#nosgbv Futility

I had promised myself that I would blog everyday. I make this promise on a regular basis and too often, do not get to keep it. But I am proud to say that I do not give up and I persist and start over and over. So it is today. Yesterday, I was just too tired to post. Today, I am too blank. Or maybe, not blank but just saturated with things that I have said too often. 

After today's event, as we sat around talking, we egged each other on listing all the challenges to ending gender violence. Each challenge was more complicated and underlay the previous one. How do we do this? This is an impossible task. 

The sense of futility pervades this little promise I have made to myself to blog. What difference does it make? No one reads this blog anyway. And if they did, what difference would it make?

The longer I do this, the harder it is to answer the question about what difference it makes. Because it is clear that nothing makes a difference. Most of what we do is simply surface work--even when we change the law, it is just work on the surface. Beneath the designer vocabulary and the expensively, exquisitely* perfumed posturing, we are just the same-old, same-old products and pawns of patriarchy. 

Cynthia Enloe's book about the resilience of patriarchy leaves us thinking about the ways in which we are complicit in reinforcing patriarchal values and misogynistic ways. Yesterday was Women Human Rights Defenders' Day and today is South Asian Women's Day. What did I do to mark either of those in a way that at least casts a puny pebble at patriarchy? Not much.

I tell myself that we are all working ants and if we keep our heads down and just move along, someday, some ant, somewhere will reach our destination. I remind myself of the Gita--do your work. Or for that matter, Voltaire--cultivate your own garden. 

As I write this on the 6th day of Prajnya's 2022 16 Days Campaign against Gender Violence, my fatigue and sense of futility drain me. Perhaps, I actually have nothing to say that matters. 

*Thank you @syrinje for reminding me of this exquisite word. 

#nosgbv Who will protect us from our protectors?

 I am settling down to blog after having just watched a news video of an attack by men claiming to be from the Hindu Sena on the prison van carrying Aftab Poonawala who is now infamous for abusing and finally murdering and chopping his partner into bits. They said to the mediapersons around them that they would protect their sisters and mothers from such people. 

Somebody ask us, sisters and daughters and mothers, what we would like. 

Respect. Consideration. Kindness. Honesty. Not because we are delicate darlings. But because we are human. 

What does not translate into happiness for us are protection, patronage or possessiveness. So much abuse happens because men think they are protecting women, or being benevolent dictators/ benefactors, or showing their love by staking territorial claim on their bodies, their choices and their identities. Actually all of these are abuse. Patriarchy does such a good job indoctrinating its female victims that we lap up masterful heroes, and identify with heroines that swoon in someone's posessive grip, or buy tickets to watch films where male leads forcefully plant kisses on women turning them forever into devoted slaves. 

But in real life, protection is the rule that says you cannot go to college because there will be boys on the bus. It says that you cannot go out to earn a living because men will harrass you, and when they do, you will be blamed for stepping beyond that 'Lakshman Rekha.' Sita was not abducted because a king wanted to avenge his sister's humiliation at the hands of her husband and brother-in-law or even because two kings were fated to fight an epic battle and she was the pretext that fate had written into the script. She was abducted because she stepped past the Lakshman Rekha. 

Protection offers patriarchal politicians a quick fix to the questions we raise about gender equality. More women's buses. More lights on streets. More CCTV cameras. More police. Death penalty. No night shift for women workers. No girls in evening college. And so on. It makes them look like they are doing something. 

What they actually do is to hem women further and further in while those who abuse them roam freely. Rapists roam free while their victims shelter. I am not speaking of any one case here but a general reality. 

Can we please confront the beast? Is there someone in politics that has the courage to say that the problem is how men are raised and how we forgive them everything? That does not mean they must be hung or castrated but can we have realistic punishments for the small acts of bullying and misogyny that begin in childhood, can we model fairness and equality in our homes? Can someone in politics take a stand on the kind of vicious sexist speech that is rewarded by the deal-making in the men's toilet (sorry, locker room is too dignified for the horrible things male politicians say in India)? Can someone say that such people will not get tickets, no one will campaign for them? All these groups of men that will protect us from ourselves and others, who will protect us from them and the deathly cocktail of their prejudice, entitlement and unthinking vigilantism?

#nosgbv Rambling reflections on domestic violence, dowry and imaginary safe havens

For three years or so, I've been part of a project that seeks to understand how domestic violence survivors access help and justice. Some of their stories are heartbreakingly familiar. One has seen so many variations all of one's life that I went from rejecting that women should fast and pray for good husbands to thinking that they desperately needed to because good men and good marriages seemed so rare. Nothing in our world was going to hand a woman romantic or marital happiness on a platter. 

When I was young, the first bad marriages I heard of were those of the women who sometimes worked in our homes. Their husbands would snatch away their salaries, spend them on alcohol and then beat them. I heard of this often enough that I am very, very uncomfortable around men who drink alcohol. The alcohol-battery association was so real to them that it is still real to me.  (On another day, I will write more about this.)

