generallyalive

Being A Minority in an Authoritarian State: Some Thoughts on the Death of Srinivas Kuchibothla

2017-03-03T23:28:00.001+10:30

An Indian man was killed in America last week in a racial crime. It is a tragedy and my heart goes out to the victim’s family, left suddenly shattered, trying to make sense of something random and pointless. I could not get the incident out of my mind, and this post developed as I kept thinking about it.

The first point is one which is made very often, yet keeps recurring. In any instance of violence by a white person, whether they kill two people or twenty, the media narrative is always an individual one. Psychological reasons are advanced: this person was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, that person was diagnosed with schizophrenia and so on. A brown person killing another may be suffering from PTSD too, especially if American drones killed their families, but the label in such a case is always of terrorism. This is true as much of the so-called ‘liberal’ media as of the conservative one. The presidency of Donald Trump has granted the hooligans of American society greater visibility, but one should keep in mind that the Black Lives Matter movement, demanding justice for racial crimes, started under a different president, who may have been more charming, better read and much more in control of his language, but who did not follow any radically different policy about racial inequality.

The reference to the Black Lives Matter movement and to the Western media representation of crimes committed by brown-skinned people has the potential to upset a lot of Indians. This is because quite a few Indians think of themselves as different from African-Americans and different from Muslims, even though some Indians in America have faced racial profiling (https://www.rt.com/usa/329006-alabama-police-indian-national/). Because there is an Indian population in America that is better off financially than Muslims and black people, they are more likely to be living in a safer neighbourhood, and so perhaps statistically less likely to face the racial scrutiny and/or everyday oppressions that these people face regularly. But when a racist person enters a public space with the intent to kill, they are not going to distinguish between Hindus, Sikhs or Muslims. To a racist white person, whether you are black, brown or yellow does not really matter.

Note that I said ‘to a racist white person’ and not ‘to a white person’. Not every white person is racist, but that does not mean that racism only exists in individuals, especially individuals who kill, scream abuse or write graffiti. There is also a racism that is endemic to the system, that is inbuilt into the administration and exists beyond individual manifestations. It is this systemic racism that allows white crime to be individual but black crime or brown crime to be a narrative about the nature of the African-American and Muslim communities. It is this endemic racism that allows individual white people to commit crimes, crimes that may then be linked to specific political causes, and still not have their crimes extrapolated to their community at large, as happened in the case of Anders Breivik in Norway. If you are an Indian in America today who feels unsafe because of the colour of their skin, look to the resources of the minorities and the oppressed people. Because whether you like it or not, you are a minority. And that means that you are vulnerable in certain specific ways, that the majority of the country does not have to think about or take into account in their day-to-day lives, and so can dismiss more easily as not existing or not taking any sort of psychological toll.

This might also be a good time to think about the fact that this is how minorities in India feel. In India Muslims worry because you can get killed for visible Muslim practices like wearing a cap (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/After-techies-killing-fear-drives-many-in-Pune-to-shun-skull-caps-Pathani-suits/articleshow/36225007.cms) or eating meat that may or may not have been beef. (http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/10/09/mutton-not-beef_n_8267052.html) This is not to say that Muslims are afraid only in Modi’s India, just as racial injustice has been happening in America even before Trump. Minorities in large societies, whether they are Muslims, Hindus or Christians, learn that their definitions of survival, prosperity, freedom and choice are always going to be different from those of the majority. They understand that their world is never going to be as fair as that of the majority, and things will not fall in place as easily for them, be it in getting a house to rent, getting an equal education, getting a job, or simply being thought patriotic without having to constantly prove it. That is why they learn and teach their children the practices to survive and thrive. This would be my advice to Indians in America: form alliances. Find the people who fight for the rights of everyone, for equality not just in name but also in practice, for those who protest each time an act of minority oppression occurs. These people are your tribe, and they will help you make some sense of this madness and provide the opportunity to take some form of action, if you so wish.

Which brings me to my final point. An authoritarian government is one in which those who govern (government, administration, police and the legal system) think that they know the answers, and expect the governed to obey. An authoritarian government makes it easier for people with hatred to be more open about that hatred, whether in words or action. Such a system does not have room for dissent or protest. The ultimate act of rebellion in such a system is to ask a question or raise a contradictory point of view. In such a set-up, being a member of the minority is always going to be more difficult, because such administrations tend to define themselves in terms of those who belong and those who are outsiders. And all too often, when outsiders ask questions it is easier to label them ‘traitors’ because they already fit the mould of the outsider. But when enough people speak up, it becomes necessary to acknowledge and address the problem, and that is a worthy goal to strive for. Even as we mourn Srinivas Kuchibothla today, we owe it to his memory and his family to not let such an incident happen easily again.

11 Child Approved Books for Toddlers and Preschoolers

2017-02-02T15:54:00.000+10:30

As my daughter grew, the books we read changed. I read a lot of different books to my daughter not only for her sake but also for the sake of my sanity! I end up reading some books over and over again, but if I read from a wide range, then the number of favourites is high enough to give me, the poor reader, some variety. So this is the system I have developed: I follow online book lists and blogs of book lists, and I keep a running list of books that sound interesting (not in my memory but in an online document!). I then put in a hold for them at the library. Luckily our local library is part of an inter-library system and so almost 90% of what I check is available. Of these books, I buy those that either she loves or I love. Otherwise we just read and return it to the library.

Alongside this system, I kept buying books for her. This is because children need books of their own. I understand that buying books is a luxury, but would still recommend that parents buy as many books as possible. Remember that books lose nothing by being second hand! Children need books that they can play with, drop food on, have read to them hundreds of times, pore over the pictures of and whose characters and stories they can recycle in their own pretend play. This is a list of books that my daughter loved, that we read from age 2 to 4.

1. Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel

This was among the first books that my daughter took to. The stories are very simple and very little happens: a button is lost and then found, frog tries to wake toad up while he wants to go on sleeping and so on. I think children love it precisely for the unhurried pace and the simplicity of the action. We went on to buy all the other books in the series and still enjoy them.

2. Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik and illustrated by Maurice Sendak

I'm always a little conflicted in recommending Little Bear to anyone. It is an old book, and a gendered one, in that Father Bear is away on a shipping trip while Mother Bear stays at home with Little Bear and looks after him and does all the household chores. At that time, our life situation mirrored the books in that I was the primary stay-at-home parent to my daughter. Yet I knew that there were many contemporary picture books with representations of more equitable households. But I still loved this series more than many contemporary books. The reason is simple: Little Bear plays outside with his friends all day. There are very few toys but lots of imagination and co-operative play. I think highlighting simplicity works for children, and I really find very few contemporary books that have the same sense of simplicity and profundity that this one has. When Little Bear tells Mother Bear that he is planning to go to the moon, she says "Be back for lunch" and I have striven to emulate that matter-of-fact attitude ever since! We went on to buy all the books in the series. Not only that, there was a television series, also called Little Bear that is now entirely available on YouTube. When Shabdita first started screen time, for a long time, this was the only series that we would put on for her to watch. The show, like the books, is slow and soothing with very little conflict, and there is much to appeal to toddlers and preschoolers. Another bonus was that because the show was a very old one, there was never any affiliated merchandising that we would have to negotiate over.

3. Ladybird Fairy Tales Box Set

This set has 24 books, and at different ages different books have appealed to Shabdita. When she was younger, she preferred the animal stories or the simpler ones, such as Chicken Licken, The Little Red Hen, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Magic Porridge Pot, The Three Little Pigs, The Enormous Turnip, The Gingerbread Man and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. These stories taught her the names of various animals as well as concepts like above, around, below, under, push, pull and so on. Somewhere between 3 and 4, she got interested in Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Ugly Ducking, The Princess and the Pea, Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Princess and the Frog and so on. Luckily, I had bought this set second-hand off Gumtree, so these are older version, not toned down versions that would avoid mentioning things that are presumed to be unpleasant to children. These stories not just interested her but prompted her to think about concepts like death, step parents and poverty among others. Of course, they are still fairy tales based on princesses being rescued by princes and living happily ever after. I still read them to her because I think protecting children from certain narratives, which do not align with our beliefs, works only up to a point. They live in the world, and have many other sources of input, and I neither can nor wish to control every thing that my daughter comes in contact with. That does not mean that I deliberately read any and everything to her, but there was no way I could keep all princess references out of her childhood, especially because almost every marketing gimmick in this society is structured towards selling princesses to little girls. I am hoping, however, that knowing the original versions of these stories will help her why a book like The Paper Bag Princess is subversive. After all, one needs some context in order to critique things. Another important lesson I learnt from this box set was that individual books are always more appealing to younger children, because they can carry them around. I have a collected stories of Aesop for her, but being one thick book that gets picked less often than these individual stories. And their hold endures. Just this morning, we read Hansel and Gretel before breakfast.

4. Paddington by Michael Bond

I bought the picture book version of this and at that time I didn't even know that it was based on a series of books for older children. The illustrations were lavish. When I first started reading it to Shabdita, she was very young (less than 2 years) and I could see that she was losing interest because she could not follow the text. So I started 'reading' the picture to her. I started describing it "look here is the railway platform. Those people are Mr. and Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown is wearing a skirt and a top. Look at her necklace and her earrings. Mr. Brown has glasses, like Mama. And look at that man behind them. He seems to be in a rush. Perhaps he is late for his train'. After describing the picture in the utmost detail, I told her a simplified version of what happens on the page, and continued the story like that. She loved it and then regularly brought it to me, pointing to the illustrations and asking me to 'read' them. I have on and off used this method of reading quite often, especially with books that she finds interesting but are too dense in terms of language. And now, after almost two years, she does it on her own. She loves picking up picture books and making up her own story to go along with the pictures. Not only that, she came to like the story for its own sake and was soon so familiar with it that I could read the actual text to her.

5. The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter

Honestly, I didn't get this book for a long time simply because it did not seem interesting to me. The story itself is simple: a rabbit sneaks into a farm even when he's told not to by his mother, eats lettuces and French beans, is chased by the farmer and nearly caught twice before escaping. When I read it though, Shabdita loved it. She was all agog, waiting to see if Peter Rabbit would be caught or not. She was overjoyed when he escaped. And in all subsequent tellings, whenever I read the line "But Peter, who was very naughty", she enjoys that bit of mischief and disobedience so very much. It all holds a vicarious thrill for her, and she likes the book so much that I've started collecting the others in the series. One word of warning though: I'm talking about the original Beatrix Potter series and not book versions of the TV show Peter Rabbit.

6. Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina

We all know this story, and this version is by a Russian author and illustrator. I bought it mostly because I have realised over time the value of having individual books rather than collections of stories for toddlers and preschoolers, though the latter often have more stories and are more value for money. My daughter loves hearing me shout 'caps for sale', which I do in the style of the tea-sellers in Indian trains, but most of all she loves the monkeys and their antics.

7. Bunny Money by Rosemary Wells

This book, more than any other book, showed me how arbitrary the recommended ages for children's books are. This book is recommended for children aged 6 years or over, and usually I would never have picked it up. But my daughter started watching the TV show Max and Ruby, and loved it. This was the only Max and Ruby book immediately available at the library, so I put a hold on the others and got this one for her. And she loved it! There is very little text in the book, so the first two times or so I had to fill in to explain the story to her, but she understood the entire story, including the fact that they had very little money left for Grandma's present by the end of the book. And now this is the only Max and Ruby book that we own, and I can recite it in my sleep!

8. What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry

I got this book from the library because most illustrators talked about the influence of Richard Scarry on their work, and more than one of them mentioned spending hours poring over the incredibly detailed pictures. This book appealed not just to my daughter but to a lot of kids in her preschool, where I had lent it for a couple of days and got back only after they got their own copy! One of the stories is called "A Visit to the Hospital" and this is the story that first cemented my daughter's interest in this book. Other stories include how a house is built, a train trip, a plane trip, a trip by ship, how food is grown, wood and how we use it, and so on. All action takes place in Busy Town, and the detailed layout of Busy Town has greatly expanded my daughter's vocabulary in terms of different shops and professions. It is a great book for a curious child, and again the book will grow with the child, with different stories becoming more appealing at different ages. Just two things of concern though: first, the book is an old one and some things, such as visiting the pilot in the cockpit during a flight (and getting to fly the plane!), are no longer possible. Secondly, the gender roles are pretty old-fashioned here: mother is a worker too, but a worker who works chiefly in the house. What I do usually is point out in conversation, whether reading this or Little Bear above, the way in which things have changed over time.

