Why I'm not a feminist...

The previous post was supposed to have been titled, “Why I am not a feminist” – but the title that I used seemed and felt more appropriate and while concluding the previous post I felt there was a lot more I had to say, and so I left it open. I have thought about this much, and more than I have wanted to (and because of the comment in the previous post apart from other writings) because for one thing there could be very many different ways to approach the issue of women. Indeed if one starts with oneself one may find not a few yucky and peculiarly feminine traits in oneself, which makes pondering or contemplating upon the issue not a particularly pleasant prospect. But I'll save all that for another time...

- for now, I'll take a different bull by its horns.

I’ll begin with a question: what do we mean by equality when we talk of men and women (and indeed any social identity)? Here’s a sober and thoughtful post people might like to revisit. Equality of opportunity– the one that interests me here – in its very basic terms means that everybody has the right to participate in whatever arena of life s/he chooses. Entry shall not be barred on the basis of sex. And so (in modern nations), we have universal adult enfranchisement including the right to vote, the right to work, the right to education, and the right over one’s own body (including but not limited to reproductive rights). These are the very basic ones and there can be many more that other people can and will locate.

Even tunnel-visioned academicians realized that gender (the social identity more than a biological identity) does not function in isolation within a society. So what other identities become important? Class and national origin become two factors of importance within a society. Depending upon national origin (and thereby the specific culture) and class – other identities become important in understanding which females have what rights and what obligations but also concomitantly the rarely broached matter these days - which males are burdened with fulfilling their obligations and must not only do their duties but also keep quiet about what females take for granted because such societies are now going through a very strong phase of the female “liberation” movement. Now let’s see – the feminist movement has had a forty year strong history in the US and political rights were established in 1920. I’ll talk more about what I’ve noticed over the last decade or so about equality but before that two tiny anecdotes.

I saw a little news clipping a couple of weeks ago when the summer finals week was on the run. A prominent US university was lauded because it had strong feminist organizations on campus and had activities planned through the week of final exams during summer. One of the activities was about “women’s rights over their bodies and the right to feel good” – guess what had been planned on campus? Females who were stressed over final exams could go and get manicures done and “pamper” themselves.

Almost everybody will remember (better than I do) about the “slutwalk” that was organized first in Canada(because a male police officer said something stupid and just wrong – both morally and factually) and which spread like wildfire in different parts of the world. The cop who said that women get raped or molested because of the way they dress said something utterly stupid and wrong, yes – but how did masses and masses of women respond to one stupid comment? They decided to walk the streets, and in items of clothing that can hardly be called clothing and they called it a "protest movement"? Now of course I do have my own questions: Why do women dress up so much or dress down and spend so much money and time on shopping to look – let’s say the word -“sexy” and preen about in public? But apart from this I still absent-mindedly wonder why masses and masses of women from Canada to India were so keen to dress up in frankly weird ways and take to the streets because one cop in Canada said something utterly daft and wrong? Should so much attention have been given to one daft remark, in this instance? I mean just imagine what would happen if some of the men got together and started paying heed to what the feminists of different hues have been saying for across forty years?

But I’ll return to the above another time for let’s look at the other side of the picture and get a handle on what feminists like to talk about when they talk about “equality”. Let’s take one of the arenas from those rights based equalities: the right to work. Very well and good. White, middle-class women, at least in the US, following the period of WWII when they had gone out to work in factories and elsewhere with the men off at war (and yes, let’s not forget: boys and men are the ones to be conscripted where conscription and drafting exist – not girls and women)realized during the prosperity of the 1950s that they didn’t want to sit at home and just play house. They wanted to go out and work. So one of the legitimate demands that arose and was made into a law through the provisions contained in the Civil Rights Act, 1964 was that no work place with more than 15employees could discriminate against the woman who wanted to work. And yes, there had been legitimate reasons to consider when hiring women before this. Women do go through days of leave during childbirth and right after – and workplaces did not want to hire employees who might take leave. I’ll consider he fairness and unfairness from another perspective. When it came to bodily rights – women wanted the full right to be able to abort a foetus whether the father of the baby wanted the child or not. The right was considered to be absolute. This was the hallmark jurisdiction that came about through the famous Supreme Court case of Roe versus Wade, 1973. As I pause for a moment I can almost hear women standing up wishing to pelt me with words if not stones. They will claim that a majority of the males did not even want the child and that no matter what, females should have supreme control over reproductive rights because this is a matter related to the absolute right over one’s body. That is not my point however, ladies. I am neither arguing against the right nor for the right in this instance.

My point is – it doesn’t make sense does it to demand rights in certain places (the right over one’s body, as it is called) and privileges in other places (the right to work with full pay)without consciously making room for the fact that we cannot – I repeat -cannot demand “equality” simply because there are places where establishing “equality” between males and females is impossible and rather stupid. I have heard very modern women saying about a couple who are about to have a baby, “they’re pregnant”. Now having a baby is one thing – couples have a baby (or babies). But excuse me, “They” are not pregnant. The female is – not the male. Biologically speaking – this is the fact. We can’t change this bit no matter how politically correct we try to be. On the other hand, I see no reason to side with bands of juvenile feminists who have decided that women who have babies are extra terrestrial aliens if not nasty and repulsive creatures. I see nothing amusing about their jokes. So let’s consider work rights in connection to the right over one’s body. Society then considers women able even if they do go through childbirth (there are interesting anthropological studies on some societies about cultural practices but I’ll leave these aside for now). The assumption is that this biological difference does not make a difference in one’s ability to work. So far so good, I guess. And so a lot of noise about the right to work and equality in the workplace and the right to education paid a dividend in as ense. Within thirty years of the right to education bill being passed in theUS – there were clear cut rises in the number of females passing out from medical school, law school and also those who received their doctorates. So the law did benefit average middle-class women. But that’s not my point.

Let’s look at the bit about “equality” in the work arenas, and a little more carefully. I’ll pick on one aspect although there are plenty of arenas where I can look at and dispassionately. Construction workers, garbage disposal workers, road builders, movers, bus drivers, policemen, firemen, mechanics, truck drivers (this is how almost all supplies are transported), security men, railway men, soldiers, and even pilots actually….Some of these occupations are still 99.9% male or overwhelmingly filled with men. Feminists may grumble again or may pretend this is not their concern. Most likely because they don’t know where I’m going with my point. Well the world is controlled and dominated by some horrible distant males and androcentric norms and values which “privilege” male attributes, they say? Well what if all these men – and in f act all working men went on a quiet two month strike? What would happen? Could someone then please tell me how “equality” exists within the workplace arena, and in very modern and liberal parts of the world? I know of some of the arguments that have been forwarded by feminists of different hues. Women can perform any of these jobs. They are capable. The other argument is that these jobs are higher paying because they are dominated by men, and so women have been kept out of these jobs while yet another argument is that these jobs shouldn’t pay more than the jobs that are dominated by women (I don’t see any reason why a secretary should be paid more than a construction worker but maybe this is just me?). And yes, sure – the exceptional female can become a fireman. And yes, I’ve seen a few women driving buses here and I’ve known one gutsy little woman in ten years who worked as a truck driver, and I’ve seen a few policewomen, and there have been a few women who have been tom-tommed post Iraq(when women entered the US army at higher numbers – but anybody can check the numbers through a basic google check; and considering the low numbers of females as compared to the males, let's not forget that when Abu Ghraib happened, which involved both the military and PMFs - women were immediately involved n the same...so really, how can feminists say that war and violence and brutality exist only because men are around or that we should sympathize with the women because they were/are simply “caught” in the traps of the androcentric norms of war and had to participate in cruelty…? – about war some other day).

I sometimes wonder about different scenarios, for instance females moving from one city to another - because most 'moving' would come to a semi-halt if the males disappeared. Male friends or professional movers would no longer help them carry out and carry in heavy furniture when they are about to move, for free or for a fee. And kind boyfriends would not be around to bring in grocery bags and this while the lovely females walk into their houses with their little handbags, and there would be no men friends nor mechanics to change the tyres on the cars, and how or why would a majority of women and girls dress down and preen in public…?

How can so many women even afford to neglect or be utterly oblivious to the men who keep so many arenas of work going? I even remember one utterly bizarre case which went to court when a fire department said that there had to be a physical test which stipulated the minimum weight that a person applying for the job would have to be able to lift. Women protested. They filed a case that the fire department was being “sexist”. I don’t want to have to spell out the obvious – but just in case some far out ex-friend is reading this post: who would want a fireman who can’t lift a body if need be?

What makes me wonder is that women who talk so much about equality don’t begin to understand that equality doesn’t work when it comes to men and women. I have heard of the other side of the argument too. Equal but different. And about not being equal at all but being much better. This is not my opinion. The way the feminists have managed to forward their collective points of view is something that sometimes befuddles my brains or makes me go ‘tsk-tsk’. No matter how many “brands” of feminism females come u p with – they share a commonality. It spreads across feminist theory of the environment to feminist theories of science being gendered to feminist theories of war to feminist theories of peaceful societies, democracies and totalitarian regimes to feminist theories of sexuality. How is it possible that feminists attack societies as different as US American society and societies like Afghanistan in the same way as though both were and are equally patriarchal andandrocentric? This is like saying that a democracy and a military state are the same because both have legitimate forms of government. So while talking about “male advantages” why not talk about the advantages enjoyed by females in non-repressive states, the kinds of advantages the sort of women enjoy and also abuse?

