Net for Gender Politics

I get this type of forwards very often:

Just a joke, please…….no hard feelings…
ROMANCE MATHEMATICS
Smart man + smart woman = romance
Smart man + dumb woman = affair
Dumb man + smart woman = marriage
Dumb man + dumb woman = pregnancy
OFFICE ARITHMETIC
Smart boss + smart employee = profit
Smart boss + dumb employee = production
Dumb boss + smart employee = promotion
Dumb boss + dumb employee = overtime
SHOPPING MATH
A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs.
A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn’t need.
GENERAL EQUATIONS & STATISTICS
A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.
A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.
A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.
A successful woman is one who can find such a man.
HAPPINESS
To be happy with a man, you must understand him a lot and love him a little.
To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.
LONGEVITY
Married men live longer than single men do, but married men are a lot more willing to die..
PROPENSITY TO CHANGE
A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn’t.
A man marries a woman expecting that she won’t change, and she does.
DISCUSSION T! ECHNIQUE
A woman has the last word in any argument.
Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.
SEND THIS TO A SMART WOMAN WHO NEEDS A LAUGH AND TO THE SMART GUYS YOU KNOW CAN HANDLE IT.

***


To be honest, this forward made me smile. Then I caught myself. What the heck! Haven’t you been cured of these stereoptying tendencies, I admonished myself.

The truth of the matter is it requires a huge amount of conscious, deliberate cerebral activity to erase notions which have come down as a legacy from time immemorial.

This forward reminded me of a song that I was taught in the music class (those days we had a period a week for music) in my high school in the late sixties. This song was taught along with classics like Auld Lang Syne, Black Sprirtuals. patriotic songs like Ye Pyari Bharath Ma. The song which went like this: “A woman , a Woman, Oh, What can she be?” was a favourite with all the girls. Some (that includes me too) even said “How true, how very true!” and we laughed like idiots at this song objectifying the female sex. Here is the song (downloaded the lyrics – was suprised to find it!)


Peter Frampton A Woman (Uh-Huh) Lyrics:
(Dick Gleason)

Johnny Desmond - 1954
José Ferrer & Rosemary Clooney - 1954

[FERRER:]
Oh woman, oh woman, oh what can she be
Whatever she is, she's necessary

A woman is something both evil and good
But too complicated to be understood
An angel when lovin', a devil when mad
A woman can make you both happy and sad

Oh woman, oh woman, oh what can she be
Whatever she is, she's necessary

Afraid of a cricket, she'll scream at a mouse
But she'll tackle a husband as big as a house
She'll take him for better, she'll take him for worse
She'll bust his head open and then be his nurse

Oh woman, oh woman, oh what can she be
Whatever she is, she's necessary

She's bashful, deceitful, keen sighted and blind
Simple and crafty, and cruel and kind
In the morning she does, in the evening she don't
You're always a thinkin' she will, but she won't

Oh woman, oh woman, oh what can she be
Whatever she is, she's necessary

[CLOONEY (Spoken):]
Girls, turn this record over
and listen to the Wife's side!

You will have noted that at the end of the song there is a note about the wife’s version. I did not bother to hunt for it ‘cos I think that it’s time this gender war came to an end.

The song I was taught as a high school going kid (2nd song) and the forward I got today perform the same function – create certain stereotypical images of the sexes. It does not matter in whose favour it is tipped.

The burden of my theory is the world doesn’t seem to have changed much from the sixties!

Now, for some of these stupid notions contained in the two songs:
The woman is manipulative.
She is unpredictable.
She is silly - screaming at mouse!
She is indispensable.
Poor man, he is usually dumb.
He is happier without a wife
He is a helpless victim of her fancies
He suffers her
And so on.

Almost four decades ago, I was the victim of certain built-in discourses in the system for keeping alive the myths about gender by conditioning the mind in its formative stage about gender roles. I am still struggling to purge the dregs of that particular outdated discourse – or is it outdated?.

And that discourse has never really been dismantled despite all the noise made from all quarters. It has spilt over into the 21st century.

Now, in this cyber world frequented more by the youngsters, the forwards serve as an additional tool to very effectively perpetuate gender politics.

Tackling the Tag

Thank you Mathew for the tag. Like you said, it’s a tag with a difference. So here I go - - -

Four places you have lived

Kochin
My Ernakulam where I grew up – So different from what it is now. The first high rise was SeaLords hotel (early sixties), on the Shanmukam Road – now the Marine Drive Road. The road had a parapet overlooking the backwaters. The entire male youth of Ernakulam used to gather there in the evenings on the pretext of getting some “fresh air” (kaatu kollaan). I’d call it a hub of male gossip. For a long time, Laxman, Padma, and Menaka were the only theatres. Then, in the late sixties, the air conditioned Sridhar came up. The Big Fisherman was the first film screened. Soon Kavitha, Shenoys and Little Shenoys appeared. Oh, I could go on and on. Wish I could turn the clock back.

Whitefield
Today it is in Bangalore. When I lived there, it was half hour drive to Whitefield from Bangalore. Do check out my blog on Whitefield.

Chennai
Did my masters there. Loved it then. Love it now, despite the fact that I was detected with a deadly disease while I was there three years back. Thought I’d never want to go back there. But I did go back and found that I have no quarrel with that metro.

Changanasserry
Thought it was a cruel blow that life dealt, catapulting me from Chennai to this small town in Mid Travancore, known for its extreme orthodoxy. But I survived it, and this place taught me the valuable lesson that, if you scratch the surface, all human beings are the same.

Four TV shows you love (d) to watch

Remington Steele – saw Pierce Brosnan first in this serial. Liked him better there.

Water Rats – How I used to love this Australian serial. You must have guessed by now that I love watching the dishyuum dishyuum type.

Bodyline: that marvelous serialized story on the Bodyline technique used by the English cricket team under Douglas Jardine, in order to win the ashes. I was thrilled to learn that senior Pataudi, then playing for the English team, was the only one who objected to the unethicality and unsportsmanlike nature of the technique. Pataudi was confronted by Jardine with the snide remark: “I understand that His Majesty is a conscientious objector?” Remember “conscientious objector” was the derisive term popular in England during WW II to refer to the anti war group led by Bertrand Russell. I was fascinated that Pataudi stood out in that spineless team. The serial was telecast by Doordarshan in ’86.

We the People & The Big Fight. These two NDTV shows are my all time favourites.


Four places you have been on vacation

Nilgiris - I love the hills. In addition to the beauty of the place, it brings back memories of a vacation with my family at the invitation of my dear brother who passed away since. He was a priest and the Principal of a school there.

Delhi – Visited the capital when my children were small. It was soon after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. My 4 year old son stunned and embarrassed and scared us by pointing out his finger at a turbaned person and shouting at the top of his voice TERRORIST! My husband and I looked apologetically at the man who smiled understandingly – God bless him! We stopped in our tracks and explained patiently who the turbaned people are, and that just because Indira Gandhi’s assassin wore a turban, it doesn’t mean all those who wear turbans are terrorists. He listened seriously, nodded and as we straightened up and resumed our walk, out shot his forefinger again and he started his terrorist siren again. He didn’t go beyond TERR - - – I clapped my palm over his mouth. I think he thought it was good fun, ‘cos he repeated the performance. This time my daughter sealed his mouth. I then had to deal sternly with him after that.

Aurangabad - Ajantha Caves. Incredible sight. What could be the motivation for the unbelievable human effort in those days when no proper tools were available?

Mysore – Tippu’s palace, St Philomena’s Church, Brindavan gardens, Museum, Das Prakash hotel and memories of my father taking us children around - -


Four of your favourite food

Tapioca and fish curry (Kappa vevichathu and meen curry)

Chinese fried Rice/Noodles – real Chinese

Sharkara payasam

Prawn fry – Kerala style.

Four places you would rather be

Guess would rather be means I’d like to visit.

Darjeeling: Don’t know why I am so fascinated by the place. Maybe, something to do with my previous incarnation?

Stratford on Avon – Wish Shakespeare haunted the place!

China – I’ve never been more curious about a country.

The land of the Eskimos – I hear there are cruises from Canada.


Four things you hope to do before you die

Start a language lab to demystify the angrezi language for the benefit of mallu youth from moffusil areas.

Contribute my bit towards creating an ideal work culture in Kerala

See the shooting of a stunt scene.

Read all the books I foolishly bought to read after retirement.



Four novels you wish you were reading for the first time

Wuthering Heights – Gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.

Calcutta Chromosome – Get through the first chapter and you’ll find this an unputdownable(love that manglish term) book.

We, the Living – prefer it to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged

Scarlet Pimpernel Books- Though I suspect I won’t enjoy those as I once did. Wish I were that age when I could enjoy them - - -



Four movies you can see over and over

Vadakkunooki Yanthram – For that matter all Srinivas movies. A genius, that man!

Lal Salaam or Sanmansullavarkku Samaadanam –most Mohanlal movies. He’s an institution in acting!

A Few Good Men – Must have watched it a dozen times – ready for another dozen –Don’t ask me why I like it so much.

Benhur – Been seeing it from the time I was a kid. Guess I can relate to it. It’s about what I believe.

For the Blogsphere, Thank you, God

I am grateful to whoever discovered the blog sphere. How much poorer I would have been without it!

I entered this sphere 4 years back, a little after I crossed that half a century mark on the linear plane of physical existence. My experience in this sphere has been like an antioxidant of the mind which stalled the aging process from setting in.

The blogs I enjoy and read most are those of youngsters . I discovered or rediscovered the present generation in the blog sphere. I must confess I had the same stereotyped notions about the “I T Generation”. They were selfish and insensitive to social issues. All they knew and cared about was the computer and its peripheral world. They knew nothing unrelated to their jobs, and they didn’t care about it. They are job jumpers who cared for nothing else in life other than material comfort.

“Oh, this IT generation” seemed to be the attitude that informed my very approach to them.

The blogsphere gave me new eyes to see them. Of course, it is the Indian bloggers I have in mind 'cos I visit them mostly. I have discovered these youngsters to be more socially informed and sensitive than my generation. Their concern for social and political issues is touching. There is that will to do something for the society which nurtured them and made them what they are. There is that frustration at their helplessness in this regard. There is anger and cynicism. There is raving and ranting.

But what is absent is indifference. Being one who always believed that indifference to fellow human beings is the greatest sin, I was ecstatic to realize that this generation is not guilty of that sin. A huge myth was debunked. I think the world is in safe hands.

The blogsphere has reaffirmed my faith in mankind.

There is yet another category of bogs that I read- of the teenagers. I visit the sites of Indian and international bloggers. The teenage angst which has always been an enigma to us has suddenly become somewhat comprehensible. Some of these bloggers pour out their hearts into the posts. Others record their routine which gives you an excellent insight into life of adolescents in different cultures. I realize that blogsphere is a very authentic document of the life and days of the youth journeying through that precariously balanced bridge that links childhood to adulthood. Novels and studies do not have that vibrant beating of the adolescent pulse that causes the blogsphere to tick.

I read hate blogs too. I hate reading them but do it, nevertheless – just to tell myself that there is a dark dark world out there, and the ostrich approach isn’t going to make it disappear. Some of the blogs justifying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust and post Godhra violence have left me stunned. I tried responding but was quick to realize how naive I’d been to think I can make a difference to such hardcore philosophy of hatred.

And I love poetry blogs. Every rule in the book regarding the architectonics of versification is usually broken in these posts – except one. The basic rule that you ‘feel’. My efforts at writing poetry which I would not have dared to show to a another living person have been posted in the blogsphere. Strange that the blog visitors never ridicule! There is some unwritten law of charity among the inhabitants of this sphere which restrains them from throwing cold water on that poet in every human being struggling to come out.

Blogsphere is a free world where there are no moral or social compulsions. This freedom, more often than not, is used in a very responsible manner, if you leave out the hate blogs. It has exploded the myth that absence of restrictive order will cause anarchy. I have seen social commitment of the highest order here. I have seen that most bloggers show a reluctance to spread cantankerous ideas.

And finally, for me as for others, blogsphere is the site where each blogger confronts herself. It is the space where we share our dreams and nightmares, our frustrations and helplessness, our bitterness and teeth gritting anger, our sense of the ridiculous and sense of humour, the works. Yet, it is not a site where we dump our dark secrets and private problems – if at all we do it, it is done with a delicacy and camouflage which raise it from the level of a mere act of washing dirty linen in public. There is a self imposed discipline in most bloggers which stop at that point where dignity is compromised.

These are the qualities of the sites I visit – and believe me I surf through a lot of blogs. For me, it is like moving through life, keeping my eyes, nose and ears open to this business called life. It is a real and true learning in that great virtual university of human nature. We bloggers form the students and the faculty of this university. It is a university with a very large heart, throbbing under the skies of an unlimited horizon, with no restrictions whatsoever in the disciplines offered, and defies the unities of time and space.

May the blogsphere prosper!

Mohan, my nephew and William, the Conqueror : On being an aunt

I became an aunt for the first time when I was just 6 years old. Within ten years from then, I got that honour three more times. By the time my nephew and nieces came down to India for their schooling, I was already in college. It was great fun watching them grow and feeling myself grow young with them.

Looking back, I feel foolish at the way I used to compete with them to lick the cake mixing bowl clean. When amma made cake, all of us – nephew, nieces and me – used to hover over her in order to grab the big but light vessel in which she mixed the ingredients into the cake batter. We would wait for her to transfer the batter into the last baking dish and then pounce on the vessel which would have the remnants of the cake batter. Amma always did things on a large scale; so we were glad that there would be plenty to attack, particularly when she saw to it that she left enough in the vessel for her drooling daughter and grandchildren.

Once I beat them to it. The minute I saw that amma was done with the vessel, I snatched it and ran with it, into the five acre compound. My nephew and nieces followed me, screaming, yelling and waving. Seeing that I couldn’t shake them off my trail, I gave up and dropped myself down on the grass, and the four of us fell to attacking the vessel. Wipe with the index finger, lick the finger. Wipe- lick, wipe-lick. That was me. They went at it with the whole hand and took longer time running the tongue over the hand. The fastest got the most. So we licked frantically.

We must have been quite a sight- one grown up and three children seven downwards in age, squatting in the grass, desperately licking our hands as though our lives depended on it! Believe it or not, I was already a graduate by then!

Poor kids, they used to be at the receiving end of my creative bouts. These kids were so credulous and uncritical that I could weave tales around them and watch as they looked at me with complete fascination at whatever I churned out. More often than not, my tales bore just the bare minimum similarity to the original. The rest was the product of my imagination which was always sensitive to the mood of the listeners and adjusted itself to suit the requirements of the moment. The whole exercise was a learning experience on how to customize my imagination and narrative skills. Sometimes my imagination would go berserk, and encouraged by the breathless attention of the kids, I would plunge into the wild jungle of my fancy and be carried away by my ability to fabricate details.

