Wednesday, November 26, 2008

It's so easy to become a celeb. You merely have to get a pic in the paper --any paper, any page-- only once and you earn the right to strut around town with the aura of an important living thing. That pic means someone somewhere could possibly recognise you in the near or far future and God, that makes you soooo important.

TV stars, for instance. Each one is in transit to the big screen but ends up adopting the airs of Shah Rukh Khan. (One SRK is bad enough, man!) To me, they all look alike and act alike. I can't tell who acts worse on screen --that main character on Bidaai (the boy who is supposed to get married to the dark girl) or the main character on Dill Mil Gaye, or that seriously deprived Karan of the erstwhile (thank God!) Kyunki Saas bhi ....

Before you summarily disown me as the serial watcher, let me salvage my tarnished reputation and declare that I watch the first serial whenever I can, I like the Archie-like humour of the second -sometimes - and have suffered a few scenes of the last saga.

Ideally, a celeb should mean someone who has done something for the betterment of mankind, and not someone who gets jazzed up for a living. Really. How does that make him/her superior, huh?

I completely and utterly adore AB but I cannot imagine drooling over him or his pictures. Never could, even as a teenager. To me, he is doing a job just as my father did (well, technically, he was a businessman) and now I do. What he does in the public life has a curiosity tag that I dont. Fair enough. Even I want to know more about him whenever I can. I could have met him a few thousand times if I wanted to but I never saw the need. And ironically, this superstar of superstars is as humble as others like SRK are arrogant.


Saw 'Wednesday' the other day. What a movie! Scores eons over the others of commercial make. Take 'Fashion' for instance. I usually like Madhur Bhandarkar movies. But this one was too laboured and too endless. One felt fatigued and helpless. Maybe a shorter version, a more realistic ending, and a better actress. Ha! I wanted to physically extricate Priyanka Chopra from the screen, especially during the first half of the film. She should get some special award for her exquisite self-consciousness during her most tragic moments. She was probably the singlemost disappointment of the film.

Now about 'Wednesday'. The movie OF the common man. Man, if I had half a chance I would do exactly what Naseeruddin Shah did. It was Naseer all the way. What a talented couple he and Ratna make. Exquisitely powerful acting. Priyanka Chopra should cross paths with them some day. Their vibes alone could help.

Each day, I write a post here. Seriously. Except that I forget to type it out and publish it. Each day, something happens which makes me think, must write this on the blog. It is then consigned to Deletable Memory, that fantastic storage space for everything you WANT to remember. DM ensures it is out of your mind in no time.

No, I dont believe in the theory that you remember what you want to remember. I simply dont. That includes the tens that my husband introduces me to every day. I dread walking anywhere with him because we bump into someone he knows every step of the way. I tell him he should stand for local elections and he will win unopposed. No one will dare fight him.

And then, he insists on introducing me to each of these people. When none of them register on my blank face, thanks to DM, he baldly tells me in front of that person, "You have met him three times before."

I have no option but to beam. Sustaining the embarrassment, I walk on gamely to plunge head-on into another encounter of the close kind.

Anyway, that's not what this post is about. This one is dedicated to my rant on pubs.

Call me utterly, abjectly, disgustingly old-fashioned but I cannot see the fun in pubs. I went to one last week only because it was a must event (that's always the case). An A-rated one in Delhi, the crowd was nice and friendly, my own people. The atmosphere was jovial and happy but, alas, the venue does everything to mar the fun.

There are no lights; so you cant see anyone. There is loud music gatecrashing into your ears; so you cant talk to anyone. There is no place to sit; so you stand forever. There is no room to dance; so we shake our bums on the half-foot space we have managed to reserve on the slippery floor. The bar sells drinks that taste putrid and sorry. The only saving grace is the ban on smoking, which would otherwise have driven me out in five minutes flat.

Oh, what a prude, they say. I'd rather be. Is it so difficult to get a tad sensible and at least try to ensure an atmosphere that is conducive to interacting with one another? Or are we to suffer it because the West has mandated this way of living? Let's get real, guys, and get some self-respect along the way.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Are you equally confused about what the hell is happening to the country? Inflation is an an all-time high, bombs are bursting everywhere and communal riots dot the sub-continent.
In the middle of all this, we have a nuclear deal pushed by an Italian head ..i mean party president... and her cohorts in government.

somebody, please give the country a break. We deserve it.
Had written this piece in Manushi 10 years ago or so.
I can still touch the seething anger and see the fire in my belly.
If you ask me whether I still turn around on men who misbehave, I do, mostly. But there is no fire in my belly any more. Life trains you.


Can’t Feel Free

I am not sure if in this society, any woman can actually feel free. Yes, we wear what we like, do as we wish, but are we free of those unnerving stares aimed at us, allegedly because of our “seductive” clothing. Are we free of the general fear of being harassed? I have yet to see even an unostentatiously dressed woman having an undisturbed walk along the quietest or the busiest street in Mumbai, a city hailed as the woman’s
paradise.
Many women will frown and rush to correct me that they have a peaceful walk almost every day. I ask them to think again and probe their minds, check if there is an image or two of some ugly monster lurking in the dark recesses of their subconscious memory.

