Fall

Thousand words streaming the
screaming fabric, demented fear
peaking rudely in a blue breath.

Falling in tranquil helplessness.

Low, ebbing trough of the past
crawling in veins, sneaking up
sapphire vines of surreal flashes.

Distorted precipice, aligned in
perfect parallax of mind to fall
deep in grey, so sublimely numb.

And yet, even as the blackest
temptations draw out my dark;
shackled by stern allure of life,
I cannot
fall.

Of Malayalees and Gender.

I was twelve when I was flashed in public for the first time. I was asking for some directions to a well mannered ‘uncle’ and while giving me directions, he lifted up his mundu and gave me my very first view of an erect penis. I remember looking at it, wondering what was wrong with it. As years passed, I would get more glimpses such perverse exhibitionism. Then the gropes began, from light touches to my posterior getting completely grabbed. Traveling alone at night in train even the short distance of Cochin to Trivandrum always ensured stares, questioning glances as to why a girl is out alone at midnight. 

My friends from North India used to stare at me in amazement when I would recount such stories, wondering how we could just let it be. The truth is, there is not a woman in urban Kerala, who if not groped by a man or been the object of lewd comments (most often uttered as softly as a whisper loud enough only for you to hear) does not know another woman who has undergone such travesties on her person. Kerala, which has 1058:1000 sex ratio and more than 90% literacy, lags behind when it comes to gender equity.

I have often wondered from where this phenomenon originates. Education is supposed to liberate man from primeval, barbaric power equations and demand civilization that modernity assures through social evolution. But somehow, the Kerala Model of Development, with all its achievements, failed to provide basic attitudinal change in men. A woman is still the second sex. The perfect example for this attitude is something that may seem very trivial, but holds much relevance today- restroom facilities for women who commute or journey long distance. A huge portion of the working force comprises of women in Kerala and yet you cannot find decent amenities for women as often as you need them. We can say offhand that there are amenities at bus stands and railway stations, but the question arises on how healthy they are. Use public restrooms for a week and you are in the high risk category for urinary infections.  There is a lack of public and official interest when it comes to providing even the basic infrastructure to the ever growing number of females who join the work force or commute to study. There seems to be a wide gap between the theoretical need for gender parity in economic development and the real disparity in their practical implementation in the state which has development indices comparable to developed nations. 

Even in the field of education, it is quite visible. Girls are expected to study till they have a college degree or perhaps a Master’s degree. Beyond that, they are discouraged to study because they might fail to get suitable alliances in the marriage market because they could appear to be over qualified for the prospective groom. A PhD is rarely considered to be a door for further research, but as a further qualification for a permanent teaching job or more salary. For all the social concreteness that we impart to women, the nuances are startlingly different. A girl is supposed to take care of the home. Intellectual or academic work is seldom considered to be input worthy of mention by itself. She has to be a ‘good, well bred girl’ for her intellectual capacity to be acknowledged. 

There have been instances where people have told me that my passion for cooking is something that will come in handy when I ‘go to another house’. They don’t view it as a part of my creativity which extends to other fields, but rather as the sole criterion for my capacity to be a potential homemaker. But whenever my brother cooks (which he does admirably well when it comes to certain dishes. Also he is capable of everyday cooking more than me.), there are often amazed or bewildered admiration and adoration heaped on him for being a boy and yet enjoying cooking. On the other hand, when it comes to restaurants and the business which is associated with feeding people, we seldom see women chefs or cooks. The public arena is gender customized to maximize the gains for one sex. These same men, who are employed in restaurants go home expecting their wives to have hot food prepared for them from within the four walls.

Think of accidents involving women drivers. Every time there is a mishap, the woman is blamed, no matter how good a driver she might be or whose fault it could be. Even though the number of Malayalee women driving or riding has increased exponentially over recent times, every time a woman displays a lack of good judgment on the road, there are irritated glances which say, ‘oh she is a woman, it is inevitable’. I believe that a woman in Kerala has very high standards set for her when it comes to the public sphere, which was traditionally men’s. She cannot fail or falter in what she does because that is attributed to her gender and not her as an individual or to the social framework which nurtured her upbringing as part of the collective and as the shadow to her male counterpart. Even though an average Malayalee woman enjoys more financial freedom than the average Indian woman, she is still expected to put all that money into her family and not herself, while a man might have more financial liberties on how he spend his income. This translates to a kind of bondage through all the phases of her life. She might be a working woman, but her life should be at home. Her friends must be few and she must cook, clean and make sure the children get good grades in school. 

The question before a person, especially the youth of globalised Kerala, is whether he/she should recognise that Kerala is still a man’s land and not every individual’s and clad him/herself in the archetypal  Malayalee identity of hypocrisy pertaining to gender roles or not. The Malayalee Manga can be Wonder Woman by day, but no matter how high a post she holds, by evening she is still supposed to be ‘poomukha vaathilkal sneham padarthunna poothingal’; the ironic remnant of cultural and economic renaissance that failed to eliminate the chauvinistic roots of an enlightened society.

