The right to travel

“Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls…

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

At the beginning of August, I took a six-hour road trip which took me through four European countries. From the very modern conurbation of the Netherlands Randstad, we drove past the busy port of Antwerp just missing the massive traffic jams, skirted Brussels to enter picture post-card perfect pastoral scenes with undulating green fields, cows, streams and farmhouses, past pretty Luxembourg which looms just past a large IKEA store and finally into France, which surprised us with hills large enough to look like small mountains. Six hours. Four countries. Not one passport check.

And where were we headed? To a very old city, named for the crossroads it has always straddled, not famous around the world for its stunning Cathedral but for having been the bone of contention for centuries between France and Germany. Strasbourg. Today, Strasbourg is home to several European Institutions.

When I am abroad these days, I am filled more and more with a wistfulness, “I wish everyone at home could have this.” I don’t feel envy because I know each community has done its time, paid its dues, but when will the turn of ordinary Indians come?

Southasia, Europe and India lie at three points on a continuum of integration, each having something to learn from the others about resolving conflict and finding a way to work and live together.

When I was writing my doctoral dissertation on national integration processes in South Asia, I would read comparisons of India and Europe that I always found interesting. I was examining national integration from the point of view of secessionist movements, so I had a strong sense of the shortcomings of existing policies and programmes. However, these other political scientists were looking—rightly—at Europe and India representing two levels of integration. Europe was moving from sovereign warring states, to states in a contract to coordinate defence and foreign affairs, migration and employment policies and a common currency. India was past that, and trying to create a common national identity. Europe, these scholars would say, had a lot to learn from India. True, I suppose, especially as the current economic crisis is fuelling nativism and xenophobia even in more liberal and inclusive European states, even before a common European identity could emerge.

Southasia, in turn, has a lot to learn from Europe. We have a real sense of shared heritage, with all our stories cross-referencing events and locations across borders. Our places of pilgrimage are scattered across the subcontinent. Our languages are common to more than one nation-state and our cuisines are distinctive but related. But we cannot visit each other easily or plan school tours or promise pilgrimages without elaborate visa procedures. Where Europe has effaced those obstacles, we have erected and fortified them.

I started this post two months ago. This month, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union, experts had many things to say, most derisive. This is a continent that fought bitterly for centuries, they said. “Is it meant to be an incentive for the EU to get its act together on the financial crisis?” “This award recognizes past accomplishment as the Obama one does potential.” I say it doesn’t matter.

Rivalries in Europe were older and more deep-rooted than the ones in Southasia. If they could be put aside, for any reason, in order for people to move freely in search of work, education or just for tourism, I say it’s a fine thing to emulate. If no-visa, no-passport travel is a distant dream, let us make consular access easier and offer visas-on-arrival as much as possible. The children of Southasia deserve free access to their shared heritage at the very least.

"Once there was a girl": Book notes

This evening, some kind friends have asked me to release the English translation of poet and novelist Vatsala's book, "Vattathul." I feel very honoured and especially so because it's Vatsala who read at the first campaign poetry reading in 2008, at a time when we really were very new kids on the block. I also feel very inadequate to the task because after all these years and all this education, I remain a reader of storybooks rather than an erudite literary or intellectual commentator.

I opened my beautifully bound copy gingerly, wanting to love the book, and a little afraid that perhaps I won't. I entered the protagonist's home hesitantly, rather like a person entering a train compartment for the first time--trying to spot the beedi stub, the chewing gum, the cockroach and the lizard, before she settles down and 'adjusts'. I don't know at what point I slipped completely into the world of Janaki, aka Rani. It must have been easy because I have met everyone in Rani's world before. The large house. The once-and-briefly-rich family in decline. The parents who are not a couple. The favourite daughter and her mildly resentful but dutiful courtiers. The oppressive-by-default sisters-in-law. I have met them all before.

I settled down into the world of the book but with a lingering distaste for almost all the characters. To my mind, this is one of the most striking aspects of this book: not one character is a wonderful, immediately lovable person. The protagonist is actually quite horrid, and when you consider her world of people, you can almost justify her vanity and nastiness. She really has it tough and you feel stray moments of sympathy or empathy of which her irrepressible nastiness immediately cures you. For instance, you want to feel sorry for the girl brought up to be a queen who suddenly moves from being the object of adoration and envy to pity, but she herself is so bitter, you think it best to leave things alone. You want to feel compassion for her when her sister-in-law feeds her husband's anger about her housekeeping skills, but she herself is so horrible to people that you think she can look after herself. When she rules Jamnagar, you want to exult, but her pleasure in it has such pettiness that you are turned off.

How does such a gentle, nice, lovely person as Vatsala write so vividly about such a person as Janaki? That's a mystery and an indication of her calibre as a writer.

Two things happen when you read a really good book. The first is that you disappear into the book, absorbed into and absorbing its world completely, always able to recall and re-enter it even when you have to function in the real world.

The second is not as comfortable: you start to ask yourself difficult questions. And for me, with 'Once there was a girl' some of those questions are: Why do I assume that when a woman writes a book the female characters must be nice people? Or even, that female characters, especially protagonists, must be nice sympathetic characters? What do I expect from a book written by a feminist? Or what is a woman writer's book? I don't even fully understand these questions, honestly.

