14 dec, zero-eight. journeys.
14 Dec 2008 1 Comment
A few months back, at the height of the Indian summer, I met a man in Pachod, a village in rural marathwada, traveling with me on the bus to Aurangabad, a medium size town about 50 kms away. He was headed to Mumbai, as I was to Pune, and our journeys would coincide for the next 7-odd hours. As the rickety bus rumbled along the dusty lanes, we began to talk, starting our conversation with a few acerbic comments about the mind-numbing heat. I learnt soon that he had come to Pachod from a mofussil village deep in the interior of Jalna district, where the offshoot of the Godavari river that had given them water for generations had slowly died, choked by the big dam upstream and thoughtless mining of the river bed for sand by local villagers. His family, once proud farmers of cotton and sweet lime, were now faced with the ignominy of sowing watermelons in the river bed during summer, and his elder brothers had pooled their meagre holdings together in desperation. As the youngest brother, his portion of the pie was negligible and hardly arable. So he was headed out to Mumbai, 14 hours by road from his village, in the hope of being employed as a gardener in one of the big companies or hotels, as a friend of his from the village was doing. He confessed that he had heard that gardeners were paid upto fifteen hundred rupees (about 33 dollars) a month in the city. He planned to return to his village as a big man, maybe in two years, with gifts for his mother and sisters, and the capability to proudly acquiesce as his family found him a good bride from his caste. I wondered on the irony of the situation, till he told me shyly that he had heard that they had excellent cultivation techniques in Mumbai, and grew exotic trees and plants in soil that was sandy and salty to the taste. This was knowledge that was more than worth the wait to go home, he said to me. As a metaphor, it was remarkably prescient, and as I sat back bemusedly to watch the first craggy rock faces of the western ghats in Ahmednagar, I thought of how my own attempt at making the leap from field-based interventions to the corridors of learning arose from a yearning to understand the workings of the world around me, and the will to master a discipline that I was passionate about.
Why’d I open my eyes?
because
I wanted to.
‘Dharma Pops’, Jack Kerouac
twenty-nine-zero eight : after the flood :
21 Sep 2008 Leave a Comment
in the world we will live in, work
pune is not flooded. not yet.
as i watched the swirling waters in dark, angry eddies, about twenty feet below my feet, i knew that the rain had not stopped up river. that up in the hills, it was still the regular pitter of passing clouds, slamming into the sheer rock face, squeezing themselves in the narrow valley between the mountain peaks, and washing the hills with rain.
the waters seemed to be raising, at least to my furiously fantasia-seeking mind. and the future of the riverside houses in pune would be etched (i felt) by a brown line of washed-up grime about 6 feet tall from the ground, all along the outer walls and the garage, as a mute testament to fireside tales of excitement-in-the-time-of-natural disaster-distress in the future.
further near the river, small houses thatched together with pieces of tarpaulin, old sacks and sticks would be washed away in the rising deluge. small shanties made of corrugated tin sheets and resting on the hard earthern floor will seep water from under their sides, then as the water begins to wash in in earnest, may not stand upright to withstand the sudden onslaught.
as reservoirs upstream fill up more and more with water, their helplessness will be depicted in their strict enforcement of maximum water level guidelines and wretched hand-wringing. in a rather macabre metaphorical allusion to the fate at the bottom of the power chain when things go wrong at the top, some warnings will be issued, some notices sent out, and vastis evacuated of their human habitation and essentials. as the dark, muttering shorls of water wash away the houses, that never existed on paper in the first place, a new set of families would have been born, transplanted overnight from the category of “urban poor” to the category of “displaced”.
the waters will recede, tho. and there will be a time after the flood. when all we shall have by way of evidence shall be the scraggly shrubs lining the river side festooned with plastic bags and detritus from the river’s path.
and memories of a day when the waters washed our houses , sometimes washing them away altogether.
All that ocean of blue
soon as those clouds
Pass away
— Jack Kerouac
september ninth, two-oh-oh-aight :primary health centre:
09 Sep 2008 Leave a Comment
in why are we thus?, work
so here i am back in aurangabad, wrestling with a bunch of medical officers from ten PHCs of maharashtra during a two-day orientation training which is part enthu, part grudging acceptance and whole parts cynical ennui(for the uninitiated, PHC is the primary health centre, a basic medical care centre in the government public health system that is responsible for the health of some 30-50000 persons in its area, administering this with the help of one doctor, abt 6 nurses, 6 health assistants and 2-3 male multi purpose workers and lady health visitors)
thus the well being and continued good health and cheer of 40000 (sometimes upto 65000) hapless people is manned by a small band of abt 20 technical staff, and some four-five non technical staff (like driver, supervisor, compounder, etc).
so if there is a small minor flood, not like the kosi and its awesome paradigm shift, but a smaller, more local flood. that happens in that particular river basin every year (say some small river that flooded, killing 16 people, and displacing about 3000 others). and then after the flood waters recede, and the people find that the rotting carcasses, the open shitting grounds, the carefully constructed latrines for the community-led-total-sanitation programme and the vast mound of filth and dirt on the northern edge of the village have leached into the only available source of drinking water, the village pond, they are too busy picking up the pieces of their lives to think abt corrections.
and then, the next week, everyone notices that the greenish-yellow gunk that forms a small puddle near their aboral ends when they squat in the grounds for their morning constitutional is more than usually offensive smelling, and the children are beginning to literally purge their guts out, thats when mr pee-aitch-see swings into action.
armed with 20 people and a packetful of chlorine tablets. and ORS packets handed arnd like largesse. and substandard and poorly stocked drug inventories, these brave men and women have to attend to the competing pressures of disease prevention, political expediency, personal prejudice, individual greed, inevitable corruption, incessant demands, squalor, filth, and the frustrating spectre of death that snatches away persons from right under their hands, even as theyre busy filling forms in triplicate asking for extra funds for diesel since the fuel budget was fixed before the hike, or more likely, waiting for the local mla to attend the inauguration of the relief camp.
