"...bhumaiva sukham." Part II

Love is related to what and who one values. If one asks oneself whether knowledge or creative work or spouse or family or friend or child or others or lover or Self or God is what is most valuable – then one also knows who and/or what one loves. It normally could be and is a combination. And along with love and the being-ness that comes with every human being (the being-ness being what a human being contains and is like and as s/he appears to us: what we normally like or dislike or love or are repulsed by, and sometimes on first sight) – there is the matter of doing. This, I believe, is set early on in life. Of what and who matter and of who and what make life meaningful and what sort of work can make life a joy. Or conversely, of what does not matter and what cannot make life meaningful in and of themselves. If one also feels strongly, early on in life that life must have a meaning and a purpose for being; that one’s life must make an absolute difference somehow to the world (by leaving a creation or an invention or a discovery in the widest sense) or to someone – otherwise one wouldn’t be here – then one keeps working and searching until one finds one’s reason.

For some, it might be one or the other - here relations can come and go and even one’s husband can die – but one’s work remains: Marie Curie was of this sort. For Joan, it was her work as a warrior and her inner voice. For some it is one’s God, no holds barred – as it was for Meera. For William, it was working and living and fighting and competing and laughing and jousting and loving and being with Phillipa; when Phillipa was gone – there was no life; ‘love was done’. For some it is a combination thereof. Other examples come to mind – but these will do for now.

Maybe some people are blessed to find their reason very early on and maybe many people are not. Sometimes, one is rather old before one gets to know (and especially if one has an awkwardness and contradictoriness about one’s character) what one can do in concrete terms. But if one persists in and with love, one can act on that knowing if one hasn’t become too senile or too deranged to act or think or be a human being and one then finds and is ‘given’ different ways (through what feel like miracles - and for those who might find that peculiar - well, there is something called serendipity no matter if some numbskulls find that stuff airy-fairy) such that a few of one’s deeply felt ‘desires [can be] coordinated in the light of knowledge’ (that’s another quote that’s been wandering around with me for awhile). One can’t go back in time to fix anything and one doesn’t become utterly fault free or even all-knowing and knows not much more than what one felt in the soul at 11, but as in terms of acting upon what one knows - one can indeed try with everything one has got.

If one lives life by one principle of what one can let go of and what doesn’t matter and what is inconsequential – and if death isn’t too keen on paying one a call and through time as one sees death in different ways - one is left with who and what one values and loves. This may not entail cutting off everything and everyone else certainly – it simply makes one very clearly and consciously and rather dispassionately make certain choices - and it doesn’t force anyone to live like a hermit, but it does entail a clear hierarchy in one’s mind and within. At some point in time, one finds oneself echoing Khshana, “naalpey sukhamasti, bhumaiva sukham.” And sometimes adds, to the universe, when one is being cross-questioned by one’s deepest friend - “but, but, and but - how can it now be otherwise?!”

**About the header quote and of what it means - and for those who don't know what it is about - this is what Suvro da had told me quite some time ago: the sage Khshana had been asked by the king, who was impressed by her wisdom, of what she would like as a gift. She answered with those lines: ‘naalpey sukhamasti, bhumaiva sukham.’ ‘Trifles don’t interest me – so let me be. Nothing barring the universe in entirety will make me happy.’ I don’t know whether Khshana indeed did get what she desired but I have the feeling that she must have. And different people would have different ideas as to what comprises of one’s universe and the matter of happiness, cheer, joy and suchlike. This post is connected to Einstein's words as well as Vivekananda's and more - but so much for this very long post which I split up in two.

"**...bhumaiva sukham" Part I

Said the ancient sage. It has been a part of a sentence that has stayed around and about for quite some time. No prizes for guessing who told me about the quote. The title of this post is connected to a question, which barring a few months of my life and very early years has stayed with me – ‘why is one not dead?’. Some weeks ago when I visited a dentist to get my teeth cleaned for the first time in my life, and the dentist was telling me that if I did not take care of my teeth – they would rot and fall out, I couldn’t help but say (while having funny memories of Florentino Ariza among some other images tickling me) that I was hoping not to be around for that long, and she shushed me. Back in my college days, I used to say that I didn’t know why I didn’t kick the bucket instead of kicking the stone on the road – and nobody much cared for that line.

The question that floats around or comes barging in sometimes is, “why is [one] not dead?”. It is connected to the question - “why, on earth…is one alive?”. Sometimes while walking and feeling strangely disconsolate and discombobulated – the same thought strums in “well you’re not dead – so, there's a reason.” Through the rushing of time and the dripping of time in the hourglass and the motionless of time, if one looks at life – one can see patterns if one is old enough (and feels much through sometimes faultless intuition when one is very young). One can observe patterns – no matter how impossible – and one can take note of many mundane and not-so-mundane incidents: people encountered, people remembered, off-beat experiences, a person remembered, career choices not made, relationships which suddenly caught spring showers and came alive, relationships which died sudden and sometimes slow deaths, professional awards, places seen, career setbacks, realizations which stayed, roads taken and not taken, risks taken and avoided, knowledge growing like a dream and meeting sometimes with realizations, fate tempted, fragrances forgotten which on their return shoot out jumbled (and sometimes maybe conjured memories), songs that send a pang, writings and stories which send a jolt through one’s being, poems re-read, waking and sleep dream-images remembered, coincidences repeated, love encountered... If one threads through and very insidiously and watches the pattern as best as one can while being a part of it and sometimes from a laughing and sometimes dispassionate distance, one can find an answer to why one isn’t dead as yet. One goes through a steady process of ‘not this, not this, not this…’ as one subconsciously and consciously and sometimes even rather desperately and in despair searches for reasons that one is not dead. It is in the eye of the storm that one sees what one needs to.

How one chances upon the ‘this…?’ this…?’ ‘Is it really this?’ ‘Can this be the reason?..’ ‘this has to be it’ - is probably a unique experience for different individuals – but I am convinced that most people can find out their reason/s for living  – whether by digging into the reason that they are not in the grave or by asking themselves: ‘what makes life worth living?’ ‘What makes overarching sense in life - no matter the pain and the heartache and the greyness and the loneliness and looniness and incomprehensibility that linger like a fog as one walks…?’ – One would have to make a list then. One would have to see what makes life feel like an almost completed jigsaw puzzle or like a steadily clearer one and what are mere flirtations or in fact silly distractions or simply choices that go only thus far and no further, no matter how one tries. One would have to make a list of all that makes life meaningful for one – indeed all that comprises Life. One would have to think of the sparks of joy that one feels and when that is ignited and why...