No matter whether the feminists themselves keep saying that radical, liberal, Marxist, and post-colonial brands are different – they too share a commonality. What they do is this: when it suits them they talk of the averages and when it suits them they ignore the averages, and they blame whatever is wrong and bad on androcentric values and “men this and men that” or that “men have it better and easier”. An exception is counted in the same way – counted and held up when it bolsters their prejudices, and when the exception demolishes their prejudices they would much rather look away or become abusive or quarrel while parroting matter included in a politically correct soc 101 textbook. I know that gender studies (some schools still call it “women’s studies”) has become a laugh within many schools or just politely accepted for now and in some schools it is still held in high esteem yet who would be willing to bet a hundred grand that none of these schools have a clear and firm section on the man who works tirelessly to make human beings more emancipated? And what about the different kind of men who seek to make women’s lives a little better and men who work to simply get societies to function? And who will tell me that gender studies includes a firm section which talks about how average women themselves engage in cruel practices, silly ones and pass these on to their children (both daughters and sons) and take advantage of how they view and treat males, and not because they are oppressed under the shackles of patriarchy (as if this explains anything!)? And who will tell me that gender studies includes a firm and concrete section on the problems faced by men and boys?…and if aggressiveness and unhealthy competition are apparently masculine traits, who’s going to tell me that spitefulness and malice and deviousness and an overwhelming obsession to “look good” aren’t feminine traits?

The one thing I have to give to the big band of feminists is that they’ve got all their grounds covered. They’ll always tell you, “I’m not that kind of a feminist…it’s the other ones who say that stuff…” – but they’ll rarely if ever critique “that stuff” nor say that it needs critiquing nor say that middle-class women need to get off their butts and start whining less.

As for the “right over bodies” and the “right to express one’s sexuality” – this is the one that makes me laugh unless I’ve got steam jets coming out from my ears. This could do with a post of its own. Sexuality now means that females want the right to dress as they please in public and bat their eyelids and curry favours (mostly of material types – expensive dinner dates and gifts) from the males or simply dress to flirt and string the males along for bits of time or it’s meant to make other females jealous. Sexuality does not mean exploring sexual relationships in healthy ways– it simply means the right to dress up and dare to bare what they please and to flirt in preposterous ways in public places. And yes, there are the other feminists who say that they don’t need the males because sexuality can now be expressed through same-sex relations. Males are not necessary since they are only interested in “penetration”. These females are even more ridiculous. I read on Wikipedia that one of the ways feminists could support the inexplicable rush of female readers for “Fifty shades of Grey” is by saying that the book is a moment of liberation because women now don’t need men to experience romance and experience arousal….

I’m wont to say that feminism needs to be done away with and all brands of feminism. Feminists can ask me the question: "don’t you think women are treated badly?" To that I’d say “yes, but so are men and so are children” and I don’t see anybody taking up a special baton to rise up in their defense while there are too many women getting an easy ride playing victims of this and victims of that. And anybody who disagrees or says “give me a break” is either dismissed as being barbaric or as being a softie or a male sympathizer. But why does one always have to agree with the feminists...?

There was this elderly female professor in Calcutta who wanted to leave a feminist meeting ina hurry since her husband was ill and alone at home. Some of her colleagues questioned her feminist credentials. She gently but quite firmly told them that she owed a great deal to her husband as a human being, and not being beside him when he needed her was not her understanding of women's liberation. One could see the incident from many angles, and I could write another five paragraphs about this. Now I’d probably have not gone to the meeting but that aside, the incident in a deeper sense comes back to knowing that first and foremost an individual is always more important and more real in one’s own life and that the exception matters. I wish, at the very least that women would remember this as they go about their lives and their work. I always remember one old boyfriend whom I've not met in many years who has told me off not a few times for my bad habits and pre-conceived prejudices, and yet as I say even now, he has made me a little less of a barbarian and has never let me forget what it means to be human among a few other things.

But this post has already gotten too long, and for those who have managed to read through patiently: here’s a little list of girls and women (either from fiction or from history) whom I like and/or respect and/or admire or I find fascinating along with all else, either for a long time or across the years, and it’s more or less a chronological list (in when I started liking or admiring them that is). I know I’m missing outsome women and girls but this might give an understanding of the kind of females I respect and/or like:

George Kirrin, Enid Blyton, Heidi, Joanof Arc, Florence Nightingale, Anne Frank, Rani of Jhansi, Marie Curie, Mumtaz Mahal, Agatha Christie, Portia, Amelia Earhart, Kira, Ayn Rand, Leslie Bach, Dagny Taggart, Miss Marple, Leslie (from The Bridge Across Terabithia), Meerabai, Clara Schumann, Rosalind Franklin, Helen Keller, Rani Rashmoni, Irene Adler, Indira Gandhi, Abigail Adams, VirginiaWoolf, Emily Dickinson, Cleopatra, Anne Sullivan, Leela Majumdar, J.K. Rowling, Pushpo (from Debjaan), Nandini devi Chaudhurani, Kadambini Ganguly, Dominique, Anandamayi(from the Shiva trilogy), and Tara - and let it be known that more than half of the women on my little list come from reading my friend whose two blogs appear on the right, and over the years or from remembering and reflecting over what he writes or through different experiences.

*Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right....*

* from the song by Stealers Wheel.

Female, feminine, girl, woman. I have been puzzling over this issue more so for longer than a month now and rather intensely in short spasms, and some years ago there were some thoughts that swam through my mind when I read (finally read) Virginia Woolf’s A Room of one’s own only because of my friend’s blogpost. I’ve very rarely thought of myself as female, girl or woman – and especially with the passing of years. Being female impinges upon my being-ness very rarely, and very rarely have I been made aware of it or felt it myself – for better or for worse. I think I was innately somewhat more of an individualist than anything else for most of my life. I cannot see myself as a girl any longer, and I remember it was in college when I suddenly realized with a yelp that ABBA and The Beatles were singing about girls who were younger than I was. I cannot see myself as a woman because a very romantic and ideal-type and culturally embedded (yeah, yeah) notion of what a ‘woman’ is sticks to my head. But a woman brings to mind a female in a very lush and rich forest. A very beautiful female and of indeterminate age, and very wise and enchanting and amusing and active and who lives there somewhere with a man. So I do use the general word women to describe other older females but hardly ever to describe myself and when I do I feel dislocated from the word itself.

Some years ago I read an article penned by a female professor, which I actually still remember. In the article she noted how difficult it was for a female of colour to be a professor because such women always feel threatened and intimidated by the male students in their classroom. While reading that I realized with a strange awareness that in all the years that I had been an instructor and a T.A such thoughts had never once crossed my mind. My race and my sex had never entered my realm of consciousness. I taught like my race nor face nor sex mattered, and I had never felt threatened by any of the male students in the classroom – not once. I’d been heckled by male students because they wanted As but never heard back from them after I had explained that ‘wanting’ an A didn’t mean that they deserved one. I had some fun conversations with some of the male students out-of-class too. At a second layer, the thought entered my head that the place I teach probably has a lot to do with feeling safe on an everyday basis. I wouldn’t like to be teaching at a school where knives and guns are brought in as a matter of course and I had heard of a friend’s friend who teaching in Brooklyn I think it was, and she had to flee because of the colourful epithets that had been used to describe her and because she had been threatened of unpleasant consequences to her body if she didn't get lost – not just by the males it may be mentioned but by the female students too. My third level of understanding while going through the article was that the female professor writing that article and pontificating had nary a leg to stand upon while making what she claimed was a “general case”. None of the little narratives that she presented made me think or feel that just because a professor or an instructor is a female and is brown or blue, she should by default experience a loss of power or authority in the classroom or while talking with her male students. A professor who always, always remembers she’s a female first (and the insidious assumption being made was that a female of colour even if a professor was a "weak female" because of something embedded in the collective conscience apparently) does so only because she is far too attached to her female identity, and this becomes her primary identity in all possible encounters. I have a strong suspicion that this is one of those stupid instances (and there are many such stupid instances) where the feminists keep brainwashing us about how we should and ought to feel victimized because sex is such prominent marker of identity, and so we must always wear our "sex" close to our skins (!), always experience a loss of power, and then make a hue and cry for being a victim and then seek payment because we seek to be empowered.

I’ve seen female graduate students up close and personal. It’s only over the last some years, once I got internet at home that I stopped working in the computer lab in the department, but I’ve had the privilege of hearing females talking among themselves. I have seen a woman working on women's rights and crying by the bucketfuls because she was in terrible debt but not a couple of days later she's also talked of how lovely and soothing stone and gem massages are (I didn’t know there were such massages available). Females who complain about not getting enough graduate stipends have come in with sassy and obviously expensive haircuts and with their hair coloured and highlighted (and no, this is to answer an ex-friend – just in case that somebody happens to be reading my blog – I have never coloured my hair), and fancy clothes and make-up on their faces, and I’ve seen other females coo and gush over the new hairdo and all else. I’ve heard females talking of cheap deals on sweaters (I didn’t know that $80 for three sweaters was what made up a deal). I’ve heard conversations right after Valentine’s Day when the females tell each other stories of candlelight ‘surprise’ dinners, amazing gifts, and the roses that their boyfriends got them and of getting the most delicious body massage ‘ehvuhrrr’…and of being pampered. I’ve heard one extremely dainty, sweet, pretty and amazingly fashionable young thing telling a matter-of-fact graduate student that she was planning to have a baby because she and her husband were bored and were having problems. The matter-of-fact graduate student who went on to get her PhD told her quite firmly, ‘you have to sort out whatever problems you’re having. Having a baby won’t fix them nor solve them...’ The pretty young thing sighed and I don’t remember what she said (but she got her PhD and a job too). Maybe she spoke terribly softly because I’m sure my ears must have been wriggling by then even though my back was turned to the conversation, and my wriggling ears must have given away my interest in overhearing the conversation. The rest of the stuff heard in a computer lab isn't fit for a public blogpost. And these are students who all get their PhD, and write papers, attend conferences and have not read anything beyond their sociology texts.

