'Aukad'

It is so important to have an imagination assistant when you are a village girl who has never seen a woman do anything other than to aim to get married and have children 

and look after the house.  

Photos of Medha Patkar , Indra Nooyi and the others are hung on the walls throughout this school. Yet it's always a case of 'unki baat alag hain'. 'Their case is different.'

 

Perhaps it will take generations. If a girl from here finishes class ten , hopefully her daughter will graduate from college . Social context is so important it can sound exaggerated to an outsider.

 

I just cannot imagine that an 8 year old girl has to wake up at 4 AM , finish her chores attend school adn return to the same routine in the evening in a dark one room house shared with five brothers, her mother and the usually absent migrant labourer father slaving away with his bare hands to build a mall in some distant city.

The entire village has no electricity . The animals live inside the houses of the families more often than not.

 

Within such a context, for her to be able to pronounce an English word takes so much courage , let alone intellectually questioning the deep rooted boundaries of caste, class, gender , and an 'aukaad' accumulated over generations of power games.

 

 

 

Globalization :

 

When you are in rural uttar pradesh and you are coordinating the hook up of an Indian girl living in London and a New Yorker student in a pretty apartment in hells kitchen, Manhattan.

Back to school

You know that feeling of dread when the invigilator walks around the classroom handing out exam papers. You are so close to knowing what is going to be asked and yet so far way.

Our education system being what it is , takin gthe ICSE (10th ) and the ISC (12th) pretty much determined our lives. A whole year or for some people a whole education spent in anticipation of one exam killed us all!

 

 

I am working in the Pardada Pardadi school in Anoopshahr , Uttar Pradesh where the femal literacy rate is 43% , ten percent lower than national average. Very often, girls get married at 13 and people are randomly killed and their bodies abandoned in the mango grove outside the school.

 

Dinner conversation yesterday was about education. The driver here haas an alternate career option. A 10th Std graduate, he gets paid to write exams of students in the village who are not confident of passing. Passing however is no big deal.

 

More often than not, in government schools where there are no teachers, on exam day, the invigilator comes and writes all the answers on the board form the students to copy.

They all pass.

 

Employers think twice about hiring anyone who has studied under the UP State board. Sure they've all passed and occasionally they even obtain university degrees, but there's no point really .

 

Strangely even to me this is shocking. The South really seems more developed, actually the North is a far cry from the South is a better way of putting it.

 

Here it is a big deal for girls to go to school after puberty. When I went to my grandfather's village in Tamil Nadu, a man was excitedly telling me about how his daughter just obtained a Masters in physics from a reputed university!

Fireflies music festival

--
The fireflies music festival was the Bangalore I first came to, alive all night, no feeling up in the name of securty at the entrance to a festival

, bring your alcohol and gulp it, smoke and then the incredible music..rock, qawwali, kerala folk everything and Vandana Shiva's speaking her philosophy although for a bit long.  Felt good to be free and sit behind the stage in the beautiful amphitheatre and listen to the music .

 

And not be told ''not allowed'' by the cops..

 

and the whole city it felt like , was there.

 

Same same ...but different

 

A friend said he wouldn't want to be seen out on Valentine's day for fear of the Ram Sena. Recently, I was out with a bunch of friends when a group of men with sticks threatened to attack the ''girls''. We joked about it and called them the Ram Sena boys.

 

Ofcourse ,Bangalore is divided – the pulsating , spiraling IT world and the unchanging  old city.

 

Men are threatened by the new age financially independent women who seem to earn more with their white collar jobs than them. Locals are apprehensive that immigrants are taking all the jobs. The South Indians suddenly unite in all this and claim that the

North Indians are brash , loud and ''spoiling '' Bangalore's culture.

Envy is at the heart of it all. More important than envy however is economy and politics.

 

If the Shiv Sena tries to collect   the inner rage of the impoverished, unemployed or in some other way discriminated Marathi speaking person to control a metropolis then in another part of India, the richer Telengana region doesn't want to share it's resources with the rest of the state.

 

It's same same but different everywhere in the world.

