"Cinderella wanted....anybody fit the bill???"

I frankly didn’t know what I felt – bugged or weary…It was one of many times that I had heard that…I thought it wouldn’t affect me but it did…We had gone to a little village called Chinnapaalam in Rameshwaram during our deprivation trip. We took quite sometime there; exploring and enquiring about the residents’ problems…It was a small village where the primary occupation was sea weed collection; the women collected weed while the men went fishing. Me and my friend waited, with the children, for the women to come back from their watery jobs. Since the others in our van had to proceed to other places for their stories, we decided to stay back. The van would come back for us once the others were dropped. As time ticked by, we decided to look around the village and take pictures. Two of the little girls came with us and showed us around. We got to see a very different side of life there. There were no bathrooms, not enough water, thatched houses and dependency on a very uncertain profession. Despite that they were happy…perhaps because they had and would probably never know what it is to live well.

That’s when it started…one of the little girls became really attached to my friend and even stood next to her in all the pictures that we took. It didn’t strike me as odd….in fact it was very touching that they became so friendly with us so soon. But then she said something, to my friend, that made my ears prickle and my heart burn. I never thought that even in such a remote corner of the world where I hoped to alleviate others’ troubles, I would meet my own demons. Her words-“Akka, you are so pretty.” My friend just ruffled her hair and we forgot about it. Then we went towards the shore where the ladies would arrive soon. There were many boats and we thought it would be fun to take some pictures. My friend wanted one first so I got the turn to capture the moment. All the little girls and boys crowded around her as they wanted to go back with us on our little chip. This little girl pushed everyone, went and sat right beside my friend and asked her to put an arm around her; “friend friend like” she said. The adoration in her eyes was so evident that if she could, she wouldn’t have let my friend go. It was sweet. But every time she could, she kept telling my friend that she was very pretty. My friend then asked her “How is she??” pointing to me…I just waved her away and laughed…the little girl promptly said “She is very nice but I like you; you are very pretty.”

I felt exhausted because I suddenly realized that wherever I went, that’s the only thing that would matter in the end. Not how good I was at my work or as a person, I was just not pretty. I remember telling my mother that it never mattered to me if I wasn’t pretty as there were many more aspects to my character that people would see and appreciate. I guess I couldn’t have been more off the mark. Even in such a tiny village where I would probably never step foot again in my life, I was reminded of that stark reality. It was not the little girl’s fault…she had probably heard that all her life too that being pretty is all that matters…she was just a zaria, as they say, for me to remember that…

It strikes me as odd because then I was reminded of what my till-then-I-thought-best-friend told me the day we left college finally “you should grow your hair, dress more like a girl and look pretty…then you won’t have any difficulty in finding a boyfriend.” It was unwanted advice but it just drove the nail in deeper.

It’s always not “enough” to be just how you are…when you are an infant, you are not “cute enough”…when you grow up a little, you are not “happy/witty enough”…when you grow into adolescence, you are not “thin enough”….when you grow into middle age, you are not “beautiful enough”…when you are almost into old age, you are not “interesting enough”….when you are finally old and think that it’ll finally end you find that you are not “fit enough”….underlying all this, is the constant “you are not fair enough” speech…

Now that I know how the human mind works, I try to ignore it. I know that I matter most to myself and how I perceive myself. Others and their opinions don’t decide who I am. But I think of countless girls who fall into this trap and are not able to convince themselves that they matter and not their faces. They go into depression, mostly ending their lives. In my mind, I know it doesn’t matter and I wish I could tell them but I know why they do it – the inability to withstand the humiliation of not being born beautiful is indeed a great burden…created by others nevertheless one which you have to carry your entire life unless you choose to unburden yourself…and look deeper to find what really matters….

But somewhere, sometimes I too succumb to my humanness….

