Story Cellar.

Rumi

2011-08-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

For awhile we lived with people, but we saw no sign in them of the faithfulness we wanted. It's better to hide completely within
as water hides in metal, as fire hides in rock.

~~

Be with those who help your being.
Don't sit with indifferent people, whose breath
comes cold out of their mouths.
Not these visible forms, your work is deeper.
A chunk of dirt thrown in the air breaks to pieces.
If you don't try to fly,
and so break yourself apart,
you will be broken open by death,
when it's too late for all you could become.
Leaves get yellow. The tree puts out fresh roots
and makes them green.
Why are you so content with a love that turns you yellow?

~~

....God fixes a passionate desire in you,
and then disappoints you.
God does that a hundred times!
God breaks the wings of one intention
and then gives you another,
cuts the rope of contriving,
so you'll remember your dependence.
But sometimes your plans work out!
You feel fulfilled and in control.
That's because, if you were always failing,
you might give up. But remember,
it is by failures that lovers
stay aware of how they are loved.
Failure is the key
to the kingdom within.
Your prayer should be, "Break the legs
of what I want to happen. Humiliate
my desire. Eat me like candy.
It's spring and finally
I have no will."

~~

There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.
Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

~~

The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both,
you don't belong with us.
When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us.
There's no place like that anywhere in the world.

~~

Even when you tear its petals off one after another,
the rose keeps laughing and doesn't bend in pain.
"Why should I be afflicted because of a thorn?
It is the thorn which taught me how to laugh."
Whatever you lost through fate,
be certain that it saved you from pain.
A Sheikh was asked: "What is Sufism?"
He said: "To feel joy in the heart when sorrow appears."

~~

This we have now
is not imagination.
This is not
grief or joy.
Not a judging state,
or an elation,
or sadness.
Those come and go.
This is the presence that doesn't

~~

Birdsong brings relief
to my longing
I'm just as ecstatic as they are,
but with nothing to say!
Please universal soul, practice
some song or something through me!

~~
One who does what the Friend wants done
will never need a friend.
There's a bankruptcy that's pure gain.
The moon stays bright when it
doesn't avoid the night.
A rose's rarest essence
lives in the thorn.

~~

There's courage involved if you want
to become truth. There is a broken-
open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp
compassion in this group? What's the
use of old and frozen thought? I want
a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.
We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm
won't do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.

Change

2011-08-29T04:13:00.000-07:00

I am ever-changing. The more I change, the better I feel. Change offers scope to slip back to the original and discover on the way the journey as it was. Change is life.

2011-08-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

Rural tourism has not only helped villages find a place on the tourist map, but also promoted indigenous art forms. My story today.

Indirapuram delights

2011-07-15T00:54:00.000-07:00

Delhi Metro has its latest station barely a kilometre from my house. I suddenly realise the importance of owning a house so early in my life. Three years ago when I moved into my house, the green belt across it wore a deserted, junglee look. Now, if you travel in peak hours, you carry strong chances of getting stuck in traffic. The Green belt is being beautified; trees line the streets; there are new traffic signals and aesthetic roundabouts. And, the price of flats has gone up drastically. Statistically, it's making more sense to people to buy homes in the locality I live in. Suddenly, buyers realise it's just 15-16 kilometres from CP and has a swank, clutter-free, signal-free highway as access point to the suburbs.
The room we constructed on our terrace often elicits queries from potential tenants; only we don't want to rent. The year we moved in, the existing rent of the flat equalled half the EMI were were paying for the rent. In three years, it's as much as the EMI. What's more, the area has multiplxes, clubs and malls at every nook and corner, perhaps as much as Gurgaon. Every housing complex built offers swimming pools and jogging tracks, a luxury in south Delhi where people have very limited options. I know a colleague who lives somewhere near Hauz Khas and drives to Siri Fort Auditorium for the swimming lessons. All I have to do is to peddle my way for about 2 kms to the nearest club, which has a neat pool and a gym. I peddle because my flat is in one of the older societies in the area and hence, doesn't have a swimming pool. New apartments are self-sufficient housing clusters.
Schools in the neighbourhood may not be many but they are coming up, esp. preps for children. There is a huge demand, esp. because most buyers are young, well-to-do couples with small children or couples planning children. In the evenings, there is such energy on the roads that it is difficult to believe it was once unsafe to move about after 10 pm.
Even Noida, and I am sorry to say this, can't be any match. And, it's now unaffordable for many - an ex-colleague wanted to buy a flat in my locality but had to move 15 kilometres further because the flats were beyond his budget. Finally, I am not complaining.

2011-06-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

I have spared myself the task of building bridges all over again. Humanity demands of us to make and sustain friends. A recent attempt with an ``old friend'' was treated with much cynicism, and I abhor that. When all I see is goodness around me and can find courage to start all over again, I can't allow anyone to darken my spirit with veiled disdain or sarcasm. I just want to look ahead and feel happy. LIfe is too short for bitterness or revenge or pretence at friendships. I would rather admit a stranger in my house than a friend who is a cynic and a doubting thomas.

Last few days have been very eventful, haven't had the time to sum it all up here. Trust me to do that soon.

Here is a nice piece from my fav. journalist who is now a novelist too: Searching for Something good to say about India

Response to rape

2011-05-31T05:22:00.000-07:00

I was very delighted to find a mail from Flavia Agnes, direcor of Majlis, today, in response to my story on Rape Counsellors in Mint on Monday.
She said the article inspired her to approach the Mumbai Police with an initiative similar to Swanchetan's (For clarity, read the story.).
I had read her books and several opinion pieces while doing my disseration on rape at the journalism school I went to. I knew she is iconic as far as activism in India on rape goes. So well, her mail shines among all the mails I have received on the story.
Good day.

rape counsellors

2011-05-30T04:31:00.000-07:00

The young girl, visibly bruised and shaken, was brought for questioning amid blaring sirens and numerous cops stirred by her sudden appearance. She was reporting a rape on a summer day in 2001 in a police station in central Delhi, where the policemen struggled to make sense of her distress.

In an instant, they went hurling questions at the girl; but she wouldn’t stop sobbing. Their questions to her were intimate and rattling—details on the rape, reconstruction of events leading to the crime, finding witnesses and identifying the accused.
As queries persisted, the girl went hysterical with cries. The investigating officer entrusted to investigate the crime was soon yelling at the victim even as her family members looked on, startled.

Rajat Mitra watched the proceedings with unease. More here.

And, here is an unrelated promotion: Why do we read PG Wodehouse?

Half of a Yellow Sun

2011-05-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

A few of my fav. sentences from the novel:

Perhaps she would have known that Odenigbo was different, even if he had not spoken; his haircut alone said it, standing up in a high halo. But there was an unmistakable grooming about him, too; he was not one of those who used untidiness to substantiate their radicalism.

She was used to this, being grabbed by men who walked around in a cloud of cologne-drenched entitlement, with the presumption that, because they were powerful and found her beautiful, they belonged together.

...he had that expression of people who marvelled at education with the calm certainty that it would never be theirs.

Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it to a prosaic partnership.

At first, when she introduced him as a writer, he wanted to correct her: journalist, not writer. But he was a writer, at least he was certain he meant to be a writer, an artist, a creator. His journalism was temporary, something he would do until he wrote that brilliant novel.

He laughed. The sound split out of him, uncontrolled, and he looked down at the clear, blue pool and thought, blithely, that perhaps that shade of blue was also the colour of hope.

He laughed and said that to bring a child into this unjust world was an act of blase bourgeoisie-how funny, how untrue it was. Just as she had never seriously thought of having a child until now; the longing in the lower part of her belly was sudden and searing and new.

Finally, before he fell asleep, Moliere's words came to him, strangely comforting: ``Unbroken happiness is a bore; it should have ups and downs.''

Perhaps he was not a true writer after all. He had read somewhere that, for true writers, nothing was more important than their art, not even love.

Richard looked at his hazy reflection in the glass door. He had a tan and his hair looked fuller, slightly tousled, and he thought of Rimbald's words: ``I is someone else.''

Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.

`Life is burning well'

2011-05-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

I am shamelessly promoting my little brother Shashikant Singh's digital art sale on fineartamerica.com. Will be utterly grateul if you can find time to register your support HERE.
many thanks.

books for May

2011-04-29T22:49:00.000-07:00

Reading `Sleep With me' and Adichie's `Half of a yellow Sun'. Adichie's novel is one of the four books I bought for this month, the remaining three being Sudhir Kakar's `The ascetic of desire', Pankaj Mishra's `Temptations of the West' and ELizabeth Noble's `Things I want my daughters to know'.
Happy reading this May.

valuable to the world

2011-04-21T02:55:00.003-07:00

``I need coddling. I am an egg that must lie in the downiest of nests under the most coaxing of nurses before my bald, unpromising shell cracks and my secret life emerges. Allowances must be made for me. I brood, I am a thinker, a creative person, one not without value to the world.'' JM Coetzee in `Dusklands'

valuable to the world

2011-04-21T02:54:00.001-07:00

It's all okay

2011-04-15T02:36:00.000-07:00

She is back at work, and finds that life is finally in order.
It's been two days since she has had to part with someone she loves most. This separation is real, and sometimes unreal. Every night in her room by the lamp, she feels the light turn to dark melancholy, acutely catalysed by his telling absence. And, then, sometimes, he is ever so near, ever so around, over phone and otherwise, telling her how days are coming along and how much he is enjoying this and that part of this course he has enrolled in. Only this morning, she remembers telling him how men and women shall never know what happiness, misery or failure feels like until they have experienced it. That is why, she insisted, every human being born has to and must avail of every opportunity thrown their way by providence or by dint of their own mini enterprises, so that they can explore and know what they enjoy and what they can not put up with.
For years, he had derided the idea of pursuing such a course, almost pleading that he is not a corporate suit guy; that he is more of a revolutionary in his own right, trying to follow something he has believed in. In a way, his disdain for the course was much understood and natural. And, his claim to a mini revolution not unwarranted. If you come from a family of bureaucrats and choose to get into a profession where you earn a modest salary for crazy hours of work and get down to doing every single task yourself (include paying electricity bills and getting the car serviced), it's surely a revolting enterprise to be undertaken, if not revolutionary. Families such as his, used to peons and servants, take it too harshly that their children have to ``suffer'' like this. Even a corporate job isn't enough for them since here too, you do everything yourself, though the money is good. But money isn't what they have valued so much.
Anyway, what she has always believed in is in the strength of one's own notion of happiness - if you are happy, nothing else matters and everyone else comes around to adjusting. This is what she is telling him. It's been long since both of them have broken away from the bureaucratic fixation of their families so it's not difficult to hold on to their own beliefs.
So, the promise of future and the thrill of the present is keeping them happy. Life, as they see it, is interesting only when it promises change in more substantial ways than the ones nature promises - seasons, ageing, time. There are certain changes she has strived to bring to herself. Mostly behavioral - like not reacting to hatred or jealously or ugly competition, or people who upset/annoy.
This morning, her phone missed repeated calls from people she hasn't wished to speak to for days. Any other day, she would have grieved the fateful circumstance which led her to resort to such stoic measures. But today, she just cleared the log and went off to sleep.
Across the years that passed and the ones that are to come, life's promise - to enthral, amaze and educate, has stayed.

Free fall

2011-04-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

Sinking deep into a valley without a shriek or cry for help - this was my recurrent nightmare when I was a child. I would wake up in sweat and call out to Ma. I don't know when all of this stopped. Perhaps, I grew up and gathered strength to tell myself that the fall, however scary, was just a bad dream and nothing else.
As this dream's corollary in life, I don't think I fell and bruised myself ever, except for a terrible motorcycle accident in Bombay. It wasn't my fault and neither was it the carelessness of the photographer I was riding pillion with. A wagon hit the motorcycle rear while we both cooled our heels at a traffic signal and the bike magically slided forth from beneath me. I fell on my hips and that was it. No fracture but my hipbone was bruised. The photographer, who escaped unhurt, took me to the nearest hospital and from there to my office. I dictated my story to a colleague and returned home. I spent the next ten days in that bare room I called my paying guest accommodation until a friend's mother took home and treated me to her kind hospitality.
In those days, I didn't have a fair understanding of the way of life in the metros - the way people were blind to human suffering and prioritized time and money over everything else. In the journalism school I went to, friends would share meals down to a rupee and that shocked me. I would often wonder why one couldn't forget about a rupee someone owed, or why people kept cribbing about money. I was not rich but I was used to deliberate forgetfulness. If someone offered me money for a coffee, I looked the other way. I still do and take it as an insult that someone I have chosen to spend time and company with, offers me money for a coffee or a snack. And, by arduous practice, it has remained just that way. A bill on my table is always paid by one person at a time - and it moves in turns by mutual respect and appreciation, never shared. With people who believe in sharing, I try to pay all of it by myself. But certainly, big cities have changed me since.
Anyway, so the motherly care at this friend's place in Bombay healed my injury and touched me deeply. I still remember and cherish them as the warmest of people I met in Bombay.
After that accident, I have fallen ill occasionally - but have never been on bed rest. Each morning I wake up to a bright room and tell myself that this too shall pass. I keep my chin up and try and get some ``beauty treatment'' though frequent slumber. In wakefulness, I read and talk. I also dream when I close my eyes and plug my iPod in my ears. In that musical solitude, I become my best dance show. I make splendid moves and I seem to know all dance forms. This morning, I danced to `Ringa Ringa', `Dhoom' and `Animal Song'. At one point in my dance, I reached the top of a cliff and dashed into a free fall. The tip of my feet moved inward in a lyrical bend and my arms flew. It was quick but I didn't end up at the bottom of a dead valley. As I flew, another song began....``Forever in blue jeans'', strummed Neil Diamond. I had reached another cliff, swaying softly into a calmer dance.

A great year ahead

2011-04-06T07:47:00.000-07:00

Didn't I say 2011 is a great year? Yes, of course, we won the World Cup. How I celebrated the win is a little secret right now, but I shall tell you how Delhi celebrated it. Thousands of people were out on streets all night - men, women and children alike - bursting crackers and hugging each other. The mostly rude Delhi was warm and joyful.
I have been on bed rest for two weeks now. But life is good. I managed to sneak out of my house after the World Cup finals and see the revelry on streets. Staying confined at home has helped me make time for more reading, writing and movies. One of the most interesting movies I watched over the past one week was `The Exam'. A thriller all the way. Must watch.
I get tired easily these days. Will post a long one as soon as I feel better.
Everyone seems to be joining Anna Hazare in his agitation. I admire him. Over the last few days, I have received several invitations on Facebook to join the cause... and I am irritated by it all. Facebook is no place for healthy activism. I believe it's a place for exhibitionists. I prefer Twitter. But like the necessary evils, FB remains very much part of my online presence.
Tired now. See you later.