It could be a delusion. But if it is a delusion which cannot be knocked out no matter how hard one has tried and in spite of how hard one has resisted and doubted and despite all tradition and convention and established knowledge – even unconventional but established knowledge – it is not a delusion then. If in the deepest part of one’s Self there is an incessant call which is backed every now and then by an external knowing of what/who matters (and does not matter) and of what/who is important (and unimportant) or of what makes sense only in a particular context – it can’t be a delusion. It is a personal journey and it can be a terribly lonely journey too sometimes – when everything and almost everyone in the outer world says that one is wrong and deluded - and one cannot sometimes make sense of what is real or merely imagined or is a mix of both and one makes horrible errors but one can keep walking, knowing that for whatever one is –  one does indeed walk with one’s God within and for crystal clear bits of time in this world as well, and even if one does not know or understand all as how one would like to, one senses in an unshakeable way that there is a reason that one is walking along. When one stays close to one’s deepest and highest love/s – one knows that for better or worse and no matter how strange or unusual or lonely or dark or plain puzzling the going seems sometimes, one is walking the path that one is meant to…

Unusual ads about reading and writing, and odd memories

I have been seeing/hearing songs on youtube every now and then, and an advertisement came up. Normally I wait for the 'skip ad' button and click it immediately and yet I watched through two ads. They're on Neil Gaiman, made by Blackberry (!). I've never read anything written by him. Now I have. I read a very well-written short story, thanks to somebody who told me to 'go read the story'. which will stay inside. Here it is.

...the ads are a quiet delight for what he says about reading and about books and the way they've been made. I don't even know what the whole idea is about behind "A Calendar of Tales" and haven't found out as yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF7-15KQQS4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc8TEZvMJFk

It got me thinking again of whether it is true that the longer one lives the more life becomes a matter of memories, the quiet ability to see the patterns and emerging connections in life and the matter of one's life showing a pattern - and a determined pattern at that even though one can't see ahead. Almost like this is how it could have been given some of the choices that one made early enough in life and yet without the matter of complete "knowledge" at hand, and so one waits...

Not to get too absorbed in memories but the two ads reminded me with a low exclamation of a very odd bit about "missed careers" again. No regrets but it is somewhat amusing to think that by the time I was in high school I was fairly sure that I could work in the ad world unless I became, maybe, a psychologist... I was probably one of the few nuts who used to wait for commercials. This was long before the day of cable TV in India. I waited for good ads, made notes in my head about them and used to keep a track of them the way I used to make written notes about "movies to watch" or which had been watched when in school (with books I was more flexible - I tried to read whatever looked good and what came as recommendations). And then came cable TV a long time later. I think the ads of Shell (yep - the oil company with beautiful music playing in the background; I think it was Dire Straits' "Local Hero"), Nescafe and Titan watches (which made that piece by Mozart something that anybody could hum) came with cable TV. And yet there had been Gold Spot and Mazaa and Amul and also some ad on a soft drink with George Benson's song ("Nothing's gonna change my love for you"...Jesus, it's been a long time) playing in the background before the explosion of cable TV. I was hooked on to ads because they felt like mini movies with a story-line, conversations and/or music. I even kept a note of nasty and stupid ads, and as a child I had embarrassed a whole room of people, who were watching a movie and talking during the commercial breaks, by yelling out why the ad didn't tell us what the specific product was all about.

And then came college. And I was still sure that I could work in the ad world and make little movies. There was a TV program called "The Dream Merchants" and I watched it with as much enthusiasm as I watched docs on Discovery and "The X files" and "Picket Fences" and "Chicago Hope". I was studying Sociology on the side, of course, but thinking more about Sociology than actually studying it. And I can't remember any longer when the slow wave of realization hit: that normal and regular ads always sold a product. No, more than that. Ads sold a particular brand of a particular product. I didn't see that before. The purpose of ads and what they were designed to do. It felt most peculiar to realize that those sometimes lovely, charming, beautiful, breathless, naughty, mischievous, and even risqué little movies were actually all geared to make us into loyal consumers of a particular brand. And with brand names becoming some sort of a status symbol (it was the same way by the time I was in college but not quite as bad) and a very market-driven idea or at least a very gross and superficial idea of what matters in life and that happiness can be purchased at some price or with a product (no matter if it's a glorious ad like some of the ads that Coca-Cola came up with or funny ads that Pepsi came up with during the cricket season or the Visa ad) - I couldn't imagine that I had missed this central bit about advertisements earlier.

Quite some years ago, there was a qualitative sociologist who gave an open lecture in the university and quite a few of us had tramped over to hear him speak. There was free food too. The expert went into a long account of how sociologists could bring about happiness by working in the corporate world and with the media and in the advertising world too and how sociologists had the great power to bring about good and positive change. One of his examples rankled terribly: about a little child in India smiling after using a particular brand of toothpaste. I'm not kidding. I waited for him to finish his long lecture and there was the applause and then the usual "any questions". I shot out questions and gave him a sound drubbing. There were no follow-up questions. The then Head of the Sociology and Anthropology department later on admitted to me in private that somebody had to tell the guest speaker that he had gone-over-the-top and he was glad that it was me, and he asked me what my field was in anthropology. I had looked at him and grinned and said that I was in the Sociology department actually.