The Not-so-Golden Touch

Just yesterday an uncle, whom I knew from childhood, came on a visit. I knew it was not entirely innocent as he claimed because he only visited when he wanted something…His first sentence and I knew that his job was with me. His opening lines were "Ahh...my journalist friend!!" and he gave his more-obvious-now gummy smile...Hesitantly, I looked up from Wilbur Smith's 'River God' and gave up my contemplation of ancient Egyptian characters. To my great surprise and even greater shock, he told me that he had recently started a new magazine and he was the Editor. This person had always dabbled in new things all his life but this was totally out of the blue!! I realized where his practiced speech was heading...he tried to ask me, albeit what he thought very casually, about what I was doing after my course...the conversation is not of much use here but the end result was that he wanted me to contribute an article for every issue of his magazine...I showed him one of my articles which has recently been doing the rounds with most newspapers as I'm job-hunting...Curiously, I wanted to see his reaction as I had got good reviews for it...He read thru it and even asked if I had done an in-depth study of Indian history to write it...I flushed and grinned and tried my hand at modesty...But his next statement left me flummoxed!! His magazine, he said, catered to students from the age of 8 to the PG level...It didn’t hit me just then because I didn’t understand what he was trying to convey…His argument was that they wouldn’t understand my language because it probably had more words than he cared to admit he knew!! But my frown had him back-tracking…He said that in the end it was entirely up to me to do as I pleased with it and it was just his view…I told him I’d think about it as he prepared to leave and I was, thankfully and very gratefully, interrupted by a phone call from an old friend.

I argued heatedly with mum that I couldn’t and wouldn’t change my article nor my style of writing for anyone…She then asked me if all the students who read it would understand what I wanted to say…I reluctantly conceded that my classmates never used to understand what I wrote even in 10th although they claimed to like my vocabulary!!! But his words had set me thinking….I read the first issue of his magazine which contained numerous spelling mistakes and random sentence association…It dawned on me that most people I’ve met outside my school and college circle spoke that way!! Probably they understand English only when it is written that way…Well hell!! Maybe the masses understand only that much English! There lies the hitch...Do I write with my usual flair and panache for a limited section of the society or in broken English because it will be more readable by the common person on his treacherous road to knowing Shakespeare??? My ego at being able to understand, read and write English effortlessly always wins hands down but at the end, it always leaves me with the nagging after-thought that the message is for the masses and what is the use, after all, if it doesn’t reach them, touch them, just leaves them clueless…….

The Ho(rr)nor story

Sometimes when I’m making tea and waiting for the tea leaves to boil, I just watch the vessel. The water remnant from its wash fizzles and evaporates in seconds from putting it on the burner. Imagine the temperature then at which it is being boiled. Probably if you tried putting your hand there then you would smell the flesh burning. You wouldn’t be able to stand a nanosecond of that heat let alone anything else.

It gets me thinking about those women who attempt suicide by burning themselves or conversely, those who are burnt by their family members. Well, sorry to burst your bubble…but it is not fiction that exists in otherwise pointless saas-bahu soaps but also in many households mostly in North India and also in countries like Jordan, Pakistan, and Palestine.

You may be familiar with the term “honor crimes/honor killings”. This dreadful practice came to my notice atleast, when the Reader’s Digest carried an article about a young girl in Palestine, Samera who was found in a well with her neck broken, killed by her mother and brothers more to preserve their honor than her promiscuity.

Girls are killed or sometimes maimed, mutilated, burnt by their own family members mostly fathers and brothers. It is, they feel, the failure on their part to fulfill their responsibility to keep the girls in check. The accused are let off if they give some compensation to the victim’s family. The maximum sentence is for 3 months to one year. Many times, teenage boys are made to do the job so that they are let off with a lighter sentence than the adults.

In India, parts of Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh this custom still exists. If a girl from a higher caste marries a boy of a lower caste, then both of them are sometimes severely punished by mutilation or at times even death. In most cases however, the boy manages to escape the punishment either by absconding or getting off with a lighter punishment. But the Panchayat makes sure that the girl does not escape. One example is that of Geeta Rani and husband Jasveer who were killed by members of Rani’s caste for having married irrespective of their caste (Punjab, India).