I remember telling Mohan the story of William the Conqueror. My little nephew had large beautiful eyes which grew larger and larger as he listened to that bit about William chopping off the hands of those who reminded him of his modest lineage. By the time I came to the end of the gruesome maiming episode, Mohan’s face was all eyes, filled with horror and sorrow and bitter anger and helplessness. The little fellow then plunged into a tirade against William the Conqueror, gesticulating savagely. The outburst must have lasted ten minutes, after which the seven year old angry young man shifted gear to become a brilliant inventor of torture techniques, devised specifically to deal with the brutal William of Normandy.

“When I get hold of him I’ll - - - “, and he’d go off into the minutiae of how he would inflict the worst possible pain on the brutal king. His descriptions were complete with the nature of the knives used, the concentration of chilly powder meant for the wounds and eyes, the size of the pieces into which the Conqueror would be chopped live - - - - - . His fury stretched over days and weeks and I began to wonder if he was losing sleep over it, for each day he would come up with new ideas regarding tools, techniques and methods of torture!

Wonder if my dear nephew remembers William the Conqueror!

Then there were those days when I was quarantined with chicken pox and put on an oil free diet. The three of them, like little monkeys, would clamber on to the window. The youngest one, being imperious by nature, would insist on being hoisted first so that she won’t be left out. The kids would pass on through the window banana chips, banana fry (pazham pori, as they called it) and whatever goodies they managed to pilfer from the kitchen. How I used to look forward to their clandestine visits through the window in those days of isolation!

My nephews and nieces – what a lot of fun they were! Recently, when I saw them, all grown up, taking in their stride the responsibilities of adults, my mind slid back to the days when the three little kuttichathans (little devils) brought such fun into my youthful days.

Michael Jackson :-(

Strange! The thought that Michael Jackson is no more fills me with this odd feeling of hollowness. I have never seen the man who inhabited a world not even remotely connected with mine. Yet, the sense of loss, the sadness is real – though I don’t quite understand it.

He entered the world of our imagination in the early seventies when I was a graduate student in St Teresa’s college, Ernakulam. The Jackson’s Five became a rage, and Michael Jackson, the youngest of the brothers,– everybody’s pet, tho he inspired in us a sense of awe. Little did we realize then that he would become what he did!

Those were not the days of TV when we could get an occasional glimpse of the pop stars, or of the Internet and you tube when we could see them whenever we wanted. Facilities such as music downloads or copying into Cd's did not figure even in our wildest dreams. Radiogram and tape recorder were the only mode of listening to music. I am trying to recollect how we became so familiar with this prodigious singer, given the limited opportunities to get even a glimpse of his pictures, or listen to his compositions.

WE used to listen to Radio Ceylon which was the best radio station for western pop music. Also, The Voice of America Morning Show, which my friends and I listened to religiously, even on working days, was another source of information about the happenings in the music world. There were other stations too like radio Australia but the first two had the best reception.

I remember how, the minute a Jackson’s Five number was announced, I’d run to the telephone to ring up my friend - just in case she wasn’t tuned in. Mostly she’d be, and would be irritated by the distraction.

If I remember right, Looking through the Window by the Jackson’s Five consecutively topped the hit parade of Junior Statesman (popularly known as JS), a Magazine which gave news about the jet set crowd around the world, the Bollywood masala and news about the music world. It was a very popular magazine among my friends. The Jackson’s Five used to figure regularly in this magazine, and we got our first glimpse of the boy Michael Jackson from JS. For some reason, the magazine was wound up and we resented it intensely.

Strange that I should be talking about all this in a post dedicated to Michael Jackson. The news of his death took me back to those days when he entered our imaginary world of music as a sensational prodigy.

His gradual metamorphosis into an iconic figure was a big disillusionment for me. Here, I speak only for myself. A prude that I am, I saw it as an eventual loss of innocence. But, I felt relieved and vindicated (?) whenever he brought out his fabulous albums. When the charge of child abuse was slapped on him, I remained neutral – refused to feel, for Jackson’s personal life had already turned out to be a let down. But then, I wanted to believe that everyman is innocent till found guilty, and that there are a lot of people out there who’d go to any extent to extract money from celebrities.

I repeat. It is very strange that someone who had, has, or never will have anything to do, most remotely, with my world can affect me so much by his departure. In this context I am reminded of what my son told me how he felt when Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed.
“The same strange feeling I had when Pope John 11 passed away”, he said.

Needless to say I was scandalized that he could talk of the two in the same breath.

“But you were very distressed when the Pope died. Do you feel the same now?”

Then he explained.

“Distressed? Not the way i felt when the Pope died.Not at the rational level of consciousness. The sense of Good and Evil happens at that rational, conscious level. The same feeling I’m talking of happens at another level. It is a feeling of loss. These are people whom I have grown up with, they inhabit our consciousness as permanent residents. We unconsciously relate to them as people who’ll always be around. And when they disappear permanently, it is a strange feeling.”

How right he is! Good, bad or ugly belongs to the thinking, rational and conditioned level of human consciousness. At that level, we are judgmental; we are governed by a certain value system. But there is another level to our mind in which a world takes shape in ways unknown to us. Many of its inhabitants have nothing to do with the small physical world in which we function on a daily basis. The values that regulate our lives are not applicable there. In that world, we are more charitable human beings , willing to give the devil his due, and everyone the benefit of the doubt. The good and the bad coexist there, peacefully, for that world is free from moral compulsions.

I don’t know if this mind probe is making any sense. But I had to sort it out with myself why I felt this terrible sense of loss at the death of a pop musician who is so completely removed from my world in every sense of the word.

May his soul rest in peace.

THANK YOU!

“Thank you” used to be a word hardly used in Kerala. I am not saying Kerlaites are an ungrateful lot. No. All I mean is we are not in the habit of saying thank you after we receive a service from, say, the sales persons in textile or grocery shops, the autorick driver, the cab driver, the vegetable vendor etc.

Nor do they expect a Thank you from the customer. On many an occasion, after a purchase from a textile shop, I have turned around to thank the salesperson who had tried every trick in the trade to sell things to me, and succeeded I doing so and carried my purchase to the billing counter. At the billing counter when I turn around to thank him, he’d have vanished – without a single word to me!

I have watched the way people alight from autos. They pay the driver and walk away without acknowledging him with a smile or even making eye contact with him. “I’m paying him for his services – so why should I thank him”, seems to be the attitude.

I once told my students that they should thank the auto driver after paying him or the bus conductor when he issues tickets. The girls went into peals of laughter. “Miss. they’ll think we are nuts if we do that”, was how they reacted!

Having had all my education in convents, I’ve been a thank you person, much to the amusement of my friends. When I first started traveling in autos on my own in Kerala way back in late seventies, I remember how perplexed the auto drivers used to be when I thanked them.

“What did you say?”, one of them asked me once.
“I said thank you”, I replied. All on a sudden, he became shy.

“Did you say something?” another guy asked after I started walking away from the auto.
‘No”, I said. I didn’t remember having said anything to him at all.
“You said something. I heard you”. he seemed offended.
It was my turn to be perplexed.
“You muttered something after you paid me. I haven’t over charged you, So why do you mutter under your breath?” he asked looking quite peeved.
He sounded so upset that I tried to rewind the scene.
“I didn’t say anything other than thank you”, I said earnestly.
“Oh, that’s it. I didn’t quite catch what you said”, said he. Irritation was replaced by that shy? embarrassed? expression!

After that I made sure that I am loud and clear when I thank someone. This, I realized startle them. They appear to be caught unawares. They look up at you, surprise written large on their faces and then suddenly beam at us. “OK madam, thank you, thank you”, some would say.

Yesterday, I thanked the auto driver who brought me home from the church and he seemed to take it in his stride.

So I guess people who thank are increasing in number in Kerala.

Thank you for visiting my blog.

I Am A Malayalee

I’m a malayalee. Every drop of my blood is Malayalee. I’m proud of being one. I don’t feel happy as I am expected to feel when people look at me and tell me I don’t look like a malayalee (the permanent red bangle I wear, I guess, is the reason for this comment).

I’ve never been able to figure out what’s wrong with the way a malayalee looks? What is so undesirable about the ‘mallu look’?

I once quarreled with a very senior colleague, slated to be the next Principal. Though she hails from Kasargod, she couldn’t speak Malayalam.

“I take special care not to speak or learn to speak Malayalam. I’m afraid it’d affect the way I speak English.”. !!??!

I was shocked. I was not used to people making such downright rude and insensitive remarks. I felt insulted, being a malayalee and an English lecturer, with the onerous duty of teaching the angrezi language as though it was the most valued creation of God.

So I was shocked that such a senior person could make such a remark. It was so much in bad taste. Before I could recover from the shock, she went a step further.

“Molly, the minute you open your mouth, I know you are a malayalee”

Young and inexperienced that I was, I exploded. And chose to be insulting.

“Why”, I demanded gritting my teeth. “Do malayalees have a specific type of mouth odour”

“I meant your English. You talk just like a malayalee”.

Then I said something I should not have, considering her seniority and my juniority. I’d have behaved differently today, but those were the days when I was young and foolish enough to believe that I didn’t have to take any bullshit lying down. And so I said:

“The minute you open your mouth Mrs. G---, everybody’d know you come from the heart of rural Karnataka”.

The pin drop silence in the staff room told me I’d made a terrible mistake. The subsequent days in the college were very difficult. When I was hauled up, even the term insubordination was used!

But wait a minute, this post was not to be about that episode. Guess it is still rankling in my mind and so surfaced at the slightest provocation!

Like I said earlier, I have never felt apologetic about being a Malayalee. But, I must confess, I have been terribly embarrassed about the way some of my ‘country cousins” behave outside the state.

In a particular organization in a giant metro where I worked for sometime, there were a couple of malayalees who antagonized all the other employees. One was a very senior person. He was an arrogant Mr. Know-all who held the rest of his colleagues in supreme contempt. The other person was a junior who was being groomed by the senior malayalee to follow his footsteps. The younger person was born and brought up outside the enlightened state of Kerala, and so, one would expect him to be uncomfortable with the typical aggressive mode of a pure breed. But no. The senior, who took him under his wing, did such a thorough job of indoctrination that the apprentice quite out heroded Herod!

My very first encounter with the senior made me feel uncomfortable. I was having a cup of tea in the canteen when he drew up a chair, sat down at my table and introduced himself as my country cousin. In a matter of five minutes, his voice dropped into a conspiratorial tone with the observation, “You know, Molly, these people here are so superficial”. I was at a loss to understand what he meant, but before the conversation ended, I caught on to what he was trying to say, though not in so many words. Our colleagues were not hard core Marxists!

Much as I hate to make such a remark, the fact remains that Marx has made such deep inroads into the malayalee soul, resulting in a deflection our thinking from the mainstream. This deviation is manifest in an intolerance of a high degree, blatant arrogance in our language, body language and the very thought process, and the absence of social graces. On top of all that, it has made us so judgmental. And we believe we are the last word on every issue under the sun.

We also believe we are way above the rest of creation. The Malayalam language has a great number of words which refer to the neighbouring states and its people in a highly derogatory manner.

Coming back to the two malayalee colleagues, I got tense every time there was a general body meeting of the employees. The two of them would take turns jumping up like belligerent jack-in-the-box and flinging objectionable (sometimes even personal) remarks and observations. The Chairperson and the rest of the colleagues never ever reacted. Initially, that surprised me. But soon I was told that these guys would go berserk if someone disagreed with them. “Better to keep out of the way of rabid dogs”, my friend who had been a witness to earlier disasters, told me.

When built-in corrective measures so necessary for the quality upkeep of an organization were discussed, the senior and his chela were unstoppable. “These are targeted at the two of us”, once the chela, on his feet, shouted. Yes, these guys suffered from persecution mania too. Every suggestion for streamlining the organization was misconstrued as a personal attack on them.

Once, again in the canteen, as I was having a cup of tea, the senior malayalee pulled up a chair and greeted me with that smile reserved only for malayalees. With great geniality which came quite naturally when he spoke to me, he tried to pick up a conversation. Somehow, without me quite realizing it, the conversation lead to the Left.

To my horror, I heard myself saying, “The leftists are the most undemocratic creatures on earth”. To date, I don’t know why I made that emphatic observation, or from where I got the courage to say that.

Our man’s face transformed. The grin became a near snarl. He plunged into a angry harangue on how the world goes round because of the left, the world has not plunged onto headlong disaster ‘cos of the Marxists, all pro people reforms have come from the Marxists bla bla bla - - .

When he stopped to gulp down some air and the tea that was going cold, I cut in. Taking a long breath I spoke rapidly:
“Listen sir, I work in the state of Kerala which is swarming with these so called saviours of mankind. The student body is infested with them. My university has these people crawling all over. You find them in the syllabus committee, examination committees, administrative offices – you name it. And with my very unpleasant experiences of having to rub shoulders with them, I emphatically repeat: the leftists are the most undemocratic creatures on earth.”

Then I got up and fled.

I avoided him like plague for a few weeks. Then one day, I ran into him. To my utter surprise, he was so sweet and pleasant and genial.

After all, I am a mallu, I thought. Perhaps he sees in me the potential to be developed into a cantankerous anti- estab!

Tell me, dear visitor. Am I prejudiced? Or wholly wrong?

Am I in the grip of the bourgeoisie mindset?

Shashi Tharoor deals with the Heat and Dust of Indian Politics

He was a success in the UN but Shashi Tharoor, MP from Trivandrum, is beginning to realise that Indian politics is a totally different ball game.

His own party men are angry with him. He did the unthinkable - socialised with the friends of the Marxists !

His own community has rejected him; he is labelled "Delhi Nair", whatever that means.

But Tharoor seems to be quite unfazed by all this row.

His response to the ruckus has a flavour different from the politically correct but inane and evasive statements that our politicians excel in - you know that verbose equivocation that we are sick and tired of listening to.

Those dinner appointments were made long time back. I cannot cancel them, he told his party heavyweights.

Angry with this fresher who pays scant respect to their sentiments , the local Congressmen have threatened report him to the High Command.

Will Mr. Tharoor take on the disgruntled elements in his party with the suave bluntness( oxymoron?) that had caught the fancy of the voters?

My father was active in the NSS but I represented Trivandrum not as a Nair but as a secular congressman.

Not many congressmen would do such straight shooting, given the love hate and the interdependent relationship between the Congress and the NSS.

But Mr. Tharoor's words were music to the ears of those who wished to see decency and honesty in politics.

The question is, will Tharoor survive?

OR, will he change in order to survive.

I'd rather he didn't survive than change to survive.

A Slice of Memory

‘Where are you going, amma?”

“To meet a big professor”.

“Its getting dark”, said my seven year old son, Mathew. “Shall I come with you?”

“Sure, if you can get ready in five minutes”. An instinctive gentleman, a truly chivalrous young man, I thought. Hope he remains that way always, I prayed ruefully.

“How big is this professor, amma?’?

I’d meant important but if this is what he understood - - -Well. I’ll pull a fast one on him, I decided.

“He’s very tall, taller than Monichayan uncle”.

Mathew stopped in his tracks; his jaw dropped; eyes became the size of saucers and he breathed,”My God, Monichayan uncle is 6’3”. This professor is taller?"

