Demise

Today I mourn your demise,
Not another day, a different way.
With a happy sigh of untold relief,
Having met and let go, yet again!
Memories and dreams,
The sweet kisses and warm hands,
Laughter whispered like a tingling,
Chant of air in my ear.
None brings you back to me,
For today I mourn your demise.
The songbird on my lips echoes,
My tranquil soul’s melody.
With a merry note and peaceful high,
A dismissive flick of the past,
I gently mourn your demise.
I never lost you, how could I?
Lose something ever unreal.

Hope

Is hope really a thing with feathers?

The little bird that sings,

Amidst gales and storms,

Humming strong to the weary warriors?

Emily, my dear Emily,

From all your death and dark,

You beckon the angel of life,

The beacon of mirth and let

The cherubin close around its light.

I adore this little bird,

Over the shadows of sorrow,

It delights in flying high,

High my eyes are set,

Let my home draw nigh.

You guide my will,

And will you let me fall,

Even then, I answer your call,

With a smile and sigh,

For you will always be

Up high in the sky

On... Drinking.

As I sit down to write this, there are various thoughts running through my mind. Specifically where to begin and where to stop.  Let us begin with an incident. I had gone to a get together with some friends. Being the first to arrive, the hostess and I along with her husband went shopping. She kept telling her husband to buy ‘that’ so that another friend’s husband and he could enjoy among themselves. I felt this a bit unusual. I told her outright that it’s wrong to actually encourage drinking.  Her reply had three points. One, if she stopped, he would drink secretly. Two, it is not manners not to drink at a social gathering. And three, this happens everywhere.

So I asked another friend of mine, who is reeling under the feeling that he has become what we call a ‘functional alcoholic’ or in plain terms a drunkard, how this works. He told me that the first drink you take gives you a high you haven’t experienced. You space out the drinks. One drink after another doing no great harm but five years down the lane, you search for that initial high with more alcohol because you just can’t have it with the same quantity. His observation is actually a medical fact, though he expressed it more psychologically. The body grows more resistant to the effects of the intoxicant that in time, it takes you more of the intoxicant to reach the same level of ‘high’.

Let us discuss some of my friend’s points. One, that he would drink secretly. Well, I found this amusing. It had a lot of patriarchy in it. Allow your man to have what he wants in ration. Give him permission and endorse it. If you do so, you have him in your control. Isn’t that what perfect women are supposed to do? What if he wants a drink, I shouldn’t stop him. He would find the atmosphere unpleasant and slowly slip out of my control. This is a lesson most middle class women learn from the society. To be tactful enough to ‘keep your man’.  Two, that it is impolite not to drink at a social gathering. Well, I have grown around men who drink and who don’t drink.  I have seen car accidents to being the only sober one in the party. And I would definitely say that the people who smirk when you say you don’t drink are usually the most ignorant ones. They might consider anyone who doesn’t drink not ‘man enough’. But, it is more ‘man enough’ to say no to something wrongly popular rather than succumb to the requirements of the society. And three, that it happens everywhere. That is precisely why everywhere, irrespective of class, creed or anything, there are anti liquor movements and rehabilitation.

Now, this is where I sadly notice the Kerala Govt’s triumph. Kerala State Beverage Corporation’s turnover for 2009-10 was Rs 5,539 crore, its highest-ever, and a 20% increase over the Rs 4,631 crore that the corporation grossed in 2008-09. This piece of news and the implication was just too great to not ponder on. Kerala has become the drunkard’s haven. Since for the state government, excise and sales tax earnings from liquor form a large portion of its revenue earnings, they are doing everything in their power to make sure that the masses are lined up in front of the shops across the state even before they open. I do suggest they also consider giving mandatory medical, life and children’s insurance coverage to regular customers. Why not also run hospitals, counseling centers for families and funeral services? Hey, let us make it a one stop shop. We can out do Russia in some years if we try. With all those ‘benefits’, people will start pouring in.  