No, as many of the survivors in our project said, it was not the alcohol that made them abusive. The alcohol gave them the courage to act on their abusive ideas and it became a pretext to grant them impunity. Alcohol does not cause abuse but particularly in India, women in most communities have pinpointed to alcohol consumption, alcoholism and the presence of alcohol stores as a source of insecurity to them. 

I now hear young people I work with say they are uncomfortable with this association. And they have a point when they say it comes loaded with class prejudice. But when you hold consultations with trade union women and self-help groups, one of the first things they point to is the location of their local TASMAC store. 

When I grew a little older, in the films I saw, marital families would ill-treat their daughters-in-law and demand more and more dowry. With the advent of Doordarshan, we saw these themes of dutiful and abused daughters-in-law, mistreated wives and endless dowry harassment in films screened in every Indian language--in the Marathi and Gujarati films on Saturday evenings, in the Hindi films on Sunday evenings and in the other regional films they began to show on Sunday afternoons. In Indian films made as late as the 1970s, the long-suffering Sita-heroine was featured either to glorify patriarchal culture or to showcase 'social evils' in the service of the new nation-state. Marriage was inevitable but almost always quite a miserable state of affairs. 

And it was very hard to miss the messaging about dowry: Dowry was evil, dowry was bad, dowry led to domestic violence. The government assiduously communicated that giving and taking dowry were punishable by law.

In the 1980s, one read about an epidemic of bride-burnings and kitchen accidents that were all related to dowry demands. Women's groups protested and filed complaints and insisted on investigations. We now recognise dowry deaths in Indian Penal Code. We read of these things scandalised--who were these people still giving and taking dowry?

In families like mine, dowry had not been a part of weddings for two generations and the simpler the wedding, the more proudly people remembered it--one ceremony, cotton sarees, small guest lists, temple weddings, court weddings. I learned that it was not the wedding that mattered but the marriage. 

I was out of India between 1992-2003, and in this decade, it seems as if all of this socialisation was just tossed aside. Weddings became ostentatious--actually, weddings became an industry and ostentation was now merely a minimalist expression! I was shocked to meet people whose weddings still involved a discussion and then display of dowry given. Whoa! Where had they come from?

They were always there. We never quite rooted out the idea that we had to get rid of our daughters somehow. That they were not on their own good enough but their lack of value had to be compensated through gifts of cash and consumer durables. That we needed to bribe men to marry them. That our own value was reflected in how much we devalued our daughters by sending them off with large dowries. We were always like this. 

A few years ago, at a college training, I added a slide on the Dowry Act passed in 1961. It still shocks me to think of the young women who came up after the session to say they had no idea that there was a law prohibiting dowry. Some time later, students interviewing me for their magazine told me that they felt obliged to have destination or theme weddings. Every single serial treats marriage as the only end-game for female characters. 

What happened along the way? How did I grow up in exactly the same country and culture and turn out so differently? For that matter, so many of the women I know and young women I work with--how were we so lucky as to escape this?

This research project has brought home some other horrific realities. Young women beaten or raped on their suhaag raat (first wedding night), keeping quiet and asking friends discreetly--is this what marriage is? Because they have no clue. They are married, whether at 16 or at 22, before they are ready to be in a marriage or understand what that partnership should be like. All around them, they have only seen abuse. And in this post, I am talking only about physical and some sexual abuse--I haven't got to verbal or emotional abuse at all. 

Women have no confidence in their ability to survive. We are raising unconfident daughters in an age when male hubris is nauseating--and powerful. Women also have no confidence that their families, their communities or their government will support them at all. If anything, many women see that all of these support the powerful--in this case, their abusers. If the first months of the pandemic saw a lot of 'woke' discussion on the 'shadow pandemic,' the matter stopped with the discussions--we have not improved our support infrastructure significantly enough that a repeat of the situation would not leave women just as helpless. 

We tend to characterise public spaces as unsafe for women and homes as safe havens. It is time to acknowledge that give what a misogynistic culture we are, any place where we are present is inherently unsafe. Women and girls and boys must fear the sexual predators in their homes. Women and girls must survive structural deprivations such as being fed the least, being a low priority for education and health care. Girls grow up being told they are a burden and in a crisis, getting rid of them through marriage becomes a solution for family troubles. Relationships are unequal, fraught and violent and each generation teaches the next to expect violence as normal. 

I can type these words. I have lots of words. But the question is: When will this change? How will this change? Will it ever change? Will young people see marriage or other relationships as partnerships rather than hierarchal transactions? 

It is so hard to have hope in such a dismal world.

#nosgbv For the sake of the daughters who did not survive

Amartya Sen made the idea of "missing women" famous--those baby girls who should be walking among us but are not because someone aborted them as a foetus or killed them as an infant or simply neglected them so much that they did not survive ordinary childhood illnesses. Our mothers and aunts and sisters and daughters and nieces who should have been with us. 