I nodded in agreement.

“Oh my God’, muttered my son. His eyes still remained the saucer size.

A moment’s silence and then, “Is he fat?”

“You remember that fat man in the movie into whose backside Mohanlal poked an injection needle?”

He had stopped again and was looking up at me with bated breath, in utter amazement.

“Hna“, he grunted, his eyes fixed on my face, his breath suspended as he waited for me to continue.

“Well”, I said nonchalantly ‘He is fatter than him”

Mathew stood there absolutely immobile, looking up at me, his eyes growing larger still, his jaws almost hitting his knees. Then I noticed that his eyes were turning glassy, and as he turned to walk, his hand sneaked into mine.

“His voice is gruff”, I volunteered”Like a bear’s”

He nodded silently. I smiled to myself as I felt his grip tightening.

A dark blue Ambassador car went by. “And Mathew”, I said, “He is that colour”.

Silence.

He didn’t speak a word till we reached the professor’s house.

I rang the door bell. Mathew’s face looked like he was about to enter a zoo which had a much publicized rare and dangerous animal.

The door opened and a little boy, a little bigger than Mathew, opened the door.

“Gurukal Sir here?” I asked the boy who apparently was his son.

“Please sit down. I’ll call him”, said the boy and went inside.

“Does he have lots of kurukkal (carbuncle) on his face?” Mathew whispered in my ear. Apparently, he hadn’t heard the name Gurukkal.

“SHHH”, I cautioned.

Both of us waited. I took a sidelong glance at him. His fists were clenching and unclenching... The eyes had returned to their normal size as he waited with bated breath.

The professor came in.

“Good evening sir", I said rising.

“Good Evening", he said in his soft, pleasant voice and lowered his 5ft 7inches, slim frame into the sofa.

“Who is this young man?” Dr. Gurukal asked, a smile spreading across his pleasant fair face.

"My son", I said looking at Mthew.

I then realized that my son was waiting for the “big" professor to make his appearance.

“Mathew", I said, “this is the Professor I was telling you about”.

Suddenly, Mathew’s jaw dropped. This time it nearly hit the floor. His eyes, which had abruptly reverted to the saucer size, darted from me to the prof, perhaps, 500 times in the space of a minute. The expression on his face – how does one describe it? Well, you can imagine what it’d be like when shock, disbelief, utter disappointment, amusement and anticlimactic feelings battle it out on a seven year old human face which is under the compulsion of appearing normal and polite and well behaved.

Did I see Dr. Gurukal looking at him in a puzzled manner? I can’t be sure.

I was in the Prof’s house for 10 minutes. Through the corner of my eyes, I could see Mathew’s small frame being shaken by occasional paroxysms of laughter which the marvelous boy kept under iron control.

As the door of his house shut behind us, my son doubled up and dissolved into a hysteria of merriment.

Ps. Dr. Rajan Gurukkal is the Vice Chancellor of MG University now. My son is in the final stage of his effort to earn the title of Doctor in his field of research.

What's the Truth about Mullaperiyar, please?

Guess all human beings are parochial but it is perplexing how parochialism can so totally cloud judgment as it does in the case of the Mullaperiyar Dam dispute between Tamilnadu & Kerala.

The dam has a long history, going back to pre Independence days. It has a complex history of litigation and inter state wrangling in the post independence period. Wallowing in the mire of these histories, the most pressing problem is sidelined.

The present crisis between Kerala and Tamilnadu has all the ingredients of a water war. But my concern is with something more than that – something immediately more serious, namely, the humongous nature of the catastrophe if, as Kerala feels, the dam should break.

The projection is that the districts of Idukki, Kottayam and parts of Ernakulam districts will be inundated, leading to unprecedented loss of human lives.

Perhaps it is the height of naivety to ask: Doesn’t this - this feared loss of lives running into lakhs - matter to the leaders of Tamilnadu who have always tried to take political mileage out of the dam issue? The number of farmers affected by maintaining the level of the dam is flaunted to incite – what? Support in the form of violence? A token gesture to Kerala about what will happen if - - ?

Tamilnadul’s attitude seems to be like: We have followed the directives of the Supreme Court and strengthened the dam. Now raise the water level for our farmers. If the dam bursts and lakhs of your people die, well, too bad. Your tough luck! Anyway, cross the bridge when you come to it. Go ask the Supreme Court then.

Can irrigation issue be bracketed with human lives?

Of course, irrigation is important. It’s a matter of livelihood for tens of thousands of farmers. No doubt about that. But surely it is callous to insist on a solution which, experts say, can cause a terrible human catastrophe?

Or is the Kerala govt bluffing? Is Kerala worried about electricity production if the dam is raised? Does Tamilnadu have any proof that Mullaperiyar is just a bogey raised for some reason known only to Kerala?

If Kerala government is not bluffing, can we afford to wait for the Supreme Court ruling to divert a catastrophe?

I’m sure disasters are not going to be restrained or delayed by their respect for the apex court.

Like an ignoramus who hardly understands the nuances of the issue, I ask:

Why is Tamilnadu objecting to underwater mapping of the dam using cameras to ascertain its safety?

Why is Tamilnadu objecting to the construction of a new dam, a solution mooted by Kerala government to protect the thickly populated downstream?

It is so difficult to digest that the politicians of any state can be so impervious to the fact that not thousands but lakhs of lives of Indian citizens might be lost if the dam gives away.

Or is it that they have some knowledge about foul play in the Mullperiyar discourse emanating from Kerala?

What is the central government doing? Why is there no sense of urgency? Does it not know this is an issue that does not provide the luxury of waiting for court verdicts? This wait and watch policy of the Centre and the just- another- litigation attitude of the Supreme Court is most incomprehensible.

Can we not approach a totally neutral expert committee of international repute to assess the condition of the dam?

The helpless readers who are fed constantly by conflicting media reports can only hope and pray that the dam remains intact till the issue is sorted out.

My earlier post on Mullaperiyar: http://pareltank.blogspot.com/2006/12/politicising-mullaperiyar.html

An Open Letter to Obama : Temper your Rhetoric with Discretion, Please, Mr. President!

"We have got to pick up pace because the World has gotten competitive. The Chinese and the Indians are coming at us and they are coming at us hard, and they are hungry and really buckling down”, said Obama at a town hall meeting in Wisconsin. http://news.outlookindia.com/item.aspx?661179

Oh my God! What a shameful statement from the President of the United States of America!!

What a dangerous idea to be sold to a people who are reeling under recession and its fallout!

What a provocative thing to do - pointing out to Asians as potential job snatchers in a country which welcomes them with open arms and uses them as techno coolies or researchers!

Have you, Mr President, forgotten that thousands of Indian and Chinese students are in the Universities of the United States of America? Don’t you realize that, at the slightest provocation, the racial violence in Australia can be encored in the USA?

Don’t you realize that all this sound and fury against Indians and Chinese can create a climate of intolerance in the USA?

Are you trying to break the melting pot?

“The Chinese and Indians are coming at us” – an invasion?

“And they are hungry and really buckling down” – Shame, Mr. Obama! Sowing seeds of fear for the hungry mob in the minds of your people.

Surely there are better ways of urging your people to watch less TV and go to schools!

Your anxiety about the inadequacies of the education system and the tough competition from outside is understandable. Equally understandable is the picture of you Mr. Barrack Obama, the father, impressing upon your children in the cozy warmth of the fireplace to give priority to their studies. But, Sir, as the President of the United States of America, it’s a deadly statement to make!

You sound almost racial!

A reminder Mr. President. These Chinese and Indians are not mendicants. They are inheritors of a legacy of culture, learning and civilization dating back to prehistoric times, to times when America in its present form was not even remotely thought of.

Mr.President, you seem to be getting more and more enamoured of your own voice and rhetorical skills that you pay scant attention to the ramifications of your irresponsible proclamations.

To be more charitable to you, did the teleprompter malfunction at the Wisconsin Town hall ?

Bloggers from the Third World - For your Information

The excerpt given below is from LIVE, a pull-out of CHICAGO TRIBUNE OF June 3, 2009. The article titled I'M CREEPED OUT . . . GET ME OUT OF HERE by STEVE DAHl is about Patti Blogojevich, wife of Rod Blogojevich, former Governor of Illinois, snacking on a tarantula during the show "I'm a celebrity---get me out of here"

Dahl writes:

As I was watching Patti Blogojevich eat a tarantula on Monday night's premier of " I'm a celebrity...get me out of here!". I was wondering what the rest of the country - and the world, for that matter - thinks of us here in Illinois. I mean, she was the first lady of Illinois for more than five years, and now she is chowing down on an arachnid to allegedly support her family. At best, it gave Illinois a Hollywood feel; at worst, it made us look THRID WORLDISH!!!!!!???? (punctuation and emphasis mine).

And then he goes on:

The producers of "Celebrity " are quite emphatic about proclaiming that all of this JUNGLE STUPIDITY (emphasis mine) is going on in the name of charity etc etc etc

Regular readers of the paper say that such remarks are frequent, and cause no eyebrows to be raised, even among Indians.

So, the Third World comprising snake charmers and mahouts, drug peddlers and hungry mouths has a new attribute too. Tarantula eaters!

I remember, in the high school (in Pondicherry), we had a lesson titled " The Treemen of Travancore", written by a European tourist. These tree men ate tadpoles, and my classmates asked me if 'd ever lived in a tree house and eaten tadpoles. How exciting, they thought! Some, however, asked me if all that was real or the figment of some tourist's imagination.

Coming back to the CT paper. Am I over reacting, making a blog out of this?

What ails Higher Education in India. - A Wholly Inadequate Answer!

My previous post suggesting that the govt of India invest heavily in education in order to provide internationally competitive higher education in India set me thinking about the issue.

Brace yourself. This is a long post, but straight from the heart.

The issue is not a simple one. At the micro level too there are serious problems to be surmounted. I guess this can be best explained by relating a couple of experiences as a teacher in the existing system.

After completing my research, I rejoined my college. I had to teach Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey Lines to the Final year BA English major students. With the recently acquired knowledge of the research methodology and tools that enabled one to break free of structured thinking, I tried to introduce a novel approach to the poem which for decades had been doled out to students in the same stereotyped and over simplified manner through the end number of cheap (in terms of price and quality) guides that were available a dime a dozen in the market. I gave a couple of titles which provided a different reading of Wordsworth and the Romantic poets. I was a fool not to have noticed the skepticism in the eyes of the students, even in the brilliant ones’. In a week’s time, a colleague told me confidentially that the students were complaining to the Head about my unconventional approach. Before the HOD pulled me up, I went back to age old interpretation of Tintern Abbey Lines, gave the probable essay questions and brief notes and gave the answers based on the most popular guide available in the market.

What my colleague told me quite unsettled me. I understand they complained to the HOD that if Miss Molly teaches the way she is doing, they’d all fail in the exams.

I’ll be eternally grateful to that lone student who came to me after I reverted to the accepted stereotyped style of teaching. She wanted me to go ahead with the way I’d started. She was amazed that there were other ways of looking at so canonical a poem as Tintern Abbey lines.

“The standard interpretation, we can get from any guide”, she had told me.

It was truly a vindication of what I believed but could not translate into practice on account of a systemic flaw in imparting education in our state.

These happened18 years back.

Just five years back, I ran into trouble again with my effort to update students’ learning process. I asked for an assignment to be done by the students themselves (and not by some typist) in the Microsoft Word. I insisted on bibliography and footnotes. I told them it did not matter how much cut & paste they did so long as they acknowledged it. I assured them if the entire work is cut and paste, I’d still give them marks for their skill in selecting and organizing facts in a coherent, logical manner. But I also told them(that was my undoing), that I’d give them only the marks they deserve, and that I’d fail them if they deserved to, and they would have to redo the assignment to my satisfaction if I were to give them pass mark. In other words, they had to EARN their marks.

I wasn’t aware of the seismic under currents triggered off by the project I gave them, till, the head of the institution who was a well wisher of mine called me quietly into the office and told me that there were complaints that I was harassing the students! I told her all I wanted was to give them a taste of doing an assignment using internet information in a sensible manner.

“You mean well. Our students are not ready for it (!!!!!!!!??????), she told me. ‘They feel this might affect their internal marks and put them at a disadvantage WITH the students of other colleges. Besides, they find it involved too much expense”!!!?

Once again I backtracked. Once again, I failed.

I can give you any number of such failures. Sometimes I wonder if I lacked conviction myself. That could be why I didn’t have the guts to pursue a task well begun.

But I console myself with the thought that I was fighting something much bigger than myself and did not possess the muscles for a one man army.

I was fighting to improve an educational system evolved to deal with astronomical numbers of students (unlike in the US or Britain or Australia). I was trying to beat a system which had to resort to and continue to follow the colonial legacy of the affiliatory system, in order to keep track of and control the management of the Himalayan task of subsidizing and educating the huge number of students who flooded into colleges after Independence. The ideal thing at that point of time was to dismantle the exiting system which was meant to produce good and obedient servants of the empire, and evolve a new system more suited to the post colonial India. But we chose to continue the existing one which by the time independent India took over had become fossilized into a partially effective system. Renovation of a structure is more difficult than building a new one. The ad hoc improvements and improvisation did not really make much of a difference for the better.

To make matters worse, in the post colonial era, in Kerala state, people became so intensely conscious of their rights that the universities and colleges became the hotbed of union activities - a fact which tied the hands of successive governments in bringing about changes, particularly in the examination /evaluation system, which I honestly believe is to be blamed in a major way for the failure of our education.

My shameful failures in the episodes I mentioned earlier too were on account of the examination system we have in place in the colleges today.

The examination system in most universities and their affiliated colleges is flawed. It doesn’t really test the quality and learning of the students. The absolute predictability of the question papers is the villain of the piece. The students seem to think that it is their right to be tested by a given pattern year after year. This is how it works:

The university designs syllabus for a course. Within a month’s time, the market becomes flooded with guides which identify all probable questions and gives answers – for essays \ brief notes.

Then at the end of the year, the appointed paper setters for university exams make questions as per the universities prescribed question paper pattern. These paper setters, I am sad to say, have in their possession all the popular guides from which they, more often than not, choose questions. Any question that requires intelligent use of knowledge acquired during the course of study would instantly raise a hue and cry from the students, teachers, parents and unions. The university then gives instruction to examiners to go lenient on that particular question. The leniency is usually in the form of minimum pass mark for that particular question.

Predictable question, predictable answers. These are the rights of the students respected by all universities. The system is such that the intelligent student can pass with flying colours with minimum learning. Originality in answers is dangerous. So teachers – both in science and humanities – teach from “the examination point of view”. Everybody is happy with this teaching. Students, because there is no demand on their intellects or skills and the effort they need to put in is minimum; teachers ‘cos readymade material is available and the examination results enhance their egos; colleges because their students produce good results and the credibility and rating of the college go up.

The spoon feeding method suits all.

The casualty, of course, is education, one purpose of which is to inculcate that grand passion for research and knowledge.