Since we talked about the middle class, let us climb down to the lower classes, where drinking is explicitly, a very large problem. Since a third of Indians exist on a daily hand to mouth basis, it becomes a problem when the ‘head of the family’ spends his income on alcohol. In addition to incapacitating him physically, there is this power need to dominate his wife and his children. Hence, no one should question his authority. A less educated or illiterate drunk doesn’t understand that all this money wasted could go for better nutrition or education of his children and in taking care of his family. In the case of middle to upper class drunks, you could say that there is a denial of reality. But, a farmer or a daily labourer hardly knows the reality apart from the fact that he needs to vent and that he is entitled to do so. If you have noticed, all major anti liquor movements in India have been spear headed by women. Women bear the brunt of it. Middle and upper class women can deny or ‘afford’ to be tranquil about the livers of their husbands getting drowned. But, the poor can’t. They need the money. They can’t be calm about losing a single rupee. This is an angle that even our system doesn’t see at times when it comes to rehabilitation of people in the name of development. You give them some money, and instead of investing, they binge on pleasures. No land no money. Who are stranded?

Prior to concluding, let me just say that the women who encourage or silently endorse their husbands’ drinking are making their children sole losers. They are moulding the next generation in a scenario where such taboos become nonexistent whereas they uphold a lot of rigid societal paranoia which ought to be set free. The men, who drink, in my opinion, are selfish. How selfish you get is another question. If you think that one day, when the time comes, when it begins to threaten everything you have, your life, your health, your family, capacity to love, that you can stop it then, you are wrong. You would have fallen too deep into an abyss that you can’t reach the air from it. There is no ‘limit’ to drinking in our social setting. It will keep pulling you under. Try and reach out for help if you can. Someone might be able to help you.

As someone said ‘Responsible Drinking? Now that's an Oxymoron.’.  

   

On... miscarriages and misidentities... just a rant. better dont read.

For the first time in a long time, I am going to rant. If my objectivity wanes, forgive me and just keep on reading.

Sun, rain, curving sky

Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone

Star shine, moon glow

You're all that I can call my own.

Isn’t it true? Of all the things that I possess, can I actually call anything my own? Produced by so many who are hardly compensated for their effort, what is mine? Of all the things in me, what is mine? Is my womb mine? Wasn’t it bartered to that guy who promised me food and a roof, cloths and safety?

Fall gently, snowflakes

Cover me with white

Cold icy kisses and

Let me rest tonight.

So, yes, I am bothering you with questions. I am so tired for working for him. He who is the master of my soul apparently. I am told I must satisfy him, for he will protect me against those lustful eyes that wander on my body when I venture out. Maybe I shouldn’t venture out. Maybe I should stay here, inside these walls. I am comfortable. I can bring up my children like this. I do agree sometimes I want to smell the fresh roses of sunshine or the alluring bouquet of morning dews splattered on the new spider web. But I am not allowed to. My body aches from losing my child last week. But I don’t have time to pause. Time for me is more than a luxury. I tell my husband it pains. He says we must do it till we have a child. An empty home is no home, he says. My in – laws tell me I am no good if I don’t reproduce. Am I no good? Maybe I should have been just a womb and not I.

Storm, blow me from here

With your fiercest wind

Let me float across the sky

'Til I can rest again.

I long for freedom. But I don’t know from what. There is this feeling of perpetual fear. There is no truth in this home. Only contracts. Contracts of private property, status, reputation and conformity. I am supposed to love this falsehood. I am supposed to believe in love when the man who is supposed to love me wants only my womb, not caring for how my heart beats for him or how it is torn every time I lose a baby. Isn’t he supposed to protect me? Aren’t they supposed to treat me as their daughter? Isn’t that what the contract says?

Shine on me, sunshine

Rain on me, rain

Fall softly, dewdrops

And cool my brow again.

What do they mean by empowerment? I have a job. I earn. Isn’t that enough? They tell me I have to be more, that I have to be I, that I have to be free of every chain that binds me. But I am not chained. If I weren’t I, why am I using the word ‘I’ so much? Doesn’t that make me aware? Maybe that’s not the awareness they talk about. They tell me I shouldn’t bring up my kids to such ‘chauvinism’. What is chauvinism? As far as I see, everything has a place in this society. Maybe that place isn’t absolute or the ultimate right. Maybe I have an existence away from my reproductive system. Maybe I do have a say in those choices. Does that mean I can stop bleeding just because I am asked to? But, now that I think about it, I am ordered, not asked. Nobody bothers what happens to me in reality. I am just a machine. When did I become a tool? Everybody has a use for me, except myself.

I've got the children to tend

The clothes to mend

The floor to mop

The food to shop

Then the chicken to fry

The baby to dry

I got company to feed

The garden to weed

I've got shirts to press

The tots to dress

The can to be cut

I gotta clean up this hut

Then see about the sick

And the cotton to pick.

