A Million Sita-s.. and remembering the joy of creativity

Last night, I went to watch Anita Ratnam's new dance theatre presentation, A Million Sita-s. It was the first performance I managed to attend this Margazhi, and it was so worth shaking myself out of the inertia of staying home.

The presentation tells five stories through Sita's voice, breaking down the traditional distance/ difference between Sita and other characters in the Ramayana. Sita, the narrator, is in exile in Valmiki's ashram and encounters Manthara, Soorpanakha, Sabari and Ahalya. She tells them about herself, remembers her encounter with them and because she has empathy, she shows us the world as they would have seen it.

As Ahalya, she lets you into her feeling of temptation and being flattered, and her anger about her punishment--to turn into a stone till Rama's feet can liberate her. When Sita apologizes to Manthara for the teasing--even pelting with stones--that Dasharatha's sons inflicted on her, a window opens, and then you feel Manthara's sadness and anger... maybe for the first time. In Sabari's devotion, we are all moved--not just Rama. When Sita chats with Soorpanakha, you see them both as sisters. You hear a sarcasm that is never associated with Sita, when she asks Soorpanakha if she knows what the Maryada Purushottaman did. And in her sharing that, you see that they have a great deal in common.

If Anita's performance as Sabari was very, very moving, she was scary as hell as Soorpanakha. I thought for a moment that I would have nightmares, but of course I dreamt of deadlines instead. Anita Ratnam's Soorpanakha would have been a better aesthetic experience!

I am really glad I went to this presentation.

It was beautifully conceptualised, written and choreographed. The music was terrific, and Lakshmi Rangarajan's rendition of the bhajan that comes right after the Manthara segment was particularly beautiful.

Only two things that bothered me a little. The pile of cloth on stage when Anita danced as Ahalya--I kept worrying that she would trip--but maybe this particular stage was really small and that's why. And for the first part of the performance, the person reading out the narrative was speaking too close to the mike, so the sound was jarring and distracted from both the dance and the music, which is one reason I may not have understood the Ahalya segment correctly, actually.

In her performer's note: Anita Ratnam writes, "A MILLION SITA-s is not a feminist bashing of Rama." And it isn't a critique of the epic or the cultural traditions in which it is rooted either. It is simply a very sympathetic look at people in Rama and Sita's story who don't get a lot of airtime or understanding. I am not sure if this is the right way to put it, but it's very much a story told from within... from within this tradition, by someone who enjoy the epic and who enjoys all its characters. It's just a story told from an unusual standpoint within the story. Like a new look-out point in a very popular holiday destination. 

This was a wonderful experience and if "A Million Sita-s" is performed anywhere near where you are, you shouldn't miss it.

I saw "A Million Sita-s" on the penultimate day of 2010 and it reminded me of how much joy creative work can give the creator and the person who gets to enjoy the work. Those of us who can be creative in different ways and those of us that can appreciate creativity should never let those parts of us languish on the back-burners of our lives. That's my New Year's Resolution, for sure!

Tenth Day

For ten days after a person dies, their family makes offerings to them every single day. On the tenth day, their appetites are satisfied and the soul can freely transmigrate to its next destination. Freeing the spirit of the one they love is an act of tough love for the bereaved family which must not do anything that tempts the departing one to linger.
And so my not-quite-42 years old cousin, Sivasankari, would have started her transit to another life yesterday.

*
I am told that we spent a lot of time visiting Sankari and my atthai when she was a baby.
Sankari was born after her father’s premature death. He had gone to the hospital to admit his ailing mother for treatment, but suffered a stroke and died. My atthai was more than eight months pregnant at that point. Sankari never knew her father and grew up in the care of her maternal grandparents—my father’s parents—and her mother in Gudiyattam.
My mother says that soon after she was born, we visited and spent whole days with my grieving aunt. I don’t remember any of that.

*
I don’t remember any of that. But I don’t remember a time when Shekhar Anna and Sankari’s presence in my universe were not real to me. I may not have met them much. I may not know much about who they were, have been, are… what made and makes them tick. But they were real and they were there and there was always affection for them.

*
Visits by us to Gudiyattam were rare and brief. My father was not one to linger over anything (he did not linger over death either). And we seldom travelled; my parents shouldered too many responsibilities for that.
Visits by my aunt and Sankari were also rare but they stayed longer. And that is probably my first real memory of my younger cousin.

*
My clearest, earliest memories of Sankari are actually of a long summer holiday when she was around 5 and my sister around 4. They were inseparable, insisted on dressing alike, played together from dawn till dusk and danced like our flat was a giant stage. I remember the giggling of two little girls and the twirling of their colourful pavadais.
At the end of that summer, my sister forgot every language but Tamil. With the facility of very little children, she had completely absorbed the vocabulary and inflexions of her slightly older playmate.

*
That summer, looking through my photograph albums, I remember Sankari asking our grandmother, “Why are there no photographs of us in this album?” Like most children, I was and remain much closer to my mother’s family.
But I have never forgotten that question. Or the hurt in her voice that she may not even have realised herself.
And till date, I don’t share photographs with people if they are not featured (actually, I rarely share photographs at all). I am deeply conscious that I may have unconsciously excluded them.

*
Our visits to Chennai got more frequent in the late 1980s. By this time, my aunt and her family had moved base to the city so we also got to see them more frequently.
Sankari was in college, then studying cost accountancy—the first person I had met in that field and introducing us to the costume jewellery treasure-trove that was Pondy Bazar.