A decade back, the universities introduced the internal assessment practice by which 20-25 % marks was given by continuous assessment through the year. The intentions were good. It was an effort to give room and importance to original work, performance of student in the course of the year and to make up for the flaw in the existing examination system. But now this has become the biggest hoax. In addition to adding to the teachers ‘workload for no good purpose, it contributes to lowering standards in a big way. Every college issues a fatwa to its teachers to give minimum pass mark to all students and not to fail them at any cost. If one college decides to follow the spirit of Internal Assessment system, it will reflect on the overall examination results of the college. Students from that college who deserve “UNIVERSITY RANKS’ (indicators of the quality of the college) will have to make way to less deserving ones from other colleges on account of the conscientious policy of the college.

So the entire process of internal assessment is a huge farce, whereby substandard submissions and test papers ultimately earn the student a minimum of 12/20. Another 20 marks in the university exams and the student passes! Border line cases enjoy moderation as a matter of policy. It brings credit to the state government that so many pass percentages are registered every year during its term.

I have heard stories of student union leaders threatening teachers who wish to mark fairly for internal assessments!

This is only one millionth of the tip of the iceberg of flaws that beleaguers the Indian Universities. As I mentioned earlier, the difficulty of dealing with huge numbers and the burden of subsidizing education in the country has watered down the system of education.

Despite this, our graduates fare exceedingly well in non Indian universities.

Perhaps, the system has inculcated a never say die attitude and a capacity to learn in our youngsters that make them fare well outside.

We need to investigate and find out what it is that makes our students tick outside India, and build on our strengths.

The infrastructure, though flawed, is there. We need to fine tune it, up grade it so that our graduates will not have to leave the country to seek higher education in countries where they become victims of racial discrimination.

Only a commitment, political will and depoliticisation of educational field can enable the government of India to address this issue effectively.

Racism Down Under - Wake up Call for India

The solution to the resentment towards Indian students who can afford education abroad does not lie in diplomatic efforts. That’s a stop gap and contingent solution. But the real long term solution lies in India improving the educational infrastructure in the country.

With the type of media coverage it is getting, there is likelihood of this resentment spreading to other parts of the developed world which have been wooing Indian students both for the revenue (income from international students is a major source of revenue for Australia) they bring and their contribution to research. But racist attacks are often beyond the control of the governments. Its increase in these difficult times of financial meltdown is an indication of the rightful-heir-being-denied –the -legacy –by-the-adopted syndrome. This is the most dangerous type of resentment ‘cos at the bottom of it is the feeling of righteousness, of fighting and killing for a just cause.

In addition to this is this branding of Asians as terrorists. The Indian students in Australia have reported that they often have had to confront hostile queries about whether they are Afghans or Pakistanis, and whether their jacket conceals bombs!

It is the most undesirable situation that we have here.

Why does a country like India which exports such a huge number of techies and researchers to the world, depend on these developed countries for quality higher education for her students?

Sixty years of independence is a long time. The issue should be addressed aggressively. We have the educational infrastructure. It’s not as though we have to start from the scratch. We have to bring them up to international standards. There are a few suggestions to address this very serious issue.

· Keep Centres of learning totally free from politics. No unions, be it those of students, employees or the teaching faculty.
· Invest hugely in research infrastructure.
· Provide sufficient funding for deserving researchers in place of the shameful pittance doled out to them now. A decent package will attract to our universities the best hands that, in the present scenario, go to foreign universities for quality, state of the art education and become vulnerable to shameful racist attacks.
· Offer enviable package to the faculty. This will attract the best hands to the teaching profession. This move is already set afoot in the country under pressure from the UGC.
· Attract funds by offering very attractive tax benefits to corporates who donate to the cause of education in proportion to the profit.
· Have in place a fool proof accountability system for the universities.
· Ensure efficient administrative machinery in the universities. The red-tapism that is the bane of any university with government funding is a huge drain on the resources of the university in terms of time and performance.
· Every state should have such universities in proportion to its population.

None of these is impossible or unrealistic suggestions. WE only need the political will to do it. It is time the people of India began to clamour for it. If we let things by, the status quo will continue.

Only the crying baby gets milk.

Perhaps the wails should emanate from the blogsphere.

In the Name of God

They make me uneasy. those prayer cum threat (sometimes veiled) forwards.

I know many who just delete them without a second thought. But somehow i find it difficult, though of late i have begun to do it selectively.

You claim to be a rational creature, i tell myself. but the truth, i guess is, i am not.

Or, why do i still insist that we are not three in number when we set out from the house for an auspicious or important occasion? I remember the daily routine during my daughter's SSLC exams. My husband , i and my daughter set out from the house together. She was dropped at the school, i at the bus station and then he went to the office. Since she was going to appear for the crucial exams which were to decide her future, i would wait at the gate so that we didn't set out in three, a number which was considered ill omened! My husband who, as a rule, is dismissive about such "superstitious practices", did not protest . Guess, he too didn't want to take a chance :-) . I still do it, but make sure it is done without drawing attention .

I have this habit of branding certain clothes and accessories as 'unlucky'. I remember the silk salwar suit i was wearing when the radiologist dropped the bombshell about me being diagnosed with a dangerous disease. We had dropped in at the the Diagnostic clinic after a party. I was wearing the most expensive Salwar suit i ever bought.

I gave it away to my maid who nearly fainted on receiving the expensive gift. She knew it was a brand new outfit.

"Why pass on an unlucky object to her?", my friend asked me when i told her.

"What's unlucky for me need not be unlucky for another person", i replied. 'Anyway, i didn't give her the Dupetta. So the unlucky combination is not complete".

My friend shook her head in disbelief. I thought she even looked disgusted when i told her about the fate of my brand new Biba salwar suits that I'd worn during the visits to the docs who confirmed the disease. I gave them to my sister in law who had to tamper with their perfect cut to suit her measurements. I thought my sister in law too looked incredulous when i told her why i am giving her those clothes, and why i refused to give the complete set(to break the unlucky combination).

And i always describe myself as a rational being!

Thus it is that i hesitate to delete those forwards which come with threats of divine retribution if i don't forward them to the specified number of people. Why take a chance with the ire of the almighty?

For a sample of the threats:

Some are blatant. They go something like this.

'If you don't sent this to 10 people, within 24 hours something terrible will happen to you". Some mails specify the nature of misfortune that will, without doubt, befall you if you break the chain- like loosing all your money, disease invading your family, losing job and the like. These mails sometimes give list of people whom disaster struck like a thunderbolt. That makes it really scary.

Some threats are subtle and use emotional blackmail as a tool.

"You have No hesitation to forward jokes, even vulgar ones. Cant you do this for God" or "Not only are you depriving yourself of a big bonanza, you are also depriving 10 others(instructions are to send to 10) of a fortune.

Some of the prayers/thoughts forwarded are truly inspiring or appropriate to your mood or the crisis which you find yourself in. But the minute i see the attempt to threaten/cajole/emotionally blackmail, i withdraw into a protective shell, and ponder over how to handle it.

Earlier, i sent them to those i knew believed in God and his bountiful as well a retributive nature.

Now, i edit them. I remove all the threats and pass them on, hoping that at least one of the recipients will forward to someone. Thus I wont have to carry the burden of the guilt of having broken the chain.

Now, i have started deleting them. I delete them without opening 'cos i know that once i read and see the samples of the disasters that will pursue me in a battalion, I'll lose the courage to delete.

I ask myself: Why am i like this? I ought to be totally unaffected by these forwards. I ought to know that whoever generate these mails are not prophets or seers or messengers of god, but - - . But who are they? Why do they do this?

Are these the efforts of well meaning souls to do their bit to establish the kingdom of God? Do they want to build up a virtual army of God to implement his laws on earth?

And who are these 'theys', these 'start' points from which these messages originate and spread all over the virtual world through the agency of even the so called rational people like me, who, for some strange reason cannot mete out the dismissive treatment these forwards deserve?

Questions and questions for which i have no answer.

Are you any wiser, dear blog visitor?

Bathroom Tamasha -1

I just read a hilarious post on European Bathrooms which brought memories of bathroom experiences rushing to my mind.

I've experienced the same sense of insecurity that Aparna describes in her post. It happened in a Pondicherry boarding school where I did my high school. The school was the Indian /English wing of the French school. French influence was heavy, what with nuns and matrons being French or francoindians (is there such a term?).

I had just returned from the summer vacation. We were told that the boarding was shifted from the magnificent Villa Maria to the English medium high school building (the high school had shifted to the suburbs). As the maids were lugging my suitcases to the dorm, I went in search of the toilet, the first destination of anyone after an overnight Kochin-Madras train journey followed by a torturous bus journey from Madras to Pondicherry.

Miss Aureli, our matron told me in her broken English that the attached bathrooms could only be used as lavs. The bathing arrangement was near the small quadrangle where the non resident students used to sit around and talk. Curious to know how they had converted that beautiful space into bathrooms, I rushed excitedly to the quadrangle. A few boarders were already there and were looking utterly dismayed.

“Where are the bathrooms?”

“There”, they pointed to the veranda that skirted the quadrangle. The veranda was partitioned into 15 bathing rooms with temporary partition material. There were no doors. Only green plastic curtains with floral prints taking over the function of doors!!

“Oh my God. How can we bathe with only the curtains as protection?” said I with all the Nazrani-upbringing-induced indignation and outrage.

“I refuse to bathe here”, said Uma Mahadevan. Her sister Latha echoed her words even more vehemently.

“Let's tell Mother Edel that we refuse to bathe if she doesn’t replace the curtains with doors” That was Gnaneswari, besides herself with r age. The little boarders shifted their gaze from one speaker to the other, their faces registering appropriate expressions.

“Come, let us go to Mother Edel”, said the brilliant Bharathi Balasubramanium.

“Here I am, girls”, said Mother Edel who had apparently been eavesdropping.

WE loved Mother Edel, the half Irish boarding mistress. Though a disciplinarian, she was the very epitome of fairness and impartiality.

"What’s your problem, girls?” asked Mother Edel gently.

Silence.

“All fine?”

“Curtains”, blurted out the valiant Bharathi Balasubramanium.

“Pretty, aren't they?” She asked with a sweet smile.

”Yes”, whimpered the boarders.

"Freshen up, girls. I have lovely snacks waiting for you. Be in the dining hall in half an hour?” she said looking at her watch.

All of us nodded meekly.

She flashed another sweet smile and vanished.

Mother Edel was a stickler for punctuality. Half an hour to wash off all that dirt from the coal powered trains. We ran to the dorm, picked up the change of clothes and met in the quadrangle.

WE strategized quickly on how to indicate the occupancy of each bathroom.

“Put the pre- shower clothes on the curtain rod’, declared Gnaneswari.

Then we charged into the cubicular bathrooms. WE started out bath, each shouting out to the other, updating each other on the stage that each was in. Somehow, that gave us a sense of security.

And then nature played truant. A huge wind came from some where and up went the curtains!

WE screamed in unison.

Uma Mahadevan was always the one with great presence of mind.

“GRAB THE CURTAIN AND WRAP YOURSELF IN THEM”, she ordered thunderously.

We did as instructed and ended up with nothing but green floral plastic curtains wrapped around us and our head sticking out above the curtains and looking at each other, some laughing, some crying, some raising socialist slogans.

“Ennaamma?” said a male voice.

A young worker who’d been whitewashing the adjacent building, stood there, at the entrance of the quadrangle. Apparently, he had come to find out what the screams were about.

In rapid, hysterical Tamil, Uma Mahadevan and Lath Mahadevan and Bharathi Balasubramaium and Gnaneswari, and little Jayanthi, and the still more little Azhakarazi screamed at the boy, asking him to go away. I joined in with my Malayalam ‘poda, poda’.

By then the matron Aureli reached the quadrangle, all panting from transporting her heavy mass from the first floor.

She saw the boy looking bewildered at the sight of girls of all sizes wrapped in green floral plastic curtains, hurling abuses at him.

Miss Aureli shooed him away, and with the green floral plastic curtains wrapped around us, we poured all our woes to her. She nodded her wise head and assured us that she’ll arrange to have the tin doors of Villa Maria bathing rooms relocated to these bathrooms.

Till I completed my high school at Cluny, the plastic curtains remained. But, by then, we had learned to deal with eventualities of bathing with the protection of only a green, plastic curtain with floral prints.

Shopping With Husband

I have yet to hear a woman say that her husband enjoys shopping. I perhaps am the lone person on this planet whose worse half (if I am the 'better', he must be the antonym) takes immense pleasure in shopping.

Of course, shopping means two different things to us. To me it means going to the shop to buy something. To him it means - -it can’t be packaged in a sentence. It calls for an entire blog to explain what shopping means to him.

The minute we enter the shop, our behaviour acquires totally different patterns. I usually walk up to an employee and ask him where I can find what I want, and then I make a bee line for that section. My husband, on the other hand - - - No. Description may not do justice to reality. Shall present it.

WE, residing in a small town in Kerala, walk into a Nalli Textiles in a big metro.

Husband (From now on H): Ask that man what you want.
ME: I know! I am about to ask him.
Having found out the section I want, I walk towards it. I look back to see my husband, his hands stuffed in the pockets, looking around – to get an overall idea of what, I really don’t know-or have cared to find out. But he sure appears as though he had come to buy up the Nalli chain!

Then he starts his inspection. Of the details.

In no time I find what I want. Since it runs into a few thousands, I want his opinion. I am ashamed to admit that I haven’t evolved enough as an independent woman to dump his likes and dislikes regarding my clothes into the trash bin.

We start walking back towards the Kanchhevaram silk section where I have kept aside a saree for his approval.

Me: I think I have found what I wanted.
H: You know Molly, can you think of a single shop in Kerala where they have such variety?
Me: It’s a pretty piece, you know, a peacock blue with magenta border.
H: And the sales men! Their body language. So professional.
Me: But it is a little expensive.
H: They know their job.
We reach the section and the sales man places the selected saree on the counter.
Me: This is the saree.
Usually our tastes converge.
H: Check it for damage.
Irritated, I ask the salesman who has already begun doing it.
Salesman: No damage, sir.
Husband: But what is that?

To date, I have never been able to find out how his eyes fall on some defect or how every piece I choose happens to have some defect. There are times when I have thought that he can create damage on fabric just by looking at it.

I start searching for another sari while he wanders about, deeply engrossed in his assessment of the shop, its business, its systems, its efficiency, its clientele, its stock, its floor management, its method of handling the crowd at the payment counter, parcel counter, and and and and - - - - . Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!

************

If it is a lifestyle type of mall, he moves from section to section, picks up items, turns them upside down, finds something to read on every item and then puts it back. When I see him picking up delicate crystals, I walk up and tell him not to touch or break. For all the attention he pays me, I need not have existed.

In a mall, he seems to be eternally disappearing – something I find most annoying. There are times when I have had to call him on the cell phone, after he performs his vanishing trick.

