Some Glimpses

Do Urban Young Women need Empowerment?

2011-03-15T23:35:00.000+05:30

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.

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.

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.

What’s with young people nowadays?

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”.

I will focus only on the contents of the debate that day and ignore my analysis of the form and structure of the presentations.

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.

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.

I mean, what is up with these young people?

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?

I got some of my answers that day, in the form of one of the participants. The 27^th 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’.

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^st century urban lives?

Identity Issues

2010-05-21T15:57:00.000+05:30

This post is seriously overdue.

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.

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:

1. Duty towards whom?

2. Duty for what?

3. Why should I not worry about the result (and in some cases the outcome) of my action?

4. If I do something how can I shrug off the responsibility of the results of my action?

5. Where does my rationality figure in all this?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So, Mr. Jindal which group do you identify with more? The urbane man or the jat?

Group Identity

2010-05-11T12:52:00.005+05:30

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.

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 "beaten path" 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:

Arjuna: How can I wage a war with my elders for a kingdom?

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.

Arjuna: But is my right greater than peace?

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.

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.

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.

Watch this space for on how group identities killed Nirupama Pathak and many more young girls in the recent past.

One more crash

2010-03-04T11:43:00.005+05:30

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 this 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.

Flamingoes and Food for Thought

2010-02-15T14:47:00.005+05:30

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 Anuradha to get over my inertia.

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 Adesh'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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Changes

2010-01-29T12:19:00.003+05:30

A 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!

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.

So, here's to a lot more writing and reading this year!

Hollow People

2009-12-08T10:41:00.003+05:30

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.

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!

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.

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 here 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.

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.

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?

Process Flow

2009-08-19T20:26:00.000+05:30

What 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?
There is one answer to all these questions – process flow.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
The process flow chart should be a grammar book not a compendium of every possible sentence in a language!

What Women Wear

2009-07-14T12:41:00.002+05:30

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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Should women allow the ancient role of representatives of culture to be foisted upon them? Shouldn’t they claim agency in this area too?

Staging a Walk-Out

2009-06-12T23:06:00.003+05:30

Hans 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

2009-05-13T19:24:00.004+05:30

A 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.
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.
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?"
Here are some of the alternatives to crowded trains that Mumbai offers pregnant professionals:
1. Take as much maternity leave as possible. If none is sanctioned, quit your job.
2. Fork out half your salary to commute by cab.
3. Start for work a few hours before your usual time and take only less crowded public transport.
4. Negotiate work timings to avoid rush hour traffic.
5. Find work-from-home jobs.
6. Quit your current job and find one nearer home.
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.

Marching Forth -- Are We?

2009-03-31T19:34:00.003+05:30

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.
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.
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:
Scene 1: 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'.
Scene 2: 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. It 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.

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.
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.
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 was 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?

2008-11-06T18:18:00.000+05:30

It 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.

2008-07-07T11:14:00.000+05:30

Every 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

2008-07-01T13:41:00.000+05:30

All Mumbaikars please stop reading rightaway. I don't intend to offend people I share geographical space with.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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!

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!

PS: I now think the sages were wise to consider Nature the almighty!

2008-02-27T20:30:00.000+05:30

There I was – an atheist in a temple. By choice.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.

2007-10-11T17:34:00.000+05:30

Errata: The movie that I wrote about in my previous blog entry is called Saraansh and not Sangharsh. The error is regretted.

I realised I made a mistake when I was reading a critical text this afternoon sitting on the very same bean bag I had mentioned in my previous blog. To take a break from reading, I looked at the ventillator and the name came to me.

There is a movie called Sangharsh too but I don't remember whether I have seen it and who is in it. I guess I'll get some info about it if I google it but then who cares? When you don't remember it, I guess, you didn't find it worth remembering.

This mistake however is a good case of Freudian slip. There is so much sangharsh in Bhatt's movie that I am not at all amazed that I remember that as the name of the movie.

By the way, I don't think I figured out, ever, why that movie was called Saaransh. This word loosely translates to the word 'essence' and in Hindi it is used most frequently in the phrase jeevan ka saaransh which can be replaced in English by the often heard, rather resigned, rhetorical question "Is this what life is about?" I remember one of my brothers, aged about 20 then, was hugely disappointed and visibly upset when a friend of the family, whom we were are all rather fond of, chose to call his newly built house Saaransh. Being a graduate student in a competitive English department then, I promptly wondered about intrepretation and misintrepretation but somehow my brother and I never got around to talking about that again.

