Thursday, November 25, 2010

Solitude


Last, slow mouthful of ice cream
wistfully melted into her whimsical
fantasies of forbidden fancies.

Around, she saw couples in their
early dawns, enjoying the flawless
togetherness, hers long lost in sighs.

Moment of solitude, pregnant in its
lust to be alive, sanguine fortitude
creeping through veins for release.

Eyes open, in the waning whiff of
momentary suspension of herself,
reminded of errands still to be run.

Friday, November 19, 2010

On... Hindi and the rest... (Not so objective, mostly a rant.)


I studied in a Kendriya Vidyalaya for most of my school life. Have always felt more of a KV-ite rather than any other institution I studied in. Perhaps it is because of the wonderful relationships I made there, perhaps it is because I felt as if I belonged there. There was only thing I have not missed till now-speaking Hindi. This post is not a diatribe against Hindi or Hindi speaking people. It is something to emphasize the need of regional languages and the need to promote the regional languages in India.
 
There are more than 1600 languages in India, with a majority speaking languages of Indo-Aryan origin and the rest speaking mostly Dravidian languages. Ever since the struggle for independence, there has been a cry to make Hindi the national language. Now, Periyar and the DMK were the main opponents of the Hindi-isation of the rest of India and the major reason why Congress was completely ousted from Tamil Nadu. Fast forward 60 years later and still, only 40% of the Indian population speaks Hindi. Yet, there is always this tug of war between Hindi and rest of the languages.

This tug of war permeates in every level when it comes to our globalised generation. Bollywood is more visible and accessible when compared to films of other languages. There is a trend to categorise films in other languages as ‘good cinema’, but hardly any effort to promote it in the mainstream. Every viably profitable movie in other major languages is remade in Hindi with added glitz and glamour (I used to think that Indian masala was the same throughout India till I found that there are linguistic differences.) instead of promoting the original movie. It is never potato, but always ‘aloo’. Relegating people from the any other region or speaking any other language to a sub-Indian level. I am not a Mallu, I am a Malayalee. I do not address my friend as a Bong, he/she is a Bengali. All Southies do not eat masala dosa and vada. And for that matter, there are Malayalees who haven’t even heard of Rasavada. Still, there is the tendency to ignore these subtle differences and resume the categorisation as Hindi speaking and not. I learnt Malayalam till I was nine years old and moved on to English and Hindi. My friends to this day cannot understand why I do not speak Hindi. It is simply because I felt that it was alien to me. I did not identify with the culture. Now there could be a point raised that that is because I am a Southie. Wrong. I once called a friend of mine in Mumbai a Northie and I remember her reaction to this day. My ears almost bled while she went on to explain quite vividly that she was from Bombay and not Mumbai and she definitely was not a Northie.
 
One of the many differences I have with some of my ex-schoolmates is that they prefer replacing mother tongues with Hindi after the primary classes. To them, regional languages are redundant in today’s world. I strongly disagree. Because only completely blind middle-class people, who have been brought up in the post-liberalisation era of India, who do not think of how the wheel turns in a macroscopic  level can say that. How can we possibly ignore every other language on the list? How do we plan to take development to the remotest villages if we cannot speak their language? How can we understand the needs of hundreds of millions and ever increasing population if we restrict the mode of official communique?

But the most important issue is that of culture. I am culturally a Malayalee and politically an Indian. But that does not make me any less receptive of any other culture. My roots make sure that I have something to return to. Granted, I am not the typical Malayalee with all the Malayalee quirks or tastes. I grew up not speaking my language, being ridiculed by my family because every time I got emotional, I would ramble off in English. But my sweetest and best childhood memories are of thumbapoo and mangoes, of smelling the damp earth after the first monsoon rain, of not Onasadyas, but of the laughter accompanying them. I do not remember my bedtime stories being of Snow White or the Little Red Riding Hood, but of elephants whose names I can’t remember now and Yakshis and myths. That is the issue. Every region has its unique flavor, unique culture. Why do we need to homogenize it? Aren’t those memories and stories and flavor worthy of being passed on to the next generation? Does being a global citizen necessarily mean we have to push away our origins from us? Don’t we need to be aware of the cultural mediation and internalization of cultural schema so that we can promote our children’s better cognitive development? I do not think that is possible in an environment where instead of diverse stimuli, conflicting interactions are presented.

Paraphrasing, in the words of Octavio Paz, “What sets the world in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life."

Sunday, November 07, 2010

Doodle...