9. Ling & Ting: Not Exactly the Same by Grace Lin

Shabdita is not a twin, and I was not sure how much a book about twin sisters and their everyday lives would appeal to her. The answer was that it would appeal a lot. This is another book that I can recite in my sleep. Like Little Bear and Frog and Toad, the Ling and Ting books have everyday, commonplace plots: the twins make dumplings together, they get a hair cut, they issue books from libraries and so on. My daughter listens enchanted each time, and I realise anew that it is the simplest books that have the most staying power.

10. Situation-specific books

I have found situation-specific books very helpful in talking about our lives together and what is happening in them. So for example I read at least 5 different books where girls learned how to use the toilet when I was toilet training my daughter, and we read books about going to the dentist before, yes, visiting the dentist. Whether it is preparing to move houses or going to preschool, I've found such books very helpful. It is not necessary to buy such books, however, as they usually end up becoming obsolete after the experience. Also, it is better to stick to versions that have a matter-of-fact tone rather than a celebratory one. Ideally, you want your child to see these things as a normal part of life and not turn them into exceptional situations that require lots of separate preparation. It might be best to read them alongside the usual books that you read together rather than making them the sole focus for a few days.

11. Science and non-fiction books

It seems really unfair to lump a lot of books in this category. I'm wary, however, of recommending science and non-fiction books. This is because they often become a means to an end. The assumption is that reading these books is the same as your children understanding these concepts. Learning doesn't usually work like that. If your child has a good memory, she may remember the names of the planet, just as some other child knows all the lyrics of a song that they hear often. Developing conceptual models, however, be it the solar system, the extinction of dinosaurs or the basic outlines of a world where cities are parts of states that are in turn parts of countries, takes time. My daughter is inordinately curious, and always asking questions, so I read a variety of non-fiction books to her, including not just science but also geography or history. I read them the way I read fiction to her: when she brings me a book I read it out to her. I don't worry about whether she understands it or not. Nor do I try and teach her things from them. I read them out to her mostly because this world is just as magical as anything else we could read about in fiction and right now all I'm doing is showing her the wonder of it. If the book is more difficult, she will wander off midway and bring something else back to read, and that's fine too. Naturally, through this sort of reading I have found specific series that I like and have purchased for us to get back to when she is older. The two I would recommend to most parents are The Magic School Bus Books (I've only read the original ones and not the ones based on the tv show) and the Let's Read and Find Out books. The former series has around 12 books while the latter has over 80 books, so it is best to figure out what interests you or your child specifically and buy accordingly.

So these are the books that are the most popular in my home. Now that my daughter is exposed to more and different narratives across mediums like books, tv and film, her ability to absorb content is expanding. She now enjoys more challenging books. Not only that, her preferences change more often, and I'm sure that any post about the books she enjoys would look very different even two months from now. Let's just hope that I can keep up!

What Historians Do

2015-11-17T18:45:00.001+10:30

One bestselling Indian author ignited a minor controversy recently when he asked on Twitter what historians do. The Twitter universe gave him sardonic replies, and to be truthful, I enjoyed some of them immensely. But here's the thing. I rarely follow business news. I may be aware of things like recessions or the occasional big buying or breakdown of a company, but on a day-to-day basis I'm just not aware of the government's decisions and their ripple effects. I suspect that the case is similar for my friends in non-academic circles. They may have some awareness of the things that we, i.e. academics and historians do, but often they do not understand why issues become so sensitive in these contexts, why we often end up taking a stand on issues that seem irrelevant to others. There are two opposed but equally reductive ways to explain this phenomenon: "All academics are liberals/Marxists" and "Academics are more intelligent and so able to detect things that others cannot". If either of these explanations appeals to you, do not read on.

NB: I'm writing this post with a very specific audience in mind: this post is for those people who are not academics or historians but do want to understand the dissatisfactions of the present times. For those already in these fields, this post may seem reductive.

So we're back to the question: what is it that historians do? Well, whether it is history, literature, philosophy or political science, a good undergraduate course will start with a variety of courses charting the entire field of study. History students will study different periods and times, literature students will read books situated not just in different time periods but across different cultures, philosophy students will read the theories of different philosophers, often again divided into time periods for easier access (for example, classical philosophy, modern philosophy and so on) and so on. Alongside this, most courses will have one, two or three courses in methods. Methods are like the toolbox: what do you use to make sense of what you are reading? Methods overlap: so for example, feminism is not just a philosophy but also a methodology, and you can use feminism to understand and make arguments about what you are reading, whether you are a student of literature, economics, history, philosophy or political science. As the example of feminism suggests, most method is thinking that helps you think about thinking, and as such is often referred to as theory rather than methodology. Apart from feminism, post-colonialism, liberalism, Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, decoloniality and so on are different theories that students use to understand, react to and argue with what they do.

The jargon that scares most outsiders or makes them caustic is usually an integral part of theory. A lot of times however the use of the jargon is not performative. When you're passionate about your subject, there will usually be one theory, one way of understanding the world, that will stand out for you above all the rest. In those heady days, you will drown in it, read up everything possible about it and talk of nothing else until all the people around you are sick of it. I remember one day my usually patient but exasperated-by-then supervisor asking me if my pizza was ontological or not!

With a postgraduate degree, the immersion into theory deepens. Now it is a much bigger part of the syllabus, as the courses are now for people who may go on to work in the field. Students choose specialisations, and they also choose how they are going to be working on those specialisation. So, for example, two students could both be working on Premchand, but one is looking at gender dynamics in Premchand by focussing the male and female characters while another is looking at Premchand's construction of the village as a non-idyllic space by using ideas from sociological theories on the urban and the rural.

It is important to emphasise two things. Firstly, there is no approach that is 'no theory'. There is no way to work on something without making an argument, even if it is simplest one (this is good/this is bad) and any argument will have some underlying assumptions. There is never an impartial historian, because even the most seemingly bland histories can be shown to be full of choices that work with certain assumptions of hierarchies. For example, histories often used to be narratives of the political fortunes of countries until theorists (them again!) pointed out that such histories rarely bothered with the day-to-day life of ordinary citizens, and rarely talked about the lives of the poor, slaves, women, children, the aged and so on. Objectivity is an illusion where human affairs are concerned, and it is a dangerous illusion to harbour.

Which brings me to the second point I want to emphasise. All theories are just that: tools, ways to think. People find that many different ones make sense to them, and often end up using a variety of arguments in their work. At the same time, there are certain standards that academic research has to maintain: no falsifying, for example, and taking contradictory sources into account. I cannot cherry pick only those lines that support my argument, and refuse to entertain any work that counters my argument. At least I would definitely not be a good historian if I did that. The reason I say this is that I've noticed that a lot of online history gets written by people who are not really historians, and who disdain theory without making any attempt to understand its purposes or even try and make their work stand up to these common standards. I have also noticed that a lot of Indian historians get labelled "Marxist" or "Leftist" when their work is not really Marxist or Leftist, simply to suit the purposes of their detractors.

This brings me to my final point, about why historians are worked up. Some of them specialise in Ancient India, and the texts that they read tell them that Brahmins would eat beef. These are not random texts but shloks from the Vedas themselves. The fact is repeated often enough across sufficient texts for it to be accepted as normal by those historians who work on Ancient Indian history. Interestingly, some of the initial historians who wrote about this were not even trying to be controversial, they were simply doing their work and recording what was written in the ancient texts. Fringe elements attacked them, and it came about that their books would not be published unless they removed the beef-eating references, and their visas for international conferences were rejected, even when they were going to read seemingly innocuous papers on 'the social and cultural habits of Ancient Indians' at international conferences, because of the fear that they would mention the beef-eating. In this manner, for subsequent generations of historians, especially for those working on ancient India, the question of the stand they took on the beef-eating practices of ancient Hindus became a political one.

In recent times, other such issues have become politicised. A book about a history of Hinduism that includes the stories of the Dalits and women is banned. And people who defend the right of other people to say what they like in their books is murdered. I am writing a thesis where I am making an argument. It may be a strong or a weak one. It may become controversial or not. It is highly unlikely (relax mom!) but let us consider the possibility. And in that case I too will have to decide whether to fight or edit portions of what I am saying. I do not know what I would do in such a situation. What I do know for sure is that after 2, 5, 10 or 20 years of working on something, excising my opinions to suit those of a bunch of people who have some power will be like excising bits of my soul.

This is why the historians and academics are fighting. They are fighting for their right to make the arguments they want to make, to do the work they do. They are fighting for their souls.

The Many Maps of Google

2015-07-20T15:43:00.000+09:30

Google is the deity of our secularized world. It opens up a whole world of information to one’s fingertips, and as someone who is given to ‘googling’ random questions quite often, I am quite aware of its seductions and the pleasures of giving in to them. Criticism of Google is not entirely unfamiliar either: for one, information is not the same as insight. The ability to process information, discern between different sources and be alert to its nuances requires not just critical rigour but also self-reflexivity and plain old time. Not everything is immediately comprehensible, and meaning is created as much through memory and mediation as in the moment itself. To use a cliché, information, knowledge and wisdom are different things. Another problem with Google is that it augments confirmation bias by tailoring our search results to our previous preferences and our personality profiles. (Facebook does the same thing). We end up living in bubbles of our own making.

To use a routine example, if I do a search for any problem that I am facing about my toddler, Google’s search results will be entirely reasonable, based on popularity. I will click some sites, and soon find a solution on some site that makes sense to me. Next time, Google’s search results will tend to return to the websites I have already visited, and push those wherein I spent the maximum time and so on. Over time, Google will know which are my trusted websites, and will discard those that I do not engage with (you can read more about this process here). Over time, my results will come from a repertoire of familiar and a few unfamiliar sources, which are then the sources of my information. Convenient? Definitely. But note, with every search my possibility of coming across something that would normally not interest me decreases. Quite soon there will come a time when I will never come across anything that would contradict the ways in which I already think, something that could change my perspective in any way.

What is true of questions concerning my toddler is also true of other, 'grander' questions. And that is why Google (and Facebook and so on) are more insidious than newspapers and magazines. Given their need to cater to a wide variety of audiences, one could still conceivably find in the latter points of view that are not tailored to one, and sometimes one may change one’s mind or enlarge one’s perception.Google caters to the widest audience imaginable, but it is able to personalize individual experience within it. And once you can do it, there is no reason to not do it, and a million profit and productivity oriented reasons to maximize this personalized experience of exposure to information.

For those of us from the pre-Internet world, if we think about our life and how we came to have the opinions we did, it is probable that the people in our world, family and friends, school, books, newspapers, magazines and television all played middling to significant parts. When that variety is tailored specifically for you it becomes restricted, and difference stands out because it is possible to forget how common it is. Contradictory opinions generate hostility when one stops being used to contradiction. If everyone on my Facebook profile is talking about progress and one dissenting individual that I went to school with insists on posting articles that talk about the hollow nature of that progress, it is easy to stay friends with but unfollow that person, usually after a few bitter arguments wherein each may claim, at least once, that ‘everyone else’ feels like them. And the sad part is that both are right: all the other people they see feel a lot like them.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Depending on your geographical location, you see a different map for different places/countries on Google. So, for example, if you look at India’s map from within India, Arunachal Pradesh is a part of India. When you look at Google maps in China, the territory is part of China. When I look at it from Australia (and presumably from other neutral territories) I see dotted lines, indicating that these areas are under dispute, that these are fluid spaces, unlike the clean lines and clear demarcations of these neutral territories. In what seems particularly poignant to me, the reason for doing this is not even ideological; it is logistical (You can read about it here). It is a way of complying with the messiness that arises when different countries have different laws and have not caught up with the transnationally efficient standards of multinational companies. The many maps of Google invoke the possibility of plentitude - if we had as many maps as we had imaginations! - but subvert it by limiting them to national narratives rather than notional ones.

