Deal with Sexual Harassment

(Had put this note together when at Breakthrough)
(And I'm still around and well, but getting over this blog, a bit)

Whether at the workplace, school, street or university, sexual harassment can cause the environment to become hostile, intimidating or offensive. Learn how to deal with it!

What is sexual harassment?

Sexual harassment is primarily an issue of power, not sex. It occurs when a person with power abuses that power and brings unwanted attention of a sexual nature into what should be a sex neutral situation.

Abuses of power in the form of sexual harassment can come from people in authority positions in formal settings, for example:

* Supervisors
* Employers
* Professors

Or, it can come from colleagues, peers, and even people who see you as a source of authority.

Harassment also occurs in an informal setting. Informal harassment is often a play on existing power structures such as gender. Gender is a source of inequality and subordination, particularly for women. Men’s whistles, remarks, and stares are an assertion of power and can feel threatening or embarrassing.

Sexual harassment differs from consensual flirting or voluntary sexual relationships because it usually is unwanted, occurs in a power relationship in which the parties are not equal, and/or contains elements of coercion and threat.

Harassment can be men against women, women against men, women against women, or men against men. It may be a repeated unwelcome behavior or an action that only occurs once. All are equally unacceptable forms of behavior.

In short, sexual harassment is coerced, unethical and unwanted, and amounts to violence.

Types of sexual harassment

Physical

Things such as unwanted touching, fondling, patting, hugging, pinching or kissing.

Verbal

Questions and comments about a person's sexual behavior, sexually oriented jokes, comments about a person's body, conversations filled with sexual innuendo and double meanings.

Non-verbal

Displaying sexually suggestive pictures or objects, ogling in a sexually demeaning manner, gesturing and making lewd motions with one's body.

What to do if you are being sexually harassed
(Adapted from Sexual Harassment: Things You Should Know)

1. Do the unexpected. Name the behavior. Whatever he's just done, say it, and be specific. For example: Why did you brush up against by breast?
2. Hold the harasser accountable for his actions. Don't make excuses for him; don't pretend it didn't really happen. Take charge of the encounter and let people know what he did. Privacy protects harassers, but visibility undermines them.
3. Make honest, direct statements. Speak the truth (no threats, no insults, no obscenities, no appeasing verbal fluff and padding). Be serious, straightforward, and blunt.
4. Demand the harassment stop.
5. Make it clear that all women have the right to be free from sexual harassment. Objecting to harassment is a matter of principle.
6. Stick to your own agenda. Don't respond to the harasser's excuses or diversionary tactics.
7. His behavior is the issue. Say what you have to say, and repeat it if he persists.
8. Reinforce your statements with strong, self-respecting body language: eye contact, head up, shoulders back, a strong, serious stance. Don't smile. Timid, submissive body language will undermine your message.
9. Respond at the appropriate level. Use a combined verbal and physical response to physical harassment.
10. End the interaction on your own terms, with a strong closing statement, "You heard me. Stop harassing women."

When harassment occurs within an organizational setup, such as a school or company, there may be an existing sexual harassment policy and a process for handling complaints. Here documentation is the keyword. You should:

1. Photograph or keep copies of any offensive material.
2. Keep a journal with detailed information on instances of sexual harassment. Note the dates, conversations, frequency of offensive encounters, etc.
3. Tell other people, including personal friends and co-workers if possible.

You may also be able to access outside legal remedies. Get in touch with a lawyer to seek detailed advice.

What to do if you have been sexually harassed

* Don’t be silent. Talk to people about your experience. Help create a social climate where sexual harassment is not tolerated.
* Educate yourself and others. Discuss what can be done if you are being sexually harassed. Discuss how myths, such as women who dress provocatively are asking to be harassed, are dangerous and perpetuate violence.
* Offer support to others when sexual harassment occurs.
* Remember: harassment is shameful for the harasser, and not for you.

Young bride to her husband

If I were a humming bird,
I would fly to your window without
bada sahib seeing me, nibble
your ear, nuzzle your neck, and fly
back.

Night visions

Cat follows.
The cat could be familliar.
Its white fur, dark patched, gleams near the shrubbery.
"Frodo!" I breathe.
But the gait is all wrong.
This cat backpedals into darkness.
Its eyes are different too.

Airplane

Are we different people free floating thousands of feet above the ground? Everything that holds us down left behind, left down there, and us soaring with happiness, with the lightness of unbeing.

Walking, No Talking

Walking is for me a private activity. Something to be carried out in the dim environs of Jangpura parks, with not very many like minded people about. Which is why I was rather taken aback when tonight two impudent young men on a motorbike entered this zone of contemplative peace. Last evening, at the Lodi Gardens, was disturbing in another way. I usually prefer to let my feet loose and meander all over the extensive gardens, but yesterday decided to take the fixed path many trod every day.

And felt, strangely, exposed. As though the presence of the hundreds (determined or joyful or sullen or indifferent) walking by and alongside put me in the limelight. The first few metres were, yes, self conscious. Then the rhythm of my walking and the rhythm of my thoughts took over and I was walking as freely, uncaringly and eccentrically as ever in that private space jotted by my feet.

sympathies all around

Finished reading a week back - and recommending, THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen.

The book is a tour de force, "a vivid reading experience of tremendous texture and dimension, a masterwork of observed detail. It's not always likable, but it's real."

Most astounding is the ability of Franzen to get into the skin of each character, in turn, and show the reader their world (including that of a 75 year old with Parkinson's and dementia) and leave no room as to the validity of their world view; and then get into the skin of the next character and make the earlier character seem villainous, unbalanced, or quite mad. Alternately, to show them up in all their confusion and weaknesses when in their skin and when outside, as specimens of normalcy and amiability.

In other words, he accomplishes the feat of creating characters as complex as human beings really are.

Definitions from Uncyclopedia -

- are growing funnier by the minute as people refine and add to this "encyclopedia of misinformation, nonsense and utter lies."

Such as:

"Polyamory is the love of tending and raising flocks of parrots as pets. Many polyamorists are therefore sea pirates."

first fight

Is it unnatural to be pleased when you have your first fight with a lover?

I think of it as a relationship strengthening exercise. It's this that teaches you what strengths and weaknesses both people bring in to solving issues, and what in turn you can do the next time to ensure the going is not so rough. (Of course, the difficult part sometimes is remembering this the next time!)

When did you last try to live a legend?

At Baijnath, legend has it that nine men can lift the large smooth rounded stone lying innocuously in a dusty arena outside the temple complex - kewal ek anguli lagaake (by using just a finger each). I challenged the men - my driver and the two from Haldwani who had found me at the riverbank and offered me fish food to throw to the rohu - to prove it true. They seemed eager to defend their masculinity, and soon we were calling out to other men passing by to join in the test. Here are the seven who formed the backbone of the team. Since the stone would not budge, they beckoned a rather senior citizen and a 14 year old gawper sitting on the railing. Women, they were firm, could not be part of the fun, since the legend decreed only men.

No luck in the first attempt, but the second time round our valiant nine, hooking one finger each under the stone, had lifted it up to their shoulders.

Over the Weekend -

- was at Kausani (here is a dreamy blog post on this hill station, which for the author has been "a fixation since I read about it in my Hindi textbook in school"). Working holiday, travelling to write, turned out to be quite marvellous, and not the least because S was a wonderful travel companion. Filled with curiosity and wonder and adventure, lots of bonhomous wise talk, and a love for walking.

And why is it that every time I return from a holiday, I find the carefully worked out schedule in my head has fallen by the hillside?

And I am all expansive.

In My Midriff

He had done all those
things
one would want to do in secret
with a language.
Like scratching his own back.

(from Riding Two Horses)

Sivakami Velliangiri has just released her chapbook In My Midriff (downloadable here from Lily Press). Her poems are by turns deceptively tranquil, eerie, and blazing with feeling. Such as

and thunder softer than the cracking
of a neck at an unusual hour.

(from Napoleon was the First, Hitler was the Second, So Are You the Third Antichrist?)

The striking imagery takes off from folk tales and modern tales, and can be often feminist (as in "To My Alma Mater") or very sexy (as in "Naughtiest Girl in School 1970").

BNP wishlist

Blank Noise Project is doing some amazing work. It has turned street sexual harassment into a subject of street performance, which can be quite a compelling method for influencing public attitudes.