What am I? Who am I? I don’t understand. I don’t understand why I have to be all this that I don’t want to be. Why can’t I just be me? My choices. My life. Me.

Now, let us go to the epi-ranting part. The verses are from Woman Work by Maya Angelou. No, I didn’t write them. What I have done is to take a bottom- top approach. The last stanza here is actually the first. Don’t ask me why I chose this poem. It just came to mind. The question naturally arises though as to the provocation behind this extremely unusual rant of mine. I have always tried to keep objectivity when it comes to writing. But, yes, I lost it today and I am not sure you understand my incoherently concrete work. Coming to the provocation part, it was when one of my close friends had her third miscarriage and is admitted to the hospital. Three strikes in almost 18 months. There are medical reasons why they had to hurry. But there is no vaguely moral justice in this atrocity of pushing a woman so hard to have a child that she bleeds and bleeds and takes all sorts of hormonal treatments, just to survive in this highly unfair world. Medically there is a mandatory 3 month refractory period (crude of me, i know), before the couple can even try. And this society makes sure they don’t have the luxury. If the man doesn’t impregnate the woman, he is not virile. If she cannot conceive, she should be replaced. Why is the womb the only thing that matters now? It’s beyond propagation of species. Look around, there are not even viruses that exceed our population. We have come all these millennia for what? To not embrace civilization even in its most basic form? This pantomime is the murkiest one the world will ever come across.

Like Evita Peron said famously ‘I am my own woman’, we all need to think ‘whose’ we are.

good bye

My love, my heart,

Heart beat which used to

Conquer all else,

Good bye forever.

Tomorrow we may meet,

Strangers on these winding roads,

We may smile, we may greet,

In a flash remember all

What went by.

I do not pretend mine,

That it won’t skip a beat,

I won’t tell you how much

I want to melt in your arms.

That is why I will regretfully

Say good bye, refuse

Your invitation to a coffee.

For you see, my love,

I miss not thee.

I miss not thee,

But my friend that you were.

I will find comfort and solace in

Arms bigger than yours,

I will love and be loved,

By a heart stronger.

But you ran away,

Abandoning me in despair,

My dear friend, you ran.

I will not find you, my friend,

Not you, in any other.

Good bye, my friend.

Forever and ever more.

On disability

I woke up from a dream. It wasn’t nice since I was rudely shaken to consciousness. I had to go to the physiotherapy department of the Medical College. As I was waiting in the long corridors, which I assessed then, was clean from sickness, from blood, there was no screaming, nobody was crying; everything was quiet. Then, all of a sudden my eyes fell on this gorgeous fellow; tall and handsome and like all fertile females of my species I gazed upon him. I would have stopped staring hadn’t it been for one reason. He was walking with the help of a stroller. He had only one leg, which had been bandaged so that it could stand the extra pressure. As he walked down the corridor, I kept looking at him. Then an amazing thing happened. He looked at me with a smile. I couldn’t help blinking to keep the tears off. Then I realized why there were no screams, no blood. They were bleeding inside, they were screaming inside. They had the choice to go on, despite the nervous twitches that made that woman in red sari convulse with her every step. Despite the obvious paralysis the man in the wheel chair was in, despite the effort with which the guy, who had his legs cut off from the thighs, tried to hoist himself up and down a special chair to gain practice. Despite their setbacks, these people, they had hope. I twitch when a mosquito bites me or cry when my finger is hurt. I feel pretty pathetic right now.

I know and you know, I hate going into statistics. But this is one of the occasions where they are absolutely necessary. In India there are around 70-80 million disabled persons. What exactly do we mean by the term ‘disability’? Or shall we say, as it is PC now; differently abled. I wasn’t sure. So I decided to look it up. Apparently, in our scenario, disability covers physical disability, visual impairment, hearing impairment, speech disability, locomotors disability and overlapping conditions. It is said that one in every twelve households has to care for someone with disability.

Now, a very small percentage is educated and only around 40% of the disabled are employed in some way or the other. Though there is reservation in Govt jobs up to 3% since 2003, it applies only to loco motor, hearing and visual. But the fact is that they are seldom filled. Here I do wonder how disabled friendly our Govt offices are, both in terms of infrastructure and human relations. In private sector (for obvious reasons), the condition remains abysmally wretched. MNCs employ less than .05% disabled persons in their workforce while the aggregate of the top 100 corporate heavy weights in India employ around .4%. When we talk about social parity, we conveniently neglect certain aspects. We frame policies but seldom approach the implementation at a people centric level.