Which brings me to my final point. The main argument that I wish to make is not that it is because of technological advancements that we live in a world where reality is constructed rather than objective. Instead, this is an example from our day and age, that is all. We have always lived in created and negotiated worlds, and no reality has ever existed on its own 'out there'. This does not mean giving up on realities though. It is precisely because realities are constructed that it becomes important to fight for those realities that we believe in.

Of Celebrity

2015-06-30T18:32:00.000+09:30

In more optimistic times, I too was a member of the gym going world. This was around a year after I'd arrived in Adelaide. Following a health scare and inspired by the Australians who showed up at the beach near our house to run irrespective of the weather, I decided to do what any self-respecting consumer of health does. I did not join them on the beach, which was free and so how could it be a viable option? Instead, I joined a gym and started making trips there as regularly as any devout person would to a temple. My gym was attached to a hotel, which actually meant that it was less busy than regular gyms, since not many people knew that it was open to outside membership.

One evening I got into the elevator. There were already two Australian guys in it. Quite a few Australian guys are big and muscular, and these two were no exception. Also, often people in Australia will talk to you in social situations, things like "how's it going" or just a smile and a nod to acknowledge your existence. So I was not really surprised when one of them spoke to me. What I was surprised by, however, was what he said. "Must be your lucky day" he said, "You get to go in the elevator with us". Never one to waste an opportunity to make a quip, I retorted "Its your lucky day too, you get to go in the elevator with me". He looked a little taken aback but then we had reached my floor and I was out of the elevator.

Later I told Vipul about this conversation. He told me "Those guys must have been famous". "Oh" I replied. That someone could say such a thing in a matter-of-fact way and not ironically had never occurred to me. "Its AFL season. They must have been AFL players" he continued. AFL is Australian Football League and that is when I realised just how much of a surprise my flippant reply must have been to them.

This leads me to re-formulate a philosophical question for our times: If you are a celebrity stuck in an elevator with someone who does not know you, are you still a celebrity in that moment?

13 Toddler-Approved Picture Books

2014-12-10T20:57:00.001+10:30

In Shabdita's first year, we read to her intermittently. She enjoyed it, and I bought a variety of books for her, but we were not able to get a routine going where we would read to her everyday. I started reading to her regularly in Canberra as a way of keeping her busy, and realised too late that reading aloud to her actually keeps me busy all the time. We've now settled into a routine that is no routine. Any time during the day, she will come up to me or Vipul holding out a book and saying 'wooooords'. She is ready to listen to 'words' any time and has firm likes and dislikes. Sometimes she listens to the entire story, rapt in attention; at other times, she quickly turns the pages and wants to finish a lot of books in a little time. Sometimes she says 'bye' to the pages that she wants to skim, seeming to know that she is just passing them by. I like most of these books, though reading them over and over again can rob them of their charm. On some days, I'm so 'read out' that I never want to see a book again. Without further ado, though, here is a list of those picture books that she returns to most often. If you have young kids or are looking to become a favourite uncle or aunt, this list may help. Some of these are books that you and I may not see the appeal of, but have the seal of approval from a two year old 'discerning' listener.

1. Where's Spot? by Eric Hill

This is the first book that Shabdita took to. She loves raising the flaps and saying 'noooooo' as loudly and dramatically as she can. She waits for the roaring 'no' and the hissing 'no'.

2. Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman (author) and Charles Vess (illustrator)

'Ladies of light, and ladies of darkness, and ladies of never you mind"... I love this book for so many reasons. For the fact that the Blueberry girl is not white, and she is different ages across the book. For the myriad creatures on its pages, from the owl that accompanies her everywhere to the whale on whose back she sits. For the line "Ladies of paradox, ladies of measure, ladies of words that fall". For the fact that when I ask Shabdita, "who's my Blueberry girl?", she points to herself proudly. For fans of Neil Gaiman, you can listen to the entire book, read by Neil himself, in this YouTube video.

3. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown (author) and Clement Hurd (illustrator)

This one is a calming read. I like the fact that there is a moon outside the window, and there is a moon in the picture inside the room. One moon is waxing, and the other is waning. I think that this book can be opened up for conversations about the many different kinds of moons, about reality and representations, when Shabdita is older.

4. Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown (author) and Felicia Bond (illustrator)

This one has Shabdita all excited because it has two cows. There are horses and pigs too, but to her they are all 'cow'. There are also cats, dogs, geese, hens, field mice and even bats. And they all sleep in the night, except the bats, which means that the last few pages are whispered, and that adds to the excitement of the book. Honestly, this book does not exactly set my world on fire, but it is a good introduction to animals I guess. She really likes it and brings it to be read regularly. Seeing her excitement, I considered how to show her an actual living cow, and realised depressingly that I'll have to find a farm that takes visitors and take her there. Sigh. If we'd been in India she could have seen cows everywhere, and while that may have made them less exciting, it is not such a great thing that she should drink milk everyday thinking that it comes from the neighbourhood supermarket.

5. Little Green by Keith Baker

Shabdita loves watching birds and enjoys making marks, with pen or pencil, on whatever surface is available. This book brings together both these things, a bird and a boy who is painting the way in which the bird flies, and does it in the most gentle manner possible. I love it too and don't mind multiple readings, and Shabdita especially likes the part where she gets to turn the book around to see the bird hovering up in the air. Trying to find the earthworm on all the pages is a bonus.

6. There's A Hippopotamus on our Roof Eating Cake by Hazel Edwards (author) and Deborah Niland (illustrator)

Its quite a mouthful of a title and features an older child, who invents an omnipotent hippopotamus friend who gets to do everything that she doesn't, like eating cake, watching tv and riding a bike. Shabdita absolutely loves this book right now, though I am doubtful of how much she actually comprehends. I think her obsession with the book may have a lot to do with the sound of the word 'hippopotamus'.

7. Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss

Shabdita likes this book because she can already say quite a few words in it, unlike most of the other books she listens to.'Up, pup, cup' and so on. I prefer Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss, but that is because I like trying out the various tongue twisters in it. Or perhaps I've just read this one too often. I'm hoping it turns out to be a good way to ease her into reading for herself when she is (much) older.

8. Busy Birdies by John Schindel (author) and Steven Holt (photographer)

Unlike the other books on this list, this one is a collection of photographs and not illustrations. The various photos of birds are stunning, and have captured Shadbita's imagination. I am not too enthusiastic about the words, such as 'Birdies eyeing'... er, eyeing what exactly? The photo of the two owls that accompanies this text, however, is so powerful and evocative that the words cease to matter.

9. The Daddy Book by Todd Parr

There are all kinds of daddies in this vibrantly illustrated book. Some wear suits, some socks, some work at home and some far away, some are yellow and some are purple, some like to take naps with you... but all of them love to hug you, kiss you and want you to be who you are. Yes, I can roll my eyes at the 'be who you are' bit, but we need narratives and constructions to begin with so that we can begin to deconstruct them. Shabdita likes this book and screams 'Papa' at all the daddies in the book, and that is enough to make me all misty eyed.

10. Jamberry by Bruce Degen

I love this one! There is so much joy in this picture book, which reminds me that a book is so much more than the sum of its parts. Is the joy in the sheer exuberance of the rhyming lyrics or in the illustrations filled with berries on berries? Is the joy in the sense of freedom that comes from a day of picking berries? Is it the joy of saying words like razzmatazz berry and raspberry rabbits? For whatever reason, this book has made a firm place for itself in our repertoire.

11. My Truck is Stuck by Kevin Lewis (author) and Daniel Kirk (illustrator)

When I purchased this book, I did not realise that it was marketed at boys, which is silly considering how much Shabdita enjoys it. I am not too impressed with the language of the book (Rotten luck, can't go, my truck is stuck), but Shabdita loudly proclaims 'car' and 'bus' for every vehicle in the book, and seems quite excited about them. Pointing out that some of them are trucks, jeeps and vans has not made an iota of an impression so far.

12. Usborne Illustrated Nursery Rhymes Felicity Brooks (compiler) and Laura Rigo (illustrator)

This book begins with Humpty Dumpty and ends with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I bought this book mainly because I did not want Shabdita to think of nursery rhymes as "those songs on YouTube". This book has nice illustrations, is not too big for her to hold, and lets her take these songs with her everywhere. I re-discovered Solomon Grundy, who is taken ill, grows worse, dies and is buried at the end of the poem. Such a nursery rhyme written today would probably be criticised for being depressing and may be removed from books for younger children. I knew it as a child and while it did not lead to a deep meditation on the nature of life and death, it did not scar me either.

13. Words

and

This is not one book but an entry for many different books. What they all have in common is that they are not narratives but collections of pictures and words. Some are organised by categories (farm animals, wild animals, colours, birds and so on) and some are general in that they cover a variety of everyday words that a child encounters. The pictures I have here are not the ones that she has, because I could not find the same ones online and there are many generic variations. For a long time Shabdita was not interested in listening to stories, but preferred knowing the names of all sorts of things, some that she knew very well (car, cup etc.) and some that she had not seen till then (lion and giraffe). Even today, Shabdita will often bring up these books and want us to read the words rather than listen to a story. I guess she has to live up to her name and know shabd first.

The 15 Hierarchies: An Introduction to Decoloniality

2014-11-18T17:08:00.002+10:30

We live in a free world. Free being a relative word, of course. There are situations when governments and the powers of one country are controlled by other, more powerful countries and conglomerates, and there are situations wherein some countries are blatantly occupied by others. In this post I am not talking about these situations. I want to talk about the situations we take for granted, wherein power equations and inequalities are so deeply embedded as to have become naturalised. This post is about the insidious presence of colonialism in situations wherein we assume its absence. The decolonial movement is relevant to us today precisely because of how deeply colonised we still are. My entry point into this discussion is an article by Ramon Grosfoguel called "Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality".

The article was one of my earliest introductions to decoloniality. As a movement decoloniality stems from the writings of certain Latin American thinkers including Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, among others. The term has been picked up by other thinkers and movements, and there is much debate about the difference between decoloniality and postcolonialism. To my mind, one point of difference between the two is that decoloniality is extremely critical of modernity and sees it as hand-in-glove with coloniality and colonial oppression, whereas postcolonialism is critical of colonial oppression without that hostile valence for modernity. Decolonial scholars argue that the beginning of modernity and colonialism were forged in the same crucible in the fifteenth century, when Europeans set out for different worlds to conquer and rule. It is not that there had not been invasions, hostility and violence prior to that, but that these colonial/modern invasions brought into being certain hierarchies that captured human selves and imaginations in very specific ways that we have not been able to leave behind even today.

Image courtesy Brandon Archambault, "Why I Can't Stand Junot Diaz: Decolonial Love is About Hate, Not Love", Snakes on McCain, http://snakesonmccain.blogspot.com.au, first published Sunday, Feb 23, 2014.

In his article, Ramon inverts our narrative of colonialism in one significant way, offering a vantage point similar to the one delineated in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Instead of setting out with the colonisers and following their exploits and exploitations, he considers colonialism from the point of view of a native in a soon-to-be-colonised space, and how their world and world views turned upside down. Ramon outlines 15 hierarchies that came to the colonised world through the coloniser, and outlining them 'as if they were separate' vividly hits home the realisation that these intertwined hierarchies form the systems that we live in and that shape us. I quote directly from the article below:

"European/capitalist/military/Christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male arrived in the Americas and established simultaneously in time and space several entangled global hierarchies that for purposes of clarity in this exposition I will list below as if they were separate from each other:

1) a particular global class formation where a diversity of forms of labor (slavery, semi-serfdom, wage labor, petty-commodity production, etc.) are going to co-exist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market;

2) an international division of labor of core and periphery where capital organized labor in the periphery around coerced and authoritarian forms (Wallerstein 1974);

3) an inter-state system of politico-military organizations controlled by European males and institutionalized in colonial administrations (Wallerstein 1979);

4) a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European people over non-European people (Quijano 1993; 2000);

5) a global gender hierarchy that privileges males over females and European Judeo-Christian patriarchy over other forms of gender relations (Spivak 1988; Enloe 1990);

6) a sexual hierarchy that privileges heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is important to remember that most indigenous peoples in the Americas did not consider sexuality among males a pathological behavior and had no homophobic ideology);

7) a spiritual hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization of the Christian (Catholic and later, Protestant) church;

8) an epistemic hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and cosmologies, and institutionalized in the global university system (Mignolo 1995, 2000; Quijano 1991);

9) a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages that privileges communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternize the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not of knowledge/theory (Mignolo 2000);

10) an aesthetic hierarchy of high art vs. naïve or primitive art where the West is considered superior high art and the non-West is considered as producers of inferior expressions of art institutionalized in Museums, Art Galleries and global art markets;

11) a pedagogical hierarchy where the Cartesian western forms of pedagogy are considered superior over non-Westerm concepts and practices of pedagogy;

12) a media/informational hierarchy where the West has the control over the means of global media production and information technology while the non-West do not have the means to make their points of view enter the global media networks;

13) an age hierarchy where the Western conception of productive life (ages between 15 and 65 years old) making disposable people above 65 years old are considered superior over non-Western forms of age classification, where the older the person, the more authority and respect he/she receives from the community;

14) an ecological hierarchy where the Western conceptions of “nature” (as an object that is a means towards an end) with its destruction of life (human and non-human) is privileged and considered superior over non-Western conceptions of the “ecology” such as Pachamama, Tawhid, or Tao (ecology or cosmos as subject that is an end in itself), which considers in its rationality the reproduction of life;

15) a spatial hierarchy that privileges the urban over the rural with the consequent destruction of rural communities, peasants and agrarian production at the world-scale."