I have my stories of harassment. There is this that happened two years ago (please try to be trigger-happy in the Jasmeen way, not mine!) - remembered more by being recorded on the blog. But what about that durga puja long ago, when I was shoved by one man, slapped across the butt by another, trying to make my way to another pandal with mum and brother and maid through thousands of people all out on the streets of Ranchi? Why does that memory stay somewhere at the top of all of my childhood memories?

Fortunately, today I've come quite far from the shame so many women are taught to carry around our bodies. I can choose to ignore innocuous looks and stares. If there's a stare I don't want, I can stare it down, or if that does not work - heckle it. There is a sense of power, of being able to do something, which means I can brush off these incidents from my mind more easily.

One of the first times I felt empowered this way was while walking down a crowded Brigade Road with my parents in 2003. A man pinched me and started walking away. Totally unrehearsed, I turned and grabbed his collar. Just a few minutes later - yes, fair Bangalore has its fair share of roadside romeos who all seem to be on this road - there came along another guy. I communicated some pretty unflattering things to him too. But what I remember most is being drunk on the knowledge, for hours after, that I had done something. The exhilaration heightened since this had happened in front of my parents, who had possibly never before seen - whom I had possibly never before allowed to see - me as a sexual being - being harassed, giving it back.

Yes, I celebrate my outrage. Let me say this again - I am fortunate in this. Still fear, shame, guilt, trauma remain a reality for so many women - across classes, regions, ages, education levels. Sexual harassment remains normal for so many men - ditto. Which is why the BNP initiative is so important.

Yet, I wish some things were different:

1. That we did not use Section 354 in the flyer, with its conservative moral tone and language.
2. Or the equally archaic term, "eve teasing". Even though, it is true, this is the term most laypersons recognise immediately.
3. That we did not list "leching" at someone as harassment. After all, we all lech. I lech. What is good leching? What is bad leching? What if someone wants to be leched? Can't you, when someone looks, "lech" back or (in many spaces) publicly object and get a public reaction/sympathy?

Some of BNP's strategies are fun. Can you imagine a row of women standing at a street corner, lolling or nervously purposeful, and a "stranger" tries to harass? Can you imagine the full force of a score or more eyes turning to him, boring into him, probing him? Wow. Kudos for imagining this and performing this, all of you at BNP.

Silly Photo

Okay, so I know my tree climbing (see right) and feet photos already, according to some, qualify for this, but every tag deserves a fresh attempt. So here it is: me at holi this year. After having prepared bhang ki thandai for the first time (though, honest, did not drink since its mother drug had handed me a not-so-pleasant time a few months ago) and, of course, many colours.

Also: tagging Em, Gautam, and Rakesh.

chhutiiiii

Having just finished a long, really long translation assignment, I sat down to journal. Today I deserve a break. Pizza delivery chains and other assorted stories for the editor can be written tomorrow. But surprise, I found my pen resisting any structured sentence or thought. I wrote no-sense, doodles, childlike sunfilled daubed up words. Happily. Make sense of this, the pen laughed. Don't you have enough sense in your life already? What will you do with so much of it? Just let go sometimes of sense, elegance, structure and your hair will grow much wilder, bushier and blacker. You'll see.

chia did it

all black clothes
perpetually blessed

with white fur

Capacity

The inaugural issue of DesiLit magazine is just out. It features my poem "Capacity". Read here.

Chia at the Jangpura parks

If you ever come across this gorgeous one and a half year old at the Jangpura parks, do spare a few minutes (or more) and join her in her gambols.

What is ggkiss?

A throaty, monster kiss. The kind you want to nuzzle down your lover's neck and hair. In the middle of the workday, with the dog -- to your left -- blissfully asleep on sheets and pillow in disarray.

Notes on the new house

D and I did up the house today, with prints, posters, paintings and assorted masks. The house is already so much more ours. A charasi Buddha A. and I had always tussled over (he insisting on putting up egg-yolk-whatsits his mommy had painted - apologies, aunty!! - if I ever mentioned this lovely old thing) serenely sits over the mantelpiece. This, now, is the shelf below the kitchen pass-through window which gives me kicks no end. The house even has - and this is what sold it to us - a foldup drinks bar! And it is open and spacious and has a third room S and I use as our writing space. So welcome aboard to this part of the journey, friends and comrades.

Blogspot banned by the govt of India?

And Typepad? Neha V's continually updated post on this here. Can you access either domain?

Just discovered -

yogabeans! YOUR INTERNET SOURCE FOR PLASTIC ACTION FIGURES DEMONSTRATING ASHTANGA YOGA

(How? Through google, of course. And the random science of hyperlinks.)

- and have not been able to stop (a) being fascinated, (b) laughing.

Archivists

It should be possible to eternally save
simple odes from simple boys
and those other buoyant sms-es
from lovers, friends and well-wishers
      on your phone
without the fear of
running out of space, or losing or damaging the instrument
or them otherwise giving in to mortality.

My feet

Hear ye, hear ye all friendly graffiti artists...

...in Delhi - I promise you a wall to paint red or the color you like, very soon, in the new digs. Dream up ideas.

Monday pre-lunch

I'm at the workplace already, instead of going first to the writing office Susan and I now share. Much writing may not happen this week:

(a) Am doing a photography workshop with Sunil Gupta and need to explore ideas visually (and know that I'm not a natural or an expert in the language of images, and some of my co-participants are quite stalwart-ish!).
(b) A major transition comes up again - a house shift.
(c) Have to, have to finish off some freelance assignments for dear editor.

Guess where I return? To my favorite part of the city - Jangpura Extension. Yes, it was with the lover I discovered this area and it's ironic that I return when he leaves. But I'll have exciting neighbours: the corporate film dude, the grass cognoscente dude, the best nonfiction writer dude, a whirling dance troupe, a longterm jangpura devotee, and others I disremember right now. And of course, Chia the dog will be the third member in the household.

I'll miss the Def Col parks, in particular Sukun and Shanti. And the Barista, my sometimes-office, with the most best waiters on the planet (except when they're under orders from the absurd management not to let in people after eleven pm).

Da Vinci Code in Ludhiana

(Sent to me by NS)

Not My Feet

Clicked by Monica

Ditty

Writing poems in rhyme is fun!
Sometimes it makes your pen and mind faster run.
             Not only with a meter Shakespearean is a poem empyrean.
             Nonsense rhymes and nonsense words
             hold some merit, have some worth.
Nothing "important" may come out this way --
say, for publication --
we only hope to let our pen hold sway
on the page - such fun!
             My poems, tied to the need to be good
             sometimes brood
             too much alone in my head.
             I must save them from sleepibed.

Circa 2 Nov 2005

May 28 (TODAY): Street intervention at Bangalore/ Mumbai/ Delhi

Here, on the Blank Noise Project blog.

No, I don't have many more details to share - one of those times I want to make it to something without a preconception and expectation.

Urb-ania

How do you deal with the extremes of weather in Delhi? In winter and in summer, I tell myself every now and then the worst is yet to come; it's *hot* but will surely get hotter still; this is bearable - survivable - the fabled Delhi summer before which all of us crawl helpless and hapless is still around the corner. Ditto with the cold.

My first Delhi summer with an airconditioner (I'm sitting in my barsaati room with the AC on) makes it easier to pull this stoical wisdom on to you. Not strictly the first, actually - my car has always been airconditioned and so have the offices I've worked in so far. Why do we choose to live in this city with the terrible weather and traffic and noise and safety conditions? What keeps us here over an off-the-beaten-path paradise? Oh, all the reasons we love Delhi and big cities all over the world. Such as some landlords not batting an eyelid when you say you're looking to share a flat with a male friend. How many times have you managed to be "lucky" this way? And how many times have you been tempted to say, "We're married"?

Now Craigslist Delhi (and Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai...)

I'm quite excited about the Delhi Craigslist. C showed it to me the day before - it is a portal featuring free classifieds and forums and is, according to C, used by people in 150+ cities "to manage their whole life, from landing a job to finding a place to adopting pets, selling old crap, etc."

An online Free Ads which is simple to use, intimate, responsive and totally cool. What a blessing for people who have just moved in and are trying to find their feet, or even for those who have been here for years and years! The site does not advertise and will grow into a vibrant urban community only if all of us word-of-mouth it. So go ahead, Dilliwallas - talk about it, use it and bring more simplicity into your life.

(In Wikipedia)

Delhi: Open Mic at Nigah - 27 April 2006

QUEER CAFÉ

Come join us for an evening of poetry, spoken word, music, singing, stories and performances about our bodies, selves and lives. Share, read, or just sit back and listen at the Queer Café – featuring readings and performances on gender, sexuality and the weather.

