Blog

Baba Budangiri: a plural past, present and future?

Baba Budan probably never realised that being a gentle Sufi saint, revered by both Hindus and Muslims, would cause such trouble three centuries after his death. And the right-wing fanatics in our country don’t seem to give him any credit for bringing fragrant filter coffee into our land, either. The legend is that in 1670, he smuggled (bound to his belly) seven coffee seeds out of Arabia and planted them in Chikmagalur in Karnataka. The rest is not just history, but a severely contested present. The shrine of Baba Budan, known as Baba Budangiri (one of the most beautiful hill-stations in the State; giri means ‘mountain’), has been the site of communal tension over the past few years, between those who wish to celebrate its syncretic past and present, and those who wish to re-invent it to be a solely Hindu(tva) shrine.

In order to support pluralism, and fight fundamentalisms, both at Baba Budangiri and elsewhere, a rally and convention has been organised in Bangalore this Sunday.

In my mailbox, these details:

*Massive Rally and Convention*
*26 November 2006, Sunday, Bangalore*
*Rally from Malleshwaram grounds, 10.30 am*

Please attend the anti-communalism convention and demonstration to be held on 26th November. This is being organised by the Karnataka Komu Souharda Vedike, which is a coalition of over 200 organizations working since 2002 to establish communal harmony and to fight against the agenda of communalism in Karnataka.

The Convention will bring together over 40 speakers from different progressive and secular organizations. The main speakers at the Convention will include Girish Karnad, Teesta Setalvad, Tontadarya Swami, Gauri Lankesh, Sanath Kumar Belagali, K.M. Sharief, etc.

Should women marry career men?

And if this sounds absurd to you, why doesn’t the opposite sound equally absurd to Michael Noer (he of the infamous Forbes article ‘Don’t marry career women’)… or to many others on this planet?

Bageshree had an interesting piece (which has bits from yours truly, ahem) in the Hindu yesterday, in which she quotes an admirer of ‘Nooyi’s Nintendo strategy’ (!) through which Indra Nooyi allegedly combines “the high-octane energy of her job with the calm, collected demeanour required to manage the equally central responsibility of a mother and a wife.” Bageshree then asks, rather pertinently:

But what happens to slightly lesser mortals who might be doing okay in their careers but may not quite have arrived at what’s called “Nooyi’s Ninetendo strategy”? Those who leave a pile of washing undone or don’t read a bedtime story to the child because there’s a deadline dangling over the head? Or rush off to an emergency surgery without feeding the child hot soup when she returns from school?

Most likely, someone will be whispering into the husband/partner’s ears: “I told you to keep away from these career women, didn’t I?”

The article also profiles Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett’s article, ‘Gasp, I married a career woman!‘ which is well worth a read. They say:

We have just completed a major new analysis of data from our study of dual-earner couples that was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. The data, not yet published, utterly contradict the Forbes thesis that men will be unhappy if they marry career women. Our study–which looks at men’s marital happiness–finds that among dual-earner couples, as she works more, his marital quality goes up. Why so? Probably for a number of reasons.

Men’s wages have been stagnant or declining for nearly 20 years, so her income may be easing financial tensions and making it possible for the couple to pay their bills. Her enhanced earnings may be heightening her self esteem, and so she brings these good feelings about herself into the marriage. He may want to spend more time with the family, and her work eases the breadwinning burden. Research tells us that men today do want more family time and are actually spending more time with their families than they used to.

Lucky I married a feminist. 🙂

Nostalgia on November 1st

As I’ve said below, Karnataka is celebrating its 50th year of creation (there was a reorganisation of most Indian states in 1956). Possibly from almost back then, a few photographs of Bangalore, courtesy the Navadarshanam Trust, via Ammu Joseph:

First, the Town Hall


Next, MG Road (South Parade)

And finally, the bane of many of our present lives: Hosur Road, Bangalore (Silkboard, can you believe this???)!!! [Update: I think it was called ‘Cemetry Road’ back then, at least so it says on this finally enlarged photograph; will check with those who remember]

Janmadinnada Subhashagalu, Karnataka…

Or in other words, Happy Birthday, Karnataka, it’s been 50 years since you were born. What do I say to a place that’s been part of my childhood and my growing up, but also reason for my growing away? I love you, but that love is mixed with sadness, with disappointment and anger. If only you would be what most in this state (over 50 million of us) imagine you to be – a place of prosperity and joy, of pluralism and peace. Instead, so many of us live unimagined/unimaginable realities, nightmares rather than dreams.

Still, your people wish you a Happy Birthday. Because you might remember then – or at the very least, the people who claim to govern you might remember – that in your people, is your strength.

Here’s a poem I wrote for my friends (and extended family) in Raichur over ten years ago:

I found words in unexpected places
in Deodurg.
In a small stillness among the cattle feet
In sudden murmurings of water
(subdued but brave)
splintering through a vast yellowness.
I found strength
and a terrible humility
in the spurts of laughter
from tired-lined faces.
In the quietness of discovery
I found words
(and a funny sort of peace)
in Deodurg.