I find this list incredibly useful, especially when I am trying to argue for an awareness of systemic inequalities. I think the list is pretty self-explanatory, but as illustration, let me caricature aspects of my life. Growing up in a liberalised world-view which set up the consuming individual at the apex of human being and took modernity for granted, I participated in most of these hierarchies. I read more English literature than Hindi, Gujarati or Indian literature in English translation; I knew more about Western art than Indian art. As far as Indian art was concerned, I could recognise only those that were very well-known (the Hussains and the Raja Ravi Vermas) or know folk forms of art without knowing individual artists (Madhubani and Mughal miniatures, for example). I saw the joint family system as a space of oppression (which it can be, but that need not be its only reality), the theories I used came largely from the West (from Plato to Derrida, I guess), except when reading postcolonial theory, wherein Said and Spivak would get honourable mention. I am still not outside of this system: I work on Gujarati literature, but I write out my conjectures and conclusions in English. I am part of a university system that is based in the West and studies 'India', just as I was once in an Indian university studying English.

As I said earlier, this is a caricature of aspects of my life. I have spoken up against oppression based on gender, sexuality or religion. I think those fights need to be fought, and decoloniality is not about a return to tradition only because it predates the colonial encounter. Decoloniality is about recognising that there are many different narratives around the world, and the Western models of liberalism and individualism are not universal and cannot be the sole arbiters of individual human lives around the world. Decoloniality is being aware of the limitations of modernity as a project, and deliberately being aware of other, perhaps more traditional, perhaps more alternative, ways of being. It is about being aware of the politics, not just of the world but of the institutions that we ourselves are complicit in. It is about being mindful of who you read and who you cite. A decolonial moment need not be complicated. The next time you consciously read a Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali or Marathi book, you are making a decolonial choice. The language of your childhood may no longer be a language you think in, but the good thing about languages is that they are never far from the surface.

NB: There is a decoloniality summer school in Barcelona for those interested. And for Ramon's article, email me if you want to read it.

Love In A Cold Climate

2014-10-25T09:21:00.001+10:30

The world of English courtship, of noble families with sons and daughters and marriage on their minds, is familiar to all regular readers of English literature. Jane Austen almost immediately comes to mind. It is a world of manners and morals, a world of perforative elegance. It is popular to berate the modern world for being less elegant, and there is an entire nostalgia industry that cashes in on the charm factor of this world, such as the BBC adaptations of Austen and Victorian novels and Downton Abbey to name a few. When the presence and multiplicity of immigrants becomes too much to handle, it is good to have an all white world to return to. Ironically, this world evokes a certain nostalgia even among the colonised creatures whose history it never was, but whose imaginative geography it shaped.

I picked up Nancy Mitford's Love in A Cold Climate (1949) not expecting anything very different. I had heard it praised a lot, but that usually puts me off books rather than more interested in them. (I'm working towards changing this cynicism.) Mitford belongs squarely to the twentieth century, and what made me fall in love with her writing, was that it does too. It is still the world of English courtship, but it is no longer asexual or idealised. Instead, it is rendered from close up, with sympathy for its follies and an awareness of its darker shades. There are balls and gowns and big rooms, and small, furtive sexual encounters in those big rooms. To me, what stood out most about the book was the matter-of-fact tone it took to everything, rendering most things faintly comical even when they revealed selfishness, exploitation and conspicuous consumption.

To cite the most blatant example, there is an uncle, ironically nicknamed 'Boy', who is fond of feeling up young girls, and this 'habit' returns to haunt him when one of the girls he feels up, Polly, mistakes it for everlasting love and insists on marrying him. There is not a lot of angst or hand wringing about the abuse, and this universe has a moment of pity for the abuser, when he has to actually live with and love the girl he desired temporarily, or rather did not even desire in and of herself, but only as another girl to fondle. Our perceptions of these matters are so shaped by our own discursive frameworks of child abuse, paedophilia and punishment that this attitude can come across as cavalier. After all, he is an abuser and she is a victim, and how can any reading be otherwise? What this book did, however, is allow me to inhabit a world wherein the mores that governed human sexuality were different. What Boy does is not justified, but neither is it an exceptional act. It is one of the things that happens in the world, and thus it can be shown as banal; its tragic potential highlighted only when Polly insists on misreading Boy's propensity as love and desire. Not only that, this tragedy is not maintained indefinitely and is represented with as little hand-wringing as everything else.

Lest the mention of abuse give the impression that this is a depressing book, I should clarify that the novel is satirical and witty. I laughed out loud right at the very beginning, as the author traced the history of the Montdore family: "they drag forth ancestors with P. G. Wodehouse names, Ugs and Berts and Threds, and Walter Scott fates. His Lordship was attainted — beheaded — convicted — proscribed — exiled — dragged from prison by a furious mob — slain at the Battle of Crécy — went down in the White Ship — perished during the third crusade — killed in a duel". This is a world that rests on shallow, hollow foundations, and isn't that funny? So Lady Montdore is always polite to young girls, even those who do not have a lot of fortune. This is not out of the goodness of her heart; rather it comes from the soundness of her mind. "'Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is a aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow." Polly rues this habit that all the young people have of being constantly in love with someone or the other. She had observed it in India, but had hoped that "in a cold climate" things would be different, hence the title. The book maintains a light and chatty tone throughout, which actually sets off the sexual encounters, familial conflict, homosexuality and murder quite well. Ok, I'm kidding, there is no murder in the book, but I wish there had been. I feel Mitford would have dealt with it lightly and exquisitely.

At one point in the text, two characters want to know what Polly and Boy's marriage is like. They ask their elder sister, Fanny, to find out, and when she points out that they do hear from Polly, this is their reply: "Do people ever sound unhappy on postcards, Fanny? Isn't it always lovely weather and everything wonderful, on postcards?" To me, the parallel to Facebook was striking. It is not a new world that we live in. The world of Love in A Cold Climate is not as different from our world today as it may seem to be superficially, and I don't know whether to rejoice or be sad about this.

Everyday

2014-10-02T21:39:00.000+09:30

Everyday, during dinner, mid-way during the meal, Shabdita suddenly feels a lot of love for me. She insists on feeding herself, so by then her clothes, mouth, hands and face are full of food. Everyday she comes towards me, arms outstretched, to give me a hug. Sometimes the hug also means "I'm done now, so put me to sleep". Everyday she ruins my T-shirt, and all my clothes end up having food stains on them. Everyday I wait for that moment, and the day she is too grown up to do it, I am going to miss it. What is life without a grubby, food stained baby wanting to hug you?

Beyond Facebook and Twitter...

2014-07-17T13:27:00.000+09:30

are Pinterest and Instagram. No, this is not a post about social media. I left Facebook, and then Twitter, almost four years ago. For one, they were addictive and I wasted a lot of time on them, and secondly, I had begun to dislike them for the way in which I found myself performing my life on them. This post, however, is not about those things. I may not have been on social media for a long time, but I am still quite addicted to the Internet. If you quit various forms of social media, barring blogging intermittently, what do you do on the Internet? Well, here is what I do.

Feedly

Feedly is my crack. It requires setting up, but once done, it is simplicity and beauty itself. Feedly is an RSS reader, which simply means that once you enter the names or URLS of the blogs you want to follow, you can read them all together. I follow a variety of different blogs, changing them as and when fancy strikes. Here are the ones that I enjoy the most.

Design*Sponge: A design blog that includes constellations from the night sky and design icons such as the Sony Walkman and the Chrysler building? Yes, please. Design*Sponge consistently offers high quality articles that open my eyes to the beauty of the world around me, and increase my knowledge of life's aesthetic pleasures. I also like An Indian Summer for its curation of various things Indian.

ModernMrsDarcy: With a name like that, how could I resist? Modern Mrs. Darcy talks of books, movies and tv shows, occasionally meandering into clothes and homeschooling. I also like A Penguin A Week, especially for Karyn's determination to read every book in the Penguin series that she has identified, no matter how forgotten or mundane.

The vegan blog Oh She Glows is my escapist fare. I ogle at all the beautiful pictures of the food, though I have not tried even a single recipe to date. Someday...! I also have a love-hate relationship with the Happiness Project, so I follow it for some time and then am off it, and then back again and so on.

I follow two Indian blogs: Jabberwock by Jai Arjun Singh and Baradwaj Rangan by, well, Baradwaj Rangan. I like their takes on cinema, and Jai Arjun's book reviews are always enjoyable. I owe my introduction to contemporary Indian graphic novels in English to Jabberwock.

On minimalism, I read the usual suspects: Zenhabits, The Minimalists and The Minimalist Woman. I used to follow various other blogs on this topic, but I like to think that I have internalised minimalism to the point where I am minimalist about the minimalist blogs I follow too!

I also like this irreverent and highly relatable blog called GenerationMeh. And surprisingly to me, I follow Seth Godin's blog. I nod in agreement when Seth talks about perseverance, rigour and quality, though he is talking about marketing and consumer relationships while I am thinking life and academia in my head. I especially like the way he uses brevity to increase his impact, which I find myself sadly unable to emulate.

I read a wide variety of parenting blogs, perhaps more than is good for Shabdita or me. I keep changing them though. The ones that I like the most and have been following regularly include Not Just Cute, An Everyday Story and Janet Lansbury. Not Just Cute and Janet Lansbury are about respectful and intentional parenting while an Everyday Story follows the project based homeschooling adventures of a family in Canberra, and has the most inspiring photos and ideas.

So you can see how Feedly keeps me busy. Every day, I have around 10 to 15 blogposts/articles to read on a variety of topics, leaving me carrying out various arguments in my head. It makes for a good day. Also, on a self-promoting note, if you set up Feedly for yourself, you can follow my blog on it too!

Apart from Feedly, I also use Dropbox and Evernote a lot.

While reading or writing, I keep the document in Dropbox, and so can access it from different computers and my phone, which spares me from emailing it to myself all the time.

As for Evernote, I have many different notes in it, and I intend to consolidate them someday in an organisational frenzy. For now, it is a great space to store snippets and ideas, and indulge my fetish of making all sorts of lists. Inspired by a blog post I read, I kept a list of the books I read in 2013, and am now keeping one of those I am reading in 2014. Looking at the list at the end of the year was illuminative: it made me aware of the directions in which my reading was headed (more parenting), what I had enjoyed and what not (some books that are so much fun in the moment can seem dissatisfying later - 'why did I waste so much time on this one?') and suggest possibilities ('I loved this one so much that I am going to track down more books by this author'). I'm toying with the idea of starting a new list, this one of all the films that I see this year.

Another useful aspect of Evernote is that I can make notes of different arguments as they occur to me, then shifting them around and assigning them to papers or chapters. I also have a list of ideas for potential blogposts, and one beautiful day, I shall turn them all into substantial blogposts and inflict them on you. Another app that I use alongside Evernote is Houzz.