 

While in a tram in Basel, Switzerland one day, a working class man starting screaming at two men who entered the tram. He was angry and hateful, the old man, I could tell even though the nuances of language were lost to me. The men he was screaming at were Germans.

 

One of the  rich looking German men said to the old man ''ok , ok'' and tried to calm him down but in vein. An Indian man intervened and started speaking in German. All this while, I was getting line by line translations from C. The old man calls the Indian man a black dog.

 

I looked petrified by this point so the Indian man in his very Indian man way came up to me and said in slurred speech (he was drinking) ''It's all ok ..don't worry.''.

 

It turned out that the screaming old man was telling the Germans  to leave Switzerland. Ever since the EU's policies changed, Germans have been coming to take high profile jobs in Switzerland which has created a lot of resentment among the locals and hence animosity towards the Germans.

 

But we are all human and we need money and we envy.

 

Mean

is the most profound word I can think of. But Rest in Peace , German Bakery. As Shweta Kapur put it ,''a little piece of home'' lost. To all those afternoons of solace it provided me away from the craziness of Bombay , for defining Pune , the charming Nepali waiters, I hope it's all back very soon.

hangin with the pope..

Throw a stone and follow its destination. Chances are that you are at a world famous colossal monument that speaks of the grandeur of another era.  To experience Rome is to be swept away by the Colosseum, to walk down cobblestoned paths from fairy tales and eat the best pizza there is.

 

When we landed in the airport, taxi drivers rushed at us hoping to cheat clueless foreigners. This was not the only thing that reminded me of India .We took the shuttle to the centre of the town in an overheated bus. My swiss companion complained about how it was too hot and that Italians considered it cold . At 8 degrees, much warmer than Switzerland my previous destination, I was happy as can be.

 

 

Rome can make you feel like you are in a 70's movie with fiats or fiat like cars dominating the traffic space... Sometimes, its History modernity conundrum and it's somewhat chaotic nature reminded me of Bombay.

 But these are not the most important things about Rome. The most important thing is that the city is a living museum , each spot sprouting some evidence of its dramatic History.

 

On day one, we went to Vatican City and were amazed by its sheer size. The St Peter's Basilica is an impressive structure with a beautiful imposing dome that is free to enter but unfortunately the queue was too long for our taste. We decided instead to pay fifteen Euro and enter the museum and  see the Sistine chapel instead . 

 

In the hallway , the roof was spectacularly painted where each square foot was a master piece in itself.  Hungry for the grandeur  that Rome had so far pampered us with , we couldn't imagine what the Sistine chapel would be if an ordinary hallway was this grand.

We walked past sophisticated maps and  paintings  to enter  a silent room with about a hundred people staring at the ceiling in silence interrupted only by the guards saying in that delightful Italian accent '' no phoo ooo tooo'''.

The curtains look real , Jesus looks alive , and books jut out from the ceiling, the story of creation is not merely drawn, it unfolds . The Sistine Chapel is human genius to its highest extent. Is it painting or sculpture or just magic?

 

 

We left the Vatican and went to the centre of town to see the gorgeous Trevi Fountain whose Italian name is more evocative of its beauty somehow – Fontana Di Trevi. There were Bangladeshi photographers all over persuading tourists to use their services and this too reminded me of Indian monuments.

 

The Pantheon , for all its greatness is unlit at night because believe me Rome has way too many monuments for them to be able to light up all of them at night. Lit or not , The Pantheon is a massive magnificent structure. Today the Pantheon functions as a Church.

 

Colloseum  , the construction of which started in 69AD is designed to hold 50,000 people. It's almost surreal to stand there and imagine all the glory and brutality it's walls have witnessed over 2000 years.

Apart from History, food is a big reason to go to Rome.  However, if you don't scratch below the surface , you will be disappointed.

Restaurants are jaded and in most you won't find the ''cooked with passion by a sweet Italian mama''  food that you are looking for. Many of them have ''tourist menus''.  If you have the patience to drift off the well trodden tourist paths and veer off to where the Romans eat, I promise you that you'll remember the meals forever. Research and ask the locals.