To sign up to read/perform, email queercafe@nigahmedia.com. Ditto if you have questions.

27th April, Thursday @ 7 pm
THE ATTIC, 36 Regal Building, CP
(Above The People Tree)
Tel : 2374 6050, 5150 3436

No photography, video or audio taping is permitted without prior permission. Email info@nigahmedia.com for more information.

www.nigahmedia.com

Artists' Day at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi: The NBA protest

Today was the 23rd day of dharna at Jantar Mantar by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) against the raising of the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam by the Narmada Water Authority in contravention of Supreme Court orders.

On April 5, at around 11:30pm, a force of more than 400 police swamped Jantar Mantar, forcefully and roughly attacking the satyagrahis who were peacefully sitting on their 20th day of dharna. Medha Patkar and Jamsingh Nargave, on their 8th day of indefinite fast, were arrested, forcefully lifted and taken in an ambulance to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. They have both maintained their fast, Medha refusing IV and taking only lime juice. Meanwhile, over fifty Narmada Bachao activists were arrested, dragged, beaten up and taken to the Parliament Street Police Station where they were harassed and detained.

At the dharna space, Bhagwati Patidam today continued on the 11th day of her fast. Other people have joined in on the indefinite hunger strike: Bhama Bhai and Raja Kalla from the valley (6th day of fasting); Mona Das, President JNUSU; Dananjaoi Tripathi, Vice President JNUSU; Avadhesh from All India Students' Association; and JNU Prof Kamal Mitra Chenoy (4th day of fasting) and two others today.

It is heartening to see the support extended to NBA by organizations and individuals from our city and all over the country. Tomorrow, all artists in Delhi are urged to join the NBA protest: painters, filmmakers, singers, dancers, poets, writers -- bring your wares or just show up in solidarity and make this a Day of Protest by Artists.

WHEN: 10 am onwards, April 9, the entire day

WHERE: NBA Dharna Site, Opposite Jantar Mantar, New Delhi

Read Action Updates at narmada.org or sign a petition to be faxed to the Prime Minister and other government authorities.

oil-and-water

She once described herself as "a pessimist, a feminist always, a Black, a quiet egoist, a former Baptist, and an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive." Octavia Butler, black woman science fiction writer, died recently - Tyler Cowen writes an obituary.

File: "An Intimate History" Show

Re-reading An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin. Came across a show inspired by the book, where "each performance lasts less than 10 minutes and is performed exclusively for an audience of one. It is like being serenaded by your own personal troubadour or experiencing an intensely intimate cabaret. All the attention is embarrassing and pleasurable."

Review: Rang De Basanti

[For EGO]

When the film begins, you love “Rang De Basanti” instantaneously. With its young, fun characters swaying inveterately to young, fun music, the film pulls you to itself with unabashed enthusiasm that is so characteristic of confident, urban, Punjabi Delhi.

The actors are good. The five main, male actors – Aamir Khan, Siddharth, Kunal Kapoor, Sharman Joshi and Atul Kulkarni – live and breathe their roles, both as university lads and as legendary revolutionaries. Alice Patten (quite to the surprise of the disdainful native in me) manages to be natural and at ease in hers. Soha Ali Khan is chalti hai, and the other actors, including Kirron Kher and Waheeda Rehman, are competent too.

Music fills each frame of the film and indeed, it is not possible to imagine RDB without the pulsing Paathshala or the haunting refrain of “ziddi…” from Khalbali, or the joyful title track. The AR Rahman and Prasoon Joshi team has given us one of the most gorgeous albums of the year – you can listen to it over and over again.

Here we also have one of the most slick recreations, in sepia, of the militant splinter of the Indian struggle against the colonial rule, represented by Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Ashfaq and Bismil.

The problem is that the film is so confused.

On the one hand, it is about the restlessness, hope, angst of a generation. The most interesting of the young male characters, also because of what Aamir Khan and Siddharth bring to them, are DJ and Karan. DJ is frozen in a present where his future is always potential, just around the corner, unexplored. Karan wears unrelentingly uber-coolness and a casual cigarette, but something else, a disquiet, shifts underneath. There’s also Aslam, discontent with his family’s increasing insularity, and Pandey, who crosses the line between idealism and hoodlumism running with the Hindutva political party in power.

On the other hand, it sets up a very demanding parallel between a generation of young people let down by the modern state, and a generation of revolutionaries fighting against a colonial state.

Let’s not even get into comparisons between the motivations, the repression, driving the one versus the other. Just in terms of forms of protest available, our generation has a plethora of choices that simply were not there seventy years ago. RDB, in that sense, completely discounts the role of media and technology today. If a candle vigil commemorating whatever outside the India Gate were to be disrupted in so brutal a fashion now as shown, some sections of the media at least would take up the story, interview people on site or at least later. If not of their own accord, through some “connection” or the other. Power and influence are just two and a half degrees away in the real world of the University of Delhi. Further, in the real world, the virtual one – the internet – would be another arena of protest. Liberal/left mailing lists, the blogosphere, are informal spaces that are used, have been used to draw attention where the intervention of the mainstream media has not passed muster.

Neither do I want to paint too rosy a picture, nor do I want to disregard the fact that I am coming from a very particular background: “urban”, “elite” and “educated” in the sense that “we” know how to go about the business of activism. Injustice and brutality happen everyday, much still perpetrated by the state and much going unpunished. But these actors are shown to be students from the Delhi University, an extremely politically aware space. Hence, that they are completely clueless and get drawn into the logic of violence and self-annihilation so easily, is very disturbing.

There is also no conception of non-traditional, non-mainstream ways of expressing political obligation in the film. Join the army, or the police, or politics – but what about working with a voluntary organization? “The young must do something” is a great message. How to get youth involved in social and political affairs of the country is a real issue. But how it should be done, what should be done to tackle youth apathy – the film promises, but does not deliver on a way out. Rather, it leaves you in a web of half-formulated notions. (“We’re not terrorists because we didn’t go into hiding or kill innocent people.”)

Karan, through the film has said, “Nothing is worth giving your life for.” Towards the end, when Sukhi, the fifth friend says, “We’re not killers!” he replies “But they are.” This point, where a bunch of carefree easy-hearted young people turn into self-sacrificing revolutionaries against “them”, has such a knell of despair. That there was not even one end of hope for them to hold on to; that they had to go for the final option and kill someone who may not even be the ‘real obstacle’ but merely a symbol.

This sense of bleakness does not go away when sincere young people from all over the country say on television, this is it, now we must wake up, act. We know the futility and ephemerality of these assertions: they too will die out with the news of the day.

Did the filmmaker think of that? Or was he too busy making a blockbuster that would inspire the young people of India?

Phew! Forgive the rant. This is, after all, Bollywood. If we can take Sue’s no-budget documentary turning out to be a kickass fiction-drama with our customary pinch of salt, we can love RDB for what it’s worth.

There, moving on

Wrench a beat for what isn't there, can't be, can't return.

Or turn back the pages and there's Him and Me - we look up, smile, get back to whatever we're doing. There's our sage-shine cats.

An entire life lived, to be lived, missed, thrown away, all right there.

Travelling...

Which means I'll miss the DBM 2nd anniversary!

Blogging in the midst of 3CFF

When friendly bloggers like Shivam Vij assure me my not being addicted to blogging is good, I feel somewhat happier and un-guiltied about the sporadic nature of my posting. But I genuinely have been busy for the last few weeks with the TRI Continental Film Festival - which has just finished in Delhi (very successfully!) and is starting in Bombay tomorrow.

Here is the screening schedule:

25-27 Jan: Mumbai
29-31 Jan: Bangalore
1-3 Feb: Chennai
3-6 Feb: Kolkata

Do come for the screenings! I'll be travelling to Bangalore, Chennai and Calcutta.

Meanwhile, The Hindu pressed us for an interview with Rabbi - our chief guest for the Delhi festival - glibly assuring us a great front page coverage of the festival. Here is what she finally delivered. These media people, I tell you.

(If this is not it, Mandira, if there is another story to follow, I promise I'll apologise with the deepest humility.)

the regulars

Delhi really is a small city.

When I lived in Jangpura Extension, I’d meet him at the Moolchand traffic crossing on my way to work. One day, he wasn’t there.

Then things changed in my life. I moved to Defence Colony. This morning, I met him again on my new route to work. We see each other, the light changes, cars move ahead by a few metres. He follows.

“Hello. It’s been a long time since we met.”