I think about them a lot. Many years ago, trying to connect gender to security when it was not a thriving subfield with its own conference circuit, I began to look at sex ratios. In the districts from which my parents came, and whose attitudes you might have expected them to possess, the sex ratio began to decline around the year of my birth. Everytime I think of that, I think how luck I am that my parents did not choose to get rid of me while hoping for a son.

From that lucky fact, my life has been blessed with good fortune. My parents thought it appropriate to feed me, to school me, to nurture me and to encourage me. Most girls barely get to enjoy one of those things. For every one of these blessings, I sink deeper into debt.

What do I owe the daughters who did not make it? Where do I begin to calculate that?

For sure, I owe it to them to make the most of opportunities and gifts I have received. And I owe it to them to re-invest those in creating a world where fewer and fewer women go missing. 

How do you re-write male child preference into a genuine ability to care for all children of all genders with the open heart that they show adults until trained otherwise? 

Punishments will take you only so far and incentives are almost as shallow. But if we can start pushing at the reasons that people give and showing them that they are not valid, maybe something will shift? 

You tell me you want a son to take care of you when you are old. I show you a generation of children of any gender who are unlikely to live at home and take care of you. And I can also show you daughters who take care of older parents. 

You tell me that your son will cremate you and perform your shradhdha every year and I can tell you that now daughters are doing the same. What is more, maybe neither of your children will believe in the customs and so no one will do this for you. And when you are dead, how do you know you will care?

You tell me that your son will carry on the family name. Daughters keep their names nowadays and your son may choose not to have children. What would you have paid for the probability of extending your family lineage? 

People argue that they have the right to choose the genders of their children. By extension, also the skin colour and IQ and so on. This is just wrong. 

The fact that India's missing women in the last century make up the population of more than one medium-sized country makes me so angry that I don't even think we need a rationale for why pre-natal sex selection and femicide are wrong. 

But if you needed instrumental reasons, and we live in a cost-benefit driven age where the most convincing arguments either address money or security or both--then the work that Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer did more than twenty years ago on 'Bare Branches' may convince you. They found that when the numbers of men outnumbered women in a society, society was prone to enter a period of unrest and civil war. The available women married men of high status and those who were left unmarried and without families went off to join gangs and militias. 

We also know in Indian states where the sex ratio has been very lopsided that a shortage of brides has resulted in the importation of women from other regions. But because families cannot afford more than one bride, several brothers and sometimes the father-in-law share them. I do not think I need to say more about the plight of a woman trapped in a strange place with strange men and no right to say no. 

In patriarchal societies, even shortages don't raise the value of women. 

My grandmother had six daughters. When neighbours came over to her mother's place, ready to lament, இன்னும் ஒரு பெண்ணா? (Innum oru penna--or ponna, in the colloquial? One more girl?), my feisty greatgrandmother would say, yes, playing on the word for gold, பொன் (pon)--more gold! Her faith that women were gold, that they had minds and hearts that could do anything, that they could speak out and challenge and be themselves and her lessons in solidarity make me a fourth generation feminist.

For these four generations of women who survived and thrived, and for the children of all genders of the fifth and sixth that we are raising, and for the sake of the daughters who did not survive and are missing--I must find the small tasks everyday that will contribute towards changing this world.

 

#nosgbv "You do such good work!"

“You do such good work!” I hear this comment from time to time when people recall that my work has something to do with gender-based violence. Most people assume my organisation and I do rescue work. We don’t. It is not important enough to them to find out what exactly we do. (We do public education or awareness work.) They are sure it is good work.

The comment makes me uncomfortable. I want to correct them. I want to explain what we do even though I know that most of the time, they are not interested. This much was enough for them.

The thing is, I am not sure what we do, or more important, what I do. After all, one is ultimately only responsible for oneself and one’s choices.

Look at the state of this world. Today we released the 2022Prajnya Gender Violence in India report and every page describes all the things that are wrong with the world. But a compilation of data is probably the happiest place you can read about gender violence, given that numbers are just numbers. Even the NFHS numbers, which tell more of a story than most, are just numbers. When you listen to people’s stories or read their accounts of abuse they have experienced, you realise the full horror of what it means to live with abuse all the time. We feel that horror and in the course of our day, we forget because blunting the edge is what allows us to function.

When people say to me, “You do such good work!” I want to say, no, I don’t. I do the bare minimum. I do what is comfortable for me—reading, writing, teaching, training, mentoring, designing. I do not throw myself in the breach to protect a woman in trouble. I do not fight hard cases in court. I do not set up shelters and make sure they run. I just do the work I can and hope it matters in some way.