Yesterday, we went to the Bed Bath and Beyond in Chicago. I picked up some stuff, put them in the trolley and started off on that husband hunting expedition. Sure enough, I found him after three rounds of walking up and down that gigantic shop. Needless to say, he was scrutinizing the underside of an exotic crockery item. For the life of me, I cannot understand why he cannot just look at that piece of art with its right side up and drink in its beauty.

As we walked back to the billing counter, I said: I have taken these items. Think we can carry them?
H: All the items in this shop are Chinese.
Me: I know these pans are heavy but I haven’t seen such quality stuff in India
H; These Chinese seem to have taken over manufacture completely.
Me: All three are stainless steel
H: And the finish of each product! These Chinese!! We really should salute them.
I try again: Do you think these will be too heavy?
H: And Molly, see how cordial and helpful these employees are?

By now, I was trying to keep in check that terrible impulse to pick the heavies steel frying pan and bring it crashing down on his head!

Instead, I looked at him, taking care that my expression didn't betray my feelings.

H: Really, we have a lot to learn from the Americans.
Me: Listen, (my voice become slightly hysterical). Do you think we should buy these items? Will they be overweight?
Husband, gesturing with his head at the friendly conversation between the sales boy and a customer at the billing counter, openened his mouth to say something.
My patience snapped.
Me: I don’t care a s--- how cordial these guys are, how earnest they are or whatever. All I want to know is whether we will be able to take these items to India if I buy them.

At last, he looked at the trolley. Took up the frying pan, turned it over.

Chinese again, declared the husband triumphantly!!!!!!!

GRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!

Racism in the Skies.

http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=Air+France+denies+ill-treatment+of+passengers&artid=OzoEHgO2ww=&SectionID=b7ziAYMenjw=&MainSectionID=b7ziAYMenjw=&SEO=Air+France,&SectionName=pWehHe7IsSU=

A woman claimed that barring Indians, all the other passengers were given good hotel accommodation since their flight was delayed.
The airline allegedly did not give any reason for the delay and dumped all Indians in a small room, she told reporters.
Another passenger accused Air France of not providing Indians with proper food or water during the ordeal.(An extract from the above link)

If this is true, what a shame!

Air France has denied doling out discriminatory treatment, but I’d rather give more credence to the passengers’version. Why should they make such a false claim? The airlines has every reason to deny the allegation.

Leave alone the ethical aspect of the issue, it is the absence of commercial wisdom which causes many international airlines not to make an all out effort to neutralize the racially discriminative approach/ attitude of its employees.

I have heard many Indian frequent travelers complaining about subtle racist slur in the treatment meted out to them.

International aviation industry should realise that non-European customers contribute hugely to their income. Guess it’ll do good to have the following quote put up in places frequented by all airlines employees.

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption in our work - he is the purpose of it.
We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to serve him.- Mahatma Gandhi

Just imagine what will happen if, the allegation of the passengers being found true, the Government of India issues a fatwa to Indians to boycott Air France!

The Silence of the Ashes

The blog visitor (to http://brokenmuse.blogspot.com/ ): Why no update?


My muse goes into hibernation
I do not know why.

When it stirs
and struggles in the cocoon
and finally breaks free
into the light of the day

It gets singed.
No colourful wings.

Only ashes.

The struggle to be born
to fly about
to exist
the pain of death

lost in silence.

Arrival at Chicago

"Move on, move on. Dont stand there", said the black security official as we walked down the corridor leading to the immigration counter at Chicago airport. He was talking to a 70+ well suited and booted Gujarathi passanger who, like us, had alighted from the Air India Flight.

The passanger stood his ground, looking back towards the aerobridge, and refused to move. Then security personnel walked towards him and repeated the command.

"I'm waiting for my wife", replied the irritated passanger.

"That's fine. But move on. Dont stand there. She'll find you'

The passanger was angry now. "How can she find me? She is not educated!".(I could have punched him on the nose for that loud declaration! Surely he owed something to his wife's image!)

The security personal laughed and told him:" Dont worry man. She doesn't need education to find you. Guess she's been you wife for a long time now?"

"I tell you she is not educated and - - -". He stopped when he heard some one call him from the front. All of us looked ahead towards the shrill, irritated voice and found an elderly woman, saree worn the Gujarati style, saying something rapidly and gesticulating to the husband.

"There she is" said the man, with Aarchmedean excitement and joy.

The security man laughed explosivley and said to me who was watching this short exchange: "I told you. you dont need education to find your husband. And look, no education and she is way ahead of him!!"

Guess basic instincts are stronger when not diluted by education!

The Lankan Tamil Crisis - Reconstructed from Memory & Hearsay

I gained first hand information of the Sri Lankan Tamil crisis in the early 70s. The college in Chennai where I did my PG had Sri Lankan Tamils who told stories about how essential items in the Tamil dominated North east region cost four times more than they did in the rest of Sri Lanka. Items like sanitary pads were available only in the black market - at a ridiculously exorbitant prize. These students used to carry home dried chillies, essential spices from the then Madras when they went home.

So a problem was there. It was genuine, I realized. The political murders that Sri Lanka was infamous for had a background that could not be dismissed. There was some sort of an economic embargo in the Tamil areas which made life difficult for them.

I do not know when exactly LTTE and its supremo caught my attention. But I do remember thinking that a separatist movement was ineveitable. That view was based on my interaction with my Sri Lankan Tamil friends a few years earlier.

Velupally Prabhakaran caught my attention – don’t know when - ‘cos of the name. My father had a friend called Velupilla. You know for some reasons certain names stick in your mind on account of quite insignificant associations. Gradually Prabhakaran began to haunt my imagination. The media took care of it.

The stories of his personality, his ruthlessness crept into my consciousness from the magazines and newspapers of which I was once an avid reader. I could empathize with the cause – the end- for which he fought. My friends from college and their tales never really deserted me. But I grew angry with his methods – the means.

I love Christ.
I love Gandhi.
And Prabhakaran did not fit in this company.

Imagine killing people by garlanding them with burning tyres! No cause justifies such brutality.

And then Rajiv Gandhi happened.

In fact, the people with whom I shared my views on current issues had all expressed anxiety about Rajiv Gandhi playing with fire when he invited Prabhakaran to Delhi and messed around with him. One does not turn a traitor on a person like Prabhakaran and get away with it. We became more anxious when the IPKF became the foe of both LTTE and The Sri Lankan government. with it.

Our anxieties soon translated into reality. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated.

LTTE was messing around with our leaders, our sovreignity. Of course we were all angry.

Stories about LTTE reached us from our friends working in the Gulf and Saudi. They told us how Sri Lankan Tamils there - from house maids to top executives – had to contribute to LTTE funds under threat of harm to their loved ones back home!

Whatever little sympathy I had with for this terror outfit and their cause faded away without my knowing it.

And then of course there was the issue brewing trouble on our doorstep. Tamilnadu politicians were making hay while the sun shone. They continue to do it – espousing the Sri Lankan Tamil cause- now that elections are in the offing. The flip-flops by the leaders of the DMK and its variations, the filmy fast unto death drama by Karunanidhi, no doubt after getting unofficial information that qualitative ceasefire is about to happen, and the dramatic break of the fast on the Marina beach like a well scripted film – it’s sick. Absolutely sick.

A gigantic humanitarian crisis exists. The Lankan army cannot be blamed. No nation can tolerate separatist movement. No Indian political group should support separatist movement. But Tamilnadu has always done it (especially when the atmosphere gets charged with electioneering) and got away with it.

The LTTE cannot be justified. It’s cowardly to use human shields comprising even children and the aged. The honourable thing for the militants to do is to lay down arms, and for Prabhakaran, to surrender.

This is my take There could be inaccuracies as it is reconstructed from memory and my understanding of the situation. However, I can safely claim that this is the take of the average apolitical Indian citizen of my generation on this issue.

a jumbled but honest confession

Dhanya picked me or picked on me for the HONEST SCRAP award. tank you dhanya. am flattered. but i wish the award came without a prize tag. nevertheless, here i go fulfilling the first condition - to list 10 honest things about myself

i always think the creator made a mistake
while allotting me my gender.

while learning needlework in the Nazareth convent
i have yearned to be out there
climbing trees like my brothers
or playing cricket
or scream from the galleries during santosh trophy.


i have wished i could jump into the periyar river
like my brothers
with only swimming trunks on
and not that horrendous five metre swimming dress
my mother designed for me.

i now wish i had listened to my father
and taken economics instead of literature.
my encounter with literature would then have been
much more pleasurable.
And i'd have been able to talk intelligently on the recession.
tho' must confess i secretly fear i'd not have graduated
had i listened to my father.
My cerebral capacity has its limits.

I'm glad i had the guts to allow my children
to follow their passion for economics and chemistry
tho i'll make that confession only in the blogsphere.
sour grapes, the world would say
'cos they are not doctors or engineers.

i always wonder what people with truckloads of money
do with it.
and why they need so much money.
all those stars and sports stars with the millions.
maybe i'll stop wondering if i make that kind of money.

between twelve and twenty five
i've asked my maker
why he didn't add another two inches to my stature.
I wouldnt have had to hobble around on high heels.

i love blogging.
tho i wish i could write a novel
and have the felicity of expression
and honesty
of arundathi roy and kamala das.

there was a time when i wished
i were beautiful
and brilliant
and talented
and admired
and envied.

today, i am glad to be just alive and kicking.
it's nice to be around still
in this beautiful world.

now for the next condition:
Choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have seven friends. Show the seven random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog. Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.

Arun, Aswadhy, Chandy, Jina, Sujatha, Silverine, Mathew

my seven blogger friends - do forgive for harassing you.

The Idle Mind

I am an idler. I love doing nothing. When I travel by train, I’m in a hurry to finish reading whatever reading material I have with me so that I can spend the rest of the journey looking out of the window and allowing thoughts to wander wherever they wish.

I love looking at the landscape that flies past and allow it to play on my thoughts which, in turn, take me to regions inaccessible to man.

As a kid, I have traveled to the world of stars on wings which I got on request from my fairy godmother. I have seen my self as Heidi wandering up the hill and down the dale tending my sheep. I have seen myself as Jill, wearing outlandish British clothes and going up and down with Jack, carrying water in the pail.

As I grew older, I loved to dream of shocking my Malayalam teacher by answering all the questions she put to me, and reading like Chitra who was the teacher’s pet. I have, with glee, seen myself punching that boy on the nose when he complained I was copying from him the multiplication table for three fourth.What I actually did was to hit him on the head with my slate and then was made to kneel down for two periods till I apologized to him. The forced apology made me want to see his nose bleed like my brother told me it happens when boxers punch each other on the nose.

Around this time, I’d have delightful visions of my music teacher Sr. R (who used to shake me up as though I were a rag doll) going up in the air (like I saw in some Tintin comic), as the dynamite on which she sat went off. Of course, I would have had a hand in the dynamite finding itself on her chair.

In high school, I saw myself topping the class and being the envy of Bharathi Balasubramianam who always topped the class. I would also see myself surprising the PT teacher who always admired my never-say-die spirit, by beating Vandana by one metre in the 100 metres race from which, in reality, I always got chucked out in the very first heat.

Still older, I saw myself as a tall and slim airhostess (in reality my stature has always reminded me of the teapot of the nursery rhyme fame), going around serving in the flight, with a charming smile on my face, impervious to the envious admiration of all the female passengers. Around this time. I’ve also seen myself acting in Hindi films. Of course, I’d be stunning, wearing a midnight blue chiffon saree with sequins work on it and dance around the trees with the hero who would keep a minimum distance of six feet from me (so much for my puritanical Nazrane upbringing).

As I grew older, I saw myself - - well. I think I’ll skip that or my near and dear ones who read this will say ambadi kalli. ivulu kollamalloo –

And then there was a time when I saw myself as a globe trotting professor, sporting a dark horn rimmed specks, delivering lectures is the most prestigious universities in the world, the talk of the town, the pride of my community and family. Of course this vision presented itself mostly during my commuting days as I sat (if I managed to find a seat) in the Madras Mail looking out of the window (if I got a window seat and not a space into which I squeezed my seat and did the a magnificent balancing act to prevent myself from falling off), after the superhuman one hour feat of cooking breakfast for the family, packing lunch for the children, preparing snacks for teatime, taking a shower, draping starched saree, jumping into the car whose engine would be kept running by my tense husband and charging into the ladies compartment as the train started moving. Whew!

And then, as I grew older still and more acquainted with the ways of the world, of politics and governance in my beloved country, my dreams took a dangerous turn with sting operations and Suresh Gopi/For the People style of violence dominating them.

My dreams grew toxic.

I stop here. The last thing I want to do is to poison the blogsphere.

Namaste!

I finished my business at my daughter’s school and walked down to the bus stop at the junction just a stone's throw from the school.

It was a beautiful junction. A gigantic tree stood in front of a temple, and spread its branches right across the street. The tree was easily more than 100 yrs old. I stood in its shade, my eyes running over the trunk for some label indicating its age. I found none.

I waited under the tree on that hot day, but enjoyed the wait.

Then it happened the first time.

A car pulled up across the street, bang opposite where I was standing. A gentleman looked out, joined his hands in a namaste. There was an expression of deep devotion in his eyes. Without thinking, I acknowledged the namaste with my own. The car drove off.

I was puzzled. Why did he greet me? Did I know him?

As I stood there trying to solve the mystery, another car pulled up. There was a repeat performance, both on the driver’s part and mine.

No sooner had that car left than another one stopped opposite me. Again that reverential namaste, and I, though flustered, reciprocated.

By now I was confused. And alarmed. Just the previous week Doordarshan had aired Satyajit Ray’s Devi, in which the head of the family gets a vision that the new bahu is a Devi. I tried to remember how my face looked in the mirror before I left the house. Yes, I sported a gigantic Sringar Bindi (Size 1) as also the scarlet red Sindhur. Could it be that -- - - -I brushed aside the silly thought from my mind.

And then another car stopped. This time it was an antique Benz. The person sitting in the back seat rolled down the dark tinted glass and looked out. Apparently he was a Tamilian, and wore a safari suit. The namaste again accompanied an intensely worshipful look, with eyes shut for a few seconds. The glass rolled up again, and the car sped away.

I was totally perplexed and terrible uneasy. I was more or less convinced that I was being mistaken for a Devi? I started looking around for an auto.

Before I could hail the auto that was cruising down the street, another car stopped, right in front of me and not across the road as it was going in the opposite direction. The man sitting in the back seat looked out with joined hands. Automatically my palms too joined in a low confidence namaste.

And then I noticed that he was not looking at me but at something behind me.

I whirled around to discover/remember that I was standing right in front of a temple whose deity was prominently visible. I remembered someone say that the deity of that temple was a very powerful one.

Catch Them Young and Safeguard Secularism: The Need For A Central Board For Regulating Textbook Contents

http://www.hindu.com/2009/04/15/stories/2009041555871100.htm


I remember, as a school going child, my day at school began with India is my country, all Indians are my brothers and sisters being shouted out in as many pitches as there were students in the general assembly in the quadrangle. The immense beauty of that cacophony!!

That practice, sadly enough, appears to have vanished from schools now.