I think, and offer this view very tentatively, as a point for more learned people to ponder: what makes this a very amazing book is that it lets you enter so completely into Janaki's world that nothing is hidden from you--her feelings, the muttering under her breath, the hurt she feels, the continuing bereavement that she is not living the life she was meant to... that you also feel with her, you see her world as she sees it, and that's no more perfect than she is. People are fond of telling people like the Prajnya team, people who speak about women's rights and violence, that women are women's greatest enemies. "Once there was a girl" lays bare before you the dingy, foul-smelling world that patriarchy, caste and class jointly create for most women--instructing their imaginations, channeling their hopes narrowly, leaving them unskilled and then limiting the possibilities for them to live truly fulfilling lives. You feel no love for Janaki but you can see where she comes from. There, but for the grace of god or just dumb luck, go any of us. That is really amazing, I think.

We make a big push for women's writing, women's self-expression, the documenting of women's lives and work--they are invisible, we say. Do we inadvertently efface the women we don't like, ignore the stories whose politics make us uncomfortable, ignore the fact that lives like Janaki's show both victimhood and agency in their expression? Aren't all stories and all lives important and worthy?

So, read this book, use it as a text, gift it to your friends, and like me, learn to enjoy the discomfort with which it should fill you. 

Anthems

Today, we celebrate five years of Prajnya. Prajnya started as a response to things I felt needed doing, that I could help do, in my head, and today it stands outside my head looming large over me, grabbing physical space around, monopolizing my brain sometimes, with a significant group of volunteers who also own Prajnya and a very large extended community who support and keep in touch with us. Wow! You cannot imagine how hard it is to believe.

I feel, at the same time, somewhat tattered and exhausted. Like a person who has fought through fire, wind and rain to walk down the world's longest wind corridor with a large, open bag of cotton-wool intact. Or something like. You get the idea. Embattled, exhausted. And in recent weeks, as we've planned our celebration, getting to something like excitement and exhilaration.Music has kept me on course.

I want to doff my hat to four songs that I rarely listen to but that since childhood, have been my idea of how to life.

Climb Ev'ry Mountain, The Sound of Music 

The Sound of Music was the first film I saw, I am told. And this song has been a part of the soundtrack of my life forever. The words are rich with meaning, and a gentle nudge even when I am really fed up, that nothing's over yet.

The Impossible Dream

I first heard this song on a tribute collection of Glen Campbell songs that someone got me. It never fails to draw me up beyond whatever moment I am in, towards something else, something more important than I am. So here it is, almost the version I first heard.

Somewhere over the rainbow

And what keeps me on this road is the belief, no doubt some would label it delusion, that "there's a land... where troubles melt like lemondrops." And it's up to us to find that land and bring it to where we are.

And closer home, two songs that resonate in the same way.

Jeena isi ka naam hai

The words echo the ideas that 'Vaishnava janato' spells out--living is about giving. I like that idea. Sometimes I also like receiving, but on the whole, giving is good! And it's another thing that the tune takes me straight to another Raj Kapoor song with an entirely different mood, 'Aasmaan pe hai khuda.' I still like this, and would list it over many other Zindagi songs with the same philosophy.

And finally.... (why are you surprised?)... Ruk jaana nahin tu kahin haarke

What's left to say? Except, "Thank you for the music"! :-)

Picture postcards from my life

Recently, I visited my cousin after many years. As we sat at her kitchen table, I looked over at her refrigerator on which she and her husband have posted picture postcards from holidays here and there. As one or the other caught my eye, she would reminisce. If I had been there, I would add my memories. And slowly we caught up on memorable parts of each other's lives.

I've been a picture postcard buyer and hoarder since I was seven, and in our home in Bombay, would often use cards to decorate my cupboard doors, etc. In my dorm room in Syracuse, I used postcards to spell out my name for new dorm-mates. I bought cards liberally until about five or six years ago, I think. And then I forgot all about them.

Like other parts of my life.

I did not buy new cards; it seemed like a waste in my NGO-founder life. I did not look at my cards; I miss people and places from my past but I have no time for reminiscence. I did not display my cards. I cannot recall where I stored them. It's like you can switch off your own life at will.

In recent months, as burn-out and physical exhaustion first felled me and as I have recovered, one of the things that is clear to me is that I live without moorings. My work has consumed me to the point that I have been alienated from myself, from my own history. I have felt friendless in this life. I have felt the absence of people in my life who remember other parts of me. Recovery has thus come partly to be defined as recovery of all those parts of myself.

Starting with those postcards.

The other day I took down a box that I did remember. It turned out to hold not just blank cards I had purchased but a new year greeting on a postcard from my aunt to my great-grandmother. It held a card my maternal uncle sent me, describing New York right after he moved there. It held cards from my oldest cousin, sent dutifully from here and there, not thinking it beneath his dignity to write to his much younger sister. I found a card my father bought at the Cologne cathedral in the early 1960s that was very similar to one I bought this summer. I can see faint traces of belonging in these slightly stained, cellotape-damaged wonders.

I cannot wait to locate all my other picture postcards. I cannot wait to remember who and where I've been.