But, does that mean we have millions of educated disabled people waiting to rush in to fill the vacancies. Yes, there are some. But, not many. Our education system has a high problem with identifying children with special needs and responding to them. In simpler terms, the Taare Zameen Par situation (generalizing) is much more serious than the celluloid representation. There is a 3% reservation of disabled children in schools guaranteed under the Persons with Disabilities Act. Then why is there a hesitation when it comes to admitting them? A large proportion of schools are ignorant of this Act, whether Govt or private. But when it comes to private schools, again we see the proportion dwindling. So social responsibility means nothing to them? But yes, they hardly have to care when the Govt schools themselves have decaying infrastructure which mocks at the personal integrity of an ordinary child, let alone a disabled child.

Why is there such a discrepancy? We stare at the ‘midgets’, we make fun of those with twisted limbs, we don’t know how to behave with someone different. There are ‘them’ and ‘us’. As always. Well, one can argue that the system is struggling to accommodate a billion people with no difficulties and it is bit too much to ask that everything be made ‘differently abled friendly’. Maybe. But are 80 million lives too little a price to be paid for negligence? Here, who becomes the beggar in the street tugging at your dress and looking up at you to have some mercy on him or an ex army man who sells lottery for his daily bread because that’s all he is told he could do? Who becomes the one with prosthetics and has a shot at better life? Economic disparity too reflects in this stratum. But that will not change unless the social and political disparities change. There are a million questions and considerations in this issue. I just hope…. Like the man learning to walk, I just hope.

I really don’t think anyone expressed it better than Martina Navratilova, when she said; Disability is a matter of perception. If you can do just one thing well, you're needed by someone.

We need to find those 80 million different things.

Me..... a secret torturesome.

Let us, as usual start with a story so that we can very conveniently understand the nuances of it. I was nine and I had a tutor who coached me for various stage programs. Let us just skip the peripherals and say that he molested me one day.  For seven years, I carried the secret with me. By that time however, I had become a ghost of what I had been. I had transferred schools and the deep confusion and fear regarding this incident kept me away from the stage and from the popular events. I despised attention. It took me a marvelous teacher at my college to find the stage again somewhat and renew my confidence. You could say that I did it because I didn’t want to disappoint him.

Now, let us go into the emotional side of the victim here aka me. I was tormented, for I wasn’t sure what had happened. I was too young to comprehend. But when I did understand, I felt ashamed. I felt as if it’s my fault. There is no question as to why I thought so. I just did. Then came a stage when I knew it wasn’t my fault and on a day when I was 16, I told my mother. She went in search of him, but since he was a guest teacher, there were scanty records of him. And 8 years past since I told her, she is very protective of me as she thinks it’s her fault it happened to me. How can we be expected to distrust everybody in this world? My mother left me alone with him only once and that when my younger brother was there. My teacher sent him to buy something. So, opportunity was created from the blue. Then of course, as I began to understand I wasn’t alone and around 25% of children in this world and 50% in this nation  undergo Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) in some form or the other, there developed a sense of acceptance. Yes, it happened to me. But, life has to go on. I cannot deny that my blood doesn’t boil at the very thought of another child undergoing the same trauma or that sometimes I wish I could search him out and shoot him. I wish I could bring justice to millions of those kids who trust their elders while lustful eyes and hands wander over their tiny bodies, contaminating their innocent souls, filling their hearts with fear.

I wouldn’t say that my life hasn’t been changed because of it. It has. And I wouldn’t say that it is not demented. It is. But, it is life. It constantly challenges you to overcome obstacles. Very objectively speaking, I am glad it happened to me for one reason- it made me a better person over the years. It made me think about myself. Well yes, there are negative points. I don’t trust men easily, though my closest of friends are mostly men. I am extremely conscious of how a stranger looks at me. An innocent touch is doubted, even from relatives. I have an ambivalent attitude towards my genitilia. I do not allow any man to take control of me. My brother hates that. He cannot comprehend how I can perceive him as anything other than an extension of me. So he does things to challenge this boundary. I think over the years I have become more comfortable with myself and as a result more comfortable with him crossing those boundaries. It reassures him that he is still mine.