 Trastevere on the other side of River Tiber is a working class neighbourhood now made fashionable by the new restaurants and the tourists who throng there for the '' real Italian experience''. A local we chatted with told us that the best pizzas in Rome are to be had at Dar Poeta (The Poet). WE spent about 40 minutes looking . With a map in hand and very little linguistic skills except  our  stock basket of twenty useful words, we made our way through narrow cobble stoned paths lined by charming buildings painted in orange and brown to finally find the restaurant in Via Bologna, a quiet street .

Down to earth in appearance, the place lived up to our expectations.  I had freshly made thin crust pizza with rocket, mozzarella and  pomodoro tomatoes  and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it nothing short of ...poetic.  There's lots to try in Italy including creamy gelato, home made pasta , biscotti, pastries and the list goes on.

 

Everyone wants to learn English evidenced by ads everywhere selling Anglais classes for cheap. Hardly anyone speaks it though. An old woman comes up to me in a clothing store , taps me gently and starts a whole monologue in Italian about the clothes not giving me time to interrupt. Another woman had to intervene and suggest that I, perhaps given my obvious foreign tourist appearance did not speak English .

 

 

 

There are huge hoardings everywhere depicting Michelangelo's 'David' tied to helicopters flying over London. The Italian caption above threatens the exporting of Rome's art if no one went to see it.

 

Yet , one gets the sense that Rome is so burdened by its past that it has nothing new to offer, no young scene to speak of. It is largely a tourist city. In 2001, the then Deputy Prime Minister started out a project to modernise the city while still retaining its historical character. There is some new architecture , new venues but nothing you'll notice on a short visit.

The last thing we did at Rome was to go to The Forum, We walked near the ruins which are a testament to human ambition , tragedy and ultimately the transience of all things – even great civilizations. I wondered how future humans would react if they found the ruins of New York . Would they piece together the Empire State building and wonder how they built it without robots, would they preserve the head of Liberty in a museum? Would they find it as beautiful as we 21st century humans found Rome?

''bound to titillate the senses''

Statement made in response to the 9 year old being raped in Goa
"You can't blame the locals; they have never seen such women. Foreign tourists must maintain a certain degree of modesty in their clothing. Walking on the beaches half-naked is bound to titillate the senses," New Delhi's Mail Today newspaper quoted Pamela Mascarhenas, Goa's deputy director of tourism, as saying Friday.


Action Heroes respond:

No woman of any colour, dress, age, character deserves to be sexually violated or what some might lightly call 'eve teased'.

By making the statement above you are blaming women instead of taking responsibility of the issue. If you believe a person's dress is culturally inappropriate, you may continue to believe so, but you cannot defend any act of violence. A person inappropriately dressed according to your idea of 'Indianness' does not deserve to be attacked, assaulted, molested, raped or even whistled at.

For your information, women from across age groups be it 3 month old babies of 90 year old have been raped. They have been raped in saris, burkhas, salwar kameez, school uniforms, bikinis, jeans, skirts, shirts,lungis. Women have been molested, assaulted, raped at all times of the day, and in public places.

We hope this will direct you towards taking responsibility of these incidents by actually addressing male behaviour and men in Goa, for which you will first have to address yourself by accepting this truth.

We have evidence even though we don't really need it.

No woman of any colour, dress , age, character deserves to be sexually violated or what some might lightly call 'eve teased'.

Thank you for your attention,
An Indian girl who loves her saris and her hot pants.


A detailed letter to the Deputy Director of Tourism, Goa is here:
http://blog.blanknoise.org/2010/02/to-deputy-director-of-tourism-goa.html


Support this campaign by being an Action Hero:

1. taking a photo of a garment you wore when experienced
street sexual harassment, street sexual intimidation, street sexual violence, or think you were 'eve-teased'.

2. upload the photo on this event and also make it your facebook profile photo for 1 week start Monday Feb 8.

3. Feb 13 onwards will witness clothes collection drives in different cities, starting with Bangalore. More information coming up. You can help organize one. You can be the Blank Noise agent and collect clothes from women around you. Take the word where you can. Be an Action Hero

4. we want out BN guys to propose ideas via which men can be involved, addressed in the issue of street sexual harassment.