now all this is an extreme case scenario. most places in india are not so dramatic, and the million daily struggles in its public sector institutions go unnoticed until there is a good flood. after all, every one wud like to sit in their home, with warm feet and dry clothes, and not have to bother abt heating water for bathing on the wood stove before the 16 hour power cut plunges everything into darkness.
having ensured these comforts, they would like not to hear too much about other persons who cannot do this.
and life’s experiences are incremental, adding on one-on-top-of-the-other, till finally when one of these men is a joint director sitting in the kutumb kalyan bhavan, pune (thats right next to le meridien, for those who came in late), then he thinks nothing of charging a paltry 60000 rupees to ensure or block a supplicating junior officer’s transfer.
public views of morality are so terribly narrow. we see only the present, forgetting conveniently the age that brought upon us this moment:
rivers of blood in Aurangabad
14 Aug 2008 Leave a Comment
in work
it was 3:30 in the afternoon. the canteen boy had brought in chai in a little canister of steel that managed to maintain the muddy liquid in perfect steaming readiness. the crowds in front of the labour room shuffled, and the assembled congregation shifted just imperceptibly. the men at the fringes of the crowd sidled toward the boy, some of them stopping for small talk, some others exchanging notes for tea.
the women in burkhas around ward no. 28 talked between themselves, some of them gesticulating excitedly toward the labor room. the conversation was in hindi, a small island of perfect comprehensibility among the gutural marathwada tongue i wud hear all round me. they were discussing the woman (ostensibly the one inside) and her pregnancy.
i wandered off, losing interest rapidly.
besides, the chai boy’s canister was beckoning with its steamy wafts. a cup of sickly sweet chai was swilled into a cup, and deposited in my hands in exchange for 3 coins: two full, and one half rupee.
i wandered to the window, looking out of the third storey grill at the gray clouds outside, the thin drizzle that had started, and wondering to myself where the heck the ANMs could be…
(for those who came in late, the ANM= Auxiliary Nurse Midwife, who deals with primary level nursing and mainly obstetric work at the primamry health centre/subcentre level in the indian public health system. they wud be working in villages, as u can imagine)
…. so here i am looking out at the dirty quad between the surgery and the ENT wards (?) on the ground floor, the filthy go-in between across the courtyard separating the two squat buildings, the effluvium of the wards above being discharged into the gutters in between. i was fiddling with my fone absent-mindedly, wondering if the bus from the health and family welfare training centre (HFWTC, u ken?) managed to come after all, back from its rural field visit (it did) , and whether the driver yunus would come to the med college immediately to bring the girls before the wards close? (he didn’t) and a thousand other issues of mundane day-to-day irritation.
and as i stared unseeingly into the gloomy wetness outside the window, i noticed a bright colour on the ground outside, three floors below.
and i looked closely.
it was a stream of blood. roughly 20 odd feet long, winding and snaking, with a meandering course that picked its way among spilt piles of black-coloured gunk and hastily-disposed bandages. it was making its way to the pit at the far end of the quad, a red river making its way, inexhorably, towards its natural end. the colour was pale at places, the surrounding water mingling with the blood to create a light suggestion of crimson. at other places, it was dark, anggry vermillion, the blood-soaked bandages leaching their colour into the stream in the rapidly-strengthening rain. i watched, bemused, as the drizzle splattered into the stream, washing away the colours, and clearing the quad of its momentary rubral hue. soon the ground was back to its muddy colour.
the boy from the canteen had left, moving on to ward no. 26/27 now.
Mrs Pardeshi called. Yunus was refusing to come. Could I ask ashok to accomodate the nurses in the office vehicle? could he do three trips?
I turned towards the corridor, righteous indignation rising in me. there is a budget for this, dammit, i muttered to Ashok.
It was already 4.
Outside, it continued to drizzle.
The sound of silence
is all the instruction
You’ll get.
– Jack Kerouac
pouring rain in pachod?
29 Jul 2008 1 Comment
in work
I am sitting in the darkened office of Shivraj travels, outside the Aurangabad bus stop, my open laptop casting an eerie glow in the interior of the shack. A sputtering candle lights up the front desk where the passive faced (ostensibly) Mr Shivraj pronounces gloomy judgement on the fate of Pune-bound buses. His desk is simple and neat, and the small shelf on the table is a willing pagoda for a surprisingly feminine pantheon, the bald-headed and tired-grinned face of Sai Baba being the only splash of testosterone in the Devi-congested crew on the wall of the desk. The Gods are visible only to Shivraj, who can see the world beyond his shop, and the traffic passing by.
The reason for the sputteringly illuminative candle is the power cut that grips all of Aurangabad for eight hours every day. Four-in-the-morning, four-in-the-evening, ding-dong, khattam shudh and more mosquitoes than you can shake a bug-repellant doused stick at. Marathwada is reeling under the effect of no rains for well nigh on one-and-a-half months since they were expected to visit, and the highway to Beed from Aurangabad reveals cracked dry parched earth, leathery skin-and-white boned cattle, and hard, wiry men in brilliant turbans, their nut-brown faces a mass of wrinkles as they squint their summer-weary eyes to the cheerfully blue sky. Every day is another agony of waiting, a familiar dance of painful anticipation as the sky darkens for a while in a mock show of cumulo-nimbic enthusiasm, the winds sweeping across the fields carrying with them the faintest whiff of moisture. Before long, however, the clouds are scattered, and the wind once again down to faint puffs of dry-as-dust air. The animals are all starved and listless, the tall bony cattle that gnaw at the dessicated roots and grass looking hungry and thirsty, their troughs containing small puddles of slushy mud by way of aitch-two-oh.
Yesterday, however, was a change, a shift from this constant cycle of dearth and rebirth. In an awesome display of open-skied exuberance, the clouds over Aurangabad and Beed, heavily pregnant with water vapour, opened up and inundated the land with their deluge.
Small rivulets were formed on the roadside, and parched cattle arched their leathery backs in open-mouthed exultation.