In one absolutely shocking case in Turkey, a woman was killed by her husband because he heard another man dedicating a song to his wife over the radio!! Women are killed for infidelity, asking for divorce, not serving meals on time and sometimes ironically, if they “manage to” get raped. A father-in-law burnt his daughter-in-law because he felt that she had not washed her son’s clothes properly.

When I see or hear of such instances, I feel, more than the male domination and the establishment of their own principles, of the lack of humanity of such people. How can they????? is all I can ask because I am horrified when I see the picture of a woman in Pakistan whose heart doesn’t give out even though she has over 93% burns…she has a child to look after….I see a woman with holes where eyes and ears should have been, a woman who has nothing on her chest but burnt, peeling flesh…..all this for what gain??? On grounds of suspicion??? On the basis of a dream, a rumour, jealousy, Power…..total control over a woman, over her fertility, her ability to reproduce so that she does not toe the line where they are afraid to tread….Create a new race without anyone from their own community….that too eloping without permission…it wouldn’t do to let them go now would it????

Perhaps J K Rowling, albeit unknowingly, summed it up rather well – Mudbloods cannot be tolerated and blood traitors will have to die……

The UnQuestionable Quest

‘She tried to cry herself to sleep but it mingled with the water leaking from the roof. Why did she have to put her bed in the bath room when all she wanted to do was to sleep? But her husband’s stern reproach resounded in her head. “Never question; just do it”. She thought he knew best and always listened to him. Now and then there were the questions of course. They rose sly and unbidden from some cavernous depth of her heart. Was it so hard for them to let her be?’

My grandmother had to experience this when she was a little girl of just 15, married to a man who controlled every aspect of her life. During her menstrual cycle, her bed was placed in the bathroom which had a leaky roof. No one thought of her as a child but as an adult with a huge cultural responsibility to shoulder. The daughter-in-law (my aunt) could not cook for the father-in-law or cross his path because she did not belong to our caste and had not been branded with the sacred symbols of the Vaishnava sect. Human dignity did not find a place in the strong holds of religion.

The eternal perplexity of man has been linked to religion and spirituality. There are so many questions which arise as we grow up and begin to comprehend and logically reason out. A traditional upbringing saves no room for analysis. The rules have been there from time immemorial and acceptance is not a reasoned choice; it is an unquestionable legacy.

I was brought up in one such family which held up the staff of religion for whatever action was done. Nothing before or beyond. It was law. Individuality and opinion were crushed as soon as they decided to have a free rein. Childhood was the beginning of a rigorous training for a lifetime of docility and a spotless character.

Women were not allowed to go into the shrine during their menstrual cycle when they were regarded dirty because of the very mechanism which endowed the family with an heir. We were not permitted to enter into the puja room or touch the idols as they would become impure. The meaning failed to register. How could a bronze idol feel my dirt when I had just had a bath? There were no answers for this. I had always heard that God was supposed to be beyond everything. Then how could that great God have the time to feel my dirt? My opinions were just snubbed or never heard. If the concept of God was even questioned, it was considered worthy enough to be guillotined. When I raised this with my mother I was told not to question….not because she believed this but because she did not have an answer to give. Is this how spirituality and religion operated? With no base?

My first tryst and continuing battle with religion began when I was two. My grand father, the one person whom I loved beyond anyone in this world, passed away. He was 65 with a son who was barely 12. God had decided to just be an idol. Why didn’t he respond when my grandfather died? If he could feel my dirt then he could feel my pain too. But I didn’t see his response. Why then do we follow meaningless rituals without reasoning out why they are actually being followed?