As the name suggests, Houzz is an app of home design ideas. I save pictures of rooms I like, in Ideabooks on Houzz (that lets you save pictures that you see on Houzz directly) or by pasting pictures I like into Evernote. These pictures are, at one level, pure fantasy. I am unlikely to become an interior decorator or incorporate every idea into any one home that I have, but these pictures and the possibilities they suggest bring delight, joy and colour into my world. Here is a picture from one of my notes, a great space to curl up with a book:

Last but not the least are Zinio, the Kindle App and Podcasts.

Zinio is an app that lets you read magazines. I use Zinio and my local library subscription together, and download almost every magazine possible, and then read them now and then. I credit my reading of Martha Stewart Living and Australian Architecture to Zinio, as I never actually picked them up in a library. Only having to click on a link to issue a magazine makes you willing to try everything!

Similarly, the Kindle app allows me to buy ebooks as well as download various free ones. In terms of the free ones, there is more chaff than wheat. I like working through them, and deleting the ones which seem irrelevant.

Podcasts are a relatively new discovery for me. I like listening to a podcast as I get some work done alongside. The difference from a radio is that here you can select what you want to listen to, though I actually like the varying rhythms of the radio and not knowing what is going to come up next. This is why I subscribe to podcasts selectively and am less enthusiastic about trying new ones out. They may be wonderful, but I am perfectly content with ABC national radio and You Tube playlists for Indian music. The podcasts I listen to regularly include SBS Hindi and After the Jump, which is the podcast of the Design*Sponge blog. I also like The Broad Experience, which talks about women's professional lives. Finally, I like the Radio Lab for making science interesting to me.

So these apps are my additions to my leisure time, my variations on reading or watching television. In a day spent running after a toddler and protecting everything else in the world from her, it feels good to sit down with my laptop or iPad, with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand, and opening up a transient world with the other. You're welcome to peek into this world or build another of your own.

Of Being Indian

2014-06-23T17:55:00.001+09:30

I recently read Pavan K.Varma's Being Indian: Inside the Real India as part of the project of reading my own books. I understand that there are quite a few books that attempt to distill the essence of India into chapter sized generalisations, such as The Argumentative Indian and India Unbound. Like all good social commentators, Pavan K. Varma acknowledges that for every generalisation he offers, the opposite is equally true for a vast country like India. He sets out to break certain myths - that Indians are spiritual or other-worldly and inherently non-violent - and takes on the behemoths of technology and pan-Indianness.

Varma argues that Indians are as materialistic as any other people on earth and that their spirituality co-exists undisturbed with materialism and the quest for Lakshmi. I agree with most of his observations about the pursuit and relentless exhibition of wealth and power in India. I have two main quibbles with these sections of the book though. For one, some of these myths are not as widespread as the author thinks they are. The book was first published in 2004, and by then we were sufficiently into the liberalised economy for materialism to have become a common societal malaise. The idea of India as a spiritual and non-violent cocoon may have been an Orientalist construct, but by 2004 it is more an easy straw figure against which Varma can lay out his argument. One should argue against stereotypes, but neither the stereotypes nor the arguments against them should be simplistic.

Which brings me to my second quibble. Yes, Indians are materialistic, pursue and display power blatantly and chase wealth as an ideal goal without any niggling sense of discomfort. But how is that different from a majority of people anywhere in the world? We do not grow up outside the world, and the world today, whether London or Ludhiana (the problem with easy generalisations is that they are catching!) is a world that extols the virtues of wealth and success, that thrusts the messages of consumption down our throats 24/7. I do not think I can say of any space in the world that the people living there do not pursue power. Yes, I am aware that there is a minimalism movement in the West, and I am thankful for it. That movement however shapes itself as opposed to the dominant culture, and unfortunately the dominant culture in the world today is very similar, no matter what part of the world you are in. If I wax philosophical, I would argue that this is not only about the world today. The desire to acquire and possess has always been a part of the human condition. Merchants found plying the Silk Route profitable because there were men and women desirous of buying silk and willing to pay well for it.

As far as technology is concerned, Varma argues that the almost universal emphasis on a certain kind of higher education - engineering and English (the language and not the literature) for example - makes Indians better at being the outsourcing capital of the world. He also discusses how they are usually software coolies, doing the more manual of the work while the creative work is done in the West. Some Indians working in American environments are able to tap into creativity and compete alongside the first citizens of the online world. Varma states that "Indian society encourages status-quoism and tolerates mediocrity" (p. 122). As a student and a teacher in India, I came up against the vagaries of the system often enough to sympathise with this idea. At the same time, I would argue that these phenomena are as much about colonialism and structures of power as about systems of education. When you praise Indians for their 'jugaad' in the chapter on business but declare their inability to be creative in the chapter, you are not only undermining your own argument, but also demonstrating that perceptions change as context changes. Current perceptions in technology rest along the Orientalist axis of Western work as inherently superior to Eastern work. After all, it is American freedom that sets glorious Indian minds free! I have studied in both Indian and Australian universities, and I would argue that a lack of resources is as much of a problem as the lack of innovative thinking. Universities in both India and Australia have good and bad thinkers, and I am sure both Indian and American IT companies have similar pools of creative and not-creative thinkers.

The final section of the book focusses on the idea of pan-Indianness. This topic is of special interest to me, given that my thesis flirts with the ways in which ideas of India are constructed. Varma attributes greater cohesion in Indian identity to the usual suspects - popular culture, which is mostly Bollywood, and greater mobility within India, courtesy transportation and the new jobs of a liberalised economy. I am just surprised that he does not mention cricket. It is a familiar argument, and I do not oppose it in the sense of 'no, this is incorrect'. Yes, Bollywood does interest a large number of people in India (except me, of course :P). At the same time, the rise of the vernacular television channels and movie industries show that both these seemingly contradictory arguments - "Bollywood brings India together" and "the rise of regional cinemas shows that regional identity is not dead" - are equally valid and relevant. They bear each other out even as they cancel each other out.

It is in this section that Varma brings up the stereotype of non-violence. He argues that Indians can be violent when it has social sanction, and prefer to compromise when the opponent in superior and there is the prospect of annihilation. The violence perpetuated on a regular basis against Dalit, minorities and poor people certainly makes the notion of Indians being nonviolent seem like a cruel joke perpetrated on those who live with the routine violence of everyday Indian life. At the same time, Varma argues that violence levels are relatively low because of a certain kind of pragmatism in the Indian fabric. Violence is bad for business, and different religious communities find ways of living and working together that work for them and keep violence at bay as exceptional rather than the norm. Again, I do not disagree with the argument per se. I do have two quibbles again. One is that 'not too much violence' is a slippery slope kind of an argument. In a nation of a billion people, how many people have to die before we think that too many people have been killed? (yes, I badly paraphrased the song) What I mean is this: the idea that India is relatively peaceful works in certain contexts, wherein we look at violence and deaths in other countries or at an abstract number that seems large, and so we derive notions of relative peace and relative goodwill. Just like everywhere else in the world, religious identities are far more complex, and ways of living and working together enmeshed in these identities in far more complicated ways than 'we are all a relatively not so violent family' would suggest. Yes, people from different communities work together, but who owns the business and who is the labour?

My second quibble is similar to the one I made above. Violence is endemic to the human condition, as 'natural' as natural can be. These instances - of violence against specific communities or groups of people, as well as co-existence - are not exclusive to India alone. Across history, in all sorts of conflicts and wars, we have seen the best and the worst of human behaviour on display. This brings me to my central problem with the book, and probably with other such books, with the idea of such books. Whatever the aspects identified as being Indian, whether positive or negative, are ultimately narratives created to serve their purpose in arguments. They may or may not be true, but their truth or falsity is not the point. Any series of circumstances or phenomena can be woven together to present one picture, and we can go on creating multiple such pictures. Some arguments are more compelling than others. I am sure some books on Indian realities are more insightful than others, and I hope to find and read them. At the same time, all these books create realities as much as document them, and there is not an Indian reality that exists outside of such documentations.

16 June 2009

2014-06-15T23:59:00.000+09:30

We have been married for five years today. Half a decade has gone by. It feels like time has simply flown past, as if it were just yesterday that Vipul and I went to Prithvi theatre in Mumbai for a date. At the same time, it feels like forever, as if this was always the way life was meant to turn out. So do I have any words of wisdom, any pearls of truth about what makes a happy marriage? Yes I do.

The secret of a happy marriage is simply this: Marry Vipul. And everything will turn out to be wonderful. You'll have to find your own Vipul though. This one is taken!

Narendra Modi's Opening Gambits

2014-06-05T20:13:00.000+09:30

I am doing my PhD at the School of Culture, History and Language (CHL) at ANU, which falls under the College of Asia and the Pacific (CAP). What does that have to do with Narendra Modi, you may well ask. Well, I have written a blog post called Narendra Modi's Opening Gambits, and it has been published on the College's website. Here is a link, in case you are interested.

http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/news-events/all-stories/narendra-modis-opening-gambits#.U5BImV5hMpE

Any further sharing shall make me happy. If that's not your goal in life, what else is?!

Canberra Calling

2014-05-12T13:02:00.002+09:30

On a windy day last month, Shabdita and I moved to Canberra to start a PhD at the Australian National University. I was sobbing with apprehension, not sure if I was making a big mistake moving with a child younger than two, starting afresh in a new city. Vipul's job, unfortunately, is in Adelaide, and so we have become a three member family in two cities. He comes on weekends and whenever he can, and stays as long as possible. When he's not around, mostly on weekdays and sometimes on alternate weekends, I learn what it is like to be a single mom, and we both learn anew how much living together in one house means to us.

As I settled down in Canberra, the apprehension slowly turned into excitement. Yes, it is challenging to be on my own, whether it will be less or more difficult also depends to a large extent on what I make of it. I am really happy to be back in a University environment, and just walking around a University campus with Shabdita feels so good. I hope I pass on this sense of excitement to her; I hope that she is happy to be in an atmosphere of learning someday. There are logistical environments to be established. I need to get Internet at home, for example, which has currently become a task akin to climbing Mt. Everest. Yes, that's not entirely true. Climbing Mt. Everest is surely easier! Anyway, I am on my way to getting these things done and sorted. When I look back to last month, I can see that I have come a long way. Shabdita and I have a home and are working towards a routine. She comes into my office with me, which has toys and a table for her, and sometimes she lets me work while she plays!

What are the biggest lessons that I have learnt in the last month? First and foremost, I have learnt how much Vipul's presence matters to my life. It is but a half life, literally, when spent apart from him. I have also learnt that it is important for me to work,to have hopes and dreams and plans and goals. I have also learnt that I am stronger than I think I am, and I am not as much of a disaster in the domestic department as I thought I was. Food gets cooked, the house gets cleaned, the laundry gets done and the dishes get washed. The house has not fallen apart. I think living on my own revealed to me the beauty of self reliance. As long as there is one more person in the house, there is always something that you think the other person will do. Now I don't have that mental luxury any more. Shabdita is not really cleaning up yet! I've realised that rather than think 'X (or V in my case!) needs to do this', it is not just simpler to do it yourself, but also more satisfying. After throwing out the trash, killing insects and cleaning up after dead insects, I realise that normally I would have waited or nagged for these things to be done. It is incredibly liberating, for I now feel that these things do not matter at all. Chores get done. They are not worth arguing or getting worked up about. Doing them everyday has a rhythm of its own and can become comforting and even beautiful if you want to see them that way.

I have also enjoyed getting to know Canberra. It is a quirky city that takes some getting used to. Its combination of roundabouts, greenery and sector-like suburbs makes me feel as if I'm back in Gandhinagar again. It is slow and sparsely inhabited, and again this requires an attitudinal adjustment. I've heard people complain that there is nothing to do here, and I've had difficulty motivating myself to leave the University to return to my empty house. The house is filling up now, and my books and Shabdita's toys will arrive soon from Adelaide, and then the house will be populated with old and new friends. Even now, it is the leaving that is difficult. Once we are home, I have the radio playing (no Internet so no Bollywood music, sadly) and the whistling kettle on the stove. As my make dinner, Shabdita plays around. Often she wants to be carried and see what I am up to. She babbles alongside the radio, and is definitely more entertaining. Some nights she is full of energy, running around, babbling, dancing and trying to jump. Some nights she falls asleep soon, and I curl up next to her under the warm duvet, reading until I fall asleep. I like this pace of life. I must be officially old, but I think such an evening is a wonderful one, and the only thing missing is Vipul to talk to. I like not having a tv any more, and am planning not to get one. I want to try other things, which I shall update here as and when vagary strikes.