The story doesn't end there. Later on a friend and I got into an argument. She didn't think there was anything wrong about ads or that a sociologist or any social scientist was any better than somebody working in the ad world. Her piece was that education was the same as the world of advertisements. That teachers, educators, professors, researchers were "sellers" or at the best, were trying to sell whatever they wanted to and therefore were in the same league as advertisers; that teachers and professors were no better than admen and adwomen - not even in the ideal type. The ugly argument - and the first one with that particular friend - from so many years ago still stays. So much for that. Yes, of course, teaching and being a teacher in the ideal sense are just the same as being an advertiser selling some brand in the market and brainwashing people into believing that "things" and "brands" can buy happiness. Right. I wonder at odd intervals whether when she is teaching and researching and winning many academic accolades whether she remembers what she said that evening so many years ago or whether she even believed in what she had said or was simply arguing with an in-fashion cynicism or whether the fact that she herself had worked with the ad world and the corporate world for a few years made her see things without much discrimination or whether it is faintly possible that she was merely tired with the way average academicians are. Who knows. I never found out because the discussion became an argument that got out-of-hand. I knew I was right then and I know I was right all along: no teacher, worth his name, is an adman.

Anyhow, the two ads that I linked - and they did turn up as ads seem and sound to be ads with a difference, and I liked them.
P.S: Here's another ad I remembered - from a few years ago. It's one I used to show in class every semester once I chanced upon it from the worldchanging website, which I used to visit from Suvro da's blog.

Damascus Nights

Sometimes I carefully choose books and pieces or conversations to read or re-read and sometimes I don’t know what exactly I want to read and sometimes I know exactly what I would love to read but know I can’t right then, and sometimes I cannot read much because the head doesn’t really follow written words the way a head normally does. Sometimes when a book or a piece of writing comes with a recommendation  or a reminder – I find myself unable to resist the call, and so run out to the library or try to wait for the book to turn up (sometimes it does) or click on a button to place an order or simply read the piece if it is readily available. 

Sometimes a book or a piece jumps on me and tells me that I’m supposed  to read it. This happens every now and then – and especially when I badly want to read something but not much is pervading my reading consciousness, and I think sadly that there is nothing that I will pick out because I won’t be able to read it anyway. 

I finished reading a book late the night before last. Only it already seems such a painfully long time ago. Damascus Nights by Rafik Schami. I had some quiet moments just sitting on top of the heat vent with a blanket on my legs thinking about the book and not thinking that I needed to write about it and feeling sadly that I’d probably even forget I read the book some months down the line or not be able to remember the book anyway. The book had practically jumped out of the book-shelf at me and I didn’t know the writer nor had heard about the book but the title and something about the blurb which I suddenly had no problems understanding made me pick it out and it seemed to be a tiny enough book, which could be read and finished within a space of an evening or two at the most – no matter what other tasks one needed to finish. The tiny tale had me transfixed and the best way to put it in is to say that the book had me enchanted as I sat for a bit late in the night wondering about life and the matter of life being a matter of places, people and of stories involving places and people... There’s a quoted line in an essay I’ve read often, ‘The universe is not made of atoms – it is made of stories.’ And recently and very often a line from the first Hindi movie I watched – a line by Amitabh about ‘unfinished stories’ makes me feel not only wistful but terribly sad, and yet makes me feel equally sure that for some stories one must simply walk and wait to see where they go. Some stories from books and some stories within the space of life simply cannot be predicted the whole way through and one has to simply turn the pages. I didn’t think I’d be writing about this book today, and I won’t digress any more but I resisted the feeling of having to write about the book saying I had a few things that simply have to be finished and can’t write about books too well anyway – but there is the nagging prod to write about the book, and so I shall save time and write some.

I’ll try not to give away the tale – and the odd thing is that one cannot really give away the tale anyway. For the tiny book must be read to be savoured. It is done in the style of the classic 1001 Nights, in a way – maybe that’s why I picked the book when it jumped on me instead of putting it back firmly in its place on the shelf. The book has tales running through it and nestling within and some of the stories have to do with the life of the main characters and some of them are simply narrated tales living within narrated tales ensconced within the main tale about the unlikely hero – a very old and odd coachman who decided to be a coachman in Syria and traveled far and wide (but not that far and wide really) because he couldn’t stand the idea of being anything else and even though being a coachman in Syria was not safe nor the most respectable profession to join (people used to avoid it if they could) – he didn’t give two hoots about it. The coachman is the teller of tales, and he realizes at one point that that is what keeps his travelers hooked to his coach. This is but one tale and the book unfurls in a peculiar way for it is about friendship and how seven of his friends who gather together and every evening – seven odd and old friends who are clear characters in the book too, from the genial but poor barber who sells songbirds and is known as a miser but isn’t really one but who cannot help counting every head of hair and bushy beard as money for his family and he too has stories to tell and stories to hear which make his clients come back to him for their next haircut or shave in spite of the nicks received sometimes….to the coachman’s best friend who simply cannot tell a tale when it comes down to him to narrate one and so he brings his wife to tell a tale among the gathering of old men…and so the book takes the reader through a strange collection of characters and stories wrapped in stories with the number seven occupying some significance - and the most beautiful tale within another springs in the middle of the book: of a red star following a silver white one and the young man Shafak who lives partly in a dream world and the real world and yet tosses a pearl back into the sky and disappears, and one is convinced that he finds everlasting happiness – for that is what he was searching for. 

The book is placed in real socio-historical and political time in Syria between 1959-1963, and the political disturbances and the dark horrors and the shuffle in dictators, of neighbouring states, of the secret spies and the young boys who disappear and families which are left to be, pensions which are not received, soldiers and policemen who wait to overhear suspicious sounding words, poor orphans who are given a  home and treated as family, noisy and nosy neighbours, unpleasant people too…all fill the tiny book too and yet with such a laughing and easy grace and sometimes naughty and mischievous humour that one simply runs with the flow and the dark shadows aren’t allowed to hover over one’s shoulder – it’s almost like the book and one’s mind and watchful thoughts pursuing the tale carefully don’t allow one to sit and brood. The old men are cantankerous, querulous, sometimes even suspicious, and they argue a whole lot, and they are unpredictable, not always likeable and not all of them equally and yet they are friends of the coachman and they want – more than anything else in the world - him to be back in his old form as the teller of tales, and there is a camaraderie and love that simply cannot be defined in words. They are not rich at all nor are they all so poor that they cannot laugh or commiserate or love beauty and they come with their eccentricities and their obstinacies and yet all of them love the coachman and they are human beings and one cannot help liking them as they argue and quarrel and show their genuine concern and drink their cups of coffee or tea and cogitate and meditate on their water pipes. 

