It has been a rough day.
This morning I woke up to news about terrorist attacks in south Bombay, also known as "my Bombay". I don't know these Bandra-Borivali suburbs, they were not part of my childhood. I know south Bombay. Chowpatty-Girgaum where my relatives live and my parents grew up. Colaba where I drank beer and made desi eyes at a white tourist for the first time (we all remember our first time). CST (or Victoria Terminus, because I am stuck in the past) from where we always caught our train to Gujrat. Nariman Point where we went after dinner sometimes to just listen to the ocean waves mingle with the sound of horns from cars. This was all I knew of India until age 15, and this was the India which was attacked. I don't take it personally, the world doesn't revolve around me, but I'd like to feel like shit about it for 2 seconds.
My other "home" meanwhile is on the brink of anarchy, though it was top story yesterday my place of birth took it over today. As I brace myself for whatever is to come here in Bangkok, be it a coup or be it a bloodbath (most likely, it will be both), I know things have shifted and nothing will ever be the same again. Both cities will have to change, and I with them because I am connected to them as they are to me.
An activist friend said to me yesterday "you can't be neutral on a moving train" and that has repeated itself in my head all day. What does that mean? Many activists who were previously non-aligned have decided to join the reds, who are pro-government, despite being in ideological opposition to them. Their argument is, when faced with a situation where electoral democracy is at stake, the ends justifies the means. Therefore, join the reds, because the reds want to keep electoral democracy.
See, if a crisis were to break out on a moving train and a difference of opinion were to arise, everyone is still on the same fucking train!! We're on the same railway tracks and our fate is shared. If you think about the analogy, it's really not about picking sides, but about working together for the same end result. And so, does the saying make sense? Perhaps it is when you are on a moving train that you should actually be neutral?? Or am I completely misunderstanding the metaphor?
And what do I think of neutrality? In all honesty, neutrality in my chosen feild of work is linked to apathy and indifference. I am never neutral, and I never will be. "Non-aligned" is not the same as "neutral". I remain non-aligned, that is my stance.
Showing posts with label india. Show all posts
Showing posts with label india. Show all posts
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
God's Own Country
In Kerala, it is easy to orientalise.
It is also easy to ponder Marxism and God, red flags and Syrian churches line the streets.
She had written it as so:
"Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end." - God of Small Things
An "underclass revolution", women's emancipation, and redemption from caste-based discrimination - such were the hopes, no? But now it is about the SEZs and the call centers and the development of the IT sector and the torture of human rights defenders.
As we carve out little but growing parts of India where the Constitution need not apply for the sake of foreign investment, we throw away a little bit of our sovereignty for the sake of development. We uproot and displace but legitimise by aggravating communal conflicts, "well, they were fighting anyway!" we say.
In Kerala, upon the waters at Kovallam beach, in a state so politically engaged with a strong human rights movement, it is easy to question rhetorically.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Gag thyself, pitiful newsmongerer
Delhi's bomb blasts which left nearly 30 people dead were tragic for sure, but for me not as tragic as what the headlines have been saying. The BBC reports on what the major newspapers have been writing, shockingly asking for stricter anti-terror laws and tougher implementation.
Quote from Times of India:
"At this time of crisis, some of the liberties that we take for granted might have to be curbed to ensure that terrorists, who follow no norms and rules, are effectively restrained."
Surely, they must be aware that the first thing that comes under the fist of any national/internal security act is the freedom of expression. Look at what's happening in Malaysia.
Quote from Times of India:
"At this time of crisis, some of the liberties that we take for granted might have to be curbed to ensure that terrorists, who follow no norms and rules, are effectively restrained."
Surely, they must be aware that the first thing that comes under the fist of any national/internal security act is the freedom of expression. Look at what's happening in Malaysia.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
7 Days in Chennai
Seven days left in crazy/beautiful Chennai, and so many places left unseen. (I blame Facebook). The 6-day work weeks in India are brutally unfair if you’re a semi-employed tourist type creature using their skillz (pro bono) in order to “give back” to the Motherland.
Here is a list of how I have “given back”, although my Indian passport gives me very little except a tariff-free visit to Bhutan - but, still! I am NRI! I must “give back”!
- This morning I gave the auto-rickshaw driver a piece of my mind when he had the gall to keep my change (the gall!)
- Yesterday, at Elliott’s Beach, I couldn’t find a rubbish bin for my ice cream wrapper. I asked the ice cream man where I could throw it and he said, pointing to the ground, “here, madam”. Thus, my shameful contribution to beach pollution.
- I work for a renewable energy company, yet spend all 11 hours of my workday at the air-conditioned office on the computer, thereby contributing to India’s energy crisis while trying to solve it.