5. tweet it #blanknoise
http://twitter.com/blank_noise

Roman Holiday part two

 

 

 

 

The story is coming up!

A Roman holiday

 

 

 

 

Buyology

Our real needs are raped by their association with buying something to satisfy them

In the depth of our hearts, where once hopefully, at the beginning of civilization there was a reservoir of stillness and connectedness, there has emerged a buzzing , gyrating train station.

Trains run in a blind metal ecstasy satisfying one manufactured want to another. And not once can we feel

the sacred silence .

If I was scatterbrained, organizing challenged, messy and careless, not even the fanciest wallet with Many categorized pockets would change my personality or make me organized. My true being of careless existence will win. Yet my credit card will shit the requisite amount paid for perceived change in the leather company's balance sheet.

The Bangalore Central happiness sale is on, a hoarding told me.  Happiness , I strongly suspect lives

in that huge reservoir now drained.

 

 

(I'd like to publicly apoologize to Matt Lowenstein for my Soviet style rant)

Religion

Sometimes I feel like religion is like chinese whispers played over generations. An enlightened man starts with the word love and it goes through many degrees of faith and politics and ends up being heard as hatred .

A house with a hundred rooms - Switzerland and other stories

To get to St Moritz is a long drive from Basel and you drive through Davos , Zurich and all the other hubs where the wealthiest settle to escape paying taxes in their own country.Suddenly,  in a surreal situation your car drives in to a train and the train takes you up the mountains. This time you are late as the train comes every half an hour. The guard says he is already three minutes late and he cannot delay the train further by one minute so our poor car can crawl into it quickly.  

En route I find myself, (as I seem to have developed a talent for planting myself in places so far away from my own world) , in a beautiful Swiss Café with a gorgeous Ukranian waitress .I chatted with four Swiss people there while eating pasta Napoli with tomaten and drinking water fresh from the glacier. Their stories are incredible. The man who had a house with a hundred rooms but worked as a chef in a low profile restaurant earning a minimum wage.

 

The temperature is – 6 degrees Celsius and outside the beauty of the Alps  is so intense it hurts your eye.

 

Welcome to Switzerland.

 

When you are sledging down the steepest slopes on the Alps, you can't see what's coming and you are going full speed . You are caught between the need to concentrate and the need to gobble the extreme beauty of the mountains as the setting sun gingerly paints their peaks a glowing orange. You are on an Alpine slope near St Moritz in Switzerland where Hollywood comes to unwind, where old women are dressed like in a 1920's movie with fur coats and hats.

You take it all in  , sleep over it and and wake up to an amazing breakfast of freshly baked fluffy croissant, a  nutty  traditional bread, exquisite cheeses, coffee and juice.

C of course cooks the most exquisite food in the world, far better than anything I have had in any restaurant I went to in Switzerland and Italy. The description of this would merit another blog post , A typical tradiitonal Swiss  farmers breakfast which is a simple but gorgeously delicious meal of roast potatoes and fried eggs- Rosti.

 

There are no simple Swiss farmers anymore.Not counting the virtual Heidi who blows you a kiss on the train to baggage claim in the Zurich airport.  Ive been here long and haven't met a single  cow yet. The youth of this country are rich from the spoils of their parents generation. The recession seems to have barely pricked the surface of this rich country given the bustling luxury stores at St Moritz.

 

I hear stories a lot. There is a woman , lets call her m , who is petrified of going broke. Her father is easily one of the richest men in the country..She inherited money from relatives which makes her richer than her father. . She works as a nanny because she is afraid of being broke. Her divorced mother thinks 60 000 euro a month as alimony is a  pittance and can barely buy her one handbag.A legal dispute is on. 

 

 I spent most of my time in Basel and went on short trips to the hills, to Rome and to Zurich.

Basel has small town charm , the two parts of the city are connected by a bridge over River Rhine. The centre of town is charming , museum studded and on sunny days a small lively street market props up . A stray musician plays the violin arranging for my typical romanticized vision of an European town.

Zurich is larger but similarly constructed around Lake Zurich and has a landscape studded with beautiful church towers that change to modern industrial buildings as you go further away from town.