Everywhere was the smell of freshness, and the promise of greenery beyond.
meanwhile, a postcript:
It is official now. “The met department has declared a heat wave in Poona”, the newspaper headlines screamed in my face on Friday. Well, not really in my face. As I rushed out of my house, my hair still wet from the shower, my ear still warm from the ambient heat of the mobile fone, I glanced over at my neighbours, where Obama had been thrown down on the mat. My neighbours are a strange nocturnal bunch. plugged into the time schedule of some random western European or eastern American time zone, they toil at odd times in the night, to apparate in their houses in the wee hours of the AM, when it is too late to sleep and too early to break fast. When finally they wake up to meet the world, the newspaper boy would have already come in, tossing presidents and heads of state with careless nonchalance onto the floor. The milk bottles hold Hillary Clinton to the ground, her smiling face held to the cold mosaic by a hard firm grip to her neck. but the paper today could not be mistaken. It was heat wave all the way.
– blog penned on 26 Apr, 2008
Tails of a Sparrow : adventures of Lotus in the deep south : a serialised tale in many parts
13 Dec 2007 Leave a Comment
in the world we will live in, work
“…birdlike, he perched in the corner, his head cocked to one side, his beady eyes shining bright. The Lotus regarded him impassively as he nervously twitched in his seat, his hands clasping and unclasping in his lap, his lips parted and moist, his gullet bobbing up and down in terrified confusion…..
The Lotus was unimpressed. He had seen much more in his time. Why, even Bee downstairs was a pretty amazing person, and he was not half this reticent.
Then the sparrow started talking. Contrary to what Lotus expected, it was not a chirrup, or even a tinny wheeze. It was a deep, throaty voice, somewhere between hoarse and sexy, with a potential to be either, (or neither, when stressed and angry)
“You see, its not like I really loved him. I hardly even saw his face you know? It was dark, and the consulting room smelt damp and musty, the bed was moist, and the pillow was covered in rexine. I remember the whiff of dettol from the tray next the head, and having to stand up on the steps kept by the side to get a leg up onto the bed. He was gentle, but very big….I really enjoy it when I’m in a dangerous place, I like to scream into the pillow…”
Sparrow’s voice trailed off, and Lotus sat forward, interested. This was heady stuff. The guys at Manoranjan Weekly were going to lap it up……”
THIS WINTER…
LIE BACK….
AND BE ENTERTAINED…
AS THE LOTUS TAKES YOU TO THE DEEP SOUTH, AND EXPLORES THE EDGE OF INFINITY FROM THIS SIDE OF REASON….
pushing office desks out through your vagina
12 Oct 2007 5 Comments
in gender and sex, work
Ho, hum. Another day, another entry. We are doing data entry and cleaning with the intimate secrets of the lives of teenage brides all across Marathwada and vidarbha, and the process promises to be interesting.
And nerve-wracking, and gut-wrenching, and sometimes-nauseating, and eye-opening. And sobering. Did I mention sobering?
So yesterday there was a girl in the list. Lets call her Kunti. Not because that’s a near (or far) approximation of her name, but because there are so many kuntis out there, staring at me from in between SPSS/STATA outputs, that its difficult to keep track of names…
Besides, I guess my apostate soul does take some vicarious pleasure in naming my representative MAG (Married Adolescent Girl, u ken?) after Indian mythology’s most famous teenage mom.
So kunti’s here, with details of her life, her background (farming, two room house), children (one- a boy), her deliveries, her abortions, her still births, her uterus, her vagina (no pain, no discharge, no ulcers), her menses (regular, three days), her views on wife-beating (its ok if the wife makes a mistake (like a long hair in the dal, f’r instance), but my mard doesn’t hit me, no sir- eyes suddenly cast down) on the 14-odd sheets in front of me.
Something was amiss in Kunti’s data. She is 16 now, its been two and a half years odd since she had gotten married. She has one kid now, so far so normal (yes, I did mean to use that word, so go figure), but she had become pregnant once before. Her son is just five months old, she’s just given him his third DPT/OPV immunisation shot a few weeks back. Her previous pregnancy had been a stillbirth or an abortion. But because the investigator had not been too careful in taking the answers, or perhaps had not checked the concordance of the girl’s response with the facts, both answers were reported in different parts of the questionnaire. We were stymied. Where do we put the previous pregnancy? So we did a little detecting work:
Her son was a full term delivery, and was 5 months old: she had turned 16 a short while back, about one month back. So lets say she was 14 years and 11 months when her son was conceived (5+9 months back; her age now about 16 years and one month). She got married when she was 13-and-a-half, and she conceived about 4-5 months after she got married, so lets say 13 years and 11 months? So was it a stillbirth, or an abortion? If it was a stillbirth and a full term, as one part of the questionnaire assured us, then that meant she gave birth when she was 14 years and 8 months. After this exhausting process, she got a break of abt 3 months before she conceived again.
Again, if it were an abortion, and induced, as the form assured us, why did she abort at all? If they were so keen to have a kid, then why did they abort the foetus at this stage? (note that I use “they” with care; abortion in a 13 year old girl married and living at her in-laws place is very unlikely to be primarily her own decision) It can’t have been concern for her health, as evinced by her almost immediate conception and successful delivery. Could it be that the stillbirth hypothesis was true?
“Well”, a colleague piped up, “what if the first foetus was a girl? Then they may have wanted it gotten rid of immediately, that would also explain the hurry to get pregnant soon.” It is to the credit of our cultural conditioning that noone questioned this possibility as being too absurd or macabre, but instead nodded in agreement and said that this is probably what happened, you’re right.
Yet there were detractors. An event like a stillbirth has a profound effect on the psyche of a girl; she would be unlikely to misreport such an event. It is more likely that the investigator would have reported it wrong, mistaking a stillbirth for an abortion. So stillbirth, thrown out the door, made a surreptitious re-entry through the window. There was less supplementary information about the abortion (how many months, where, etc), that sort of pointed to the possibility of a stillbirth.