I have heard Indian females of different feminist groups holler about patriarchy and androcentric norms. I had one telling me off about figure skating because I didn’t know that it was such an-oh-so-obviously sexist sport meant for old leery men who got turned on by nubile or pre-pubescent females dressed in body hugging outfits. But what about gymnasts or divers or swimmers? And what about the male figure skaters? And surely at age 6, I couldn’t be called a leery old man for watching figure skating, diving, and swimming on TV?…the same female had proceeded to show me how incredibly flexible and agile she was by spreading her legs all of a sudden in the middle of a conversation where there were males and females sitting around. I was challenged to show how flexible I was. I demurred. Yet another feminist scholar who knows all the right jargon and has read the right people starting from Judith Butler to Helen Longino proceeded to gyrate in the living room space where a couple of people were dancing to some feet stomping numbers. She started clinging and moving up and down one of the males and pressed her body in such an embarrassing manner that the male, friend though he was started moving off in another direction. And yet when one female is stared at by some Indian male because she's smoking in a public space, the female raises her voice in protest while talking of the "disgusting" incident later for the male is displaying a "general sense of entitlement" by staring at her when she's smoking.

These females they know – all of them know the correct jargon, they know that their male friends are simply too nice to actually point out that middle-class women should really stop complaining while doing all they do but these females know they can call a man an MCP if he dares to voice the same. Well how about calling these women FCSs? Female chauvinist sows, that is. They can't stand males in general and they can't stop talking of androcentric values and they can't stop talking about patriarchy...they can't stand males and they talk about males as a 'species', and they see all men as belonging to one indistinguishable category. And there are plenty of the identical sort sitting in India too. There was one particular female who had a little blogpost titled, ‘Let’s kill chivalry’, which still gives me the creeps. Right. Let's do away with chivalry and politeness, and decency and good manners and general courtesy but let’s also call the rare man who does put into practice courtesy and good manners a ‘sexist’ while we’re at it, and when the rare man objects let's call him an "MCP". FCS, I think is a stunning descriptor for these females.

There are other feminists too who believe that feminism is a way of addressing the structural problems that women face within a gendered society. I don’t disagree that there are problems that females face in situations simply because they are females but it also makes very, very good sense to ask ‘which females’ and address the particular issue at hand rather than ranting emptily and vaguely. When middle-class females call themselves feminists and rant and bleat and complain about facing so much psychological pressure to do this and that (and all because of male hegemony) and that they aren’t getting a fair deal, they would do well to see what I do: 'they want to eat their cake and have it to!'…but of course they haven’t been blessed as I've been (thank God that I am), so I can’t entirely blame them. The matter goes down to seeing individuals too and not just seeing and parroting these terms of patriarchy and sexism because they're cool and radical while also being painfully politically correct at least within academic institutions (a male professor could most likely be thrown out for saying that middle-class women should do something else other than shopping or spending their time bleating and complaining while proclaiming they're proud feminists). This is what the females miss - seeing the individuals and seeing the specifics and seeing what is dislocated between even their own talk while writing papers and what they do in their real lives, although they refuse to see what the average middle-class female is like, and they refuse to acknowledge that females have as much of a hand in the social injustices as much as the men. So they neither acknowledge the average when that upsets their apple-cart and neither acknowledge the individual and specific encounters when that jars their pre-conceived prejudices. Add to this that they've never in their entire lives come across a man with a mind and the courage and who has the ability to call a chalk a chalk (or a spade a spade), and so many of them lead lonely and depressed and angry and sad and sick lives.

To see these females from middle-class backgrounds who are educated and living cushy lives while facing absolutely no exploitation and no subjugation bandy around these terms even when they are talking of themselves and other women much like themselves used to make me wonder whether they were blind or just stupid or just creepily insane. "Frankly...I don’t give a damn" (yes, I rather like this liner). I try to see less and less and hear less and less of these types. These same females who talk about media oppression, the right to one’s body, the androcentric norms which define beauty, the right to express their sexuality and the rest will dress up when they please, use expensive make-up like proficient models when they so wish and bare their cleavage too when they so feel like it or look and sound like unhappy, vituperative angry hags or just pompous pontificators on patriarchy all the time in public, and the double-standards never seem to end, and then they say that I’m the one with a problem (and I have absolutely no issues with dressing up or using make-up or wearing heels or looking like a grumpy aunt – it’s a matter related to the ‘why’ would I do what I do and to see as well one is able, and since I laugh at the whole deal of ‘feminism’, it seems awful to their ears and they say that I should learn to agree to disagree; but why indeed does one have to be a feminist to be aware of structural inequalities or be sensitive to human beings who haven’t gotten a fair deal in life? - No answer to that one, of course. I seem to come across as being disagreeable and most improper. But then this post isn’t about feminism really; it's just about to-be-PhDs and doctorates with degrees and other types of females I've come across the most in these years).

I can’t say too many pleasant things about average males but I’ve seen myself as being pretty much the average person most my life, and I am female going by my sex – so that makes me an average female on almost every count but one, and that makes all the difference. I can’t say that I feel any sense of companionship or any fondness or any sense of kinship for the females I’ve seen and spent most of my time with, here in this town and that too some of these are females who have read more than a fair bit and are in institutions of higher education and who believe that they are doing useful things and advancing knowledge, and they think that they know much about the world and about themselves, and more than the ‘average’ person. Well, they make me sick and tired - the lot of females that I've had to be with for more than most of my time here, in social situations. So personally, I'm much better off having conversations with the couple of rare humans and beings who come across as being human and real, and make me feel human. There will be a second part for this post maybe after a suitable intermission. This was just to give an overview of some of the different kinds of clowns and jokers that I’ve seen much too often in this university town and in my social circles….

A sudden musing on (the English) language

Language is a strange and curious affair. I sometimes still get confused whether it is a tangible or intangible part of culture; I can’t make up my mind. Using language well can be compared to much. It can be like a dance, like a blend of dance moves mixed with precision movements drawn from the martial arts. It can be a war of legs, as in the tango. It can be the casual, almost limpid, lazy movements of a person with a sense of perfect rhythm, dancing to some music playing on the radio while doing this and that and the other. It can be like a body cutting through air and water and executing a breathtaking dive…it can be a painting or a picture capturing more than a thousand words, bringing to mind connected images and emotions. Used well, language transforms intangible feelings and invisible thoughts, brings back memories, gives them shape and form like a clay shaper, makes them real to the hearer or reader. It can be an audio and visual and tactile affair or just one or more. Sometimes it makes its way through and as a stream of silence. The words themselves may bring silence within the mind-space of a reader. Words may sometimes break into one's silent or noisy or chaotic or nonsensical world as well, and make strange and then abiding sense but to only the hearer. Language and writings translate words to pictures and images and thought... Language lets, it seems almost banal and terribly trite to mention, humans communicate.

I know only one language not-too-terribly-badly. I very badly wish I knew Bengali just as not-too-terribly-badly. I sometimes think that I must have spent many, many, many lifetimes utterly illiterate and uneducated. This is not a disjointed thought. I feel that way because I steadily realise sometimes in gentle spasms, in blissful showers that also ache, and sometimes like a cold shock that learning even one language well, understanding it well, and using it well (by which I mean superlatively well) is given to the rarest of the rare. I know that I sometimes don’t quite understand English when I read prose or poetry. And I don’t mean abstruse or badly written material. Neither do I understand much material that is read by many in Philosophy, Sociology, Economics, Political Science, History, Psychology, and so on and on. It’s one thing to digest and then dismiss. I can’t even get over the first hurdle of actually comprehending and following what I read. I don’t quite know how I understand what I do either. I’ve tried to understand this but I don’t think I’ve gotten intellectually wiser about this.

I learnt English at a very early age, and loved the language without thinking or even knowing that I loved it. I loved language and liked using it and liked playing around with words and sentences. I liked the sound and look of words. And I read in snatches and deeply and loved that too but never thought that that reading or writing which I stayed with was something that required thought or needed any justification. By 8, I had a firm and fast friend within me who was telling me constantly and insistently that I must never forget English, and that I had to master it as well as I could. It was something rather remotely similar to walking fast. That may sound weird. But it was a matter of compensating for other stuff that I didn’t have, couldn’t master no matter how much time I was given, and couldn’t keep up with. By Class XI, I remember that I had been maintaining a steady diary and other random note-books for sudden writing urges but stories I could not write. I was not a story-teller. I sometimes started but they never quite got to the end. Some faltered mid-way. I think there are some people who are born story-writers and others who are not. Maybe it is a talent that can be honed and requires a particular hungry and insistent and imaginative mind-set but I don’t have that and didn’t have that. My muse for story-writing is either lazy or non-existent or cannot think beyond what it has seen and heard and lives with. Not a particularly imaginative nor a particularly intense nor passionate muse then, I guess. Or maybe I have a monomaniacal muse. By the time I was finally doing my Master's, I became horribly arrogant and a little too obsessed in how I expressed myself and I was the same way in college. I liked the mode of expression and paid a keen attention to how I said what I did but there was very little I think in terms of content. I simply followed my thoughts. I don’t have any of my diaries or any old writings with me but I’m sure I must have sounded just plain convoluted. I think I had the tendency of adding too much sauce as well apart from sounding unnecessarily long-winded and unwieldy.