Recently, I was standing at a railway station when a decent looking chap walking afar in the opposite direction saw me, suddenly cut the horizontal distance between us in a few quick paces and without touching me passed by a hair’s breadth. The idea obviously was to unnerve me so that I am on edge till he walks past. By no stretch of imagination can this be termed as sexual assault. Sadism? I would think so. This was not my first or last such experience. Men with such indulgences are uncannily similar in their modus operandi. The universal male obsession with females may be essentially sexual in nature but the
wild gestures and catcalls, executed so helplessly, have mainly to do with a certain sadistic streak that women probably do not possess, and if they do, is not easily manifest.
There is a hidden agenda to a catcall, to a delibrate brush or bottom-pinching: show her who is superior.
Let’s watch her suffer humiliation and helplessness, the feeling of violation that burns through her every time someone darts that look and mutters in that alien language. The offence almost never meets a defence. The glory of watching one’s insults being absorbed through her skin without fear of reciprocation is something men savour. And since most women prefer to pretend they have not felt humiliated even as their
whole mind is seething with the humiliation, the man’s confidence is vindicated. The victory is savoured till the next prey.
On another occasion, when I was dressed miserably and looking it, a chap came close and breathed some offensive-sounding syllable in my sweaty ear, upon which I snapped, with some help from the humidity
and the heat, and decided to confront him. Digging up some Hindi invectives reserved for his category, I hollered at him loud and clear for the benefit of several others who were drawn to the scene.
The bewildered man did not know what had hit him, just as I hadn’t two seconds ago. With an incredulous look on his face, he tried to hide his mortification by walking away, face
sunk somewhere in his chest. The rest of my audience was aghast.
The expressions around me clearly suggested disgust. I was being disowned for mouthing such unpronounceables, which are reserved for the unfair sex. A fitting defence is always perceived as an offence.
All the women I know are afraid of physical assault, molestation and the darkest nightmare of all, rape. This form of offence again is necessarily the prerogative of the male. If there were only good men in
this world, women would probably see no need to marry for safety or to keep an unhappy marriage going. Often, it is to protect herself from unwanted attention that she stays
married to an unworthy man and takes his name.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Now, have you got over the blasts? The Delhi one, I mean.
or even the Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad ones? Arent we supposed to forgive and forget? I mean, every nation has explosions happening all round. So what? Look at the US. It had 9/11, didnt it? It's another matter that it attended to it big-time and made sure that it didnt have another one.
Look at even good old Pakistan. Each time someone riots or a mini-explosion takes place, it barks the place down, gets a grab at the US and India or whoever is within reach.
And we? We sound the red alert. We get bytes from Shivraj Patil who changes his attire three times in three hours to make sure the creases dont show on national television. This time, thankfully, he didnt say, "I am not going to say that someone is to blame," as he did after A'bad.
It's terrible, the way we live and never learn. NEVER.
We tolerate. We tolerate endlessly. What can the government do? we ask.
We all nod wisely, Mumbai is next.
Yes, it is. So? Are we going to stir up and show some genuine outrage or simply face what is in store? Are we going to do something to prevent it? Nah.
I mean, what CAN we do, right? We can't think of getting these clowns in Delhi to get to work, can we? We still have no idea who sends those emails that mock us so badly it's getting embarrassing to live.
Next polls, we know whom to vote for too. After that, we forget we voted for them. We tolerate and hope they will do their job. If they don't, we suffer.
And we suffer in silence.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Education creates egos.

Yes, I firmly believe that. Of what worth is an education that deters you from doing something mainly because you fear how you will be viewed if you do it? havent you encountered such situations ever?
There are any number of NGOs engaged in spreading 'knowledge' and we all applaud it as the worthiest motive. But of what good is sine, cosine if it robs you of your compassion and gives you a feeling of superiority over others?

When I see a blind man at railway stations, I offer a hand. But sometimes, I feel awkward: will people laugh because I look educated? You rarely find an educated girl/boy offering support to these people. They either trudge on their own or, 9/10, they are bailed out by a poor man. Educated people can't be bothered.

Two days ago, we heard heart-rending wails from the thicket outside my home after midnight. Husband and I took our umbrella and tried to source the sound but couldnt. The sound stopped when we neared it and we could see no dog, pup or any other animal.
So we came back. Around 7 am, we woke up to the same yelping sound. Out we went, and this time, because of better light and some morning walkers, we saw a she-dog (she was too sweet to be called a bitch) stuck in the mouth of a narrow nullah underneath the road. The nullah flowed into the drain perpendicular to it and was presently gurgling out water in torrents fed by the heavy rains.

None of us had the guts to step into the drain --we could see rats scampering in the muck -- and extract her from the dirty nullah. We watched helplessly as she did too, until a good man outside the gate saw us gathered mournfully and walked in. As if to the manner born, he handed over his watch and umbrella to us, rolled up his trousers, and plunged right in. Catching the dog by her mouth with one hand, he squeezed her out of the nullah and on to the road. She had broken her hind legs and limped but as relieved her nightmare was over.
The man worked as a watchman in a building nearby, sported a tilak and was cool about his soiled clothes and feet even as we educated types were relieved that someone else had done the job for us while we worried about health, hygiene and perception. So much for higher learning.

"Kamyabi ke baad jab palat kar dekha, Toh mere kadmo ke nishaan na the, Unki jagah jo dekha to dung reh gaya;

Weh the hathileyon ke nishan, Tab samjha woh sahare hain, Jin par chal kar yahan pahuncha, Mere mata pita ke pawan kar kamal."