One gets to read about ‘hakawatis’ who are the narrators of tales and who frequented the cafes of Damascus and who tempted the clients by the old ruse of leaving a hanging tale so that the listeners would come back the following evening. One reads about a woman, Leila  – who nobody could keep tied to a place, not the prince who loved her and nor her husband who loved her because she wanted to roam the world and tell stories – and she stays in Damascus only to give birth to and bring up her daughter and then leaves without saying too much once the daughter is 18 and is married. The old coachman’s wife who visits him in a vivid sleep dream in a blue velvet dress after he falls asleep in a full-bellied fuzzy state and in a mosque after an interesting but curious day right after he receives his pension suddenly (I started feeling a bit like the old coachman through his day long wandering around his town). His wife tells him that she didn’t have a choice but to die first because she couldn’t stand being without him for she got bored without him and had never been able to stand being bored; and she goes on to say when he is looking hurt that yes-yes she knew that he had always been so much in love with her all along but for her, life with him had been worrisome yes, tension-ridden yes – but boring – never, and so she had loved life with him…, and his wife in her fine way reminds him in a hilarious scene that the oh-so-beautiful-platter that he just about bought is ‘errr – missing?’ and so he shoots awake – the old man. Being scolded by his beautiful muse in another dream because he has the tendency to ramble and forget when he’s rambling. The little boy who loves the coachman and hears the thoughts of the coachman because the old coachman shares even his thoughts with this little boy (who is the official narrator, I guess of the whole tale) even when the coachman is not speaking with anybody else…. Oh, how does one begin to write about a rambling, spinning book like this or even say much about it.

The book charmed me and at so many levels and in so many places and just when I needed it and was ready for it. It enchants for it makes the reader see and yet again just why one loves companionship and also through stories and tales even though they feel like such personal and ‘non-useful’ deep delights, and loves to both hear and tell stories and tales and share stuff by the fireside and through the changing seasons. The book talks about the power of the imagination to seduce when one is least expecting it or believes one is far too old (if not wise) to be seduced and its power to run through and chase through life – life, which could come across as nothing but dreary and being a drudgery and a drag and a bore unless it feels and is frightening and somehow meaningless and in its chaotic flux or stupor – as it slips in to take us higher in its magic, just so as to make a couple of dreams or more come real, and the book blurs the line between dreams and reality, and very gently and very easily and sometimes sharply and suddenly and yet so divinely and therefore naturally. It speaks about the power of different kinds of love, and also of easy and unconditional love which both demands nothing and demands more than one knows but one senses, and precisely because it becomes unconditional – the ‘why’ is a matter which never stops perplexing one. One keeps guessing about more things than I can write and till the last page and never really stops guessing but even that is part of the joy which fills one soul and the trusty friend in the mind seems to get even sprightlier while egging one on to laugh without feeling bad or sad and keeps saying, “See how a tale develops? That’s how one needs to weave a tale…”…and so one sees the tale yet again in little movie clips: the old, laughing and somewhat mysterious coachman who is a teller of tales and who stops speaking altogether, and his friends…, the old coachman who had another incomparable gift – of healing sparrows and making them fly again, the tale within tales of fables and myths and magic, and a couple of shared dreams that might just become real within the given space of now and the sand left in the hourglass...

I’m not sure sometimes about life and sometimes I get panic stricken while life keeps running at a maddening pace through the hour-glass and yet sometimes I am told to look at it from a distance and in its meaning and sense evoking moments which are sharp and clarified and it would seem then that one simply must play as well and hard and with whatever gifts and goofs that God and one’s creator and one’s pilot has armed one with and take some moments to be a human being and then walk with renewed faith that life connected is a mix of darkness, reality, light and winking magic and certainly a few mysterious miracles even though one knows one errr...is a crank and even a sinner but no saint – not by a long shot.

Words again

Language still confuses me and words too, and sometimes I utterly fail to understand human language when my senses are terribly woolly or heightened in a peculiar way. I muddle over using the right words and use wrong words and especially when feelings are evoked through a particular word. I use words and interpret them in the way I see a word. "Law" for instance. It can mean the law laid down by an individual man in the world, by a community, law as ordained by the courts, the law of the sun and the moon and the stars and planetary motion, and the law of the universe, and even beyond - of the endless and the infinite - by the laws of Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and Love which individuals feel keenly like a divine law and irrespective of what the laws of a land might say. I will pursue the post possibly while pondering upon other words too. So much for now.

The town in the East

Some memories emerged from the haze and smoke  – so I’d written a bit of what I do remember. I thought I had clear enough impressions but while I remember incidents – I don’t really remember how I felt. And I’m quite sure that my experiences since then have sort of erased what I found difficult or annoying or what I enjoyed. I don’t know whether this will fit the bill and I'm not happy with it but let me give at least a glimpse of some of the memories that did turn up upon digging. I lost one of the drafts that I’d written – so this jumbled one is all I have for now about the 'return of the native'.

I remember the cows on the roads. This should not mean that I had never seen a real cow – I simply do not remember whether I had before that, to be honest. The sight of so many cows and in so many shapes and sizes wandering around as free as you please had felt a little strange at first, and the fact that cow dung therefore was a regular feature. It was a lucky day if I managed to come back to the house without trampling some, and then managed to slink in through the gates without having a cow following me. They’d eat up all the vegetables and flowers and it was not uncommon to find a placid cow chewing on something at some point of the day during a holiday and I’d go out sometimes to merrily herd the cow out of the gate and would feel like a ‘rakhal chhele’. No dustbins outside the house was also something that raised question marks in my head. The first time was also the last that I visited a public latrine (till I was way into college)...The lack of pavements too made me curious.  And there were very different odours and smells and fragrances and colours….and the matter of language although this last one was not something I consciously thought about.