I saw my mother being subjected to torturous rituals without a care about whether she was well or not. She just had to pull on. What kind of God was this who didn’t understand the pain of a mother and was selfish enough to want offerings when my mother was in pain? Religion, for me, always meant bondage and limitation of ideas and rational thought. There was always a ‘do-this’ and a ‘do-that’. There was no freedom of thought. Culture is just a cloak of the ignorance inherited from generations.

To this day, I have not found an answer to my question because all the people whom I have spoken to have themselves been puzzled. Is this really inscrutable or have we been conditioned in such a way that we do not want to question at all?

Requiem to the English Dream

As Indians in the contemporary world, we are faced by this nagging question of our identity. When we are abroad we voraciously plead guilty to being Indian. Comfortably nestled in our home ground, we obnoxiously advocate our Kannada legacy or Rajput ancestry. In our narrow mohallas, we audaciously kick the dust up others’ noses as we triumphantly trample their religious beliefs. Each one of us nurses a secret whim of making our religion the one to become the face of the world. At the end of the thought is just another selfish person who forgets the spirit of being bound as a country, a nation which has, though badly beaten, emerged from the smouldering embers as one to be reckoned with.

It began with the East India Company’s systematically slow but steadily methodical sponging of our country’s soul right from the day the Queen signed the charter in 1600. When we shook the sleep out of our eyes, it was time to go to work, to build the British legacy in India. We saw our own country being bedecked with English graffiti. But our national pride took a strenuous and arduous journey to get to where it has now.

I would just like to recount some of the prominent instances which bound us together as one and when people thought only of the Nation and its freedom. The revolt of 1857 was not one of the earliest struggles but one with very far reaching effects. There had been many scattered but small attempts to oust the British. The revolt made the people realize that they could combine their individual efforts into one powerful force. As unexpected, it left the British dumbfounded that their toys could work without keys. The people felt the true power of being one and the first tiny fledgling of hope of being a free country fluttered to life.

Revolutionaries like Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru and Mangal Pandey were able to garner the support of the masses and exploit their energies in the right direction. Bhagat Singh’s famous fast in prison bolstered the people to take up the cause of the nation. The need to fight against injustice and to take what belonged to us was valiantly demonstrated by them. The Kakori Conspiracy and the death of policeman Saunders did just that. It alerted the intruders that these were no empty threats. Mangal Pandey’s protest against the biting of gun shells with pig fat just made Indians realize that they were being made to do things essentially against their culture. But Bhagat Singh’s soul searing words “Mera rang de basanti chola Maaye rang de” called out to all Indians to have unrequited love for their Mother, Mother India.

Gandhiji’s entry just secured the locks of the chain that bound the people. Despite belonging to different religious sects, people came together to fight for one cause. “Poorna Swaraj” became the nation’s religion. They lived, ate and breathed it. The birth of the Indian National Congress with statesmen like Nehru, Tilak and Sardar Patel at its helm, gave a steadiness and sense of direction to the struggle. The later meandering into the Extremists and Moderates did not deter them from the main cause. Gandhiji’s Dandi March and the Quit India Movement only choked the British administration more. The Tricolour became a witness and symbol of a nation’s struggle and its awakening. But the national spirit was to bear the brunt of individual struggles too. The shackles had hardly been taken off when the nation was again bound and this time by those who had fought for Her. Petty internal struggles bellied the sense of new found freedom. Sacrifices were forgotten, the struggle ignored. The nation was still to witness the horror of the Bengal riots and in its wake, the assassination of Gandhiji. Then came Partition. Jinnah won but India lost. Pakistan was formed but thousands died reaching it not because of the distance but because of hate. As an afterthought, Bangladesh became a separate nation in 1971.

The British strategy of “Divide and Rule” became more popular among us than we can ever imagine. We are no longer a nation of proud Indians, preserving the legacy of independence left behind by our grandfathers and great grandfathers. We have a mind of our own which likes following its British enslavers. The disturbances in our country are mainly due to the issue of religion. Otherwise the Godhra riots would not have taken place nor would the Babri Masjid have been bombed. Innocent Sikhs were killed when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Our country is being hopelessly compartmentalized into religious communities and everything is seen through the lens of religion. The cause and the reason for what we once came together are only a part of history textbooks now.