What does one say about a guy who writes like this? Abhinav Bindra, who stole a billion hearts on Monday, August 11, 2008, had written this in his home at one point when he was feeling disheartened. A gold in a 10-metre air rifle is just one of the crowns on the head of a son who values his parents. His heart, if you ask me, is firmly in the right place.
Till yesterday, I hadnt heard of him. But after seeing his cutesy face, so innocent, serene and calm, on TV, I have become a huge admirer of this young fellow.
I equally admire his parents who put their lives on hold to nourish their son's dream, to give him everything to excel in his desired vocation in a country which doesnt understand or encourage any kind of sport except cricket.
The couplet tells you about Bindra's profound maturity at such a young age. Indeed, success comes and goes but what stays with you always are the efforts of your parents and people who love you.
As in Beijing, Bindra has hit bull's eye with this one.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Jaipur, Bengalooru, and now Ahmedabad. Next destination/s: ________.

And what does union home minister Shivraj Patil, second to PM in internal security matters, say immediately after those sickening explosions in Ahmedabad? "I dont want to say that someone is to blame, or that someone should have done something. That's not what I want to say. I wont say it's because someone didnt do their job. There is no point going into all that. We dont want to say such things..." and so on like an idiot for five minutes on TV. Honest. The evidence is on your TV screens.

Here is a man who knows how to pad up big-time.
1. I dont understand how anyone can be so sick as to take THIS opportunity to jump at a rival's throat.
2. I dont understand how a responsible office-bearer can actually play political games first thing without first making a sympathetic statement for the victims, at least for the record.
3. I dont understand how he takes so long and so many words to say "Look, BJP is responsible."
4. I dont understand how we vote for such yucky, sticky, dirty people.

We have not just a cold-blooded, unfeeling government at the helm of affairs at the Centre, we have brazen and reckless thugs who have the gall to push their political agenda upfront in your face even while you are mourning the dead.

Not only their ministers, Congress henchmen --known as spokesmen-- such as one Rajiv Sponge were all over TV channels in a flash, almost grabbing the question like a footballer to start shooting obscenities at the BJP. They did the same thing Kargil-time. They kept ranting about how the Vajpayee government was sleeping all through and not doing enough. And when we won that war, they glumly shrugged, but we should have not allowed that to happen in the first place.

Considering the Congress never makes any mistakes-- remember all the blasts in Jammu and Kashmir for the last four decades, Mumbai in 1993 and thereafter, every year, Delhi, and wherever else -- its first reaction to a blast is to check out the government in place. If it's the BJP, the Congis slap on some make-up cake(ya, they actually look like they will peel any time) and present themselves post-haste at the ever-hungry TV studios like good boys at work to do momma's bidding.

(When 9/11 happened, the US Opposition didnt go gunning for Bush & Co. They united in grief, shared the anguish of the government and the people, and never talked about "intelligence failure." They knew this is not the occasion to strike. This point has been made by several intelligence officials, but alas, always in private, never in the press.)

I think it's disgusting that we vote for these scumbags. I hate talking about them because they are beneath contempt. And what's really unbelievable is that everybody else is seeing what I see and yet not seeing it. Am I the only one seeing them the way they are? Everyone else is voting them in. Do you?
Let's all get them out of the way. Vote Mayawati, vote Lallu, if you like, but not these Original
Sins.

By the way, does anybody else also get the feeling the serial explosions have a political mastermind?

P.S. When Mumbai trains cracked up on July 11, 2006, BJP didnt jump to studios to scream blue murder at the Congress. It issued a dignified condemnation. Just ONE case in point. Should suffice.

Here's a piece from Le monde. To me, its mostly mumbo jumbo. All I can recognise are two names: Tushar Gandhi's and mine.

If anyone cares to translate, she will get a favourable mention on this blog. (What else can a journalist offer?)



Tushar Gandhi, profession arrière-petit-fils
Gandhi, c'est lui. Lui que les journalistes appellent pour obtenir des informations sur la vie du Mahatma. Lui qui commémore, à Bombay, le 60e anniversaire de son assassinat, mercredi 30 janvier. Lui que les marques du monde entier contactent pour être autorisées à exploiter l'image de son arrière-grand-père. "Je suis son emblème. Un peu comme la mascotte des Jeux olympiques. Une mascotte qui ne fait pas de sport, mais qui est dans tous les médias", avoue sans honte celui qui veut défendre la philosophie du Mahatma dans une Inde en pleine modernité.
Tushar Gandhi est loin de ressembler à son illustre ancêtre. Sa voix grave et son corps massif sont à l'exact opposé de la maigre silhouette de son arrière-grand-père. Cela n'empêche pas certains de ses concitoyens de lui toucher les pieds en signe de respect. "C'est comme s'ils croyaient toucher ceux du Mahatma. Cela me met très mal à l'aise."

Tushar Gandhi ne sait pas exactement où il est né. Sa mère a accouché il y a 48 ans dans le compartiment de première classe d'un train reliant deux gares du Maharashtra, dans la région de Bombay. Mais ses origines tiennent dans son seul nom. Dès sa plus tendre enfance, son arrière-grand-père, remplit son existence. Il réclame des histoires de princes et d'aventuriers à sa grand-mère ? Elle ne fera que lui conter les épisodes de la vie du Mahatma. Il veut répondre aux coups donnés par ses camarades de classe ? Sa grand-mère lui intime l'ordre de ne pas leur répondre par la violence. Voilà pourquoi, lorsque sa mère vient le chercher à l'école, elle le retrouve souvent en train de se faire battre par les élèves de sa classe. "Ces événements auront eu au moins le mérite de me rapprocher de mon arrière-grand-père", concède-il en souriant.