2011-03-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

Saw four movies yesterday -- Black Swan, Julie and Julia, The Visitor and The Invention of Lying. Finished reading `Sleep with Me'. And, too tired from the London trip. Lazy to post. :(

Of art and its challenges

2011-03-10T04:58:00.000-08:00

I began reading JM Coetzee's `Youth' last night. Four chapters down, I am enthralled. I read out parts of it to R last night to tell him how those sentences could well have been mine, if I were to write of my ambitions when I was 18 - young and fierce and claustrophobic in a world where opportunities were limited and dreaming was for the loafers.
The protagonist wants to be an artist; I want to be a novelist. He constantly thinks of his life, ambitions and relationships - how in the grand scheme of his ambition, early failures amount to nothing, just as artists such as Picasso and authors such as Ezra Pound faced plenty of hardships and struggles before shining through their dark days. And, then, he also weighs the possibility of failure, not by dint of circumstance or paucity of opportunities but by his own failure at merit/potential/drive. And, he says: ``...then he must be prepared to endure that too: the immovable verdict of history, the fate of being, despite all his present and future sufferings, minor. Many are called, few are chosen. For every major poet a cloud of minor poets, like gnats buzzing around a lion.''
One more striking thing: Art needs pain and passion to thrive, emerge, from the mundane and the obsure, as a mark of human greatness.
Pain and passion, my constant companions. (More later ;) )

next 365 days

2011-03-07T03:50:00.000-08:00

Truely, from where I stand, the year looks tough.
I have always fancied to be a warrior. Now is the time to play it. To the core.
Let me begin with people around me (because they freak me out most, though I would happily admit that life is often easy with them being around.) My new driver needs enormous lessons in directions. The new maid from hometown needs training. The already there housekeeper is cooking a meal too heavy (in my absence, I mean!) The once-a-week gardener constantly pushes for new plants and new flower pots every other week. All electronic appliances need annual servicing. The car, after a hefty-bill repair, still has a faulty clutch.
The neighbours are the stickiest part- all of them are way older (mean ONGC officers who look overburdened with tuition expenses of their college-going kids and lady lecturers with a recurring slipped disc). One of them came up yesterday and was visibly disturbed by our brightly done up entrance (the walls are sea blue with a golden name plate neatly arranged in the middle and several ceramic flower pots which stand out against the white staircase railing). ``Oh! You guys just worry about your own door!'' he commented. ``Whose else's do we need to worry about?''
Another one simply likes to fit into my age group by encouraging her college-going son to call me `auntie' even as he resists and almost eats his own words at his mother's courtesy towards me. Then, there is another one often reminding us about our newly-constructed room on the terrace: ``Do you really need this room?''
Then, there are the usual bills to pay and home loan EMIs for one whole year with a single income.
R is off to studies next month. Obviously, there is a lot more to handle than bills and nasty people. There is looming prospect of loneliness and companionship, hours of silence, a thousand calls perhaps during the day to discuss, among other important things, daily quibbles about maids and work and the drive back home, and distant love. It's appealing sometimes to think that this is going to bring back the charm of our college days and my fiercely independent streak will take me back to several crazy things out of my own volition.
But then, what shall be acutely missed will also become the strength with which I shall sail through the next 365 days. Something in us tells me.

I will be blogging about my upcoming UK trip on my travel blog. Be with me.. :))

Istanbul Literary Review

2011-02-28T06:06:00.000-08:00

Firefly Furrows, my latest poetic publication.

2011-02-23T00:49:00.000-08:00

JDS Salinger and Morarji Desai had something in common: Urine Therapy. Salinger's new biography is out.

Death by.... RTI?

2011-02-09T23:56:00.000-08:00

Just the very fact that RTI activists all over the country continue to face threats to their lives proves that the Act is indeed a powerful tool in the hands of the common man. That said, what next can happen to make sure these attacks stop?
Mint story today on the worrisome trend.

My 2010

2011-02-08T10:16:00.000-08:00

In Q&A:

1. What did you do in 2010 that you'd never done before?

Officially published poetry, something I have never tried. Got fringes. Learnt Surya Namaskar. Wore a bikini.

2. Did you keep your new years resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Nope. This year's list is simple: no shopping for clothes, better savings, furious reading, more poetry and short stories. And of course, better stories in narrative non-fiction.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Not exactly. But I heard about so many women becoming mothers, and most new borns around me are girls! :)

4. Did anyone close to you die?

God bless my loved ones. 2010 was safe.

5. What date from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

The day my college bike got serviced, I guess. It has brought back simple joys of my teenage years.

6. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Finishing a very difficult, 12-hour trek in the mountains of Uttaranchal.

7. What was your biggest failure?

Being lazy. ;(

8. Did you suffer illness or injury?

What kind? Started wearing specs.

9. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

Rag's. For being the gentlest man ever. And, my father who finally confessed that he loves me the most!

10. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

My own. No one else, I think, takes so much out of me anymore.

11. Where did most of your money go?

Books. Kavita Bhartiya corsets. Paintings.

12. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Rag's selection in India's top B-schools. This was his first attempt and he got calls from all the three places he had applied to.

13. What songs will always remind you of 2010?

Gal meethi meethi bol... we can always practise, isn't it?

14. Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?

Happier. It's been a great start to the new year so far. Touchwood.

15. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Travel. Plays. Poetry readings.

16. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Shopping. Talking. Fighting.

17. How will you be spending Christmas?

I will simply buy cakes for people I love.

18. Did you fall in love in 2010?

I am always in love. It's a state of being.

19.How many one night stands?

This question shall never apply to me.

20. What was your favourite TV programme?

Don't watch tv.

21. What was the best book you read?

`Serious Men' by Manu Joseph.

22. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Montage. Chris Knight.

23. What did you want and get?

I wanted narrative non-fiction and now, I am paid for it. Had Wanted to play Lady Macbeth since the time I was in college and I finally did. Wanted to publish as a creative writer and I did. Wanted to earn a fellowship and I did.

24. What did you want and not get?

Wanted to enrol for MA but couldn't just quit the job.

25. What was your favourite film of this year?

Ishqiya. The King's Speech. Inception.

26. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Cheered up for R in the first half of the day and was surprised with an intimate get together organised by his school friends to celebrate the day.

27. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

...if I had prayed more and shivered lesser.

28. What kept you sane?

Love. Faith. Green tea.

29. Who was the worst new person you met?

I saw the best in them. Whoever I couldn't relate to don't exist.

30. Who was the best new person you met?

My sister's better half. And, the gentlest ever Nraj.

31. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2010.

Never react to ugliness in people.

32. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

Hero

How was yours? :)

clean slate

2011-02-07T10:22:00.000-08:00

If diaries could serve as paid mourners, I would give them all my wealth to count miseries and record failures. For, I have had many.
And, if they knew how to celebrate life, I would go live with them.
But truth is, they remain fat storehouses of scribbles about meaningless hours spent worrying about nothingness when the ink of thoughts can be better spent.
My diaries have served my emptiness well. It's time I fill them.

25 random things about me

2011-02-07T09:51:00.000-08:00

25 random things about me

1. At 13, I had to drop out of school for six months and shift to a government school bustling with verbose, young girls. That is where I learnt talking.
2. That was the year when I also ran away from home, twice, and once spent the night lying hidden inside a cargo truck. At dawn, I sneaked back to my room to find everyone awake and crying. I never ran away again.
3. I strongly believe in love. In a weird way, I can love and hate at the same time.
4. I want to go back to studies, preferably when I am pregnant. I believe in the Mahabharata tales on Abhimanyu.
5. I want to write a book some day – a rustic tale of sunshine destinies and improbable successes.
6. I want to take a mid-year break for an ascetic life sometime soon – back to a Yoga school in the city I was born in.
7. Once, I had a take on everything happening around me – from politics to drama. Five years at work have taught me to take it easy. I am absolutely unperturbed.
8. I am a loner; I like quiet sessions with friends over a cup of coffee and a poetry book. And, if possible, a rendition of Madhushala.
9. I can sleep for 24 hours at a stretch. Especially on a cold Sunday morning.
10. I like my morning tea served on my bed, with the newspapers. I am a lazy bum.
11. I hate to work for a living; I am looking forward to the day I can work to have fun.
12. I cannot and just not suck up to anyone (You could call it a bloated ego; I call it my inner fibre of self-respect).
13. I think men are very beautiful, especially when they respect women and offer them their seats in a crowded bus.
14. As a schoolgirl, I was determined to marry a man who could sing well.
15. I like to write poems and am addicted to blogging. But often, I just can’t write a word.
16. These days, I am training to run. When I run, I feel liberated.
17. I have an extremely creative brother and I am really looking for a pretty painter to set him up with :-)
18. I think people should go to work with lots of self-respect. This reflects in the work they do.
19. I am irritated with the world going mean. I mean why can’t someone just say hi to a stranger?
20. I often go out of my way to help people. Once, I was close to making myself too stoic for such kindnesses but I think I would rather help than regret not helping.
21. Few months ago, I gave up on a man I once considered my guardian angel. Today, I am challenging him to be a man again.
23. I want to go back to my 47 kgs again.
24. I hate the frills – in clothes, women and men and conversations.
25. Rains turn me on. Next best is an intelligent man.

History can be yours

2011-02-03T07:38:00.000-08:00

In this book of history, you are the hero is all about rise in demand from individuals eager to chronicle their lives in books and videos, which has also meant that personal historians in India are growing.

Excerpts:

``History once was all about kings and queens and not about the subjects. Then came a subaltern wave when the focus shifted from ruling elite to the lowest common denominator, the common man. In the 1980s and 1990s, India’s new ruling elites became the centre of much of contemporary history, with books such as The Polyester Prince and Mahabharata in Polyester: The Making of the World’s Richest Brothers and Their Feud by Hamish McDonald recording lives of industrialists Dhirubhai Ambani and his two sons Mukesh and Anil.

Historians say personal histories are a means to move beyond dates and statistics to record history and make it more interesting. “It can be very hard on the reader to understand the complex subject whether it is economics, politics and social change without looking at the individual experience,” says historian Patrick French whose latest book India: a Portrait talks about post-independence India, with examples of personal histories of individuals such as a man who had been chained in a quarry for two years near Mysore and also telecom revolutionaries such as Sunil Bharti Mittal, who rose from middle class to become the head of Bharti Airtel Ltd, one of India’s biggest telecom companies.''

---

2011-01-28T08:18:00.000-08:00

Hilarious! Here: Hey Davos, Can I Have My Husband Back?

Personal history that touched me

2011-01-27T06:43:00.000-08:00

``I am not cultured. I’m not settled. I can’t be Brahmin. Probably ‘not being settled’ is going to be a permanent feeling as long as ‘being settled’ requires certain labels. Very recently, I composed a verse for my lover in Shree. It has no bhakti. Like love, it is merely itself.''

Sumathi Murthy in Tehelka. More here.

The storm that day

2011-01-26T11:00:00.000-08:00

August 8, 2009.

Did you know I was caught up in a storm on national Highway 24 for five hours today, went all drenched, my auto almost flew, I shivered to a fever and yet, managed to reach office at 7.30 pm?
And, did you know it was the worst storm I have seen in my life? At that time, I remembered R and msged him thus: ``Do you know I can see death? If it's my last moment on earth, may God let you know that I have loved you like on one else and will love you wherever I am.''
He called up, in an anxious fit, and I yelled at him: ``Idiot, rainwater will get into my phone. I am msging na.''
I thus smsed: ``I think the storm will be over. Don't worry. If you call, you might have to spend about 10K in the next two days for getting me a new phone.'' ;D Oops!
The storm was over in about an hour and I was crawling to office. It took me five hours to get there. The phone conked off. It is stilll acting up.
The auto I was in also broke down at one point. There were no autos on roads, cars were breaking down. And, I told my auto wallah: ``Bhaiyaa, may my prayers be with you, please find courage to repair the auto.'' And, lol, he could repair his auto. He dropped me at CP, I bought myself new clothes, changed and came to office.
hawwzzat! :-)
life is strange. Today was a bad day. I was on a deadline and had to reach office early. I was so, so late. And, unlike other days, I chose to travel in an auto today. And, it rained.
In Dilli, such rain. can you believe?
Ah, such is life.

Him

2011-01-26T10:30:00.000-08:00

I met him in a classroom. ten years ago.
He, the silent spectator to my antics in class. I was a class leader of sorts, sitting on my professor's table and announcing to my girlfriends my ideologies, my arrogant dismissal of campus politics and unfailing love for my family that would overpower everything else. He quietly listened.
The silence has taken over my verbosity over the years. We have grown inseparable. Despite disagreements, despite distances.

those seven days

2011-01-24T01:59:00.000-08:00

Miracles happen. Last week proves that. It began with a horrible late night assault on a highway, several rounds to the police station and the hospital during the week and a nervous meeting with a doctor who offered hope and plenty of it.
IN the middle of it all, I had given up on my plans to attend the Jaipur lit fest. By Friday evening, the meeting with the doc had brought plenty of hope and cheer.
That very evening, after the last test was done, I was on a bus to Jaipur, though still very worried and depressed. And of course, alone.
*More on JLF soon. Stay tuned.

Cancer and women

2011-01-18T09:01:00.000-08:00

The Cancer of the Uterus in women is caused by the HPV virus. WOmen infect it when they have multiple sexual partners, or when their boyfriend/partner/husband have had sex with such a woman. Early detection can happen only when sexually active women go for Pap Smear tests. In India, there is very little awareness on the subject. Most women are asked to go for it only at the time they are pregnant or planning to become so.
I didn't know about it until recently and I am 28!
Here is a very moving Salon story of a woman living with HPV.

two horrible days

2011-01-18T08:41:00.001-08:00

Today's poetic find

2011-01-13T07:08:00.000-08:00

Inside Out
By Diane Wakoski

I walk the purple carpet into your eye
carrying the silver butter server
but a truck rumbles by,
leaving its black tire prints on my foot
and old images
the sound of banging screen doors on hot
afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on
the sink
flicker, as reflections on the metal surface.

Come in, you said,
inside your paintings, inside the blood factory, inside the
old songs that line your hands, inside
eyes that change like a snowflake every second,
inside spinach leaves holding that one piece of gravel,
inside the whiskers of a cat,
inside your old hat, and most of all inside your mouth where you
grind the pigments with your teeth, painting
with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting
with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth.

You cannot let me walk inside you too long inside
the veins where my small feet touch
bottom.
You must reach inside and pull me
like a silver bullet
from your arm.

Planning Commission all game for Dalit capitalism

2011-01-11T05:58:00.000-08:00

Please read how Plan panel mulls ways to spur Dalit capitalism. This is Mint follow up to my story on Dalit entrepreneurs published earlier.

Excerpt:

Narendra Jadhav, a member of the panel, said a proposal to introduce executive development programmes for Dalit entrepreneurs at some of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) is also being considered. “(We are) very seriously contemplating the idea to have some kind of formal executive development programme for Dalit entrepreneurs. It can be outsourced to some of the IIMs. Most Dalit entrepreneurs have business skills, but they need polishing, particularly the younger ones. This will be considered, examined and polished in the 12th Plan. We will make a policy in this regard,” Jadhav said.

heaven on earth

2011-01-06T03:41:00.000-08:00

Often I have thought of Heaven
and compared it to the world I live in
sometimes when I am happy, no matter
how deep the failures hit me
or how scant are gifts i collect on the way,
I feel I have already seen it

Heaven as we all know is far and
not everyone will get there, I am told
But sometimes when I walk mountains
and chance upon villages hidden from humanity
I look around, rub my eyes and open them
to weepy hills and clouds left unseen

On those days of my wanderlust, I truly believe
for heaven, I do not have to die.

Pal Sin. December 6, 2011.

Verse that don't always rhyme

2011-01-04T07:30:00.001-08:00

Three of my poems in Muse India Edition 35 (Jan-February 2011).
I am also featured on their homepage and poetry section.
Do leave feedback. Thanks!