One thing that I'm very grateful for is the kindness of strangers. In my very first week here, desperately house hunting, I ordered a coffee and then couldn't find the card in my purse. I was already exhausted and started blabbering to the owner 'I can't find my card. I'll call my husband on the mobile and he can read out his card number to you, that you can fill out. I'm sorry. It's just one of those days' even while dialing the phone to Vipul, who was not able to take a call then. A woman walked up to the counter and paid for my coffee. Once Shabdita and I were in the bus and it started raining heavily outside. On top of that, she sneezed and that too more than once. The girl sitting next to me asked me 'when you get off, do you want my umbrella?'. At another time, Shabdita and I were caught in a sudden burst of rain and made a dash from the car park to my office building. A woman who was about to start her car rushed out and insisted on giving us her umbrella. When I told her I only needed to get till the building, she personally escorted us to the building, holding the umbrella over us like a protective charm, which is what it was. To all these women, thank you. Your kindness has warmed up this cold city for me. A note, especially for the grandparents: I have an umbrella and I now carry it everywhere. I wouldn't let Shabdita get wet, so please do not worry.

This had to be saved for the last. In Canberra, when a bus reaches the final stop, the announcement inside the bus reads thus "This bus, on arrival at the next stop, terminates. Please disembark.' I get a mental image of a bus, empty after the passengers have disembarked, exploding in a flash of self-pity, a la Marvin the paranoid android. Ah, bureaucratic town. Wouldn't it have been simpler to just say 'The next stop is the final one' and leave me without visions of exploding buses in my head?!

Ba

2014-04-02T18:03:00.002+10:30

I would call my grandparents in Rajkot, where they insisted on living on their own. It was an inconvenient house, with the toilet on the ground floor and the rooms upstairs. The stairs were winding, and the ones that led to the top floor were precarious. They were not entirely healthy and it must have been difficult but Ba refused to shift anywhere else. It was where they had lived all their life and no other place must have felt quite like home, I imagine.

So I would call them. My grandfather would answer the phone. Over the past few years, he has lost his hearing. He would begin the conversation by saying "Hello I cannot hear you." I would start screaming too "Bhi, its me. Babli. (His pet name for me)." I would scream louder and louder, and he would keep repeating "I am calling your Ba. I cannot hear what you are saying. I cannot hear any more. Just wait, she is coming". Meanwhile, Ba would begin her long journey to the telephone. Her legs hurt and she would walk slowly, muttering loudly all the time. "Why do people call us? It is so difficult to walk all this way. Do they think I have nothibng to do?" She would finally get to the phone and say "Hello". "Ba its me". I would say. "Oh my child, I am so happy to hear your voice. How are you?" All that she had been muttering would not matter. She would discard that persona in a moment and become the affectionate grandmother. She would ask me about life in Australia, interested in the daily minutae of my life. "What did you cook today? What time is it there?"

At the end of each conversation, she would say "Have toh bhagwan lai le toh saru" (Now its good if God takes me). I would always respond with "Ba, evu kem kaho cho? Evu na kaho." (Ba, why do you say that? Donb't say that). Over time, this statement and its response had become routine. She said it, but it was difficult to believe that she meant it. She loved living. She was inquisitive about everything, gossiping about family, friends and neighbours with gusto. She was fiercely alive, and age did not make her withdraw from the world or become cynical about engaging with it. She wanted to know what everyone was up to, attend weddings and funerals, meet people and talk to them. At my cousin's engagement, she got mehendi put on her hand with everyone else. I saw the picture on whatsapp, and knew that she would have participated in each and every ceremony, insisting on following the rituals and trying to get everything done her way. I remember family functions where she would do or say utterly outrageous things, and exasperate my mom or my chachi, and their eyes would meet sympathetically in a crowded room, commiserating with each other.

She passed away in November last year, a fortnight before we went to India. She never saw Shabdita. It was sudden and unexpected. The house in Rajkot lies empty. My grandfather is a prisoner of his own senses, unable to see or hear; lost in his memories and the conversations echoing in his mind. With her,an entire way of being 'our family' has gone. There were typical things that we would say or do, actions, reactions and patterns evolved over the many years of being one family, which now have to be reworked. We all have to learn how to engage with each other anew. Rest in peace, Ba. I'm sure heaven for you is a place where everybody knows each other and gossips about the achievements of their families and the secrets and failings of others. I hope to find you there someday, and then you can tell me everything about all the people you have got to know.

I Said Something That Wasn't...: On Identity

2013-12-21T13:18:00.003+10:30

The title of the film The Invention of Lying is a spoiler in itself, in that the film is about the way in which lying was invented, and the world before and after that act. The film is funny in parts, though one could quibble that not lying and stating at every moment exactly that which is on your mind, are two different things, a distinction that is not made in the film. Here is the trailer of the film.

It is a sophisticated conceit, this world where no one lies. The film does not go the somewhat predictable way and show a dreary world where there is no fiction, no cinema, no advertising. Instead, all the modern familiars are there, but oddly inverted because the 'lying' that sustains them is missing. Thus, there are 'truthful' ads and there is cinema, but only in the form of documentaries and historicals. While the film does not explore it, I can't help thinking: what kind of history it would be, without its debates and its interpretations? The same event was called 'the Mutiny' by the British and the 'First War of Independence' by the Indian freedom fighters - which history would be more 'truthful'? Once you start thinking about it, it becomes clear that the divide between 'fiction' and 'news, reportage, history, politics, religion, culture' becomes unsustainable.

The film does not take this possibility on. Instead, it focuses on specific moments in this truthful world: In such a world, how do doctors interact with patients? What do people tell each other about where they go once they die? However, in this blog post I want to focus on one particular moment. Ricky Gervais' character has just spoken the first lie in the world, and he then attempts to explain to his friend what he has done. He tells him "I just said something that wasn't." And the friend says "Wasn't what?", to which he replies "Just wasn't". This is very clever writing, as naturally you cannot have a word for truth until and unless you have a word for lying, and vice versa.

This brings me to Saussure and the question of identity (and you thought this blog post was only about the movie!) In a previous post, I had summarised Saussure's breakdown of words and concepts into signifiers and signified, which make possible the argument that concepts are constructions rather than essentials. Saussure also argued that each letter (and word-concept) derives its meaning from its position in a particular sequence. What is B? It is the letter that comes after A and before C. Meaning depends on context and contingency rather than on any essential characteristic within itself. What is an apartment? It is a type of house that is not a bungalow, not a palace and not a hut. Within the context 'type of dwelling', it occupies a place that is relational (in relation to other types of houses, an apartment is one) and negative (it is not all these things, therefore it is this). Having grown up in India, the image that comes to my mind when I use the word 'apartment' (and I am more likely to use the word 'flat' rather than 'apartment') is different, presumably, from someone who has grown up in Paris or New York. When we accept that identity is relational and negative, then the characteristics with which we imbue identities are webs of our own spinning. When I assume that a ramshackle apartment in Paris is more 'romantic' than a ramshackle apartment in Mumbai, this idea is sustained by the discursive intertwining of the ideas of romance and Paris, which includes elements of Orientalism. After Wake Up Sid, though, Mumbai's romantic quotient should never be in doubt!

Amol Gaitonde, View from Mumbai Marol Hillview Apt.1, 2003, image courtesy wikipedia commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_from_Mumbai_Marol_Hilllview_Apt_1.JPG

The idea of identity as relational and negative frees up the notion of identity and releases it from its thrall to essential characteristics. In the absence of a relational notion of identity, an Indian is someone who loves cricket, Bollywood, is fanatic about caste and religion, works in a call centre, is argumentative, is intelligent, is not intelligent, knows English, does not know English, is underdeveloped because does not question social norms, is creative precisely because of ability to re-work social norms and so on. This list is filled with both positive and negative characteristics, can be populated indefinitely and volumes written on each characteristic. For example, I would love to write one on the 'unargumentative' Indian, as the idea of making an argument about 'unargumentative-ness' is whimsically appealing. All this activity, this definition of characteristics makes us feel comfortable, as there are bounds to be grains and pearls of truth in all this wisdom, all this information. The relational notion of identity frees us from all this noise, as it were. In this understanding of the world, to be Indian is simply to be not American, not British, not Australian, not Russian and so on. Saussure used the example of the Geneva-to-Paris train to make this point, wherein the train that goes at 8:25 is distinguished in terms of its position in a system where it is distinguished from the 8:20 and the 8:40 trains, rather than understood in terms of its engine or its number of carriages. Relationality allows us to understand identities in relation to each other, enabling us to see descriptions of identities as the fabrications they are.

The first of fifty two weeks

2013-11-30T20:15:00.001+10:30

Shabdita turned a year old this month. As I look back on the incredible year that this has been, I can divide it into two big learning curves: the first week and the first year, i.e. the other fifty one weeks. This blog post is the story of that first week.

I don't know about others, but when I was pregnant, even then, it never seemed real, that I would be a parent at the end of that process. I did feel certain physical sensations once in a while, but was mostly all right. I was intent on my work, and interestingly, was procrastinating far less than usual, driven by a need to "do" as much as possible before the baby was born. I was categorically not feeling attracted to pictures of babies, sweet things, sour things, buying things for baby and so on. A colleague of mine would often asked me if I had started shopping for the baby and I started saying 'yes' towards the end only because I did not want to disappoint her. Incidentally, I bought most of Shabdita's things after she was born. I realised that a lot of the ideas surrounding pregnancy (that you will feel x or y or z) are narratives, and one can play into it as much, or as little, as one wants. In retrospect, I should have taken to my bed more often! But otherwise, no matter how little or how much one prepares, the idea of a child is totally different from actually having a living, breathing physical baby in your hands. It 'gets real' in an instant.

It is difficult to capture the first couple of days in words. For one, the emotions that one feels are all jumbled up. You would think that one would be either happy or unhappy. How about both at the same time? How about beyond both, feeling shock, awe, fear, tenderness, guilt (including for all the things you didn't buy!), impatience, patience, love, protection, wonder, worry, exhaustion, exhilaration, an aderanalin rush like no other that will just not let you rest, suspicion, self doubt, competence and a million other emotions that you cannot even comprehend, let alone name. The boundaries of what I thought of as 'my self' had changed and that self would not be the same again.

I am adding to the myth-making, am I not? I struggle with explaining this without it coming across as myth making. I am not a big fan of myths, so let me revisit that last line. 'My self will not be the same again' is not the same as saying 'oh this is wonderful and grand and everyone should do it'. I have lived through one particular experience and I cannot 'un-live' it, no matter what else happens, unless I get conveniently hit on a head with a log and lose my memory, a la Bollywood films. In that sense, I am setting up becoming a parent as an experience that is precious to me, that I choose as meaningful to my life. It need not be so in every case.

To return to the story, all of that was what I was feeling inside. What was happening outside? For one, the nice hospital were Shabdita was born did not allow overnight stay by any one, including the father. Like most babies, Shabdita slept happily through the day and was up all night. It was like being thrown into the deep end of the ocean. Moreover, the hospital was trying to put us on a schedule. Every four hours, I was supposed to feed her, change her, cuddle her, then put her to sleep, express breast milk for the next feed, eat something and go to sleep, that is, get my rest. Alongside this midwives or doctors would come in regularly to check my blood pressure, to see if I required pain medication, to see if I was suffering any after effects of the epidural and so on. As Shabdita was a low birth weight baby, some days they wanted to change the four hour routine to three hours, so that she would get fed eight times a day instead of six. Why am I sharing this in such detail? To highlight its absurdity, I suppose. The first few days, getting her to breastfeed took so much time that it was time for the next feed before I had finished this one. My eating and sleeping were haphazard, but I was carried on by exhilaration and hardly noticed. I was also very tense and high strung because I felt that I knew nothing, was entirely unprepared and was being judged by the midwives. I shed bitter tears the first few days as I regretted not 'reading up' more, not knowing more, unable to accept that nothing would quite have prepared me for that first one week.