“Yes. You stopped coming to Moolchand, didn’t you?”

“They closed that crossing. I’ve been here for 3-4 days now.”

“And before that?”

“L… I live in G…, you know.”

The light changes again. We smile at each other and move on.

And I’m suddenly happy Delhi’s such a tiny city.

Review: NHRC Disability Manual 2005

It is a huge task to try and cater to “lawyers, NGOs, academics, human rights activists and the general public” as the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) wants to, in its recently published Disability Manual 2005. For a lawyers’ handbook, it may be enough to include legislation and case law, academics may prefer critical analysis, and activists may need practical examples from real life. The Disability Manual works best as the first, with faint swings at the other targets.

The disability rights movement began in the 1970s in the aftermath of the American civil rights and women’s rights movements. Today international norms and legislation duly recognize persons with disabilities as rights holders and enjoin national governments to actively promote the necessary conditions for the disabled to fully realize their rights.

The manual, a sturdy publication with good production values, is divided into six parts. The first explains the historical and conceptual underpinnings of disability jurisprudence. The understanding of disability has changed from medical (disability as individual pathology) to social to the human rights definition in vogue now, with factors as wide-ranging as wars, poverty, natural disasters, crime, occupational disasters, and Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) of the World Bank brought under scrutiny. These are looked at briefly and one wishes the language was more lucid and the text more elucidated, especially since this chapter is meant to be foundational to the rest of the manual.

The models that inform law and policy have also shifted, but in the strange way law has of enduring, continue to uneasily coexist. The charity model, the bio-centric model, the functional model and the human rights model are examined in the next chapter with particular regard to their impact on Indian legislation. The final chapter in this section outlines the fundamental right to equality as guaranteed by the Constitution of India, the Directive Principles of State Policy, along with statutes like Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities; Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995; Mental Health Act, 1987 and Rehabilitation Council of India Act, 1992.

The four parts following trace international norms and legislation relating to the protection and promotion of social and cultural rights, economic rights, and civil and political rights of the disabled. These are dealt with comprehensively but staidly. There are useful tables that compare international standards with national standards contained in laws and regulations, and also tables comparing general rights with rights specific to the disabled.

The sixth part deals with international mechanisms and procedures that can be deployed to advance the rights of persons with disabilities. The role played by international human rights law and procedures is, here at the end, properly contextualized and attempts to adorn them with a “talismanic quality” are protested. The chapter explicates with hypothetical cases the procedural options available to someone wishing to protest a human rights violation or issue internationally. This is the one place in the book where case studies, albeit hypothetical, are used, and, not peculiarly, they immediately enliven the text.

Eight annexures, beginning from national legislation to international frameworks and principles, make up the tail end of the book.

As suggested earlier, people engaged in the advocacy of disability rights might not find the Disability Manual stimulating since they would be looking for more case studies, more strategies, more hands-on tips and advice on how to challenge rights infringements. They would want to know what lies beyond rights jurisprudence. Law and legal change have proved ineffective in bringing about social change, and the attitudes of pity and discrimination against the disabled so prevalent in society have not yielded to the rights discourse which ends up seeing the disabled subject as single and monolithic.

A discussion of the Ability Fest’05, where disability-themed films were screened for four days and created an air of excitement and debate in Chennai, or the colorful India Gate demonstration which bemused all the passers-by and hangers-on, would have added something extra to the manual.

All said, the manual fills a gap long felt for a comprehensive publication on disability rights in India. It is hopefully the first of many to come.

(beyond the i, jan-feb 2006, eyeway.org)

journal (v. intr.):

Let me declare, first, that this post was composed in my journal. Of course, I was sitting then on a train going from Ranchi to New Delhi, laptop ailing in the suitcase and hundreds of miles away from an internet connection, but even if I were at home with everything technical in place, I'd probably write the first draft on paper. It is about the old-fashioned thoughts flowing smoother on paper yada, but it's also about a relationship I share with my journal.

We try to spend some quality time together everyday, my journal and I. Usually in the mornings, but if I'm running late, and can't, by late evening I can sense a kind of pressure growing within me. Some miscreant words and actions involuntarily part my company.

To avoid this lowgrade consternation, journaling has a crucial place in my life. I pour out many emotions on these pages, much I'd rather not share with another soul. I vent without self consciousness, let my pen travel wherever, however it will. I reproach. I whine. I'm petty and nasty. I write first drafts, redrafts, onlyever drafts. I make peace with myself here - and to get the best results I don't censor anything.

Fastforward fifty years. Say I've written and published and become known. Say I die. And all these numerous journals of mine are published unabridged.

What will the readers read? Who will the readers meet? Not, or not just, Monica Mody the known.

The thought's exhilarating yet dreadful. And this is why, after reading Joyce Carol Oates' review of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, the journalista in me finds myself obliged to proffer a counter.

For Oates, Plath's journals "present a very mixed aesthetic experience". Is aesthetics the point anyway? Journals are not after all "unrevised, inferior work", they are a space to sift and cleanse the soul. A space where one finds the energy and wisdom to go on living our quotidian and creative lives, where we come to terms with our truths and lies and half-lies.

This -

Confronted with a manuscript so uneven in quality as these journals, Plath would certainly have discarded hundreds of pages in preparation for its publication -- lengthy, breathless adolescent speculation about boys, dates, classes, career (''Can I write? Will I write if I practice enough? . . . CAN A SELFISH EGOCENTRIC JEALOUS AND UNIMAGITIVE [sic] FEMALE WRITE A DAMN THING WORTH WHILE?''); sketches and drafts of stories aimed for the lucrative women's magazine market; awkward early poems (''Down the hall comes Mary, bearing sheets / Crisp squares of folded linen / And, dressed in green, she greets me / With a toothless morning grin''); countless reiterations of physical symptoms (''Woke as usual, feeling sick and half-dead, eyes stuck together, a taste of winding sheets on my tongue after a horrible dream''); petty squabbles with Hughes; and the determination to be a good wife -- must not nag (ergo: mention haircuts, washes, nail-filings, future money-making plans, children -- anything Ted doesn't like: this is nagging).'' Plath's ceaseless anxiety over submissions to Ladies' Home Journal, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic and other magazines runs through the journals like a demented mantra; the mailman is both the blessing and curse of her existence through the entire span of these journals. Surely such repetition might have been avoided.

- I don't agree with. Readers of journals don't, shouldn't, read them expecting to find precision or brevity. They come to them for - or find - all the murk and beauty of the human mind, in its higgledy-piggledyness. This, I hope readers of journals remember, is not the person the journal-writer is: what would an ubermicroscopic examination of the self yield but a distortion? Neither does it detract from the writer's "major"ness or skill.

My opinion may alter radically once I actually read Plath's journals. As of now, I find the designation "piranha voice" for Plath's journal voice a wee bit unjustifiable. You see, I know. I know I can, too, obsess endlessly endlessly about things big and small.

***

This book, borrowed and read in college, was what got me to take my "diaries" seriously.

***

Just finished reading Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang by Joyce Carol Oates and found it truly fabulous.

After ages a book I read at one go not piecemeal five minutes snatched before bed or driving.

a little respect

Yes, I've done it too - let my perception of "chick flicks" and "chick lit" be faintly colored with disdain. I plead guilty, sistahs, and abjectly beg your pardon. It took this post and then this article for me to realize how the condescension was as oppressive as "universal" feminism snootering black, lesbian, third world women.

Genrization is necessary and inevitable in this age of information & sales. But genres can oppress, and we must, as thinking people, deploy them only after some thought, some questioning.

Fine. Go ahead and snooter works that do not qualify as "great" art, "great" literature. But be aware of that unconscious snigger - it's popular among women, ha! ha!

Equating women with frippery, with the laughable, pinchable, ignorable - they're not central, not "us", so what if they're half of the entire?

Here's the avowal - I'm a feminist. In all its broad, queer, non-postfeminist glory. Thanks, Ratna, for teaching me what can lie beyond the limiting definitions of feminism.

Never Sufficient

On Wednesday, driving madly from Rajpur Road to IHC, trying to make it for at least ten minutes of Samit's reading/launch, long lines of cars and commotion extending before us and the thought of deadlines whooshing past blaring in my head, I turn to A. and say, "Writers' time is what we need."

Marquez, in an interview, on writers' time: "...a desert island in the morning and a big city at night. In the morning I need silence, and in the evening a few drinks and some good friends to chat to. I need to be in constant contact with people in the street and know what's going on in the world. This all fits in with what William Faulkner meant when he said, 'the perfect place for a writer was a brothel, because it's very quiet in the morning but there's partying every night.'"