I do not know if this practice was prevalent in all the states in the country, but as a student in schools in Kerala and Tamilnadu , I remember vying with the students around me to be heard when I proclaimed my Indianness, my fellow feelings for the other Indians and my love for my country. It was a good practice. It had a subliminal effect on me, and had a role in creating a sacrosanct aura around the concept of ALL INDIANS ARE MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS, irrespective of caste and creed.

The site given above, which appeared in Hindu op - ed page a couple of days ago, is indeed distressing. It talks about injecting communalism in the minds of unformed, tender minds of children in Gujarat as a strategy to usher in Ram Rajya. Indoctrinating communalism in young minds can ensure only intolerance and violence in these future citizens. We see it happening with the Taliban and other fanatical religious groups. The world is reaping the harvest of uncontrolled violence sown through ‘religious’ instruction divorced from secular humanitarian values. An irony, ‘cos religion cannot be divorced from these values.

Now, the RSS-run publishing house in Gujarat has taken a leaf out of this practice of catching them young and poisoning their minds. Yes. It is poison. Hatred is poison. Any text that legitimizes and officialises hatred and violence is poison. Detoxification of the collective mind raised on such ‘righteous’ hatred and violence is a near impossibility. The process of communalizing the tender minds of Gujarat is in full swing now, if the article is to be believed. The motive is political – to ensure vote bank in future for a divisive political outfit.

The centre must step in. Not only in Gujarat but in all states and monitor and regulate the text books prescribed for schools, right from the nursery where, in some states, it is reported that pictures are shown demonizing minority groups.

We need a central regulatory board, totally apolitical in nature, comprising intellectuals of renown. The Board should have a set term and should not be dismantled every time the Central Government changes. Political appointments should not be entertained. Regarding the text books, social studies and history text books should have the same content through out the country The state specific chapters and lessons should be designed by the state board which should be governed by the central board. The content and syllabus designed by the State Boards should be prescribed and published only after getting the approval of the Central board. The state boards should be given strict guidelines to conform to ALL- INDIANS- ARE- MY- BROTHERS- AND- SISTERS CONCEPT.

I wonder if this sounds crazy but unless some bold step like this is taken, India’s secular credentials will become history. The process of sabotaging it is already in the works. A generation anchored in lethal communal ideology is emerging in Gujarat while intellectuals and industrialists sing paeans to the Gujarat mode of Development.

I foresee the type of comments this post will throw up. I will be questioned on why I have no problem with Christian indoctrination and Christian nations’ indulgence in violence through history, or the cracking down on the Sikhs after Indira Gandhi’s death, or Islamic terrorism. Why single out Gujarat alone?

My answer is this. I do have a problem with all this. I do have a problem with every religious or political outfit that brainwashes young minds into accepting hatred as a laudable emotion, and violence as a permissible tool for achieving desired ends. No religion justifies violence and murder. True, Christian nations from the middle ages onwards have indulged in the worst form of violence in the form of Crusades, Holy inquisition etc. But these are shameful chapters in the history of civilization which no one should emulate. These dark, cruel and shameful happenings should not be used as justification or precedence for inculcating hatred among people. The attack on the Sikhs or terrorists attack elsewhere in India are no justification for a State government to officially indulge in the type of indoctrination in the name of Hinduism which is a great religion of peace, a religion which does not provide space for violence. The engineering of the text books to create a generation of hate filled Hindus is NOT the way to counter Islamic terrorism. My problem with Gujarat is that communal politics is slowly but surely gaining legitimacy there, and the path is being made clear to make possible a theocratic state within ten years. For within a decade these fledglings who are being systematically indoctrinated through schools will become competent practitioners of communal politics characterized by hatred, violence and exclusionism.

Let’s remember that much quoted saying that an eye for an eye makes the world go blind. Gujarat is heading for this blindness, for seeds of vengeful hatred are being systematically sown in the minds of the children by the official machinery. All that talk about the sensational and successful development agenda of the Gujarat Government is a ruse to deflect attention from this dangerous, long term strategy to destroy the secular fabric of India.

Are Mallu Males Perverts? The Answer - Straight from the Horse's Mouth

Today, i got a very interesting response to my post titled ARE MALLU MALES PERVERTS?. Click on the link below to read my post.
http://pareltank.blogspot.com/2008/05/are-mallus-malesperverts.html

Here's the response- a confession, rather:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Are Mallu Males Perverts?":

every word in this blog is sad but true . Being brought up in Cochin I have done many things which I feel ashamed of now - How ever those days the general attitude of the crowd is to look at every women as a object for pleasure - even though we had good female friends, the moment we are out from their company the natural attitude is to look and strip ever women in the street . In crowded places we have shown atmost vulgarity too - The point is men/boys in general thinks it is OK to do that - After leaving Kerala and living in a different state/country 1. Feel sad and ashamed of how I treated women. 2. Feel pity for all the women in Kerala . All the movies during those times made sure women was abused and pushed down and glorified all that "Very Macho "" !! It is not that I have become a Saint now - I still ogle women - How ever I make sure I dont stare at them constanly and look at them when they are not watching . And stopped taking advantage of the situation where they are in - totally! - even started helping women to some extend - Finally a piece of advise to all Mallu men -If you have even the slightest intention of getting a girl the only way is to show some decent behaviour - Think with your head and not with your co##

Random Thoughts on Elections 09 - Shashi Tharoor, Advani, Narendra Modi et al

The man who jumped on to a rath and traveled from Kanyakumari to Ayodhya to demolish a mosque and let loose communal disharmony in the country now writes to religious leaders swearing to protect “the multi-faith spiritual heritage of India if voted to power”. Not that people don’t change over the years. Had his present posture been prefaced by an apology for his role as the architect of a divided nation, his words would have carried conviction. As of now, one can only say that Advani sure has a perverted and cruel sense of humour!

* * * * *

Coming out of the church after midnight mass on Easter, I collected the longish card that was being distributed at the gate of the church. Distributing novena or prayer cards after service is a common practice. I looked at it to find Shashi Tharoor smiling up at me under an overhanging konna branch with a hand symbol beside his face, wishing me a happy Easter and Vishu. I felt happy. Is it symbolic that this should be given out on Easter? It is predictive of the resurrection of morality in public life in India? Ha ha, if wishes were horses - - - Anyway, Sashi Tharoor’s face is the most visible one in Trivandrum. Congress posters are all over the place and very very prominently pasted. A very different face (he’ll make an excellent poster boy for anti-aging creams, I must say). Taken from many imaginative angles. Seemingly innocent of the filth that distorts the image of our politicians. Once he gets elected (a foregone conclusion or wishful thinking?) will he turn out to be a Dorian Gray? God forbid, but such is my faith in the polity of my dear country.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, netas - of left, right and Centre (read Congress)-are descending all over the state bullshitting the same old stale or toxic crap. When will they realize that they cannot fool all the people all the time?

* * * * *

Elsewhere in the country, Narendra Modi comes up with a metaphor reminiscent of Hitler’s holocaust policy. Congress, being an old lady, is of no use to the country, he says. There is grave danger lurking in this metaphor. In the Jewish concentration camps, the category consisting of the old, the women and children were marked out for the first rounds of gas chambering, ‘cos their utility value was none. If metaphors are windows which expose the hidden recesses of the human mind, Modi is a danger man who can subvert the humanitarian values that form the foundation of a civilized society. And, oh God, he has his eyes on New Delhi!

Maundy Thursday and Indriappam

I have always loved the Maundy Thursday. While it is not all about Indriappam (Kerala version of unleavened bread) and the pesaha paalu (Passover milk), it is also about them. A Maundy Thursday without them is unthinkable to me.

For this pesaha, my maid was on leave. I know many nazarane families have given up this practice of making appam and paalu – but not for a moment did I think of not making it. My eighty plus ammachi (mother-in-law) with poor eyesight and a weak heart and I, still treated like cut glass after my brush with cancer, decided that maid or no maid, appam and paalu we shall make. How can you think of Maundy Thursday without them?

Why is it so, I wonder.

My earliest memory of the Indriyappam and paalu goes back to the days in DARE HOUSE, where I lived from the age of four to ten. The Maundy Thursdays have always been the same. Ichayan (my father) at the head of the table and amma and eight children sitting on both sides of the big dining table. A short prayer and then Ichayan symbolically cuts the first made Indriappam which has a cross on it from two small pieces of palm leaf received on Palm Sunday. Then amma takes over; cuts that appam into as many pieces as there are people seated at the table and staff in the house. Ichayan then dips each piece in the Paalu and gives to each of us and the staff of the house.

The practice is identical in my husband’s house too. I suppose it is the same in all Nazrane houses.

To come back to the question, why is it that I am so particular about this practice? Why is it that I am filled with a sense of guilt? sadness? whenever I have remotely contemplated skipping this custom just for once?

I suppose nostalgia has something to do with it. Sitting around the table for this ritual always takes me back to the many many years we’d done this before. As we children grew up and flew away one by one, the number around the table dwindled. On some Maundy Thursdays, our little nephew and nieces would come home for the breaking of the unleavened bread. Their young bright faces and enthusiasm and chatter would make up for the missing siblings. There were times when my brothers’ friends joined us for this ritual. Yes. There was plenty for the mind to wander and linger over. Nostalgia is certainly not innocent of complicity in creating that compulsive need to perpetuate the practice.

But that is not all. There is something more to it, something more compulsive than nostalgia, something which admonishes the mind when it toys with the idea of skipping the practice. That something has a deeper appeal, but I cannot put my finger on it. The emotions evoked by it defy clear definition but I will try to analyse them here and now.

I think it has something to do with the shared knowledge in the collective consciousness of the nazranes who, for generations have been fed on the Biblical story of Jehovah’s protective arm over the chosen people in slavery, which the feast of the Passover commemorates. Equally if not more important is the fact that it is a reenactment the Last Supper. The text is translated into action year after year in the family on Maundy Thursday, and the whole ritual brings with it a complex interplay of tradition, myth, shared knowledge and spiritual experience which constitute the sense of nazrane identity.

And thus it was that we got the neighbour's maid to grate coconuts. The rest, the two of us managed.

By one thirty indriappam and pasaha paalu were ready.

Once again achachan (my ninety four year old father-in-law) cut the indriappam i.e. broke the bread -unleavened one on this day.

Shashi Tharoor in the Fray: Why we should Give him a Chance.

Why is he in the fray at all?

Possibly because of the weakness the President of the Congress Party has for intellectuals, technocrats and political novices. Also because she has an incurable faith in mallus (!? :-))

My take on Tharoor

He is a true global Indian.

I think most of us in my profession began to take him seriously as he made his presence felt through his literary works. Then, of course, he became the Under-Secretary General of the UN and all mallus were proud of him. When his claim for the position of UN Secretary General was rejected, all Indians were angry. Mallus were more angry. Many said that the US manipulated the appointment ‘cos they knew that Tharoor couldn’t be manipulated. Well, what the truth of the matter is, no one knows. Whatever it is, Shashi Tharoor’s image suffered no damage. He became a man of character and a man with a mind of his own despite his well celebrated super diplomacy.

I attended the inauguration of his AABC at Technopark. Mr. Tharoor impressed me by his very difference. He was picture perfect on the dais which he shared with MA Baby and VS. We saw the diplomat in action on that occasion - strict adherence to protocol, all the right moves and gestures like escorting the CM and The Education Minister to the lectern which was hardly 10 feet from their seats, when the MC invited them for their messages. Tharoor played his role as the host and organizer with much charm and élan.

After the inaugural function in the common hall of Technopark, we had to move towards the AAbc building which was bang opposite the hall. I saw a strange sight which both amused and impressed me. Mr. Tharoor put the ministers in their cars and instead of getting into another AC car and following them to the office , he ran across the compound, across the road and disappeared into the gates of the building! No doubt he was waiting for them when the VIP cars reached the building.

I cannot think of many public figures who would have run like that in the hot sun( except perhaps Alphonse Kannanthanam), totally impervious to the fact that he is a celebrity and a person who missed the highest position in the world by the skin of his teeth.

Why should we elect him?

The points stacked against him are 1.he is inexperienced in Indian politics 2. He is too westernized in his thinking 3. He is not in touch with the ground reality in India.

Let’s look at each of these problems.

He is inexperienced in Indian politics – true, I guess. But what are these experienced guys doing? The more experience they acquire, the fatter their pockets become, the greater their nexus with anti social outfits and greater their propensity to play the communal card.

He is too westernized in his thinking

So what? A refreshing change, a new perspective and a global outlook. The country can do with it.

He is not in touch with the ground reality in India.

How many of our netas have that? They are in touch with party's ground realities, not the country’s. Besides, Shashi Tharoor is learning - and learning pretty fast. He’s improving every second.

And then of course, a whole lot of pro Israeli articles he wrote which can be dismissed without much ado. He wrote them not in the capacity of an MP.

Will he win?

No idea. Hope he does. The differences in the party over giving the ticket to Tharoor have been ironed out. The campaign is in full swing. And he is media’s pet.

A word of advice to Tharoor from a well wisher.

Build up a rapport with the intelligentsia of Trivandrun with whom he is very popular. They have a great reach and are a sure route to the common man. They are waiting for a change, for a new face and new mind free from the frog in the well syndrome.

Wish you success Mr. Shashi Tharoor

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Chilled in Venice and Capuccino

“It will be windy”, Antonio, the travel agent’s local man who accompanied us through the tour in Italy, had cautioned us. “Put on something warm”.

So I pulled the sweater over the salwar suit. My feminist husband who turns macho when it comes to braving inclement weather, chose, however, to wear a half sleeved shirt, and , as a concession (I was nagging) a sleeveless sweater. I must say he looked quite handsome!

As we entered the bus, I noticed that most of our friends were also clothed as though to beat a mildly chilly weather. Of course, none was as inadequately dressed for the weather as my dear husband.

The short walk from the hotel to the bus was brrrrr cold! I got nervous and offered to run up to the room and get the windcheater and the cap for both of us. As expected, the hubby vetoed contemptuously with an upward turn of the left corner of his mouth.

WE soon reached the spot where we had to alight from the bus to board the boat that was to take us to ST. Marks Square.

As we walked, the realization hit us with the bitterly cold blast that greeted us, that we had seriously underrated the weather. It was windy all right but the wind bore no resemblance whatsoever to the welcome breeze or even the occasional chilly wind of our tropical homes. This was terrible - felt as though someone was shoveling ice on me as I walked along. I looked around and saw everybody shivering shamelessly. Some were trying to control the jaws which went kadakadakada.

“They should have told us it’ll be this cold”, someone grumbled.
“They dihidihidihid”, voice unsteady.
“They should have told us it’ll be freezing cold! Pah”

As we waited for the boat, we noticed that the water between the jetty and wall was full of rotting leaves.

The Keralites among us tried to make a joke of Venice being the Alleppey of the west but couldn’t get to the end of the joke as our voices dwindled off into a freezing halt. We tried to smile at each other but ended up grimacing.

I looked anxiously at my husband. He grinned at me nonchalantly, but I thought I saw something laboured in that grin.