Idle pencil tip, paused arrogant in
mid-air, aimed restless, the silent
ant on uneven paper symmetries.

It sensed doom, scattered from the
shadow of the lead’s imminent gloom,
dexterous manoeuvres for survival.

Crushed, back broken yet struggling
hopefully (perhaps); tiny spasms of
survival in writhing knots of agony.

Tip twisted, dancing to the whims of
mercy’s hand, cruelly dealt for fancy
of higher cognitive intentionality.

Monday, November 01, 2010

On... fairytales and vampires.


When I was young, my grandmother would tell me stories of Yakshis, the female vampires who used to lure men to suck them dry of their blood. Usually the Yakshi was a wronged woman, who wanted revenge. It must be from hearing such stories again and again that I became obsessed with vampires, reading Dracula at around ten, then again around fifteen, etc. The mystery and power associated with each character was sublime to my fertile imagination. By my late teens, my romanticism had made me a fully fledged vampire lover. I empathized so strongly with Louise and despised Lestat from Rice’s ‘Interview with the Vampire’. I wanted to be one of those victims from whom these mighty creatures fed.

But all fantasies must end some day if they are not rooted in reality. There is a time when you realize that Little Red Riding Hood has a very sexual premise, with her cloak symbolizing her menstrual blood and fairy tales like Cinderella and Snow White stereotype women as damsels who are waiting for their charming princes. Though the vampire myth originated quite ordinarily, the class being extended to any supernatural creature which feeds on human blood and flesh, it has transformed into a classic misogynistic structure which exists on several layers of the human psyche.

Let us consider the case of a Yakshi. Always an attractive woman, with long, jet black hair, who whispers seductively. She targets men who are traveling alone. Now, in most of the stories, the Yakshi can be warded off by chanting mantras. Hence, most Brahmins could avoid the attack, since they had better knowledge of those mantras. We could bisect this particular instance. First of all, the implied danger of female sexuality. Even in popular culture, a woman who is beautiful and flaunts it is at times referred to as a Yakshi. The woman is something to be afraid of and if you wrong her (the notion of propertising the womb, kept safe from men with ‘ulterior’ motive), you would most probably end up being her food. Second of all, there is a hint of subjugation of women through faith or religion. The victim has to call for god, recite specific mantras and they act as a barrier which cannot be broken by her.

It might be rather hasty to take a quantum leap from a Yakshi to Dracula or other modern vampire versions, especially the male vampires with the harem of beautiful vampires/victims, all lustful and vying for his attention. The objectification of woman is so rampant in each of such a theme. Consider Dracula, the Count, with his mysterious ways, so powerfully seducing women, with their heaving breasts always painted so picturesquely in every illustration. And as vampire fiction has evolved, the female characters have gotten more and more overtly sexualized and the male characters more and more moody and dark. There is a clear distinction on this level, with women becoming addicted to fear rather than love towards the single male protagonist. Consider even the infuriatingly dumbed down Twilight series. The basic theme is that of the aloof male who wants to feed off the woman he loves and the young woman who is attracted to this dangerous recklessness. In fact I find Sookie in True Blood extremely refreshing, because she is one female character who has steadily refused to fit into the stereotypes set by the vampire genre of voluptuous females who act sex-starved and get pleasure from highly deprecatingly detached males feeding off them. 

The truth is that the sexual theme goes further into S&M. A powerful person dominating and inflicting pain on the other. Since the victim is mostly a woman, one has to wonder what kind of imagery is being projected on to the minds of vulnerable young women, who are discovering their sexuality, aided by the pop-vampire fiction that now pervades every turn of mainstream entertainment. How come it is alright to be humiliated and be ‘pain sluts’ without actually consciously transferring the power in sex? The masculinity and femininity (also cannibalistic tendency with allusions to ‘bodily fluids’, coupled with suggestions of the Incubus-like behavior) of a typical society are aggressively amplified in this context leading to distorted concepts of power transfer  when this kind of socially acceptable distortion of the aggressive component of the male sexuality is promoted by the media. It is a part of social learning. 

Every single aspect of the mainstream media is directed at profit and it is necessary to amplify the desired status-quo which will maximize it. Somehow, we fall short of realizing such tendencies. We tell our daughters fairy tales about Sleeping Beauty and women with long hair and the princes rescuing them from their ill fates. We also fill their heads with horror at being the subversive woman. Then we point them towards ultra-hormonal characters which they can visualize for their happy ending, in a very unnatural way. Where is the choice?