I think it was at this point that one of us saw the precariousness of our discussion. We were calmly discussing figures, forgetting that kunti was standing at the other end of the column of numbers that detailed the inmates of her uterus over the last 2-and-a-half years. In case u didn’t know, dear reader, when a girl conceives, at the point of conception, her body stops growing physically. So there was kunti, forever stuck at 13 years and 11 months, spawning children through the next 10-odd years of her life, and then waiting to become a powerful mother-in-law or a proud grandmother, whichever came first (the first is for the sons, the second for daughters). Babies grow at more or less the same rate no matter how old the mom, perhaps better fed if they are known to be boys. So you have a 2.5 kilogram bawling mass of flesh and bone, all writhing limbs and bulbous head, pushing and straining at mom’s pussy, chin-to-breast, shoulders-at-right-angles…phew. Like pushing a desk out of your vagina, to quote Rachel from F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Only, of course, that it’s a 14 year -old- cunt, innit? That’s when most girls in upper class urban India go to the ninth grade, think of what subjects to major in eventually, and argue with their parents about grunge music and the right to stay out after 8. Kunti, meanwhile, is busy, either lying on her back and getting laid by a 21 year old youth eager to experiment the moves he’s seen in the x-rated vcd he rented from his friend, and also to prove he’s a man by knocking up his bride before the year is over. And after his splattering ejaculate has impregnated her super-fertile uterus, there she is, nine months later, in roughly the same position, pushing desks, a la Rachel.
Then at 35-odd, there she is, a grand old woman, perhaps with a uterus so bruised and torn that she has a prolapse, or perhaps with a uterus removed by some kindly doctor who murmurs “youre done with it after all, we might as well knock it off” (please translate into vernacular), with such a world-weariness and brusqueness about the sex thing that her husband, scarce 7-9 years older than her, decides to seek it elsewhere, maybe in another wife, maybe with an accommodating lady in the village/next village/market town, or with one of his nieces/daughters in law.
Do you wonder why I feel a faint sense of revulsion and distaste when people swear by our old culture, and how the villages are pure and true, and how western influence and modernity has sullied our great heritage?
Then again, maybe I’m being melodramatic.
Amen.
marathwada on my mind
12 Oct 2007 Leave a Comment
in work
So here I am in Pachod, a tiny mofussil village on the border of Aurangabad and Jalna, on the highway to Beed, a mere 60 kms from the town of A’bad. I have been here for the past week-odd, trying to make sense of the first set of figures to come from the married teenagers that dot the villages in Marathwada and vidarbha.
For those who came in late, that means the areas to the south and centre of Maharashtra and to the east of Maharashtra. Think cotton farmers, think families eating poison like it were so much dessert, think myopic government policies and lower support prices, think evil sharad pawar (with the wax face that’s melting slowly around the edges and falling off) routing all taxpayers money (and irrigation water) to baramati, then maybe somewhere vidarbha will ring a bell.
Marathwada is worse. Considered by many maharashtrians to have the most patriarchal, parochial, claustrophobically chauvinistic society in the state, it is a fermenting petridish of teenager-marrying, wife-beating, son-loving, daughter-avoiding, hierarchy-ridden farmers: hard, silent men and women with leathery skins and squinty eyes staring into the blinding glare of the noonday sun. The terrain is harsh and unforgiving, the land dry and dusty, and everyday a struggle against the elements. I spent most of last summer roaming these arid lands, my mouth parched, my lips cracked, and the jeep I was travelling in as hot as an oven. Every time we stopped the vehicle, the heat would hit us like a furnace, the searing screaming wind whipping dry sand against our skin. It would hurt to even look out at the landscape, the light glinting off the naked black rocks, the dust storms in the distance emitting hot zephyrs across the distance, to reach you and suck the moisture out of ure body like so much fruit pulp from an alphonso mango.
Ok, bad metaphor, maybe that’s a cue for me to move on.
the unbearable heaviness of being (indian) – 2
02 Jul 2007 1 Comment
in gender and sex, why are we thus?, work
Hallo chikkabiddies! How’re y’all?? Poona is awash in a deluge fit to send Noah into paroxysms of ship-building, as gallons of water tumble from open sluice gates at khadakwasla into the city’s sewers, gutters, streams, and ultimately, to the river mula mutha that slices the city into two. Even as I write, cats and dogs slam into the soggy earth outside my window and a cold breeze runs thru the fanless rooms.
In a few days, I fear we may be into the stage where the river will be swollen to overflowing, and the bridges will go under water.
As part of my continuous series on Indian culture and its albatross-weight, let me go on to my core area of intervention, professionally at least: marriage in adolescent girls. This is, incidentally, the area where I work, so my data is genuine, at least for this corner of the world, my opinion based on true observation.
Many parts of India still marry their girl children off on the teenaged side of 18. And before you can go on and conveniently blame it on the rural hinterland for this statement’s veracity, the National Family Health Survey-3 pegs the figure for girls married by age 18 as 49% for rural and 29% for urban Maharashtra. Woe betide girls in Bihar and UP.
So there you have a girl, 13-15 years of age, picked up from her hopscotch sessions with her friends and handed over to a young man perhaps ten years her senior, barely 6 months to a year after her menarche. She was probably in school before this, but school is perhaps only upto primary level, and the secondary school is probably in the next village. Since there is a possibility that the character of the girl be sullied if she were to go into the next village for school, if she were to keep late hours, if she were to Horror! Fall in love with some unsuitable boy, she is asked to stay at home and prepare cute tiffin boxes for her brother leaving for school. And then, a girl hanging around the house all day with scarce anything of particular note to do besides help her mom in housework and in the fields is always under risk of being considered for marriage.
So there she is, 14 and married, sent off to a house maybe three villages and a whole universe removed from her own, led away by a callow youth astride a white mare and accompanied by drunk dancing dolts. She leaves with a substantial part of her father’s lifetime earnings with her, never to return again except for childbirth and selected festivals.
At her husband’s home, she often has to share the room with her husband and mom-in-law on the floor, as her pa-in-law occupies the only cot in the one-room house. Peri-pubescent and petrified, she is entered nightly without preamble, with ritual certainty, by her husband, mother-in-law sleeping satisfiedly nearby. There is very little scope for tenderness or playfulness as he heaves in between her thighs for a few times, grunting with the effort, his seed splashing all over the puckered lips of her cervix. Her moans are perhaps muted, her rhythmic movements cut short by a few unrequited spasms as he pulls out of her, his work done, sleepiness washing over him like a wave.