A few hours to write and a few to read. A few to be with yourself, thinking or dreaming, and yes, a few to be with friends.

Louche

Ignore the writing,
Ignore the blog.

Compose bagatelles
of sms-es.

Delight in them.

Merrily

On the editorial page in The Hindu today, an article exhorting that there be no 'unnecessary "coyness" about celebrating Christmas in a Christian country [Britain].'

The author completely misses the bus. It's not how many Christians there are in Britain or how strong the religious traditions are, but what Christmas stands for that makes it important to claim it from pseudo-secularists. The "spirit of Christmas", which is as pervasive in its good cheer and kindness as, I imagine, the air of Goa. Santa Claus, gifts, secret santa. Trees, decorations, mistletoe. Reds and greens, chocolate or plum cake. Christmas stories, Christmas movies, and above all, universal goodwill and generosity that you cannot but help respond to, get seized by. This is what the British and American kidlit of my kid days told me, and the odds are still is telling to kids everywhere.

Certain myths, like this one, are so beautiful in their innocence that you have to fight to keep them alive.

Trade tricks

It must be the oldest trick in a writer's book: when you can't express your displeasure openly, fictionalize them, put them down in your novel.

Without a qualm, I'm thinking of incriminating someones like this in the prose piece I'm writing for the Sarai workshop. You'd cheer if you knew how nervous I was before it --

"For the past couple of years that I have thought of myself as a writer, poetry has come much more easily to me than prose. I like working with its elusiveness and its precision, its ability to transmute experiences into half-familiar, half-forgotten beings and landscapes. Using its devices, I can leave behind straightforward narration or discourse and explore the oblique. More and more I find my poetic voice reflecting undertones of my political engagement with feminism, but not, I believe, in an unsubtle or unpleasing fashion.

Being an avid reader of prose, I know it is possible to attain with it similar effects, right from metaphors and imagery to sound patterning. The form of the prose text does not impose limits on its aesthetics.

The limitation, then, is in my own head and practice. A writer should be able to override the externals of form and structure and I think it would be of great benefit to me to take a deep breath and venture into the territory of imaginative prose.

So then, I want to attend this workshop to counteract in me the anxiety engendered by, and to instill in me the discipline of, prose writing, in a supportive environment with peers..."

I'm quite pleased to have finished two pages to read tomorrow. To be continued. Short, but they're there and not half-bad.

A Better Man

Writing poetry in a man's voice is not coming as easy as I thought it would. While I can pull together all the parts of me-woman into vital writing, I seem to have lost that dual eye so necessary for an artist to give detail to the "other".

The men I know well, I know as people I love, and I can't/don't want to take over their voice from them. The men I don't, I don't want to cannibalise to caricature.

Okay, this is sounding a bit feverish. But writing it down might help open some valves!

Winter, Delhi, December 2005

My third winter in the city. Hopefully also my last for some time to come - I'm telling everybody around and promising myself that I'll be out of the city for the next one. But applications haven't been happening, and evenings seem to vanish and with them the opportunities to work.

I texted him last week: time seems to move differently in this winter light.

And then again, yesterday, about the sun drenching one half of my bed. If I lie on the foot of the bed, the sun falls all warm on my face.

I'd spent an afternoon at home after such a long time.

This room

The last time we met, S had posed this as a “what if”: “What if I ask you to write a description of this room?” I’d taken in the room in an arc: the horizontal slats of the Venetian blinds, the grey and black photograph that insinuates their relentlessly parallel pattern, and thought, of course I’ll write about these.

When I walked in today, I noticed the circular table round which we sit had been shifted a tiny bit to the right, elongating the space that opens up, clear, on the other side. This meant I could not sit on what I think of as my usual seat: it would be too close to the wall for my liking. I have occupied the seat I’ve come to think of as my usual only twice during the four meetings we’ve held so far. S’s books are lying to its right, and since I can imagine a round table exhorting a staggered filling up, I walk up to sit opposite my usual spot, facing Sarai’s backyard.

In our second meeting, I gazed across the glass of the doors from my usual place to find the sun lighting up one half of a tree, one half of the lawn.

This afternoon, the blinds across me were drawn, a slitted wall of grey. Just as I am on the brink of feeling cheated, S opens them. The backyard has a tree. There is no sun.

Electric

A new poem is like a new lover. The first time you write it, you're left sparking. And when you revise, you're perfecting the lovemaking, magnifying pleasure.

circa 30 Oct 2005

My favorite Rumi poem

EVENING SKY GARNET RED

Morning opens a door with help for
those who don't ask for any. Love

tears its shirt. Mind begins the
sewing repair. You come and both

run off. I burn like aloe wood to
touch the one who set this. Dressed

sometimes like disaster, sometimes
like a guide, the ox of the self

sweetens his mouth in a pasture. A
parrot falls in love with an Arabian

colt. Fish want linen shirts. The
drunken lion hunts drunken gazelles.

It cannot be said how you take form.
One man asks for spoiled cheese.

The prayer rugs all point different
ways. If you would soak again the

evening sky your garnet red, the
qibla tips would turn that way.

(from The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems trans. Coleman Barks)

Something's rotting

Was at Pitampura yesterday when someone called up aunt and told her to switch on the news. It couldn't get more repulsive - somebody had planted bombs in crowded markets and a bus two days before Diwali.

NDTV's coverage was itself appalling: a particularly inept/nervous/sick cameraperson was zooming in and out on a pretty young female reporter's lips, eyes, hair. And she was asking someone with an injured son in the RML Hospital how many casualties there were in the ward inside.

I seem to have lost touch with the way the visual media has shaped up - was actually watching the news after months yesterday. (Ironically the HT Brunch cover story today gripes about growing sensationalism in the media.)

On some other benighted channel, things were being blamed on "intelligence failure". What kind of paranoid society are we helping come to life where our sense of security and well-being depend upon police pickets? Panic is cancerous - and we can't counteract it with more surveillance.

If you want to inform them about new tenants, I'm one too.

Four

The number jumped at me as I typed the last post. I used to think this was the brink at which I got unlucky.

The cats lasted four months. Just as my lovers before him.

Dear L,

The whimsical question which was lost in cellular traffic for 48 hours and, later, stopped making sense: Can people change?

Before my text got through to you, I had my answer - yes, of course they can. Or I thought I did, since of course in the matter of a few days everything had jumped out of or into mutant corners again. What a cataclysmic ride this has been. Me futilely trying to hold off change by leaning against what had already crumbled until everything came down and I could either lie there and be swept away into something godawful - or do something.

So I jumped - very deliberately, cat-like (after all, keeping cats for a mere four months will also change something) and now look where I am, now look who I am. So I look around me and think, yes, people do change, yes, things do get better - only if you make the jump.

Asli Superhero

[This was written for Lifestyle Trends - on the stands now, with an abridged, edited, slightly different version:]

Some people like their lives humble, unfervored and unexaggerated. Others are fans of Bollywood. It is for these others that I intend my blanket declaration:

There is a Hero Hiralal in each one of us.

Someone who loves films simply, with a glad heart and starry eyes. Someone who can suspend all belief but in the heroism of the hero.

Of course, like all other heroes, our Bollywood heroes perform good and noble deeds. They enroll in universities to protect damsels. They refuse to elope with lovers until families consent. They let fiancées go to be with their true loves.

However, they are usually doing something more, something greater than the merely extraordinary: something far beyond the abilities of us ordinary mortals. Take Amitabh Bachchan in Mard, who is seen performing the goddess' aarti using his palm as a lamp. We wouldn't try this, not unless we're crazy. Or Captain Planet.

The Americans understand why certain figures violate the laws of physics. They're blessed with powers and abilities beyond those of normal humans that let them fly, see in the dark, lift off entire buildings and hurl boulders - and with great power, we know, comes great responsibility: that of being Superheroes. But Bollywood heroes are neither relocated extraterrestrials nor rich do-gooders with cool accessories. So what gives?

XXX

The earliest films made in India centred round the legends of gods and goddesses, spirits, sages and demons. This mythology, through centuries of telling and retelling, grew into a "universal psyche" that allowed Indians to be comfortable with the existence of superhuman powers. It was also the most accessible source for creating new ways of storytelling about a new principal: the Indian film hero.