How the humble cycle came back to my life

2011-01-04T05:19:00.000-08:00

I bought a cycle in April last year. A metallic blue from Hero - with good shock absorbers but no gears. I have met cyclists with fanciest of cycles at cycle rallies and laughed at the vanity of it all - if cycling is a sport and a fitness sport at that, why do we need fancy ones which would not allow us to peddle harder in the first place? A cycle with gears for me is as good as a motorcycle minus fuel!
My first cycle was brought to me by my father when I was barely a year old. I, of course, used it as a toy thing with my father holding me on its seat and moving it to and fro.
When I turned 9, my parents brought me one more. On the first day itself, I cycled for hours with my sister riding pillion. The cycle was from Avon, bright metallic red and a size 16. It was too big for me then. My feet would touch the ground with great difficulty but I never gave up on it until the time it became too small for me to ride.
That happened soon enough actually. In two years, I grew taller and started pitching for a Hero Puch. It was the in-thing those days and I dreamt of owning one by the time I was in Xth.
In first year of college, I got a Hero Honda Street instead. It was, again, a metallic red bike with super sexy gears - 100 cc, auto-clutch and 102 kgs, among other specifications. I owned the first one ever owned in Patna,and my father paid a bomb for it. I still remember the glee on his face after he test-drove it. I held it once and discarded initially: ``Oh! It's so heavy! Why don't you just buy me the Hero Winner? It's lighter and simpler to ride.'' My father then implored: ``This one has gears and biking with gears is just so much fun. What's the point in buying a bike which you won't enjoy riding?'' I instantly agreed. I have seldom said `No' to stuff which promises fun. :)
My college was just about 3 kilometers from home and for the next five years, I drove that bike to college every single day - sometimes carrying friends and sometimes siblings, in Sun, in rain.
Now when I look back, I realize I could easily have cycled that distance and I sometimes hammer my head over it. Patna being a small town would have been great for cycling. But I didn't, because my father could afford an expensive bike. Cost-wise, it was pretty effective - For a liter, the bike drove me more than 40 kilometers. I loved my bike and the envy it evoked in men and women alike. I never thought about the cycle and what it could do to my body and my pocket money and the environment. Actually, environment was just a slogan on May 1 during my college years. I have begun taking it seriously now - esp. after flower pots on my terrace begin drying in summers and unusual rains lash at my bedroom windows rather revengefully, at oddest times possible.
I was beginning to grow aware of fitness in my college years and that's the time when I started with morning walks and weight training in the stadium gym near my house. But I never thought about a bicycle. From a tool of fun and frolic of my childhood, bicycle never caught my fancy until last year. After six months of swimming, I was seriously mulling over my next fitness regimen for the period pool remains closed. That is when I thought of cycling.
Today, my college bike and the new bicycle lie side by side and I use them both. For distances less than 4 kilometers, I use the bicycle (and would use it for longer distances only if I can find bicycle tracks. Sigh!); for long distances, I use the motorbike. And, for distances more than ten kilometers, I use the car (damn!).
And, often, I use the Delhi Metro too. Well, just f.y.i. ;)

PS: Many cities across India are now rethinking urban design policies and incorporating cycle tracks in redesigning of streets and flyovers. Read my story in MINT on this HERE.

The 100 Best of all times

2011-01-04T02:06:00.000-08:00

Modern Library's list of hundred best novels of all times includes The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. And, several classics I read way back in college as a student of Literature.
This list, I hope, is useful to you all.

My story on Penn Univ. website

2011-01-04T01:32:00.000-08:00

One of my stories on Sanskrit finds mention on the website of University of Pennsylvania here.
Check the list bar on the right hand side of the page for Related Resources.

Happy N(ude) Year.

2011-01-03T08:25:00.000-08:00

A powerpoint file of the new Kingfisher calender kept lying in my inbox for long. Unread. What better way to wish a very HNY to you all than copy and paste stuff here to convey my greetings?

So, my greetings! Have a great year ahead. And, those who swim, must swim more. Those who don't, must learn. My mother often says: `Even if you don't know how to swim, your clothes will be wet if you take a plunge.'' So, take a plunge. :))

Dalit capitalism

2010-12-28T06:16:00.000-08:00

The rise of Dalit entrepreneurship is an evolving story. Two important facts: a) the trend finds echo in Black capitalism of America under Richard Nixon. It's limited to a handful; most entrepreneurs are self-made; and b) despite the tall claims to wealth, the beginnings were humble and present for most continues to be small scale, and for many, discrimination in labour market continues.

Read my story on the subject today HERE. Also read India's New Dalits here.

Travel posts

2010-12-24T22:29:00.000-08:00

In case it catches your fancy, please read Pondicherry I, Pondicherry II and Pondy vignettes on my travel blog Footloose.
:) Travel is in a way life itself. When we travel, we find ourselves in ways we have never imagined.

Travelling

2010-12-16T07:21:00.000-08:00

A hectic week again. Saturday, I am flying to the city where I spent my precious one year studying journalism. From there, to a beach town, for some quiet and solitude.
Will be blogging from there. On a few previous trips, I regretted not carrying the laptop.
This time around, my travel blog will see regular posts. See you on Footloose.

marriage of minds

2010-12-08T10:43:00.001-08:00

Sister married a quiet Punjabi this Monday. A fellow Judge, a gentleman, a bright promising young man.
My father kept saying ours is a cosmopolitan family. There are many reasons for that. He also cried a bit, on my shoulders, though we both know daughters in our family never leave; they bring sons into our home. This is how we have stayed for generations. This is how we strive to be.
At the core of this philosophy lies the deep-rooted feminism in my father. Three decades ago, when he married my mother, he would address my mother as ``Mrs Singh'' when sons-in-law at my maternal grandfather's house weren't even allowed to speak to their wives! He says he revolutionized the household then with his insistent address for my mother, a rather honorable one. Yesterday, my mother's sisters agreed with him when he said that.
Sister rejected bright IITians and MBAs (she repeatedly calls them ``rupee-counting morons'' though I find this a cruel generalization except for the fact that during the course of groom-hunting, we came across many such specimen.) to marry someone who reads and reads a lot, makes great conversation, loves his parents and ours too, eats little, runs a lot, and most of all, is modest despite being a Punjabi.
The reality is finally sinking in. My baby sister is married. And happily so. And, her wedding reaffirms to me a staunch belief: marriages aren't about parents deciding for their daughters' future and if their men can afford Versace; it's about daughters telling them that security of a fat wallet isn't what all women seek; Some of them want men who can stimulate their brains and give them a dignified way of life.

Moving on

2010-12-03T08:17:00.001-08:00

Everyday we are alive can be a miracle.
from the movie Premonition.

I have somehow realised the value of moving on. As life says, play along.
From a philosophical point of view, this can be viewed as the clutter-free way of pursuing life in which one blanks out all the worries in life and takes each day as it comes. I never believed this was possible. But with age and experience, I can see that much is possible.
Just as it is possible to be duped by a street astrologer, even as heart believes him to be conscience-driven, like RK Narayan's eternal astrologer, who returns home on a lucky day with massive earnings, and also with guilt that it was raised with lies and a false identity.
There is seldom any goodness left in trusting randomness, and its fallen victims, and faith is the biggest folly. The more you trust, the more you are deceived. But should you care? No. For life is largely about experienes, bitter-sweet, like love and longing.
Do not seek permanence. Life is not literature that you could hope to churn out a classic for readers' delight, and it changes, unlike the gradually emerging wrinkles under your eyes.
Seek joy instead, and clarity to see though the immediate burst of joy in your heart to find pain and a message that this too shall pass. Learn, like you must, to accept things as they come and gracefully seek an exit towards newness of experiences.
Do not hold on to past, frayed relics of love and desires; invent new subjects to feel strongly about. It could be as trivial as your new boots or new books, or profound stupidities for finding new friends, or a poetry club that lets you read your poems without shame or a dance class in the neighbourhood where no one laughs at your two left feet.
But as you move on, should you not be human to feel pained with remebrance of innocence past? When I fell in love, with many men and women in my life and expected them to last, each one of them hurt my faith before they left. They also chained and liberated my thoughts, like strange control-freaks, with little consideration for my blinded love.
But what I once considered the breaking down of my self into pieces, became the single-most defining point for my freedom.
As Gulzar says:

Aise bikhre hain raat din jaise
motiyon wala haar toot gaya
tumne mujhe piro kar rakha tha.

and translated by Pavan K Varma:

Like a broken necklace of pearls
my days and nights lie scattered around
you had kept me strung together

Dilli

2010-12-03T08:08:00.000-08:00

This city is weird, you see. Here, men ogle at women's legs if bare; laugh when they hear them make a point; stare and smile, as if the fact that they exist is a joke, when they hold the steering.
I sometimes wonder if there is any city in the world as brazen as the national capital, which may have history to boast of and perhaps Delhi Metro when it comes to genuine pride, but what does one make of history which is spoilt by the excesses of the present, sexist ones at that?

Just a bad week

2010-11-22T22:00:00.000-08:00

She found me bohemian. I do not know what that means. I follow my heart - wherever it takes me - for dinner, under the sun, moon or the stars, at a poetry session or a book launch, to the cinema screenings, to long walks around Connaught Place or lonely hours at the coffee joints.
How crazed I am that I have no destination; I have simply begun to love the journey. I have an anchor - my home, the world I have built with certain choices and with love, and I keep moving away from it only to come back. I do it with such faith that I never lose my way. One road closes and I find a hole through circumstances. I just get on with life like no one's business.
This week has been tough. I missed meeting a close friend - once lost to misunderstandings, due to a maddening work schedule and now am finding it difficult to call and apologize. I hate when I fail my own expectations of bridging gaps and re-knitting bonds.
This past week has been all about madness, and I look back and scoff at the personal failures.

today's poetic gift

2010-11-17T14:20:00.000-08:00

One

Wo jo din raat safar karte hain,
is ishq-e-manzil se door jaate hi nahin
Hum kehte hain jab, dafa ho,
wo kabr-e-dil main dafan huye jaate hain.

Two

Is dil ki zidd hai ki khwahish poori ho,
is khwahish main hi ek naye safar ki guzarish hai;
Ki hamein khwab mein kal jo manzar darawane lage,
aaj zinddagi ko unn khwabon ki hi zaroorat hai

~Pal Sin~

India's new Dalits

2010-11-10T01:32:00.000-08:00

Find out who are India's new dalits?
Interesting that the proliferation of malls and materialism has come to undermine India's rigid caste structures. This is certainly a change for the better.
In the airports, malls, clinics, IT parks and elsewhere, these are the anonymously hidden upper-caste Dalits of India and they are upsetting the caste order like never before. Good news for India where young men and women still can't marry partners of their choice because of their castes, can't access safe drinking water, toilets and decent education.

poetic loss

2010-11-09T06:37:00.001-08:00

She is getting poems from her mother at midnight - in sms-es. Short profound ones on life and its tragic questions. On waves that break on a stone and find no music. Of struggles that were never redeemed.
Mother being a spiritual being has a rather defeatist take on life -- it's almost spent -- and then, she suddenly gets romantic about the end -- so let's become one.
The daughter knows her father would never read what her mother wrote. He never read when she was young, pretty, full of life and glamour and romance. He would now simply not know that she picked up the pen in decades today and began with a feverish rage to reach out to her children. Of all she wrote, she only meant one thing and the daughter knows: Her life has been wasted on the dry canvas of her arranged union. Her grief was muted, yet aggressive. Her grief moved the child to tears.
She's still trying to piece herself together.

टूटा पहिया

2010-10-26T05:01:00.000-07:00

मैं

रथ का टूटा हुआ पहिया हूँ

लेकिन मुझे फेंको मत !

क्या जाने कब

इस दुरूह चक्रव्यूह में

अक्षौहिणी सेनाओं को चुनौती देता हुआ

कोई दुस्साहसी अभिमन्यु आकर घिर जाय !

अपने पक्ष को असत्य जानते हुए भी

बड़े-बड़े महारथी

अकेली निहत्थी आवाज़ को

अपने ब्रह्मास्त्रों से कुचल देना चाहें

तब मैं

रथ का टूटा हुआ पहिया

उसके हाथों में

ब्रह्मास्त्रों से लोहा ले सकता हूँ !

मैं रथ का टूटा पहिया हूँ

लेकिन मुझे फेंको मत

इतिहासों की सामूहिक गति

सहसा झूठी पड़ जाने पर
क्या जाने

सच्चाई टूटे हुए पहियों का आश्रय ले !

~धर्मवीर भारती

Poems from Kunwar Narayan

2010-10-26T04:48:00.000-07:00

Bachche ki khushi

Ek saaf-suthare chaukaur kagaz ki tarah
utthakar zindagi ko pyar se
sochta hoon is par kuch likhun
Phir
use koi mor dekar
kai tahon mein baantkar
ek naav banata hoon
aur behtay paani par chupchaap chorkar
us sey alag ho jaata hoon
bahaav main wah
kagaz nahin
ek bachche ki khushi hai.

Ek Ajeeb Din

Aaj saare din bahar ghoomta raha
aur koi durghatana nahin huyi
aaj saare din logon se milta raha
aur kahin apmaanit nahin hua
aaj saare din sach bolta raha
aur kisi ne bura nahin maana
aaj sabka yakeen kiya aur kahin dhokha nahin khaaya
aur sabse bada chamatkar to yeh
ki ghar lautkar maine kisi aur ko nahin
apne ko hi lauta hua paaya.

Laapata ka huliya

Rang gehuwaan dhang khetihar
uske maathe par chot ka nishaan
kad paanch foot se kam nahin
aisi baat karta ki use koi gham nahin
tutlata hai
umr poocho to hazaaron saal se kuch
zyada batlaata hai
dekhne main paagal sa lagta hai
kai baar oonchaiyon se girkar
toot chuka hai
isiliye dekhne par juda hua lagega
Hindustan ke nakshe ki tarah.

~ ~ ~

Perfection.

2010-10-25T03:20:00.001-07:00

There is no notion in the world as misleading and doubly as promising as perfection. We love people in our lives, and we love people to help them permeate through our life like our favourite perfumes and we eventually settle with the thought that with all the ensuing peace and contentment, this situation could be nothing short of perfection.
Truth is, perfection is a feeling - a feeling that there is nothing wrong, no treatment ever shoddy, no care ever incomplete, no expectation ever unmet. Fact of the matter, or rather, matter-of-fact truth is that perfection is an impression we accept of people, situations, accomplishments. Perfection therefore is free of errors and mistakes because it overlooks them; it makes people judegement-proof, clean as sandalwood, revered as a temple floor.
Perfection is faith.

thought of the day

2010-10-25T03:10:00.001-07:00

Life is an impossible journey of errors. The only way to live through those errors and still feel untouched by filth is through faith. You will know. You won't stay without knowing.

Super 30

2010-10-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

PSUs tap Super 30 to create own talent pool and the co-founder of the phenomenon in Patna sounds ecstatic about the development.
The agency CSRL, which is executing these programmes for the PSUs, is following directions from Abhayanand on faculty and student recruitment. Wonder, if Super 30 made Abhayanand famous, why is Anand Kumar, who the former collaborated with, nowhere to be seen? Have these PSUs never heard of him?

odd jobs

2010-10-11T05:15:00.000-07:00

Setting the traps is a story about men who are in the oddest of jobs. With the CWG 2010, their jobs assumed unprecedented importance and precisely for the reason that anything associated with the Games was fiercely guarded by the government machinery, tracking these men was one difficult task.