To do this should not be a big deal. For all the privilege and good fortune I enjoy in so many ways, spending a little time trying to absorb and make something of these heartbreaking stories, staying up to make posters for a discussion on some new emerging form of brutality or standing before a disinterested group to drive home the point that consent matters—these are small, very small tasks. This is the smallest instalment plan for repaying my debts to this world.

I am uncomfortable with “You do such good work!” because I am just one working ant in a history of millions of billions of ants (and other animals) that have done this work. Our efforts add up slowly if we persist. But I am not the first, not the best, not the most efficient and not the most passionate. I am just doing what I can and what I must. Even a well-intentioned singling out, beyond my family which I know does it solely out of affection, is so patently false that I want to say, “It’s nothing, it’s nothing!”

And also, I do not always do this with perfect passion or grace. Working on gender violence related topics is depressing, it is infuriating but mostly, for me, it is that thing you don’t expect me to say: It is tedious. Tedious, because in order to be able to do persist, I have to become a little unfeeling and because no matter what we do, the world does not change fast enough for us. We are like machines chipping away at a task, endlessly, unable to stop, unsure of what happens beyond our station. Reductions in numbers do not matter because you know and I know that each person matters. For each one, their suffering and their ordeal are the only things that are real and a reduction in reporting or incidence does not really matter. Unsure of what my work is going to achieve, I often do it with irritation or impatience or resentment. So when you tell me, “You do such good work!” I am embarrassed.

And if I do, if all of us in this field do “such good work,” why have we not succeeded in ending the scourge of sexual and gender-based violence? Why does each story we hear top the previous one in viciousness and brutality? Why does human creativity find its true genius in innovations of how to be violent and hurtful? After all these generations of campaigning and crusading, counselling and social work, why is sexual and gender-based violence still pervasive and ubiquitous? We cannot be doing “such good work” when there is still so much work left to do. So much work.

So much work that when someone says, "You do such good work!" I suspect they hope that the compliment will distract me enough that I will not ask them to do something. It's not enough that I do this work or that those billions and millions of other ants have. It will take each and every one of us. 

Each one will have to challenge patriarchy's stereotypes. Each one will have to call out misogynistic speech. Each one will have to make a donation or volunteer those who provide pro bono support services to victims of violence--because we are all complicit in the continuance of a violent world. Each one will have to intervene when we witness abuse. Each of us will have to commit to learning new ways of thinking and speaking. It will take each of us doing this "good work" tirelessly, and together. You may think I do such good work but my work is ineffective without you.

Treading water, typing words

Of all the promises I make to myself, exercise is the most easily broken, followed by writing. And I do not make many promises to myself so that's a hefty percentage! Why is it so hard to make time for either of these--both in their way life-giving? 

But that's not what I want to write about. I actually have nothing to write about in this post. This is a treading water, typing words post, intended to remind me of how good it feels to write. If I keep typing, I will remember that it is possible to write. It is possible.

All through the day, I am writing or typing perfectly composed pieces on this and that--in my head. I could be jotting them down on paper. I could be typing them into my phone as Notes or even, into a blog interface. I could be opening a new document on the computer. But I leave them in my head and like a rice-flour kolam, they are slowly consumed and disappear. 

That is fine. Must everything be documented and recorded for posterity? Life itself is a temporary condition. "Everything must change,"as the song goes. I do not lament my lost words. 

This exercise is about treating myself everyday to the physical pleasure of writing--somewhere, anywhere. It is not about preserving my thoughts and words. It is not about readers. It just feels so good to do this. I must indulge myself more often. 

Seeking Hope in Apocalyptic Times

In the eery stillness of the first weeks of the pandemic, the air heavy with anxiety and fear, it was hard not to think of the apocalypse. Would we ever emerge from this moment we could not understand, even as we registered the sudden deaths of people who were hale and hearty? The invisible peril from Wuhan was the stuff of mythology and horror films, terrorising humans who could not fathom what hit them but fell to it like ninepins.

Alongside the pandemic, a steady stream of frequent climate-induced disasters--floods, tsunamis, cyclones--remind us of the mythological end of time in several cultures, Biblical rains and floods or the pralayam of Indian puranas. The Ark of our times has turned out to be a private yacht and most of us are still drenched. The Big Fish that was to save the planet seems to have eaten all the small fish. 

"Hell in a handbasket" has been a phrase I have come back to several times a day. Just look at who we have become, the newspapers seem to say to me: mean, petty, conniving, untruthful, vengeful, egoistical, selfish, self-serving, arrogant, oblivious, unable to feel compassion, incapable of empathy, opportunistic. We watch people being lynched and raped and we film them first before briefly performing outrage and then moving on. We are just horrible. 

Our leaders. The less said, the better. In Indian mythology, the Big Fish ate the small fish and corrupt, venal Manus (kings) who oppressed and exploited the people and the earth eventually provoked the Pralayam. 

You tell me--if these are not apocalyptic times, what are they? 

And then yesterday, Ela Bhatt died. 

