very few autorickshaws and nearly no taxis on the road, and there were rumours that the local train might not ply for the day. He asked me to take a call on whether I'd like to risk my life to go to work; with broad hints, of course, that taking a risk would be foolhardy. Considering the students are on vacation and I sit and read all day long in the faculty room, that too in solitary splendour when my more experienced colleagues are busy with weighty administrative matters, I decided to give the adventurous ride to work a miss. I slept some more, read the paper a tad too thorougly and supplemented the standard maid-cooked meal with a chutney. The maid, by the way, showed up a little before noon to compensate for the morning's leave of absence; being the true blue professional Mumbai bai she is! And, I also got to catch up with my local friends who called in to enquire if we were safe at home. They, of course knowing how the city works, wisely decided to not venture out. The husband also reported from his post at work that there were about 3 people at work. Naturally the workaholics, including him, would not let mere Nature deter them from their workstations! But then it occurred to me that Nature did manage to bring the economic capital of the country to a standstill. The trains had to be stopped. Buses were not expected to ply on flooded roads and people were not expected to report to work in such conditions. Moreover, the ones who did report to work were requested to head back home so that the companies would not be held responsible for any eventualities. The brave ones who ventured out did so without the customary lunchbox in their bags, what with bais dealing with flooded homes, and these brave souls had no clue about the means of transport back home.</p><br /><p align="justify">All the gossipy stayed-at-home types reminisced about 26th July 2006, some of them about stories of rare courage, some others about resilience and a few about melodramatic tragedies. Some other busy souls, stopped by natural conditions, busied themselves at home and got a lot of work done at home. Neighbours used the unexpected holiday to catch up on news about each other instead of the customary nod while handing the trashbag to the janitor. </p><br /><p align="justify">Suddenly, Mumbai looked very much like a sleepy small town in coastal Andhra to me. And all this because it rained heavily on one night! </p><br /><p align="justify">I still have not figured out what makes Mumbai go but I have sure figured out what makes it stop in its tracks! Nature does!</p><br /><p align="justify">PS: I now think the sages were wise to consider Nature the almighty!</p>Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17725419.post-41501184846698440532008-02-27T20:30:00.000+05:302008-02-27T20:31:49.780+05:30There I was – an atheist in a temple. By choice.<br />It was an unusually cold Mumbai morning and I had to be present at our organisation’s gathering marking the 59th anniversary of our nation declaring its sovereignty to the world. It turned out to be a day of learning; in more ways than one.<br />After the collective trip down memory lane and the reaffirmation of our patriotic credentials, our rendering of our National Anthem that surely made poor Gurudev turn in the proverbial grave, we had a wonderful Mumbai morning all to ourselves. Believe me that is an unheard of treat in Mumbai. A full day of leisure!<br />We were miles from home, the weather was lovely and we had time on our hands! I talked my husband, another atheist, to walk into a nearby temple. I had no idea which deity was reigning those holy precincts. I was curious and my husband was game, so in we walked.<br />It was one of the cleanest and least noisy temples I have ever been in. Having been brought up a Hindu, I must’ve followed my parents or have been cajoled, coaxed, or forced by them into countless temples. This definitely was the cleanest.<br />The garba-griha was dedicated to a beautifully sculpted and bejeweled idol. So, it was a goddess. And a devotee’s hymn informed me that the idol was that of Kamakshi Devi. The sonorous voice, dripping devotion was singing, “Kamakshi Kamkoti Vasini…” Come to think of it the song or that line of the song is ridiculous. Well, the town Kamakoti is named after the goddess Kamakshi. The place acquired its name due to the legend that it is the abode of Devi Kamakshi on Earth. What does the hymn maker mean by telling the goddess that she resides in Kamakoti?<br />But of course, all this is an afterthought. At that time, the only thing we, a pair of atheists, did was listen to her, awestruck. Not only was she an amazing singer but also a true bhakta. After so many years of witnessing and participating in hundreds of religious rituals, I can safely say that I have never heard that kind of true devotion in anyone’s voice. At that moment, for that lady, there was just her expression of devotion and the Goddess. She was oblivious to all else.<br />The minute she had sung her hymn she switched into the normal mode of going through the right motions within a temple. This includes bowing in front of the deity, dipping one’s ring finger into bowls of kumkum and vibhuti and applying these to one’s forehead.<br />We followed her and her family out of the garbha-griha and saw them gather together for a photograph. She was a tourist! Not a regular at this temple! Who would have believed that? She was so comfortable in the sanctum sanctorum! She was not intimidated by the unfamiliarity of the surroundings or the new faces standing cheek by jowl. It was as if neither the strangers around her nor the unfamiliar surroundings mattered. All that counted was the Goddess and her devotion for the Goddess. It was like watching Pandit Ravi Shankar with his sitar. Or Guru Kelu Charan Mahapatra dancing. In those moments nothing exists for them except their emotion. They don’t perform. They transform into their emotion. So did this stranger in a kanjeevaram saree in a Mumbai temple become the hymn she sang.<br />It occurred to me that I go to concerts and recitals for this. To witness this transformation. Of a human being into an expression of emotion. To be there when someone experiences that slippery moment of being completely connected with one’s emotion.Ushahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14706092288384012069noreply@blogger.com2