--

I wrote a poem after one of the interviews with these men. That is when I realized it wasn't difficult to feel poetic at work.

Patna part II

2010-10-08T12:12:00.001-07:00

We moved to Patna on November 13, 1991 to live with our grandmother. Since the time, I spent twelve years in Patna, until mid-2003 when I moved to Chennai for journalism studies.
My father relocated mother and three of us to the capital city after he realized his frequent transfers would jeopardize our studies. We used to have a large house with three independent blocks within our residential campus. We lived in the newest of blocks. In the smallest block, various men employed with us, including sharecroppers from our village who would visit us occasionally with returns from the agricultural produce, stayed. Another large block was rented out - Out of the ground floor, a family friend ran his factory for herbal medicines. On the floor above, an army officer lived with his family.
My first day in that house was full of pleasant visits from relatives. I remember my brother, who looked particularly notorious with his hair fringes and padded hands and feet on a thin frame, gushing about the playground next to our house, and Grandma never stopped toasting for us. At least on the first day. We were happy about the change.
Father told us it was the capital city - the journey from Supaul (flood-prone and with just three public schools) to Patna was a momentous one. I had just dropped out of a very prestigious public school and I was particularly upset about it. I saw it as upsetting my academic progress - at 9, I had cracked the entrance test for admission to class VI, that too with 5th rank, and my teacher who came for tuition was elated. Many of Azam sir's much older pupils had failed and he hadn't expected me to clear it in any way.
My move to Patna happened to destroy all that I had achieved in my own small way, but father's repeated assurance that I would get better schools calmed me.
On the very first day, my road trip to Patna appeared like a ride to Las Vegas. I hadn't been to Lag Vegas but in the magazines my father subscribed to, I had read about it: wide roads, bright lights and wildness.
Patna of my childhood was my Las Vegas. I was convinced about it the next day I visited Maurya Lok Complex with my aunt: it was my 9th birthday and my aunt wanted to buy me clothes. I was jittery about walking into shops. They appeared grand, cold and ah, expensive! My first jeans from a city shop cost a thousand bucks then, and I so pleaded my aunt to not buy it. ``I would be spolit,'' I had then said while secretly hoping she would still buy it. She did. It was a cool royal blue pair and I wore it for so long as I could fit in it. Then we went to the May Fair restaurant for egg rolls and noodles.
Two of my siblings and I found place in the best of schools. I remember my grandmother lending me a diamond-studded watch and black silk stockings for my first day in school. We had an all-boys school next to our house and grandmother had several aggressive tips for me to handle guys on the streets: ``Tell them: ``don't you have a sister?'' ``Have you seen my sandals?'' ``Get lost or I will punch you.''
My mother was worried sick. As soon as grandmother was finished with her tips, Ma would husk me away to her room and tell her to ignore advice. She had scary consequences to cite: ``what if the guy follows you?'' ``What if he answers you back rudely?'' I thought it was best to listen to Ma, esp. because even as I took a bus to school, I would ride a bicycle for Maths tuition in the evenings with my sister riding pillion.
Despite these exaggerated dangers, Patna appeared promising. We had more places to go and better schools to study.
My mother took some time adjusting to it. She would often complain about loud movement of vehicles beside our house and pollution. It was a congested city, she would tell my father, and we just heard it all in passing. We mostly agreed with father: ``From here, they'll go to Delhi, London, America. Here, they'll think big.'' My mother slowly got used to attending functions at school, Parent-Teachers' meetings, paying our fees and verbose days with the grandmother. But I always knew she missed the small town and its comforting gifts of routine, of knowing every neighbour, of rickshaw travels around the town, of humble living and peace in our courtyard.
In my first year in college, I realized Patna's limitations. The college was the most telling picture of anarchy -- its 17th century Dutch architecture was in ruins with no money and no interest for restoration; its hostels were storehouses of firearms for the local goons; Just before annual exams, its teachers would announce strikes; women were subjects of ridicule and a rude sort of male gaze and once in a while, there were murders and rapes on campus by outsiders. Much more happened but I hope you get the drift already.
I had two amazing professors and even today, I owe my every single lesson in Literature and politics to them. Their every lecture was a discovery and a consolation, and an apology for the city. I dreamt of better days and waited for a breakthrough to come to me. When it happened, I leapt like a leopard would at a prey. I travelled very, very fast to reach where I am.
The journey is still a very long one, but when I go back to the city, I realize how my small-town aspirations blend perfectly with the opportunities in India's big cities and a large part of who I am belongs back there, to the city I truly belong.
LINK: My story on the emerging nightlife in Patna

some poetry for the soul

2010-10-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

Like
A pair
Of mismatched newlyweds,
One of whom still feels very insecure,
I keep turning to God
Saying,
``Kiss
Me.''

---

First
The fish needs to say,

``Something ain't right about this
Camel ride ---

And /i'm
Feeling so damn

Thirsty.''

~Hafiz

Freedom :)

2010-09-03T09:31:00.001-07:00

An incredible lightness of existing, living, breathing - That's what freedom is. My dear ones, enjoy yours while you respect mine.

the learning curve

2010-09-03T09:30:00.001-07:00

Allow me my mistakes. I am young only once.

Life after best friend's wedding

2010-09-03T09:29:00.000-07:00

Life after best friend's wedding: Consider him lost if his wife begins answering your mails!

missing note

2010-09-03T09:28:00.001-07:00

To you who knows without me saying: While I was away, I missed you like I miss winter, like a corpse looking to postpone its decay.

Monday blues

2010-09-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

sunday evenings are depressing as hell even if i have had the best food, shopped at Prada and been love-soaked during the day. Hell, neither money nor love beat the Monday blues.

silences

2010-09-03T09:23:00.003-07:00

Allow me my silences. Like the years that have gone by, solitude gives me conversations company doesn't, humanity, crowd and the world wouldn't.

ah, Men!

2010-09-03T09:22:00.001-07:00

Men are our Eric Claptons, worshippers, lovers, best and worst critics, children, pillars of strength, competitors, inspiration and all seasons. The men in our lives are all we have to find the best in us.

dreams

2010-09-03T09:21:00.001-07:00

I can't stop dreaming. It's funny but when I wake up, another dream begins - brighter than the ones I saw when my eyes were shut. Sometimes gloomy, of the snakes and lakes as well, but mostly, my dreams are about what you understand by `desire' - a product of human heart which explains a want so desperate that it hurts like love.
:)

Patna's brave new nights

2010-08-28T13:25:00.000-07:00

javascript:void(0)

H.i.l.a.r.i.o.u.s.

2010-08-05T02:42:00.000-07:00

Red EYE

Bihar

2010-08-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

Bihar is a subject of great curiosity - anytime - whether it rots or it develops. Here is a series of stories which tell you where it is headed:

Bihar sees reverse brain drain

Bihar sees a growing tribe of rural migrants

The roads more travelled

The management of Bihar

Happy reading!

Billet Doux

2010-07-19T01:22:00.000-07:00

Dear soulmate,

I have a confession to make. The idea has just hit me badly and I can't get it out of my system.
Do you remember those were just papers, old and new, frayed and burnt, smelly and oily, fresh or leafy, and yet, how much we craved for those, all the time?
Now, it seems the green leaves have taken over. We must put them back in their place and let the old, forgotten order reclaim its well-deserved place.
I have bought plenty of them today. My hands ached carrying the load, but my soul felt light. No pretensions, my baby, I really love the boring thing about leisure and flipping through them - from me to you and you to me (remember?), as if I were into a song and you, the mozart of love.
You know I could be a singer, or a belly dancer or an actor, but if we don't restore the paper, I can be nothing. We are what our patience for papers is.
Endurance and privacy - they help us build, page after page, as you straddle diverse, imaginary worlds. How you love the real and I love the imaginary can bring about a great collection, but most importantly, a posterity rich in thoughts, dreams and hope, and swelling with a certain kind of richness most capitalist paupers fail to acquire.
Let us then, darling, get back to more and more books. I spent 5000 rupees today. I hope you won't complain.

lovingly,
your nerdy pal dal.

authoring dreams.

2010-05-27T18:09:00.001-07:00

My life so far has been friendless. Na, don't get me wrong. I have friends, but to think if anyone who has been patient enough to deal with my silence, is a cruel memory.
Often, I have asked myself why, in the last 27 years, I could not find myself one soul who would stay with me, through the days when I am alone and not occupied with work or general miseries of life, and enjoy the differences between us as much as we bring ourselves to love the similarities.
I have blamed many essentially impulsive idiosyncracies in my being. I have felt guilty about carrying a fast-changing mood on my nostrils. I have regretted being happy one moment, rebellious the next. I have even tried to change/moderate/adapt myself according to situations that befall me. Nothing worked.
I realised I am going to stay and survive - just like this. With a beautifully calm house to my comfort and shelves carrying books that I hope to finish some day. There is a fundamental need in me, and I have often felt it more convincingly than before: the need to read and write.
In a hometown of blatant patriarchy and irreverent politics, I missed good public liabraries. Most I went to were overcrowded with students from university hostels, hoping to utilise the newspaper shelves since they were not buying any, or they had to deal with libraries with one of the staunchly tightfisted norms for lending books. My sole hope - the British Council library - was shut down too in my third year as a member as it didn't register enough readers.
Those were the days of abject hopelessness, in an age when hopes are built.
I had a motorbike, with a metallic red frame and a roaring start. I would travel kilometres on it, bookstore-hopping in search of a better book, a better bargain. I spent all my pocket money on books, and when I needed more, I had to convince my mother that I had indeed read the previous one. The fast-piling books on my shelf would often prompt father into a quick check into my collection. Pa and I had a secret deal : If he would pass on his magazines first to me and not to my younger siblings, he too would get to read my Hardy and Lawrence.
During the years between my school and college, I read countless number of books - varying according to my reach and limited knowledge. The number of poetry diaries also grew - from one (First one was started when I was eight) to three. In my four years of journalism, I am yet to fill up my fourth, but this is not what I want to talk about today.
I want to ask myself if I should secretly celebrate or, on a bad day, perhaps lament the death of my dream of sustaining friends or should I keep persisting? Which is a better deal: Relish my solitude and celebrate my freedom to be free of meeting appointments, keeping dinners, making promises, or keep going out of my way to please those I value but get no return value, or mourn my happy solitude?
If I go back to discussing what I like best, I would happily say: a room to myself with things I like, like books, a good movie on my DVD, a blank diary and a nice flowing pen. I am all set for happiness. I began with small paragraphs in school. It continued, like a puppy romance, intense but short. Then, the paragraphs grew and became stories - from my mother's village with the castle and elephant in the fields and dacoits on my nana's roof!
My favourite professor did the critique; I was amply encouraged. There was a sense of relief, and not jubilation if I am to be honest. I considered myself such a faff till that time - vain daughter of a poet-mother who would find herself scandalised at my love poems. For me, those were expressions of what I saw in the world - love, betrayal, news reports on dowry killings, the Iraq war, and on a sensitive note, letters to God on Dabwali fire and a note on Pa, and Ma.
Most of the bulk was love poetry. My experiments with its facets disturbed my mother, who kept postponing a critique until I gave up.
The three diaries were later reviewed by my younger sister when she grew up and started writing herself. Once, overwhelmed by a poem, she came teary-eyed: ``Please publish these.''
I could never find a publisher. Well, I haven't tried for one so far.
I do not know if I would ever find one if I get down to trying. But do I really care if they don't get published? May be, I do. But the thought that I am slowly preparing some sort of a literature pool, however base that might be, for my children (if at all I ever have one!) to read gives me unfathomable joy. When I discovered and eventually read letters written by my mother to my father when they lived away from each other, I broke down. I locked myself in the bathroom and cried for hours. I marvelled how such degree of dedication from a woman to a man was possible.
Ma had written those letters at a time when Pa was still struggling to make it to the Judiciary while Ma was already teaching at a Science College in Uttar Pradesh. They lived three-day-long train journeys apart; Pa travelled when Ma sent him money. One of her letters had then told Pa: ``I dream of a beautiful life with you with our children and your love. I dream of a life when I would seek from you every small thing I need, right from a saree to a star. And, when my dreams come true, I would quit all my dreams to live your dreams, for our happiness.''
She did. She came to live with my father when he joined as judge in the district courts and gave up writing and singing with minimal regrets.
I took it upon me to compensate for that - in a way a child revives all dead dreams.
I write with the hope that she would read them someday.
I also write for hope. For also telling myself what I am - a loner with longings for quieter company in this cacophonous, nagging world that makes me so conscious about what i do purely out of my inborn reclusive tendencies -- float alone.

M.V. Rajadhyaksha (June 7, 1913-19 April 2010)

2010-04-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

Mangesh Vitthal Rajadhyaksha was a Marathi writer and critic of repute.
I hadn't heard of him until his name cropped up during one of the conversations on vernacular literature and authors. Mr Rajadhyaksha didn't just write in Marathi though. He wrote in English too and for a large part of his life, he also taught English Literature in colleges in Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Kolhapur.
I know all this through the Internet. What spurred hours of searches in his and Vijaya Rajadhyaksha's (his wife and also winner of Sahitya Akademi award in 1992) name was a small piece of news: they are my boss's parents!
The day I learnt of it, I felt extremely elated. I had goosebumps. First, NRaj is an erudide scholar himself and a great person to work with. And, to have literary stalwarts as parents was a remarkable distinction I couldn't help gushing about. He later told me how he grew up next to the literary giants such as Dharamveer Bharti. I discovered that the place he stays at (Sahitya Sahwas) is the same place where Sachin Tendulkar grew up!
It's said that during his college years, the senior Rajadhyaksha also won the prestigious Wordsworth Prize for the best student in English Literature at Mumbai's Elphistone College. He also served on several prestigious committees, including the National Book Trust and the Jnanpith Trust that gives the Jnanpith Award.
Wikepedia says: ``He was closely involved with Abhiruchi, a Marathi literary journal that was the launching pad for some of the greatest writers in the post-independence era.''
All my life, literature has fascinated me. There is no end to it - it's like the sky, vast and without a border or ceiling to clip wings, scuttle thoughts or bury dreams. The more I know, the punier I feel. And, to discover the Rajadhyakshas felt like a blessing. As if I was in some indirect, remotest sort of way waking up to knowledge I would otherwise have missed.
My deepest condolences to the Rajadhyaksha family.

Here is the Times of India obit on the acclaimed writer:

Eminent critic, essayist and erstwhile professor of English, Mangesh Vitthal Rajadhyaksha, died on Monday at the age of 96 after a brief illness. His essays, collected in seven volumes, brought to Marathi literary criticism a rare perspicacity, candour and impatience with cant. His style was economical, precise and always lined with irony. He also coauthored a seminal history of Marathi literature with Kusumavati Deshpande. Panch Kavi, a selection of the works of five poets who represented the new and modern in poetry at the turn of the 19th century, became a literary classic. His preface to the volume remains one of the most lucidly argued pieces of literary criticism.