“Not freezing?”, I asked him.
“Will survive, don’t worry”. Casually.

The boat arrived and a batch of Chinese tourists came out. All of them looked double their size from the layers and layers of clothes they had wrapped themselves in. Their headgear reminded me of the pictures of Eskimos. And as they passed us, they were grinning at us and at each other, hugely amused at us, the poor tropical creatures, shaking and shivering and crouching in the most undignified manner.

The boat was warm and soon we were in our elements. The view on either side was incredible. It felt as if we were moving through the medieval ages. Cameras were clicking furiously but I sat back and enjoyed the feel – the feel of traveling through some age in the remote past, the feel of the romance of a bygone era.

Oh, it was lovely.

How well these Italians have preserved their heritage! The centuries old structures were well maintained. How well developed is their tourism industry. Why can’t we also do this, I thought sadly. We too have an equally great heritage to preserve. Why don’t we get our act together like these people who are so proud of their history and heritage?

WE reached the jetty near St. Marks Square where the guide was waiting for us. Out of the warmth of the boat, we restarted the uncontrollable shivering act. I saw hands disappearing into the sweaters, noses turning red, teeth chattering as people listened to the very competent guide who was least impressed by our frozen condition. She herself was in a great overcoat with a furry collar, and wore a warm monkey cap which covered her ears well (It took all my self control to restrain myself from snatching it off her head and running away with it). She wore knee high boots, and here we were with nothing more than trousers or jeans or churidars or salwars between us and that sadistically biting wind that was, without let up, sending millions of tiny sharp icy darts.

Needless to say, the square was simply out of this world. Soon it was dark and the lights came. The sight took our breath away –the lights were symmetrically arranged for the best effect. The bell tower, St. Marks Church churches with stunning carvings and pillars – oh, it was all so richly carved with figures from history, myth and religion. Only, we were freezing and wanted to get into a warm place to revive our blood flow which, by then, was beginning to get congealed.

My poor husband by then had given up all his macho pretensions, and was making funny sounds.

“What is it?” I asked.
“Chumma” he said, like Mohanlal.
“What are those strange sounds you are making?”
“Hei, it’s nothing”, he said. He tried that lopsided grin which froze half way thru. I noticed the goose bumps on his arms. He was the only human being in that crowded square who had any part of the anatomy exposed to the stinging wind. I noticed that he too was becoming an item of tourists interest.

I wanted to gloat and tell him “Serves you right”. But I didn’t. After all, I can’t behave as though there is no tomorrow.

Soon, it was time for the gondola ride. We chose not to go. Another couple from Kerala too decided to stay back. We were not sure if we could handle the cold(When the group returned after the ride, they told us that the gondola ride was warmer than standing in the Square). Besides, it was dark and the visibility was almost nil. The guide told us that it was worth going just to feel and hear the sound of the water lapping on the sides of the gondola. Well. We have traveled enough times in the snake boats back home in Kuttanaad. So there was no novelty in the experience, we Keralites who chose to stay back consoled ourselves. It was a different thing if we could see the banks, which, the guide had told us, was not possible in that fading light.

So we hung around in the square while the others went for the gondola ride. The ground floor off the pavement of the square was full of shops where Italian jewelry, Murano glass items and a whole lot of other things were very attractively displayed. We tried window shopping. The rates appeared whopping, particularly when we converted euros to rupees; I guess our frozen state too had something to do with the rates appearing prohibitive.

“Let’s get into a café and have something to drink”, I suggested. “It’ll be warm and coffee will warm us up”

We got into a café and ordered cappuccino coffee. We were thrilled at the prospect of sitting in the warm café and sipping little by little piping hot coffee. Soon the order came. Each of us was served, without exaggeration, half an ounce of bitter coffee! We masked our utter dismay behind a poker face while it was being placed on the table. I even managed a sweet thank you in the direction of the waitress. After all, we are the brand ambassadors of our country!

I wish I had taken pictures of our expressions as we looked at the half ounce blackish coffee and then at each other.

“Maybe more will come”, I said hopefully.
“Mmn. kaathirunno” (you can wait forever for it), my friend said.

We tried sipping the coffee slowly but none of us could go beyond one and a half sips. It was over! One and a half sips for two euros!!(More that Rs.120).

“We came in for the warmth. Let’s think that we are paying for getting away from the cold”, I said weakly. After all it was my bright idea to walk into a restaurant and sip a giant cup of piping hot coffee and feel the warmth seep through your body and thaw the frozen blood. I had to come up with some justification.

All the three nodded somberly in unison.

Looking back, we realized that we should have freaked out on some good food and stopped converting. But I think it takes a few days of transacting in the unfamiliar currency to be able to do that. The Venice trip was in the evening of the day we landed in Italy.

And of course, our brains too were frozen, disabling sensible thinking. It takes sometime to handle the alien climate of an alien place too.

Renaissance Visited

I saw. I really and truly saw. With my own eyes.

I saw the Statue of David and the Pieta. I actually stood before them and looked at them. And thought of what the sculptor believed - that a form was always trapped in a stone, and the sculptors job was to liberate it from the stone!

I saw Buonnarotti’s aesthetic extravaganza on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel and on the wall behind the altar.

As a child I had seen them in that gigantic hardbound album of classical art which I couldn’t lift. So heavy it was. My brother Vakkachayan had acquired it from somewhere and it was my favourite pastime turning its pages, from the first to the last and reading the captions and the explanatory notes. Every picture in that book of paintings from the 11th century to the 19th century had a long story behind it. My brother told me many of them, and I poured over those pages almost every day. The Sistine Chapel paintings and the statue of David, I remember, made me blush. I remember the domestic help once teased me for looking at ‘obscene’ pictures.

But last week I saw them all. In flesh and blood(!?). And I looked and looked.

No. I have no trained eye for art. But the idea. Yes. It is the idea that held me enthralled. The idea I had passed on to my students year after year when I introduced them to the Italian Renaissance, the precursor to the English.

Looking up, with my head at right angle to the body, at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the heavily crowded room where cameras were not permitted. I remembered the numerous stories about Michael Angelo. The Agony and the Ecstasy. The spirit of Renaissance reflected in the strange but exquisite co habitation of the Hellenic and Hebraic achieved in the paintings and sculptures of the period. The liberation of art from the straight-jacketed demands of an austere religion. All that I read (without fully comprehending) and taught as part of my profession came crowding into my mind. The feeling was strange. It was like a nostalgia for something I have never seen or experienced – perhaps a nostalgia for an imaginary world I was forced to inhabit as one of the imperatives of my occupation, and which eventually entered my soul and became part of me.

Maybe I’m not making sense.

The Return of the Natives - Are You Ready, Kerala?

The reverse flow has begun. The NRIs who kept Kerala going through the ‘Money Order Economy’ are returning in hordes/hoards to Kerala.

Is Kerala ready for them? The Government is offering rehabilitation packages. But how effective they will be, time alone can tell.

But one thing is certain. Kerala will be hit below the belt with the return of these people who buttressed for decades a comparatively non-income generating state. These Non resident Indians slogged it out in the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the USA to sustain a lazy and arrogant people back home. Now, Kerala will not take kindly to their return. And, these people cannot be rehabilitated unless the proverbial Kerala mindset undergoes a sea change, and a climate is created for investing money in business in Kerala

This brings to my mind an incident I witnessed in 1986, while traveling from Trivandrum to Changanasserry in a bus.

The bus stopped in some place after Kottarkara, and a well dressed man in his early forties alighted. I had the window seat and so I had a good view of the gripping drama which unfolded outside.

Apparently, the passenger was employed in the Gulf and had come home for a vacation. He had boarded the bus from the Trivandrum airport. As he got down, the kili unloaded his suitcases from the top of the bus, and left them in the waiting shed. In the meanwhile, the man had hailed a cab and was about to load the suitcases into the cab when a group of head load workers (hereafter will be referred to as attimaris) circled him. The man very politely said that he didn’t need anyone’s help to put those suitcases into the cab. The attimaris became aggressive. Some raised their voices. Others began to get abusive with the taxi driver, threatening dire consequences if he transported the passenger.
.
“How much”, the passenger asked. Still polite.
“RS. 200” (it was in the eighties, mind you).
The passenger smiled and said, “Come on, brother, you must be joking”. He then offered to give them some money for a cup of tea for each of them.
The attimariwallas became nasty. They laughed raucously; their language and body language changed

“Let’s see if you leave this spot without giving us what we asked”, one of them challenged in the most belligerent, offensive hateful manner.
Another man put his hands on the suitcases.
And then something happened which stunned us.
All on a sudden, without any warning whatsoever, a great transformation came over the passenger. From a polite, peace loving soft-spoken man trying to arrive at a compromise with the attimariwallas , he metamorphosed into a raging bull!
“Take your hands off my box”, he thundered.
Believe it or not, the attimarywalla jerked his hands away as though the suitcases were white hot.
“I slog it out in the desert sun for days and months”, he continued, unstoppable by now, “and you guys cooling your heels here want a share of what I made with my sweat, eh?”(Literal translation)
Then, he unbuttoned the sleeves of his shirt and pushed them up his arms, clenched his fist and said, loud and clear in a deadly calm flat voice.
“Come. Who wants 200 hundred rupees? Come and take what I have to give”, he said.

I couldn’t believe what I saw. The attimaris moved back in a group, looked at each other. Then one of them looked at the cab driver and said, “Go on, take him to whichever hell he wants to go to”. Then looking at his fellow headload workers, he said”Let’s not waste time on these good for nothing people”, and they walked off.

Our bus left the stop at this point. The driver, conductor and the passengers were eagerly waiting to see how this drama would end, and I must say that all were happy with the ending.

As the journey continued, I remembered a report which had come in the Malayala Manorama a few days earlier.

A foreign tourist landed in Kochin airport. As luggage, he had only a back pack and a sophisticated video camera with its accessories. The attimaris surrounded him as he came out of the restricted area and told him that as head load workers, it was their right to carry the video camera as it was a fairly big piece of baggage. A fellow passenger, whom the foreigner approached for an explanation of their demands, explained to him the practice of attimary.

The visitor thanked him and walked back to the airport, bought a ticket for the next flight out of Kochin - to Goa.

A Manorama reporter met him at the Goa airport and asked him what made him come to Goa.

“There is no Atti Mary (sounded like attic without the last k sound and Mary, the name) in Goa”, he said.

Things haven't changed in Kerala still. The situation is as bad if not worse.

Now, back to the return of the diasporic population of Kerala, the situation is grim not only for them, but also for the state. Predictions are very disturbing. The most pessimistic prophets of doom see the state plunging headlong into the worst economic abyss with inflation, unemployment, crime rate and suicide rate reaching an all time high. With the elections in the offing, these issues are non-issues to leaders and political parties who, by now, should already have set afoot policies to preempt the projected alarming fallout of global meltdown.

But then, it is too much to expect from our netas a feeling of an urgent need to address these issues. What does it matter to them if the state economy crumbles like a pack of cards? Or trauma grips people across the classes? Or men, women, children succumb in despair to the tribulations of a failed economy?

With political support, unionized labour, Associations of officers and clerical unions in the public sector will continue to agitate for their pound of flesh, totally impervious to the fact that they are highly privileged with an all time high salary, perks and job security in times when retrenchment across the globe is casting dark shadows of uncertainty and insecurity across God’s own country. And what does it matter to our callous netas if this state and its people go to the dogs?

Thank You and Good Bye, Sri Mathew T. Thomas, Our Dear Transport Minister

He belongs to that endangered species among politicians called Statesmen.

He is clean.

He is a performer. He had begun to turn things around for the KSRTC.

He is creative, imaginative and resourceful. He had earnestly set about reviving the ailing KSRTC with innovative moves.

But Mathew T. Thomas, the Transport Minister of Kerala had to go. He had to submit himself to party discipline. But he was stoic about it. Cool as a cucumber, and cheerful. “The minister’s post is not my birthright”, the man said! The most quotable quote from a sphere dominated by Pinarayis and Mayavathis and Lalus and others of that ilk.

I hope they are listening.

And the people of Kerala love him. People love honest and performing ministers. To have committed, competent and upright politicians at the helm of affairs redeems our faith in the democratic system.

On a personal note, his wife is my student. She shifted residence to Trivandrum when her husband became the Transport Minister in the LDF government, and commutes to a town in mid-Travancore where she works as a lecturer. She traveled in the ordinary class for more than a year. The ordeals of commuting in the ordinary class can be appreciated only by those who have done it. A few months back, she took first class season ticket when she realized that the time spent in the train can be fruitfully utilized for preparation and paper evaluation.

Recently, I happened to travel in the same train that she commutes in. She came to hear that I was traveling in the next compartment, from a common friend who had run into me in the station. She came over to see me. I must confess that I was flattered that the minister’s wife had come to see me. But what struck me was that she was the same old respectful pleasant and unassuming student who attended my lectures some twenty odd years ago. A very unassuming, self-effacing person who simply did not think of taking advantage of her husband's position.

Not only Caesar, but his wife also is above blame.

May their tribe increase.

Every Woman Has Her Day?

We have come a long way.
The road ahead is longer
And the ordeals tougher, we are told.

Next is flogging in the maidan
Or is it stoning unto death?
That depends, we are told
On whatever it is that suits Him.

Still ahead it’s begging
By the dusty streets
Of busy towns.
But our manicured hands would betray us.
Though the purdah would shield our wounded pride.

Tougher ones will follow, we are told.
Their numbers ever increasing
Like the hydra headed monster
Two replacing every decapitated one.

Will the ordeals ever end?
Will our destination
Remain ever elusive?

And our protests?
Will they remain ever drowned
In the silence of despair and fear?

Media and Terror

It is strange how media is playing in to the hands of the terrorists; and how the government is doing nothing to correct it.

Every act of terror is a statement. A major component of the modus operandi of terrorist activities is to go for maximum publicity. The perpetrators want the statement to travel far and wide, and the media is meekly obliging them.

Media tenaciously clings to its rights – the right of expression, the freedom of the Press, and thrashes out at the government when it places restrictions in the best interest of its trouble shooting operations. This we saw during the Mumbai terror attack. There are many who believe that the situation could have been handled with much less causality had the media not been so keen on updates which were being fed to the high tech terrorists through cell phones. In the name of the freedom of the fourth estate, the media cooperated with terrorists, without meaning to. Apparently, media’s concern was only with its own inalienable rights. But, if an exercise of their rights can be achieved only at the cost of general weal, rights no longer remains RIGHTS. Rights stops being rights the minute they encroach on the legitimate welfare and safety of others. But with the cutthroat competition that channels and print media face, one up mannish attitude prevails, but no sense or sense of propriety and discretion. Responsible behavior is often compromised. And most of the time, the dramatic and melodaramatic reporting and the clever punch lines which might win journalistic acclaim are also what the terrorists want to elicit from these passionate guardians of democratic rights.

As for the government, it lives in such terror of the media that it refuses to take a firm stand with it. With some elections round the corner all the time, the government will not jeopardize its position by earning the ire of the all powerful media, which can make or break its chances of reelection.