In our Hindi speaking consciousness this word has a negative tinge if not a totally negative connotation. Just as most English speakers are uncomfortable with the word 'clever' becuase they promptly associate it with 'cunning' and not with 'intelligent'.

Now the question is, why did Mahesh Bhatt choose to give this title to this movie? Especially when the last shot is of the old couple sitting on a park-bench in soft sunlight and the pleasant cliche of their son's ashes turning into grass after all those grey and dark frames of a bleak corridor, ventillators and ceiling fans? Bhatt must've been a rather young man when he made this movie. I would say somewhere in his mid-30s. The question I'd like to ask Mr. Bhatt, if I ever meet him, would be this: Why call that movie Saaransh?

2007-10-04T18:15:00.000+05:30

Well yes, when all the regular hibernators must be preparing their cosy nooks to go into hibernation, I am coming out of hibernation! And you would think that I would have some earth-shatteringly significant announcement if I chose to come out of hibernation. Never fear! It is just me with my random observations about life in general and things in particular.

We have recently created a makeshift dining space in our new home. This is not only a dining space it doubles up as a pleasant space to sit around and chat or pontificate. On a rainy morning, when the weather was totally uninspiring for anything but whiling time away, I was sitting on my beanbag reading the capers of a boy who was created in England between the two World Wars. Now, however well written mischief is, you either have to be a mischievous child or have to be have been one to read William's doings with rapt attention. My eye wandered to the ventilator above the door. I was sure I had seen that ventilator before. I mean the same patter on glass as was set in that ventilator. No, not some time previously in the same house and no I don't mean deja vu. Having nothing better to do I let my thoughts wander toward the sighting of that very same pattern in a ventilator. Was it a photograph? Was it something on a screen? Well yes, it was on a small screen. In a flash, a la Bollywood, I knew where I had seen. In a Hindi movie of course. And not at all the typical Bollywood movie. This movie was made by Mahesh Bhatt and it launched one of the best actors in Bollywood - Anupam Kher. It was called Sangharsh and was an account of the crazy struggle of a retired schoolteacher trying to get the typically corrupt officials of some government enterprise to release the urn that contained the ashes of his son who was killed in an act of racist violence in the US. This movie was made before globalisation and before Indians migrated to the US in planeloads. And if you think that was enough to depress you, this movie also dwelt upon the power of politicians, ideals of youth, star-crossed lovers, right/desire of a woman to have a baby conceived out of wedlock and madness. Wow! Quite a list that! That is ten movies even for Vishal Bharadwaj!
I saw this movie on DD when the goras who we saw were the ones heading from the airport to the only two luxury hotels in our town and was not old enough to read about racism and the various theories and ideologies it generated. So, the movie left a huge impact. I think I can recall every frame if I set myself that exercise.
How is that my middle class home has the same ventilator glass that was there in a movie? Well, yes the movie was set in Bombay (it was Bombay then and not the relatively new Mumbai) and it was about a man who must have put in his life's savings to buy that flat. Also, I always suspected Mahesh Bhatt shot all his movies in actual homes and not on artificially created sets or hotel rooms. However, the uncanny resemblance was firmly ensconed in some back recess of my mind. And I started noticing ventilators in various houses. Most of them looked like mine!
So, if you are living in Bombay and you are not Amitabh Bachchan then you live in a flat, in a building, in a colony. Even you cannot pick either your flat or even your building among all the others for having some unique quality. If living in Delhi is like living in a sarkari colony, living in Mumbai is living in a sarkari colony minus the amenities.
For more on Mumbai, look at this space every once in a while!

2007-07-06T16:48:00.000+05:30

2007-06-29T17:35:00.000+05:30

The rains are at last here. And I thank my good sense in choosing this house that is "inconveniently located" "far away from all the action" "at the other end of the world" each time I sit on my little coir charpoy reclining against a pillar on my porch and watch the rain. Well, this is not another one of those bored bloggers writing about the wonderfully welcome rains. I have never been a huge fan of monsoon. Though, I am must admit that the two essays that made my English and Hindi teachers take me seriously were about the first day of monsoon. I have absolutely no recollection of that legendary first day of monsoon that made me a favourite with my language teachers and gently drifted me to English studies. A good guess though would be that I was sitting on my bed engrossed in an Enid Blyton or a Nancy Drew oblivious to the rain.