Most of the midwives at the hospital were wonderful - supportive, patient and cheering me on. A few were not. There were subtle elements of racism, not direct or deliberate. It manifested itself in underlying assumptions that my choices would be less informed, my practices suspect. My being ill-informed was not just a trait of my personality but an aspect of my nationality. For instance, the importance of keeping the baby in the cot was over emphasised to me because Indians tend to let their babies sleep in bed with them. A white person doing the same thing would be following attachment parenting and 'co-sleeping' whereas the same decision by me would be an unthought acceptance of my native customs.

Once, around midnight, I called Vipul, crying. The midwife on duty that night had told me "If you cannot manage after four days, what will you do when you take her home?" Most of the midwives were overworked, so I cannot blame them for being tired or crotchety. But at that moment I was devastated. If was as if this woman knew the truth, that I wasn't fit to be a mother. I hung up the phone and kept crying. After some time, I heard a whispered 'hi'. It wasn't Shabdita or the woman next door. It was Vipul. He had driven to the hospital and convinced (charmed in his own words!) the other midwife on duty outside to let him see me just once. As I said, most of them were nice. He could not stay long, but his coming made all the difference.

Why am I sharing all these memories here on this post today? Partly because, as I said in an earlier post, we need to voice some of the silences around motherhood. I also want the personal story to make a political point. That moment, which represents the lowest moment of that week to my mind, came about because of a certain institutional environment and certain circumstances. For me, it was that place, that woman, that moment. For someone else, it would be something else. Women give birth under a variety of circumstances. Some get respect, some don't. Some have family around, some don't. Some do it in their own countries, following customs and practices that they may not want to. Some do it as immigrants, ill at ease or happily welcoming new ways of doing things. Some do it naturally, some use pain relief and some have caesareans. Some are deliriously happy afterwards, some are calm, some are still in shock and some are unable to cope. For each and every first time mother, the learning curve is steep. Some situations are perceived to be 'easier' than others, and there is no doubt that giving birth to a child in a hospital with pain relief options is not as difficult as doing it where doctors are scarce. Each story, however, charts one growth on that learning curve, each story deserves to be voiced, shared and heard.

Posted with Blogsy

Unpacking My Library

2013-10-27T13:07:00.001+10:30

I have started a new project. I am going to read the books I own. Yes, I am admitting to the almost blasphemous: I have not read all my books. I have flagrantly put on display knowledge that I actually do not yet possess. In my defence, buying a book is my tribute to the idea of a future. I have bought it today, and someday I shall read it. For the present, there are always books borrowed from the library.

This resolution came about when a visitor looked at my gleaming bookshelves admiringly. "So you have read all of these books?" he asked. The guilt that I am ready to feel at just about anything immediately floated to the front of my consciousness. "Erm... Most of them" I said. A knowing grin came to his face, and this of course compelled me to keep explaining "The ones that I have read were things I was either studying, teaching or researching. And I have read almost all the detective fiction and fantasy that I own.... and a few random ones here and there". I gave up the attempt, and I am sure that he now thinks that I never read. Sigh. It is true. My likelihood of reading a book increases drastically when I have borrowed it from the library rather than purchased it.

I know some of the reasons for this sorry state of affairs. Brought up in a middle-class household, book-buying was reserved for the 'best books', the ones that one 'should' have read. And the frivolous stuff was meant to be issued from the library. I have read all of Agatha Christie's books, but never bought one through my childhood. Similarly for P. G. Wodehouse and a myriad of detective and fantasy fiction. As I began to earn my own money, I always bought books that I felt that I should read, mostly literary masterpieces or theory. I have nothing against them and have come to enjoy reading philosophy and history more than most other things I read, but it has created a large bank of 'someday' books that I bought willingly, almost dutifully, but resisted picking up as I was unconsciously prejudiced against them.

My book buying really took off after I came to Australia. For one, books are more easily available here than in India, and the second hand stores are endless sources of treasures. The joyless Puritan in me still bought two kinds of books: 'those that I will to keep forever' and 'those that I will read and then donate'. The latter were, of course, variations on the library theme, but mercifully without a deadline. So I kept reading and recycling books like the Game of Thrones series. Once in a while, I liked an author so much that I decided to keep the book (Raymond Chandler, I will never say farewell to the lovely you!) I also kept adding to my collection of someday books.

Not any longer. I have already started reading some of my own books and find them fascinating, and wonder at myself for holding on to my fear of uncharted waters for so long. I have come to terms with what I like, while also accepting that I may like something else, but will never know that until I try it. I think I am in for an exciting time. The title of this post is a homage to/plagiarism of an essay by Walter Benjamin from Illuminations, available on this link as pdf. The essay is a delightful read. Naturally, I especially enjoyed the idea that the non-reading of books is the characteristic of all true collectors. Of late, I have been reading quite a few books, blogs and articles around simplifying one's life. Most of them have resonated with me. At the same time, as Benjamin says "Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects". How does one reconcile the wish for simplicity with a love for objects, books in his case? For me right now, the answer is to keep what I love and consciously choose to keep. I am unpacking my library in two ways: by reading it and then by giving away that which I do not love or do not choose to keep. Knowing myself, this is most probably not going to result in a substantial reduction. But then that is not my aim anyway. What I wish to do is far more ambitious: to know myself by getting to know my library.

The Supermarketisation of Activism

2013-08-28T01:27:00.001+09:30

Sometime around a couple of months ago, as we sat down to dinner and television, we saw on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that the US Supreme Court had struck down an important section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a part of Civil rights legislation. According to the previous legislation, certain states with a history of racial discrimination could not amend any electoral laws without getting prior permission, or pre clearance, from the Supreme Court. Now, those states can amend electoral laws to make it more difficult for the poorest people to vote, leaving them disenfrachised. For example, people without specific kinds of identity cards would be people without identities as far as voting is concerned. I am not making up this example. American politicians regularly carry out all sorts of gerrymandering in order to be elected, and the nation's democracy gives the word a bad name. Not that it stops them from using it for other countries as a litmus test, one that they are mostly doomed to fail.

Anyway, that night I thought to myself "they'll pass some sort of gay rights bill soon". The very next day, the American Supreme Court struck down the Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA), thus rejecting as unconstitutional the act which defined marriage as only between a man and a woman. It is an important moment in gay rights activism, one well worth celebrating. Why had I been so sure, though, that it would come? Perhaps because it allows the 'you win some, you lose some' narrative of modern activism to be perpetuated.

This is not to imply that there is a conscious deep dark conspiracy wherein 'they', i.e.the sources of institutional power, deliberately take away something one day and give something the next day, thereby keeping protestors in check and appeasing the more conservative elements of society. What I am trying to point out is more insidious. It is the 'supermarketisation' of our activism, wherein we can choose between different causes, and embrace certain oppressions in the name of emancipation in other areas. In this scenario, one step forward and one step backward seems to make perfect sense, even if all it does is keep you in the same place that you started from.

The fragmentation of activism makes it difficult to conceptualise and challenge systemic formulations of any kind. Things are always tackled piecemeal, and it is hoped that these different and independent improvements will aggregate into a better world. At the same time, there is a tacit understanding that some battles will be lost, which effectively nullifies the aggregative utopia even before it comes into being. It is time to claim another way of being radical, it is time to be radical by radically re-ordering the world.

Posted with Blogsy

The ABCs of Our Home

2013-07-23T18:27:00.000+09:30

Shabdita is learning the ABCs of this household. A for Apple computers, B for Bollywood and C for Cricket. We are open to suggestions for other letters of the alphabet. Yes, K would definitely be for Kyunki Saas bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, but, as it has to be meaningful for both of us, may end up being for Khanwalkar.

In a bid to make Shabdita a true blue Bollywood baby, we decided that we would each pick one dialogue that we would repeat to her endlessly, and hopefully make it her first line. I decided to go with the iconic and the appropriate "Mere paas maa hai". After all, even A.R. Rahman felt compelled to refer to it, irrelevantly but endearingly, in his Oscar acceptance speech. I was pretty happy with my choice, and even felt bad for Vipul. After all, the most iconic line for a father is "Mera baap chor hai". Until I heard his pick. Now, morning and evening, Vipul tells Shabdita "Ek chutki sindur ki keemat tum kya jaano Ramesh Babu". Its beyond iconic, definitely epic, and I'm jealous about how uncool my choice now seems to be.

Shabdita however seems to have a favourite line of her own, that she lives up to through her actions rather than words. Her line is "Aankhen nikal ke gotiya khelta hoon". After all, my spectacles come off, so why would not my eyes? Everyday she goes after them with a vengeance, pausing only to try and pull off my nose or teeth. I think we should forget cricket and go with C for Crime Master Gogo.

Decolonial Dreams: Good news to share

2013-06-17T19:40:00.001+09:30

Excitement and modesty war in my heart as I write this post. I want to share the exciting news that my first solo-authored article has been published. It can be accessed online in the First View section of Modern Asian Studies here. Friends with institutional access, please download the article. And thank you if you do that more than once, or circulate it among those whom you think may be interested. Friends without institutional access, if you want to get a copy, please let me know and I'll inform you when the print version is going to appear.

Those of my friends who are not academics may be wondering "Why is this a big deal?". Well, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a young academic in possession of intellectual ability must be in want of a publication. And getting accepted by Modern Asian Studies is exhilarating, as it is a prestigious journal published by Cambridge University Press and, like most prestigious journals, it has a high rejection rate. (Yes, modesty lost by a large margin!)

At the same time, there is another, less selfish reason for my happiness. And that is because my article, the beginning of my life's work, is on Kanyailal Munshi. Not Shakespeare, not Jane Austen, not Kurt Vonnegut, not Thomas Mann. Not that these are bad writers. Yet I am happy that I am beginning to decolonise my mind. In their focus on specific times and places, Shakespeare and Austen are as "particular" as Munshi and Premchand; in their focus on the interaction between human self and the world through ideas of love, courage, honour, glory and so on, Munshi and Premchand are as "universal" as Shakespeare and Austen. Premchand, Govardhan Ram Tripathi, Dharamveer Bharti, Mohan Rakesh and countless others need the academic industry behind them. They need to be read, discussed and analysed from post-structuralist, feminist, decolonial and other perspectives. When academic literature around them abounds, we shall realise that "universalism" and "particularity" are narratives created by academic industries, and new narratives will allow new valourisations. I dream of a future where literature departments across India will teach Indian novels written in Indian languages. Students can read translations in their mother tongue, closer to the flavour of the original. They can then dissect them in whichever language they prefer, including English, and spread information about them far and wide. The language may be the coloniser's, but why should that stop our thoughts from being decolonial?

Unrequited Love

2013-05-02T15:56:00.000+09:30

Shabdita has given her heart away. The object of her affection is literally that: an object.
It is the ceiling fan that hangs above our bed, and is more fascinating to Shabdita than all her toys put together. Often, while drinking her milk or playing, she will stop suddenly, look up, make sure it is still there, and then continue with whatever she was doing. If she is lying on her side, she will roll over to get a view, but will not go back to feeding until she has seen it once.
Sometimes she is in my lap, on our rocking chair, and I am talking to her and she is gazing at my face, in the intensely concentrative way that she has, smiling once in a while. She glances around the room. She looks at her toys. But none of this will do. She looks up. It is still there, weaving its magic by turning round and round, both motion and stillness. She is happy to see it. She can then give all of these other things her attention again. Her mother matters again.
Like all relationships, this one is not perfect. The object of her affection doesn't know she exists, and doesn't really talk to her. And her mother disapproves. I hope that the next love of my daughter's life, at the very least, does not look down upon her!

The Corruption of A Republic

2013-04-01T15:28:00.000+10:30

[I first wrote this blog as a commentary on the MnM website and it can be accessed in that form here.].