Is there consent in this copulation? Perhaps. After all, marriage implies consent. Is the consent valid? She is a girl of 13 who is doing what her parents ask her to do. But tradition deems that it is. Is her consent informed? Does her mother explain to her hesitatingly before her marriage that her husband is going to stick his schlong into her pussy every other night? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Does she have a choice?
In what way is this different from paedophilia? In what way is this practice removed from a sleazy German in Goa buggering some little girl he has lured away using sweets and playful jokes? Does anyone ever think of child brides when they talk of child-sex and dirty old men?
To my mind, the difference lies in tradition, and in the unbearable weight of culture. Marrying the daughter off at 13, or 15, or 16 , or even 18 (medical advice says that the ideal age for India is after 20) is sanctioned by cultural norms that allow sexual transgression of the most extreme nature, provided it is sanctified by marriage. And while we all may wrinkle our noses at it, there is an implied shrugging of the shoulders and a “what can I do about it?” attitude that prevails. A sort of “these-are-aberrations but India-still-has-the-greatest-culture-in-the-world” about it.
My entreaty is simple. When you think about the glory that was India and swell your heart with pride as you dwell on the various achievements, the enormous corpus of art, the gentle peace-loving nature of Indians and Indian culture, spare a thought for my 49% demographic, and ask yourself this question: Can any culture that treats its women so badly ever consider itself truly great?
the unbearable heaviness of being (indian)
02 Jul 2007 2 Comments
in gender and sex, why are we thus?, work
The weight of tradition is onerous, a deadweight around our collective necks dragging us down, and choking us. Usually, tradition is used along with culture, a loose term meant to indicate a way of life that has existed for centuries and a collective approach to problem-solving that derives as much from precedent as to immediate realities.
People who are traditional are often also described as old-fashioned, and the reference can be desirable or offensive depending on the person. Usually, being traditional is admitted to with a sense of self-effacement, a shuffling of the feet, a sort of embarrassed cough, yet there is an attendant aura of deep satisfaction, of societal approval for having followed its tenets.
An extension of the same theory is religiousness. A person described as religious is usually seen as disciplined and philanthropic, “doing good” wherever indicated; this is accepted as a positive character trait even if the religion in question is different from your own.
Yet traditionalism has a particular sense of warmth and comfort about it, a sense of cookies and apple pie, of geometric patterns in front of Brahmin houses as convoluted as the coffee steam wafting to ure nose, of strawberries and cream, of dal-chaaval and cute girls in pretty chadors reading the Qu’ran in unison.
There is a sense that tradition is the way of our childhood, a halcyon age when the world was happy and people were good. Even if this is an exaggeration, being traditional is not a personal trait that is associated with too much opprobrium, a traditional person by definition does not have to face censure for ending the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
I come up against tradition quite a lot in my job. It is almost always stifling, irrational, and frustrating. It fosters hate and bad blood, and creates difficult situations where there need have been none. Let me explain:
In most of rural India, girls are a distant second choice as far as children are concerned, besting only eunuchs and disabled persons in a desirability scale. In most communities, the bloodline is passed on by the male child to his son, and so on, so daughters are a loss-making investment a “paraaya dhan”, fattened and raised only to go to another house after marriage, to be a willing receptacle for some other family’s seed, to bear their offspring, and to perpetuate their line. Again, daughters bring in little by way of monetary compensation to the parents because of their low levels of employment in remunerative work; in fact, they actually demand a greater investment from the parents because of their dowry needs.
Marriage is universal, and the daughter’s marriage is the culmination of a couple’s social life, a duty that they must fulfil, to entrust their daughter in the hands of a suitable man who will feed her, clothe her, and heave periodically in between her thighs so as to deposit frantically wriggling spermatozoa in her uterus.
This is all mainstream tradition, and if you have looked at the way that much of India conducts its activities, dear reader, then this is a not-unfamiliar pattern.
Ok, so we have the daughter who cannot carry on the line, (and thus represents a dead investment) and whose dowry needs are so high (necessitating large amounts of immediate investment: have u ever tried raising 10 lakhs in cash and a 100 sovereigns of gold at short notice?) as to cause families to be plunged into endless debt in their wake.
There is less incentive to feed them well and to educate them, you would say. And you would be right. Just not an effective business proposition. So there is reduced motivation to have girl children.
: The spectre of female foeticide rears its ugly head:
Yet this does not end at foeticide. Study after study has shown that families deliberately feed their daughters-in-law less if she is seen to have a female foetus. So girls are born with a lower average weight across households in rural India, and left to clamour for more as wailing babies, fighting for their mother’s breasts even as the mom in question’s fatigue is ignored and she is asked to get back to work on the field (son-bearing women are allowed a lot more rest and succour post-labour, is it any wonder why women prefer sons too?). And for a household that denies its babies proper food, is it any wonder that girls receive less food and less attention as children?
(so, for instance, the next time u make a “dumb female” pronouncement on a rural/conservative urban/ traditional Indian/ culturally orthodox woman, do spare a thought for the fact that much of what we call intelligence depends on brain growth and development (function of foetal nutrition and childhood food habits), on freedom to move, to question and to study (function of the prevalent cultural mores in a traditional society), and on ability to translate all this into sentient thought and conversation (function of the society’s culture). A girl denied most of this, which we take for granted, really has no recourse, does she?)
I am not trying to make a case for pity, or for sorry “awwww….. poor dear”s, I’m just trying to tell u that this world, this dark underbelly also exists in Indian culture, and that we must be aware, if we are to understand.
I’ll-stare-Crowley
13 Jun 2007 1 Comment
in work
Talking about the weather is such a human thing to do.
You may point out to me rather rightfully here that talking itself is a rather human thing to do, and conversation being denied to many other life forms that share webspace with homo sapiens on the earth, its is perhaps superfluous to bring attention to this most basic of facts.