I did not know her personally. But in recent times, we have lost so many of these good human beings. Principled. Devoted to people--not work, careers, causes--but people. Humane. Hard-working. Trying to live their values. Gandhians. When I type the last word in the context of death, my heart breaks a little more. 

This year, I finally visited Ahmedabad, a city that has been on my bucket list for almost four decades. The first stop we made was to Sabarmati Ashram. I sat on the verandah of Gandhiji's home for a long time, looking at the river, and asking desperately for the courage and determination to get up and do what is needed every morning.

Social media and the derivative news media that report social posts as news have introduced us to many individuals who are famous for being famous or famous because they post online. Good for them! But it is not people of this time I want to be like. 

I want to be like the Gandhians whose presence and work I have taken for granted all my life. I envy that sort of engagement in public life, the span, the depth. I want to communicate like Gandhi. I also want that disciplined daily routine that gently accomplishes so much and is so elastic it accommodates everyone. I want to read and write like Nehru. I want to persist and work in ways that make life better for people everyday--like Ela Bhatt and Jaya Arunachalam did, to name just two. I want to aspire to be truthful and good and I want to bring that simplicity to my messy life.

We have ingrained from the capitalist, corporate world, the imperative of measurement. How many steps did I walk? How far have I come? How many people did I meet? How much money did I raise? How many people did I feed? How many votes did I win? They matter somewhere but they also don't matter at all.

Sitting on the porch of Gandhiji's cottage, looking at the trees and looking in the direction of the river (the high wall that obscures it must be a metaphor for something), I tried to breathe and pray and in some way touch the space and energy of all those well-intentioned visitors who met Gandhiji here, who seem never to have said, "I am so frustrated" or "I am so burnt out." I did not quite succeed. But I did bring back something. Hope, perhaps. 

Ela Bhatt's life work, like that of all the other Gandhians including Gandhi himself, points to one thing--doing something everyday adds up. This is something I too have always known. But the apocalyptic scale of humanity's problems makes me feel--makes many of us feel--that our efforts are useless. They are not.

I am also struck as I leave this blogpost midway to do housework at the equanimity, even joyful acceptance, with which Gandhi embraced the routine, mundane maintenance tasks of life. I am very distant from that ideal, performing them at best with efficiency and more often, with irritation. I could suggest that it is because we are so much more stressed in these times but I am honest enough to suspect that it is also temperament. I am not as evolved and perhaps, as a woman, the expectation of my acceptance riles me as much as the work itself. Topic for another blogpost! The point is that those routine tasks are also part of the big change or the big resistance we say we seek.

Hope lies in solidarity. The deep loss I feel about Elaben's passing is also related to this. We connect to each other through our values and friendships and these keep us going in hard times. When storm winds knock us off our feet, it is the people who hold on in solidarity that keep us from disappearing. When we disappear, these are the people who keep asking: Where is she? When someone like Elaben passes away, we lose a strong, steadfast link in that chain, one that has stood up so long that she has anchored many, many others. 

With the loss of each Gandhian, it is as if that world of principled action and integrity in public life slips further away from my reach and becomes a memory that too will fade. They feel like the last bastion of quiet goodness and that bastion is crumbling. To be as the words of Gandhiji's favourite bhajan suggest, one who knows the pain of others, helps others who are suffering, without ego or pride, is the hard road to hope. 

Will our children ever know of this wonderful world of goodness? All we now know is this apocalyptic moment of invisible evils, nature in fury and amoral, immoral humans. 

I seek hope everyday. In the discipline of a daily routine. In hard work. In the sincere effort to be as good as I can--not good at something, but just good. In solidarity with others--expressed at minimum as compassionate thought, hopefully with empathy and sometimes, as public support. Hope is in my effort. Success is also in my willingness to try. Maybe that was the secret of the charkha and spinning--to centre oneself in the task at hand. To keep spinning anyway. 

Many years ago, I wrote this: 10 things to do in times of political upheaval, DNA, March 27, 2017. It does not seem like enough at this moment, but if this is all I can do, I must do this at least.  

Red Cedar Reminiscences

 

The Iron Man at Home

Today, my father would have turned 94. He passed away suddenly in 1995, leaving us to remember and miss him every single day. 

With each passing year, my experiences deepen my appreciation of the person he was. It is hard for children to truly appreciate their parents (a category that in India still includes grandparents, uncles and aunts) because they simply do not have the life experience to do so. But as we live through every vicissitude and recall what we have seen and heard from this older generation, we understand better even when we disagree and we appreciate more.

My father was confident. His parents did a marvelous job--or the universe did--of just making him comfortable being himself. In this world of branding and self-promotion, I appreciate my father's authenticity. He was always just who he was. I remember him speaking in exactly the same way--warm, honest, matter-of-fact, blunt--to everyone. It did not matter if it was a celebrity, a priest, an employer, a colleague, a cousin, an employee. He was himself, always, with no apologies. I have seen him in conversation with the garage mechanics who would ask him how to fix things and with my professors and with the shiny, posh people of his times. He was always himself. I am trying to find words to capture this and not succeeding. 