The rains and the monsoon story were a precurssor to a narrative on the advantages of my glorious portico and to reveal that I was not a particularly boisterous child. Other than the fact that we rang out 2006 and rang in 2007 here and had other cosy little parties, my portico is my strategic position to notice the rare passerby in my isolated colony and theorise about the trends in society. While there is hardly a passerby there are a lot of children around. Most of them engrossed in their games and in their world of playground politics. They do not bother me. The ones who bother me are the pre-pubescent over-weight boys and girls trudging up the road, turning back and draggging their feet towards other lanes in the colony. They hardly look like they enjoy the excellent weather. It looks like this is a part of their homework (wonder if schools do give homework even now) or some such 'duty' that children regularly do in exchange for getting undisturbed playtime.

Last evening, I was lost in the tale of Husrev and Shirin that was woven into the tale of a 'modern' 16th century romance in Istanbul, sipping pipping hot tea, munching on a crunchy snack, enjoying the pre-rain breeze, reclining at my regular viewpoint on my porch. I look up to give my eyes a treat of looking at green rather than black print on white and what do I see -- child after child about 12-13 years of age, with various degrees of a weight problem, sadly walking around the colony. I promptly twisted my packet of crunchies into a temporary knot and lay the book aside. And began thinking, how does this happen? Is it home-based recreation? Or the supermarkets? Or ultra-busy parents? Or fat wallets? What is it?

Are we now going to have seminars, academic papers and eventually consumer goods to battle childhood obesity? Is this how contemporary economy sustains itself? Create a market then develop goods to keep the market going? Children have already been dragged into conspicuous consumerism not only as prime consumers but also as ambassadors for various products ranging from chocolates to life insurance. These lonely pre-teen 'walkers' are walking away all the junk they enjoyed eating. Their parents cannot deny they complicity, even if it was not deliberate, in letting these children harm themselves. At least now, these parents should do themselves and their children a favour by thinking carefully before pushing them out of the house on these lonely walks. Pre-teens do not forget these solitary walks and find it difficult to forgive the people who put them through it.

2007-06-06T18:16:00.000+05:30

Would you agree with me that Eliot is extremely quotable? Somehow, I have always noticed that 'scholars' usually throw Eliot at you and hold their breath expectantly. When they see that particular light of vague recollection in your eyes they start talking to you in their language. If they see blankness in your eye, you can bet they will start their patronising act and if you beat them at it with "oh, not old Eliot again" they will promptly recognise you as one of their kind.

I started with Eliot, at the risk of being labelled a 'scholar', as I remember lines only from Eliot; the exceptions being "...dances with the daffodils" and parts of "The Second Coming". So:

"There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;"

(By the way, I googled that to save myself from pedantic friends who will insist on correcting it to the coma in a comment for this post)

Now, why am I talking about faces and preparing faces? I am surrounded by faces, prepared ones. And I watch them go about their act for that one moment when that face slips or is undermined by a gesture. That one moment when Aishwaraya Rai tripped on her evening gown and went on to become Miss World rather than Miss Universe.
Where do they come from? These people? I often wonder. And how can they go about replacing one face for another seamlessly till they their bedroom lights are switched off I imagine. Would you call this an art or a skill? Whichever it is I am rather awed by it. Having not acquired here in all these years and having given up the hope to acquire it.

So, I go about collecting all those little moments when these faces fail. And I do not mean catacylsmic or even dramatic moments. Completely insignificant ones where a very tall, stern and thoroughly professional manager of a section of a multi-national company casually brushes his hand against a silly piece of office-decoration and a glamorous scholar tastes a new flavour of ice cream and can only utter a shocked "where do they make this?" and a scholastic friend crunches dry leaves under his cycle-tires while seriously discussing Matthew Arnold. These little moments remain in my mind. As I feel a little closer to these people then. That little slip where the face shifts enough to see a less grown-up face gladdens me.