Tushar Gandhi n'a connu que les cendres du héros de son enfance. Le souvenir de la poussière sacrée lui glissant entre les mains le rend encore tout tremblant. "Mon corps vibrait", se souvient-il. C'était en 1997. Il venait de découvrir l'une des rares urnes contenant les cendres du Mahatma, dans le coffre d'une banque de l'Orissa. Au terme d'une longue bataille juridique avec l'administration indienne, le coffret était finalement vidé à la rencontre de deux fleuves sacrés, le Gange et la Yamuna, comme Gandhi l'aurait souhaité. Lui qui détestait les reliques et avait la hantise d'être idolâtré.

Pourtant, en Inde, Gandhi est bien devenu un dieu. Les musées qui portent son nom ne cessent de se multiplier dans le pays. "Gandhi est vénéré, mais ses idées sont inconnues et son rêve abandonné", déplore son arrière-petit-fils. Pour propager sa philosophie, il a créé un site Internet regroupant toutes les archives existant sur Gandhi.

Inévitablement, la vie du Mahatma se confond avec celle de Tushar Gandhi. Lorsqu'on l'appelle sur son téléphone portable, l'hymne préféré du Mahatma est diffusé en guise de tonalité. Dans le salon de son appartement de Bombay, où il vit avec sa femme et ses deux enfants, l'image du petit homme frêle enveloppé d'une tunique banche est partout. En photo, en figurine de bronze posée sur le téléviseur ou encore en dessin sur une porcelaine installée sur le buffet.

Pour transmettre son héritage, Tushar Gandhi n'avait sans doute pas d'autre choix que de s'imprégner de l'existence de celui qui avait coutume de dire : "Ma vie est mon message." Il a quitté son emploi de graphiste pour se consacrer entièrement à la recherche des plus petites anecdotes concernant son arrière-grand-père et mieux le faire connaître. On apprend ainsi que l'illustre ancêtre a été un précurseur dans la protection de l'environnement. "Il avait l'habitude de coller les lettres l'une sur l'autre pour écrire sur le verso vierge. Ça le terrifiait d'imaginer que l'on pouvait gâcher autant d'arbres. Le seul fait que nous n'ayons pas conscience des conséquences de nos actes individuels l'inquiétait", assure-t-il.

Gandhi n'appartient pas qu'à l'histoire. C'est aussi une marque gérée avec soin par son arrière-petit-fils qui, après avoir tenté de l'exploiter commercialement au bénéfice de la fondation Mahatma Gandhi, créée en 1997, y a renoncé sur fond de polémiques. Aujourd'hui, il autorise uniquement les publicités qui ne sont pas en contradiction avec les principes du père fondateur de l'Inde. Lorsque le constructeur allemand Audi lui a demandé l'autorisation d'utiliser l'image de son arrière-grand-père pour une publicité, le refus a été catégorique : "Vous imaginez Gandhi vendre une voiture de luxe allemande ? Si la voiture avait été hybride, respectueuse de l'environnement, j'aurais certainement accepté." En bon gestionnaire de marques, Tushar Gandhi défend la sienne : "Gandhi est la marque la plus populaire au monde. Soixante ans après sa mort, il est le seul homme susceptible de déclencher un acte d'achat partout dans le monde."

Le pouvoir évocateur de cette marque explique l'entrée en politique de Tushar Gandhi. Il a été contacté par le Parti du Congrès, auquel appartenait le père de l'indépendance de l'Inde lors de sa lutte contre la colonisation britannique. Mais ça a été rapidement la désillusion. Le parti a refusé de l'investir dans le village natal de son arrière-grand-père, au motif que sa caste lui aurait fait perdre de nombreuses voix, alors même que Gandhi, tout au long de sa vie, avait combattu la ségrégation des castes. "Tushar n'aurait jamais dû rentrer en politique. Tout l'art de Gandhi était justement de faire de la politique sans être un politicien", regrette Seema Kamdar, une journaliste basée à Bombay.

Désormais, Tushar Gandhi consacre son temps à des projets humanitaires dans les villages, "ces lieux désertés par le boom économique du pays", et multiplie les conférences. Certaines de ses déclarations choquent et sont sévèrement critiquées. Lorsque, par exemple, il avoue publiquement qu'il n'est pas végétarien, comme l'était son arrière grand-père. "Une offense gratuite et inutile lorsqu'on fait partie de sa famille", déplore Jitendra Desai, membre d'une organisation gandhienne basée à Ahmedabad.

Son livre sur l'assassinat de Gandhi a suscité les réactions les plus violentes. Let's Kill Gandhi ! ("Tuons Gandhi !") met en cause un groupe de Brahmanes, la caste des prêtres hindous, dans la préparation de l'assassinat de Gandhi. L'effigie de Tushar a été brûlée et il a reçu des menaces de mort. "J'ai clamé haut et fort que ce serait un honneur d'être assassiné, comme mon arrière-grand-père, pour avoir défendu mes idées", répond Tushar Gandhi. Ce qui l'inquiète davantage, c'est plutôt ce cauchemar fait récemment, et dans lequel le monde entier avait oublié Gandhi. Sans sourciller, il ajoute : "Si cela arrivait, je préférerais mourir."

Tushar Gandhi.