The American superhero emerged in the 1930s, a decade shaped by economic and political crises, as a protagonist of escapist adventures where the American public could imagine a world not trounced by forces beyond their control. He was usually a white, middle to upper class, heterosexual, professional, young-to-middle-aged man, ready to pull his weight to do good and fight evil, but clearly privileged.

The Bollywood hero comes into his own in the 1970s, once more a decade of economic and political turmoil. Yet again, he magic carpets the audience to a universe illusory - but located among the People. He is either a migrant from a small town or village or the lost son of atycoon, and becomes the voice and the muscle of the marginalized.

XXX

The one cliché that marks out a superhero in the American comic book is his secret identity. His credibility is assured by a colorful persona complete with a colorful name and a colorful costume.

Indian heroes, however, do not need a secret identity. Bruce Wayne might need one to protect his loved ones from retaliation from his enemies, or Peter Parker, to preserve a private life. But such considerations have never bothered the Indian film heroes. There can be no "private life" in India shorn of obligations towards the family, society and state, and it is desirable that each hero willingly join the pantheon of inspirational figures for the young. What, if not this, is the point of heroism?

Further, our heroes are far too valiant to battle under false pretences. I can imagine Sunny Deol gagging with embarrassment and contempt at the thought of needing a disguise to protect his mother. My brawn, he would drawl, can beat any adversary upfront, face to face.

Mr. India, of course, has been an exception to this rule, but this is because it was a conscious parody of masala elements from Superman, James Bond thrillers, Disneyesque adventures as well as The Invisible Man. Its release in 1987 was closely followed by the only othercredible Bollywood superhero films: Shiva Ka Insaaf, The Indian Superman and Shahenshah.

XXX

Another media where numerous superheroes spawned in the 1980s was the Indian comic. With liberalization under way, there was an altogether new class whose children aspired to know Superman and his indigenous counterparts better. What is incredible is how so many indigenous superheroes derived their inspiration from Amitabh Bachchan, the reigning megastar. The most famous of them all is Bahadur, a shaggy-haired, bell-bottomed dude in Diamond Comics, but there were also Anthony Gonsalvez and Supremo (with sidekicks Vijay and Anthony).

There is no room for doubt about the Indian public's emotional attachment to its heroes. And why not? Jai of Sholay may not be any more or less courageous than Spider-Man, but he blows up bridges and decimates thugs without spider-webbing wrists. This makes him moreobviously heroic. He also dies soon after, and this makes him more poignantly heroic.

The thrall of ordinary mortals with extraordinary abilities: that's the thrall of Bollywood. Heroes who are content saving a family, a village, a girl; who don't obsess about saving the world. Heroes who don't look uncomfortable and itchy in costumes in fan-pictures takenwith us. Heroes whom we can look upon with affection and pride: jaise apne Dharam pa!

To The House I Did Not Get To Rent

I woke up and smiled and stretched in
this room. I sleepily grabbed purring

cats. I padded through space sprawling
plump spreading sensual and strung

with abundant plants. I lived beyond my
means and supped reveried wrote. Sun

suffused each particle of air with winter
honey. I'd possessed you in a twinkle --

so what if we were never joined?

Nayi zindagi, naye andaz

3-4 weeks ago I was finishing my days completely exhausted, whether or not I'd done the awful cross-Delhi commute. Impulsively (and it's slightly embarassing to admit to these impulses) I picked up a book called New Feminine Brain with a lot of hogwash about "gender brain" but a very useful detailing of mineral and herbal supplements whose addition to/absence in your diet affects you physically and emotionally.

Now for me supplements and multivitamins have been something my parents religiously pop into their mouths. I had also been warned by an aunt that if I take supplements "at this young age", I'd need that much more of them when I grow older.

I had been postponing visiting a doctor, trying to convince myself the fatigue was not serious enough, it would go away. Then I happened to discuss it with four vivacious women colleagues and, most marvellously, each of them was an expert - to some extent or the other - on nutritional supplements.

So I self-medicated. If you're reading this and plotting the next step, please do what I say, not what I do - go see a physician!

I'm right now on Chyavanprash, Vitamin B Complex, Calcium and Iron (whew!). I'm drinking milk and eating fruits regularly, and trying to overcome my habituated disaffection with exercise. And I'm feeling so much better. So much more able to do the day! Also - and I agree with Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz here - that matters on the "personal front" are pleasanter than they were then, during my days of severe back ache and limb-dragging exhaustion - is also gratifying.

Sadly, it looks like these supplements are with me for life. The toll urban living, unmindful living takes on you.

Labels matter

The 10th International Women and Health Meeting (IWHM) is going on in Delhi. On Thursday evening, I went for a stunning performance by a Malaysian troupe of transsexual persons called "Prima Donna". Several of my friends had seen them perform at the 2004 WSF at Mumbai and had come back raving, so I had to catch them this time.

I invited the friend I was supposed to have met that evening to come with me. She said she didn't want to see transvestites perform. I indignantly pointed out they were transsexuals, not transvestites, but it was all the same to her.

It is difficult to see the big deal about the varieties of social and biological genders if you don't have access to this information. Diane Wilson's site and sexuality.org explain the various terms quite nicely. In short, a transsexual "wants to change his or her physiological gender, and to live permanently in the new gender role", while transvestites are crossdressers.

As it turns out, the Prima Donna troupe included transsexuals as well as cross-dressers. And so awesome they were.

practice

The Milk in its cream-red carton and the two Curds in their cups live in the door shelves of the refrigerator. They’re often visited by an assortment of Juices on weekends, and a bottle of Tahini is an honorary resident at the moment. The bottles of Water camp here every once in a while, ostensibly to keep a watch on the oft-dissenting occupants, but they far outnumber the residents and end up intensifying the strife.

Space, you see, is the main problem in the door shelves. And the army of Bottles does not seem to realize that.

(prompted by Writers Digest)

morality, morality

"...sexuality that is "good", "normal" and "natural" should ideally be heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, and non-commercial. It should be coupled, relational, within the same generation, and occur at home. It should not involve pornography, fetish objects, sex toys of any sort, or roles other than male and female."

"Any sex that violates these rules is "bad", "abnormal", or "unnatural". Bad sex may be homosexual, unmarried, promiscuous, non-procreative, or commercial. It may be masturbatory or take place at orgies, may be casual, may cross generational lines, and may take place in "public", or at least in the bushes or in the baths. It may involve the use of pornography, fetish objects, sex toys, or unusual roles."

- Gayle Rubin, in Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality

Once I'd known this by heart. The other day, at a Voices Against 377 meeting, I was struck afresh by how each of these norms of acceptable sexuality are bundled together.

Getting married? Very good, very good.
Sex for money? Very bad, very bad.

It's hard work

The thing about political choices is they present themselves every step of your life. There's no permission to let up or retire; you have to keep negotiating them through life.

Because you're not, after all, the only star in your universe. You can't make your choices in abstract or in a void - say "I'm A, B and C" and believe it to suffice forever. Each choice is to be made within a context, with a set of external factors to contend with - social norms/prejudices, families, work.

Sometimes the battle seems almost not worth it because you yourself don't know what's at stake; what would happen if you surrender. Only a vague reluctance to fit into the system.

Afternoon

Cats drunk with sleep stumbling in the house.

Is Harry Potter Still a Nice Jewish Boy?

Found some really funny Potter links on the Guardian. Read what happened at Accio!, the Potter convention,The Half Blood Prince digested, and, the best of all, alternative accounts of Dumbledore's death. My favorites are in the style of Helen Fielding, Sappho, Alexander McCall Smith and Roald Dahl's BFG (by Lousie Emma Rouse, 9!) - but I have to admit, I've yet gone through less than half the page.

This is the North East

Returned from a four-day trip to Guwahati. The TRI Continental Film Festival was traveling to the North East.

***
(Over whisky and rum)
Me: I have this confusion. Should I, shouldn't I talk of the "North east"?
B: It is a rather meaningless term. There is so much strife and ignorance in this region.
B proceeds to give me a thrifty overview of these problems. She is part of the North East Network.

***
Another evening. I've run into N, a friend of a friend, at the film festival, and she invites me to hang out with her and a few friends. We're at L's house, and L's bar is also stocked with rum and whisky. I'm not keen to repeat the rum-with-water experience and we go down to get some beer.

N tells me she couldn't stand watered rum or whisky either, but then she returned to Assam after a decade and her cousins said: What kind of a tribal are you? You need to sweeten your drink before drinking it? Finally, a few weeks back, when as usual there was nothing on offer except whisky, her resistance wore off and she now guzzles it as well as a veteran.