The streets around the centre seem to have a small but interesting art scene with many shops exhibiting sculpture and painting for sale. C says the nightlife is surprisingly hot for a city so small.

Although C complains that Switzerland is too perfect , it is interesting for me to see a world that works, where you don't worry about leaving your bag  on the tram floor because no one will steal it. I have developed an unjustifiable trust in some western countries. With no offence to anyone, Italy is excluded from this list. For the basic necessities of life and a little more, the state is accountable. The streets are clean. The public transport is reliable. The government can afford to not be corrupt about basic things and concentrate on the bigger things.

At the Zurich railway station you pay the equivalent of 100 rupees to get in but the toilets are surely the fanciest and the most spacious I have seen in a public space.

Sometimes, my Indian upbringing means that I have a subconscious dread towards toilets in public spaces. The Edinburgh park toilet swept me away with its clean floors, nappy changing stations etc but Zurich was even better.

In Rajasthan , I have seen toilets with layers and layers of aging shit garnished with fresh shit and watered by pisss. in public loos.

 

Sorry my dear reader, The Alps are beautiful ,the chocolate is out of the world...just think of that to get the previous image out of your head. And I promise to put up pictures soon.

(I've slightly changed the stories of the people I have talked about to protect their identity)

Switzerland

Christmas card outside my window. As soon as you reach the airport and take a train to baggage claim, The ghost of Heidi pops up on the window and blows me a flying kiss.

I can hear the sound of cows and cow bells. 

No ,I am not kidding. The swiss seem super serious and host international treaty making sessions but apparently they can be silly in  a fun way.

Perfection and punctuality to an extent that it hurts my Indian eye. 

Dubai

--
Dubai 's view from my plane was as expected long golden snakes of light , row upon row of identical houses , some flashing a turquoise rectangle of a pool.
swimming. The airport is sparkling , plastic and recessionarily vacant. I have 11 hours to kill, a reclining chair , a laptop and very little enerrgy.

3 Idiots

Three Idiots had me smiling throughout. And rolling of the floor in laughter occasionally.
The story of three boys who try surviving in a highly competitive engineering college ,
It has its dollops of romance, sorrow and now because of the ever increasing need for Bollywood films - a message. The message in this case is that that engineering colleges should not be factories producing fodder for companies but encourage scientific thinking and individuality. We had Aamir Khan looking hot despite being twice the age of an average college student helping birth a child with a vaccum cleaner.
When I say I like Bollywood movies for the joy, I don’t mean it condescendingly. Discrepancies in plot,unrealistic situations where a student speaks of a professor as a rapist and a minister as a (rapee) in a school function and doesn’t end up expelled aside, I love this movie because it is funny. And I think it captures Indian boys of that age quite charmingly.
( As you probably figured this is not even pretending to be a review of the movie) . 

This Bombay

On the local from VT to Kanjurmarg , the general compartment, crowded with people of many kinds, a paralyzed man, a woman with child etc
I squeeze through the crowd , three stops before my stop so I can reach the door . My plastic bag scrapes against the face of a woman. I smile and say sorry.She flashes a warm smile.
It's the end of a long day for most of them. 10:30 PM. Yet no one loses their temper. Everyone smiles. Everyone helps trying to make space for a child on a ledge.
I don't want to exoticize or romanticize.
This is not always so but 80% of the time, everyone is nice. At a time when everyone is angry about everything, I can't help admiring this Bombay.And smiling.

Street

 

And you blog again

You go to the Commercial street auto stand after stocking up a war’s supply of patience. You take your auto and drop your friend at Basvangudi as always. Then it is time to be vulnerable because you are alone at it is 10 PM , late where I live.

The lechometer comes into action – the mirror inside the auto that shows not a trace of the road behind or anything else that might be of value to a driver except perhaps wank off material.
Wank off material is the woman behind , who in this case is wearing a blue shirt , grey jeans and a long black sweater.

You wonder if you should move out of his sight. Then you will be too close to the edge of the auto and stray flying hands from passing bikes can access your mammary glands. (This has happened before).
The same goes for the other side. In the centre, you are in perfect view for him to see.