Who was my father? He grew up and went to school in a village. He had to get a job straight out of school and he was proud to say--to anyone--that he began by sweeping the floor. He was a machine-whisperer and could fix anything. He had a formidable work ethic. He rose to the top in his line of work by dint of these two things. He did not strategise his rise or network. If he liked you, he did and you knew. If he did not, he did not labour to hide it either. 

While he did not have the privilege of a college education, it did not stop him from being a reader and a book lover. Bookshops and book exhibitions were a favourite family destination. I got through chickenpox as a ten year old, reading two books a day, dutifully purchased by my father on his way from work. (I also got spectacles at the end of that summer!) My father travelled a great deal for work and books with boarding passes tucked in as a bookmark lined many shelves at home. A signal to us that he was sitting here, or there. Always a book with a boarding pass tucked in. 

My father was fearless. He shared his birthday with Vallabhbhai Patel, we learned in school. It made perfect sense. "Iron Man" meets "Iron Man." As a child, this unfamiliarity with fear meant my father would climb trees, swim across rivers and defy teachers (and be punished often for it!). As a young man, it meant he was a wild biker who met with many accidents. As an adult, he took adversity as it came--neither lamenting his fate nor bragging about his courage. What was, just was. He dealt with it as best he could. 

Always shielding us from impact. He was not a speech-maker or a hugger but my father lived his love of family. He was a quiet man, actually. He spoke very little and he would seem not to be listening or noticing. But then he would remember small things--fresh potato chips which were a favourite with nieces and nephews or to bring back 'Andhra killi beeda' from Madras for every single adult relative in Bombay. When difficulties came, I don't know how, but we still had music lessons and I still paid for French class. When other people faced problems, he would quietly show up, do what they needed and move on. When he died, we learned from strangers how much he had helped them. 

My father's heart was soft--unable to watch suffering even in movies that he knew had happy endings. It was large and generous, prompting him to give without counting or thinking twice. And it was very brave. 

My father's brave heart spent the hours before open heart surgery planning a new venture. What he had--work experience and a capacity to work tremendously hard. No capital. No fellow-enthusiasts. No business experience. He had the courage to try and the courage to fail. I think about this every single day of my journey with the NGO. He came out of the surgery and at a time when I see a lot of people pull shutters down and say, "I am a heart patient, I cannot do this or that," he simply took his patched up heart that surgeons told him was now 20 years younger and he tried. 

He also failed. Or do you ever really fail when you try with all your heart? That's something for me to meditate on today. To try and fail comes with a price in the outside world but on balance, it leaves behind a more magical legacy than an industrial empire--your children learn they too have the freedom to dream, to innovate, to do what moves them, in the way that they think is right. There are really no external standards. 

My father taught himself many things and he encouraged us to do the same. All appliances were accessible to us as soon as we could stand and balance ourselves! We were allowed to use the record player, the typewriter, the spool tape player, the cassette player when it came and cameras. He was shutter-happy and so are we so that we have some marvelous family photos over the years. Our willingness to learn new platforms and ways comes directly from him. He would have loved this age and been an enthusiastic early adopter of everything, including possibly TikTok (or whatever there is now!). 

My father could tune out wonderfully as well. He would immerse himself in the morning newspaper, in a book or in a programme on TV with the absorption of a child. He, who never spoke about his worries or troubles, would forget them--sometimes for the ten minutes in which he caught just the end and closing credits of a film, we teased! He would have loved this world of OTT shows and YouTube and Instagram and also had some caustic observations on some content! He could compartmentalise, always paying attention--while not seeming to--to the task at hand or the company around him.

I want to tell you that my father was a terrific cook. His vadai and chakkarai pongal remain unmatched. But while he liked to make the special dishes, he wasn't like most men raised in patriarchy who only do that and seek praise for making tea. He could do it all and made a lot of housework part of his daily routine--from bed-making to shoe polishing to cooking regular meals to buying vegetables. When I was 16, my mother was in bed for a few months. In any other household, I would have taken over. But in ours, my father did. Apart from the traditional housework, he also did other things like braid our hair every morning and mine was down to my hips! I did not realise that housework was gendered until someone in school commented on vadais my father had made! That too was a gift--the ignorance of patriarchal norms around housework!  

My father wanted to write his memoirs. He knew he'd had a remarkable life but he did not expect it to end when it did. While alive, he was too busy doing and living to sit back and mull and write. Still, he would not have looked back. No regrets, no maudlin nostalgia. What was, just was. 

When he died, I understood for the first time how lucky we were to have him. I had truly taken him for granted, as every child does. Now, memories of my father feel like meditations on life. As a child, visitors would comment on how I resembled him. Now, I hope I have ingrained some of his qualities too. 