***
I was supposed to have gone to Shillong for screenings on the 5th. The program got postponed. The Khasi Students' Union had agitated about something or the other and the govt. declared a six o'clock curfew. I was told people would be scared to come for a festival even during the afternoon.

***
There has been an economic blockade in Manipur since June 19. Over 50 days now. Imagine the shortages people had to face: food, medicines, all essential goods and commodities.

The IAF finally airlifted supplies on the 6th of August. I had no knowledge about it till the 4th when B told me about it. I might have missed it in our Dilli newspapers - I checked with the lover, a more consistent reader of news; he hadn't seen it either.

The Guwahati newspapers were carrying each development on the front page. The national media seems to have picked the story up now, after the Centre's involvement.

To be continued...

chacun a son gout

So I've finally read the sixth Harry Potter. In less than 24 hours, exactly like everyone else. Potterphilia made it so easy to give up daily life for a day.

And it was a good read. Rowling seemed to lapse in a few places, but the fan in me wasn't disappointed. Perhaps, says the lover, we're more undiscriminating than most!

Neat Categories

I met two army officers on a train traveling from Ranchi to Delhi. Our journey started at five-ish, and by dinnertime we were arguing about non-government organizations, the ambiguity of human rights violations, democracy vs. military rule, freedom to choose vs. fundamental national values. It was strange to be a part of such a textbook debate, to know that this is precisely the dialectic you've been told to expect when you meet an army guy.

Night before yesterday, met another textbook case: a casual migrant with a bit of land in Shahadara, which he leaves every once in a while to pull the rickshaw, knowing that all this can ensure him is bare survival. With talk that veers involuntarily to his children and eyes that grow wistful at this remembrance.

We inhabit stereotypes. But it is painful when there's nothing of an individual that leaves a tiny escape route from categories. Lets them sprawl a bit, be something they're not expected to be, say something they're not expected to say. Military discipline or the harshness of want. Or social norms. Or familial obligations. Or peer pressure.

Do we have it in us to resist, resist?

Reflections after transcribing

Was transcribing a half hour interview yesterday - another first, this transcription work. Completely backbreaking, and took me around 3 hours, with a break in between.

I realized your attention just dies out on you after you've listened to and typed out a certain number of words (1-1/2 pages in my case). And then you have to force your ears to listen, you mind to interpret what you hear, and your fingers to type.

I realized that though I type fast, I mostly end up using my forefingers - making me feel like a toy train running on tracks meant for an electric engine.

I realized that after a point each sentence begins to resonate of exquisite craft, each meaning acquires depth, and each sound-pattern becomes as intimate in your ears as your mother's voice.

I realized I don't want to transcribe again.

In Delhi, babe. Or, To be whole again

I tried to be a Delhi chick today. Hanging out with friends at the Priya Complex for the first time ever.

What a wondrous experience it was. I was so surprised to be asked, and not just once: "Where is your boy?" I've become so used to my "world" where it is almost... declassé to ask about the whereabouts of the boyfriend when you don't know anything about him or the nuts and bolts of the relationship, and thereby suggest women need boyfriends to hang out with.

Most of the other girls there (oh, I don't mean to go on like this - I really liked these girls - so self-assured and vivacious and young - each at least two years younger to me - but this was so bothering) were either with boyfriends or the boyfriends were coming later.

I suppose I'd be singing a different tune if I was not going steady. I don't know. But what is this emptiness we're culturally baggaged with? Why are we taught to hanker after the boys not there? (And this makes me pause, reflect, realize I do the same: hanker after the boy not there. Uh-oh.)

The Cats

There has to be at least one post with their photos, to introduce them.

The goodhearted bignatured grey sage, Frodo, and the indomitable twinkling orange star, Toft.

In Continuation: A Love Affair with Words

I'm still not used to saying "I write" when asked about what I do (particularly when you're travelling, as I've been doing, this is a question you often get asked). I located my discomfort in how slowly my writing seems to be going (this is no excuse, but we adopted two delightful kittens three weeks ago - I let them claim an unnecessary share of my time) - once I become more industrious, I thought, I'd be able to say the words easily.

Then I heard a friend, a published writer of some repute, introduce himself as an "editor of the magazine XYZ". Was this modesty? - and if so why? Or diffidence about being in the writerly profession: more dubious and unprofessionlike than most others?

Another friend in another conversation felt a published body of work is what entitles you to call yourself a "writer". I was slightly disappointed - hey, I may not be published, I may not be writing every day, even (at least those cauldron-words of the soul), but this is the identity I'm most at home with: a writer!

Yes, A. - I know I really need to gather my creative energies with much more urgency.

The Cooler is Bought

Before...

the heat lying low
just below the chiks
ready to rise and pounce
on me

its tang
of terror reaching my cheek

The Morning After...

last night
the cooler so delicious
i couldn't thank it enough
thank my fortune
enough

Of Egos and Dial-ups

Reached Ranchi today (yes, my feet do seem to have pahiye attached) and am coping with a reliably infuriating dial-up connection.

Meanwhile, here's me measuring Paheli's Bollywood Pulse at EGO.

Beyond Imagine

Attended a chilled out recording of Money Mantra on June 7, where Mallika Dutt on behalf of Breakthrough and Anjali Gopalan from the NAZ Foundation were discussing funding for HIV/AIDS programs in India. The NDTV people had also invited a few august troublemakers from AIIMS to be in the audience, who initiated several insightful debates such as how India, as a truly great country, should not need HIV prevention programs: its sprightly, courageous, Swadesi youth can more than handle the tweensy infection on their own. How TB's track record as a killer is more proven and why don't organizations such as ours campaign against TB. How much of the world population is infected with AIIMS [sic].

Well, after the recording was over, Dr. Kapil Yadav from this venerable band gave me his visiting card, which had this, um, song, at the back:

"Imagine all the people living life in good health you may say Im a dreamer, but I am not the only one. I hope some day You'll join us and the world will live as one."

John Lennon
&
Kapil Yadav

Meantime

• Metamorphose into a part-time jobholder.
• Write your first ghazal.
• Attend your first writers' group meet.
• Take your first creative writing (sort of) class.
• Begin your first radio play.
• Have several fights with lover.
• Get engaged.
• Buy new cushions and cushion-covers and cheer up the living room.
• Survive Delhi heat by sprinkling liberal doses of water on the floor, mattress, clothes, skin.

That's not too bad post-a marvellous-holiday, is it?

Escape. Delhi. Heat.

Bliss. Cool. Hills.

Yes, I leave for a holiday today and am too worked up to post anything other than, foxily, a note I wrote on the Reader List when gmail first came on the scene:

Agent Gmail

Gmail invites are a bit like Agent Smith, na? Much as you try to eliminate them, hardier varieties spring up.

And what a clever dispersal strategy. Who can humanly resist the exclusivity of an “invitation”? You have to beg/borrow/steal for one, and pass it on, and accept if you get one.

Soon, then, one can foresee a tyrannous reign of gmail accounts – each one spawning a dozen more – and internet human-users helplessly, recklessly opening more and more gmail accounts, sending out more and more SOS invitations, just to keep their inboxes looking non-messy and invite-free…

Giving Ideas to Copy-leftist Inventors

Books inspire in me a predatory impulse. I crave to usurp them all, to add them to my library, to have them at my beck and call.

In reality, I can xerox only so many books. I can buy only so many shelves. I can’t imagine reading for pleasure on the screen. The thought of reading an e-book makes me quiver with panic.

So, to plant an idea in bravehearts out there who, like me, care for books, feel wolfish about them, and have more tech savoir faire than me:

The world needs a device to zap a book into a chip, and chips back into real books. With a straight spine, pages that can be stroked and patted and thumbed, the smell of words aging better than wine, a shape you can walking, hold comfortingly close to your bosom.

If someone could master this technology, just imagine: I could have thousands of book-chips packed away in a suitcase, all zappable into books whenever I wish to dip into them. Imagine the marketing possibilities!

A device like this could also be part of the government’s literacy drive: in a city like Bombay, where every inch of space goes a long way, the government could in good faith exhort residents to buy and read more books.

Interested, anyone? In funding the research, or becoming a part of the research team, or showing solidarity? Write me.

Baghban: An Incomplete Review

Some films are supremely maddening. I remember watching Baghban on VCD exactly a year ago, and it provoked me enough to begin this invective (and I think it has sufficient bluster and fire to make it enjoyable even in its incompleteness):

The premise is sweet: a nearing sixty couple are so madly in love with each other even forty years of after marriage, that teen-agers find them a bigger inspiration than Laila-Majnu or Heer-Ranjha. Their love story finds a gushing publisher, becomes a blockbuster and bags the “Booker’s Prize”.