The result? The media becomes partners in terrorism and the government just watches helplessly.

Ideally, when terror strikes as it did in Mumbai and Lahore, the media should refuse to give it coverage. Of course, it should be reported but no visuals, no discussions till the situation is under control. As a matter of policy, refuse to give terror the visibility it craves for. But invariably, what happens, inadvertently though, is the glamourisation of the terror act, and more often than not, the viewer ends up developing a sneaking admiration for the terrorist’s modus operandi and professionalism. This is exactly what the terror merchants want to tell the world. They want to sell the idea of their professionalism and preparedness to take on the world.

On its own initiative, media will not restrain itself to the extent of withholding visuals and emotional reporting by high profile journalists. A national disaster that can enhance its viewership will be looked upon as a kill, as the occasion and moment to attract sponsorship. For the media, patriotism is only second to commercialism.

So the initiaitive should come from the government. It should either take the media into confidence and arrive at an understanding on how it should behave in times of terror strikes, or it should declare a state of emergency as it is constitutionally entitled to do during war time. For terrorism is war. No denying that. Only, the nature of warfare is different.

Needless to say, all countries battling terror or not supporting it, should do this. Nations of the world should agree on this policy of regulating media behaviour during terror attacks in any part of the world. Otherwise, an effort in this direction by one country will be rendered futile. I know this idea sounds wild and unthinkable and naïve. But the way terrorism is growing across the globe, the governments will have to tread hitherto untravelled paths to combat this danger. Depriving terrorism of publicity is not a complete solution, but is definitely a part of it. No stones must be left unturned to drain terrorism of its life blood.

To Smile or Not to Smile

‘What does a smile cost you?’ asked my mother-in-law when I told her about running into a neighbour from our hometown, outside the supermarket. My brother had been with me and we were coming out of the Complex compound when this middle aged thin man started walking towards us, looking as though he wanted to speak to me.

‘Looks like one of those well dressed tramps who come with sob stories and end up asking for money”, I told my brother under my breath. I had remembered a similar story told to me by one of my colleagues just two days before.

The man, walking quickly towards us, reached us. I noticed that my brother was about to say something to him. But the man was already asking me with a smile if I were so & so's daughter-in-law and so & so’s wife.
Yes, I told him. He then identified himself. He was our neighbour back home ( obscenely rich, i remebered the name) and when I didn’t return his smile, he thought he should come up and identify himself.

“How stupid you are”, protested my brother, totally annoyed. “I was about to ask him for some money. That’s the best way to drive off decent looking mendicants”.

My mother-in-law had a good laugh when i my narrated this incident. She tried to imagine the situation where my brother beat him to it and asked him for money, and the explanations I would have had to concoct to be seen in the company of a man who asks for money from total strangers. “Surely, you cant tell him you mistook him for a beggar; also, you can’t also introduce M as your brother too”. Wiping tears of laughter, she advised me not to be so miserly with my smile.
“Nobody will smile at you if they don’t know you; You have such a terrible memory for faces. So just smile back. It costs you nothing. Otherwise you’ll offend people”, she said.

Yes, after all, what does a smile cost me I thought. And I practised her advice, smiled at everybody who smiled at me, whether I knew her/him or not.

And then, one day, at the railway station of the small town where I worked, I was waiting for the Madras Mail. My friends from the other colleges and offices hadn’t yet arrived. So I sat on the bench, and looked around.

Then I saw him.

A tall square faced man with light eyes. I knew I had seen him somewhere. He looked very very familiar. I must have been staring at him for I saw him look straight at me. Then I saw a hint of a smile on his face.

I gave him a broad, charming smile.

I usually look away after smiling at a person whom I didn’t recognize. But before I could do it, I saw a startled expression on his face. Then he too smiled. And started walking towards me.

I was desperately trying to remember who he was, where I had seen him but couldn’t. He sat on the other end of the bench. I looked at him, hoping to place him from the conversation. He turned his head and smiled hesitantly. Suddenly, like a bolt of thunder lighting up the sky, the truth was revealed to me. Yes, yes, with that same abruptness that the law of buoyancy exploded on Archemedes, and which made him rush down through the streets of Greece in a state of undress!

In flash, I knew why he looked familiar.

He looked exactly like Kapil Dev who was a much fêted celebrity then, and so was among the most visible faces in India.

That’s why he looked familiar!

Disaster! I didn’t know the man, and I had smiled at him!

I jumped up from the bench and walked quickly towards the book shop, and searched and bought a magazine I did not want. As I turned to leave the shop, I saw the man standing behind me. Then I rushed to the soft drink counter of the railway canteen and asked for a Fanta, stood there and drank it. Turning around, I saw him standing there, too.

I panicked. As usual I started knocking at heaven’s gate to pull me out of the mess I had got myself into. “Please, pleeeease, God. Deliver me from this stalker!”, I pleaded.

Tanta daang! At the entrance of the platform, my friends appeared – six or seven of them! And they stepped on to the platform laughing and talking.

I bolted towards them.

I must have looked flustered, ‘cos they asked what the matter was. Without looking at the man, I told them that the man standing near the refreshment counter was stalking me.

There were a few very bold ladies among them and they decided to handle him. I pleaded with them not to.

“That’s why these rascals behave like this. They get away with everything ‘cos women don’t react.
“No. no. Listen to me first and then decide whether to give him a dressing down’.

I told him about the blunder I made. They had a good laugh.

“Never smile at a man unless you are 200% sure you know him”, they advised.

Times must have changed a lot since my mother-in-law’s days, I thought ruefully.

Ever since, I don’t smile, even at my husband, if I see him outside the house unless I’m sure it’s him and not someone who resembles him.

Slumdog Millionare Should not Have Won the Oscar?

Netizens have received the Slumdog Millionaire’s achievements with mixed feelings. Opinions are divided almost 50/50 between those who feel the film deserved the accolades it received and those who feel it didn’t. Now the print media has begun reflecting the views of those who believe that the film got more attention than it deserved.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, so am not in a position to talk about its merits. But the logic that informs the negative responses deserves to be looked into. Take a look at this excerpt from the link I have given at the bottom of the page.

Other than Slumdog, I have seen only one film out of the other four nominated. But I've read about all of them. The one that I saw is The Reader. The subject is far more intellectually challenging, emotionally moving and morally disturbing than Slumdog can ever hope to be. - - - -
But look at the themes of the other movies that were nominated this year. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the love story of a man who is born as an extreme geriatric and keeps getting younger and dies as a newborn. Only for a brief period of time are the man and his beloved around the same compatible age. Of course it's an impossible concept and completely unbelievable, but it's a high concept. Milk is about the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States; Frost/Nixon about the first interview disgraced US President Richard Nixon gave, to has-been TV journalist David Frost. For both of them, it is a chance for redemption, for a somewhat sane life. These are all big themes. I am not doubting Slumdog's quality as a film in any way. Danny Boyle is one of the most talented directors around. But comparing Slumdog to The Reader is almost impossible. It's like comparing A Christmas Carol to Great Expectations.

Scrooge won, little Pip lost. But that's the way it has been with the Oscars

Interesting, isn’t it? But the reference to “a high Concept” and “big themes”, and the purportedly reductive comparison of Slumdog Millionaire to A Christmas Carol betray the grip on the author of certain notions of canonicity and high culture.

If the problem cited is with the execution of the film, I have no arguments against it. But that’s not the case. He writes: I am not doubting Slumdog's quality as a film in any way. Danny Boyle is one of the most talented directors around,. So that’s not the issue. The issue is the theme of the movie. It’s a problem with the size and height of the theme.

Now, who is to decide how to hierarchize the quality and importance of themes? True, the reverse development of Benjamin Button is strange, curious, interesting and daring. The predicament of a gay public figure in Milk and the intense moral drama of Frost/Nixon are sensitive, challenging and intellectually appealing themes.

What about the theme of Slumdog Millionaire? Is it trivial? A social problem best swept under the red carpet of the Oscar venue?

On two scores, the comparison to Charles Dicken's Christmas Carol is appropriate. 1. In Victorian England, the novel revived a new interest in the spirit of Christmas which was being reduced to a mere bash by those who enjoyed the fruits of the Industrial Revolution. 2. Though a fantasy tale, it was a emphatic censure of the social evils thrown up by the Industrial Revolution. In a fabular style, The Christmas Carol poses the question to the conscience of Victorian England turning a blind eye to huge marginalisation of human beings. And the question is one that is hugely relevant today, in these days of a corporate friendly mode of development across the globe. And the question Scrooge puts to the ghost is “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer Scrooge gets is “Yes. You are.”

Well, Slum Dog poses the same question. Is that question any less relevant than how challenged people or gays or the privileged deal with their life situations?

Is the issue of sixty percent of a city’s people living in slums something that can be dismissed on account of its lack of intellectual appeal? In what sense is it not a high or big theme?

Or is it that, by Hollywood standards, it is a low budget film?

What/who decides the height and size of a theme?

Aren’t we Indians angry because the film defamiliarizes the ugly reality of the underdogs of our society? Because it causes the film to fall off from the eyes of us, the twenty first century Scrooges?

http://in.news.yahoo.com/48/20090224/1241/top-it-shouldn-t-have-won.html

Stray Afterthoughts on India at the Oscars.

I was waiting for the euphoria to die down somewhat.

It feels great. We always knew that AR Rahman was a rare genius. I love music but have little or no knowledge of its science. But one doesn’t have to be a music academic to know that AR Rahman is the rarest of gems. I can never forget the first the first time I heard Chinna China Asai in Tamil. I was checking university papers. The song stunned me into inaction, suspended all my senses except that of hearing. It was nothing like I’d ever heard before. The novelty of it – the sounds and their management, the sound of water?, a brook tripping over stones? all captured in a harmony that I was sure would suspend the motions of the stars. Such was the total effect. It was incredible. Listening to Chinna Chinna Asai for the first time was an experience - of a sensation coursing through my blood; it was not just an act of listening to a composition. It was like being part of a hitherto unheard harmony of strange sounds descending from another galaxy. When Ar Rahman tamilised Beethoven in Thiruda Thiruda, I was bewildered, dazed, and ecstatic. The space between systems of music seems to collapsed totally.

Now, of course, the novelty has worn off.

However, we didn’t need an Oscar to tell us what AR Rahman’s place was in the world of music. But we are happy that he got this recognition.

But it took an Oscar and other international awards for Pookutty to make us realize that the ‘technicians’ are/have to be artists par excellence, that there is a high degree of aesthetics involved in the role of these technicians. I remember, more than twenty years ago, my very intelligent niece Anita was very vociferous on this issue. Strange, it took a quarter of a century and an Oscar to make me realise how truly she had spoken.

Both the Oscar award winners carried themselves with extreme dignity and confidence at the function and after.

But our own dear Anil Kapoor. What on earth got into him! On several occasions he made us go red- eared! But what took the cake was his excited declaration ('Guess who came on the stage after the best movie was announced?' Anil Kapoor -) that Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russel came to the stage to congratulate the Slum Dog team, that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt came to his house(?), “they didn’t know who I was, they didn’t even know I'm an actor - - –“!!!??? He was incoherent with excitement.

Oh, he embarrassed us, to say the least. Why doesn’t he realize that the adulation of millions of his countrymen is a greater recognition than a few Hollywood stars shaking hands with him?

And so back to my pet theme. When will we recover from this colonial hangover?

Thank You, Resul Pookutty.

I come from a country and civilisation that gave the world the word that is preceded by silence and is followed by more silence. That word is 'Om'. So I dedicate this award to my country," said Kerala-born sound technician. This is not just a sound award but a piece of history that has been handed over to me.

Thank you, Resul Pookutty. Not just for the Oscar, but for going out there and proclaiming to the whole world, and to India in particular that he is an Indian, he is proud to be an Indian and that the Indian heritage is his too, despite being a Muslim.

He went a step further. He dedicated the Oscar to India as a gift on the day of the great festival of Sivarathri which India was celebrating while the Oscar function was going on.

He represents the true spirit of India , that secular backbone of the Indian psyche which holds this country together despite the concerted efforts of agents with petty political agenda to polarize this great nation on communal lines.

His speech took me back to my college days when we were Indians first.

Thank you Pookutty. May your tribe increase.

Two Great Men - Dr. Aiyyappa Panikar and

This is my third post on Dr. Aiyyappa Panikar. While searching for something else I came across a synopsis which I had written on a bibliography card (!) as demanded by the great man who was then the Director of the Institute where I did research. As I was writing it down with shaking clammy fingers, a fellow Research Scholar told me this story.

Dr Aiyappa Pannikar (AP) was a very demanding Research Guide. He only had to look at a page to detect the grammar errors! His eyes need only to run down the pages of an entire assignment for him to ascertain the quality of the work. If he was in a foul mood, he would tell you in harsh language what exactly was wrong with the paper – whether it was puerile, simplistic, superficial, biased, judgmental, lacks cogency and consistency, or whatever. If he was in a pleasant mood, he would tell you the same things in the most humorously sarcastic language that you will laugh at yourself. Either way, it was an education – a rare one that you will always treasure for it was a clear and emphatic discourse on what research should or should not be.

So, one of his students – it happened to be a nun –once went into his room which was adjacent to the Research Scholars’ room (he was not the Director then – it happened long before my days at the Institute). The Research Scholars’ room and Dr. Panikar’s room, on the first floor, had the corridor on one side and, on the other side, huge half French windows over looking a stretch of vacant plot with trees and wild growth. One would not dare to venture into that plot for fear of snakes and insects. It was as dangerous as going into Dr Panikar's room with a badly done assignment. The Research Scholars’ desks were placed against these windows and they sat facing the windows.

So, this nun announced that she was going to submit the first chapter of the first draft of her thesis and went out. Five minutes after she left the room, the research scholars facing the window saw A4 papers floating over the vacant plot like so many kites out of control. They quickly asked each other to check the papers on their desks to see if their papers were blown off the desk by the ceiling fan. Nobody had lost anything. They were wondering what it could be. Some one said it could be from the desk of the professors’ rooms, all of which had these windows on one side. As they were discussing, one of the scholars spotted the sister walking gingerly into the plot, looking up furtively to see if anyone was watching from the Research Scholars room. All of them kept themselves out of sight ‘cos they realized what had happened, and didn’t want to embarrass her. Apparently, Dr. Panikar had flung the papers out of the window.

The poor sister picked her way through the overgrown grass and thick vines, praying, no doubt, to St. George to keep her safe from reptiles. Occasionally, she would shoot a quick glance at the windows. The Research Scholars watched the entire operation keeping themselves out of sight. Soon, there was only one more sheet of paper to be picked up. It was right below the window of one of the Research Scholars. As she bent down to pick up the paper, he threw down the cigarette he was smoking so that it fell near her paper. She jerked her head up to the window to see her fellow Research Scholar wave out to her with a sweet smile.

That Research Scholar with none other than the late Dr. Narendra Prasad, who later became a famous actor in Malayalam.