Our culture has always advocated embracing all the religions of the world. But we seem to be comfortable in our Hindu, Muslim and Sikh shells. The Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS) and its right hand the BJP have always wanted to make India a completely Hindu country. The countless Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis who have stayed here from the times of their forefathers are as much a part of the fabric of our country.

The Christians on the other hand, are sorting to conversion at a feverish pitch. To counter this, even innocent Christians like the Father and his two sons were mercilessly butchered in Orissa. We cannot confer the right to take away some one’s legacy just to prove the supremacy of one religion. In our haste, we even forget the rich culture that we share individually and as a nation. Each state has a full fledged flourishing culture of its own. We are not leaving any stone unturned to uproot that very culture, that groundwork that defines us and our nation as a whole. The 28 states, 6 union territories and innumerable dialects do not show how different we are but rather the strength of a country to stay together despite so many differences and yet those being complementary.

In the end, our National Culture is of oneness, respecting all religions and treating all people as equal and not following Cultural Nationalism by engaging in our own inconsequential disputes over religion so that one religion becomes that of the nation.

Maybe it’s time we paid our last respects to the East India Company’s ingenuity.

LET DOWN BY 21 GRAMS

My grandfather was reading out my favourite Phantom story to me and then he suddenly stopped. He abruptly stood up and walked away even as I bawled. He turned, gave me a sorrowful look and then he was gone. I sat up, the sweat streaking down my forehead in long rivulets. The dream never went away; just came back every time with an intensity that was traumatic.

There were too many problems burdening him. His son had just turned 12; an age when sons need their fathers the most. It was also becoming difficult to educate the girls with the expenses mounting and the debts……..His heart was another story. He had to somehow pull on; it could not fail him now. She did not know about it and he would not tell her; she already had enough to worry about.

I was just two and a half when he left us. Our house could not accommodate all the people who came to pay their last respects. I was entrusted to my grandmother and although I did not know that my grandfather was dead, I saw them covering him with a white cloth. He was lying on the plank unmoving and I guessed that something was wrong. Then I saw my grandmother’s tears.

She would never forgive herself for this mistake. How could she have done this? She had seen his pale face but thought that it was because of fatigue due to the long hours of travel. The journey had been a nightmare; no hospital in sight and his heart not willing to give him any more time……….

There were loud shouts and all the men helped put the body into the truck. Cotton had been stuffed into his nostrils and people were throwing flowers on the body as the truck started moving. “Ram Naam Sathya Hai” rent the air leaving a void in all our hearts – some who knew the truth, some who were not aware and one little mite who was too small even to understand that the one she was so attached to was gone. My mother was inconsolable.

Never….the word had a horrible ring to it. She needed him and did not want any one else. But she had a little girl now whom she had to look after. Daddy’s little girl…..that’s what he used to call her. Now she could see him in her daughter. How could she explain to the angel that Thatha was never going to come back with sweets for her or to lift her up in his arms and throw her into the air?

Every time we used to pass under the railway bridge, I would begin my litany – “Mr. Train please bring my grandfather and grandmother from Madras. Tell them to come soon because I am waiting for them here.” I was too young to understand why my mother’s eyes became moist every time. My mind could not accept the fact that I would not see my grandfather any more. He had just gone on a long vacation and had forgotten me.

She hated boarding school but had to stay there at least for 5 years. Everyone was deserting her. Grandfather had left her and hadn’t even called since then; mother wanted her to stay in boarding for 5 years or even 12. She was only 5 now. At night the stars were the only ones who knew her secret desire – to see her grandfather at least once. But she learnt the truth. He had gone; left her…..