Postscript: I learned as an adult in the US that there is such a thing as an 'Iron Man' Triathlon that involves swimming, cycling and running. Very fitting, for a person who'd been such an active youth! In one of our last conversations, he rued that being his daughter, I did not swim, bike or drive. He did all of them with great enjoyment! 

How can I keep from singing?

On Thursday morning, even as President Putin declared war on Ukraine, I was speaking with two Afghan women friends. These were work-related conversations but how could they not talk about the reality that is uppermost in their mind, omnipresent in their day.

Both were lucky enough to have left and to have their immediate family with them. But with reprisals on the rise, what of their extended family, and in our part of the world, there is really little difference in the intensity of our caring for second cousins and the mother-in-law of your cousin’s daughter?

More immediately, they were fearful for and heartbroken about their friends and colleagues—other women human rights defenders—who have been disappeared in recent weeks. 

Read more:

·         Afghanistan: US envoy says Taliban detained 29 women and their families, Economic Times, February 14, 2022.

·         Emma Graham-Harrison, Taliban have detained 29 women and their families in Kabul, says US envoy, The Guardian, February 12, 2022.

·         Six women’s rights activists still missing in Afghanistan, UN News, February 1, 2022.

They are hearing that the women are being tortured to give out names and other information. They are also therefore, fearful of reprisals directed at others in their circle. They are afraid of being targeted abroad. They are furious at the silence around what is happening.

The abductions have made it even riskier to speak out—impossible within Afghanistan and increasingly difficult outside. And if a cloak of fearful silence falls, we have permission to ignore what the Taliban are doing and they have impunity.

When Afghans are facing hunger and repression at home or evacuated and stranded in other countries, unable to immediately find livelihoods, the decision to freeze Afghan assets and redistribute them among others makes no sense.  

Read more:

·         Charlie Savage, Spurning Demand by the Taliban, Biden Moves to Split $7 Billion in Frozen Afghan Funds, New York Times, February 11, 2022.

·         Charli Carpenter, A Better Use of Frozen Afghan Funds, Foreign Policy, February 18, 2022.

Afghans who are now refugees abroad are among the luckiest few, because they are alive and relatively safe. However, refugee life is not easy. You leave your home, your land and your community to end up in places where you are dependent, for a long time, on the charity of others. You may have assets at home, or at least, savings or a pension fund, or land that will feed you. Suddenly, everything given to you is already more than you can ask for. What happens if you fall sick? In many of our countries, someone will find you a doctor. In some of the advanced industrial countries, finding a doctor takes several months and if you have no insurance, it can be too expensive—especially if, as a refugee, you also haven’t found a job yet that will feed your family.

Warsan Shire wrote “no one leaves home unless/ home is the mouth of a shark.” No one. Anywhere.

This week, my brave Afghan friends sounded so defeated, worried and tired. And I listened to them, unable to do anything other than listen. I preach when I teach, about global citizenship, about our interbeing and about claiming and exercising agency, but really, am I also not trying to convince myself? Yes, I can write, but the men who decide read the men who think they decide. The rest of us are shouting into a void.

The world is worried about Ukraine. So am I. War is just wrong.

But we run global politics like a scorched earth policy. Decide, or least state, that something is wrong. Go to war. Get bored, get tired, get distracted, get real, get out. In the meanwhile, we have reduced places to rubble and lives to PTSD. We have theorised the disdain for discussion and listening as ‘securitisation’—if something is a security issue, we allocate more resources to it and limit access to information. This is what is. The theory ends up justifying the practice. So we either learn to ask no questions or cannot remember whom to ask. No one is listening anyway.

On Thursday, through my conversations, the song in my head was Enya’s recording of “How can I keep from singing?” The rest of the song is unrelated but as my friends’ worries go unheard, how can I keep from singing?

The world’s attention is focused on Ukraine. And because our attention spans are so shrunken, this means that everything, including improbably the pandemic and its miseries, have begun to fall off our radar. How can I keep from singing?

Militarism is an Eternal Flame

Source: https://cdn.editorji.com/V2dOka2MIo.jpg

Last week, the Amar Jawan Jyoti was extinguished after lending its flame in December 2021 to India's new National War Memorial. 

There are many points of view on this, broadly divided along predictable political lines.

To me, this underscores a change that has been creeping in on us, as a society, for many years. Simply put: We have now gone from remembering the unknown soldier--my son, your brother, her father, his uncle--who died in a war someone else decided to wage. The soldier, usually male, may have enlisted for any reason, making a commitment to take or give a life in the line of duty. We recognise that this is a sacrifice anyway, and we recognise that families suffer losses in the name of this duty. 