The auto seat becomes your world. The world is a war zone.
You rationalize it. What if this had been a hot man at Zenzi. Maybe you wouldn’t have minded.
You wonder where the auto driver’s left hand is. It’s not on the autos steering thingie.

Maybe you are a classist bitch. Why should a man staring at you bother you ?
Why should it threaten you?
Just earlier in the day, a man follows you just outside that gated apartment complex , that haven of safety- home. He keeps saying ‘’ Nice bums’’. You turn around to face him with the angriest expression you can manage. He continues telling you he wants to fuck you . You slap him. Instinctively. You are not a violent person. You get so scared at your own reaction. You quickly walk away and slip into a cyber cafe.
You worry that he is humiliated and he will gather four to five of his friends to attack you later. After all, you live in this area.
That was in the morning. It is night now. You are back home.
And by the time you are home , you think it’s pointless to blog about it because you’ve done so in, 2006,2006,2006,2006,2006 and feel this way every other day.

Not this , Not this

It’s always been difficult for me to find the geography of my own life in literature. Urban, upper middle class , mostly Bangalorean . Anjum Hasan’s Neti Neti captures the city that is in a maddening flux in some parts ,stagnant and seething in some parts and in some parts traditional as it would have been fifty years ago with sensitivity and a nuance I haven’t read in writing about Bangalore before.

Sophie Das is 25, has moved from the quiet hill town of Shillong to transcribe Hollywood movie subtitles by day and have moral tussles with her land lord about hanging underwear, spend time in pubs with her boyfriend Swami and navigate the weed bed of wealth in the malls, streets and homes of the city’s privileged.
Then there are her friends. The dubious Ringo Saar whose job is to bash up people defaulting on loans, Anu who gets through life doing nothing and keeping a boyfriend and convincing him to move to Australia where the roads are clean.
Shiva, who could be those few people we know who keeps tipping the parallel narative that connects the lives of urban youth into conversations. The South Bangalore gang that hacked a 21 year old man of a rival gang to death, a man who forced his wife to drink acid, how the shit of the rich determinedly travel to the open sewers of the poor.

Her colleague Shanti Gouda lives on the metaphoric other side of the city – lower middle class and working her way up , subtitling English shows for money but refusing to enjoy their vulgarity.
We meet the police men who tell the city’s migrants only half jokingly that in Karnataka they must speak kannada. And the rich Punjabi father and son duo who get out of their air-conditioned car to bet up a local auto driver in their perceived right to exert their masculinity.
Sophie is a witness to other people’s tragedies, forced to make a comment or two. A child dies in a mall, but when a brutal and unexpected murder ends it all for Sophie she imagines finding peace in her mountain home away from what she calls India . It is at this stage in the novel where it feels like Hasan clumsily put together news reports from Bangalore’s recent past and used these events as a backdrop for Sophie’s angst.

And yet, her dull and cold family home which she believed could never change has its own share of , if placid, fissures. Her sister is on a teenage trip towards boys and gold earring gifts while her parents’ relationship is not what she imagined it to be.

The elections are on , their politics suddenly revolving around a visit by Bob Dylan with every party wanting to capitalize on it in a rock loving town. Sophie chases her ideas of a man she has been fascinated by, if not in love with for a while . Nothing however is yielding enough for her to stay.

I can feel Bangalore in Hassan’s prose..it’s fissured class dynamics, , its confused youth , its gourmet shops , its butter and ghee shops , its migrants and its malls.
It’s not Amitav Ghosh’s Sunderbans or Arundhati Roys river polluted with world bank loans or Rushdie’s magic realism. Its most of our lives..


Those of us who went to college here know pretty well how to irritate sales girls by making them help us test lots of expensive perfumes that would cost 1/5th of our first salaries, walk into expensive branded stores and try on purple dresses just because our Tibetan market skinny jeans and what could be easily from Mango t shirt, coupled with our ‘’neutral’’ accents made us pass off for those who could afford such shit..
''She squinted at cubbon park (on a map) and tried to picture them separated by it- Sophie and her friends on the right half of this centre drinking coffee in Styrofoam cups, and Shanti’s mother and great grandmother on the left half , selling breakfast to lewd lorry drivers.’