Yet, out of all the topics that grab out attention on a daily basis, it is the weather that is among the most universal. Everywhere in the world, two strangers or nodding acquaintances (or G8 diplomats) will talk about the weather, discuss its mood swings, talk lovingly of how it was in the old days, talk with relish about the horrors of the new age, talk of deluges, of drought, of cold thaws and hot flashes.
It makes climate change actually old news, if you were to look at it that way.
Nowhere is this obsessive interest in the fluctuating fortunes of the weather more apparent in India than during the end of summer and the beginning of monsoon.
Random acquaintances perched on seats no. 21 and 22 of a private bus from mofussil town to mofussil town will start a conversation with “you think it’ll be late this year?”, and take it up from there.
The monsoon is like an old friend, dropping in at around the same time every year, but delaying travel plans until the very last minute. Some years it is in form, and some others it is just tepid and weak…
Enough of that.
It is the 12th of June in Poona now, and the rains are nowhere in sight. We had a shower earlier in the day, and the night breeze is cool and calm, yet the morning after will bring only freshly washed roads and the hot sun in a cloudless sky.
Kerala, meanwhile, is inundated, I hear.
I want to introduce to you now a terrorist crow that has been plaguing my existence for a while now. Bald and sparsely feathered, he is the guardian of the open terrace that is just across the hall from my office. Every time I go out on to the terrace, he is there, wild-eyed and choleric, hurling abuse; or worse still, he fixes me with a gimlet stare with his beady eyes. His antics would make the Spanish inquisitador smile, would make Alistair Crowley pat him on the back and beam.
How can I be so sure that my own Crowley here is a He? Well, for one, raucous voice, and quarrelsome nature.
But that, as many of my cynical friends would point out, is no grounds for such assumptions. If anything, they would note bitterly, it seems to go against the established gender stereotypes. Well, he seems to have a faint smattering of fluff on his upper lip. That also, they would pipe up, is no clincher. Well, he swoops in from time to time and tries to shoo me away from the terrace, whenever I go out there to attend a call. He looks at me with his malevolent stare and caws with the most raucous of voices. He hops on the ledge just outside the terrace, and makes ineffectual little flying loops when I shoo him away, only to come back again and caw, more irritated now that there has been an attempt to oust him from his perch. His vindictiveness is perhaps feminine, but his aggression is male.
So here is Crowley, lord of all he surveys, monarch of the north-facing terrace, irascible potentate of the sun-kissed balcony, resident of the deciduous tree in front. Bald and ugly, he would win no prizes in a beauty contest for ugly crows. There is a patch of missing down on his neck, surrounded with straggly plumage, a small landing strip of naked asphalt that stretches itself and looks veiny and coarse every time he croaks. He has an ugly, heavy beak and ruffled, unkempt feathers, all covering a corpulent torso that supports itself on his two dandy legs. Crowley is no looker, this is something that he realized early on in life, and the constant blows and slings and arrows that he had to bear through life have embittered him. He complements his hideous visage with a horrible personality, irascible and mean, swooping down on random strangers if they so much as stepped into his terrace. His impudence is extreme, because after al, it is not his terrace, as much as it is not mine. But there must be some way by which we both can co-habit with minimum confrontation and fuss?
Evidently there is not. Every telephone call that I take in the terrace is punctuated by a series of harsh croaks, and the unsettling sight of Crowley with his beady eyes, hopping just beyond arm’s length. A violent Shoo-Shoo elicits the barest minimum respect, a single swoop through the air to come and rest in the same position, and with renewed bouts of caw-cawing. And then, the coup de grace. Crowley flies off, and just when u think that are rid of the little blighter, he swoops back over ure head, low and close, brushing by you and giving the fright of ure life, before pausing to alight at exactly the same perch as before, and renewing his verbal assault on ure senses. Then he holds you in his hypnotic gaze, and reprimands you for the sins committed in past lives, while questioning ure continued following of this one.
Truly, I’ll-stare-crowley is a formidable foe.
Cupcake!
09 Jun 2007 1 Comment
in work
I want to introduce today one of my friends, Cupcake. He works as a consultant, employed for his indepth knowledge of the inscrutable workings of the government system. Thus, he is an inside man, one of the genuine cogs in the machinery, who has now been spit out by a soot-belching engine, free to roam the earth, rolling downhill and floating upstream at will. He has been taken into another organisation for his intimate knowledge of how the wheels move, and how the different levers click and hum and churn together in total synchrony.
Cupcake, however, is a man of mysterious motive, a man who moves to the beat of his own drummer, a largely tone-deaf percussionist who follows occasional drum rolls with gentle taps on the camel-hide. Sometimes, the drummer is absolutely still, stopping to admire the daisies, and then Cupcake gives it all up too, lurching forward with his characteristic bucolic air. For a considerable period of time, this man held the health of millions in his podgy hands, a careless stroke of his pen deciding the fate of hundreds of doctors, thousands of students, and lakhs of people suffering indescribable miseries, waiting for deliverance from the circle of birth and rebirth. The experience does not seem to have filled him with the sense of gravity that it should have.
Cupcake is still calm and unruffled, seemingly unimpressed by the onus of his position. For a while last year, he was chasing mosquitoes across Maharashtra, aided by a white car with a red flashing light on top. Sometimes, during the long summer days, he still talks wistfully of the car.
But it is the Cupcake of the now, the ab, that I am obsessed with.
His telephone is one of the gadgets in his life that attracts maximum interest and attention. Mystified by the workings of a machine that hitherto was confined to the universe of heavy bakelite handles and rotating dials, Cupcake is simultaneously fascinated and scared of the smooth slick nokia that nestles in his pocket.
Its every message beep sends Cupcake into a paroxysmal reaction, when he scrambles madly to get it out of his pocket and hold it to his ear, with an efficient ‘allo? Only that there is no answering how d’you? The lights are on, but of course noone’s home. So Cupcake looks at the screen, now died down to its dark default display, and, mystified, presses the “accept call” button. The phone still stays silent. But sometimes, in a ruthless display of personal efficiency and perseverance, he presses the button again.