Okay, so, 7 days left and the following selfish things to do (after “giving” so much):
- Shave my hair at Tirupati
- Drink wine in Pondicherry
- Liberate Auroville from the shackles of Colonialism
- Track down one of these mysterious impromptu bush-parties on the ECR (email me)
Here is a list of how I have “given back”, although my Indian passport gives me very little except a tariff-free visit to Bhutan - but, still! I am NRI! I must “give back”!
- This morning I gave the auto-rickshaw driver a piece of my mind when he had the gall to keep my change (the gall!)
- Yesterday, at Elliott’s Beach, I couldn’t find a rubbish bin for my ice cream wrapper. I asked the ice cream man where I could throw it and he said, pointing to the ground, “here, madam”. Thus, my shameful contribution to beach pollution.
- I work for a renewable energy company, yet spend all 11 hours of my workday at the air-conditioned office on the computer, thereby contributing to India’s energy crisis while trying to solve it.
Okay, so, 7 days left and the following selfish things to do (after “giving” so much):
- Shave my hair at Tirupati
- Drink wine in Pondicherry
- Liberate Auroville from the shackles of Colonialism
- Track down one of these mysterious impromptu bush-parties on the ECR (email me)
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Tsunami Nagar
My fabulous roommate, Pasta, does sustainable livelihoods work in Chennai slums. She comes home each evening with mostly hilarious accounts of the day’s events. Sometimes, there’s a USAID audit and senior members of her organization are being taken to court, other times community workers are devising plans to invite Prabhudeva to an awards ceremony for the women’s self-help group. Such things make us laugh uproariously and slap our thighs with a gosh-darn-it-will-they-ever-learn.
Recently, she told me of her visit to Tsunami Nagar that left me depressed for days. When entire fishing communities lost their homes and businesses to the tsunami, a new settlement (i.e. slum) called Tsunami Nagar was built to rehabilitate them. Miles inland in the Chennai suburb, the fisherpeople were unable to access the sea, (i.e. their source of income and food). At the slum, they were forced to deal with sanitation and space issues that they had never encountered before. She was blunt, the slum resembled a toilet. Tsunami Nagar was apparently burned down in protest last year. The slum has been relocated a total of 3 times without a single improvement in conditions. Tsunami Nagar is supposed to be a temporary settlement before they get moved into permanent tennements which are built on the side of a hill resulting in the bottom houses getting submerged every monsoon season.
I consulted my friend Google and damn near fell off my chair when I found this Indian Express article (Jan 19th 2007):
"At least 35 women of Tsunami Nagar, where tsunami affected persons live in temporary shelters, were reported to have sold their kidneys for about Rs 40,000 to overcome financial problems, and were operated on in two private hospitals in Madurai." [link]
The aftermath of the tsunami saw the single largest global relief effort in history (an unqualified opinion); there was a sense of solidarity and humanity when people tuned in to their TV sets and really felt like they needed to do something. We felt connected to each other, didn’t we? I feel as though Tsunami Nagar represents the failures of the development sector. The intention is there, there is no denying that development agencies are crucial though subject to ridiculous bureaucracy which is the source of their limitations - but it’s time for reform. We need to start again, we need to hold true to the rhetoric of partnership building, we need to take capacity building seriously and not turn it into development jargon and mostly we need more common sense.
I am not deterred, lest you be mistaken. I am frustrated due to my head-on collision with How Things Really Work, but not deterred. They don’t teach you everything in a lecture hall, but that’s why there’s still room to learn. You have to be strong to be a foggy idealist but you have to be even stronger to maintain foggy idealism through head-on collisions.
Recently, she told me of her visit to Tsunami Nagar that left me depressed for days. When entire fishing communities lost their homes and businesses to the tsunami, a new settlement (i.e. slum) called Tsunami Nagar was built to rehabilitate them. Miles inland in the Chennai suburb, the fisherpeople were unable to access the sea, (i.e. their source of income and food). At the slum, they were forced to deal with sanitation and space issues that they had never encountered before. She was blunt, the slum resembled a toilet. Tsunami Nagar was apparently burned down in protest last year. The slum has been relocated a total of 3 times without a single improvement in conditions. Tsunami Nagar is supposed to be a temporary settlement before they get moved into permanent tennements which are built on the side of a hill resulting in the bottom houses getting submerged every monsoon season.