Born in Mumbai, he was educated at Chhabildas Boys High School and Elphinstone College where he won the Wordsworth Prize. He taught English at Elphinstone College, Mumbai, Rajaram College, Kolhapur and Gujarat College, Ahmedabad, giving to three generation of students not merely knowledge of texts but a way to look at, understand and love literature. He served for many years on the board of trustees of the National Book Trust and was, for some years, a member of the Jnanpeeth award committee and the committee for Marathi literature of the Sahitya Akademi.

The impact of his critical genius was first felt during the period 1943 to 1953 when he wrote a regular column Vaad-Samvaad in the pioneering literary magazine Abhiruchi, founded and edited by the late P.A and Vimala Chitre. The column commented on literary issues but also extended itself to include related fields like broadcasting, theatre and cinema. His critical target was always the literary object, never the writer as a person.

His going has bereaved the Marathi literary world. He leaves behind his wife, the eminent writer-critic Vijaya Rajadhyaksha, and three children.

Courtesy: TIMES NEWS NETWORK

My hate note

2010-04-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

When I look at you, you look beautiful, at your core, with marvellous greenery and space. Yes, space that Bombay never gave. And, money that i wander through your streets to earn. I write and your queer ways make me an observer, a reluctant participant to the drama on your streets, in your people, in your harsh exterior and an embracing, ever-accomodating core. That is why I am here, because you let me in, like millions. Yet, how do I help myself from hating you and the multitudes you own/accomodate, millions who came as migrants and have abandoned their earthy values to make you what you represent - ostentation, arrogance and absolute paucity of kindness and compassion for non-conformist hearts. How I wish I could stay away but you stare at me in the face - in your wealth, your unkind sense of hospitality, your exalted sense of community, your queer, mean approach to religiosity. You represent the North my much-abused East has never known, nor acquired. You introduce a smart set of values my rusticity repels. You have become mine, because I own a part of you, now, with my financial investments, but will you ever own me?
In Durga Puja, I still miss the city that walks, from one pandaal to the other, all night, all day, and where honking cars make a criminal contingent on roads swarming with individuals, humanity and the likes of me, very unlike you, very unlike you. I do love you - for your space. Rest, I say, is amusing. You are amusing.

On the Internet...

2010-04-12T08:12:00.000-07:00

...no one knows you are a dog! quite summed up the advantage of anonymity on the Internet, which also is its disadvantage depending on which side of the fence you are in.
While websites in the West are considering ways to avoid anonymous comments on the Internet (Read the full report here), I am wondering if Indian news websites would follow suit?
Mint website introduced a new system of posting comments recently, which allows readers to post comments via Facebook, twitter and other such platforms. Do check Livemint.

IPL and the fading graph of titillation

2010-04-07T05:13:00.000-07:00

Another interesting piece, rather viewpoint, on IPL:

Losing my IPL Virginity

I agree.

Sex and the Mahatma

2010-04-07T04:20:00.000-07:00

It's back in the news. Gandhi's sex life may be making rave news again with Jad Adams's biography of the Mahatma Gandhi : Naked Ambition.
Years ago, soon after I passed out of J school, I read Sudhir Kakar's Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality where he analysed Gandhi's practice of sleeping naked with his woman disciples and likened it to a internal war against the most primal of human wants. Adams goes a step further in saying Gandhi may just not be celibate after all, however hard he tried to be.
Adams's introductory essay on the book Thrill of the chaste: The truth about Gandhi's sex life does not make me furious with a mission to salvage Gandhi's reputation as mahatma or Father of the Nation. Instead, it makes me cringe at the collective failure of this nation in selecting its role models.
While the jury is still out on the truth behind Gandhi's experiments with celibacy, my worries are related broadly to the idol-worship we engage in as a nation. Any sports person who can hit a ton in a cricket match is a demi-God; any spiritual guru who can deliver sermons on loudspeakers can never f*** women; any actor who can stammer on screen and yet walk away with the most beautiful girl in Timbuktu is infallible!
Gandhi is a different league altogether. He has been accorded the greatest respect ever in this nation. If Adams's story is even half-bit true, it's worrisome.
But my immediate concern is: Is Gandhi: Naked Ambition the next book to be burnt by zealots in this country?

Related:

Gandhi and Sexuality

Gandhi's Private Life

The Naked Mahatma

And, on a completely different note, read this funny piece on the Shoaib-Sania story:

Shoaib Malik: Love, allegations of sex, and dhoka

``to be the frontier of our own pasts''

2010-04-06T04:15:00.000-07:00

Today's wonderful read is India Calling by Anand Giridhardas in the NY Times. He talks about the migration of Indians to the US in the 1970's and the generations after that who might be on their way back given India's rising potential as a sunrise nation. The concluding lines are delightfully meaningful:

``India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.

Which just happened, for many of us, to be the frontier of our own pasts.''

Now a bit on Richard Florida, who Giridhardas quotes in his article:

Richard Florida, author of the global best-seller The Rise of the Creative Class , is best known for his views on creativity and it might be revolutionizing the global economy.
For more, go here.

Green with dharma

2010-04-05T05:45:00.000-07:00

My story today:

Saffron gets a green tinge at Kumbh

Have plenty to gossip about, but not today. I'm getting my laptop fixed. Soon then!

blah!

2010-04-02T04:42:00.000-07:00

Now read this, also from the former boss's FB page.
Attracts me immensely, considering I just wrapped a series on the language.

--

Evening looks particularly delightful. I am gonna get back home early, cycle to the swimming pool and come back to get glued to the television. I saw Rush Hour on the movie listings. Yesterday, I treated myself to The Bad Santa. Love Coen Brothers though this one was just produced by them. And Billy Bob Thronton -- yuck, he so fitted the role. The slogan on the little, fat kiddo's t-shirt is still ringing in my head: Shit happens when you party naked.
This reminds me: April 9, I got a party to attend - the Mint annual party. :)

Meet thy bloggers

2010-04-01T04:58:00.000-07:00

Meet America's interesting bloggers here (via FB page of my former boss).
My favourite is Crushable, The Gloss and CURBED (though it is of little use to me!).
Neat blogs, most of these focussing on fashion and style. Wonder if fashion is bigger than politics, education and livelihood?

Lalitpur - part 1

2010-04-01T04:49:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to share, spurred by today's story on Bundelkhand :

Lalitpur is my mother's home. My maternal grandparents' place.
When I was a kid, I was often teased for my Bihari roots by my cousins who thought just because they were not from my state, they were superior to me culturally and socially.
My maternal uncles own half a dozen stone mines in Lalitpur. The village of Jakhlaun is almost owned by them. One of them has one mine for production of granites. All my childhood, I grew up starstruck by their wealth.

As I matured and looked at the world around me, I realised how backward the area is (it suffers from acute draught situation and flash floods and excessive mining leading to deforestation and ecologial imbalance) and how my mother, despite her rich upbringing, was lucky to have married my father who despite his limited means did not have to be part of an excessively vicious cycle of human greed for a living.

Knowledge is everything. It changes the way I look at the world.

More on Lalitpur. And its burdens. Soon.

the maths of design

2010-03-31T04:24:00.001-07:00

Here is for you a brilliant piece my editor blogged long ago. Just thought it would be apt to share. First, the interesting para:

“How many editors read Edward Tufte?” I have asked such people, and then embarked on a lecture on who Tufte is. Tufte is an American academic best known for his work on depicting data. His books on the subject, including The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Beautiful Evidence are seminal works in the area. He also wrote a celebrated article in Wired magazine titled PowerPoint Is Evil.
As a student of math myself, I have recommended Tufte to art directors in every place where I have worked, including Mint too, where, I must confess, the person in question has taken my advice and read Tufte.
....While on the subject of graphics, here is an extremely interesting one I came across (hat-tip to Boingboing).
Courtesy: www.livemint.com

For full version, go here.

News and advertising

2010-03-31T04:05:00.001-07:00

I found this fascinating quote today:

``I am aware that money can’t buy me readers, but it does help me hire more reporters, allow them to travel, and, by ensuring that we aren’t always strapped for it, run a honest newsroom.'' (Courtesy: www.livemint.com)

You should read the whole blog post from my editor Sukumar Ranganathan here.

Degrees of access

2010-03-25T04:50:00.000-07:00

My story this morning. A usual one, but useful info for students and academics. I have been scared all my life of losing my file of mark sheets and the trouble it can entail. If you lose them, you could spend months and months visiting the university and board offices and yet not get a duplicate copy!
Now, one can apply for it online, keep a soft copy and well, find it saved in hard copy format as well. How convenient! Wonder why no one thought of an electronic depository of degree certificates earlier?

ownership of legends?

2010-03-25T04:43:00.000-07:00

Games chief has beef with dietary diktat was a fun story to do. Do read and post your comments.
For this story, I tried finding a sports historian but failed miserably. I mailed Ram Guha but he says he doesn't comment on sports anymore. No other name cropped up during the process of writing the story except noted columnists who were at one point in time journalists! Had to avoid, but really, there aren't plenty of sports historians in this country? No wonder we are such a pathetic nation when it comes to sports! And, no, leave cricket out. This is not the only sport we got! Honestly, I have lost all my interest in the game after IPL. I hate the Shilpa Shetty's and Zinta's of the world owning a team. Do you know what that means? Owning a team is owning everyone who is in it. My question is: Can a legend like Tendulkar be owned? Don't you think it is blasphemous?
I so so hate IPL!

how to keep loving!

2010-03-24T06:17:00.000-07:00

Lovely article here by an ex-colleague in Mint a year ago.
It has great suggestions to stay active and keep loving. I am going to try on of those: belly dancing. :)

fair play

2010-03-21T22:58:00.000-07:00

Garhi Hakeeqat is two hours away from Delhi, if one starts early morning. That saves you mad rush hour traffic.
Why I chose this Panchayat in Haryana is not hard to understand. The sarpanch of this Panchayat appeared to me more realistic - not ultra-heroic, nor too docile. She is basically a woman who learnt her ropes and is still learning, just as India is - in all spheres - globalisation, democracy, gender equality.
If one sees Sunita Devi, she looks robust and talkative. Her husband certainly loses out to her in personality - she is taller and more well-built. Plus, she doesn't seem to be aging as fast as her better half. But anyway, there was a time, before her stint in local politics, that she wouldn't step out of the house too often. It took her two years after being elected to actually address villages from a dais. Now, she travels wide and far. She has been to Delhi to participate in policy dialogues on Panchayati Raj, knows how to reach the block development office and understands NREGA, the flagship scheme of the government to ensure employment to its people.
Yet, when we reached there, she was also willing to cook a wholesome lunch and was really disappointed when we had to rush without eating at her house. All in all, a real woman with a realistic journey in politics, which doesn't smack of any miraculous ascent to power, a la superwoman.

A peddle push

2010-03-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

Sorry for being irregular. I've either been traveling or preparing to travel.
Yesterday, I was off for a cycle rally. When I set my alarm for 5 am in the morning, i wasn't really sure if I would get up and end up at the venue, but i did. Someday, I knew, I had to begin being participatory, sharing my interests with a group or set of people who enjoy doing the same not just on any virtual platform but in the real world. It was great fun; I now know I am not going to postpone small happinesses.
On a completely different note, please read my story on the upcoming campus of the ISB at Mohali, Punjab.
Will post the unedited version soon.

MIssing parts of English 3

2010-03-12T05:03:00.000-08:00

English series: Part 3
By Pallavi Singh pallavi.s@livemint.com

NEW DELHI: I dream of an English
full of the words of my language.
an english in small letters
and english that shall tire a white man’s tongue
an english where small children practice with smooth
round pebbles in their mouth to spell the right zha..

When Meena Kandasamy wrote these lines, almost like a petition, pleading that her roots be allowed to flourish in English, she was just 18 and fresh from the unusual loss of her poetic name: Ilavenil.
The Tamil name meant `Spring’ but often became the subject of ridicule for the young Dalit poet when many said it sounded like the name of a train. ``I winced in horror and wept on my pillows. I wanted a name people could accept, a name that wouldn’t point to my Tamil origins,’’ she recalls.
She later adopted her nickname Meena, a common name for women in South Asia, to escape the predicament and in response to any question posed to her in Tamil, she spoke in English. ``I want this new tongue to accept me. I expect it to appreciate my sensibilities, admire my culture and above all, be accommodating,’’ she says.
``As a Dalit, as a woman, you want to be loved, you want to be a part of things, you want to be touched that way, you know, the whole untouchability question.’’
Though a borrowed language, she says English earned her recognition. Poems in Kandasamy’s first book Touch, written in English and published in 2006, have been translated in five languages.
The Chennai-based poet also took up translations of Tamil works of xxx, because to her, English is the language which helps one transcend the immediate circle. ``It doesn’t operate with the Dalits alone. English takes your voice to a larger level and helps in your search for solidarity.. like-minded people, people who want change.’’
Kandasamy’s engagement with English as a means to reach out to a larger audience is part of an emerging struggle in the journey of English in India: the Dalit aspiration for progress and its demand for schools that teach the language.

About 500 kilometres away from where Kandasamy lives, the big step towards teaching of English has already been taken, that too with state support.
In Coimbatore, the second-largest city of the state, a massive English training project is underway. A seven-month old programme designed by the British Council under the Tamil Nadu Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, a flagship programme to put every child in school, is training teachers in government-funded schools to teach communicative English better. The real beneficiaries, says Alison Barrett, head of the Council’s Project English for State Partnerships, are children from marginalised sections who attend such schools.
In Coimbatore, for example, Dalits form 16% of the population, yet hold just about 1.38% of the land, as per a research by the Madras Institute of Development Studies in 2005, and of the school going children in the district, only 12% of children’s fathers are matriculates, says the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2010 released by non-governmental organization Pratham early this month.
For the state, the Dalit population is about 8% as per the 2001 Census and since 80% of these stay in villages and just about 11% of them own land, they end up as agricultural labourers leading to heavy disparities in access to jobs, land ownership and wealth share.
``English thus is a way of accessing socio-economic advancement. English in this country (India) means a language of power and if you don’t give them English, they can not access power structures and effect changes in socio-economic policies,’’ says Barrett.
In Tamil Nadu, where a strong Dravidian movement in the xx thwarted the Indian government’s plans to impose Hindi as the country’s official language, the English Project has brought in its fold 1.25 primary school teachers and 50 lakh children in just a span of seven months.
Thiru. S. Kannappan, Joint Director for the SSA in Tamil Nadu who was involved in Planning, implementation and monitoring, says the project came just at the right time when the learning levels in the language in state run schools were ebbing – just about 22% children in the schools in TN can read easy sentences, the ASER report says.
However, beyond the academic case for English, Dalit activists argue that English is the key to emancipation of people from this community - not just because it opens many doors for job opportunities but also because it helps ease the caste and power structures that come with speaking the regional languages.
Doctor Ambedkar Cultural Academy (DACA), a charitable organization working among Dalits in Madurai, lives by the anti-Hinduism slogan, which essentially identifies the religion as the root cause for all casteist evils. ``In the social order corrupted by Hinduism, education and teaching of English can help build the Dalit youth power. Our struggle is to free ourselves from being an untouchable and becoming human,’’ Anthony Raj, founder of DACA says. Raj says as a Dalit leader, he had to face hostility from the local government, the police, political parties and non Dalits. Today, his organistion, among other things, has been running vocational programmes in Madurai, Theni, Tirunelveli, Dindigul, Ramanathapuram and Tuticorin aiming at the rural Dalit population, the basic skill being English.
Taking off from Tamil Nadu, the quest for English has found newer seekers in states such as Kerala, Delhi, Punjab, Bihar, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh of which the three have the highest percentage of Scheduled Castes population. Bihar, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh account for 40% of the SC population in India, according to Census 2001.
Proportionately, the largest proportion of population of the Scheduled Castes to total population of the State is in Punjab (28.9 per cent), followed by Himachal Pradesh (24.7 per cent) and West Bengal (23 percent).
Anjali Bhawra, former principal secretary (education) for Punjab whose department trained pre-service teachers in English in the state-run colleges for Bachelors in Education, says the initiative generated enormous opportunities for the trainees, especially in private English-medium schools. ``They could see that with the language training, their options in a teaching career had grown manifold,’’ she remembers.
The demand for English in these states, thus, stems from the aspirations of the lower castes to be heard and empowered. From the British times when English remained restricted to an elite class, it has now undergone a transitional change to become an aspirational language as the politics around it changed. Where popular politicians once secured rural votes by promising to banish English in state such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, a powerful lobby is now rooting to extend English to the masses.
In Uttar Pradesh, which has the highest percentage of Scheduled Castes population to the total Scheduled Castes population of the country (21.1 per cent), Dalit thinker and author Chandrabhan Prasad is now promoting the language as the `English Goddess’ – a symbol for Dalit emancipation. ``Not only is the English language spoken everywhere in the world, respected by the people of all the nations, easily learnt but also the people of the English nation are impartial and unbiased—and to whichever nation they go, they do not indulge in the base acts of casteism or communalism,’’ says Prasad, who declared October 25, as the English Day in a last year coinciding with the birthday of TB Macaulay, the British administrator who introduced English education in India.