Now as any self respecting nokia user knows, pressing the green button twice sends a call directly to the last number dialled.
And this is exactly what happens. So there are a few anxious moments as unidentified caller and Cupcake exchange was-it-yous and it-wasn’t-mes, before Cupcake, with characteristic style and panache, launches into some other convenient topic, chasing down another rabbit hole now that the beep quandary has been resolved.
Sometime last month, an errant rock flicked by a passing autorikshaw struck Cupcake’s leg, making a deep wound across his ankle, a gash oozing blood and about the size of a monocle across, half a monocle’s thickness in depth.
That was a while back, but Cupcake was scarcely ruffled. Treating it with the same amount of nonchalance with which he treated much of life, Cupcake ignored the wound, letting it pass from innocuous gash to deep ulcer, with ugly serrated margins and an angry black base. He sprayed spray-on bandages over the wound, and when people berated him for that, he washed it with water and lovingly rubbed betadine into the wound. Then, afraid that his inaction may aggravate the wound, he diligently rubbed fair and lovely into the ulcer.
And then some.
Soon, people began to notice the wound; the more sensitive olfactory bulbs began to sniff it out. There were embarrassed questions, dirty looks at the dog, and general all round consternation. The source of putrefaction was discovered, eventually, and public opprobrium and uproar forced Cupcake to do something, and to do it fast.
And so he did.
The next few weeks were filled with visits to the doctor (always an old friend, one whose history linked him to Cupcake in some mysterious way, whose rapid ascent to his position of prominence was in some way indebted to Cupcake’s munificence) and enormous doses of powerful antibiotics. The mornings were now consumed with a detailed examination of his ankle, his universe riveted on his medial tuberosity, almost willing it to heal under his benign E.T.-like gaze.
Cupcake gives a new dimension to the phrase “contemplating my ankle”. He has beheld the world on the tip of his phallus, heaven in a recalcitrant spurt, he has held infinity on the side of his talus, and eternity in the ankle that’s hurt.
idylls of the king
05 Jun 2007 1 Comment
in why are we thus?, work
The idyllic prettiness of villages is a myth, thrust upon us by deluded bollywood directors and picture postcard companies in faraway la-la land. The sweeping meadows, the picturesque houses, the brooks babbling over random bends, the cuckoos singing dreamily, nestled far far up in the trees, the trees: tall and sturdy, having withstood a thousand years of human habitation with gentle forbearance, with benign silence, all are lies hoisted upon an unsuspecting (and largely, uncaring) urban population.
Realities are more grim, and if not grim, at least far more grimy. The cute chicks that are expected to be cavorting in the village ponds are usually replaced by farting buffalos that crap their guts out as their owners scrub their broad backs. The women at the river’s edge are irritated and edgy, their backs bent over with the task of having to wash the vessels in the water, their stomachs twisted under the effect of the long tapeworms twisting and squirming inside their cavernous guts, their countenances screwed up because of their worm-infested bowels.
The roads are dusty, the children dirty and snot-nosed, the villagers are constantly eaten up by the twin forces of yearning for greener shores and superciliousness for their city slicker cousins.
The shops are cheap and tawdry, they are pale imitations of what sells in the nearby cities, in the close by towns, and cheap muslin cloth jostles for space among the racks and racks of faux silk.
There are vehicles all round, belching thick black smoke into the air, poisoning the glorious village air with carbon monoxide and lead.
Yes, lead, because the fuel is most likely bought at a local bootlegger who pours everything from kerosene to ethanol into it. At any rate, the old and defunct engines probably would spew as much toxins into the atmosphere even if the petrol were lead free.
The people may be kind and benign and welcoming and nice, but this is only so far as u are prepared to behave like a cretin with no knowledge of their customs, and a child-like trust in everything they tell u. apart from the disturbing patriarchy there, the moment u let up that u know a bit more abt wat is going on than the average city slicker/out of towner, then be prepared to see all the friendliness vanish.
Again, it helps if u look like a total outsider, the curiousity value of the tapir at the local zoo, but gawd help u if u look like the local populace, talk like them, but say things that they don’t like to hear. (like saying all men were created equal, and that its barbaric to have a different well for people living in the same village, a well that is open and runs dangerously close to the shitting grounds)
Bigotry is an old rural pastime, as is insularity and chauvinism.
Trust me, I work with an organisation that tries to convince junta not to marry off their daughters at 13-14 years age so that they may not be taken by their husbands every night in utter darkness and stifled sobs even as their fathers in law snore nearby and their mothers in law listen in satisfied silence. The task is difficult. Most people would rather that their daughters be sent into possible partial starvation and definite marital rape every night by their boorish husbands who would ignore them for the whole day until just before they proceed to penetrate them just because their tradition and custom taught them so.
(Also because u are from the city, u wud never know, so much for universal human rights.)
I am sure that this is not de rigeur for every village in the country, I’m not even saying it’s the rule for most, but I’m saying there is a sizeable majority that works in this manner, and it would do good to keep that in mind when u watch the next inanely idyllic bollywood flick extolling the village’s virtues.
hungover on monday mornings
14 May 2007 Leave a Comment
in work
Hungover on Monday morning is the last place in the universe u want to be…
Ure mouth sandpapery, ure throat semi-parched, ure lids hooded, ure arms bearing that hint of bone-deep fatigue that makes u wanna just sigh and give it all up for a warm bed and a cool room somewhere far far away, where you can sleep without the tension of being caught, or worse still, being giggled at you snore, your nose hair tickling ure septum.
Obviously all this is wishful thinking. I shall have to stay in my seat, and keep my eyes prised open in the manner of some forgotten graphic from a tom and jerry show, with matchsticks to keep my lids from snapping shut…
Or else, I could write.
We are in cruel May in
Poona. The hot zephyr breezes blow across the city every afternoon, the air stinging with the bite of sand particles, tossed across the concrete jungle like so much confetti. We screw our eyes up, and cower behind our scrunched-up lids, our tired, dusty faces, the world for now a series of flashing images and low resolution pictures flashing across a scarred, battered cornea.