I consulted my friend Google and damn near fell off my chair when I found this Indian Express article (Jan 19th 2007):
"At least 35 women of Tsunami Nagar, where tsunami affected persons live in temporary shelters, were reported to have sold their kidneys for about Rs 40,000 to overcome financial problems, and were operated on in two private hospitals in Madurai." [link]
The aftermath of the tsunami saw the single largest global relief effort in history (an unqualified opinion); there was a sense of solidarity and humanity when people tuned in to their TV sets and really felt like they needed to do something. We felt connected to each other, didn’t we? I feel as though Tsunami Nagar represents the failures of the development sector. The intention is there, there is no denying that development agencies are crucial though subject to ridiculous bureaucracy which is the source of their limitations - but it’s time for reform. We need to start again, we need to hold true to the rhetoric of partnership building, we need to take capacity building seriously and not turn it into development jargon and mostly we need more common sense.
I am not deterred, lest you be mistaken. I am frustrated due to my head-on collision with How Things Really Work, but not deterred. They don’t teach you everything in a lecture hall, but that’s why there’s still room to learn. You have to be strong to be a foggy idealist but you have to be even stronger to maintain foggy idealism through head-on collisions.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Uh, what am I doing here?
I like Chennai. I like that is small and uncertain of its purpose. I like that the rickshaw drivers make it their sole purpose in life to scam me and only me. I like this bizarre community of expatriate software engineers and development workers, each one asking themselves "why am I here, exactly?"
Biju and I, we are kin. Canada to Thailand to India, my life travels backwards. And for what, really? Perhaps I should keep my bags packed always, the quicker to leave unfinished endings.
My relatives wrinkle their noses, "Chennai? But you won't get your food in Chennai. Tell me, why did you leave Canada?" The weather did not suit me.
Biju and I, we are kin. Canada to Thailand to India, my life travels backwards. And for what, really? Perhaps I should keep my bags packed always, the quicker to leave unfinished endings.
My relatives wrinkle their noses, "Chennai? But you won't get your food in Chennai. Tell me, why did you leave Canada?" The weather did not suit me.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Inheritance is Identity
Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss is a fitting travel companion for someone as stateless as I when returning to the country of her birth. It doesn’t matter how un-often one makes this journey, questions of identity are bound to follow. Especially if identity displacement is your best friend and you keep her in your pocket at all times.
Inheritance has probably been the central theme of this trip as the backdrop involves my father’s bitter decade-long battle with his uncles to regain what is rightfully his. There are some aspects of birthright that we fight to own, there are others that simply run in our veins and linger in the air in the form of stories and memories and dust balls.
For starters, being in a room with my mother’s entire family is like staring your gene pool in its face. Everything from my pointy chin to the inability to finish anything once begun has been inherited. I no longer claim responsibility for anything, it is simply in my genetic make-up and is probably my mother’s fault.
My trip to Gujarat began in a second-class dabba on New Year’s eve. Never again. The train rattled with the snores of a thousand men and smelled of festering faeces, I brought in the new year somewhere on the Maharashtrian-Gujarati border where, officially, booze becomes illegal. In Ahmedabad, I dutifully visited the Sabarmati Ashram from where Mohandas K. Gandhi began his famous Dandi March. I stood amongst huts once occupied by Gandhi and his followers, where he prayed and ate and slept, where he inspired and led people to take back what belonged to them. If this is where the notion of birthright began for contemporary India and Indians, then it is still being fought for in every sense of the word, whether in the domestic realm or in terms of autonomy of state. We are all wanting to take back what is “ours”, divide up and own.
I had never quite felt Indian enough, never knowing my family enough, never being able to speak Gujarati with the confidence I ought to have, always wanting to validate the Indian passport that I hold with more Indianness.
On we went to Khambat (or Cambay, if you like), our “ancestral” town. My great grandfathers from both sides of the family are said to have been visionaries and ahead of their times, they were entrepreneurial and shifted each family from subsistence-living to the throbbing, pre-war gemstone trade (a family business which will end with my generation, if I can help it). They were big fish in small ponds, they set out to Burma and subsequently got chased out, their various offspring now span a bunch of continents. Their legacies remain in the form of two mansions that sit like haciendas amidst shacks. Empty ghost houses, filled only with the stories we remember, rest forgotten. I see romance in these: a dusty gramophone, a teak headboard, an electric water heater. Oddly, I belong.
Everyone in town knows who I am, but I haven’t got a clue who they are, but I know we are part of each other. I know this because an old woman, who used to be my father’s nanny, who has since been forgotten by my family, is filled only with memories of love that moves her to tears when she speaks of them. I cry with her because it hurts to be forgotten.
My past is not made up primarily by patriarchs, mind you. My womanhood is connected to generations of women who personify the words endurance and sacrifice. Child marriages, financial devastation, death of toddlers, young widows, domestic violence, you name it. I sit with them and they laugh toothless laughs because my accent is so silly and they feed me some more because they love me even though they’ve met me, like, twice. And I am proud that their blood runs in my veins because this is blood of silent strength and perseverance. This is Superwoman blood. This blood makes people weep.