2007-05-08T16:01:00.000+05:30

You get back from work. You are very tired. The idea of picking up a book or the newspaper is not very appealing. You switch on the TV, lie back on your beanbag and pick up the remote. Then, you begin surfing channels. Sounds familiar?

You must have noticed that I mentioned ‘surfing channels’ and not ‘watching TV’ in the previous sentence. That was deliberate. That was to reiterate that we do not watch TV anymore. And that is the wonder of TV. We do not need to put in any effort to feel relaxed.

The disjointed images and sounds that zip past us, like a slideshow put together by a whimsical child or an insane person, are similar to the disjointed images and sounds that we were participating in throughout the day. The one difference, and that is where the genius of it lies, is that we do not have to actively participate in the later disjointed slideshow. In the previous one, we have to keep checking if we are in the same page as the others around us. The ‘real world’ – the one where we work, talk, negotiate, meet, and interact – expects us to make sense of the disjointed images and sounds that come our way. The world of 500 TV channels, on the other hand, gives us the tool to simulate a familiar environment where we can simply sit back and relax.

When walk into your home and switch on the TV, what you are actually doing is changing the silence of the home environment to the one that you have just walked out. While you get the comfort of familiarity, you also get the advantage of passivity.

If you thought 500 TV channels were there to satisfy varied tastes, think again. Try to recollect the time you got back from work and actually watched an entire program on TV.

2007-03-12T11:56:00.000+05:30

I was looking out of the 10th floor of a high rise building. This action constituted my 'break' from work. That too a recommended break. My doc asked me to look at "a green patch of land" every hour or so. Well, not a very difficult thing to do, I presumed. Till I actually started looking for that elusive patch of greenery around my office.
I realised that I was enveloped by high rise structures or upcoming ones in every direction. Startlingly though, there was no building right next to ours. There was a discarded doll's house; whose lid had blown off.
Surreal as it may sound, my bird's eye view rested on a doll's house in the middle of a corporate jungle.
I have always been fascinated by doll's houses. I suspect the fascination arises from not having played with one. Doll's houses were under those category of toys that were part of the nurseries of kids in Enid Blyton books as far as my childhood pals and I were concerned. And the first time I saw a three dimensional one was, during my teens, in a Bollywood movie; where, ironically, it was used as a symbol of a slow erosion of childhood.
One of my fantasies, as a child, was to take off the lid of a doll's house and look down into it. Yes, children have incredibly high egos; dreams of godhood!
On this particular 'break', I saw this long-forgotten fantasy come true. There it was, a rather carefully built doll's house. Unlike a typical one though, there was a careful structure but almost no furniture. There was just broken down furniture, discarded clothes, outgrown toys and all those boxes and paper that a thrifty homemaker collects to be recycled as emergency packing material. I presume, when the ex-residents of this house left, their burdens were too heavy for thrift, planning and hoarding.
There, in the middle of a room, I saw a huge rangoli. Painstakingly and skillfully painted by some family member. As soon as I saw that rangoli, my brain stopped registering other details. I cannot recollect, for instance, if the walls were semi-destroyed or if the windows had shutters or not. The rangoli jarred me out of my cosy nook, where I was fulfilling my childhood fantasy. It flung me into a sudden empathy towards the erstwhile residents of that house. People who abandonded the familiarity and comfort of their home due to 'development'.
I cannot bring myself to take a 'break' now. For fear of the story the next 'green-patch-of-land' might tell me
PS: It is Ground Zero now, at the 'doll's house'. When I was hiding in my cubicle, the house was levelled down. I might find my 'green-patch-of-land', come rains. If the cranes don't get there before the rains.