The neighbour-didi who used to teach at Carmel used to go to school in a rickshaw. I accompanied her for awhile before I started taking the school-bus. One morning while she was getting on to the rickshaw – she said, “catch my bag”. I got very nervous – and this, I remember. I thought she was going to throw her bag at me and I was supposed to catch it in mid-air and I didn’t know why she would want to throw her bag at me. I must have looked stupid because I was waiting and as ready as I could be while she was patiently holding her bag out to me with one foot on the rickshaw. I realized what she meant after long painful minutes but it stayed inside and gnawed away at me…why would somebody want me to “catch’ her bag when she meant for me to “hold” her bag. In school an incident occurred one day when the class-teacher asked me to say a nice prayer that could be used for prayer service.  I rattled off one from memory and finished it off with a, “guard India and watch over us”. The teacher – no matter how dim she was in some ways – said that that could not be. I insisted and very firmly that that is what the prayer was and how it ended. She looked at me with disbelief and that prayer was not used for assembly as far as I remember but indeed many years later I realized that I had pronounced ‘guardian angel’ wrong for all the years I was in England, and for that one prayer. Otherwise there was the ‘crisis of communication’ but in a very non abstruse manner. I started having the same problem with the inmates of the house but there I now know the breach had to do with the fact that nobody wanted to listen to anybody else  (which was the best thing that could have happened, I also now feel and with a quiet vehemence). I found a way of tackling the school problem myself. I simply started speaking the way I heard people around me speaking. For at the beginning if very few people understood what I was saying – I happened to understand very little of what others were saying even though we were ostensibly speaking the same language. And so one of the first words I mangled was the humble, earthy potato.  I pronounced it neither ‘puh-tay-toh’ nor ‘puh-tah-toh’ but I said ‘put-e-to’, and the Indian-isms (or what I’d imagined was Carmel lingo) such as ‘did you go there today only?’ ‘why don’t you tell me no?’ ‘open your shoes’ slipped into my conversation satchel until I raked some of them out but more than some remain and pop out in a most embarrassing fashion, while I have been reminded of quaint English phrases and words and idioms through the years, and not just from books  – phrases and words I’d almost forgotten.

School and home both used to bore me to the gills when both weren't scaring me witless especially during the first year of readjusting whether it was a day that the class teacher of Class 2 was either doting on me or was debating whether to give me five whacks with the ruler across my palm or ten. I was her pet, and she let me participate in every school and class competition and liked hearing me speak but she was also utterly exasperated with me - and so I can’t blame her for the whacks which I bore with no visible expression but a smarting palm. I used to dream all the time in the class in a lazy, vacant, empty and sluggish way and never finished classwork (although I was very helpful towards my bench-mate and others if they wanted to know the names of vegetables or what-have-you for making a list of ‘ten somethings’), and I didn’t even care. I must have come across as being annoying. I don’t know quite why I was so lackadaisical in the classes because there had been regular classwork earlier but I was  remarkably vague in the first year (and vague, slow and aggressive in the second) although I did fairly well for extempore and poetry recitals and liked reading stories. That apart I was very forgetful about organizing my affairs, and so every day I would leave something or the other behind – either at school or in the house so punishments and/or scoldings from both ends were not uncommon. It was a daily thing – forgetting books or exercise books or a water bottle or a tiffin box or a pencil or an eraser. Class 3 was even more horrific in this regard. I am very vague about breaks and game periods during the period of fitting in but I remember the smell that hung around in that primary school corridor – it was the smell of squashed boiled eggs. Maybe children hated the boiled eggs that they got for tiffin or maybe with all the running and jostling and shoving, eggs were dropped by the dozen and then squashed by running shoes…but that still floats in my head and it was anything but pleasant.

There was some exam or the other within ten days of joining school and I flunked almost all the subjects, and brilliantly. I didn’t even care whether I knew the answers and for the history exam, I remember having folded my exam script carefully and just sitting after 15 minutes. I can’t remember how many exams I sat for in class 2 but the exams were a painful experience; I did a bit better in the second one or whichever one it was but the Bengali teacher especially wanted me to be kept back in Class 2. Given my incredible feat of scoring what I had – I’m not surprised. Why I was sent up a year I have no clue but I made it to class 3 which is a different story, and with a terribly unpleasant teacher too.

Reading was still fun but more than that I read bits of what I could because I could read. I borrowed my second Enid Blyton from a didi who was a neighbour, and it was a Famous Five. I understood very little from the first reading actually and got very confused but I kept at it, and I read an assortment of different books and comics both in English and Bangla in the first year. There were two functioning libraries in the township, and I started borrowing books from there too, and sometimes books were bought. I had some ‘books on tape’ and I remember listening to the ‘The little Match-girl’ over and over and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ but I didn’t listen to too much of the old music, not until I was in class VI or IX…

I had a very interesting time learning Bangla from what I remember – and the initial experience was lovely. I learnt the language rather quickly but I didn’t learn it well (very much like swimming, learnt at the same time more or less). The script and everything about it came across as being very intricate and very involved and much more ‘curvy’ and undulating with dips and rises, an absolute lack of immediate edges and angles, especially in its sounds in relation to the script. 

Reading, writing odd bits, wandering around the neighbourhood where I had motley groups of friends with whom I’d play away the late afternoons and early evenings, enjoying the phuchkas greatly when I had them, playing with and trying to take care of the newborn pups that were born within a season along the street where I stayed for five years in the first house, E-47, joining the pool, learning to sing with the harmonium, watching movies at the local club are what I remember from the very first few years. School was a nightmare till I became a rowdy rebel from class 4. From VII, school was fun because of participating in every possible extra-curricular event (including singing) and then there were the plays a group of us used to put up through the year.

I did a lot of cursive writing in the initial years – writing in both English and Bangla – something I’d never done before, and the practice used to keep me utterly occupied. I’m quite sure that I practised more handwriting than I did studying anything, and practised more handwriting than did any of my contemporaries. I could have become a forger I sometimes think if I had been maybe street-smart and hadn't had a conscience which jumps on me or been hired as some ‘calligraphy-writer’ if they had jobs of such a  nature.

In those very first few years the times that I badly missed that other town far west (where a bit of me was probably wandering around) was when Christmas would swoop down. Then I couldn’t help it, and used to feel cranky, tearful, cheerful, garrulous, querulous and quiet in bouts – and it was the same way with sudden smells. I don’t remember any longer what it was that I so badly missed with the sudden smells but singing those carols in school made me feel incredibly nostalgic, and while I’d sing them with great fervour and with the brimming spirit of Yuletide there would be lumps somewhere jostling  but I had somewhat mastered the stiff upper lip if nothing else...