I do know though that other authors sometimes influenced how I wrote and terribly. I don’t know whether this happens with everybody but I do know that it happened excessively with me. I was determined by the style of the author I was obsessing over through my school years and in my college years, and I know Agatha Christie, P.G.Wodehouse, Roald Dahl, and Ayn Rand come to mind particularly. Then came the horror of realizing, and at 25, and without the earlier who-cares-about-that attitude that I didn’t know grammar at all. Not only did I not know grammar but I hadn’t followed the basic principles of grammar in my prose (or in the hasty and insane fit of poetry writing that probably all Bengalis fondly go through). And that was that. I taught myself grammar frantically while teaching a bit of grammar to others, but still don’t understand very basic rules and almost nothing of punctuation.

Language is a mighty strange thing. I don’t understand semantics or semiotics or linguistics or anything of that sort. I do know that I don’t like just form without content but sometimes I can see when I read what I do that the form blesses the content with an unusual beauty and tone and an uncanny depth. The only thing I started becoming obsessive about, and with reason, is the use of particular words and knowing whether I wanted to use a particular word in a sentence. I obsess over getting sentences to mean what I want them to mean but don't always succeed. It seems like a very basic thing but I fret over it in a rather paranoid way sometimes. I started pondering more and more about how words can mean something in a general way, given the common dictionary meaning, and yet words and phrases mean something specific to the user and the reader and the hearer and the writer. Sometimes I look up the dictionary to see what very regular words mean. Sometimes I need a dictionary thrown at me. Sometimes I don't look at a dictionary even when I should. Sometimes I think one should come up with a dictionary to give meaning/define words that can mean different things to normal people and to people who might have non-normal experiences.

Humans communicate through language, and the written or verbal way is the only way I've communicated for most of my life, and sometimes it is a beautiful and many-pronged affair….yet I sometimes can’t help wondering and furiously how we manage to communicate through language given that words, turns-of-phrases and even sentences so often have a double-meaning, triple meaning, and depend upon the mood and mentality and mind-frame of the people communicating; on what we choose to pay attention and what we choose to let pass during those moments. The common framework exists and so many layers and hidden layers and more and more emerge and wait to emerge through the dance and music of language sometimes. I can’t quite imagine a world where there is no language but and since I was suddenly exposed to the world of sci-fi literature so late in life, I came across the idea of communication in a 'language' but not in the way we generally understand it, rather late in literature. Only it neither felt like fiction nor fantasy and I didn’t understand the science behind it.

“First there was light”, was there, yes? But did the word come before or after or with the light? I have recently had wondering bouts very late in the night ‘bout the matter of language - physically alone but not exactly lonely, embalmed in a non-silence while carefully examining the red-orange glow of a cigarette, and with sometimes a half-hanging smile for company.

The golden deer....

I've been somewhat quiet here which doesn't mean I haven't written anything. I even wrote possible shortish blog-posts - only they never got around to making the final cut. During the Christmas break (last year) a song liner from a short essay kept pealing out in my head. I had last heard the song while in school (in fact that was the only time I actually heard the song, and it was a friend who knew the song and she got frequent requests from me to sing it), and had all but forgotten about it until I read the essay many years later. I found the song on youtube sometime during Christmas. I realise I fill in some of my own worders for the song. Not that I can sing it.

Maybe a proper post will be put up soon, but for now, a rather belated Happy New Year and here's the song link, which is more than a joy to hear, no matter how many times one may have heard it. A rather stubborn song, it is too.

A little gift from the river

The days I walk to the river - some days, if I remember to carry a plastic bag with me I pick up some bits of trash lying around. I picked up the habit from Joe (who'd go armed with plastic bags if he were going hiking; some stories there but another time). There's not a whole lot of it but one does find some, and it displeases me, and I like picking up the junk and dumping it while thoughts of different sorts wander around my head. Some days I've had to hurry over to the garbage bins lying next to the river trail having found and collected five cans of beer and a couple of empty bottles of whisky and rum just so that nobody imagines that I was downing all the stuff while sitting on the sandy banks of the river.

Today the wind was blowing furiously. It was a wind that was raising yellow, brown, and orange leaves into whirling dervishes. The blazing wind I thought was going to blow me off the bridge. I didn't really expect it to but just to make sure that it wouldn't, and just in case it did, I was walking near the rails. Just so that I could grab on to the rod on the rails if in case the wind got a little too playful. But it was warm too. Strangely warm for a November afternoon. And after walking around and a bit of climbing and racing down, and walking and looking all around the still overgrown banks, having a fairly huge and happy dog running towards me and barking merrily just when I was climbing up a sheer slope and all...near one section of the river where I decided to visit today, there were plastic cups and paper and stuff lying around. I scrunched up my face and went and sat near a bit of the banks for a bit. Did my usual stuff. Wrote a bit, smoked some, laughed a bit, and looked and listened. I got up after a bit, and armed with my plastic bag and another couple I found lying near the banks, I started stuffing all the plastic and paper and assortment of trash which probably was simply blown out of some open garbage bin. I had a merry time too. Walked all around, climbed up and down the banks and some of it required leaping around like a goat. I was talking out loud at some points too, and hoped that nobody was around to watch my antics. Found a discarded magazine in which I read about a young Purdue student, who started an I-Read program in Indiana schools, and it made me sigh and gulp at the same time. The magazine too went into one of the plastic bags...

But nothing compares to the delicious moment when I chanced upon a $5 bill lying there half-hidden under the carpet of leaves. I was so delighted, and I'm not quite so sure why....but it was lovely. I put that carefully in my bag, smiled widely, and surveyed my surroundings. The plastic bags of rubbish I deposited in a dumpster, and feeling quietly pleased I wondered what I would do with the completely unexpected $5 gift from the river and river banks....

On desires and on 'winning'

Painting/sketch: Rabindranath Tagore. Untitled. Downloaded.

16th October - 11th November 2011: There are some liners from books, movies, and songs that sometimes play over in the head with greater frequency, and they keep one company even as one goes about one's daily life. Last year at some point I'd been pondering over 'if winter comes', (although I couldn't frame the thought). At some point when I was immersed in the first embalming shroud of a reluctant winter, and I was silent for the most part and doubting myself and there was nothing I could see particularly well, I felt like saying (although with far less excuse than Frank Slade), 'I'm in the dark here'. People fond of me were looking at me with not much fondness nor much hope almost like they were giving up on me, and there were some liners from Viktor Frankl's autobiography which made me say that if he could believe in his bit of hyper-reality, and in the midst of going through what he was and at Auschwitz no less before he was sent to Tϋrkheim, I had no earthly nor divine right to think I was in the dark. I couldn't really see much, and I do have myopia, and sometimes need new glasses without knowing it but along with Shaw's St. Joan I had to say within, 'By what other judgment can I judge but my own?' – although I wasn’t too sure what I was judging by my own judgment. Positive thinking however sometimes helps, even though one doesn't know why one is thinking positively but sure enough sometimes shining drops of much-needed hope come from other quarters, and also the everyday sort of joyous hope, which is just as important – and from older and younger friends. And sometimes that lit-up hope says that there are some other people too in this physically real world, others who live and smile...

Lately, it's been a defiant, accepting, disconsolate, and rather melancholic but proud liner, from the Abba song, 'The winner takes it all...' (and just that liner blaring out unless I’m actually half-listening to the song while doing other things). There's another line that sings in my head these days, Jo jeeta wohi sikander. Not entirely disconnected from the previous Abba liner. It's from a movie of the same title that I enjoyed watching in my school-days.

Is life a race or a game though where one wins or loses? It does seem to be a game sometimes, and a game where one gets to know some of the rules bit by bit, and a game that’s not particularly fair or square, and sometimes one isn’t so sure whether one is getting any better at actually playing the game. One takes a leap (of faith?) and seems to be racing through, and with smiles too, until one lands into a river instead of what one assumed would be a sand-pit. It seems peculiarly brutal too at times even if one is sometimes an observer to the brutality and the cruelty (which doesn’t always draw or let blood although that too does spill) and the banality. It seems hard and real at times especially in its drudgery, sadness, everydayness, bland normalcy, poverty and sickness (not just physical) but undeniably real in the sudden, sometimes fleeting, and somewhat translucent sense of mystery, magic, charm, laughter and serendipity. It also seems peculiarly individual, personal, private and even isolated but not-quite-so at times.