Tombs to unknown soldiers, around the world, recognise the courage and sacrifice of the individual soldier. They mark what Rupert Brooke wrote about in "The Soldier":

If I should die, think only this of me:
      That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
      In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
      Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
      Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
      A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
            Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
      And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
            In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

We justify this dying and killing in the name of nations--"imagined communities," to use their most elegant definition--fictions we write ourselves for a host of reasons. Married to the legal entity of the state, the romantic ideal of a community of affect and aspiration becomes mired in the reality of monopolies of violence and turf-battles within and without states. Just as the individual soldier loses their name and identity in these battles and must be commemorated anonymously, so does their memory become subordinate to that of war itself.

It is telling that we have moved our commemorative flame from the tomb of the otherwise forgotten soldier to a monument that immortalises war. War is both a tragic, traumatic, human-made disaster as well as a lofty venture, ennobled by rhetoric and aggrandized by ceremony. 

When states build war memorials, they celebrate themselves in their rawest expressions of power. They remind us of the resources they can command to wreak destruction. They remind us that once they fought and won--because which loser builds a monument to loss, right?--and that they can do so again. As the soldier is lost in the war, they are lost in these statist celebrations. 

And while, when we revisit and rewrite history, the category of "unknown soldier" might expand to include many outside the state forces who also give their lives for a larger good (albeit still defined by others), official War Memorials are very clear about who the good guys were, and who, the bad. 

I have been commenting for several years about the metamorphoses of our Independence and Republic Day celebrations. Where we would have folk dances, and skits about social reformers and freedom-fighters, it is now all about the military and the police. There seems to be nothing left for India to celebrate except the valour of soldiers (which is real but perhaps we should also ask, to what end?). In skits, speeches, songs and dances, we are always the virtuous "us" vis-a-vis undefined but obvious enemies. As we become more militaristic in our celebrations and assertions, ironically, our identity is defined less by who we are than who we are not. 

The Amar Jawan Jyoti, which said to the deceased soldiers and their families, "Sorry, we decided and you died but we are so grateful to you for this sacrifice," is now replaced by "Behold, the grandeur and triumphs of this state!" This is who we now are. This is who we are choosing to be. 

Sunshine and a multi-coloured crayon!

Another New Year, another resolution. The most important nursery rhyme we learn (in English) may well be 'Insy Winsy Spider,' what life seems to be nothing but an endless series of climbing up walls, sliding off and trying again. I am not sure what the spider's goal was but as I grow older, the doing itself has become my goal. Just to be writing. Writing what, who will read, is it good? I actually don't care. But this is like those fifteen minutes that you get to soak your feet in a tub of hot water with salt or something fancier--wonderful in the moment. 

Year-end lists, new year resolutions--been there, done that. I might actually have nothing left/ new/ useful/ interesting to say. 

So let me capture this moment in words, just for the fun of it. A lovely morning sunlight, with the glimmer of a threat--"Shall I remind you of summer?"--in the glint of this light. All quiet on the Kamalabai Street front. My messy desk, left with all the residue of last year that I had no energy to actually tidy up. This reminds me of the mess I would leave behind were I to die this minute, this week, this year. Too much stuff, too much stuff. The baggage of a lifetime lived in hard work and anticipation. I spy three gifts on the table. A mobile stand, new, gifted by a new entrant into the family. A mug, designed in the 'ethnic cuteness' style, faded now on the outside but bright as ever inside--maybe like my spirit? A violet acrylic jar, a little visitor gift by a poet friend, repository of unpoetic but essential pendrives, of which I own many. I also have two tubes of hand-lotion--something else that I buy freely. I still spend more money on small things than large ones--the legacy of a lifetime of financial uncertainty. New diaries, old bills. Cables, cables, chargers, chargers. Three mugs full of pens. Because the aspiration to write--many words in many colours--will not die. 

When I die, just burn the material stuff with me. It is not worth the bother of sorting and filing. We are just dust and ashes, after all, and all our profound thoughts, turbulent passions, heartbroken fatigue and tickytackystuff are just waste material. Like this empty dabba that once held mints, or this sample 'activating essence' (activating what?), or this 'Refreshing Tissue' from some long-forgotten flight. 

There are also some nice little things here. A box of copper-coloured ("rose gold") binder clips that improve every printed text. A lovely multi-coloured crayon (another gift) I still haven't tried but that I realise must become the image that goes with this post. In the photo I just took, it separates the gloomy from the bright, brings colour and the promise of time spent creatively into this New Year weekend. Perfect! 

There has not been a day without writing in my life--email, cards, tweets, posts, brochures, prospectuses, articles, talks, pep-talks--but when I say that I need to write, I mean this. This feet-in-a-tub-of-water feeling of just sitting down and writing what I want, and away with the world. This is, once more, my promise to myself this new year, for which my uncleared desk might well be a metaphor, given all its tired, painful baggage. May we all find sunshine and multi-coloured crayon this year! And now, I must remove my feet from this tub-of-writing-water and hit the publish button so that I might play with the crayon!