In a way, from what I can see now all the different experiences, hits and misses and the rest from then converge...to The Beatles' 'In my life' and Tagore's 'Purano shei diner kotha...' 

A town from the past

"Time is an endless lane/ And Life a little mile without a bend...Behind us what? Before us, if we ran,/ Might we not be in time to seek the Grail?" Morton, In search of England

It was a small and safe town, and the place I stayed between '79 to very early '83 was 157, Cliff Gardens. It was located in what was then known as South Humberside. The house I stayed was bang opposite to the Scunthorpe General Hospital. The hospital looked huge back then and very grand – made of brown brick – and yet when I checked in on google images on a whim – it doesn’t look that huge any longer. The whole street view feels very strange to see…and I’ve never, ever wished to go back into my own past, and I’m not exactly sure why or how I’ve been tempted to write the following. Maybe it has to do with reading a book in sudden and very drawn out shifts or maybe they are old memories simply rearing like ghostly horses upon being jogged by different essays I've been reading and the conversations I've been having, and they almost feel like they happened to somebody else... 

There were not a few families with children living on the same street, and my memories while they are not linear – I do remember playing with them, and I would walk the three or four blocks on some early afternoons and mornings to go play with the kids. On one occasion three of us ventured out of the back gate in their garden after some days of wondering of what lay beyond – a space which was covered with grass and had trees and looked like a little forest grove. I remember holding the youngest child’s hand in mine as we set forth for our adventure one fine day. I don’t remember any longer how long the walk was or whether there was even a path but eventually somehow or the other we made our way into concrete and tarmac actually and I remember looking at the building that we could see rising in front of us. As we walked all around it we realized we had reached nothing but the front of the hospital building. Another day while sitting in the back yard I saw a helicopter in the air for the very first time in my life. I waved and waved and yelled but the chopper after hovering around for some long minutes flew off. The front garden and I had a relationship going. I planted some orange pits and something of a strawberry once, and watered the plants regularly but sadly enough never got any fruits for my labours. There was a sweet shop cum general store a little way off but I don’t remember what I got from there apart from lozenges for which I showed a great fondness. Those days the tinkling musical ice-cream van with its friendly man, on Sundays was a regular feature. I don’t think we got ice-creams every Sunday but certainly every now and then. I showed a penchant for only ice lollies in garish colours and sometimes in a ‘cola’ flavor and none for the creamy stuff.

There was a library close enough. It was a circular in shape from what I remember and  had a few broad stairs, and every week there were 3 books that I got. I don’t remember getting to learn English, and I don’t remember when I started to read on my own. I remember reading lots of ladybird books for children, a mix of different books for  kids, the Mr. Men series, Paddington Bear, encyclopaedias of space and geography books filled with pictures and  a mishmash of different kinds of general knowledge books with lovely pictures, and then an Enid Blyton – only I didn’t know she was the Enid Blyton until later.  Never read a Dr.Seuss until I was in my late teens. I remember there being a small book-shop inside the hospital. I used to go to the hospital every now and while ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ had been a birthday present, ‘Heidi’ was a general gift. Both were in comic book form, and by the same publisher with black and white sketches. ‘Heidi’ I read much later but the unabridged ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ I never could read. The kids’ version gave me the chills.

I joined St. Augustine Webster Primary school – meant for kids between 3-ish and 12-ish – and after I showed an overwhelming reluctance to go to a pre-school for toddlers. These are the only bus trips I remember. Otherwise all the places I went to in the town were on foot. I remember the school years and the teachers and a few incidents rather vividly, and the kids in school. Alison Kent – a tiny sprinter and a fast friend, Francesca Ristangio – the Italian, Cecelia, Fiona, Anne-Marie, Sarah, Sarah’s friend Alison Brader, and the dark long haired Natalina whom I may have forgotten…, and other girls whom I vaguely remember. I didn’t get along with the boys in my own class but have fond memories of a younger boy and a few of the older ones. I remember Miss Queen who was the loveliest, very cheerful, and youngest teacher I had and she used to laugh a lot apart from one day when she was in a crying fit and a temper and had scolded us when one child had spilt a bottle of milk. Every school child used to get a glass bottle of milk before lunch hours. I hated the milk. I don’t remember what I did with it but one day I feigned illness after finishing my class work just so as to not drink the bottle of milk. That was the last year that they gave us milk in school. Alison and I were such fast buddies that Mrs. Joan Miller whom we had in class 4 declared on the first day of class 5 that while the circular seating arrangement in the class with a girl seated next to a boy would apparently mean fewer noisy conversations in class, she didn’t have the heart to separate Alison and me even if we were noisy. So we gloated in the class with angel wings sprouting from our heads although I wouldn’t have minded exactly being seated with a  nice enough boy on either side... Fate had different ideas however. Not within minutes of settling down, the Headmaster, Sir Paul Ibbotson (who was always in his Mr. Chips garb) walked in and called out my name. I stood up and walked out of the class with him, and I still remember thinking that it was a funny day to be having an impromptu reading test. But they were always lovely and one got to be with the Headmaster for some glorious minutes in his idyllic office and he answered different questions  about the pictures that graced his office and one could even sit in an armchair for a few minutes after the reading test – and if one performed well one got a toffee (now I think everybody did but one still felt mighty special). I traipsed along with him that day and was almost sure about turning the corner in the corridor when he was talking about this and that and said that I was to do classes in class 6 and not in 5. That happened often enough – jumping a year (I don’t think it had anything to do with being smart or clever – I think there was some age factor too playing in the equation). I was not happy about it and I don’t remember what he said but he gently herded me into class 6. The best thing about that was that the Headmaster used to take our special science classes and that’s the first time I knew what “gravity” on the earth as compared to the moon meant because the Headmaster did a pretend moonwalk in the class. There were prayer services which I quietly adored, ‘best effort’ competitions which involved drawing and colouring but I don’t remember any writing competitions apart from the regular classwork and homework, and there were no exams on a regular basis at that age. I remember learning the multiplication tables till 4 at home. I learnt the five times table from Alison’s stopwatch, and that was my one moment of glory for the rest of my life as far as Maths was concerned.