Julien Bouissou, Le Monde, 31.01.08

http://www.lemonde.fr/asie-pacifique/article/2008/01/30/tushar-gandhi-profession-arriere-petit-fils_1005359_3216.html#ens_id=1005283

Friday, July 25, 2008

What is a human being that does not hurt?
I am extremely hard-hearted about people without a heart and all heart for people who are soft and sweet. :-)
This is not my interpretation about myself but what everybody says about me and I think this is more or less true. Whether right or wrong, I am terrible with people I dislike and I am quite nice with people I find genuine.
I am a reasonably good judge of character but I have made mistakes. The first was in college, when a friend sweet-talked me to penetrate my highly popular group (we were rowdy as hell, never mind my serious bespectacled demeanour)
I realised a day before our class 'social' I had singlehandedly pulled off that she was just so jealous of me. Just as you see in the movies, I was wounded before my big day.
My mum saw my face. She quietly came to me, patted my back, and said, "what's wrong?" I said I never expected this girl to stab me in the back like this. It hurts.
Mum heard me out and calmly said, "It's terrible but you are much bigger than this. Don't let her affect you." There was nothing extraordinary in her words but she was extraordinary. Her energy and power of emotional empathy soothed me so much I instantly felt better and stronger.
On the day of the social, the hurt was there, my eyes welled with tears and for the first time, my friends saw that I too was vulnerable. They rallied around me, and the next thing I knew, I had simply blotted her out of my life. Just like that.
She was around that day, but she had stopped existing for me. And the social went off beautifully. I was compering, performing and coordinating but I didnt remember her a single second and my event was a runaway hit, the talk of all college.

Wily nily, this has become standard strategy ever since. Each time somebody misbehaves, or hurts me, I wipe that person out of my consciousness. It's often interpreted as arrogance but I seriously don't see the person at all for me to think about him or her.
Once, one of these riff-raffs got antsy and demanded,"Why are you behaving like a royal highness, and pretending I dont exist?" And I didnt know what to say to her because I never really went out of my way to ignore her. It happens by default.
Some part of me decides that I shouldnt be wasting time on this worthless person, or it tells me, "He/she doesnt value you." So off he/she goes.

The only time I kicked serious ass was last year, when someone spread some utterly laughable rumours about me. Well-meaning friends saw through it and told me. Ill-meaning friends latched on and spread the word.
I was shocked and hurt that someone could be so malicious but lost no time in hitting back. Usually, I dont hit back because, as I said, to me, such people are beneath contempt and once I blot them out of my life, there is no question of wasting my energy on a non-entity. But this time, I just felt like doing it. So attack I did and the person smarted under it forever, not expecting a non-violent person like to me to get ferocious.
Sometimes, these guys spice up your life.

People get hurt all the time. When some of them confide in me, I tell them to ask themselves one question: "Have my parents brought me up with so much love and care so that I spend some precious moments of my life agonising over this person who means nothing to me?" And pop goes the anguish. Yes, some of it stays but then this gives you tremendous courage to cope.

Try it and tell me.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

You guys are going to call me absolutely `middle-class' (I love Ratna Pathak Shah for the way she says it in `Sarabhai vs Sarabhai') for this. But I genuinely believe DD National is the best Indian channel we have. IT has some singing shows, but the bulk of its programming is super stuff--series of cartoonists, how they work, series on rural issues, programme on health issues, educational material for children, lessons on morality and sensitive films.
Each time I click past DD National to Star, Zee, Sony, Sahara and what-have-you, I find someone or the other saying, Oh this contest means the world to me, I want to fulfil my mother's dream or I want to give my dog the best car in the world, and some sundry judges (often, has-beens such as Chunky Pandey, Raveena Tandon or Sonali Bendre and the nightmarishly omnipresent Malaika Arora-Khan).
Someone is praising a contestant or someone is fighting and someone else is crying copiously. Are these guys for real? Can't we have some real reality, people?
It's that time of the year again when we worry about a drought-like situation in Maharashtra, and probably many other parts of the country.
For a Mumbaiwalla, scarce rains means water cuts in the last four months of the year. For a farmer, it means debt and depression. He has spent all his expensive capital (at an interest rate of 30 to 40 %) on the seeds, and has sweated and toiled to sow them. Now he is waiting for the rains to do their job.
If it doesnt rain by July 31, the government will declare a drought in some areas. And when there are no rains, farmers despair and hope their region is declared a drought. Why? So that they can hope to get work on some EGS scheme (work for eight hours for a paltry 50-100 rupees or so) and they can put roti on the table.
Declaring a region drought-hit is not the end of his worries.
1. He may or may not get work on a scheme. It's not guaranteed.
2. The EGS schemes are run by a highly corrupt administration which makes up names of people on the rolls or, if it feels more adventurous, makes up an entire scheme itself. The farmers therefore may continue to starve while the official records show everybody has got work. In case an IAS officer decides to undo the wrong, she is transferred.
3. The money from EGS is erratic. A debt-ridden farmer may sign on a slip of paper saying he earns Rs 100 per day but he may get only Rs 50-60 in hand. The remainder is taken by those people for services granted
And, we are still not talking about what if the region is not declared drought-hit
And, we are still at the farmer's survival; we are still not talking about his heavy duty loan for the seeds which drives him to commit suicide.

Does the sickening Congress wheeling-dealing on July 22, or Rahul Gandhi's `brilliant' speech (how much are we going to fuss over him?), or even all those endless but mindless reality shows make any sense to you now?
Don't you think we have lost all sense of reality somewhere, that reality is not all about dancing and singing?

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

It's incredible how so many people are giving the clean chit to Manmohan Singh. "He is a good man," goes the refrain. But hello? Whom was all the horse-trading for? All the Rs 25 crore-50 crore getting wheeled into different corners of the world and all those heavy duty abstentions, cross-votings were intended to bail out this man who has somehow emerged dudh ka dhula even after sitting on this muck.
How can a person who allows someone to commit a murder be clean? Didnt Man know what was being done to save his disastrous government? Or are we saying we should go blindfolded when a murder is being committed in front of your eyes?
Why are we so daft?