So why doesn’t it work as a film? Maybe because it manages to perpetuate, while ostensibly being a movie about two old people, the same stereotypes that almost every successful Bollywood film has flogged till now. A breathtakingly beautiful woman jisne samay ko mutthi mein band kar ke rakha hai, and who is therefore adored by her husband, the patriarch. Saif and Rani, perhaps, forty years hence? What has changed but the wrinkles and the white hair? If the love between a couple married for forty years is shown as still dependent upon her beauty (you may argue that Hema Malini’s good looks are peripheral to the issue, but catch Zohra Sehgal playing the role of Pooja – even a Zohra of thirty years ago), the Hindi film audience would surely lap up the movie, it is so in accord with our candyfloss desires! This, then, is not the reason for the film’s collapse.

Perhaps it is the excessive brand propaganda. Hema with a Tata Tea packet every two minutes in the initial half hour; the “chhoti-moti” company ICICI; the Archies Gallery which is a café; the Ford which Amitabh is compelled to test-drive around town. But almost every recent film has done this, and sometimes with less panache, so this is not what gets hackles up either.

It must, then, be the way Amitabh sidelines Hema in conversations: “yeh hamare-tumhare beech mummy kahan se aa gayi?” when their son talks to his mother first about money; removing the receiver from her hands when she is on the phone with another...

This Morning: A Lurid Story

Driving to work. Rush hour traffic. Ring Road. Hundred of cars inching along.

I see a squelched-out rat on the road when it is barely a metre ahead. There's no time, no space to manoeuver, and a second later it is under my wheels.

Doodling an Evening Away

Delhi, May 2005

Creativity is all Nonsense

Something attributed to John Lennon which so exemplifies the non-rationality of creativity:

"We've learned over the years that if we wanted we could write anything that just felt good or sounded good and it didn't necessarily have to have any particular meaning to us. As odd as it seemed to us, reviewers would take it upon themselves to interject their own meanings on our lyrics. Sometimes we sit and read other people's interpretations of our lyrics and think, 'Hey, that's pretty good.' If we liked it, we would keep our mouths shut and just accept the credit as if it was what we meant all along."

Nivi's Edge

I was startled to see a short story by Nivedita Menon in Lines (“Engagements with ‘At the Water’s Edge’”), and then completely bowled over. This woman is truly amazing. As an academic/activist, no one can match her brilliance and charisma, and when she chooses to fictionalize her “left-secular-democratic” cohorts, an entire incestuous subculture spanning Delhi, Colombo and “abroad” comes to life.

Contingent Friendships - 1

These days when my car rolls up at the traffic crossing, the beggar turns and walks to the row of vehicles on my left. If after the detour the lights still haven't changed, he approaches me, looking quizzical. Just to say hello and tip his hat at me. He doesn't ask for money anymore. If I take out a coin from my wallet, that's fine, else he walks on to the car behind mine.

Ever since I'd started a chatty conversation with him more than a month back, he avoids me. And I avoid him, keeping my eyes fixed on the book in my lap till he is actually near my window. As though we know something shameful about each other.

A Love Affair with Words

Old identities die hard. Stubborn, outdated bits of you refuse to let the new bits feel at home. You have to take a deep breath and give the latter an unfaltering welcome: "Welcome, New Me! I hope we get along well."

When you introduce yourself to someone, you might say, "I'm working with a human rights organization," and leave it at that, and then feel awful for finking out on the new you.

You might say, "Well, I'm currently working for a human rights organization," and hope your audience is discerning enough to catch the delicate emphasis, that hint of hesitation, in your sentence. You'd still feel more or less like a fink.

Or you might take the deep breath. Will this sound silly? What if they ask what I've *published*? What if this is all a big mistake? Breathe.

"So, what do you do, Monica?"

"I'm a writer." There. An apologetic grin quick to follow, but I said it, I named me. I am, I am, this is who I am.

Congratulate me, mon amis. June onwards I'll be employed part time, and can spend more time writing and doing crazy things with my life.

Queer Haikus

Faggot Haiku

Faggots reach into
their own asses we are not
afraid of our shit


Haiku on bleeding nine days out of every month

It's time to invent
machines to suck the blood out
and make me come too!


Haiku on being the only lesbian from Jamaica

Wonder whose pussy
I was eatin' when I had
a P.O. box there?


by Staceyann Chin

Irish-name, or, I succumb

Your Irish Name Is...

Gemma Guinness

What's your Irish Name?

Dream fragment

A warning is issued about a sea monster. People run in panic. I see a giant trapezoidal wave crashing down on a ship, and think: is the monster screened by the wave?

At India Gate

I finished the bhel puri.

A scream fizzed in my throat, ran through the length and breadth of my mouth, till I thought I’d have to let it out. Happily, there were many distractions around: the lights rippling in the lake, the merry boats, the people, the carefully dreamy air out of a film set.

Three minutes later I realized the sting had silently rolled off my tongue.

Single, or How often are resolutions fashioned

Last night of being single. The lover's away in the far south and this feeling of expansion (all this space, mine alone!), this time that's mine to plan or rest or expend as I will, is delightful in its rarity. Any lessons here? Nothing can be done about the space, but perhaps we need better nonspatial practices...

Looking sharp some more for surprises

Today, at the beauty salon, I saw the child in a woman, an employee.

She was wearing an oversized coat and came and sat on a chair that was too-high, and started swinging her legs. Suddenly I could see in her the wife, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, who left home in the mornings to reach work on time - to reach an entirely different world than the one left behind. Like I do. Who held on to her wildness until she could return home in the evening/night; had to throw off fatigue and perhaps pay attention to other demands. Like I do. Oh, how we hold on to this memory keening yearning, this conviction that home/the evening will come and bring freedom!

Of course, more and more I find the "wild" part of me infiltrating and blitzing the code of civil conduct delineated for public personae. Which is all right. We should all be able to dress and behave in the way most authentic for us - formal cool or wild child or anything else in between or beyond.

Cat at home

There's a cat who visits our kitchen in the dead of the night to scrounge for leftovers. She wriggles through god knows which godforsaken opening to get to our third floor, all-doors-closed flat!

In search of etymology

Doodled "water under the bridge" in my journal in the morning - and reailzed I don't know where the phrase comes from. Googling yielded me a painting by Monet, a sketchy explanation and another one.

The find of the week, however, was this quite unrelated trove of words. Rummage away!

The unintended sneer

"You're constantly thinking about the house!"

It took me a few minutes to fathom what about this comment riled me so much. Certainly, the gratuitousness of the "constantly". More than that, the implication that thinking about the "house": what needs to be bought, what needs to be repaired, is a simple-minded, lowbrowed exercise. Rather than a labor of love.

You didn't mean this? Perhaps.

At the Lodi Garden

Memories of regeneration, of greenery and birdcalls and the wind shimmering with flower-scent and me rolling in the grass
sometimes with you, often alone
have a way of impressing themselves on the microchip in the head,
so when I return for minutes so brief they have meaning no more than hands ticking across the clock
and sit on the green swell of earth,
the connection calls me back into the centre of stillness
and I lie back to smell the grass and feel its itch on my skin, and behind my head gardeners dig the earth.

When You're Away

Possessiveness the engorged serpent
abruptly
billows up from my waist in
ordinary conversations,
hood flame and flaring,
and rushes to swallow
the room, chairs and tables,
my companions.

Chagrined, I sit on it and
push it down.

headlines scanner

More and more frequently these days you find me sheepishly confessing: "Urmm, I haven't been following the news. I had no idea about this Shakti Kapoor incident..." Apart from the usual daily rush to work/other places, it's also part-apathy borne out of a realization that I actually don't miss the "news" too much. This Sunday, in blessed solitude, I sit and devour the Indian Express and TOI, and feel, suddenly, my relationship with the world, my place in the world, re-scanned and re-established.

a friday gathering

A magical poetry/song evening at Friday's at Nigah. Everybody seated in a circle that was not-quite round, with chapbooks and anthologies in the centre for those who hadn't carried something to read as well as print-outs of some magnificent poems that Sharmi had brought. Indolence and sharing and much singing and music and general well-being. Poetry all around me. Mogambo khush hua! - and we've been spurred to put a date to a long-standing plan to host a poetry/song evening at home: 30th of this month.