English’s recognition as the great leveller in Dalit literature is not new, though. In 1911, Tamil scholar and Dalit ideologue Iyothee Thass Pandithar wrote about the necessity of English as the common language in India instead of Hindi. Periyar EV Ramasamy, the father of the Dravidian movement, spoke of how English would banish other languages from even the bedroom and the kitchen -- places where intimacy and culture are supposedly at their pickled, preserved best.

In east India, West Bengal, where English was withdrawn from primary schools in the mid-1980s, faced an intense public pressure to reintroduce the language. ``The demand picked up since people were not getting jobs. The emergence of the IT sector was really a game-changer,’’ says Debanjan Chaudhuri, head of Project English for East India.

The teaching of English thus began, initially from class 6 in the mid-1990s and from class one in the year 2000. The rapid progress of the language was however witnessed among the state’s Tribal and Dalit populationss, where teaching English directly and not through Bengali, the official language of the state, worked well. ``Bengali wasn’t really the mother tongue of the Tribals. Now because of the direct teaching of English, there is no intervening Bengali in the way of teaching the language,’’ Chaudhuri says.
Till date, the English Project with state partners have typically focused on training teachers, developing course materials, providing innovative ELT resources and training to build teacher communities. However, its collaborations with Corporate Social Responsibility Foundations and non-governmental organisations for improving the employment prospects of youth in rural, semi-rural and urban India have brought forth teeming curiosity from unexpected quarters.
At the Delhi-based Aga Khan Foundation, one of its vocational programmes in the Nizamuddin neighbourhood evinced unusual demand from the unemployed youth living in the area. ``All of them aksed us if we could teach them English, when we went to train them in various vocational skills which did not just include English. Mostly, the youth in their 20s wanted to learn the language. Today, even they link it to employability,’’ recalls Meena Narula, one of the project coordinators at the Foundation.
The role of the language is also crucial in India’s story of growth. Last year’s NASSCOM Everest Report on the future growth of Business Process Outsourcing warned that the predicted growth of the ITES sector will depend on reaching out beyond ’ready to eat’ recruits to the estimated 85% of college students who are not currently considered ’employable’. ``English can fill the gap. It is like Bisleri water - you may go for anything to eat but you do need water. Whatever be your personal qualification, you can’t go far without English,’’ says Alka Gupta, founder of the British Academy for English Language in New Delhi.
In a typical class at Gupta’s institute, which has grown to moret than 40 centres all over India in the four years since it was set up, one can find people from various social strata flocking together. ``We have autorickshaw drivers, cab drivers, students from SC/STs and the Other Backward Castes. Tourism industry is fuelling the demand for English-speaking people. Some of the companies have also made English compulsory,’’ she says.
Companies such as Barclays and Nokia Siemens have also been training its staff in communicative competencies to meet the challenges of transforming the workforce. Braclay’s Philipa Mathewson did not respond to email queries sent by Mint.
Gujarat, after a long spell, made English compulsory in its school curriculum only in 1998 and is now hurrying to set up English language labs across the state. ``The government has implemented the policy but there is dearth of teachers now,’’ says Rajendra Singh Jadeja, director of the HM Patel Institute of English in Anand where the state’s first language lab was set up in 1976. ``If Gujarat wants to integrate in the global economy, English is the only way out,’’ says Jadeja.
In a Dalit village in Nagapattinam, notorious for its history of violence against Dalits, English is now vehemently being pursued as a lingustic necessity in replacement to the native Tamil. Here, during one of Kandasamy’s visits recently, she recalls how women were miffed at her attempts to converse in Tamil. ``They were speaking in English. They felt insulted that I chose to speak in Tamil with them,’’ she says.
In her growing years, Kandasamy had felt the same and protested with English in her mouth. Between then and now, she says nothing much has changed.

~Ends~

An edited version of this story appeared in Mint on March 8, 2010.

A handful of good teachers to educate India

2010-03-12T04:44:00.000-08:00

Pallavi Singh
Sehore, Madhya Pradesh
Pin Code 466002

When Roop Singh Taroke, huddled in the back rows of a damp congested classroom, drew a blank at the mention of a geometry box, he looked around for help.
At the Upper Primary School in village Amazhir, which appeared glum with an overcast sky, only 30 students out of the 180 enrolled for classes I to VIII had turned up the morning after Raksha Bandhan, the Indian festival for siblings, along with a Guruji, or a guest teacher.
The lanky Roop Singh Kharte, all of 20 and the lone Guruji present, burst into a nervous smile at Taroke’s predicament. ``I teach only Hindi,’’ he said, turning to a bunch of class II students clamouring in a corner, even as the 15-year-old looked up to him, dazed.
As it turned out, Taroke, son of an agricultural labourer and a class VII student at the school, had never seen a geometry box in his life. In the Maths textbook for Taroke’s class, there is a separate chapter on Geometry, but to get started, there are bigger obstacles than the missing geometry boxes.
There aren’t enough teachers.
In the four bare classrooms, a teacher conducts two classes at a time, and half of the four employed for the upper primary school that teaches classes I to VIII have been hired on a year-long contract, including Taroke. The contractual job, in effect, means that Taroke, an undergraduate student at a college in Bhopal, the state capital about 80 kilometres away, teaches at the school only during vacations for Rs 150 per class.
Most, an agitated group of parents debates, do not turn up when it pours heavily and the routes to the village get blocked, or when festivals are round the corner. In essence, then, the argument veers towards the inextricable link between teachers and the quality of education, now a primary concern in a state where no one, not even the state government, puts a number to the extent of contract teachers, popularly known as `para teachers’, in schools as well as vacant teaching positions, but most agree: ``there are just too many.’’
As per a report of the District Primary Education Programme of 2000, more than 220 thousand para teachers are engaged in full time schools in various states in India out of which Madhya Pradesh has a share of 53.7%, or about 118 thousand.
Not surprisingly then, 48 out of 374 government schools in Sehore’s Nasrullaganj block, of which village Amazhir is a part, have no teachers, according to theMadhya Pradesh government website. Mint’s e-mail and phone queries on the subject to the state’s primary education secretary Snehlata Srivastava remained unanswered.
Fifty-two schools have one teacher each, in contrast to rules of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Indian government’s flagship scheme to put every child in school, which stipulate that no schools should be left with just one teacher. Only 37 schools in the Block have more than 4 teachers each.
``In 1997, when the government found the teaching vacancies were too many and they had scant resources to fill them, they adopted a recruitment policy, which favoured para teachers. From our observations, we know number of such teachers has increased very alarmingly over the last few years though vacancies still remain to be filled on a large scale,’’ Anil Sadgopal, Bhopal–based educationist and former member of a government-appointed committee that drafted the Right to Education Bill, passed by the Parliament recently to ensure education for all children between 6 and 14 years, points out. ``It’s making the whole education system unstable.’’
In most states including MP, the minimum educational qualification for para teachers has been lowered to class XII (and class X for women), thus doing away with the minimum qualification of a Bachelor in Education degree, an undergraduate teachers’ training programme in Indian universities.
Sadgopal explains that he is hinting at the notorious combination that has come to stay with such contractual jobs: an underqualified and untrained crop of teachers grappling with the insecuity of their jobs.
At the Shiksha Guarantee Shala (Education Guarantee School, or EGS) in village Palaspani, 30 kilometres away from Amazhir, Radheshyam Barkhare, one of the teachers at the school, perhaps knows it better.
One of the primary schools set up by the state government to provide elementary education to children as a matter of right, the Palaspani EGS makes a good example of challenges for basic education in rural areas, where pucca roads and transport, or the lack of it, make nagging, day-to-day worries.
In the hundred years of its existence, Palaspani, named after the abundant water-sapping Palas trees in the region, has been destroyed and rebuilt three times over but its vital connect to the world outside remains unchanged: a 4-kilometre-long kutcha road through the fields.
This is the route Barkhare takes everyday – from his village Amirganj to here, for Rs 2000 a month at the school. ``If I were a regular teacher, I would be earning at least four times more than what I get,’’ he says, but then, he has studied only up to class XII.
The parateachers in the state are categorised in five grades, each classifying teachers as per salary and qualifications. For teachers who are graduates, the renumeration could go up to Rs 12,000 a month.
A group of parents at the EGS, which monitors classes and teacher absenteeism at the school under Pratham’s `Paisa’ project, singles out two days early this month, when the school had to shut down because none of the teachers turned up due to incessant rain.
The project, being run in six villages in Sehore, sensitizes parents towards making government schools accountable for every bit of the government money being spent on the education of their children.
``When it pours, the schools remain shut for days because none of the teachers turn up,’’ Sobha Kalausia, whose son Atul is a class V student at the school, complains, even as Barkhare puts up a robust defence: ``The roads sink in rainwater and snakes are loitering about the fields. Which route do we take so that we do not have to die?’’
Barkhare’s angry outburst underlines the risks he takes for his meagre salary, especially during the rains. Parents, including Kalausia, who are part of the Parent-Teacher Associations playing the watchdog, say such teachers are more inclined to bunk because they have fewer incentives to teach in terms of money and job security. Barkhare adds that the incentives have come to a naught, with iregular payment of teachers’ salaries in the state. ``These are times of financial famine for teachers. The government says it has no money to pay us. Our festivals have no colour.’’
Officials in the government defend the employment of para teachers in schools saying the system ensures less teacher absenteeism and quality education since they risk being fired at the slightest deviation from duty. ``With permanent jobs, teachers slacken a bit and ten to falter on their duties,’’ Kedar Singh, principal of the Sarvodaya government school in Bhopal argues.
However, various studies on para teachers including a 2006 report by World Bank and National Institute of Educational Planning and Research, describe the process as a cost-cutting measure adopted by various state governments, with each para teacher deployment costing the state one fifth of the normal salary of teachers in MP. Notably, teachers’ salaries are not covered under the SSA, but left with the state governments to fund.
The report also points out that such para teachers are now the norm, especially in the newly set up schools. ``In MP, official renaming of all teacher cadres as teachers permits them (the state government) to bring statistics (on para teachers) down to a level of 1.5% and 2.30% in rural and urban primary schools, and 0% in upper primry schools,’’ the report states.
First introduced in Rajasthan in the 1980s as `Shiksha Karmis’, the concept was lapped up by various states in India after the World Bank adopted it in the early 90’s, beginning with Uttar Pradesh, under the District Primary Education Programme, now a part of SSA.
``Para teachers have come up in response to the challenge of providing universal access to primary education under different situations. Sometimes, they help in remote and tribal areas, which do not qualify for formal primary schools within the state government norms. They also meet the teacher requirement in regular schools,’’ says Yamini Aiyar of the Accountability Initiative, Centre for Policy Research, in New Delhi whose organisation ran the `Paisa’ project in MP.
Sadgopal says the para teacher system discriminates against children of the poor. ``This is an unstable and fragile system. It (the presence of para teachers) doesn’t exist in the Navodayas or the Central schools and will not exist in the 6000 model schools being set up by the government across the country because everyone knows, to run good schools, one can’t rely on parateachers who are paid even less than contract labourers,’’ he says.
Lowering the bar has also meant institutional decadence, argues Sadgopal, who cites the gradual death of state-run training institutes in Bihar during his tenure as chairman of the State Common School System Commission in the early 2000s. ``In the wake of appointment of parateachers in Bihar, the state government in 2002 issued an executive order saying no training would be required for such teachers. As a result of that, two things happened: all regular colleges offering the Bachelors in Education programme and diplomas in elementary education lost steam as no one would apply since it was not required for teaching jobs anymore,’’ he says.
The latest report released by Pratham, the largest NGO in the education sector, last month says the learning levels of children in Std 5 in India’s schools saw no improvement since 2008 and tuition classes for children across all grades have increased indicating poor education standards even as infrastructure hand enrolment had improved in primary schools.
All the state governments in 2003 were directed by the National Council for Educational Research and Training to provide data on para teachers. ``All of them gave data except Madhya Pradesh, perhaps because this is the state to have employed maximum number of parateachers in its schools,’’ Sadgopal says.
In several cases, the work load is palpable.
Headmaster Santosh Dhanware at the Middle School in village Dhaba, stone’s throw away from Palaspani, grapples with the teacher shortage as a matter of routine. On most days of the week, he has to travel to the nearest Block Education office in Nasirullaganj, 25 kilometres away, which leaves just one guest teacher for the school.
Seated on a fragile wooden desk in one of the classrooms, Asharam Solnaki is busy multitasking his skills of teaching and counting numbers. These days, in between scribbling mathematical sums for his class on the blackboard, he also prepares voter lists for the impending polls for the local bodies in the state. ``Earlier this year, I was also involved in preparing voter list for Lok Sabha elections,’’ he says, while poring through a large notebook on his desk.
Yet, a quick-witted Nikita Sahu, the only daughter of a school teacher, attends classes everyday in the hope that next year, she will make it to one of the Navodayas, the centrally funded secondary schools meant to provide affordable education, and would no longer have to sit on tattered plastic sheets for classes and deal with ``free periods’’, minutes of self-study allotted to a class in the absence of teachers. Sahu’s case perhaps also reflects the best and the worst of this paucity: her two brothers go to an English-medium convent school in ineighbouring Nasirullaganj. For her though, there are the Navodayas, but only if she qualifies.

This is the unedited/full version of the print story published in Mint on Feb 23, 2010.

English, again.

2010-03-08T05:43:00.000-08:00

Posting one of the interesting responses to my English series from Chaudamani Ratnam of New Delhi. Please do read and post your views.

The whole issue of learning English needs to be looked at from a rather radically different perspective. Some anecdotal logic will illustrate my views.