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

So many people have been asking me why I quit mid-way. And a small number is also curious to know why I refused to take up a job for a while.
Let me begin at the beginning. And this is one record, off the record, whichever way you look at it because there is none other. I was fed up. I was fed up of what I and everybody else around me was dishing out in the name of journalism day after day. We were all glorified clerks, rushing for a story - please, please, any quote will do -- and dashing it off before the deadline.
We had this list of usual suspects we always spoke to for a quote. There were activists, doctors, lawyers, officials, politicians, even industrialists who were ever ready to give us a byte or quote. They made up the dial-a-quote diary. And believe me, they are all psychos, crazy to see their name in print.
Each one of us is guilty of making heroes and heroines out of them. Shabana Azmi is one. Shobha de is another. Pritish Nandy is the third. There are many more whom I dare not name for I too have used them often.
That's what eventually go to me. That I was writing worthless crap and the paper wanted me to write ONLY worthless crap.
Add to that a totally Worthless Person to coordinate work with and I threw my hands up.
Call it mid-career frustration. I didnt give it up all at once; I tried to set things right, complained that we need to get some quality into the paper. But then, no paper was talking about quality, so why us? Nobody was listening. All they said was relax, we will change things, we will change the WP, we will not let you leave. That was their bottomline. Mine was change everything.
As I had been ill the year before, I was already low on patience and felt like a break. I could have jumped from one frying pan into another, but didnt want to. AT ALL.
So, after months and months of hesitation at the idea of being without a job, I simply quit.
The sabbatical has been the best thing that ever happened to me. It did me a world of good, refreshed my spirits, nourished my soul, recharged my batteries and got me doing things I wanted to. All sorts of people came with all sorts of really flattering offers, and I picked what suited me. Now, I am not talking about those right here but basically, I realised there is a whole world out there which you havent explored.
So, if anyone out there thinks a job is the only way to live, get a life.

I seem to be making it a habit. And now, its positively embarrassing. So I shant apologise for the hopeless delay in writing to you this time. I would rather say thanks for bearing with me. Ya, believe me, I have been losing fans and friends because of my absolute inability to write here.

Now, cant afford that for too long. Guys, please come back. I promise to behave next time.

Am going to be politically incorrect this time. Too much bottled up within, you see.

Am seriously irritated with the way we urbanites decide we are superior to the rural or tribal people or even animals. Why? We speak English, right. We take bath, we have these big, neat houses, an 'education', we eat at a dining table, we go to the gym, know all about raindances, cardio and aerobics, sushi, spanish food, russian coffee, and what-have-you. Our kids go to IB schools or boarding. And, of course, we love dressing up like the west.

In some inexplicable way, that makes us superior to someone who gets his hands dirty toiling on the fields, doesnt get power to run his fan at home or water to nourish his field, lives off roti and onion or just roti on leaner days, cant afford to send his kid to the municipal school beyond 5 years because he needs an additional hand on the field, speaks a coarse dialect of an Indian language and spends a lifetime struggling to make two ends meet .

Heard two-three journos the other day talking (in clipped tones, why that is such a fad I cant fathom) about how Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh insists on talking in English. Said one in a well-cultivated nasal twang that made her voice sharp and highly unappealing, "When I met him, I kept talking in Hindi and Marathi but he would insist on talking in englisss. He knows ours is an engliss publication. And God, he simply cant speak a wordddd.. Uf."

Am equanimous about politicians but whenever I have spoken to this CM, he has happily spoken to me in Hindi and Marathi and when I have spoken in English (I have these spells of blanking out on Marathi), he's responded in that language in a completely legible way.

Considering the exposure of these almighty journos to politicians including the CM is even less than mine, it got me thinking about why they were doing this. It's the age-old problem of reverse chivalry. We have settled our thinking that east or west, English is the best. And anybody who doesnt know the language is doomed.

And God, am I glad I speak it! Imagine how I would have fared had my parents decided to send me to an Indian language school. I know very bright journos earning Rs 20,000 a month after 15 years in the field and not getting half the respect I get only because they went to a non-English school. Naseerudding Shah had once said the same thing about Om Puri: that Puri was a superior actor but not given his due because, well, he was not the suave, English-speaking Shah.

You are reading me today because I am speaking from a position of strength as we see it. Had I studied in Gujarati and timidly complained about discrimination, I wouldnt have got half a ear.

Believe me, it gives me no pleasure to be better-off than them on this count. I think it's terrible the way a country of one billion plus simply sinks its head in the sand, not just with no self-respect but also with lots of shame at being what it is. And what is it that brings this hopeless identity crisis on? I have no idea.

Try speaking to someone in the first class compartment in Hindi and she will give you an offended or a withering look. It's happened with me. When someone speaks in Hindi, I end up answering in English if I think it's an educated person. Years and layers of conditioning that will probably never come off.

We can, however, do something. We can try to be conscious of it each time we run someone down simply because he can't speak English. We can also try to see that we speak an Indian language when we speak to a stranger outside our professional circles, if possible. It's ok if your English gets a little forgotten in a process. Better than to forget a history thats millions of years old. And your own identity.

Who knows, we could actually get some sense of self-pride back along the way, and learn that we arent really too bad after all.