Eminent Indian psychoanalyst and social commentator, Dr. Ashis Nandy, found himself in the middle of a controversy recently after he made a few remarks on corruption at a session entitled ‘The Republic of Ideas’ at the Jaipur literary festival, 24^th – 28^th January, 2013. Author and publisher of Tehelka magazine, Tarun Tejpal, spoke of corruption as an equalizing force, to which Dr. Nandy said ‘Just a response to this part, very briefly. He’s not saying the most important part of the story, which will shock you and it will be a very undignified and, how should I put it, almost vulgar statement on my part. It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs (Other Backward Classes) and the Scheduled Castes and now increasingly Scheduled Tribes and as long as this is the case, Indian republic will survive.’ A journalist present at the panel took up this statement, which was later endlessly replayed on a 24-hour television news channel. Dalit organizations and activists protested against Dr. Nandy. Not surprisingly, considering the upcoming elections in some key states, some politicians jumped into the fray and called for Dr. Nandy’s arrest. In India, anti-Dalit speech is punishable under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities Act), 1989, and is a non-bailable offence. There were demonstrations, and police complaints were filed against him in three different locations. Fearing physical harm and the possibility of imprisonment, Dr Nandy and his family went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of India did grant a stay order on the arrest warrants against him, but at the same time, the Chief Justice of India told Dr. Nandy’s lawyer “Whatever your intent, you can’t go on making statements. Tell your client he has no license to make such comments”.

The Indian social media and blogsphere exploded, with various arguments emerging on behalf of and against Dr. Nandy. The most common complaint against Dr. Nandy is that he was a casteist, and that he had stereotyped Dalits, and a few such complaints came even from those ostensibly defending him. An emotional critique by Anooop Kumar outlines Dalit oppression in India and accuses specific media personalities of defending Dr. Nandy instead of interrogating “upper caste anxieties”. There are blogs that, while disagreeing with Dr. Nandy, argue for his right to express his opinion and to “be wrong”. There are those who argued for his remarks having been made in humour, and lament the dearth of an understanding of wit, satire or irony. While the case seems to be closed after the Supreme Court judgment, there is still debate about whether this was a victory for freedom of speech or another instance of the way in which the upper castes in India can get away with any derogatory statement against the lower castes.

The freedom of speech argument is unsatisfying. The difference between ‘provocative speech that forces you to think’ and ‘provocative speech that is intended to hurt, denigrate or provoke’ is very context dependent. The intentionality of any speaker is not only difficult to prove, but also difficult to know. I would like to base my defense of Dr. Nandy neither on his right to say what was on his mind, nor on his intentionality. Instead, I would suggest that his remarks be understood through a discussion of corruption, and the way in which Dr. Nandy uses the term.

What does the signifier ‘corruption’ stand for? It refers to bribe taking, circumventing legal, administrative or social rules for personal profit. It is often tied to moral decay and decline, as in ‘the corruption of a society’. Developing countries are said to suffer more from this malaise, and it is seen as an obstacle to ‘progress’, which is understood not only as shiny buildings and invisible poor but also as the absence of corruption. The idea of corruption as entirely negative, without any beneficial aspects, has become firmly entrenched in current public debate in India, partly due to the popular anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare last year. One example of this is this newspaper article written by a civil service aspirant, who condemns corruption as entirely evil in hectoring terms.

In such an environment, to suggest that corruption is not necessarily a bad thing is to risk derision, contempt and incomprehension. Even at the Jaipur literary fest, at the discussion in question, corruption emerged as the obstacle to the utopia India could become. What Tejpal and Nandy argued for was a rethinking of our notion of corruption. In India, corruption frequently allows a way in for those outside power hierarchies. A poor woman can pay 50 Rs. to a policeman and sell flowers on the roadside, whereas lack of corruption would mean that only those who could afford the rent of a shop would sell flowers. Successful corruption becomes enterprise, and the successfully corrupt person an entrepreneur. It is interesting that when he talked about corruption as an equalizing force, Tarun Tejpal, used the example of Dhirubhai Ambani, who became one of the richest businessmen in India from humble origins by often circumventing the restrictive trade laws of pre-liberalisation India. In corporate circles, paeans are sung to the Indian ‘rule breaking/free thinking’ spirit, and Ambani has been mythologized as the pre-eminent rule breaker. If Dr. Nandy had responded to Tejpal’s comment by praising the spirit of jugaad in the Indian psyche, he would have been lauded as an astute observer. That he used a more controversial example to suggest corruption as a form of social mobility, and prefaced it by calling it a ‘vulgar and undignified statement’, does not take away from the fact that he was re-orienting the idea of corruption.

To liberal and neo-liberal attitudes, such a re-orientation of corruption is frivolous at best and disgusting at worst. In the neo-liberal framework, it is not corruption but education that is a social leveler, education and opportunity that will raise people out of inhuman conditions. One Dalit response to the controversy, Anoop Kumar’s post, lays bare the illusory nature of the educational panacea: “It took us several videos on suicides of Dalit students from premier educational institutions to even get some acknowledgement that these institutions, completely monopolized by 'upper' castes since inception, might carry some casteist prejudices and discriminate against Dalit students.” Education is a part of society, subject to its privileges and prejudices, and is not constitutive of it. Most parents, earning above a certain income, send their children to coaching classes, which poorer and socially backward families are not able to do. Coached children do well in school, university entrance and public examinations. Such ‘merit’ is constructed and is a result of the resources available, yet very few people would think of the ability to send one’s children to coaching classes as corruption. In a nation where one can pay money to cut the queue and get darshan of the gods faster and closer, what is outside of corruption?

Dr. Nandy suggests, as scholars do, a proposition that is counter-intuitive, appears outrageous, but bears thinking about. In the absence of education, in the absence of social and political justice, in the absence of freedom from prejudice, perhaps corruption is not a bad thing after all. It offers the socially marginalized an option previously unavailable to them. Money makes it possible for them to send their children to better schools, money makes it possible for them to live a certain kind of lifestyle, money makes it possible for them to make more money.

This is why Dr. Nandy’s argument falls into the category of ‘provocative speech that forces you to think’. It is our intellectuals who challenge our comfortable ideas, and force us to critically examine the world we live in, by turning regular, glib assurances upside down. I can understand people disagreeing with Dr. Nandy’s proposition and arguing against it. What leaves me shocked, however, is that very few people actually take his idea on board and react to it, reasoning for it or against. Instead, they react unthinkingly, remain steadfast to a one-dimensional idea of corruption and then call Dr. Nandy “reductive”! Even amongst those who defend him, those who actually discuss his notion of corruption as an alternative to the bureaucratic and legal framework are few and far between. Meanwhile, the liberal narrative remains unchallenged – corruption is bad, it is only the government and administrative bureaucracy that is corrupt, not the people themselves, and once we remove this corruption we shall have attained Nirvana. Or at least be Singapore.

The Indian Supreme Court was equally unthinking and uncritical. In matters of provocative speech, where the lines separating different kinds of ideas are thin, it is crucial for lawmakers to understand context, and engage with the argument as a whole. The Court disappointingly ratified the popular opinion, that Dr. Nandy would not be arrested after all, because that would be taking things too far, but he really shouldn’t be formulating arguments for public consumption. Dr. Nandy was only doing what scholars to – presenting arguments for people to work with or argue against. The Supreme Court’s verdict may seem to uphold freedom of speech on paper, but what it actually does is stifle provocative ideas without attempting to understand the argument. The saddest part about the controversy is what Dr. Nandy said after the Supreme Court’s decision, that he will now voice his ideas “in some other country or within the four walls of my home”. The Indian ‘republic of ideas’ is the poorer for that.

Valentine's Day 2013

2013-02-15T08:41:00.001+10:30

It is either a very happy relationship or a very unhappy one when dates do not matter anymore. Luckily, Vipul and I fall in the first category. We routinely forget our wedding anniversary. Once when Vipul told someone a wrong wedding date, I quickly 'corrected' him - with another, equally wrong date! Every year, both moms remind us enthusiastically of the marriage date, sigh at our seeming apathy, and ask us to celebrate it In some way. As people who eat take-away more often than one reasonably should, we celebrate by cooking at home. We've been a bit better with birthdays, but just about. Naturally, any other anniversaries or dates don't even stand a chance. Here is a sample, from yesterday.

Me: ( from the kitchen) what date is it today?

Vipul: (from the living room) it's the 13. (After a pause) no, it's Valentine's day today. It's the 14th.

Me: Then the yogurt has expired. I hope you didn't use it to marinate the food."

Posted with Blogsy

Delhi, December 2012.

2013-02-10T20:49:00.001+10:30

The gang rape of a young woman in Delhi in December elicited some very regressive views. Most of the reactions of bureaucrats, politicians and socio-religious leaders were insensitive or plain inane, such as the suggestion that the perpetrators of the gangrape in Delhi would have stopped had the victim only addressed them as bhaiyaa. In such a mindless climate, the media had a field day; all they needed to do was ask a suitably prominent public figure to react to the case, and then step back and berate them from a morally high standpoint as the person in question proceeded to make a fool of himself or herself.

This also allowed the media to escape any sort of soul searching. Most news reports sensationalise sexual crime, and extensively cover Bollywood violence and sexual innuendo. I don't want to single out any one media outlet, but newspaper websites that regularly carry content like "5 signs she wants sex tonight", "B town babes this week - hot or not?" contribute to the sexualisation of a culture. Arguments about responsibility tend to run thus "we all grow up in the same media environment, and not everyone of us is a rapist or a killer." This is true, and that is why there is a difference between culpability and responsibility. While those who perpetrate the crime are the ones deserving of punishment, none of us lives in a vacuum. And this is not only about the media or about Bollywood, sexist though they both are. It is also about power, and what is possible in what context. When people see other people get away with rape, murder and whatnot, it emboldens them to act on their worst impulses.

I have been following Tehelka's coverage of Delhi's rape case(s), though at times I read the headlines and skip the article. I avoid them only to lessen my nightmares. I do agree with Ajaz Ashraf's piece that this particular incident resonated strongly with people because of the familiarity of its social and geographical markers. As a student in Delhi, watching a movie at a PVR complex and catching a bus home is routine. Most of us would heave a sigh of relief if we got a private, air conditioned bus "aaj baithke jaane milega", "aaj dhakke nahi khane padenge".

Another searing piece was an interview with a woman who had been raped, an article that I could not read in its entirety. What I will not forget, however, is how she went to AIIMS for the physical checkup, and as they were waiting to see the doctor, the nurse shouted "Kiska rape hua hai? Andar chalo". I can picture the nurse, who is probably a good woman, ordinary, overworked and underpaid, who has become desensitised and utterly unthinking in the routine course. It requires sensitivity and thought to figure out who could be the victim, walk up to them, talk to them in a low voice, and spare them the gawking glances of the entire corridor. If such behaviour is not innate, it could perhaps be enforced through training. What I want to highlight is that it is not only "men", condemned in blanket terms, who need to be sensitised and their mindset changed, but society as a whole. There is nothing wrong with people wanting the government to make public space safe, but they have to be equally willing to introspect, and think of the variety of ways in which women are made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe, day to day, in familial spaces and outside.

An aspect that struck me strongly - perhaps because I currently live abroad - is the way in which the international coverage of the case has cast it as a conflict between modernity and tradition in India, such as this story in the Wall Street Journal, an informal survey of Delhi men on what causes rape, which insists on the 'Western influence' narrative. As an explanation for the event, it is simplistic at best and downright insidious at worst. The point is not the argument "rape happens because Indian men cannot deal with 'their' women who have become too 'bold' because of Western influence" itself, but the purpose that the argument serves in this setting. It allows for the perpetuation of the idea that the rest of the world, or the non- west, is traditional, and that Western influence is a liberating force that meets conflict at every turn, but will, like the true hero, emerge victorious in the end. There is no place in such a narrative for plurality or difference. What about rapes that happen in New York? They will be castigated in many different ways, but the narrative of 'modernity v/s tradition' will never make an appearance. All of Amercia is modern, you see, each and every inch of it. In such a vision of the world, any violence, sexual or otherwise, in the Western world, is just itself, whereas in the non-western world it is a reaction to Western influence, to modernity and what not. If we accept that human beings are complex creatures, let us also accept that there are many reasons for rape - misogyny, abuse, power, lack of power, sadism, opportunity and so on and so forth - and resistance to modernity may be one of them, but cannot be the single most important factor.

There may be multiple reasons to rape, but the reason not to rape is perhaps simpler - respect for another human being as a human being. It is very difficult to not despair in the wake of such events, but as someone who has depended on the kindness of strangers, I want to end with the blog post 'this is also India'. Hopefully, there is still hope for us.

Posted with Blogsy