I sometimes wonder how we win or lose in life, and what determines winning or losing. Some great people say that it's the choices that define who we are, and not our abilities, and sometimes I gladly and stubbornly believe that and sometimes I can't help but raise my eyebrows to say, 'really?' And so, what if I make choices and I don't win or worse just seem to be losing time and with it the possible dreams? Who's going to say, 'well done' or 'well played'? And I do want to see the smiles, the satisfaction, and the happiness on real faces, and not just from the imaginary audiences who were once cheering me on in my head. One may raise the quiet question, 'what do you mean by winning though?' It's not unrelated, this question. Because we do say very sagely that life isn't about winning or losing but about playing well and hard and true. And it's also true that I don't want to win formal prizes at competitions, and stand on the number 1 spot for the Olympics 100 m race with Jana gana mana playing in the background. I'm not talking about winning races but I certainly strongly desire to be useful (as Janet Jeppson Asimov says) or to be of benefit (if that sounds better), before I pass off, and by playing well and hard and true and by making the choices that I make – that I won’t deny.

The root of life does seem to be '(hairy) desire'. This answer had erupted in my own head and upon a whispered question within from my fimh towards the beginning of the previous decade, ‘what is the root of life?’ I started reflecting upon the Buddha's second Noble Truth not infrequently, and only because of an essay written by Suvro da, which I read also towards the beginning of the previous decade. Desiring (or craving) for 'x', in some sense, is one of the things among other things which leads to unhappiness, dissatisfaction, pain and also possible and potential suffering but desire begets the experience of life itself. It seems almost like those self-evident things that one imagines that one always knew and one nods one's head and says 'yes, I always knew that' but it's one of those things that one wouldn't have known at all until somebody hits one with that question...'what's the root of life'? and until somebody also gently prods one to think about it, and earnestly and more than once. Desire, if one reflects upon it (and people can reflect upon it in different ways) can also be without the constant and insistent craving. I think it’s sometimes possible. And if one reflects upon life and living one can also gradually and quietly eliminate many things on the list of ‘things’ – material or non-material – that one seems to crave for or had seemed to matter with a ‘not this’, ‘not this’, ‘not this’. And if one engages in this enterprise there are certain factors that emerge:

It’s not a matter of repressing desires but it’s a matter of sifting through one’s basket of ‘desires’ and with directed help from the external world and one’s internal world.

It’s not a matter of an authoritarian stamping out of all desires.

It’s not a matter of being the fox who couldn’t get the grapes and called them ‘sour’.

And it's good to remember what Tagore, in his very matter-of-fact way points out, ‘mere renunciation of the world does not entitle one to immortality’.

Eventually, one may see what one desires - and it might not be terribly clear at the beginning - given the external world and reality as we know it and sense it, and from the deepest part of what we call a ‘self’. With that bit in place, one might think that one is enlightened with nothing really left to do. An exceptionally detached frame of mind or even an exceptionally aroused frame of mind may sometimes give rise to such a feeling. Genuine desires however are connected to one's purpose and meaning in life, and so one soon realizes that one is being an ass because one can't possibly sit and do nothing. So while the inequalities of life and the level of pain and suffering differ enormously – at the level of an individual life if one chooses to remain and participate in life as a regular human being and with certain desires and a certain attachment to the physical world still firmly in place (related to doing good/being useful/doing something beneficial/being happy and bringing some genuine happiness), the first Noble Truth sticks and makes its way felt through the second.

If one sort of even glances through some of the biographies of the great masters, one can spot a cardinal difference between the Buddha (in how he is depicted, at any rate) and the rest. The Buddha really did seem to have reached a state of 'imaginary grace' where everything and everyone counted but nothing and indeed nobody mattered (about the Buddha maybe some other day; I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, a proper scholar on the Buddha, anyway), and yet that did not stop him from doing what he had to do (although there’s a story about that). He did what he could do. He became a teacher. Life then is not just a matter involving thought, reflection, and contemplation. Human beings aren’t just ‘floating minds’. Living, no matter whether it seems and feels like a game or an illusion or even a delusion or a drama or a stage-play also involves being, acting and doing along with the connecting within.

But how much and how far does one go into seeing and experiencing and connecting within with the ‘spinning wheel of life and death and what-not’ before one stops in one’s tracks (or is made to stop in one's tracks), and says, ‘that’s all I can take, thank you, and I’ll take what comes from making my choice because this is the only choice that I can and want to make given who/what I am and have become’? For as one participates in life and plunges into one’s own consciousness, one sees the glowing bits born of one’s own experiences with life and living and the relations that remain. One is reminded for instance of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (also read towards the beginning of the previous decade), who travels far and wide, up and down and all around all kinds of paths, engages and experiments in much in his own search for enlightenment, and then finally finds his meaning in life, in and through his son begotten of a nautch-girl. I sometimes wonder where that story could go from there. This Siddhartha already knew that the choice he was making necessarily implied that he had ‘returned’ to be attached to life, and primarily in the form of his son. And through attachment then, this Siddhartha re-joins the cycle of life, and with it all the entanglements of life. Gives reason to ponder upon the Buddha’s principle of pratityasamutpada.

Space and time do not permit me to leap along this path, and so I bring my post to an end for now while having different liners floating around while returning to doing what I can (‘because nobody else can do it’), am able to, and have to even though I don't have the sure-shot prescience to know whether I'm winning or losing or doing any good or facing and engaging with life 'zestfully and with an earthy good sense' or whether that liner from a Miss Marple book, ‘Intelligent girls are so likely to become imbecilic if they are not careful’ fits me to a T. And since one doesn't know one has to say 'it ain't over till it's over', 'where there is life there is hope and light' and also a quiet 'Jesus Christ', every now and again, and hopefully see and hold on to one’s own radiant light blazing away, which is not (thank heavens...a 'Holy Moses' would be more appropriate) a speaking bush on fire in the middle of a desert.

My Cats

'nother old un with some changes included. Written in Jan this year.

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Over the years I've grown fond of cats - at least some cats.

I've had a strange relationship with this particular feline species. I disliked cats intensely as a child and while growing up but in a very unreal way. I didn't like the idea of cats and I don't think I ever saw a real cat until quite late in my life, and if I did see a cat I don't remember it. Yet I also remember when I was 5 or 6 or thereabouts I wrote a half-page 'autobiography' about a cat and drew a cat as well. Why a cat when the pretend story could have been about anything? I don't know. Maybe it's because drawing a cat is very easy.

At some point - when I was quite old - I started hissing at them. I didn't ever dream of hurting a cat but I hissed at them and they hissed back at me and we were quite settled about our mutual dislike. And their eyes - unblinking and sharp and piercing and quite inhuman, so I told myself. I believed in this too. I also believed that they were not particularly fond of humans or of company. That they were not just solitary creatures, which I may have been able to accept and even admire, but also slinking, mean creatures and pleasure loving and pleasure seeking creatures in very narrow and self-centred ways. I saw them as nasty humans. Nothing like dogs, and I loved dogs - I was sure that I loved dogs and disliked cats, and that cats and I would never get along together.

The hissing at them went on for a while, and in one of the places that I lived in Calcutta - there were both cats and rats that ran around in the compound. The rats were bigger than the cats. I don't know whether the cats killed and ate any of the rats but I had the strong suspicion that some of the rats may actually have eaten some of the cats. The hissing and my deep dislike for cats continued until a young girl who used to teach at a college listened and told me, "read this". I read it. It was Jeanine by Paul Gallico. And I stopped hissing at cats. It happened - just like that. It was looking at the life of a cat from the cat's perspective (sure, it was written by a human)...who knows exactly what clicked. (Years later I was taken aback when a friend, no longer a friend, looked at me like I were an idiot and dismissed my point by saying with a tsk-tsk, "Shilpi, this is not an intellectual issue for me. It's not something that a book can change. It's a deep-rooted dislike and I don't like cats and I never will." Whoever said that books just made an intellectual impression on the human being though?).

I stopped hissing. But I still was extremely wary of cats. In the last place I lived in Calcutta there were many well-fed and seemingly happy cats that prowled around the complex. Their eyes I found just as lifeless and expressionless and yet unnervingly penetrating somehow. And all my "kitty, kitty, kitty" calls (and I did try every now and again) went unheeded. Some of them would look at me and then walk off with a look of complete arrogance and another one would look at me with an intense gaze almost saying, 'Good God, do you have to embarrass me and my friends?! You're a freak. And do you think we don't know? We know you hissed at cats! Just because you've stopped now, you think I'm going to walk over to you, softly purr and rub my coat against your legs? You've got to be kidding." And with that it would give me a long and sudden hiss and saunter off - and yes, insouciantly.

And so that was it until the last four years. First came the big grey tabby. I'm bad at figuring out the age of cats. I honestly assumed that he was a kitten and wasn't too sure about his sex either (which is a difficult thing anyway because most of the stray cats are neutered or spayed, given that they had an owner at some point). He came to the porch one day - somewhat scarred and scruffy and with one eye that was scrunched up and with one eye giving me the 'look' of what I cannot really say. But that look hadn't been expressionless. A glowing jade eye and he had spoken to me with that eye. A gruff, "Ah, I know you". But he turned around and off he was. I'd been leaving out food for him on the porch which he came and ate and he would, I noticed be on the look-out for me. If ever I made the mistake of going out to the porch, he would bolt. But he made fast friends with our neighbour, Kim, and he would sit with quiet Kim whenever Kim would be sitting on the porch on early mornings with his notebook and coffee. I would stare at the grey tabby, from the window, who would be petted by Kim, would settle on Kim's lap or settle amiably next to Kim - and sometimes the tabby would make a fat-face at me but he'd not stay for a second if I tried going outside. There was his pink flat nose, there was his alarmingly large but very well-shaped head (I don't know how he balanced it on his rather thin and battle scarred body) and his noble chin and that scrunched up eye and that amazing green eye which seemed to see, know, and observe. Guha came back from India after a month or so, observed the cat, and quite against his principle of not bringing in stray animals brought the grey tabby in as soon as the tabby came along hopping on the frost covered grass in November.