Can sense that pent-up anger rising. So, let me calm my nerves while u take a commercial break. I will be right back.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Sorry for this belated posting. Thanx a million for noticing and plodding me to get back. The thing is I get word-weary. Have had too much of words from childhood to a career that grew on the strength of my words. That’s one of the reasons I simply upped and quit a full-time job, and don’t feel inclined to do a column. Imagine churning out 1,000 words week after week not because you have something to say but jabardasti.
Tragically though, I seem to be never able to get out of wordsmithing. Whatever I do revolves around words, words and more words. Sigh! So, I periodically lay off the blog every few days for a breather…now, I feel like new!
Last week, we had an unlikely visitor. It lay coiled like a black rubber band underneath a table in the unused bedroom. I had already turned the entire house upside down looking for him (or was it her? We’ll settle for `him’ in deference to our male-dominated world, as we don’t know) and was acting on the hubby’s advice of sprinkling phenyl (yes, phenyl) all over to get him out of hiding.
I was dousing the bedroom in this super-smelly liquid, spraying near the bedframe when I spotted him. He was tiny and thin. He had spread himself along the skirting and lay there Zen-like. He would have lain there forever, motionless, had I not summoned people for a look. Once he realized he had company, he stirred, very gently, and gave us the much-needed confirmation that it was indeed him.
All hell then broke loose as we screamed, shrieked and scrambled to the phone, and the security van arrived with three men holding a huge flashlight and hockey sticks. They tried to prise him out of his comfort zone. While they managed to coax him onto the hockey sticks, he refused to make the logical progession into a carry bag. Not even when they sprayed phenyl on him. Instead, he simply bared his fangs. The tiny fellow gave a dekko of his small but distinct hood and everybody took a co-ordinated step back.
It was indeed a baby cobra, the security guys confirmed, that had crawled through the non-existent crack in my main door and slithered purposefully to the farthest corner of our reasonably big house. We would never have known, had not our neighbours been around to witness this housebreak. An earlier inspection by the security guys had yielded nothing as he was virtually invisible to spot.
I shudder to think what would have happened the next morning when my maid swept under the table thinking it’s a long earthworm, or even a rubber band?
But then, such is life. You never know how much of it is left even as we spend every moment asking for more.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

In the film `Gandhi', Kasturba has a dialogue which goes something like this, ``Our people are starving because we are wearing clothes made by foreigners.'' Mahatma Gandhi then makes the historical exhortation sparking a bonfire of Lancashire mill cloth that could supposedly be seen right up to England.
Even as we continue to debate the relevance of the epostle of peace and non-violence in these post-modern times of high-value stress and complex economics, this statement has a certain currency that's hard to ignore. There is a sense of anticipation about this side of India. The GDP is seriously looking at a euphoric 10 per cent, much like the sensex (till the day before); the economists and the world have approved of us-- our increasingly globalised environment in which Monsanto has a field day, supermarkets and malls stock only MNC brands, movies in multiplexes are out of reach for the lower middle class, and a consumerist lifestyle propped up on loans and the strengthened rupee to give us a leg up on the social ladder.
Sure, we need to be bullish -- our industrial performance is glowing, we have given the world Nano (after the zero), the gross personal wealth (no pun intended) of the Ambani bros spurs many on to similar marathons, the sundry takeovers of foreign companies achieved and planned but never dreamed, the no-end-in-sight BPO boom, and so on.
But there is another India we have lost sight of, which is not with us or within sighting distance. They are still grappling with bread-and-butter issues, even as we bake cakes by the dozen.For the past ten years, more are more of Them are being driven to suicide. The scene in the countryside is grim: rotting onions, poor yields due to scarcity of power and water, private loans that grow into an endless debt trap and the inevitable albatross of a daughter's wedding.
The fact is that we have doggedly refused to look right and left and perhaps, behind us. It doesn't matter to us that, in the anxiety to impress the world outside, we have rode roughshod over our own. We have not paused to see whether we are all moving together.
Our incomprehensible approach to growth is one of the reasons Gandhiji is so, so relevant today. In one of his initial speeches at an INC meeting, he had pointed out, after Mohammed Ali Jinnah made a stirring speech demanding direct action, that we need to identify with the farmer, the villager and see what he wants. A bunch of people sitting on towns and cities cannot decide India's future, he had argued.
He could well have been making the point today, except that few would bother to hear him out. We have as agriculture minister a man better known as the president of the Board for Control of Cricket in India. Each time a cricketer or cricket is in crises, or egos are being rubbed, Sharad Pawar materialises, either on the right side or the wrong, either making a point or never getting at it, but always, feverishly, on the job. His job as a minister doesn't actually take a back-seat, it is simply never on the horizon. If he could, he would probably ask all farmers to stop worrying and play cricket, a la Marie Antoinette.
As for the governments, they don't even give a farmer the freedom to call his suicide a suicide. Government norms make it almost impossible for a hapless farmer's death to qualify for a `suicide' status.
The intellectuals of the world will froth forever over the topicality of the Mahatma but to those who can see the disconnect, we never needed him more than now-- as early as yesterday.

Friday, January 04, 2008

This is a must-read.