There is a cool breeze in the room. Warm water brought in using a hose and fortuitously stored in the tank beneath the cool is sprinkled using a motor on to the mats all round the box. A fan blows out air, vents on all other three surfaces do the rest.
Simple. Ingenious. Cheap (comparatively). The delightful utilitarianism of the desert cooler fills my heart with wonder and joy, I am struck with awe at how it uses such a simple principle, viz evaporation and the cooling effect of water that is turning into the gaseous state to solve such an age-old problem, with considerably less cost to the purse and to the environment than the air conditioner. And how it creates this fine mist in the room, this delightful moistness, this air of fecundity, which besides the natural outcome of keeping everyone cool and moistened, also increases the horniness quotient of the room. The moist, water-cooled air, as it wafts over the room, and assails my nostrils with the sweet smell of its wetness, also carries the unmistakable air of fecundity, it is as if there is a sudden urge to procreate, to celebrate in the fertility all round and to be a part of the grand cycle of life that begets more life.
I’m babbling of course. What does it mean to be hungover, hungry, harried and horny on Monday morning at work? The second and fourth can be taken care of in the loo and the kitchen, tho maybe not always necessarily in that order. But what of the weight of a bone-crunching hangover? What of the persistent feeling that some chump has caught ure optic nerve in a pair of sharp tweezers and is twisting for all he is worth, right behind ure retina?
What of the weariness, the drudgery, the dreary tendrils of tedium, entwining thru the branches of office habit, bringing lethargy, somnolence, indolence, sloth and sleep?
What, indeed, of boredom?
But I am not bored. I like my job, and it is sufficiently motivating for me to shed aside my cynical cap and confess that it does attempt to make a change where there was none, where originally there was a barren desert, it offers the prospect of a garden, and while it may not always succeed, it at least manages to plant a sapling.
In the hard, dry, dusty Marathwada earth, where generations of people lived and died in the calmly fatalistic acceptance that change is impossible, they have managed to bring about a difference. And that difference is heartening to me. It means that there is hope. It means that there is belief, and from there, there is hope.
blogging in from mumbai airport
05 May 2007 Leave a Comment
in journeys, why are we thus?, work Tags: changing india, mumbai airport, two indias
So here I am in the Mumbai international airport, sitting sprawled on the floor, leaning on a pillar for support, my back propped against the wall, my ass parked conveniently on the floor which once was red-smudged and filthy from random arcs of betel-spittle that would land on its broadside.
Now the airport is cleaner, and the staff of kingfisher airlines make sure that its far prettier too. Oh mummy! what babes. They stride purposefully across the airport lounge, their smart white shirts and tight red slacks looking oh-so-chic in the bleary eyed morning. The kingfisher airhostesses too, match them step for step, their short skirts and smart red jackets contrasting with their white shirts and red high heeled shoes.
And in case this post is beginning to sound like a re-living of all my hidden fetishes and secret fantasies, I have to add in my rather weak-spirited defence that it is five in the morning after all, and like any other red-blooded male worth the three chimes on his biological clock, I have also been confronted by a sudden release of endothelium derived relaxation factor in my helical arteries and the result is tumescence, but of course, and a constant, hang-dog, not-eaten-in-days expression when I view the opposite sex.
In terms of representing a universe removed from the dust and the heat of Marathwada, this place manages pretty well, and the smart swish of the beautiful people around is not the only thing that’s changed. In more rural
India, by now I would have been surrounded by a crowd of gawking people, and at least one saucy little boy would have asked me what I was upto, and what I intended to do now that I had written all of this down. There would have certainly been questions, and genuinely delighted oohs and aahs as I took a snap of the entire gang, (even the shyly smiling girl in the corner, who refuses to show her face to the camera) and uploaded it on my machine for everyone to see.
Here, photography is prohibited by law, of course.
It is instructive to see these great engines, these conduits of traffic of modern India, the malls, the airports, the IT parks, the exclusive townships filled with the perfumed plutocracy who strive all their lives to keep out the other, and to imagine what they must think about that very other.
(my god! An amazing pair of legs in red pumps just walked by, her perfume wafting across and tickling my olfactory nerve endings. Um. Very nice)
Do they realise that it even exists? If they see it, will they recognise it as their own, (by extension of course, this whole concept of a people or a piece of earth “belonging” to someone or the other is faintly ridiculous, but in terms of having a common government and common taxation pools, at least) will they see anything familiar in the people, except perhaps in the language of the people, the random articles arranged neatly on the shelves of the grocery stores, the vehicles speeding by on the adjoining highways bearing the same registration plates as their own would?
Does anything else connect these two different countries?
Is there a collective consciousness, a realization that this is part of the same political entity, and the decisions made in one place, in a darkened booth in exchange for an indelible black mark on the forefinger might irrevocably change the lives in the other?
Is that all there is to it? A political oneness? Do these two
Indias share nothing else in common?
Is there any danger that we might anticipate with this greatly widening gulf? Anything that we might see and point out as This is the one danger of this sort of isolation?
I can think of one. Prescriptivism. The belief that since what is seen all round is this, then this must be all there is all round. Both ways, the happy fluorescence of neon does not in any way make it less real, or less significant. Neither does the grinding poverty of the villages make that any more real. Yet, it is instructive, I would think, that these two presumably exist in the same universe, and seek to make broad decisions for each other. Their lives are thus interminably and inextricably inter linked (god that’s an AWFUL sentence) and their relative isolation only makes this dependence more scary.
I have traversed the nearly 450 kilometres from Pachod to Mumbai in the course of the evening and the night, covering the first 60 by ST bus, the next 220 by shared-chevrolet tavera, and the last 170-odd by volvo, and for all that I know, I might be in a different country, or even a different world, where the rules are different, and where mention of the origins of my journey are either met with bland incomprehension or with distaste, as if I had farted in an elevator and the junta had instinctively formed a circle around and away from me, keeping the odious vapours at bay.
Yet, if noone farts, will anyone come to know?
I wonder.
and here I am, logging on to the airport network, and posting this blog with a click of the button, just like that!
how’s that for ubercool?