Looking Back

See that man? Chaos haunted
for years, tumultuous in his
perennial lust to find himself.

Every mistake gathered from
depths of lava and ash in life’s
seismic rumbles and rubble.

Fretted, thought high and low,
creased forehead, burrowed
in borrowed fantasies of life.

Every book, read and tossed,
philosophies myriad, his soul
reflecting its vague anguish.

Breathing defeat, endured the
calm gravity, continuum lost in
the last futile moments of life.

Tiny fingers crept up his
wrinkled, frail hand; gurgles the
last lullaby for the grandfather.

Reading through Vicki Hearne's 'What's Wrong With Animal Rights'.

Some days back; I had the opportunity to read through an amazing essay by Vicki Hearne, titled What's Wrong With Animal Rights. While I encourage the reader to read the entire article, here I will be discussing my stream of thoughts and certain questions that originated while I was reading it as a direct consequence of having read it.  I must clarify forthright that I am not an animal lover per se. And this certainly is not a discourse on animals.

The major question that flashed through my mind while I was reading the article was – how can she know what the animal wants? The logic that she used to argue about happiness and satisfaction to me seemed flawed at first. The logical fallacy being that we cannot offer a choice to the animal about the setting in which it could be happy. In doing so, we concentrate on the set of animals in specific anthromes, involved in reciprocal relationships with human beings, with choices and preferences being extrapolated through behaviour. This seemed fascinating to me. Even more the previous day when I was party to a discussion where happiness of uncontacted tribals in Brazil was touted to be greater than those in ‘civilized’ settings. It seems right at the first glance. But the question is, are they happier than us just because their lives are less complicated and hence by default, associated with less suffering? A common cold could prove fatal to an entire tribe. How do you measure happiness unless there is a transfer of the requisite behaviour from one setting to the other? Perhaps if a tribal is slowly made to migrate to a more urban setting and given the choices required, he might be able to make an appraisal. But not us. My mind made an unjustified or justified connection of this with Hearne’s words, ‘Happiness is often misunderstood as a synonym for pleasure or as an antonym for suffering.’ I think happiness is in the process of creation. Creation of something new. Perhaps not to the world, but to you. I understand when Hearne surmises that, ‘But Aristotle associated happiness with ethics -codes of behavior that urge us toward the sensation of getting it right, a kind of work that yields the "click" of satisfaction upon solving a problem or surmounting an obstacle. In his Ethics, Aristotle wrote, "If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence."  

The next point that hit me very hard is something I have always wondered about. What do you mean by belonging? I have written poems about it, wanted to belong to people, but somehow all the pieces came together only when I read her words,’ Possession of a being by another has come into more and more disrepute, so that the common understanding of one person possessing another is slavery. But the important detail about the kind of possessive pronoun that I have in mind is reciprocity: If I have a friend, she has a friend. If I have a daughter, she has a mother. The possessive does not bind one of us while freeing the other; it cannot do that.’ I have never read a more brilliant analysis of the state of belonging. Many of us go through our lives searching for precisely this and end up equating it to a kind of bondage, instead of acknowledging that with such possession comes a package of rights as well as responsibilities. We believe that a parent-child relationship is obligatory rather than a choice. Sometimes even reaching out to our friends becomes an anathema. Relationships suffer when the involved persons believe that this possession is indeed slavery, without realizing that it is reciprocity and choice.

When Hearne says that ‘A correction blocks one path as it opens another for desire to work; punishment blocks desire and opens nothing.’ I am flabbergasted with awe. Punishment often creates a negative valence. More often positive punishment than omission training. Slapping the child for the spelling mistake works in the short term, but in the long run, it is definitely repeated corrections, in a way that he/she understands that will work. True, this requires a lot of patience, but proper communication hardly involves punishment. This is not applicable just to kids. When I tell my friend that I will not talk to him if he does not perform a certain task for me, I am diminishing his intrinsic motivation and the value attached to the act of my talking to him by the threat of omission. This part I had the chance to observe when I had to deal with my little cousin who was undergoing a certain phase of no moral stability. He found that my love for him was always soft and mellow and that I would not be tough with him whatever misdemeanor there was on his part. Following the advice of a dear friend, I decided I had to be more earth than water, be steady rather than give in and bend. And for the brief period that I had with him when I was able to put this concept to action, I could perceive a visible change in him. He was responding to me more positively than ever. Perhaps because the basis of strong love was already there, he could assess that I would not harm him in any way.

I have not read any more of Vicki Hearne’s work, but I found this piece interesting because of the so many parallels I could draw from it to people and to me, personally. To me, that is philosophy.