Christmas was a beautiful time. I remember getting a few gifts every year, and I opened them on Christmas morning with great excitement. I loved the carols and knew all about Jesus and the timeless tale of the baby born in the manger in Bethlehem, and the places of Nazareth and Galilee I used to roll around with my tongue, and the inarticulate deep feeling for the spirit of Christmas and for Jesus have stayed with me, and have probably grown deeper if different through the last decade... There were not a few dinners with a mix of guests at different points of the year – and that’s how I tasted wine and alcohol and had a go at cigarettes and cigars before I turned 8. I remember the fireworks from one year, and it was the same year when I first got a very long stick of pink peppermint candy, which I saved like a miser. The fondness for peppermint and mint have stayed.

There was a park somewhere – the name of which I have clean forgotten. The park, I did not visit alone but I had the habit of brushing my fingers along the trees and bushes on the way to the park which was along a hilly road, and every time I would come back with what I now know are painful nettles. I liked the hilly park and yet I didn’t learn how to swing on my own till I was 8 and so I had to wait to be pushed on the swing unless I romped around. It was in that same park that a big dog had chased a neighbourhood friend and I had looked on aghast. I don’t think the excited dog had any real intentions of biting him because the dog pranced away after some seconds once his master called him but the huge brown-black barking dog with a  wild face running after the friend is something that had terrified me.

The bridge connecting South and North Humberside wasn’t built till ‘81 apparently and I was there in that town till  very early ’83, I think. I remember a few trips to that bridge and also eating take-away fish and chips wrapped in newspaper in a strange place off the bridge with little seats and on a cold day. I don’t know whether it was the same day or another like it but on one occasion I stared for long minutes at a horse which was wandering around in a grassy field with lots of trees. It was probably somebody’s house with a space of a small field. The horse was simply wandering around and did not take much of an interest in me, as far as I remember, but I was fascinated by it, and insisted for the first time that a picture be taken with that dark brown horse and me. Everybody tried to convince me that the horse was not a particularly fine horse as horses go, and that it was all angles and bony and most likely unwell but I couldn’t care less. That picture is still around somewhere but not with me but I remember the horse and my stubborn face which shows up on the picture.

I used to watch a fair lot of TV too. I must have watched children’s shows as well but don’t remember them too well. But I watched Panorama on TV and the old James Bond movies with the incomparable Sean Connery, Casablanca, Guns of Navarone (I remember liking ‘Force 10’ better when I watched both a decade later) whether I understood much or nothing - and other movies which I don’t remember. It’s from TV that I got to know about the Falklands War and Jack the Ripper, and the race riots that used to break out in parts of England, and God knows what else. I heard and saw a lot of music on TV too. That’s how I got to hear ABBA, The Beatles, Cliff Richard, Julio Iglesias Sr., Tight Fit, Modern English, The Cure. …Shakin Stevens was probably my long-distance first infatuation but I won’t bet on it. I watched ‘The Sound of Music’, and ‘Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang’ (supercalifragilestiexpialidocious!) and ‘Charlie and the Chocolate factory’ and ‘Pygmalion’ during the Christmas special film telecasts on TV, and I heard the songs and also a few other pieces from the old records that were purchased and played on a record player.

I was also with not a few bizarre fixations...I wanted seven brothers and a maybe a few sisters and all of us would have bunk beds and talk a lot and be great friends. It was one of my fondest fantasies. I fell ill once, and for the longest time I believed that I had seen the doctor drawing out some spinal fluid with a huge needle. Only many years later did I realize that it was a false memory because the doctors and nurses would not have put up a mirror on the ceiling for my benefit simply because I preferred seeing what was being prodded into me. I had one sudden infatuation when about 7-ish: he was a friendly, communicative, red-haired (!), tall, and lanky bus driver whose name I remember, and I remember feeling the pangs while singing songs during prayer service when in school, and at some point I had a quiet crush on an older boy named Steven, and very badly wanted to talk with him but never did. For the years there in that town I was rather boisterous and noisy and adventurous in some ways, and also quiet and fairly precocious and sometimes silly, I think and yet I remember feeling the feeling that life lay somewhere else and I missed a deep part of me, and one day when I knew I was coming/going back to India (and I’d known that India was the land where I came from) I was equally excited about the prospect of returning. I carry the smells at the then Heathrow Airport and on Scandinavian Airlines, and I remember nothing else about the return journey. There are other strange memories which kind of rise in the mind and yes, there was the weather in that town in England – but this is more than enough for now...

I know I missed toast once back in India and I used to get quietly enraged when people didn’t know what the hell I was saying or would laugh about my pronunciation and everybody around me would join in on the joke whether I was speaking in Bengali and even in English, and yet I couldn’t blame them so I would feign a quiet indifference at the beginning. Some two decades later I got to know that there had been a much older boy back then who had defended my pronunciation in my absence, but I hadn't heard of him or seen him back then when I was 8.

On the matter of children and oath taking

I’ve been thinking of children because of the blogposts I’ve been reading and essays and conversations I’ve been reflecting over, and the furrows on my head have grown deeper, and for different reasons. 

This post sort of takes off from the “Lemmings…” post for which Suvro da posted a link and in connection to the particular matter of oath taking and Girl Guides.