1) The Europeans more than 500 years ago came to accept Indian(Hindu) numerals and arithmetic as far superior to the Roman system then in vogue. For example 10x10=100 is a lot simpler than XxX=C and so on. Indians initially passed on their system to the Arabs who were trading with Venetian merchants. The Venetians soon realised that the Arabs were getting the better deal in every transaction and initially thought that the devil was working through the Arab mind. However two Roman Catholic monks in disguise enrolled at the University of Cordoba in Spain, then under Arab rule, and learnt their system of arithmetic. They came back and started teaching the Venetian merchants. The Pope in order to protect the monopoly of the Church over knowledge, threatened to excommunicate anyone practicing the "heathen" arithmetic, but the pragmatic Venetians just told the Pope to stuff it.
2) Similarly the powers that be in India are against the spread of English as they see it as a threat to their own status As a Dalit leader recently put it;first we were denied knowledge of Sanskrit and now,English.
3)My question is that if the world accepts the superiority of Indian arithmetic why should we not accept the English language as being superior.. Some justification follows.
4) Wherever the English laguage has clashed with any other,English has prevailed;e.g.
over German French,etc. and that too by choice, not by force.
5) In the USA the origins of the European population are roughly 40% English,40% German and 20% the rest of Europe.Yet English has come to be the national language though there is no official language.In Canada all labelling is bilingual but one can see that the French version is 30% longer and I believe not as clear.
6) In All India radio and Doordarshan about double the amount of time has to be allotted to Hindi sports commentaries as compared to English as it takes twice as long to say the same thing. In fast moving games like football and hockey the Hindi commentary is useless
7) In World War Two, in a major naval battle between Japanese and American forces a numerically superior Japanese fleet was wiped out by the Americans.A subsequent joint study by senior Japanese and American naval officers came to the conclusion that it was not a victory of American arms but that of the English language . The Japanese language was just not upto the requirement of higher command and control especially in a highly fluid situation.. The Japanese messages could not be coded in real time unlike English. Americans and British changed their secret codes frequently but the Japanese could not do this even though they knew that their code had been broken
8) English is the easiest language to learn and later absorb additional knowledge by one self. It needs only 26 characters and about 2000 words for a working knowledge and can be learnt early in childhood.. Chinese on the other hand requires 40000 words/characters for the same level of proficiency.To put it in a lighter vein it is easier to learn to eat with a spoon but not with chopsticks.
9) English is usually touted as the language of international communication but the question to ask is why. The answer is that it is superior just like Indian arithmetic.

Read Story Three of the English Series, which appeared in Mint on March 8, here.

The classroom crusader

2010-03-04T16:56:00.000-08:00

One of the profiles I loved doing. For the story, I had almost 5 hours of audio tape. Will upload soon.

The edited version of this profile appeared here.

ANIL SADGOPAL
Born: 1940

The Classroom Crusader

Pallavi Singh
August 5, 2009

Every campaign, for Anil Sadgopal, has its notes in a classroom. Typically, for a 17-year-old aspiring Botanist, he says he wouldn’t have done today what he did five decades ago at the St Stephen’s College in 1957. ``I know they would not admit me today. Those days were different, considerate.’’
Before an interview panel of academicians including a Britisher, which resisted taking a student from the Hindi-medium of education, he insisted on being interviewed again until he was told, through a chit of paper, that he was rejected. ``I moved back that chit again and asked them to stamp their decision on an official letter, explaining the reasons why they were denying me admission,’’ he says. The jury was appalled and he offered to explain: ``I would take this chit, take a bus direct to the Raashtrapati Bhavan and ask the President why did we ever have to fight for Independence when I do not even have the freedom to study in my mother tongue?’’
In the next ten minutes, Sadgopal, a Hindi-medium student of Science from Birla Vidya Mandir in Nainital was admitted in the St Stephen’s College to study Botany and Biochemistry, among other subjects, and to kickstart the beginning of a life that was later to become a string of small and big protests and the Jamnalal Bajaj award for pioneering work in the field of education.
Five decades later, the eminent physicist turned educationist has quietly settled in Bhopal, the scenic capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh state, in a tiny, creeper-lined house after two busy decades in a small village in the state trying to teach Science in government schools and a brief stint at Delhi University, the institution where he studied through the 1950s, and long tenures as member of various government-appointed committees including the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), to recommend academic reforms for India’s education system.
Lately, since the time a legislation of the Indian government to ensure free and compulsory right to education for children between the age group of 6-14 years picked momentum after hanging fire for years, there has been noise all around him. Newspaper editorials, cover stories in the alternative media and street conferences are full of his note of dissent, true to his innate ability to critique and express a difference of opinion on the legislation described as ``a law to snatch away the rights of children’’ by him.
Sadgopal, now 69, says he is just part of a larger struggle for basic constitutional rights. ``I fear the possibility of individuals getting bigger than the causes they espouse,’’ he hands out a note of caution as I meet him at his home in Bhopal’s inconspicuous Sahkar Nagar on a Sunday. With a khadi jhola stitched in places and a bunch of files, he alerts that a public meeting on the proposed legislations is about to begin in the next 30 minutes. ``Let us get there on time first,’’ he says.
In the next ten minutes to Rahul Nagar, which begins at an alley consumed by squalor and open drains, a group of young men help him park his mud-coloured Maruti next to a heap of garbage. The meeting is in the verandah of a temple, where 35-odd people gather slowly and settle down, all of them from the neighbourhood.
There are a variety of complaints on the floor of the house – government schools charging tuition fees, denying admission and being outright commercial with admission interviews. Sadgopal, with an intense gaze and disarming candour, begins simplifying awareness concepts: government schools have to provide free education, no child can be denied admission and that the `biggest court’ in the country has banned admission interviews in junior sections.
As the crowd listens intently, Sadopal’s gifts in interpretive clarity, communication and commitment to education comes through. His thoughts and tireless campaigns in Madhya Pradesh over two decades have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond education as one knows, with his organization Kishore Bharti carrying out welfare programmes at a national level, and particularly in the state.
In 1961, when he left for Caltech for research in Molecular Biology, this was not the course he had planned for his life, though. A wrong subject selection led to Sadgopal flunking the qualifying exam for a PhD there. ``I flunked paper on Geneties at a time Jagdish Khurana was getting Nobel prize in the subject. I have never been so depressed ever in my life again,’’ he says.
His second attempt at the qualifying exam was a return to excellence. It led to a 150-page paper on genetic code, which got published in the United Kingdom-based international journal Annual Review of Genetics in 1968. ``In the paper, I even critiqued the genetic code of Dr Khurana. Normally, people get into this stuff after years of work but I was just a student,’’ he says.
This led to plenty of job offers in the United States and fat pay cheques by the time he was completing his research, but a group of Indians at Caltech, then moved by the severe Bihar famine of 1965, decided to return home. ``In our common room those days, all American television channels broadcast the famine news and our American friends would ridicule us for not returning home for relief work. Those days, I understood very little about the villages,’’ Sadgopal says.
So, in 1968, Sadgopal returned to India with his American girlfriend Meera, and got married that very year in a simple ceremony in Pune. ``That was also the time I began tour of villages and remote areas to understand them better. Meera joined a hospital in Bombay as a doctor and I joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research here. It was a life-altering experience,’’ he says.
In Bihar and West Bengal, Sadgopal met activists from the Communist party of India and, as he puts it, learnt the basic core of inequality : land relations. ``Though I remained a Gandhian in pedagogy, I developed a Marxian perspective into things.’’
At the peak of a very fruitful stint at the TIFR, an organization that carries out research in Social Sciences, where he even set up a tissue culture lab, Sadgopal quit his job and came to Hoshangabad district, a hundred odd kilometers from Bhopal, to launch, with a handful of friends, the phenomenal Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme, which brought teachers from Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Delhi University to introduce innovations in Science teaching in government schools.
``The idea was that children should learn Science through experiments with ``their own hands’’ and not rote method. In 1978, we expanded the programme to all upper primary schools in Madhya Pradesh,’’ he says.
But for every recognition, Sadgopal’s vision was collaborative. The year the Jamnalal Bajaj award was announced for him, he refused to accept the award alone citing invaluable contributions from his colleagues at the Department of Social Work, DU. Later, all faculty members from the department received the award together.
In the years that followed, Sadgopal wrote half a dozen odd books on education, focusing on working of government committees, specific education schemes and policy analysis, in particular, his meditation on the meanings and dangers of World Bank’s structural adjustment programme, which in simpler terms means getting developing countries to cut back on their social sector spending as explained by him.
Sadgopal, through a brief association with the People’s campaign for a Common School System in 2006-07, also proposed setting up of a common school system that would mean setting up of more neighbourhood schools and abolition of ``divisive’’ classifications between a government-run and a privately-own school, as part of a re-draft of the Right to Education Bill. On the other hand, government describes it as a pioneering legislation to ensure a right to free education for India’s children.
In the midst of his zeal for activism, Sadgopal is always reading and petitioning the government, just to mark his dissent. ``Dissent is the most important of democracy,’’ he says, recalling his various furious submissions at the CABE meetings where his dissent over the draft RTE Bill was not recorded. ``I want to be remembered in history as a member who spoke his mind.’’
In 1984, Sadgopal also resigned from the National Commission of Teachers, even as he recalled an official in the government remarking that his presence in the government-appointed committees meant ``lesser damage’’ than the potential dangers he could pose if he were left out of then. ``My experience at the last CABE committee taught me that committees were not a way to formulate policies for this country,’’ he says.
But his disappointments with government-committees continued. ``To my objections, there was abject silence in the government. No one took a stand,’’ he says.
To someone whose disagreements began as small fights in university classrooms, those were rare days. As a young student of Botany, Sadgopal once asked his teacher at DU why he only taught Aristotle and not Charak and Sushurut’s Taxonomy whose theories were equally good. ``In Theology classes, I didn’t like reading lessons and no one could make me do. I asked too many questions too, which wasn’t allowed,’’ he recalls. ``Still, from then to now, I have seen a loss of concern in the middle class about social issues. Twenty years ago, a public hearing will give people at least three minutes to speak. In today’s neo-liberal society, I won’t get this space.’’
One of his earliest campaigns advocated learning in mother tongue and even endorsed the three-language formula of education as recommended by the Kothari Commission of 1964 (pls check). This could be traced back to his experiences in class VI, when shifted to an English-medium school in Nainital, he kept on reading out Hindi poems to his teacher till the time she asked him to leave the class. ``I ran and did not stop till I reached home. That was perhaps the beginning of a turning point in my life,’’ Sadgopal says.
Then came two blinding flashes of light: the two women in his life, Meera, the first he married in the 1960s and later separated, and Shashi Maurya, the other social activist he met in Hoshangabad in the 1980s and married in 1993, with a conscious decision to not plan any children ``since both of us are too committed to our work to think about children’’.
Nonetheless, with both the women in his life, Sadgopal says he also learned a great deal about gender issues and even worked with Meera for welfare of Bhopal gas victims in 1984.
These days, most of what consumes Sadgopal is his writing hours, his public meetings and his zealous work to protest the RTE Bill in its present form. In the colonies where he spends even his Sundays motivating people to send their children to schools, he is deeply admired for his vigour. ``There is nothing that stops him. He is tireless,’’ says Ram, his associate and second wife’s son from her first marriage.
Sadgopal is convening a national seminar on Right to Education Bill in Bhopal this month and another sit-in protest in New Delhi. But turning down a Rs 7,000 contribution from a local private coaching institute to get an advertisement published on the pamphlets meant for both the occasions as a mark of his in-principle opposition to coaching institutes and private players in the education sector, Sadgopal is again ready with his begging bowl. Just like ten years ago when he pulled out of a long association with a welfare initiative simply because they agreed to accept monetary help from an international agency.
``I am just happy and content that debates on structural adjustment, Right to Education Bill and privatization of education are issues that have become part of public discourse. That’s where I see my gains,’’ he says.

EoM.

The English question

2010-03-04T05:56:00.000-08:00

English has had a very weird connection with India. Within India, the connection gets more uncomfortable than weird as you move up North in the country's cowbelt.
As I was working on the English series, of which story one Will English Become India's weakness? appeared in Mint on March 4 and story two The pitfalls of linguistic jingoism on March 5, I looked within, reminisced and asked myself many questions.
The `English realisation' in my life goes back to the time my father got married. In 1976. My mother was a Bundelkhandi. She spoke the native language and wasn't well-versed in Hindi. In those times, to think of a girl in rural Uttar Pradesh, who could speak English, was unimaginable. Thanks to her studies in the Science stream and later her job as a Botany professor, Ma had picked up good enough English which helped her interact with my father, who would speak either Magahi, a dialect of Bihar, Hindi or English. When I was born six years later, I picked up just two languages - Hindi and English. No Bhojpuri, Maithili (now recognised as one of the languages in the Eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution), Magahi, Angika (all local dialects in Bihar). This was a sad consequence of my parents' limited linguistic exercises. When I grew up, I realised it was more than just my parents' unwillingness to learn each other's language which kept me away from the native languages. English was elitist, Hindi was urbane and regional dialects were simply too rustic.
My English-medium education often generated awe among relatives from the villages. To hear a sentence in English, they would sit for hours imploring me to read a poem, or sing a song.
When I had to drop out of my reputed English-medium school for a few months in the wake of an unprecedented family misery, the very fact that none of the top rung schools would admit me in class X brought unspeakable grief to my parents. In those days, they saw great hope in me because I almost always scored highest marks in the subject in class, and in what they considered a rare talent, I excelled in Hindi too.
I shifted to a Hindi-medium school in class X (year 1997-98) and struggled with the tough Hindi terminologies in Science textbooks, most bearing `Tatsam' origins (Tatsam means a word which has roots in Sanskrit). In the pre-Boards, I made a killing in the English paper: 98 out of a hundred. When the class X Board results were out, one of my teachers, before handing out the marksheet, asked me: ``Which subject would you like to look up first?'' I said: ``English'' and she was in splits: ``But English marks aren't added in your aggregate.''
That is when I realised that my school was affliated to the state-run board (Bihar State Education Board), which followed a language policy averse to English. It began in the late `70s in Bihar as part of the linguistic politics around Hindi and the slogan `Pass WIthout English' became the order of the day. I was one of the many children from these boards, but my English-medium education since the early days of my life saved me. Don't get me wrong. It was a great school but I had the edge over others because I knew English. It began with small privileges - in the Hindi-medium school, my proficiency in English made me different from others, at least in the way teachers looked at me. They thought I was this serious, nerdy, anglicized child who could anchor an ENglish play in the school's annual festival, be a good class representative in inter-school debating competitions, intelligent after-school company for their children and overall, a ``cultured'' child to teach and mentor.
I could speak English. This became such a shield, and still remains my shield against snobbery and unwanted elitism.
In the journalism school in Chennai, I was often greeted with a remark I later grew replusive to: ``Oh! You are from Bihar! I thought you were from Bombay.'' To be brutally frank, I never thought this was a compliment. I would return the remark with: ``Why? Do people from Bihar have horns on their heads?'' People would laugh; they still do. But while doing this series for my newspaper, I found the answer: English.
The very reason that I spoke good English misled most people into thinking I could not be from Bihar. When I tell you this, you might argue against this but I can argue back. But some other day on this. For now, you could read Bihar's Boat people by Bhawesh K Mishra to understand what I mean.
Some states and some people, and particularly Bihar, invite unwarranted and pre-conceived notions, as argued by Mishra and I second him here. This whole nexus - of judging and dismissing people by their origins, and most importantly by the language they speak - seems to be breaking though, as economy moves at a fast pace and opens many opportunities for small towns to be part of the big, elite gang.
About two decades ago, my father's sisters got married in upwardly mobile families and settled for good in Delhi's elitist ghettos (read ``South Delhi'') because they could speak English (remember the matrimonial ads seeking Convent-educated girls?) and wear skirts.
My father's English, with generous doses of French and Latin, rattled my mother's family. They could never make peace with my father, because, err, as I gathered over the years, they could never speak such good English.
Many years later, their children do not face this handicap. They made sure all of them studied in English-medium schools.
English hence unites us. They are linguistically different, so are we. We adjust, embrace and when the going gets tough, we get back to English. Same could be true for India and its tryst with the colonial legacy, which is fast transforming itself into a language of opportunity.
But English's universality does have its flip side. At a personal level, English kept Maithili and Bhojpuri out of me. It's a regret, because regional languages lie at the core of my roots and one of the ways I can keep it alive within me. For the time being, I am learning spoken Maithili from a cab driver in my not-so-English neighbourhood.