Then a little over a year, there was a kitten. Not exactly a tiny kitten. But a 9 month fairly chubby kitten who had had a temporary home but was now homeless. His mother and brother had run off and he was there out on the porch on a cold January very early morning, and he looked inside. I remember his look with his head slightly tilted to one side. The grey tabby now sitting on the table in front of the window saw the kitten outside and miaowed and said, "my hedgehog. That's my hedgehog. Please bring my hedgehog inside. I need to take care of my hedgehog." And so Guha very promptly went outside and brought that kitten inside. The kitten is now considerably larger and tubbier and far more mischievous than the grey tabby whose eyes are both in fine form.

Cats do not have expressionless eyes. The grey tabby (Barty/"Baati"), whose name should have been ideally, "Kettle", has the brightest, greenest and most beautiful eyes that I've ever seen on a non-human animal. They are bewitching eyes too. They speak. Sometimes he can make them go all liquid and big and keep making them bigger and he will look up with the expression, "are you going to pet me now? Plea-a-se?" Sometimes it's harder to figure out what he wants me to do when he gives me the look. Sometimes he'll be gazing out of the window with such a faraway expression in his eyes that it seems to me that he's seeing his own planet. Sometimes he'll be looking at me from his place on the counter-top with the regal expression, "I'm king of my castle." and yet at other times he'll shut his eyes tight and open them wide and do it again, and he'll expect you to do the same. It's called a winky-blink - a sign of love and affection. I'm not kidding. Sometimes though he can look quite unreal. His liquid eyes go all black....he never looks mean but he does look quite dangerous. Yet at other moments when I talk to him in gobbledygook, he looks at me with almost ancient fondness "These humans - I have to humour them." while at other moments he'll look at me with, "No, not now. Please not now. I'm having a moment here. Please don't talk with me if don't have anything important to say."

The Kitten (Max/"Ghoti") who should have been ideally named "Bundle" has grown up but never really seems to have grown up. He has his kitten waddle and doesn't know that cats are supposed to protect their tummy at all times. He sometimes exposes his tummy (much like a dog) and expects you to rub him down, pet him, and cuddle him. He's naughty too. Loves to jump on the counter-top and lick a bit of this or that that's been left out on the counter. He'll try and drag a bag of cereal that's bigger than him (although he hasn't done that in a while) and once he tried to take a whole loaf of bread back to his hide-out. Yet the funny thing with him is that he keeps turning around waiting to be caught. And he never tries doing any of the naughty stuff when I'm not at home. It's almost as though he's hatching his plans so I'll go running after him, "Max. Max. Drop that. Now." Or else, "Max. Max. Ekhuni pituni debo," ...and he's thinking "well it gives her some amusement I think, running after me and chasing me around". Max loves running and hiding into the wardrobe. He has a little shelf inside where he sits and waits and sits doing god knows what and all my asking him to come out doesn't work at times, especially when I tell the rare guest that he'll be out in a jiffy (I'm terrified I'll shut the door and he'll be there for half-a-day...one day he'd been trapped in the refrigerator for some minutes but that's another story). The kitten does have the grace to look quite guilty when he's scolded for real. His head drops and he still looks up from his eyes while somewhat guiltily pushing at the floor with his front paws...so I don't think that it's true that cats have absolutely no conscience either. They do. I remember the only time that Barty ever tried to take something with him was a big piece of chicken. He'd never done anything of that sort and later he looked like a sad and old gentleman who'd been caught in a frightfully embarrassing position.

And cats are not unsocial. They look forward to being petted and they make space for you on the bed and sometimes they'll come and snuggle right next to you...and that is one of the nicest feelings in the world. The grey tabby grooms me. He grooms my unruly hair and bites my head just the way he keeps the kitten clean. Sometimes he gets so focused in his grooming regimen - his eyes are closed. Even if I try to shoo him away, he comes back. He wakes me up in the morning or just keeps looking at me even when I try to snuggle under the blankets so that I get out of bed and get to work after feeding him and the kitten. The grey tabby sometimes becomes crotchety if you don't play with him or sit with him or spend some time with him every day and the kitten will refuse to face you if you ignore him for too long. He'll sit with his big bum facing your face. Quite rude but he doesn't care. The grey tabby sometimes does get a scolding from me because he needs petting right when I'm trying to work or getting something done. He sometimes gets quite clingy too....but not if he's given a bit of attention for bits of time...the chicken/kitten is actually a more self-reliant cat although he goes through his odd phases...and he still likes being picked up and carried around the house while he stares intently completely motionless and transfixed at the ceiling and the walls, and at my face for some seconds as though it's terribly interesting before squirming to get down to the ground and go about running off again. Kettle hates being picked up by me.

P.S: Sometimes I think that all they have is a roof over their heads and some water and food.

(Early Jan 2011). Edits October 2011.

On Knowledge: the wider and the personal II

...There isn't anything wrong with having specialized knowledge as long as it doesn't make a human being wear narrower and narrower blinders...and as for the PhD, I don’t think that getting a PhD should be a joke. I think it should mean something. And I am sure I'm not the only deluded student who thinks that the process can be meaningful, that it can be a labour of love (no matter how slow and monochromatic one might be), and that no matter how much one tells oneself that it's 'just' a PhD, one cannot help hoping all the while that even the outcome should matter - that it should make a positive difference to at least one human being...

...To digress a bit, I am reminded of the joke in one of Asimov's books on humour. I think it goes something like this: There's a white haired and white bearded man - flowing white hair and flowing white beard....and he's standing and pointing to a spinning globe - a man and a woman and an apple tree and an apple and a snake...the earth, sky, stars, sun, the moon, oceans, majestic nature, humans, sentient life form....and so on...and out of the penetrating void comes a booming voice, "And that's all you did for your PhD!'

Being a sociologist I can’t help asking: if the PhD degree were seen to have some independent value then why is it that no university or college will hire a sociologist with ‘just’ a PhD degree any longer? Because that’s what it is. It is just a degree. Even colleges and universities (the very places handing out the degrees) know that the degree is merely a ‘necessary but not a sufficient’ cause to hire someone to even teach 17 year olds! There are other issues too but let me not venture too far.

..I probably sound like I'm complaining and I am. But to make it clear, I'm complaining against myself more than anything else however. I've taken a bloody long time to realise some things, and nobody else but I can be blamed for the same. And yet this too was like one of those many things that I felt I'd known for long enough. A very peculiar analogy came to my mind one day: ...to maintain one love, and then to go and be infatuated every now and again for some days or weeks in a row...Being in academia I knew I should have found one area of specialization and stuck to it, chosen some hoops to jump through with a smile, and I should have done so back in the first year of my Master's (while dabbling in this and that and the other), while not just writing quick papers but doggedly trying to get them published or at least going to five conferences in a year. And I had the chance to do precisely that. Dabbling in this, that and the other and having an exceptionally short-term memory for most pieces of facts and information and readings does not work one way or the other. Indeed most of my knowledge regarding academic sociological material that has been best preserved is the stuff that I read and learnt during my undergraduate days in Calcutta...close to two decades ago, and the rest of my knowledge that has held me in stead for this long did not come from academic books nor from stuffy academic articles nor formal classes.

I know I'm not gifted or clever or intelligent by any stretch of the imagination but if one decides to play within the system then one plays by some rules, and then some of the other rules may be bent a bit, bit by bit. If not - one stays within as long as one can and is able, and then looks for alternatives. And I'd thought I'd known this from the time of my undergraduate years in India (in fact when folks studying in college and the university used to complain about what a warped system it was, I used to raise my eyebrows: if you don't like it and are clever/intelligent/gifted enough - you can leave; but if you choose to stay...well, you must grit your teeth and get along with things; now look who's raising their eyebrows!). And even if it were in a completely different context, here I was complaining again, and recently that an Ivy League professor took so long to figure out that he couldn't talk with people from a different social class....well, at the very least, he has a job and has finished his PhD, and can now pontificate.

I remember some of the things that Rand talked about as though I read her yesterday (about Rand some other day). I know it’s not possible that every human being should or could become a myriad minded man or woman or be exceptional. But what can we say about a world where we lose the sight and senses to even be able to admire and value such men and women – no matter how rare and no matter how far out they lie on the tail-end of the curve in a statistical distribution. It’s one thing for us not to be able to reach the heights of the giants but what can we say about a world where we cannot even admire and value people who can and do? It takes eyes to see and ears to hear and the required senses to understand...

