My apologies. Between bouts of flu and flying (well, a euphemism for travel that included slow buses, never-available autos, cockroach-flicked trains and a couple of cloud-jumping flights), I’ve been off-line. Some of the travel was for pleasure – like my news de-addiction drive, austerely followed in Goa (visual proof attached), and abandoned immediately on return to Bangalore – but most of it on work. Fulfilling, but not necessarily pleasurable.
Ashwin was saying the other day that it was interesting that I hardly – if ever – write about my work. I think my fear is that if I begin, I will never stop… the moving finger writes and what if, having writ, none of my tears will wash out a word of it (despite WordPress’ excellent editing tools)?
Why the awkwardness? Because the work I do is not necessarily seen in the feminist/social justice world as being radical enough; it might even be called – brace yourselves – co-option. And yet I do it: because real life is hard to classify, and allies and enemies so often merge into one another, that it seems more honest to dare to dance on the margins, in the interstices of spaces and communities, searching for allies in an enemy or watchful for enemies in an ally.
Beyond the rhetoric, I do something fairly simple: I work with the Karnataka State Police and UNICEF, on a project that looks at building a people-friendly police; more specifically, a system that will be responsive and sensitive to violence against women and children. It’s tough for me – or any one on our team – to call this work pleasurable. But it can be fulfilling in unexpected ways: two weeks ago, we did a workshop with 400 trainee constables in Belgaum. Some of them are double graduates, and many of them have joined the police because of the ‘job security’ that government positions offer; at the moment, the only departments recruiting are education and police. It wasn’t unexpected to find so many choosing being a police officer rather than a teacher, but it was unexpected to find them almost uniformly (!) full of creativity, spontaneity and fairly reasonable levels of sensitivity.
So what changes once they’re at the police station? A fall-out of training practices that emphasise discipline over responsiveness? That almost-Weberian monster, routinisation of caring? Or an inherently violent system, a near-perfect model of patriarchal power, that needs extraordinary courage and will – individually, if not institutionally – in order to create spaces and moments that are less violent, more inclusive, and whose outcomes are just? And yet, those spaces and moments and individuals seem to exist – though they don’t sell headlines. And no, I don’t think I’m suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. 🙂
Tell me what you think.
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