*
Sankari got married when I was living in the US. For more than a decade, I have barely seen her. To be honest, our lives and interests barely touched, though strung along a single thread of familial affection. We saw my aunt more often, even her brother who lives abroad.
She married into a large close-knit family, had a successful career, two lovely daughters and moved around India with her husband and children.
In a family that is practical and honest in its relationships, we did not call each other out of politeness, subconsciously accepting the lack of intersect and understanding it did not mean disconnect.

*
I think I last saw her at the first birthday celebration of her younger daughter. That was seven years ago. It was a warm reunion and we were happy to see each other after a long time.
But we have not met since.

*
Two years ago, when our nephew has his upanayanam, Sankari could not attend. She was very ill and had to have emergency surgery. The surgical would did not heal well, and infection spread through her diminutive body. She suffered great pain and discomfort, spells of hospitalisation and finally loss of consciousness.
My aunt called us two weeks ago. “She is suffering. She is not well at all.” She did not tell us exactly what the matter was. Nor did she dramatise the gravity of the situation. People were flying in to see her—“vandu paathutu peita,” she said (“They have come and seen her”). We were puzzled by the phrasing but did not press. My aunt also said, “If there is a cure, let her be cured. If there is no cure, let her not suffer.”
Perhaps she was trying to tell us her daughter was dying. But it is not in our nature to probe; people will tell us what they need us to know.
Besides, we were still sure she would pull through.

*
Sankari had been finding it difficult to speak. She was communicating with her family by writing notes. When my aunt called us, she was already slipping in and out of consciousness. Her eyes would open briefly, then close.
As they did for the last time on early Tuesday morning, September 8, 2010, around 3:15 a.m..

*
Sivasankari is survived by her husband, two very young daughters, a doting elder brother, sister-in-law, nephew, niece, many in-laws, many cousins, many friends and a mother who has seen and struggled too much.

*
I barely knew her. Really, I barely knew her. And neither of us had been moved to simulate closeness or stimulate contact over the years.
But her illness and passing have cast a long shadow over my days. She will not know that.

*
She desperately wanted to be well.
I remember Sankari as a girl with many dreams and desires. Strange that I do, because it is not as if we had conversations in which she expressed these or enough time together to have known it. It is as if, unbeknownst to either of us, her yearning for happiness communicated itself to me. To others as well, no doubt.
I believe she was very happy to find herself married into a large, loving, inclusive family. I believe she had every happiness she could have dreamt of.
But I think: Would ten days of pinda offerings satisfy all her appetite for life? Will she see her dreams for her children realised? Will she do all the things she wanted to—maybe travel, maybe have a large garden, maybe kacheri-hop—with her husband when they both retired?

*
I am deeply, deeply saddened by Sankari’s death. I could not have predicted how much.
It’s not just the waste of a life that still had a lot of living left in it. It’s that cliché: Blood is thicker than water.

*
Your ten days are up, Sankari, and for Hindus, there’s no resting in peace. You must move on and so must we.
I can only wish for you a journey of fragrance and light. And immeasurable love and happiness in lives ahead.

September 16, 2010

Controversy over appointment of women to senior posts

Cross-posting from The PSW Weblog: Maldives controversy: Women appointed to senior posts, September 2, 2010. 

Are debate and decision-making mutually inimical?

A few years ago, I saw some students off on GN Chetty Road one night and went back in the morning to discover all the trees were gone. Perhaps there had been press coverage for months about the flyover that was scheduled to be built and I just did not notice. Infrastructural projects are not riveting news until their ecological and human costs become evident. And even then, not everyone stops to take notice.

Whether it is GN Chetty Road's trees, or Sethusamudram, or the Sardar Sarovar project, I think one of the really big problems is that discussion and debate begin after work on the project begins. You cannot return to the status quo ante and you cannot really proceed. So insult is added to injury as something is lost and yet, that which ostensibly could have been gained is delayed indefinitely.

Why don't we debate these things before we start? It would identify pitfalls or at least make them known. My point here is not to start a rant but to genuinely pose this question.

I tried to look at this from the other point of view and imagine the reasons officials would offer for not having town-hall debates and the like:

1. The issues are complex and cannot be debated by lay persons.
2. Nobody would care enough to attend. If they did care, they would have been vigilant enough to know already.
3. It is the role of civil society and the press to highlight these things.
4. We cannot keep debating things; decisions have to be made and every decision comes at a cost.

All of these are valid to some extent but still don't add up to a reason not to debate. My question is how do we set up these conversations?

Prajnya campaigns against gender violence every year primarily in order to bring the issue into everyday conversation. We want people to recognize that there is a problem, to use the words for which they invent euphemisms and to come around to having their own discussions about the root causes and solutions. Lasting change will come through this, we believe. We try to come up with creative, fun, different ways in which to nudge these conversations to start, but it is not easy even with an issue like gender violence which is closer to most of us than we will admit.

How much more difficult then, to get people to stop what they are doing to discuss infrastructure or energy projects whose impact most of them will feel only considerably further down the line! Take this article by Milind Deora today arguing for a new airport in Bombay/Mumbai. How do we take this out of the op-ed page, the talk show studio and the cocktail circuit into every space where conversations happen?

And if we did that would we find ourselves in perpetual debate mode, never calling a decision and carrying it out? I am also afraid of that. In fact, temperamentally, that bothers me more than lack of debate, I must confess.

Therefore, this is a serious question and I would love to hear some answers: How do we generate debate on important public matters and how do we do it so that debate does not derail decision-making?