And this in the same world where some half-nude celebrity – whose only claim to fame is that she was born a rich girl – gets paid some million dollars to make an appearance in a night-club for crying out loud?! And this in the same world where we automatically sit up if a person has the formal ‘degrees’ and has received the formal accolades, no matter whether they know what they are talking about? And this in a world where individuals are requested to lend their expert knowledge into turning a nation into a knowledge economy (no less), and are requested to do so because they made some clever and smart moves in spreading the net of mobile phone communication?! And this in a world where a grubby software expert who has made some quick money is the one who manages to get his book published by a prestigious publishing company (most likely even that was ghost written) as he pontificates upon the social, cultural, political, economic and educational aspects of an entire nation and gets dubbed a ‘visionary’?! And this in a world where a certain kind of rhetoric gains enormous significance within academia ('critical...', 'communicative space', 'dominance', 'engaged activism', 'interdisciplinary interaction', 'democratic participation', 'protest and resistance', 'hegemony', 'marginalization', 'parochial', 'subversive', 'structures', 'silenced voices' ...and yes, I'll leave out the rest of the words in the academic dictionary), while we forget sometimes what 'knowledge' itself means or what 'thinking' means or that the world may not be explainable by our pretty and 'radical' little world-views or that our jargon-ridden parochial and increasingly fragmented theories that we so passionately hold dear are sometimes hopelessly ill-suited when it comes to understanding individuals of remarkable versatility and phenomena of non-quantifiable nature (which we then dismiss importantly as being socially non-significant or unimportant), or even how much pure grit (leave alone other traits) it takes to achieve some degree of emancipation while living in the real world as an individual and not within the safe perimeters of an institution or a specialized community where almost everybody solemnly agrees with everybody else and one's daily bread is guaranteed as long as one has got one's body through the door and doesn't rock the boat too soon. And this in the same world where millions of dollars are spent in researching different aspects of self-esteem...And this in the same world where we have closeted conferences and academic journals publishing articles regarding 'highly specialized' branches of knowledge which are being understood by fewer and fewer and fewer human beings and are accessible to only those who are tied to formal academic institutions, and which deal with such fragmented issues that they have incredibly little bearing ultimately, and for the most part - in the space of real living and living in the external world (and people think I am mad)....

The degree of freedom that people within colleges and universities get to experience I sometimes think and if they go along with some stuff sensibly is of an unreal level (given that one is within an institution), and there are some mavericks in the different fields still: those who know, connect, and remember moderately well….and yet, I can’t help thinking that the brightest stars aren't there within formal academia. They would not have been ignored if they had been here, and if such folks who see education as an inter-connected enterprise were around they would have received their due and done what they needed to, and would have been much appreciated, I think….but they aren’t here. It saddens me this, and every year it saddens me a little more and rankles that much more although I didn't think it was possible. It's such a waste - and with such fine resources...

...and I have been blind and exceptionally slow in seeing what I thought I had 'figured out' a long time ago: that if one chose to play within the boundaries of a given social system for a given period of time one had to jump through some hoops quietly and diligently and with minimum fuss, and with a smile - because it certainly isn't bad if people can do that and early enough, and I had the formal chances. And I wonder too how much time I wasted and what else I may have already lost in trying to find and understand matters (which I thought were of cosmic significance) while missing what was right there and in front of me and what was gifted to me...and these are the times when I wonder what came of all the introspection, reflection, reading, thinking, writing, wondering, and going inward, and the years of isolation...

So what exactly do I know ?....

... - if it matters, it matters no matter what...; fingers clenched over thumb, walking and doing and being while a being makes me wonder, smile, and be quiet while the sand runs fast and hard through the hourglass....and that's that for this and now.

On knowledge: the wider and the personal I

There are a couple of thoughts that I’ve been having and they’re somewhat linked. There was Pupu’s blog-essay on knowledge and then there were a series of recent essays on Suvro da’s blog regarding human beings and their ways, the rise and fall of civilizations, and education, and there have been other essays, a couple of well-written biographies, and some academic articles that I’ve been reading and re-reading, and there was something that was bothering me but I’ve not had the attention required to actually organize my thoughts well but I was wondering and thinking about knowledge again, and in a formal way this time, and within academia.

Over this last year I realise something which took me a very, very long time to realise… although I felt I’d known about it for a long while when I read Pupu's essay on being knowledgeable: It’s not just that people do not know but it’s that people aren’t interested in knowing any longer; that human beings simply aren't seriously interested in anything, and knowing anything that matters. But this thought kept niggling me for this is what is even within formal academia and at higher and higher levels or so it seems to me. Knowledge: the sort of knowledge that I used to and still think and consider to be valuable, and the general mark of being educated seems to be rapidly losing its value. Knowledge of history in its many-layered connections, knowledge about the social world, knowledge of the natural sciences and the natural world, geography and the political and economic conditions of nations, of great people and their works, of philosophy, of humour, psychology, the environment, knowledge regarding works of literature and poetry and religion.....and the ability to meaningfully connect all that one learns, and to share some (not just collecting and reciting disconnected heaps of information or to spout some random bits of reading).... even these seem to matter less and less... Not only is knowledge of this sort being valued less there seems to be an invisible resistance to this sort of knowing…people aren’t even interested in such connected knowing any longer. And I'm not lying but I knew a couple of students - they were class-mates in school - who read more when they were in school and high-school than some of the people who are doing their doctorates. It actually embarrasses me to say this but even I read a wider range of stuff than most people in my department do.

I'm thinking of generalized knowledge and people who gather PhDs. It’s probably bad manners to say this – but it’s a joke. How can it be that a person receives the title of ‘doctor of philosophy’ (no less!) and yet is expected to know almost nothing outside the wee-bitty area of specialization, which is what a PhD has become…? (I won’t get into the questions of how much ‘research’ work is of genuine worth, meaning, and displays some level of originality). Now I don’t think it would be marvelous if all folks had opinions about everything – it’s better sometimes to have no opinions on things because one simply doesn’t know, and to speak only about that which one does know. But mere opinions and informed knowledge and the ability to build bridges amongst bodies of knowledge are not the same things. And I do admire highly focused scientists or workers who know not much about everything but simply focus with passionate intensity on their own area of work. Marie Curie, from the bit that I have read about her, was not interested in expressing her views on anything much, but – before people start thinking of her - scientists, social scientists, and other PhD pass-outs are not budding Marie Curies. So I honestly can’t see how knowing less and less and writing less and less, and being less and less interested about interconnected matters can be a great leap forwards …well, it might be a great leap for sure but into what exactly?

....I often think how professors could use poems, stories, anecdotes from the lives of great men and women, speeches, and quotations within sociology, and meaningfully along with all the regular 'items' that they use...Yet remembering these are not even considered to be particularly valuable any longer within education as a whole, leave alone within a social science discipline. Meaningfully quoting from memory, connecting it to the matter in hand is not really viewed as being something worthy of admiration or respect or of significance. It’s one thing not to know or not to remember – but when we say that it’s no longer even important or worthwhile, and this within an ideal-type portrayal of education (because memorization seems to be bothersome) that’s when I think there is something 'off'. And yet what happens? We also forget that memorization, and at different levels, is possible. And so it’s equally true that some Indian graduate students with their ‘amazing’ memories are sometimes venerated because people, on an average, seem to have forgotten that memorization is indeed something human beings are capable of doing. It doesn’t even matter what some of these students rattle off (sometimes it can be parroting senselessly and without comprehension from a text-book) but others look on with admiring astonishment as though the person were as marvelous as some rare prophet walking on water…

My own prof. who recently retired was exclaiming with somewhat restrained but visible anger and annoyance that sociologists don’t even seem particularly interested in history, and that we had decided at some point that knowing or talking about history was not considered to be relevant within sociological studies….

Even if I take the matter of social psychology – a specialized area …or let me re-frame that: it was considered to be an area of specialization, and with reason once-upon-a-time. Social scientists believed that a discipline that combined the understanding of the internal processes of the human mind and the external structures and processes of society would be a discipline that could draw from the best of both worlds. And now one needs to simply read what the long gone original masters of the discipline – like William James (on the varieties of religious experiences) and Maslow (self-actualization) and Mead (‘I’ and the ‘me’ and the ‘generalized other’) and Cooley (‘looking-glass self’) wrote, and even Erving Goffman (who wouldn’t be considered to be a dinosaur exactly) to what the new social psychologists are writing about, and how. Some of them even imply that James was too ‘broad’ and non-empirical, so now we split up the discipline finer and finer and finer till we have ten million people working on the head of a pin (and ten hundred of them are cited in every paper). So we split up the study of ‘self and identity’ (a sub area, or maybe even a sub-sub area of specialization within social psychology) from the study of emotions from the study of awareness from the study of personality from the study of motivations from the study of deviance…well maybe I should stop right there. Deviance is of course another area of specialization and of course the quantitative experts aren’t on talking terms with the qualitative experts. And one mustn’t even talk about cross-disciplinary flowering. If one starts getting into talking about the ‘self’ in philosophy – the social psychologists and the philosophers are not on communicating terms….in fact even the psychologists working in the field of ‘self and identity’ are not interacting much with sociologists working in the field of ‘self and identity’….

Knowing, remembering, connecting, and sharing are gradually being seen as impossible tasks for the meagre human mind, and so since people who can remember and connect and who do have large bodies of knowledge in their heads are such absolute and utter rarities – we’ve come to the smart conclusion that we do not need to remember ‘lots of stuff’ any longer. That recent study conducted – with some flaws – and the comment by the researcher, that remembering is not as important as building connections, and that 'knowledge workers' these days are somehow more ‘refined’ because they ‘connect’ amongst knowledge bodies (really? - all that connecting falls flat when one doesn't remember history but is teaching a course which requires and demands remembering, at the very least, world history far more than sociological theories of different brands...), that there is always ‘google’ to check up what we don’t know and can’t remember (that there is: I sometimes wonder how many instructors would be out of their temporary jobs without being able to access google), and that we are simply being more ‘sensible’ somehow by knowing ‘where’ to look to find what we can’t remember – that single study is an illustration enough of something more pervasive, and something that has been steadily accumulating over decades. And one can observe and look around, and people doing their PhDs too can look and see what is expected, and indeed admired within their own areas and from their own discipline and from their own disciplinary specialization...