2007-01-10T18:16:00.000+05:30

Happy new year and all that. And let's not talk about career prospects and such stuff. That is about the only thing I get to overhear each time people are ringing out the old and ringing in the new.
And no no. My disinterest is not out of dissatisfaction. I do not dislike what I do. Suits me fine actually. Standing right there behind that curtain, I get all the stories I want. Keeps me going.
I remember saying I will tell you about my little game. The one I play on days when I do not need to do many dishes. I can afford dawdle then, so I notice the hands that place those dishes on the counter.
Did you know you could fall in love with hands? And the stories hands can tell! No man, not eyes! I am keeping out of that zone for a while. That zone demands too much of you.
There are hands and then there are hands. When I started out, I'd try and guess the gender. Oh no no! Don't brush that off! It is not as easy as you might think. Jewelry was never much of an indicator, I suppose. In my opinion, it does not give any clues. You either wear jewelry or you don't. I saw a big silver ring with intricate filigree work worn by a guy and a sturdy topaz and gold ring worn by a girl. The gender comes out in the way those hands are handling that plate they keep on the counter. Okay, hold on, I am not going to start on cliches now. I am not even going on that sherlockholmesian trial. You go play that game when you have time to kill. Why should I spoil your fun?
There is this guy with neatly clipped nails. The strange thing though is that they are clipped to look pointed. As if he takes the clipper and goes click from the right and then click form the left. Original! What do you think? Now is this guy like that with all that he does or is this a one off thing. Like you know, follow the book, day in and day out -- and there is all this originality itching to burst out. It comes out in one of the most 'mundane' chores.
And then there is this girl who carefully picks up her crushed paper cup and serviette from the plate, dumps them in the dustbin and then slides the plate carelessly over the counter. Reminds me of those drivers who rush into the traffic and drive recklessly till the traffic scares them. Then they dramatically slow down and start behaving like they are driving to qualify the driving license test. Oh yes, before you point out -- she does the exact opposite. But of course, the essence remains the same. Getting too scared of your impulsive actions and then zooming into the opposite direction. Similar to that glamourous mommy who darts her eyes in all directions before quickly wiping the mess created by her toddler. Really! How can she be seen bending in her designer jeans to behave like the women she despises?
My favourite though is the hand that gently places the plate on the counter and holds it, waiting for the pressure from my end, figuring out whether it slides into a machine or is picked up by a human hand. This person is interested in my existence. Are you surprise I wait, everyday, for this hand?

2006-08-24T12:10:00.000+05:30

So I work for this corporate where everybody starts every 'english' sentence with 'so' and randomly places 'like' and 'this' wherever they want to. That is why I started talking about myself with that word. Now, you might wonder why I am trying to mimic people who speak fashionably 'wrong' english? Hold your horses, the rest of the narrative will clarify.
Well, the job I do makes me compare myself to the cellophane man in "Chicago". Ok, beofer you start hunting me up to hit me let me tell you what exactly I do in this corporate.
I do the dishes.
Yes, that is what I do. I clean the dirty dishes as and when they are placed on the counter. Inside the cleaning room, I rule the roost. Not that there is anybody else to rule over. Just the fittings, dishes and dish-towels.
It is good. Makes me feel at peace with myself and the world. All that setting things in order and cleaning up whatever needs to be cleaned. Just a digression, don't u think Holden Caulfield would have loved to have this ability? See dirt - clean it!
Sometimes, I wonder though -- do people really know I am doing such as service to make their life more comfortable in this place? You see, they don't see me do all this cleaning up. They come and place their plates on the counter and I pick them up, clean them and place them on a different counter for the catering staff to place them back on the dining tables. Of course, I know the catering staff rather well. With them I do not feel invisible. More like translucent, if you kow what I mean. They do their job, I do mine. But of course, they know my name and the way I do my hair and such things. Frankly, that is more than enough. They do not interest me.
What interest me are the voices I hear from the other side of the counter, floating up through that little counter-window. The bits of gossips, the little secrets, the complaints, stray bits of information. And the people from whom these voices emerge.
I create entire stories from the tones of these voices and the variations in them. Some have unusual accents and some copy those unusual accents. The ones with these mixed accents are the more interesting, naturally. Gives me a lot to think about at work and also for whenever I have nothing else to do. The whys and whos and wherefroms of those voices.
Now, after patiently reading through all this do you begin to understand why I would like to belong? Is it too much to expect to be recognised as a listener, an observer, a partcipant?
And it is not just the voices. I play another game with the people whose dirty dishes I clean. Will tell you about it some other time. So long then.

2006-08-09T19:36:00.000+05:30

New Age Talk

Scraps of tales
Floating through
Cyberpsace

Back and forth
Disjointed
At cross purposes

*

Disconcerting
Monologues
Chanced upon

Gesticulating
Strangers
In elevators

*
Short messages
Sliced words
Cryptic

Word morphing
Portmanteaus
New registers

*

Glimpses
Of stories of
The New Age

Decode
And start
Your blog