I have often wondered what makes a person so perverse as to get attracted to such innocence. What pleasure do they get? But, it is not for me to wonder. I cannot imagine getting inside such a person’s head without any training. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that for a man sexuality is objectified. I will be grateful if one day somebody explains to me how this sexuality is objectified from the tip of his penis to a region that possibly cannot accommodate it. It has no logic in it. But, of course as always, human mind is not about logic alone.

Yet, I think, is anger the way out? If I search him out and confront him, does it make everything alright? Yes, I want to search him out one day. I want to stand in front of him and say that he hasn’t destroyed me. But, I need to achieve my dreams for that. Maybe its post conventional stage of morality, but I don’t believe in revenge. If indeed I were to feel angry towards anyone and destroy that person, does it make me any better than him/her? I believe in avenging. I believe I should have the courage of conviction to stand up straight and say, yes, that’s my past, that happened to me, but look at me now. I avenge myself when I let my light shine and change the world around me. There are a lot of things wrong with this world. Lot of things. Does that mean I run away from it? How can I run away from a world that tomorrow is my children’s? Do I teach them to stay and fight or blame everything on the world and run for comfort? Do I let my emotions get the better of me, seek him out, yell at him or do I get to where I want to be, where I can help people who have gone through what I have been through or worse? Or help make policies and generate awareness about CSA or rape or anything else? Isn’t that the ultimate REVENGE? Isn’t there a bigger picture than me in this? I believe so. I believe I have to do my part in that picture. For better or worse, I am wedded to this need;to this idea of societal evolution.

Child abuse casts a shadow the length of a lifetime. So said Herbert Ward. Let us cast some light over it, shall we?

On Local FArmers market and a part of our apathy

This story begins with a mango and two brinjals. A mango that I bought. It seemed perfect when I bought it from the super market. But I found it wasn’t as tasty as I had expected. Then one day, my mother bought mangoes from a street side vendor. They looked horrible. I asked her whether it wasn’t a waste of time. I had to suck in that attitude when I found out that they were so tasty, I could hardly quit eating.

Now, we talk about the brinjal. Not Bt. Two ordinary brinjals, side by side. One is smaller and the other is larger. The larger juicier looking one costs less than the slightly disfigured small one. Which one would you buy? Naturally the larger one. Does it matter that they are fed on pesticides and fertilizers while the other is completely organically grown and that’s why it costs more?

More than half of the population is employed in agriculture in this country whereas agriculture as itself amounts to only 18% of the GDP. After the liberalization started, the growth of this sector has decreased when the whole economy is dashing across the race track at top speed. Where the entire population’s income rose by around 4%, only a marginal increase has been there in the case of agricultural workforce. Around 48% of small scale farmers are indebted. And we can guess to whom they are indebted. As the Government drives the economy towards more and more liberalization and offering incentives only to the richer of the farmers, one cannot help wonder how many more are going to commit suicide. So, I am talking about policies and how they affect the lives of some people. But, let us go a step further, round the corner to the nearest local farmer’s market. We are going there at a time when ASEAN pact is all set to import everything on the platter on a lesser price. Now, the question comes, when there is a growing following in the developed countries when it comes to the local farmer’s market, why is there apathy from our system? Why is it that most of these farmers have little or no access to technology and instead of admitting them into the system, we keep them on the periphery? 

The middle class is increasingly being attracted towards the all-in-one supermarkets. Well, there is no question as to where the small farmers are left in this scenario. They are forced to sell their produce at much lower rates than usual which the supermarkets sell for much higher price. Last week I refused to buy spinach from an old woman because I had already bought some very colourful ones from a shop. She asked me where people like her would go if we didn’t buy from her. Very valid question. She told me that she has to sell her wares at the end of the day to some middle men at much lower price than what I would give her. 

Another crux of the matter is most of these local markets operate in unhygienic conditions, along the roadside. No protection is offered to the vendors and no respect to what they sell. They have to stand the heat and the rain. So while we buy vegetables kept fresh by injecting god knows what, preserved in cold for a longer time than the everyday fresh ones in the market, we hardly notice the underbelly of these giants. And the real lives sacrificed for their making. I really don’t understand why there are no proper regulations to protect these lives or why the consumers aren’t made aware as to the choices they have and how these choices affect the economy. It is rather a pathetic condition when successive governments are doing everything to liberalise everything while owing no allegiance to the masses which voted them to power.

As always, since someone else (Robert M. Hutchins) said it better than I, The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Well, the last part is an entirely different topic. but, then again, i find so many different dimensions to this one statement.