What roots are these that clutch? Well, they’re mine: they are my roots.
Inheritance has probably been the central theme of this trip as the backdrop involves my father’s bitter decade-long battle with his uncles to regain what is rightfully his. There are some aspects of birthright that we fight to own, there are others that simply run in our veins and linger in the air in the form of stories and memories and dust balls.
For starters, being in a room with my mother’s entire family is like staring your gene pool in its face. Everything from my pointy chin to the inability to finish anything once begun has been inherited. I no longer claim responsibility for anything, it is simply in my genetic make-up and is probably my mother’s fault.
My trip to Gujarat began in a second-class dabba on New Year’s eve. Never again. The train rattled with the snores of a thousand men and smelled of festering faeces, I brought in the new year somewhere on the Maharashtrian-Gujarati border where, officially, booze becomes illegal. In Ahmedabad, I dutifully visited the Sabarmati Ashram from where Mohandas K. Gandhi began his famous Dandi March. I stood amongst huts once occupied by Gandhi and his followers, where he prayed and ate and slept, where he inspired and led people to take back what belonged to them. If this is where the notion of birthright began for contemporary India and Indians, then it is still being fought for in every sense of the word, whether in the domestic realm or in terms of autonomy of state. We are all wanting to take back what is “ours”, divide up and own.
I had never quite felt Indian enough, never knowing my family enough, never being able to speak Gujarati with the confidence I ought to have, always wanting to validate the Indian passport that I hold with more Indianness.
On we went to Khambat (or Cambay, if you like), our “ancestral” town. My great grandfathers from both sides of the family are said to have been visionaries and ahead of their times, they were entrepreneurial and shifted each family from subsistence-living to the throbbing, pre-war gemstone trade (a family business which will end with my generation, if I can help it). They were big fish in small ponds, they set out to Burma and subsequently got chased out, their various offspring now span a bunch of continents. Their legacies remain in the form of two mansions that sit like haciendas amidst shacks. Empty ghost houses, filled only with the stories we remember, rest forgotten. I see romance in these: a dusty gramophone, a teak headboard, an electric water heater. Oddly, I belong.
Everyone in town knows who I am, but I haven’t got a clue who they are, but I know we are part of each other. I know this because an old woman, who used to be my father’s nanny, who has since been forgotten by my family, is filled only with memories of love that moves her to tears when she speaks of them. I cry with her because it hurts to be forgotten.
My past is not made up primarily by patriarchs, mind you. My womanhood is connected to generations of women who personify the words endurance and sacrifice. Child marriages, financial devastation, death of toddlers, young widows, domestic violence, you name it. I sit with them and they laugh toothless laughs because my accent is so silly and they feed me some more because they love me even though they’ve met me, like, twice. And I am proud that their blood runs in my veins because this is blood of silent strength and perseverance. This is Superwoman blood. This blood makes people weep.
What roots are these that clutch? Well, they’re mine: they are my roots.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Coming Soon: Adventure Tales of Pooj in the Motherland
This is my final week at work but I won't miss it. The world is blue and foggy with woe but I will get over it.
On Friday, I will be on an Air India flight to the Maximum City. Pray for me: pray that I will not sit next to an elderly, smelly uncle who will line-maro and make gulab jamun double-entendres.
I am about to embark on a 3-week reunion with my maternal family who span 3 countries and 3 generations, who have not all been in one place at one time in 13 years. I foresee drama, tears, loud voices (all mine) and lots of good food, good laughs and good memories.
I have been practising the following things in preparation for this trip:
- Heckling at white tourists
- Perfecting the art of negotiating why I deserve to sit down on the train because I have a farther distance to travel and/or I have polio
- Chai-making
- Developing the inner strength to resist engaging in any conversation ending in conflict over Medha Patkar and the NBA with my Hindutva uncle
Fun!! :-)
On Friday, I will be on an Air India flight to the Maximum City. Pray for me: pray that I will not sit next to an elderly, smelly uncle who will line-maro and make gulab jamun double-entendres.
I am about to embark on a 3-week reunion with my maternal family who span 3 countries and 3 generations, who have not all been in one place at one time in 13 years. I foresee drama, tears, loud voices (all mine) and lots of good food, good laughs and good memories.
I have been practising the following things in preparation for this trip:
- Heckling at white tourists
- Perfecting the art of negotiating why I deserve to sit down on the train because I have a farther distance to travel and/or I have polio
- Chai-making
- Developing the inner strength to resist engaging in any conversation ending in conflict over Medha Patkar and the NBA with my Hindutva uncle
Fun!! :-)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)