Ambassadors of Conscience

In today’s Times of India, an article on an innocent man who spent 11 years in jail for allegedly raping and murdering a six year old girl.

Kounder was released from the Yerawada prison on the directives of the Bombay High Court which took cognisance of a suicide note left by police inspector Iqbal Bargir in 2000 who said that Kounder was not guilty of the crime he was charged with.

The court order said that Kounder, who at the time of his arrest in 1995 was employed as an illiterate sweeper with the Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation, was suspected to have been wrongly implicated in the crime.

And what if Kounder had been given capital punishment? Surely raping and murdering a six year old girl justifies it (after all, the last time a Manila rope was made at Buxar jail was in 2004, for Dhananjay Chatterjee)? The next time I rise in righteous anger against rapists and murderers and shout ‘off with their heads’ in a grotesque imitation of the Red Queen, I will have to remember Armogam Munnaswami Kounder. A poor man, from a family of casual labourers in Tamil Nadu. A family he had lost all contact with in the past eleven years. As I write this, he is on a train – somewhere between Pune and Vellore – wondering whether his wife and son will recognise him.

In the midst of the on/off line (in more ways than one) debate around the death penalty, I think Shivam said it simply and effectively. Dilip quotes Nandita Haksar, the civil rights activist representing Mohammed Afzal Guru:

Can the collective conscience of our people be satisfied if a fellow citizen is hanged without having a chance to defend himself? We have not even had a chance to hear Afzal’s story. Hanging Mohammad Afzal will only be a blot on our democracy.

However, Rahul Mahajan gets into the act, saying he will sit on dharna to register his protest against those seeking pardon for Afzal. Perhaps he feels the Delhi police will then help him get elected.

Collective conscience? I leave you with an excerpt from Seamus Heaney’s extraordinary poem, that asks from us the greatest and deepest responsibility of all time: to be an ambassador of conscience, beyond the platitudes, beyond the politics of expedience. Please read the whole poem on the Art for Amnesty site.

When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway

At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather

The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared

[…]

I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself

The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen

He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved

You’ve come a long way, baby?

…into a world in which your parents tell you you’re ‘unwanted’ every time they call your name.

From Uma’s post, in which she quotes a news report on what some girl children are called in Punjab and Haryana:

Kaafi ~ Enough

Bharpai ~ Paying the Penalty

Dhappan ~ A Full Stomach

Mariya ~ Deathly.

Badho ~ Excessive.

Bas Kar ~ Stop It.

Unchahi ~ Unwanted.

Support Sharmila, repeal the AFSPA

Irom Sharmila has been on a protest fast for the past six years; since 2nd November 2000, when security forces killed innocent villagers in Malom, Manipur. About three weeks later, she was arrested and charged with attempted suicide: the authorities in Manipur have since been force-feeding her through a nasal tube. Sharmila was released on October 3rd from judicial custody, and on Friday, October 4th (last Friday), she was smuggled out of Imphal, and began her protest at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi.

On Friday night, she was moved to AIIMS by the police. This morning, The Hindu carried a report by Siddharth Varadarajan, that the Justice Jeevan Reddy Commission, tasked with reviewing the provisions of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), feels that it should be repealed. The report quotes the Commission as saying:

The Act is too sketchy, too bald and quite inadequate in several particulars.[…]the Act, for whatever reason, has become a symbol of oppression, an object of hate and an instrument of discrimination and high-handedness.[…]It is highly desirable and advisable to repeal the Act altogether, without, of course, losing sight of the overwhelming desire of an overwhelming majority of the [North-East] region that the Army should remain (though the Act should go).

* Announcement: There is to be a peaceful protest in Bangalore, in solidarity with Sharmila, urging the state to repeal the AFSPA. 2nd of November, 2006, at 5pm, at the Gandhi statue, MG Road.

And then there was silence…?

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.

Continue reading “And then there was silence…?”

Outsourcing flu

You can be Bangalore-d in many more ways than one. It’s not just our world-class infrastructure that we can boast about at the moment. We are also, solely from anecdotal evidence, the world’s flu capital. No, not bird flu (for which we now have a cheap vaccine developed by Indian researchers), not chikangunya (‘that which bends up’, from the Makonde, a matrilineal ethnic group from east Africa… and you thought it sounded like it originated in north Karnataka? So did I), though these have added weight to the honours list. But the common, garden variety, seven-days-or-a-week influenza is… well… everywhere. Especially in me. Twice over in the last two weeks.

You think the world is outsourcing flu, amongst all else? Sigh. It feels like it at the moment in my little corner of the blogosphere. And I’m the privileged back-end office. Working overtime. Triple sigh.

In the hope of recovery – and for all the others who I know are suffering too – here’s a funny something from the master of cheerer-ups: Ogden Nash. And just in case you’re wondering: when I have a snuffle, my temper is uffle.

The Sniffle