An old un

The following was written in January right after classes had begun for the semester. An old, rambling post but I don't have anything new for now.

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The classes are at 7.30 in the mornings (but not every day of the week...I'm too embarrassed to admit to anything else). I couldn't remember the last time that I had to be ready and out of the house by 7 in the morning. I tried recollecting this bit of information during the brief Christmas break that we had (they call it 'winter' break here) but my memory eludes me. I do remember the last time that I was waking up and getting ready and out of my dorm room by 6.45. It was a term when I was doing three or four things, and doing them fairly well - so I thought. Even if I wasn't doing them well - I was delighted about the prospect of waking up early in the mornings even on the days that I wasn't so sure where I was going.

I told myself to get into a strict routine over Christmas. That didn't happen. And as it sometimes happens when certain things simply have to get done, after a couple of nights of dreaming strange dreams - the day I had to make an appearance - I shot out of bed as soon as the alarm went off. I fed my two little pets, got ready like an army sergeant, and was out of the house at a reasonably early time. The snow had been falling gently and steadily through the night and through the dense, black liquid light there were the silver white sparkles that I love. And there was the silence. The snow hadn't been plowed as yet. I brushed off the car (there's no trolley that early, and I'd much rather go and sleep in the classroom the previous night than try and walk all the way in the morning), hopped in, worked the windshield wipers, and one of them (the one on the driver's side, no less) fell off. Rumpelstiltskin, blue blistering barnacles and all that! I hopped out again, warmed my hands on my jacket, looked at the wiper, looked at the one that was fixed, and then set the loose one in. Out it fell. Okay, nice. Really nice. I could still make it if I walked and I looked out into the darkness wondering whether I should boot it up the hill or simply run at a steady enough pace all the way.

I stuffed the wiper in my pocket, dusted the snow off the windshield, hopped back into the car, peered through one clear spot, drove along and halted in front of Jerry's coffee shop and requested my neighbour to come out and have a look. He did what I did with the wiper, and it stayed on, and Kim said, "Don't use it too often." I nodded and off it was.

None of the roads seemed to have been plowed quite that early and as I inched along I couldn't stop staring at the snow and gingerly pressing on the wiper button. I would turn the knob once and the wiper, with a mind of its own, would provide me with two or even three furious, speedy flicks and come to a rest. At one point I even barked at it, "Give it a rest would you? I clicked just once." To prove a point, the rakish wiper gave another half-flick, and I said, "I didn't even touch the knob!"

It's just about 2 miles to the campus from where I live and I knew I simply needed to cross the bridge over the river without going off course or banging into a car or something else. And so I cruised along with the maniacal wiper half-fixed on, and at a somewhat jaunty angle, giving rapid and smart flicks when I wanted only one. I just prayed that it stayed on because it was doing its job perfectly well when it was doing it.

A friend had very kindly offered her empty parking spot behind her apartment complex. Given the strange winter we've been having here - I'd gone over to check the spot the earlier evening. It seemed a regular spot and there seemed to be a narrow, unpaved lane which sort of meandered its way between two apartment complexes and came to meet the large parking space. I'd checked all that the evening before. Now as I finally crossed the bridge without incident I slowed down as I approached the narrow lane, and I didn't know what it was actually. I was quite sure that it was the same lane I'd seen the evening before but it looked completely different. Snow was piled high. There was no lane that I could see. It looked like a lovely snowy mound. A hill of snow...a desolate space leading to other-lands - maybe. But not a lane. I wasn't going to risk trying to get through that and have the car getting stuck with one of the maniacal wipers flying off and hitting someone on the face...I had though inched off the road to take the turn and I could see a steady progression of traffic right behind me coming off from the bridge. I stayed put. Let all the cars and morning trucks pass me by and I got back to the main road while sipping some coffee hastily. Now to find a parking spot. I refused to touch the wiper button, and the wiper sensing the urgency of the situation ("the nut, who's been talking with me, has to reach her class on time") behaved itself for a bit. It wiped when it was so bidden and held its peace otherwise. I hunted around for barely two minutes and then the wonderful sight of an empty parking spot met my eyes. No parallel parking required. No crossing of mounds. No parking metre. I could technically park for an hour but if the little van with the roving eyes belonging to the sharp human didn't come by right away - I'd probably miss the ticket as well. At least I was hoping I would because the class itself was over an hour....

I stopped at the parking spot and the wiper gave me two of its brightest and sharpest flicks. "Go ahead. We're not on the bridge now," I cheerily yelled. I leapt out and there was the walk from there to the department. Quiet, silent, sparkling bits of snow through that still liquid black met me, and the air wasn't even cold enough for gloves. I gulped and raised my eyebrows and gave a half-smile.

The class was...fun but this is not about the class.

I raced back to the car after the class and the office hours were done for the day, and there was no parking ticket on the car. I emitted my silent thank-you. I needed to move the car though and needed to go and get some paperwork done. So it was back in. I jabbed at the wiper a couple of times and it seemed to be doing not too badly. But it was hairy driving around campus. I never did quite realise before today how many students simply jump out onto the road without looking or keep walking across the roads as if they are in a trance (even though I know I've done it myself sometimes* missed the bus twice and a lorry once: but it wasn't my fault with the lorry; the truck climbed onto the curb - hardly my fault....). But today it seemed as though it were happening more often. At some point I wondered whether the car was invisible. I know it doesn't help with the snow sometimes blowing towards one and when one is trying to keep one's eyes shut while still walking around but I wish the pedestrians would look up sometimes when they're crossing the middle of the road. While I was having these righteous thoughts, one red truck nearly banged into me while taking a speedy turn and I forgot to yell or honk the horn. I just gave the driver a glare which he couldn't see anyway. The rakish wiper was working well though till I got to yet another car park when suddenly it went flying off and landed somewhere in the snow. No students around, thankfully enough. I stopped the car, ran over to it where it was lying in the snow laughing. Anyway, I managed to fix it on again, and then it was back home while telling the wiper to go slow. I reached my street and let out a sigh of relief. I would not have wanted to be driving out on the highway today - that's for sure.

And I've been talking to a wiper...I think the nutty wiper is also missing a nut of its own.

Weird weather and winds

The weather here changed at some point when I wasn't paying attention. I was helping a friend for three days to move houses...not out of overflowing kindness of the heart but simply because there was nobody else. And sometime over the weekend the weather changed, and I noticed it yesterday noon or so for real. There's an undefinable breeze and sometimes a gust of wind, and it has a curious fragrance. It's not a fragrance of flowers or leaves. It's hard to say what it contains but it seems to be blowing in from other worlds and places and times. I can't even quite sense whether it's a warm or a cold wind. I mean that. I can't figure out whether even the air is warm or cool to the skin. My senses don't seem to know. There's sun. That much I can sense. And there's a sky shot through with a lazy blue. That much I can see. I know at other times a dancing, smiling if somewhat restless joy captivates me when similar weather saunters in. Now I just feel restive with nowhere to go, and those flickering, vague images make me want to run away somewhere for a bit. Yesterday after feeling the same urge to run off, to get out, to go do something - I finally left my computer and word documents alone, and got out of the house in the early evening, and wondered where I could go. I looked at the road. I simply went for a walk like every evening - just a more long-winded walk. That's all I did. A walk which lasted for two hours, and which took me to the river after a month. The river is in retreat and the sandy banks have green shoots and clumps of greenery. I walked around there. Sat for a bit. Smoked, of course. Went through a little pool of water with my feet sinking into the bottom making muddy whorls. The weather is distracting. Even now I can sense it while sitting indoors. It makes me go out but there's something missing so I come back in. I remember similar weather with strange winds even in Calcutta and in Durgapur. I don't even quite know whether there really was a wind or what those similar fragrances were. There used to be a missing, and I was quite sure that I was missing not being here, and that someday I'd be traveling a lot and that would take care of the feeling...maybe it's a feeling of wanderlust or of missing pasts long past or of seeing dead dreams playing out for real somewhere or of sensing imagined futures or maybe the weather is an accident: it comes in from parallel universes or something. Whatever it is it is entering my senses no matter how hard I try to avoid it. I can't think of a thing that I can do that would dispel the strangeness of the weather cutting into my senses. There's an emptiness, which shouldn't be empty. I feel like a dislocated self for every possibility, which sounds like a fine possibility is considered until I shake my head: go and sit in the library and work; work in the coffee-shop; take some print-outs and sit at a coffee-shop and read; walk around; go to a park maybe; watch a funny movie; go for a swim; go and sing on the hills (just kidding with this one)...so I stay indoors and do what I'm doing. Even fimh seems quiet, vague, and distracted, and lets me be. So there's nowhere within to crack jokes or smile or just be and let the strangeness linger while carrying on with things. Quite odd. I wonder whether this is like some other things, where one simply has to wait for the fever to pass.

I hate using my completely forgotten bits of french but there were a couple of phrases that I remember hearing, and which have since stuck. The weather now brings to mind one of them: that sense of je ne sais quoi...that's what seems to be skipping around within. Maybe I've just been here for too long a time and that's all there is to it. I don't know.