When I was small I used to question my mother as to why God did not take away those whom we hate. God’s logic of taking away those whom we love the most always escaped me. But I have come to realise that only when we lose those we deeply love, do we realise what they meant to us. I am always grateful that I got to experience two and a half years of his love…….because I know now that it is enough to last me a lifetime………...

The so(u)le of music

"Daayam Padaa Hua" one of the many fantastic renditions by Ghazal maestro Hariharan which proved that no one can beat him either in expression, variations, ease, mastery or rendering.....It is heartening to know that some one can expose your soul to the vagaries of life, love, loss, happiness, joy so breathtakingly....lay it bare, strip it of anything but emotion and passion......when you can only gasp at that depth that you have somehow reached unwittingly.....when he sings, you hear each word for what it means and what he has made it mean.....you are not just concentrating on the tune or the beats or his voice.....he makes the entire song one whole which you get totally absorbed in.....when he sings "Sharaab la Sharaab de" you feel as though he is asking you for it....and the slight tease in the song makes you smile and snatch your hand away before giving it to him.....To the contrary, a song like "Ab ke baras bhi" brings out the loneliness, the craving where you get this image of sitting solitary on a rock with the ocean lapping at your feet and the horizon stretching forever.....At that moment you feel that Hariharan is more than a singer.....He is the life that makes a song breathe, molds it, gives it shape like a sculptor......He makes you reach that height if only for an instant......and at that moment I feel the way Jonathan Livingston Seagull felt when he got in through the crack and discovered eternity......

Regret

One fantastic word which makes you realise that you have once again not done what you wanted to do in life...one more step towards making others happy with you on the other side feeling like you are in the dumps

The weirdness of having "mixed feelings"

The word that found most popularity during the convocation of the ACJ class of 2007...I must have used it almost every other second that i breathed on that day....why did I???? I was not particularly over-joyed during my stay in Chennai and my stint at ACJ....everyday was filled with emotional and professional instabilities...but in the midst of it all, my all-too-human nature filled the gaps....i fell in love....with my life, my work, my friends, their lives.....yet, after a point i was tired....tired of it all maybe at times because i was so confused about what i wanted to do...whether i wanted to help them or run away.....what was space???? my cupboard, my bed, my chair, 5 mins of my peace and composure???? no idea...but it was never mine...atleast not for the last 10 months....but in some perverse way, it appealed...they became home and family....a family which tore my brains to bits and loved me whole-heartedly.....The package included giving missed calls to my mother almost five times in a day sometimes and the first sentence as soon as i picked up "Please calm down...don't get so angry"....the remedies, of course, is another story....An outsider's easy domain of solutions "Do yoga, drink lots of water, meditation also helps, listen to happy music and read some book"....Life proves more wily....gives u time only to get angry..not more not less....then there are those strands of life - memories which stick long after the phase is over....it becomes easier to say "Move on man" but what about days when you wish for that cloak of familiarity, that surge of establishing yourself more because someone so strongly believes and shares what you believe in, the old man of habit where you never want to sit anywhere else but that which is temporarily yours, that bolt which hits you when you see a long-ago photo and wish you could just smell the air as it did, walk that path just once more, feel the way you did at that precise moment....That's when "mixed feelings" assumes its importance.....It is neither happiness at having spent time at a great place nor sorrow at leaving it, neither pain for your friend at having lost a job nor ecstasy of your having bagged another.....it gives a name to those seconds, those phases that would otherwise pass into oblivion, that come suddenly in a flash and rush past, those images that play out in front of your eyes as if you could touch them when you are listening to your favourite song and leave an unease and void......
It gives a name to that feeling of wanting more of something that is past and yet looking out for the future......I felt the same on the Convocation Day......there was happiness and the excitement of starting a new life, reality took a break.....In the train, with the last real shreds of my Chennai life slowly slipping away and a new terrain on the horizon, the tears came.....for myself, for the life i had, for the wonderful moments, for the progess from sai to Sai, only for the photos that i had, the memories.....they still refuse to go away................