The leader of the Girl Guides in an effort to be “relevant” took the old oath about “being true to God, Queen, and country” and changed it to “being true to myself, and my beliefs”. What made me laugh one early morning was that I started thinking about children – the real children that I’ve known (including myself), heard about, read about, and thought about. Children, I think, normally know better than to trust their batty beliefs and they don’t entertain too many fancy notions about their changing “self”. I’m not sentimental about children, and I know 5 or 6 year-olds or even younger children and certainly older ones can be viciously cruel or hurtful or malicious or spiteful or just plain dumb or just vain or silly - both from personal experience and having known myself. But children can also be imaginative and curious and are more engaged in living and investigating and experimenting and can, I know play for hours with a little string or a thread or in a sandpit or with a colourful piece of paper or make a tent with a bed-sheet apart from engaging in reading and writing or thinking provided that there are a few of the external factors in place and no immediately repressive inhibitors and some active encouragement (from teachers in school and/or parents). They can also be stubborn and also very unreasonable but also sharp. And comic strip writers especially and children’s writers and writers writing upon children have pointed out that children can also be intelligent. Calvin knows better – that’s why he speaks with and listens to Hobbes. Dennis (whom I sadly ignored rather often) may not explicitly have a friend he speaks to, but he speaks of a “conscience” with cookie eating. Zooey in ‘Franny and Zooey’ speaks to Jesus. The Little Prince has his Rose. The very real little child in ‘The Selfish Giant’ makes the ogre-ish giant come alive with his love, and the child is no other than the little boy Jesus, and he’s there when the Giant passes away. The girl in a story called “A little bit of Sorcery” has an omnipresent friend when she finds herself most disillusioned and depressed whom she could then call upon. So many children talk to some other part of their Self – a deeper Self, and so do grown-ups….I have talked about this earlier in old posts. 

So to take that original oath of “being true to God, Queen, and country”: I think young children if left to their own devices within the framework of a given culture may prefer talking and arguing and seeing the world with God, Jesus, maybe Lucifer, story book characters or conjure up somebody else with whom they can exchange stuff while the world and the adults around them comes across as confusing and disturbing or just muddled or disgusting or plain hypocritical. In fact, after some more thought on the matter, I say it’s better to talk with the Queen. At least a child’s version of what the Queen implies and what the Queen might or might not say gives the child company to sort out what she sees in the outside world. The whole deal of the oath is that the child knows that there is somebody else within to keep one company…even country makes sense. Being true to one’s country is a deep oath and there is nothing frivolous or inane about it even if one cannot talk with one’s country so to speak in the same way as one would talk with the Queen…. The writer of the "Lemmings..." article was not overrun with sentiment to believe that the original oath of “being true to God, Queen, and country” would make brilliant little thoughtful girls who would go on to do incredible things with their lives. Even with the oath the writer knows that maybe, just maybe one or two or three of the little Girl Guides may be shaken out from their states of sleepy self-satisfaction.

So to go back to the “true to myself and my beliefs” bit. It brought to my mind a story I’d read in my first Enid Blyton (Ruby story book), from which I remember two tales and one was titled, “Because my mother does….”. It had made a very strong impression on me. I won’t go through the whole story but to provide a synopsis from what I remember: thunder and lightning and a storm breaks out while the primary school kids are in the middle of a class, and a couple of very young kids hide under their table and one kid shakes with fright and a couple run to the window to admire the storm, and the teacher asks the two frightened kids why they are hiding under the table. The children shaking with terror say, “because my mother does.” Why did the two kids run to the window? "Because our mother does." And the teacher starts asking the other kids in class about why they do some of the things they do, and don’t do some of the things they don’t and it turns out that all the kids do what they do, “because my mother does…”. A little extreme, maybe, but Blyton transmits her point with a sharp nudge – with the teacher talking with the children, and getting the children to enjoy storms and hold little frogs and some such other stuff, and takes them to the farm to see some cows – and she points out that children tend to do what their mothers do but that there is nothing automatically good or reasonable or noble about doing everything or not doing everything their mothers do. The children are also rather quick on the uptake, and they realize that they are somewhat silly for being scared of so many different things simply because their mothers are. Of course these days such a story would probably be banned on the grounds of being sexist but let me not get into all that. 

To go back to the oath then with the ‘be true to myself, and my beliefs’ . With no God or Queen or country in the proceedings – who are little Girl Guides going to be true to? They might not want to trust their batty beliefs in entirety but the little girls can now be true to their mothers and their mother’s beliefs, and be little clones of their mothers. Or else they can have the whole of society in their minds  – and be true to that society with all its concomitant sicknesses, and do exactly and only what society tells them is alright or any dogmatic tradition of beliefs that manages to wheedle itself into minds which have forgotten or which have never known what is good and beautiful or have only faintly wondered about meaning and purpose in life, and why these elements matter. The same idea, if one thinks about it raises its ugly and evil head in ‘Harry Potter  and The chamber of Secrets’. Ginny, the lonely child who has nobody else starts writing in a diary which starts writing back, and Riddle is able to control her for his own demented purposes, and yet Ginny being essentially good is able to fight back. There are other examples that I can think of – but this is sufficient, for now....

This is not a matter limited to little girls. 
And people in their teens, mid twenties and older and older still – the grand middle class in the world is converging towards some unspeakable and mindless and horrifying mean; conforming to the standards that have been laid down by the consumerist culture and the accompanying bombarding ubiquitous messages – buy, splurge, booze, eat, shop, preen in public, go with what titillates the senses but nothing more, and make sure you have the cash to throw out. And that’s what we have…an increasingly mindless planet in which the masses cannot distinguish at all amongst what is shallow and filthy and crude and disgusting or mind-numbing and what lies in the middle and what is the true and the good and the beautiful. It makes me go back to my original rant that little children need to be taught what is good and beautiful and what is ugly, among other things...And what can I say about the great majority of sociologists who ignore the matter of "values" altogether or imagine that values are too "fuzzy" to talk about as sociologists or don't want to investigate why it is that we are becoming so mindless that "50 shades" becomes a best-seller and the "gangnam style" video gets million hits and is applauded by VIPs around the world...maybe for more than most it is a matter of "living in glass houses" when they aren't in their academic towers or maybe we are happy taking pot-shots at the "culture industry" and the media, and maybe many haven't ever articulated what values they themselves live by. While being prodded into being reminded of "A Brave New World", I was reminded of Orwell’s "1984", and there is a very interesting comparison between the two books on Wikipedia ("Anthem" is a book I'd place in the same category but as a mirror image). 

What I do wonder about is why people who when young and have the opportunity to learn a little from someone who is better don't try harder. 

I know how easy it is to feel unnervingly lonely or be swept away or to feel horrified and this in spite the fact that I've always been, as far as I can remember, a thinking & feeling being more than anything else, I think, and I know I've been deucedly lucky and blessed in a couple of ways, which makes me wonder all the more at times. 

 So I still hope because...And I stick to the hope because of the because... More, later.

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.