Saw P Sainath on the Lok Sabha channel on TV the other day talking about something extremely close to my heart.
Listening to him was such a novel experience, wired as the brain is to expect trite and more trite baloney from all channels these days, whether they peddle soaps, news or reality. And here was a senior journalist who has travelled across the length and breadth of the country telling us in grim pictures how we have utterly and completely lost all sense of reality and sanity, how the threatened existence of Shah Rukh's pony tail assumes much more national importance than a similar plight of almost half our countrymen in another part of the world.
Dividing these two worlds is this very tangible, visible line that permits a one-way movement: stepping over the threshold in our charmed land of plenty (and sponging up some more of our seemingly infinite space) becomes necessary for many of the deprived lot on the other side but, on the happening side of the divide, we are too happy chasing our material dreams to look behind and check whether the larger lot is catching up.
What he said makes nonsense of our nauseous evolution to the top of the human pile as most see it. He asks the most pertinent question of the century: Where is our sense of outrage? Indeed. Though only some of the text of his speech is reproduced her and not really in Sainath's words, it's mostly him paraphrased, or edited or changed in some way simply because I couldn't keep pace with his speed (sigh! getting older) and also because I can't any more understand my shorthand! With apologies to Sainath for producing the text in slightly arbitrary form, with some missing links (deliberately left as they are because I feared introducing some meaning that may not have been meant) and with some new links (wherever I thought the import/meaning could stay undisturbed), here it is. The errors and misintrepretations are all mine and may please be forgiven:
``India ranks 126th in the human development index and has a life expectancy less than Bolivia's, the poorest country in Latin America. We have around one lakh billionaires even as 800 million continue to exist in the same country on less than Rs 20 a day. There is no such thing as an Indian reality. There are multiple realities.
Our impressive growth rate is just one of them. While the Indian CEOs's salaries are soaring, farm income has declined. The average monthly per capita farm expenditure, according to the NSS, is Rs 503, close to Rs 477, the BPL figure for India. About 55 % of this amount is spent on food and 18 % on clothing. Fuel and other needs make up the rest. This leaves precious little for education or health in a country which has the sixth most privatised health system in the world.

In terms of food, the average rural family is actually consuming 1 kg less than it did 10 years ago. We can clear an SEZ in six months but not land reforms in 60 years. Tenancy and other issues continue to dog the farmer even today. The compensation (doled out by the government during crises) often goes to the absentee landlord and not the farmer.
Globally, coffee prices are booming but the man who grows it in Kerala is committing suicide. Farm data, which started getting recorded only in 1995 by the National Crime Records Bureau, shows that there were 1,12,000 suicides between 1997 and 2003. Ironically, two-thirds of the suicides occur in one-third of the country's population, and mind you, in cash crop areas (not food crops, as commonly misunderstood). In the last 50 years, we have driven people to cash crops and now we are paying the price for that growth -- we are governed totally by the volatility of price movement.
Maharashtra, with a huge base of cash crop cultivation, is the worst affected. One offshoot of this haphazard `growth' is that the number of women farmers in this state is increasing because the men have migrated. But, if the woman farmer or the elder son looking after the farm commit suicide, it is not regarded as a farmer suicide because the land is not in their name. Yavatmal, with an astounding number of suicides, is facing this problem acutely. For any suicide to be counted as the farmer suicide in government's logbooks, it has to be committed by the farmer in whose name the land stands. Again, private money-lending debt is not accepted, only bank debts are. So the hapless farmer's suicides is not considered a farmer suicide.
In our official documentation of farmer suicides, we record the last cause such as fight with the wife, etc., even though every suicide owes to a multiplicity of causes. Debt and other cultivation issues rarely figure as immediate causes, further blotting out facts. There were 2,832 suicides in Vidarbha in 2006, according to police station records, but only 538 were deemed eligible for the compensation doled out by the government. Most suicides are accounted for as farmers' relatives.
For a farmer, farming has become too expensive. Cultivation costs are extremely high. From Rs 2500 per acre in ...., it has jumped to Rs 13,000 per acre for farmers who are using the new Bt brand of cotton seeds. We are moving towards corporate farming. Agricultural universities are doing research for Monsanto.
Let's look at Vidarbha.Today, the Vidarbha issue (suicides) is being kept alive only by stringers and local journalists of the area. There are 17.64 lakh households (families) in Vidarbha out of which 4.31 lakh, that is 75 % of farmer households, are in maximum distress. Three lakh families have serious problems getting their daughters married. It's an explosive situation.
I happened to witness a most heart-wrenching and, at the same time, enriching moment in a farmer's house in Vidarbha. The farmer had no money to marry off his daughter and decided to get her married with a few other girls to save money. When he saw he didnt have Rs 300 to buy her a wedding dress of Rs 300, he sank into a depression and committed suicide on her wedding day. The bride was naturally shattered and refused to go ahead with the wedding, But she was persuaded, because the family couldn't afford to postpone it! They had already spent all they had on the preparations.
There was a worse, more heart-wrenching moment, to be lived when the father's funeral procession crossed the daughter's wedding procession. The bride wept copiously, uncontrollably. I cannot fathom what must have gone through her young mind to be married in such circumstances. But we read mostly about lavish weddings such as that of Lakshmi Mittal's daughter.
There was one moment though that I felt proud of witnessing. The entire community had
pitched in bit by bit to buy the bride her dress. All of them were poor farmers, trapped in similar economic strife, but they had the humanity to save a dying situation.
There are three reasons why suicides shoot up. Someone called me the other day to say I can buy a Mercedes Benz at 6% interest without any collateral but farmers are committing suicide because they cannot get a decent interest rate for a loan of Rs 8,000. Where's our sense of outrage?
Secondly, health is the second largest component of rural debt. There is no one to bail him out.
The spiralling inputs costs are the third factor driving farmers to kill themselves. A whole new class of moneylenders has emerged -- companies selling seeds and other inputs for the farms have now got into the picture.