Patna

2010-02-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

Love takes me back to Patna when I am hellbent on hating it.
First, we didn't have good roads, a decent state of law and order, universities without good teachers. Now, we have the city in a grand churning of sorts - flyovers, roads, Malls, restaurants, pubs.
The city is in a state of flux - where to be and where not to be. Patna, like many of its migrants, is facing an identity crisis of sorts. Where to be, then, is the question of the moment - whether it should stop being a city which kept development out with its potholes, rising crime graph, chauvinistic sense of superiority, political pride in its Lalu brand of socialism, and fight back to be the city which allowed its people on its streets for nights spent on roads during festivals when people would feel one in walking - from one pandaal to another, where festivals will be more than just celebration around religious rituals, where festivals would also showcase popular art in all possible forms and a city which will go out of its way to embrace/accommodate/accept people, or just stand still?
Not the land of my birth, or the scintillating city of the scenic lakes or the singing pigeons, Patna still shapes my identity. In my 20 years at the place where I grew up half-sleeping, half-reading, I haven't spotted a single eye-candy pigeon. There are noisy cycle-rickshaws, women and men on roads including cattle, and loud autos. I can vaguely remember cuckoo and koels on the mango trees in our house. But not a single pigeon, like the ones at the Gateway of India in Mumbai.
Patna-lovers may prove me wrong, though.
Poems can, therefore, be written only on the cuckoos, or the cows with large, weepy eyes or the drunken elephants in the circus. For variety, one may go to the Patna zoo. But If I were to make a choice, it would always be the Toy Train that even adults love to piggyback on.
I have read novels on Patna, but the city, certainly, is much more. Its soul, its ruthless magic, its simmering angst, aborted dreams - I still await a book to narrate it to me.
I am looking for glimpses of a biker-girl who evoked awe, scorn, teasers from pedestrians when she set out for college, or on way to the British Libraray, melted in the rains as others gasped in horror. There is a smug charm in being so rebellious, so headstrong in that city. After hitting home, would there be endless caveats on how not to forget raincoats ever when it is not raining, or to pop Vicks action 500 when you sneeze? Or, would the act be simply ignored? I want a text to answer this for me.
I am so hungry, and I would say for donkey years, for the delicious murabba from Sweet Home and would even settle with its smell on some intelligent pages. I am even okay with a dull painting that celebrates its vivid, fearful colours. May be, Anunaya Chaubey, my strongest crush in college, my English professor, can parcel one to me. I remember his paintings, each celebrating life in the city-- its rickshwpullers, the Ganges, the streets..
Patna has no suffix or prefix attached -- it's named with no colour, no joy or magic. It is a plain, simple PATNA. Just like the rose, rain drops, or if i am allowed a little extravagence, pearls.
It touches you when you are open, when you are willing to be touched. And, when you look at it with scorn, it just lets you be, and at times, even bends in modesty. But it never complains.
An acquaintance from the hometown is writing a novel. I don't know the subject or the plot. May be, another God of Small Things in the making, in stream of consciousness that consciously keeps the city out because, as I am told, Patna can only be in the stories of people it has nurtured but never merit a story on itself.
I can only sigh and head for more libraries, loaded bookshelves with all my love to find it. Many think I'm crazy.

PS: If you are keen on Patna, try Patna Roughcut by Siddhartha Roy Choudhury. Don't look for a literary masterpiece but you can find much of the city here.

teachers on contract

2010-02-26T05:00:00.000-08:00

Not Enough Teachers to Educate India might be something you would like to read.
It talks about the introduction of para teachers in primary education sector by various state governments and the pros and cons of it. Personally, I don't think it's a very good move. It absolves the teachers of their sense of responsibility towards quality teaching, which has a direct impact on performance of students. Sad that this is becoming the norm these days.

Buzz vs Twitter

2010-02-18T00:58:00.001-08:00

An interesting comparative assessment of Google Buzz can be read here:
Buzzing, Tweeting and Carping

Single, ready to mingle?

2010-02-17T08:54:00.000-08:00

This is a question I am often asked. Nah, don't get me wrong.
Almost a decade ago, someone didn't even need to ask. I was so very evidently unattached - firmly buried in books and visibly wafting in a lofty sort of arrogance that no one was good enough! This someone just played with silence, read out poetry and settled firmly in my heart. No silly questions asked, of course!
A decade later, Facebook happened.
Users filled columns after columns after columns on interests, jobs, music, religious views, and duh, relationshop status - single to committed to single to open to married to duh, in a relationship with to single!
I myself played the game and in the beginning, it was fun -- `ooh, when did that happen?' to `congrats hon' to `ohhh...since when?'... And, then, I made the smartest move - I spared the strangers this tiny bit so they ask. Often - everywhere - on the wall, in private messages, over chat.
Now, if I were at a party, how would people ask me this? Most wouldn't, right? Some do. In fact, many do. Someone I know asked: `So, where do u stay in Delhi?' Next question: `Alone or with family?' If I said `family', they asked: `Parents?' F*** man, come to the question!
Anyway, ask me how I handle this - In one of my earlier posts, I have written reams about my disgust for such personal questions but in our society, this is how women are greeted. Mostly. And, their relationship status almost always contructs the entire meaning of their existence.
For example, if you are single, it almost always means desirable, potential date, most preferred party mate, star presence on a guest list. I mean, yeah, all men out there will court you - even the married ones. After all, who knows if they are `open'?
Anyway, my intention is not to distort the happy meaning of being single; my trouble is with the way such questions can limit women. I agree that for many in steady relationships - lovers/husbands/boyfriends, this clarity can be a way to keep unwanted friend requests at bay. But if one looks at networking as the greatest boon of social networking, this could be the ultimate nip in the bud - the end of the very beginning.
I don't know about others but if I ever went to a party (and that would be rare), I wouldn't like to tell anyone if I am single or committed or married. I would like to be known for who I am - writer, aspiring author, failed tennis player, struggling jogger, loud biker! These details contruct me - the details in failures, joys, victories, interests, soft spots, hate links, everything I like, dislike, do and don't beyond that inner circle of my being which hides/awaits/denies something about me.
While social networking on the web has limited women and their virtual circles to their relationship updates, something bizarre has happened on the communication front too. The web has made them look and become more approachable - what one can not or may not be able to say in person or over the telephone, can now say over chat and in most likelihood, get away with it! I know a friend who kept cracking jokes until they got personal and I objected. He said: `c'mom girl, chill, i was just kidding!' I was furious but I could say very little except a straight smiley, like this one - :-|
Most of virtual communication today can get very personal before you know it and this could be a friend you have thought highly of all along! What do you do in such situations - be blunt and risk ruining the friendship or let it pass as a minor aberration on his part? Dificult to decide, no?
I call this the million dollar dilemma of our virtual existence - how much Internet-social should be become? For women, it's a deeper thought that bothers me - do they allow themselves to be dismissed or approached purely on account of their relationship updates?
I would be glad if someone corrects me, but sadly, it is indeed very difficult to find men on networks who would be genuinely interested in what you do and who you are beyond the pretty face. A dear friend and colleague once said: ``It is indeed rare to find men who would be interested in a woman once they know she is committed. For them, that's the beginning and end of the chapter.'' It bothered me no end - if this is true, how sad, because everyone, almost everyone, plans to get married eventually.
Another friend, divorced and single for many years, said while she celebrates her single status, it often gets to her. ``It's so difficult to find men who will fall in love with you.'' For her, most dates fixed on Facebook ended up as one-time affairs, partly due to her unwillingness to ``play along''. This brings me to a related question: how do we find love? Through blind dates fixed over FB or Orkut or some such platform and then pray for everything to turn out great? Or, find someone in college/workplace/weddings/social dos, through common friends? If latter is the better way out, what does the first option stand for - frivolous, fun meetings that could get anywhere (life-in-fast-lane kinda stuff) or wild chances with fate?
A male friend bluntly describes social networking sites as ``pick up joints''. Another violently disagrees.
I remember someone writing to me a funny message to which I sent no reply. After a chain of messages, this person asked, almost pleading: `Could you at least tell me if you were single or committed or married?' I realised my silence in such circumstance would be brutal and hence, I sent a reply.
While you guess what my answer was, this reminds me: ever wondered why men are not asked this completely offensive and totally irrelevant (yes, irrelevant) question?

Why be on Facebook?

2010-01-20T04:40:00.000-08:00

What got me thinking was a question from a colleague (SS) who wanted to know if a particular guy on my friend list was someone I knew? I thought hard on the name but couldn't recall. I wondered where I had met him.
When I told SS that in all likelihood, I perhaps didn't know him, she gaped in horror. I knew what she meant.
For most of us, Facebook is a great stage to be on. One could connect with friends, familiarise oneself with the lives of `not-so-familiar' ones, voyeur into ex-lovers' profiles and just stroll around a bit when one has ample time on hands.
Yet, with all this desire to be territory-free in their explorations on FB, a significant section of people on such networks worry about privacy a little. No, in fact, they worry a lot. That adequately explains my colleague's horror.
After she pointed out, I went to this friend's page and figured we have 46 friends in common. 46, no less! I told SS that I couldn't have said `no' to someone I shared 46 friends with.
What I couldn't explain to her at that point was this: If I begin to exclude people from the list simply because I did not know them, it would defeat the very idea of social networking. Am I on Facebook because it's only friends and family I care about or because I wouldn't mind a few more people on my friend list? I choose the latter. I want to include and not exclude.
As a networking site, FB provides a great opportunity to find like-minded people and even those who are equally interesting people other than those who share your interests. In the last six months, I have connected with poets, travellers, bikers, playwrights, actors, tarot card readers, yoga trainers and photographers.
For a change, I am not limited to what I studied and where I work and what I love doing. With newer additions to my list, I grow richer. I would admit that not all friend adds lead you to people who will have something to inspire you about but yes, all friend adds certainly lead to newer people - dull, bright, arrogant, self-centered, warm or contained. That is when you learn to appreciate differences and not just relish the similarities.
If you are a woman, there will be many who would want a date. And, most men will certainly ask you if you were single, committed or married, however intrusive you might find the question to be.
But FB has offered me a zest to travel to cities I never thought I would ever want to visit: Pune, Kochin, Ahmedabad.. These cities have interesting people and did someone not say it's people and not places that matter. I have come around to this perspective and peacefully so in the last mony months since I temporarily withdrew from FB.
Then, I had believed that it was making an exhibitionist out of myself. Now, I think it's entirely upto me what I want to be.
I read a report on The Atlantic recently which said the FB was leading to divorce, since it offered plenty of distraction for women and men to look elsewhere despite being in steady relationships. I admit it can get very heady at times, since all you have to do to connect with a good-looking/hot man/woman is to send a private message and if he/she is open, there you go! You can at least manage a date, isn't it?
That is when you need to stop. If you are on FB for long, even when you haven't received any messages/comments/links, you must log off immediately. And, you must limit your hours - you know how it is with more in less time - so, surf what you need to surf on, see and write to whoever is most essential to connect with and be selective. That, and plenty of love and faith in your personal relationships can take care of straying.
Of course, limited facebooking - once a week - would also boost your productivity at work. Better still, keep FB off your workstation.
Let me add a bit on adding friends too. An average of 50 people send me friend requests in a week. Earlier, such requests were fewer in number. Now that my friend list is inching closer to a thousand friends, such requests have shot up. I have figured out how it works - you have a friend who has 60 friends in common with you, so FB will send friend suggestion to friends of all your friends suggesting your name to them saying ``Add Pallavi Singh. She has x number of friends common with you.' You may or may not add.
In my case, i definitely check out. Many perhaps won't admit but you won't find this difficult with me. What I like doing is something I believe in. And, I never am shy of talking about my beliefs, simply because, they make perfect sense to me.
Unlike me, there are people who share their photography work, paintings, songs, albums, biking tips, Reiki lessons, or simple songs from Youtube. FB is a platform for sharing; it's your choice what you want to share - your life, your lovelife, your work, your interests, general news or just plain, inane thoughts of little interest to most. It's entirely your call.
I share a bit of both on FB - my life for a list of people in my `Friends' and `Work' lists and topics of general interest - from music to poetry - to the `Never Met' list. In the new year, I have also decided to meet at least a few of the most interesting people from the `Never Met' list. I believe this is where all networking should lead to - from virtual to real - for better.
I could meet this playwright I have been talking to - since I love plays so much. And, meet this young poet from Madras who reminds me of my favourite Maya Angelou. Or, go biking with this biker from Pune who writes beautiful poetry.
If it were not for Facebook, I would be alone and stuck - thinking only what I do/write/think/love/approve of is best. Facebook makes me what I should be - open to goodness.

Your BMI Calculator

2010-01-15T05:44:00.000-08:00

Your BMI calculator is here. Find out if you weigh right.
Wish you fitness and peace above everything else. :)

I dreamt of the village..

2010-01-15T03:58:00.000-08:00

Motorcycle Diaries - Al otro lado del rio

This song is the ringtone on my cell. I was away when the phone rang and when I returned, the song had played. I sent link to the song to my colleagues who loved the song. Thought would share here. :)

-

It's a cloudy day again. Overcast sky - like a grey sweater which has been lying abandoned on the terrace all night and has become impossible to wear; visually calm traffic - without the sunny-bright of the Sun, it appears to appear less striking in colour, sound, rush; sleepy office - with my desk one of the first to light up this morning.
Usually, on such days, I would fly kites and play with street children on my apartment roof. Of course, when I was a teenager. Yestderday, I begged for dahi-chuda and tilkut (understand?) and found a country-cousin's tiffin loaded with the stuff. Ate a bit, almost ceremoniously, and called up Ma to tell her that she needed to eat well for me when I hadn't.
Such life. then and now.
On days like these, I dream of the village, the tree by the river, flowered plaits on my aunt's hair as she would read out nursery rhymes to me, my grandmother's brass bowl of daal-bhaat and desi ghee, salted cookies hidden in glass jars in father's almirah, Ma's red lips after eating beetle, my size 16 bicycle with two tiny siblings riding pillion, the circular staircase to Nana's room, the mud-plastered haveli in the ancestral village, the well and the steel bucket tied to a jute rope, the wax drawings of an asbestos roof....
Then and now. Sigh.